Cum on feel the noize

So you think I've got an evil mind
I'll tell you honey
I don't know why
I just don't know why
So you think my singin's out of time
Well it makes me money
And I don't know why
I just don't know why anymore, oh no...
- Slade, 1973

So yeah, sweet little Lauren actually turned out to be rough as fucking guts. She swore like a wharfie, sank piss like a demon, burped and farted with aplomb, and prided herself on out-bloke-ing as many of our bloke friends as possible - most of whom quickly took one hell of a shine to her, mainly because she was great company and never, ever, failed to get her round in. As you may have guessed, Lauren was a parochial Queenslander through and through - even more so than Dr Cletus - to the point of actually punching-on when the sledging got a bit too intense in the third Origin game that year. Yes, actual common-or-garden-variety violence. It was like being set upon by a homicidal koala - I wasn’t sure whether to fight back or to laugh. Thank Christ NSW won all three games that year, helped by Freddie ‘About to cut loose’ Fittler and Rod ‘Get back on the bus’ Wishart - I’d have never been able to put up with her had her lot managed to win (as they’d done three-blot under Fatty the year before, even without all the Super League contracted players - which was all she talked about for the months leading up to Origin I.)

You might, then, have been of the suspicion that Lauren was something of a tomboy, and perhaps even had sexual leanings in line with most of her male friends - i.e. that she was keen on muff. However, as the hapless bastard who’d ended up with the room next to hers, I can confirm that this was NOT the case. Lauren liked dick. Boy, did that girl like dick. And, judging by the regularity with which the sounds of hot monkey love echoed through the house, she had surprisingly little difficulty recruiting dick either. Not to say she was unattractive - she was vaguely hot if you were into that sort of thing, i.e. a bit fucking rough but decent in a dark room and apparently an absolute hand-grenade in the sack - but she wasn’t really my sort of girl. Besides, finding someone’s pubes in the shower, or in particular on your soap, isn’t really conducive to developing an overwhelming sexual attraction to them. (I was pretty sure the curly black ones weren’t the work of our resident ranga Dr Cletus. Not that I wanted to think too hard about it.)

Even when dick wasn’t available for comment, Lauren showed her industrious nature by making her own fun - and this is where we can draw the noisy share house parallel with Lena and McCarthy, except that Lauren’s anthem of self-loving appeared to be Enigma by Deep Forest. Eleven or twelve at night, the house quiet and dark… until the soft strains of Enigma would begin to waft through the walls. I still get revulsive chills if I hear it today. Because you’d know exactly what was about to happen next, since you knew she wasn’t listening to it for its musical qualities. If you had any doubts, they’d be swiftly allayed - by the rising, rasping breathing, the firm thudding of her bedhead against the wall, the little gasps and heightening yelps, the hum of her vibrator, and as things became more vigorous, the… erm… squelching. Believe me when I tell you, I wasn’t sure whether to be mildly turned on or deeply, deeply disturbed. Usually both - and usually far more the latter than the former. I think I was even more disturbed that I was getting turned on, as well. At which point I’d usually get out of bed, go and crack a beer on the lounge or the balcony (depending on ambient temperature), and try to ride out the punishment. Kinda like Lauren herself was doing.

Lauren was completely candid and unembarrassed about it, as well. She had no shame about her sexuality, be it her need for regular servicing (on a strictly casual basis of course), her compulsive regime of self-manipulation, or her willingness to discuss the all of the above in disturbing detail either at the pub, in the car or even across the breakfast bar. I’m not saying the rest of us were un-embarrassed - Dr Cletus in particular had issues, given that he’d known her since she was in primary school - but Lauren seemed to be enjoy talking about sex almost as much as doing it, probably just to make the likes of Dr Cletus squirm in his Weet-Bix. She got similar amusing effects by flirting outrageously with me in front of him - and naturally I joined in with the banter because winding Dr Cletus up was Bloody Entertaining. At one stage we managed to convince him we’d shagged on his bed when he was away on a rugby trip one weekend. He was absolutely aghast, white as a sheet. After a few minutes of embellishing the tale with increasingly grotty detail, I couldn’t keep the story going any longer, and dissolved into giggles.

