After surviving the Wiccan battle-axe, I decided to move to more student-like accommodation. A fog sits between my hindsight and November 2005, but I remember the house being very typical of student accommodation (or ‘digs’ as we would call it, back in those days). I had the odious and undesired downstairs room. It was clearly a former dining area, being adjacent to the kitchen, and it was cold and Spartan – custom-made, perhaps, for the cerebral cherub that I was in those days. I was on the breadline back then (given my physique of hefty paste, I may well say breadlines), so I was happy to take it, linoleum flooring and all. In any case, my flatmates were amicable, and the weird guy, who used to piss in the sink in his bedroom (not the one I was moving into, fortunately), had moved out.
So, I passed the time eating HobNobs, reading Ulysses, chronicling my undergrad days in teleplay scripts, and avoiding doing any substantial work on my doctoral thesis. The composition of that house's residents changed quite frequently, and, after Christmas, a foul odour began to pollute the air. I wish that was a metaphor.
Returning back from the Christmas break, I found the newly arrived cretin bent over his greasy, oily, fatty food in the living room. His oil-laden hands had already slimed all over the remote control. (It wasn't long before I had developed the habit of wiping it before use.) I bid him a salutation, hopefully expecting a warm response. My greeting was met with a deeply suspicious leer, his pupils rolling to their periphery to save his head from twisting fully in my direction. The beady abysses returned to his food and TV. He may have said hello, but it was drowned out by the body language of great discomfort.
Perhaps it was because I was from the capital and he was one of those tragically small-minded people from outside the Pale who took offense to people within the Pale (a person from beyond the Pale who acted beyond the Pale if you will), or perhaps it was because he had his own set of close friends, but we rarely spoke. When we did, we disagreed. We had typical disagreements among cohabiters: the nature of individualism, the performance of Charlie McCreevy as Minister of Finance, the appropriate use of the word 'rationale', and who was the main vocalist in The Beatles. I grew more and more sickened by him, the greasy dishes he wouldn't clean properly, his diet of wedges and pizza, his egregious lack of cunning when stealing my milk, his late night drunken muttering outside my bedroom door (to be fair, it was easy to forget there was a bedroom through those doors). None of these things prepared me for the time I once went into his room. I would have assumed he was keeping a cadaver underneath his bed, so bad was the smell, but I know for sure that a corpse would have found the strength to resurrect itself and escape the terrifying stench. In the blurred panic brought on by the smell, I remember seeing a Febreeze sprayer. Clearly Smell Bag, as we affectionately called him behind his back, had learned to adroitly circumnavigate washing his clothes, opting instead to spray them with odour remover.
Like most ugly things in this world, it can never just stay in its own corner. Over time, the sickening smell began to encroach on the hallway, and even down the stairs. The nadir of the whole situation was perhaps when one of my housemates related his incredulity over seeing Smellbag walking out the door with his own excrement on the back of his beige pants. (I must concede that it was brave and progressive of him to wear beige pants. Remember, this was back in a time when it was illegal for Irish men to do so.)
Supposedly, he was going to do an apprenticeship in a large accountancy firm. I have no idea how he expected to undertake such a role with his level of hygiene and presentability. Maybe he cleaned up and looks back on those days with a little embarrassment, or maybe he's shaking in some ditch somewhere keeping himself warm with a blanket of self-delusion ("Charlie Mc Creevy's break-out-the-champagne tax giveaways were a good idea."). I'll go easy on him, for we eventually became comrades. Faced with a housemate even worse, we found enough common ground to transform our mutual disgust into a mutual disgust for another.
But that, I'm afraid, that story will have to wait for another day.
(Slaps knees and begins to rise)
"Oh, please Papa Nigel tells us more disgusting tales."
Perhaps another time. There's only so much ruthless defamation one can do in a day.
"Oh, but we love how you air your laundry so thoughtlessly."
I'd love to continue, but it hard work revealing the low side of one's character.
"But you shamelessly create mistrust in your readers so well."
(Yawns. Dons hat.)
Sorry guys. The rest of my repulsive two-facedness will have to wait for another time.
So, I passed the time eating HobNobs, reading Ulysses, chronicling my undergrad days in teleplay scripts, and avoiding doing any substantial work on my doctoral thesis. The composition of that house's residents changed quite frequently, and, after Christmas, a foul odour began to pollute the air. I wish that was a metaphor.
Returning back from the Christmas break, I found the newly arrived cretin bent over his greasy, oily, fatty food in the living room. His oil-laden hands had already slimed all over the remote control. (It wasn't long before I had developed the habit of wiping it before use.) I bid him a salutation, hopefully expecting a warm response. My greeting was met with a deeply suspicious leer, his pupils rolling to their periphery to save his head from twisting fully in my direction. The beady abysses returned to his food and TV. He may have said hello, but it was drowned out by the body language of great discomfort.
Perhaps it was because I was from the capital and he was one of those tragically small-minded people from outside the Pale who took offense to people within the Pale (a person from beyond the Pale who acted beyond the Pale if you will), or perhaps it was because he had his own set of close friends, but we rarely spoke. When we did, we disagreed. We had typical disagreements among cohabiters: the nature of individualism, the performance of Charlie McCreevy as Minister of Finance, the appropriate use of the word 'rationale', and who was the main vocalist in The Beatles. I grew more and more sickened by him, the greasy dishes he wouldn't clean properly, his diet of wedges and pizza, his egregious lack of cunning when stealing my milk, his late night drunken muttering outside my bedroom door (to be fair, it was easy to forget there was a bedroom through those doors). None of these things prepared me for the time I once went into his room. I would have assumed he was keeping a cadaver underneath his bed, so bad was the smell, but I know for sure that a corpse would have found the strength to resurrect itself and escape the terrifying stench. In the blurred panic brought on by the smell, I remember seeing a Febreeze sprayer. Clearly Smell Bag, as we affectionately called him behind his back, had learned to adroitly circumnavigate washing his clothes, opting instead to spray them with odour remover.
Like most ugly things in this world, it can never just stay in its own corner. Over time, the sickening smell began to encroach on the hallway, and even down the stairs. The nadir of the whole situation was perhaps when one of my housemates related his incredulity over seeing Smellbag walking out the door with his own excrement on the back of his beige pants. (I must concede that it was brave and progressive of him to wear beige pants. Remember, this was back in a time when it was illegal for Irish men to do so.)
Supposedly, he was going to do an apprenticeship in a large accountancy firm. I have no idea how he expected to undertake such a role with his level of hygiene and presentability. Maybe he cleaned up and looks back on those days with a little embarrassment, or maybe he's shaking in some ditch somewhere keeping himself warm with a blanket of self-delusion ("Charlie Mc Creevy's break-out-the-champagne tax giveaways were a good idea."). I'll go easy on him, for we eventually became comrades. Faced with a housemate even worse, we found enough common ground to transform our mutual disgust into a mutual disgust for another.
But that, I'm afraid, that story will have to wait for another day.
(Slaps knees and begins to rise)
"Oh, please Papa Nigel tells us more disgusting tales."
Perhaps another time. There's only so much ruthless defamation one can do in a day.
"Oh, but we love how you air your laundry so thoughtlessly."
I'd love to continue, but it hard work revealing the low side of one's character.
"But you shamelessly create mistrust in your readers so well."
(Yawns. Dons hat.)
Sorry guys. The rest of my repulsive two-facedness will have to wait for another time.
