House Guests from Hell

Disclaimer: I’ve known several lovely Irish girls during my various years abroad, and while I’ve always been impressed with their tolerance for booze, I would never classify them as a country of drunks. That being said, I have never witnessed such appalling, alcoholic behavior, as the two Northern Irish girls who stayed with us last month.

Our roommate, Pat, has a friend living in Japan who asked if a girl he met there could stay with us while she spent a week in Sydney. He said she was young and sweet and that she was traveling with a friend from Belfast who he had never met, but was a former model and single mother of a three year old child. We have an amazing beach apartment, and an extra room, so we're always happy to welcome guests, but what Pat’s friend failed to mention—that both girls were raging alcoholics and the single mom/former model a raving lunatic to boot—might have changed our minds.

I was the only one home when the girls arrived, Shantala, the extremely blonde former model dressed in a full on fur coat, and Rozy in enormous Uggs. . . Let’s just say I’ve never seen fur in Sydney, let alone Bondi Beach, and it was an uncharacteristically warm winter day. They burst into the apartment like a hail storm, squealing about our beach views, and asking several unanswered questions about how much we paid in rent, then staging an impromptu photo shoot in front of the windows, model poses and all. I handed them a bottle of sunscreen and they shed their boots and fur for string bikinis and hit the beach for hours.

That night I organized a dinner with Giff and Pat and our friend Andy at our lovely neighborhood Italian joint. We sat down to order and the girls immediately requested a bottle of Yellowtail Shiraz, an appalling choice, especially when living in Australia. I apologize if any of you happen to like Yellowtail Shiraz, but this is like requesting a Fosters beer, you just don’t go there. Giff and I exchanged a knowing glance—we’d just toured the Hunter Valley wine region by tandem bike and we knew better—and ordered another bottle. After the wine arrived, the girls had to switch seats to be closer to the door so they could get up for a cigarette every 20 minutes. While we ate our delicious, homemade pasta, they shared various boozy misadventures, featuring several black-out nights they’d experienced on the Gold Coast the week before. Shantala had left her daughter with her parents, and I thought she was just cutting loose for a little while, until she explained she had a very addictive personality, and had trouble with cigarettes and alcohol, amongst other substances (including the Valium she offered from her purse under the table).

After the meal, Giff and I excused ourselves and headed home, while Pat and Andy joined the girls for a nightcap. We didn’t hear them come home, but the girls stayed out until 4am and I woke up to a mess of clothing, heels, and the contents of a purse spread over the living room floor. I was on my way to my nanny job and when I got home that night, the mess was put away. While Giff and I were watching television later on, Pat came home from work and told us he owed us an apology because the girls has opened some of our wine the night before. I looked at Giff, puzzled because we only had a fridge full of beer and I’d told the girls where to find a bottle shop if they wanted any vino. I was about to tell Pat it wasn’t ours when I realized what had happened. I ran to the fridge and pulled out the vegetable drawer. Sure enough, the bottle of dessert wine we had purchased at a lovely, hill-top vineyard that Giff had hidden behind the veggies, was gone. Shit. I promptly began rooting through the trash and recycling, looking for the evidence of their crime, but the bottle was nowhere to be found. Pat thought that they had been drinking in their room, so I threw open the door and stashed behind Tripp’s surfboards was the half-drunk bottle of our precious wine. My heart sunk. I was appalled that anyone would root through someone else’s refrigerator and open any bottle of wine without asking, let alone a small, special bottle that was so clearly tucked away. Who could be so desperate for a drink after an entire night of boozing that they would raid a vegetable drawer!!

In the morning there was an obnoxious, cutesy note pleading not to hate the drunken Irish girls and that they were going out that day to replace the wine. Good luck. If you want to head three hours west to the Hunter Valley, be my guest, because you can’t find it in any stores. What they did buy was an undrinkable bottle of cheap, orange Muscat wine, which they left on the kitchen counter next to our empty one. This was Friday night, and bright and early Saturday morning, Giff woke me up to tell me he had booked us a flight for the Gold Coast that weekend. We got the hell out of there, and I couldn’t have been happier.

When I got back to Bondi the following Monday, the girls were home, sprawled out on the couch in nothing but our beach towels and smudgy black eye makeup left over from the night before. I retreated to a late lunch with Andy, and he filled me in on what we’d missed after the Italian. Highlights include Shantala bragging that she’d smoked cigarettes and done an occasional spot of cocaine throughout her pregnancy. There was also the time that Andy looked up from his drink to find the girls making out next to him. They weren’t lesbians, they’d explained, they just liked to have a little fun.

Later on, I got the weekend update from Pat, who had witnessed more than a few of these drunken girl-on-girl sessions. Thrilling, I'm sure. He was upset over Shantala's behavior and said if he’d known how completely crazy she was, he’d never have agreed to let them stay. He was relieved that we’d gone away for the weekend, because the girls had been coming home and jumping on him in the middle of the night, wreaking of several bottles of wine and stale cigarette smoke. He warned us to keep our computer and anything of value behind closed doors.

He also told me that they'd been walking along Darling Harbor, and Shantala fell behind, stopping to peer down at the dark, oily water, arms wrapped around herself, rocking back and forth. Apparently she'd had a 45 minute conversation with herself and when she caught back up with them, she said if it wasn’t for her little daughter, she would have ended it all right there. She also lives on welfare and refuses to work, and told us she has a husband somewhere in England who she married when she was 21. A few years later she was preparing dinner and realized she didn’t feel like being married any longer, and put her spatula down and walked out the door. Seriously, she never spoke to the guy again, and he couldn’t find her to request a divorce. He’s not even the father of her child, it’s all so sad. .

Fortunately, this was their last night in Sydney, and they’d decided to spend a quiet evening in. Giff and I went to bed before they got back from dinner, and in the morning I found several empty bottles of wine, amongst bread crumbs from an entire loaf of bread, the second of which they'd consumed without replacing. There was also a wine-stained shirt soaking in the kitchen sink, and several articles of clothing strewn across the floor. I had to get out before they woke up, so I went for a coffee and stayed away as long as I could. When I came home, I found both girls stretched out on the couch reading gossip magazines, the signature goopy black makeup smeared under their eyes, with empty cartridges of cigarettes and several lighters littering the floor. I hadn’t actually spoken to them since the wine incident, and was thrilled when they told me they were leaving for the airport in an hour. I even offered to order them a taxi online, anything I could do to get them out.

I’ve never been happier to see someone off. I thought the drama was behind us, but Giff and I woke up early the next morning to go for a cliff run, and on our way out we bumped into the landlord who asked if there were any smokers in our unit. We assured him no, at which point he said in that case, why did his lawn look like a dirty ashtray. Giff mentioned that we had some guests who were smokers and apologized for their behavior. When I got back from the run a little behind Giff, he’d already collected 100 cigarette butts and there were plenty more. Giff, who’d remained irritatingly calm throughout the entire visit, even after the wine incident, finally exploded. Not only had they been smoking inside after Pat told them not to, they were chucking their butts out the kitchen window onto the landlord’s lawn below. As Giff put it so eloquently, bitches.

Well, at least they are gone now forever, and Andy just rung up to invite us all to drinks to celebrate their departure. Cheers!