“Nah mate,” I laughed. “Don’t worry. We didn’t make love on your bed.”

“No?”

“Of course not,” retorted Lauren. “You kidding? We didn’t make love,” she declared. “We fucked like animals. Reverse fuckin’ cowgirl, baby. Had to change the sheets three times…”

And so he went off all over again. Funny, funny shit. Good times.

Less so the morning she appeared at breakfast, waited until I had my first mouthful of cereal on the way southwards, before asking: “Hey, what’s the weirdest place you’ve ever cum on a girl?” All the while contemplating something that had apparently congealed between her toes at some stage the previous evening. There was a back story. There was always a back story. I didn’t want to hear it, and neither did Dr Cletus. So she told us. She always told us. We usually got the match report from the evening’s play across Lauren’s four poster bed (built from broomsticks, fuse wire and net curtain cast-offs from Spotlight – about as pretty-pretty princess as Lauren ever got). Her conquests got rated quickly and mercilessly, often before they’d even finished Doing the Deed. And because she was apparently easier to get off than Velcro-sided trackpants, she usually ended up waiting for them to finish, but she’d turned that into a bit of a game too. Depending on how well they’d done, she sometimes offered to make their Big Moment that little bit more special. The ones who’d disappointed were pretty much told to get off and get out. The ones who’d impressed got invited to take their moment of release to other selected locations, proposed on a predetermined sliding scale balancing quality of performance against perversion/discomfort/degree of difficulty. The ones who’d astounded got the pick of the board. Anywhere and anyhow they liked. It was just that when Lauren had made the offer later made famous by Sarah Michelle Gellar in Cruel Intentions – ‘You can stick it anywhere you want…’ – she hadn’t figured on having met her first ever foot fetishist. Still, an offer is an offer…

Yeah, skipped breakfast that morning, funnily enough. And wore thongs in the shower for the next week. Funny, funny shit. Good, erm, times.

Of course I didn’t find it so funny when our local ‘noise pollution’ issue began impinging on my personal relationships. I’d been chasing a sweet little thing in our Biochemistry course called Alyssa, who was a nice Christian girl from a nice Christian background (grew up in Kelvin Grove, went to Brisbane Girls Grammar, that sort of thing) with whom there was a definite spark, if a little hesitancy on her side - she suspected my motivations weren’t quite as pure as I might have indicated. Which they weren’t, obviously. I wanted to do very naughty things to her, my mind warped by all the hormones seeping through the wall from Lauren’s room. (Yeah ‘cos THAT was causing it.) So there was attraction on both sides, but Alyssa wanted to be wooed, to be courted. So I asked her out for coffee with mutual friends, then I took her out for dinner (just the two of us); a few days later we went for a movie together (some generic romantic comedy, might have been the one about cats and dogs with Uma Thurman and Janeane Garofalo) and I kissed her goodnight on her doorstep… and so it went. Four or five dates came and went, and I was an absolute gentleman, a very model of chivalry and patience.

“So are you gonna fuck her already, or what?” interrogated Lauren through a mouthful of Nutri-Grain.

Well, no. Like I said, Alyssa was a good Christian girl, and good Christian girls don’t fuck on the first date, or even on the fifth. Was she ‘saving herself for marriage’? Well, she’d planned to, but she was starting to have her doubts. Like a good little budding scientist she was questioning everything, including her structure of belief, and what it was founded on, and the answers she was uncovering weren’t that reassuring. Basically, she was having a minor crisis of confidence in her faith, and in the whole moral scaffold that was suspended around her faith. Like sex supposedly being very, very bad, when to her it seemed like something she’d like to explore for herself, very, very badly.

Date number six of one, half a dozen of the other - a Thursday night in early Spring. I took Alyssa out to Amphora, a cool little Meditteranean restaurant that happened to be within walking distance of our place. We chatted, we laughed, we shared an engaging bottle of red, we dined, we flirted. We walked back to my place. I’d of course offered to walk her back to hers, which was further down Hawken Drive towards the uni. But passing my place, I saw there were no lights on, and proposed she come in for a coffee. She accepted the invitation, her lucid brown eyes alight with anticipation.

