Moving Day

And so at last the inevitable occurred. Sick and tired of my sponging and my unfulfilled promises to totally start paying rent, my parents finally kicked me out of their executive top-floor apartment in Balmain.

They did this not by imprecation, threats or tears. They simply listed the apartment for sale.

“You’re crazy,” said their crazy real estate agent, Angelo. “To list a place like that, in a building like that, in this market.”

He had a point: the evil old elevator that occasionally seemed to teleport people to another dimension (they’d get in, but they’d never get out) had recently been removed and was due to be – but thanks to a contracting foul-up had not yet been - replaced by a new and hopefully less evil elevator that would only teleport people to the Gold Coast. So now the whole centre of the building was an empty shaft in which nylon ropes had been hung, up which you, the resident, were expected to jumar.

“Crazy to sell,” Angelo repeated.

“You don’t understand,” said our parents, “we have a 30 year old son who won’t move out.”

The ad appeared the next day. “Ideal for mountaineers,” it said.

So I had to pack my meagre belongings and skedaddle. The logical thing to do would be to move in with my girlfriend Lara, but as the total lack of reportage about her in this column indicates, the relationship was going well and I didn’t want to jinx it.

Victor Ninox, incredibly, still lived in the catacombs and disused water conduits beneath the city, but I wasn’t yet desperate enough to bid farewell the sun for the remainder of my fast-diminishing youth. Yes, the last three years of not paying any rent had left me with a generous nest egg, but I was just $107,400.86 from being able to buy a Porsche 911 outright, so neither did I want to go and actually rent an actual flat.

While pondering this dilemma, I went to visit the offices of the magazine. As it happened, they were in the middle of moving too.

“I just don’t see,” screeched the editor over the likewise-screech of packing tape being torn off its roll, “why we have to keep all these AT cases. And this 28.8K modem. And this inflatable novelty globe with the Empire Earth III logo on it!”

“Because,” squealed the tech editor.

“But the globe isn’t even a sphere! It has a goiter. Vivendi has given the Earth a goiter.”

Sighing, the editor pulled the plug on the globe and it deflated into what looked like the scrotum of one of the nastier beasties in The Zone. He tossed it into a box and sealed it up. The noise of the packing tape was like nails on a blackboard.

“What’s going on?” I asked, standing in the doorway with my big suitcase and milk crates. The milk crates were what I used for my bed. All I needed was a relatively clear and flat space on which to arrange them.

The deputy editor stood up on his little back legs and looked at me.

“What’s going on?” he asked. “What’s going on? We’re moving. We’re packing as fast as we can! There’s one!” he suddenly shouted. With cat-like reflexes, he grabbed a crossbow with a Medieval 2: Total War sticker onto it and fired the bolt into a stack of boxes. There was a squeal and a rustling noise. The deputy looked disappointed.

“Missed him,” he said, shaking his head and reloading the crossbow.

“Missed what?” I asked. “Why are you moving? You guys never move!”

From across the room, the tech editor gave me a haunted look, then jerked his head at some tiny movement and suddenly dived into a pile of boxes. There was a terrible squealing and shrieking noise, cut off suddenly. The tech editor emerged, wiping his hands on a Fallout 3 T-shirt.

“Hey Ed!” he cried, “I got one!”

“Great,” said the editor. He was pulling packing tape off a spool so he could stick it back on again and pull it back off, for maximum nails-on-blackboard effect. “Only uncountable thousands to go.”

“Uncountable thousands of what?” I asked.

The editor looked at me with huge, sad eyes. “Interns,” he said. “The damn things are everywhere. We’ve spent the last six months trying to eradicate them but it’s no use. They are uni students after all: they breed faster than we can kill them. So the company is relocating. To the other side of the harbour. To a skyscraper. With a moat. And arrow slits and a button that releases poison gas. And dogs.”

“Will you be safe there?” I asked.

Staring into the editor’s eyes was like staring into hell itself.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know.”

A thought began to percolate through my ironically caffeine-deadened mind. “So this whole building is being abandoned?” I asked.

The editor looked philosophical. “Well, we have high hopes it may become fit for human habitation again. Starved of their natural diet of new games and sweet tech, the interns should eventually die out. Of course, if someone were to volunteer to remain behind and hunt and kill the interns whenever they raised their scaly little heads, the process would be sped up markedly. But who would be crazy enough to actually live in this dump?”

I was wearing a grin of which Blind Drunk’s William Liability himself would have been proud. I stuck out my hand.

“What?” said the editor.