When I was at uni, I was just about to turn 21 and my best friend Pete asked me to move into a share house with him and his mate Ben, because their other housemate was leaving. I was a bit hesitant because, until that point, it had been an all-boy household. But Pete convinced me that Ben, who I didn’t know very well, had three sisters and was used to living with girls. So I decided to move in.
For the first few months it was great. But after a while I began to notice that Ben was actually really lazy, never doing the dishes, always leaving mess around, and finishing the last of the milk without replacing it, despite the fact that we lived across the road from a convenience store.
He was always bringing girls back to the house and letting them help themselves to what was in the fridge as well as my shampoo and cosmetics in the bathroom. Afterwards, he’d strut around the house bragging about what a stud he was, thinking it was hysterically funny.
When we went back to college, Pete was not around as much, which was fine as we were all busy studying. But the less Pete was around, the worse Ben got. He’d play music at top volume when he’d come home at 2am with random girls, knowing I had to work at 7am, or when we were studying for exams because it was “the only way” he could concentrate.
When I confronted him about it, he tried to pull me onto his lap and bat his eyelashes at me, all coy and flirty. I was furious. It was then I realised that he wasn’t “used to living with girls” — he was used to having three sisters and a mum to do everything for him.
I thought things would get better when Carla moved in. We had a spare room out the back and I thought another girl would restore the balance. But it made things worse because Ben and Carla hooked up. Now I had two inconsiderate people in the house. When Pete went away for a college trip for two months, things grew worse still.
Carla was a waitress and often had to work late on weekends. After a while, Ben was back to his old habits with the random girls — he would go down to the local pub on a Saturday night, pick up some girl, bring her back to our house, sleep with her (rather noisily) and then send her on her way before Carla got home from work around 1am.
I was absolutely disgusted. Carla was still my friend, and I couldn’t believe he was blatantly cheating on her. And he’d still strut around the house in his boxer shorts, dabbing himself with Calvin Klein Obsession and calling himself “the lady killer”.
It all came to a head one day when I came home from work and Ben and Carla were at it in the bath with the door open. I had to walk past the bathroom to get to the rest of the house, so without looking I pulled the door closed — what else could I do? But they got really angry at me and started yelling about how I was really inconsiderate and rude. Even Carla started yelling at me — I couldn’t believe it. I told them they should be more discreet, looking pointedly at Ben, and then Carla started screaming that I was just jealous of her and what they had.
Well, that was it. I decided right then and there that I couldn’t handle this anymore without Pete around, so I packed everything into my room, gave them two months’ rent and went back to my folks’ place.
I was so angry. I called my mum and ranted to her and saying how horrible Ben was, how he was cheating on Carla and how she had turned on me. I even told her about the perfumed strut he’d do around the house before and after he cheated on Carla. To that, my mum said, “He’s just an idiot, sweetheart. People are like that. You should piss in his perfume — that would teach him eh?” Of course my sweet old mum was just saying this as a joke to make me laugh.
But the more I thought about it, the better an idea it seemed. I was laughing to myself every time I thought about it. But I knew that, as funny as it was, I didn’t think I could really go through with it.
A week later I had to go and get my stuff. When I got there I went into the kitchen to get a set of crystal champagne flutes my aunt had given me for my 21st. In my hasty packing earlier, I’d forgotten to put them in my room. I looked on the shelf in the cupboard and they weren’t there.
I asked Ben where they were and he said “If you leave things lying around, they tend to get broken, you know?” Then he and Carla left for a romantic lunch.
I was absolutely furious. He had purposely broken my 21st birthday present just because he was such a jerk. My brother turned up then to help me pack my things in the car. I was so mad when he got there. It was then that it occurred to me that I could go through with peeing in his perfume! That would teach him every time he did his big strut!
So I made my brother keep watch at the front door, I went into Ben’s room and picked up his big bottle of Obsession. I went to the laundry, grabbed the little jug we used to fill up the iron, and took it to the bathroom. Standing over the kitchen sink, I poured out half the bottle of Obsession and poured in the contents of the jug, which earlier in the day had been a glass of water that I had consumed.
I started to panic when it went all cloudy, but it soon settled down and looked completely normal. I put the bottle back in Ben’s room, packed my things and left.
I still keep in touch with Pete, and I know that he is still mates with Ben. Ben and Carla split up long ago, but as far as I know, to this day neither of them is the wiser. I can only assume that until the bottle was empty, Ben was wearing my pee as cologne!
Picture: Getty Images. Posed by model.
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