The house was empty - Dr Cletus was at rugby training (usually followed by rugby drinking); Christ knew where Lauren was, probably out trawling for schlong at the Rec Club or the RE. Didn’t matter. We were out of coffee. Didn’t matter either. Alyssa’s mind was swimming with sacramental wine and the delicious thrill of potential sins of the flesh. We kissed our way along the corridor to my bedroom. In the darkness, I laid her down on my bed, and gently began undressing her. I was expecting resistance, but there was surprisingly little. She’d made her mind up; she was going to surrender herself to me tonight. She made me promise to be gentle. I was. We made love gently, tenderly, with care and consideration. First time for both of us on that count then.

Afterwards, we lay together in the still of the night, cradled together in the time-honoured ‘spoon’ position, my mouth nuzzling the back of her neck. Tears streaked Alyssa’s face, but she was happy; she’d had a more pleasurable ‘first time’ than many, I suspected. I’d done what I could to make it so, plenty of attention before and during. I felt as though she might be about to tell me she loved me… which I wasn’t at all sure how I was going to deal with.

Then, I heard a door slam in the adjoining room, and sounds of a scuffle. Oh wait, that’s not a scuffle. That’s Lauren. And the schlong she was trawling for. Snogging vigorously. Slurping like pigs at trough as they grapple with each other…

Uh-oh.

I lay very still and hoped for the best. Alyssa’s brow furrowed. Our special moment was fading fast. Particularly when, after the panting and slurping next door had reached a peak, I clearly heard my beloved flatmate make the following suggestion:

“No, babe… I’m on me rags this week. But you can do me up the arse if you want…”

Jesus Fucking Christ. Needless to say, things went a bit downhill after that.

Particularly because Lauren decided to give her new love a sequence of step-by-step directions as to what he needed to do so as they both got the most out of the experience. I’m sure you can guess how the play-by-play went - Lauren barking instructions like a cross between a drill sergeant (ahem) and the dirtiest porn actress you can conceive of, intermingled between more grunting and panting (and not a little squealing), and the slapping of flesh on flesh. Stroke that, squeeze that lube there, use your fingers here, now rub me there while you try to stick it in, ow ow OW, not so hard you fucking arsehole, how the fuck would YOU like it, oh OK that’s starting to work, oh OHHH my God yeah, make me squeal like a pig boyyy…

I’m not really here, I told myself. I’m somewhere else. Somewhere a long way away. Somewhere with bunny rabbits and fluffy teddy bears and rolling fields of daffodils. Somewhere where my sensibilities aren’t getting as thoroughly violated as my flatmate is…

I knew that Lauren, let’s say, wasn’t a debutante at this kind of thing - it was one of the many, many unsavoury subjects she considered as breakfast-table conversation - but talking about it was one thing, hearing it being committed was quite another.

Alyssa, of course, was horrified. Particularly when she felt, or thought she felt, stirrings behind her.

“Oh my God, you’re getting off on this, aren’t you!”

Honestly, I wasn’t. My response was as involuntary as that of cattle being led into an abattoir. They don’t rationally choose to start rutting madly in the holding pens. I didn’t choose to get hard listening to Lauren getting pounded. I’d prefer to think it was being next to a beautiful, naked woman who I cared about very much, which was my attempted line of response; I don’t think it would surprise you to learn that it didn’t work. Or that Alyssa threw her clothes back on, marched out the door and pretty much didn’t speak to me again for months, avoiding me totally for the rest of our years in the same course. We even did Honours in adjoining labs in the same research institute at UQ, and she barely even acknowledged my existence until graduation day - when I got a very token half-hug from her and some equally heartfelt good wishes for the future.

Gee, cheers for that, Lozza. And, as you’d expect, she was unrepentant afterwards.

