Photo of the park at the front of Rose’s house
This memory is a compilation of a series of entries from my Magic Moments notebook, dating back to the sunny Autumn months I spent in Sydney in 2014:
- Rose has a new housemate moving into her share house soon. Apparently she is a Russian artist, according to Red, but he tells taller tales than Rose… Like that one about being recruited as an undercover spy in the Sydney Neo-Nazi group by the Anarchists… I’m sure that there’s some truth in the story, but it’s tall as can be.
- The Russian moved in and it turns out she’s Ukrainian. She is an artist though, but Rose questions the quality of her work. I haven’t yet met her because she’s never around in the evenings or on the weekend. Apparently Rose only feels her presence when she starts pumping European Hardstyle Electro at 3 in the morning. I think she might have green hair?
- There were leeches in Rose’s shower.
- It’s been a month and I haven’t met the Ukrainian yet. I don’t even know her name. Rose said there was a meeting of anarchists in her living room, Z brought them all there. He’s been hanging around the anarchist bookstore a lot and getting embedded into their community. Rose finds it off-putting.
- Apparently the Ukrainian has gone to rehab. She hadn’t returned home for a couple of days, and no one really took notice because she was so absent anyhow, but Red said that her parents came over to get some books for her in rehab. She has a marijuana addiction, which Rose and I didn’t even know was an actual addiction that you could go to rehab for. Her parents also tried to take her cat but Red wanted to keep it, so he told them he didn’t know where it was.
- I visited Rose today and she told me that Red and her went into the Ukrainian’s bedroom, and apparently it’s just crawling with cockroaches. Like, there are cockroaches everywhere. And the cat. They think she must have brought them with her from her old share house in her clothes and belongings. Red is going to bug bomb the room tonight, and I told them to make sure the cat wasn’t in the room. I’m worried about that animal and the state of that house.
- Rose texted me last night and told me she heard a cat crying and scratching. They bug bombed the fucking cat.
Photo of myself in Rose’s share house of 2014
After the cat incident, Red called her parents and asked her to take the cat to the vet. They also took the rest of her stuff, so I haven’t heard a word about her since.
Rose wrote a short story about her, but in the short story her secret was that she was actually a zombie. In the story, Rose tried to have conversations with her but found her to be awkward and shy. On really hot days she smelt really awful, and that’s how Rose figured it out.
Rose and I, along with some friends of ours, applied for a Puppet Workshop run by RMIT Links because we wanted to turn her short story into a short film with life-size puppets. We emailed them too late so we won’t be able to do the workshop, but we all agree that puppets are cool as hell and that we want to continue with the project anyway. Hopefully the ball will roll, because I think this story has potential to be a fantastic exploration of the crossover between documentary/fiction/personal essay.
