OK, to elaborate on this bloke I lived with in 2006...
I didn't know he was going to move in. My mate, whom I lived with, had been in a relationship with him for all of two days. But suddenly there he was. And he WAS, if you know what I mean. He was in the study on the second floor at four in the morning, blasting Terra Firma out of his boom box ('I think you'll really like this next one, Fisho') while I'd be wild-eyed and jittering on six cans of Red Bull, trying to write a three-thousand word essay on the Holocaust. He was in the kitchen drinking all my beer while I spent two hours preparing dinner - and then he'd go down the bottle-o, buy some more beer, and expect me to pay him money if I wanted one. He was in the loungeroom, playing my PS2 and erasing my slots on the memory card. He was always there, in the background, smoking and glowering and generally making his presence felt.
I suppose it was partly my fault - I'd met him at uni and introduced him to my mate. But I didn't know that she'd end up having a sexual relationship with him! Then again, I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me - she wasn't the best judge of character and I should have heard the warning bells when she said 'I really feel sorry for Mike*, he's living on his own and he doesn't know how to cook. I'm going to go around there and make him dinner.'
Fortunately he tended to pull his head in around Mr McSpaz. They'd gone to high school together, where Mr McSpaz was a big football hero and Mike was just this prickly little oddball. He'd been quite intimidated by Mr McSpaz and had always looked up to him. Anyway, when they met again at our place, after six or seven years, MM's first words were 'Hey, I know you! You're - um - Kev!' His name wasn't Kev. Fifteen-year-old MM had started calling him that because he thought Mike looked a little bit like Fred Savage. The name had stuck and Mike had hated it.
MM hadn't meant to call him Kev this time, though, he just couldn't remember Mike's real name. But in hindsight I'm glad that he did, because somehow the name 'Kev' re-established the old high-school social hierarchy in an instant. Mike was still intimidated by him. 'Good bloke, Mr McSpaz,' he said earnestly to me later that night. 'Dunno why he calls me Kev but he's a good bloke. I never thought in a million years he'd one day talk to me like an actual mate, fair dinkum. He never picked on me or nothing at school, but his mates did.'
So I got off pretty lightly, when all was said and done. The worst thing Mike did to me, apart from the perennial scowling and stomping around, was when I'd leave something on the lounge room floor or in the bathroom. Angus was eighteen months old at the time, and it was hard to remember to pick up EVERYTHING when I was trying to look after him, do my uni work and whatever cooking and cleaning had to be done. (I'll just digress for a minute and explain why I was living with these people when I had a child to raise. When I split from my husband, I came home to Australia and lived with my parents. We didn't get along and when I started seeing Mr McSpaz they hit the roof, because separation or not, I was still legally married; the divorce didn't go through until the following year. I had to find a place to live and my friend said that I could stay with her if I didn't mind sharing a bedroom with Angus. I couldn't stay with Mr McSpaz because he lived in a tiny two-room flat in Coro and it was hardly big enough for him, let alone three of us. Whenever we did stay over, we were always having to move the furniture into whatever room we weren't using at the time so that we could fit in Angus' portacot.) Anyway, Mike would gather up whatever I'd left on the floor and put it in my bed. Sometimes I'd come home with groceries and put the bags down on the floor, and instead of putting them away, Mike would put them in my bed. I gave Angus a bath and left the old nappy and the towel on the floor while I went and got him dressed. Ten minutes later I found them in my bed. He didn't give me much of a chance to clean them up! But I got him back. One night he was completely s***faced and left all his empties and stuff on the landing outside his room - I waited for him to go outside and then I put the whole lot in his bed. I hope they leaked everywhere. He never did it to me again.
But Mike was horrible to my friend - his
girlfriend - he would get drunk and violent. He would shout at her and push her around, often in front of guests, he just didn't care. And if the guests had brought alcohol, if he got in a rage he would just carry it off with him and drink it. I confronted him about this once and he said 'I'm f***ing annoyed. I'm in a bad mood. I think that's a bigger problem than my drinking someone else's piss. I don't care at all about that.' I suppose the only redeeming quality about him was that he was always very kind to Angus. I was glad of that because I was having no luck at all finding another place - I'd even tried the caravan parks - and if he'd carried on like this in front of Angus, we'd have had to live in my Daewoo or squash ourselves into Mr McSpaz's miniscule flat. In the end, that was pretty much what I did anyway - my friend, blinded by love, decided that Angus and I were getting in the way.
We were responsible for Mike's dreadful mood swings; he was unhappy because he never got to spend any romantic time with my friend. We had to go. So it was back to my parents' place and the war zone. At least by then they'd actually reconciled themselves to the fact that I was in another relationship, and they came to like Mr McSpaz very much in a short time - and now they can't stop saying how great he is and how lucky it was that I ended up with him.

But we didn't get along any better than we ever had and so I ended up with Angus in MM's flat for most of the time, only coming home at intervals when the claustrophobia threatened the relationship. It was a huge relief when we managed to find a sizable house for us in Old Reynella.
I think my friend and Mike lasted a further week after I moved back in with my parents. They had a predictably drunken, abusive, messy breakup. Before he left, he spat in her bed and took various items of clothing, video games and whatever else he thought was valuable. Then he moved up to Queensland to look after his sister, who was in a mental hospital for mental illness related to heroin addiction. The following year we heard that there was a warrant out for him in Queensland for attempted murder - he beat up a bloke quite badly in a pub brawl. He came back to SA and did the same thing there - in between ringing up my friend/his ex and threatening her - and again in WA. Some people just don't learn from their mistakes. I don't know where he is now but he won't come back here if he knows what's good for him.
*not his real name but it'll suffice. I would prefer not to put his real name. He is, after all, wanted for attempted murder in three states.