“She wasn’t your type anyway,” Lauren declared. “Goody fuckin’ two-shoes, she’d have bored you to tears after a few weeks. The thrill was in the chase - once you’d fucked her the novelty would have worn off, you’d have been bored shitless with her. Trust me,” she added knowingly. “I’m an expert in deflowering Christians.”

Much as I hated to acknowledge it, Lauren had a point. My next girlfriend was a promotions girl from the Gold Coast called Bambi (no, it actually was, her parents should have been ashamed – I would have taken it up with her mother but sadly she’d been shot by hunters) who I met when we were down there for Indy weekend - actually I somehow managed to pick her up at the Surfers Beergarden when she was supposed to be selling us cigarettes. I think I bought two packets, which were palmed off on nicotine-addicted mates in following weeks given I didn't smoke and never had. From my vague recollection I think I may have also put on a rakish Irish accent to match my unshaven, devil-may-care appearance (think Colin Farrell well ahead of his time, even though the reality was probably more like Colin McRae well after his bedtime) and pretended to be a charismatic Irish lad in town for a good time not a long time. By the time she became wise to the ruse, it was too late, and she was in a forgiving sort of mood. Bambi was tall, slender, stacked, doe-eyed (sorry) and much more comfortable with the idea of hot sticky sex before marriage than Alyssa had been. According to Lauren, in moving from ‘A’ to ‘B’, I’d reverted to type: plastic bimbos with less clue than Clouseau. Bambi and I didn’t last long - it was a decent commute to see each other, as well as the minor problem of actually having very bloody little in common apart from a considerable amount of basic sexual attraction - but it was fun while it lasted.

I’m rambling. Where was I? Oh yeah, share house noise. The other thing which contributed to the levels of din at our place was that like me, Dr Cletus liked his tunes, and he liked them loud. He had a big fuck-off stereo which was parked out in the lounge room, and which he liked to crank the shit out of first thing in the morning - the audio equivalent of a strong coffee to get the brain used to the idea of waking the fuck up and heading off to lectures. You’d be surprised how affective a 7.30am hit of Acca Dacca or Pearl Jam (or even a bit of new-school punk rock, which Dr Cletus was a bit of a fan of) could be in order to get the blood pumping and the synapses firing. Particularly when supplemented by a strong coffee, of course. It wasn’t such a problem for me, as him and me had pretty similar uni schedules on account of being in the same course - it was actually kinda useful as a failsafe wake-up call to have him cranking the Offspring or Frenzals (yup, he was a fan too - he had Coughing Up A Storm and bought Not So Tough Now during the year) or something if I’d slept through my alarm, which I did a lot, particularly on mornings I was supposed to be working at the motorbike shop - but Lauren resented it immensely, as her first-year Arts load was so token she was usually able to sleep in, or would have been able to sleep in had it not been for DJ Cletus.

So our totally dysfunctional, if always entertaining, household did manage to make it through a full year, or at least into the summer holidays of 1996/97. All the Brisvegas crew went their separate ways for Christmas but we were all back by mid-January, mainly because we’d gathered a posse together to go to the one-dayer against the Windies at the ‘Gabba - back in the days of the old Hill, the dog track around the boundary, and most significantly of all, full strength beer at the cricket. There were a good fifteen or twenty of us, all with sombreros, blue ‘wifebeater’ singlets, Stubbies, the whole bogan regalia. The game I cannot for the life of me remember at all. I seem to recall that our one-day side were pretty appalling that year - the ACB hadn’t hit on the idea of having different test and one-day sides, so Tubby Taylor was still waddling about at the top of the innings - and I don’t think Australia even made the final of the tri-series, beaten by Pakistan and the Windies. I recall that Brad the Cock from Toowoomba showed up to our place as we were deep in pre-match preparations (i.e. sinking beers) and tried to invite himself along, even offering to buy one of us out of our tickets for a hundred bucks - we actually had a spare ticket, but there was no fucking way we were going to sell it to him, because he was Brad from Toowoomba and he was a cock.

