When you live in a house with a dozen or so people, you tend to meet them in one of two places: in the kitchen, or in front of the television. This inevitably leads to random chitchat, the occasional shared drink, and a laugh or two as you bemoan the fate you concurrently hold – which in this case was continued residence in Upoko Manor. The house had never been particularly clean or inviting in my first couple of months there, but with the advent of American tenants who were fond of the bottle (or the makeshift still, as noted before) it began to deteriorate in lots of noticeable ways.
Every few feet, it seemed, marked a new stain from a spill of some kind or other. To this add a kitchen perpetually askew (it turns out that an erstwhile resident Kiwi had been taking care of the house’s kitchen messes – I remained out of the equation by cleaning as I cooked and escaping with my nice cookware at the end) and an interesting layer of semi-crushed beer cans over the living/television room carpet, amongst usual wear and tear. It wasn’t the partying Americans, however, that brought the house to a social and/or tidiness halt, however.
From the time of my first tour around the house I was told tales of a terrible creature that inhabited the deeps of the basement. It was the kind of thing (person, I suppose, is the proper term) that would send people fleeing from a room en masse whenever it entered – despite being outnumbered by a remarkable amount in most cases. Wherever it went it dropped long silvery black hairs in its wake as it stared continuously into a small netbook laptop; if it were only a question of hair, though, few would have had a problem with it.
No, the thing that sent entire roomfuls of people fleeing as quickly as their legs could carry them was the stench. Few could describe exactly what it was that our nostrils were being forced to deal with on a daily basis: some said it was extreme body odour, others perpetually un-cleaned clothes (and room in general) that had absorbed a panoply of food spills. All agreed that it was nothing to be trifled with, and retreated at the first snippet of the ghoulish laugh that the creature (also known as Voldemort, Stenchomort, or simply ‘THE BEAST’) would emit, on average, about every 3-4 minutes when absorbed by the chatroom it perpetually tapped away at on the laptop. To be caught early in a cooking process by the creature as it came up to burn its dominantly meat-based diet was the deepest-held fear of all in the house, and would frequently lead to otherwise productive people abandoning doing dishes – or making tea/food/etc. – for hours at a time until the creature oozed back downstairs and windows could be breathlessly opened.
I found myself celebrating my last weeks of tenancy with a slew of attempts at cookery in the kitchen; after all I had a lot of odds and ends in my pantry to use up, and damned if I was going to abandon a vast amount of precious foodstuffs in my semi poverty-stricken state. So it was that one day I set about making a layer cake filled with custard, for the enjoyment of all of my household friends as well as myself. The cake turned out a bit flat/unleavened, but this was not going to dissuade me from making an acceptable treat – bringing the ingredients together exactly to specifications, I began to heat up the custard filling mixture on the stovetop. Alas - something quickly went amiss… to my great sadness and frustration.
The unearthly laugh of the creature from the abyss sounded at the bottom of the stairwell, but I held out some hope: not every mindless cackle immediately led to kitchen occupation. I hoped against hope that I would be able to finish my confection in peace (custard, as you know, being something that requires near-constant attention to pull off correctly) as the moments went on. Suddenly I heard a 240 pound (one estimate) footfall at the bottom of the stairs, and I knew that my blissful kitchen time was at an end.
I considered pouring the entire mixture out into the waiting sink in order to get out of the room before it became malodourously occupied, but decided that my failure of a cake simply needed something else to make it worth presenting to my good friends. So it was that I found myself stirring my pot while the creature filed in, blasting bad punk rock from its laptop and completely oblivious to anyone else’s presence (or sense of hygiene, obviously). As my custard mixture reached the crucial boil I dipped the temperature just as I had done many times before in order to simmer it to a desired thickness, all the while trying to escape my olfactory reality. I found myself disassociating, much like in police reports for victims of violent crimes, from my harsh existence as the creature worked beside me, arms held aloft to reach in and out of cupboards again and again… I tried as hard as I could to seamlessly blend all of my being into a clumsily played live guitar solo as my eyes watered. Previously opened windows were, alarmingly, shut by the creature to snuff out the ever-present (but never so incredibly welcome) winds of Wellington, and I found myself praying for the completion of my culinary attempt to rescue the lamentable cake.
Something, however, was amiss. In the time I had been floating next to my body in guitar solo-ghost mode I had stopped looking at my custard (staring out the window like a lookout on a tall ship) my custard had gone off the bubble. The heat was still on at the usual rate, and I had done nothing unusual: it was simply another case of the occasional power dips that plagued the house from time to time. Turning up the mixture led to increased sadness as it began to stick and ruin itself. My custard, and accompanying layer cake, was simply not to be on this day. I carried the pot out of the kitchen like a wounded bird (to be cleaned later, obviously) and stripped myself of all outside-facing clothing in order to remove the smells that had permeated them during my kitchen time. Donning new duds and rinsing out my hair and nose, I returned to the upstairs carpet of cans a failure from a treat-making perspective.
It was in this instant that I knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that I had to leave this scent-forsaken house. I had accomplished all the relevant paper working I needed to do in order to work at a school in the upcoming season, and had seen a pathetically small amount of my adoptive country. In a couple of weeks my extraneous possessions were put into storage, my last food supplies had been consumed, and I found myself on a boat heading across the Cook Strait. The wind blew in my face, and for this I was grateful: irrational though I know such a thought was, I knew that no iota of the stench of the creature, and of the complacent decay inherent in life at Upoko Manor over the last month, could reach me. I had an entire other island to explore, and a bag on my back once more.
OH NO THE BEAST! sucks to your ass-mar
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