But as for the game itself - I can only remember that we sunk astonishing amounts of piss, Super Dave (up from Sydney for the weekend, along with McCarthy) got hauled away by the coppers for hurling a stack of plastic cups at the back of a fat security guard who we’d nicknamed ‘Chief Wiggum’ and who was carrying on like a complete fucking Hitler (giving us an excellent opportunity to indulge in a raucous chorus of ‘You’re going home in the back of a divvy van’ as he was removed from the premises - actually he somehow managed to sweet-talk his female arresting officers into letting him walk free on the promise that he went straight home) and that we all ended up back at the RE, then back at our place after that - beers were sunk, weed was smoked (by those who were into that sort of thing), pizzas were delivered, devoured, and delivered again, and things went on very late into the night.

Finally, the pace started telling; by one or two am, folks started heading for home, or retiring to their beds, or more commonly just flaking out where they lay in the lounge room, watching the Best Bits of the Late Show on video. There were bodies everywhere - it was starting to look like the closing scene of Hamlet. The survivors at two were myself, Lauren, the Jeff, Super Dave and Dr Cletus, who’d returned from a trip to the slashers with the gleeful declaration that Mad Mick Martin was passed out on my bed, still with his motocross boots on, comatose.

“Fuckin’ bonzer,” I observed. “Where the fuck am I gonna sleep?

“My bed,” Lauren offered. “As long as you don’t fuckin’ snore.”

“The amount of noise you make in bed,” I responded, “how the fuck would you hear me if I did?”

“Mate, it’ll be growling rather than snoring that you’ll be doing,” observed the Jeff, to drunken giggling.

“Man, I ain’t going anywhere near that,” I declared. “The echo would be deafening, for starters…”

The one-liner, once what I’d meant had been comprehended, hit like an atomic bomb.

“Oh fuck,” groaned Dr Cletus. Not even forty-seven rums could disinfect the filth he was being subjected to. “That’ll do me. I’m for the off - catch you in the morning.”

“Afternoon,” Super Dave called after him, by way of clarification.

I agreed. “Morning? Fuck me. Optimism is one thing, but that’s just fucking delusional.”

Lauren, I could tell, was still sitting there open-mouthed, trying to fumble through her drunken reserves of comebacks to offer some sort of counterpunch. “You right there, girl?”

She shook her head. “You’re a cunt,” she eventually offered.

“That all you got, bee-atch?”

“Ah, fuck off,” Lauren declared. “You’ll keep, you softcock.”

“Yeah. So does your mother...”

Lauren flipped her middle finger at me, and concentrated on drinking.

“I love this girl,” I smiled. “Just look at her. All class. Scruffy as fuck, hair everywhere, wifebeater and Stubbies, swilling beer like a motherfucker. She’ll wipe her mouth with the back of her hand now. Like an angel suspended on wings of gossamer…”

“Jesus you two, just go and fuck each other stupid and get it over with, will you?” Super Dave drunkenly pronounced. “Seriously. I’ll even pay for the carpet cleaning. Just get on with it, for Christ’s sake.”

“You,” Lauren responded, “are a very, very sick puppy.”

“See Jeff, this is what you have to look forward to if you end up at uni doing enge,” McCarthy noted (engineering being a career option which the Jeff had been weighing up at the time). “You’ll end up like Super Dave. You’ll become seedy and corrupted and women will give you an even wider berth than they do now.”

“Yeah, but that was true of Super Dave long before he did enge,” the Jeff replied.

We move on. Three am. Beers remaining: zero. Survivors remaining: two. We were slouched on the old brown sofa, which was so old and decrepit that it had been quarantined out onto the verandah (even we had standards). After the mid-thirties heat of the day, the cool of the night was almost chilly - particularly after sweating through January humidity all day in a singlet and shorts. Which kinda explained why Lauren and I had become rather cosy together on the couch, but then again, it kinda… didn’t. Particularly when you remind yourself, as I did so continually, of the first (and perhaps only) commandment of share house living: thou shalt not covet thy flatmate’s ass. No matter how drunk you both get, no matter how astoundingly poor your form has been in the past month, no matter how long it’s been since you’ve seen action, no matter how disturbingly hot she looks with her pert little bra-less tits pushing her nipples through that flimsy cotton singlet, or how sultry the scent of the sweat on her skin, or how intriguingly damp her crotch feels through her shorts as she straddles your leg… rule one is still rule one. Rule one is, Don’t Screw The Crew.

I made a move to get up.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re off to?” she inquired. “I’d just gotten comfy.”

“Somewhere you can never follow,” I replied nobly. Then added, “For a slash.”

“Wouldn’t say never,” she said. “If it was any harder, you’d need more than two hands to aim it.” She gave me a fiendish grin. “Anyway, while you’re up,” she said cheerily, and shook her empty stubbie cooler.

“Think we’re out,” I observed.

“Fuck it,” she remarked. She was trying to think. It looked a painful process. “Bottle of vodka in my room - top desk drawer. Bound to be some shit in the fridge we can mix it with. You want to do the honours?”

I made my tour of the facilities - which would have come close to waking up the house had the house not collectively been dead to the world - and breezed into her room to find the vodka. I was pretty sure yet more alcohol at this late stage of the evening wasn’t a good idea, but I guess I just wanted to play this evening out to its logical conclusion, just to see what would happen. Yeah, that’s right, it was purely innocent curiosity on my part, not the desire to take that slutty little sexpot and fuck her until she couldn’t walk straight - a desire I was trying very hard to pay no attention to. Don’t screw the crew. To be honest though, girls like Lauren - and by that I mean, in the nicest possible way, dirty little sluts - really aren’t my thing. I’ve never been interested in stirring another man’s Clag as an overarching concept.

Sure enough I found the half-bottle of vodka in the drawer of her desk (cheap-and-nasty Kirov, which dampened my enthusiasm somewhat) but I found something else - a well-thumbed exercise book opened to a particular double-page of Lauren’s handwriting. Some sort of journal, or diary? Or the draft of some work of prose or fiction? Well, since we’re claiming curiosity as my overwhelming motivation throughout, you’ll not be that surprised that I decided to find out for myself.

I know, I know. You’re not supposed to fuck your flatmates. You’re not even supposed to want to. But I do. Badly.

Um, good.

I want him inside me, hard and hot. I want him in my mouth, him pulling my hair, making me do it right. I want him to fuck me in every dirty little hole he can cram his long, strong fingers or his big thick cock inside. I want him to make me scream and beg and cry his name into the night, just like he does with all those stupid little sluts he brings home and fucks in the room next door.

Put the book down and step away from the desk, Angus. This can’t end well.

I’m not his type, of course. He likes blondes - slutty little blondes with looks and tits, tight arses and hourglass waists. He’s a smart guy, but he doesn’t like smart girls. Ask him, and he’ll deny it; he’ll say he’s attracted to intelligent women, but he’s a lying fuck. He likes them dumb and submissive. Like his latest conquest. Promo chick from the Gold Coast - model looks, Playmate figure, all lip gloss and long lashes, fake blonde hair and fake D-cup tits, as artificial as the Gold Coast itself. Does he care? Hell no. She’s hot, blonde, dumb, and worships his cock.

That’s bullshit, I found myself protesting. On two counts. Bambi didn’t worship my cock - she merely paid it the usual respects you’d think were in line with the position - and more vehemently, I did actually prefer brunettes, like Lauren. Well, obviously not TOO much like Lauren. Like… well, like Sophie. Who had been a little bit like Lauren, but not quite as irrevocably evil. Similar girl-next-door figure, and similar short, spunky hairstyle, which wasn’t helping me much at the moment. I might have preferred intelligent brunettes, but I didn’t discriminate against dumb blondes, particularly as dumb blondes were less likely than intelligent brunettes to discriminate against me. I was an equal opportunity employer.

Maybe I wouldn’t care so much if I didn’t have to sleep a few metres away from him, a flimsy wall between us, while he fucks her. Sound carries in this place. I can hear every moan, every thrust, ever anguished cry. I’m so jealous, I feel sick. I know what I feel for him is more than just sexual, but I don’t even want to think about that. Not when it’s ten o’clock on a sticky, humid Friday night, and I’m already in bed, alone, and I hear his bedroom door slam. And I can hear his mouth pressing on hers, then running across her body as his hands firmly and expertly strip her clothes off. Soon I can hear her whimpering gently while he devours her with his tongue and his fingers…

See, at that point someone sensible would have recognised the incredible likelihood of Stuff Going Wrong and would have stepped away from the nasty, nasty amateur erotic fiction. (And it got nasty. Trust me. I'd give full chapter-and-verse but I kinda had visions of this book selling over the counter at Dymocks rather than under it at Club X.) Yup, someone sensible would have stood down and moved along. Unfortunately noone sensible was available for comment. I didn’t put that book down. I just kept reading. As my eyes went like dinner plates, my jaw slowly dropped towards the carpet, and… other stuff of a physiological nature happened. It became difficult to stand up, anyway.

Even through my alcoholic, hormonally-addled haze a few truths became self-evident. Lauren had a talent for writing. She also had a talent for transposing her fantasies onto other people – suddenly it was me with the thing for tying up girls (in this case a helpless-yet-willing Bambi) and relentlessly putting them to the sword (her terminology) whereas the occasional ropeburns on Lauren’s wrists over breakfast tended to suggest it ain’t me, I ain’t the fortunate one. While Bambi and I were standing in for Lauren’s bondage fantasies, Lauren herself – at least in literary form – was listening in with shame and guilt and great gobs of jealousy, and before long frantically plundering herself up against the wall between our rooms with increasing and some might say alarming intensity, and language descriptive enough to curl one’s toenails. And while some truths were told, some share-house mysteries were also solved. It probably wasn’t Dr Cletus who was nicking my copies of Penthouse after all (or ‘the Black Label edition of this magazine’ as she primly referred to it in the text – no prizes for guessing the intended submission target of the piece.) And as for why the shopping list always seemed to have us buying telegraph cucumbers for making salads when none of us ever actually made salads… I think I figured out why that was. Though to be fair the cucumber, or the use thereof wasn’t the most alarming part. The most alarming part was the roll-on deodorant she augmented it with at the crescendo of proceedings. I think you can guess how she used it, and I think you can guess where she used it. Alarming mostly because it was clearly described as MY roll-on deodorant, and I had very, very strong suspicions certain elements of this were Based On Real Events.

Actually, ‘alarming’ suggests I held onto some sort of detached moral judgement over the whole deal. You know I didn’t. You know I was fucking slashed and all I could think was ‘By fuck she’s a filthy fucking slut and I need to bend her over this desk right now. RIGHT NOW DAMMIT.’

Anyhoo, stuff came to a conclusion - see what I did there? - agreeably, and noisily, for all three participants involved. Possibly a little too noisily for one, as she soon realises.

My eyes are closed and I’m facing away from the doorway, so I don’t realise what the light means until it’s too late. It means my door is open. I realise, to my horror, that I have company. Silhouetted in the doorway is the blonde, Bambi. All of a sudden, I can see what he sees in her; her skin filmed with sweat, her breasts full and inviting, her hair crazed, her wrists red from her bindings. And her smooth-shaven pussy, wet and well-loved. She smiles archly, even offers a little ironic applause.

“Well, well,” she observed. “What have we here?”

I feel hopelessly vulnerable and ashamed; with my ‘toys’ still embedded, it’s a little difficult to claim I’ve been up to anything other than the obvious. It’s difficult enough to sit up.

Then he appears beside her. His eyes devour me with relish. His cock, I notice, is still as hard as a girl could ever hope, and still glistens with her wetness. He glances at her; she merely smiles knowingly. My eyes dart from her to him as the delicious realisation of what might follow overwhelms me. All of a sudden, my arousal starts welling up inside all over again.

“Wouldn’t want you to stop just on our account,” he remarks.

Then the room swims in darkness, as the door closes.

I shakily set the book back down on the table, and muttered a breathless “Jesus Christ”.

“So, you found it then,” said a sultry little voice from the doorway.

“The vodka? Yeah,” I replied, pointing to the bottle on the table.

“You know I didn’t mean that,” Lauren replied. The atmosphere was chokingly humid in her room. She felt the need to confess. “I’m thinking about sending it to Penthouse Forum… what did you think?”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” she replied breathily.

“I think it’s the single filthiest thing I’ve ever read in my life,” I responded.

“Good,” she nodded, moving closer. “Mission accomplished.”

I knew then I was going to fuck her. Ideally, harder and deeper than any man had ever done before, but I had a lot to live up to. Enough had been said; it was time to break every rule in the share house commandments, beginning with the first one.

The sun woke us next morning. It was as awful as you’d expect: blistering hangover from the alcohol, exhaustion from the lack of sleep, sunburn from the cricket, several aches and pains from Lauren’s particular penchant for rough, domineering, reasonably disturbing sex (she’d definitely been transposing her submissive girl-slave fantasies onto Bambi and I) and, of course, a whole metric shitload of guilt, shame and other twisted emotions. We both knew that things were about to go rather horribly wrong - for us, and for the share house dynamic itself.

I needed to know where I stood. “That stuff about…” I began.

“It’s a work of fucking fiction,” she replied flatly. Which was true on several levels.

“Lauren, don’t bullshit me.”

She cast her eyes down. “What the fuck do you want me to say?” she demanded, her eyes beginning to stream with tears.

“Lauren…”

“Go fuck yourself,” she replied, burying her face in her pillow. “Get the fuck out of my room.”

So at least I knew where I stood. In another room, preferably. I climbed out of bed, and started putting my clothes back on. At which point I heard the stereo crank up out in the lounge room - a tune I vaguely recalled as a Frenzal Rhomb track, so I suspected the hand of Dr Cletus in this. I cautiously poked my head out the door, and wandered along the corridor. I reached the lounge room in time for the chorus:

And I don’t want to fuck you…
Well I think you’re really nice but I couldn’t bring myself to fuck you…

And found Dr Cletus, the Jeff, McCarthy, Super Dave and sundry other members of the tribe looking at me bleary-eyed and vaguely accusingly - Dr Cletus more than the others, but for deeper reasons than just having their sleep interrupted by the sounds of hot nasty monkey love through to the early hours of the morning. As to who'd put Dugadugabowbow on the stereo, it was anyone's guess,

You can come round to my house, but I don’t want to fuck you-hoo…
Well I think you’re really nice but I couldn’t bring myself to fuck you.

Super Dave broke the awkward.

“Angus,” he began, “when I said I’d pay for the carpet cleaning… you do understand that was meant as a joke, don’t you?”

That was pretty much it for that particular share house. Whatever Lauren felt for me beyond just sexual attraction (and whatever it was, I didn’t really feel it in return), she couldn’t deal with me knowing about, because she moved out within days; Dr Cletus was particularly sour on me for a good month afterwards, and not just because we couldn’t manage to find a decent flatmate in the short period before the lease lapsed, and had to move out into a two-bedroom apartment instead of our awesome house. He got over it; I got over it. Presumably, so did Lauren.

A few years later, when I was a bit more famous than I was as a third-year biochemistry student who worked in a motorbike shop, I received a parcel in the post. It was a copy of a book - A5 format, glossy cover, very professional, reputable publisher and all. The title was simply ‘Depravity’. The author gave her name as Mia Lauren, but the note on the inside cover was in the same handwriting as Lauren’s dirty little exercise book. ‘Only the names have been changed,’ the note said, ‘to protect the guilty.’ Lauren had signed it with a kiss. The content was, as you’d expect, rather ‘intense’ if not ‘confronting’, and it took some fast thinking to explain it away to my then-girlfriend, but it was clear that Lauren had a career in this sort of thing. One she’s managed to do rather well out of, as it happens…

Well that was almost entirely gratuitous. What were we talking about again?