The Vacant House

The house had been under surveillance for a week or more. One of the guys lived in the same street and had been keeping an eye on its status when he wasn’t at school. It was clear that the owners had moved out, the house was vacant. I’m not sure how, or when we decided to do it. I don’t remember any group discussion. It was more like something unspoken had passed through the group, a possibility, that, later, became fact. Friday night was to be the night. This was what Friday nights were for, still are.

It was the height of summer. The days were glaringly bright, the heat unrelenting, but, come dusk, the sky transformed itself into magentas, purples and deep blues like a velvet curtain, and it was on nights like these, that we gathered together and planned our siege.
As with all groups of school age kids, there was a leader, a leader who was never officially voted in, and, if we are to look back from our present positions, this particular leader would, no doubt, be the one person, who is now living no more than three kilometres from where he grew up, is working some dead-end job, or, more probably still, is unemployed, is married to a woman with an ass the size of a small state, and is raising kids he can ill afford. Or he’s a successful entrepreneur. I guess it could go either way. Come to think of it, it was probably him who suggested we hit the house, so, I guess, we also shouldn’t discount the possibility of him being in gaol. We were all probably twelve at the time, thirteen at the most. We were all already smoking cigarettes and spitting…regularly.
This was the suburban life in Australia at that time. It still is. The Australian suburbs are a sprawling vacuum of nothingness, where mediocrity, alienation and boredom are king. Even at twelve, maybe particularly at twelve, you will do anything to relieve this. And we did. Not that we knew any different. The entertainment had to be free and make use of whatever we had.

My friends were all kids of the neighbourhood, kids from school, predominantly lower class, though we didn’t know it at the time, it was just where we lived. There were no girls. The girls would come a few years later. Girls and booze: a path, I’ve strayed little from, almost thirty years henceforth.
Once we were sixteen and had our drivers licence, the booze was a lot easier to get. Australia is probably the only country in the world that has drive through centres, purely dedicated to booze. And, they are everywhere. As ubiquitous as a barbecued chop. Australians like their booze to be accessible.

The house faced onto a reserve of eucalyptus trees, through which, ran a small creek. There were various dirt tracks that followed the creek through the dense scrub, all of which, come night fall, would be cloaked in darkness, providing multitudes of escape options. We were confident, that once we entered the scrub, we would be beyond the reach of any authorities. After all, this area, of almost untouched bush, had been our playground all of our lives. We knew all of its secrets, all of its hiding places like no one else. To us, this uncleared area of native Australian bush was the size of half the world, certainly, it was most of our world.
We lived, then, in what was the very edges of the sprawling suburbs, on the edge of a city – the city itself, paling, in contrast to the enormous distances of the suburbs –at the edge of an endless sprawling desert. And it was during the summer, that this desert made itself known, encroaching in various ways, into our safe little suburban lifestyles.
The smell of eucalyptus, constant insect buzz and clicks in the tall dry yellow grass, the odour of algae in the pools of mostly stagnant summer creek water, these are the memories of my childhood. The creek and its surrounding scrub was our adventure playground. At that time, no one gave any thought to the fact that we were all living on the edge of a desert. It was just where we lived, without context, without any real links to the rest of the world.

Friday night came, as did mashed potato, steamed vegetables and some kind of meat…followed by tinned fruit and ice cream. I have no idea whether this is your typical Australian suburban dinner (though, I do remember, years later, a strange night of dinner at a friend’s house, stoned to hell on a wire, and being served, by the mother of the house, three fish fingers on a large white plate; three fish fingers…on the whole plate, that’s all there was…and me with a head full of dope, you think that wasn’t strange?), but, what I do know is this: while all other families were eating in front of the television, we were sitting at the table…talking…of all things. Not that it would be like this forever; the television always wins. Always. But, in my family, it happened in stages. First, we moved the television to the room adjoining the dining room, surreptitiously-like, hoping no one would notice. We could just glimpse it in the distance, flickering with its sound turned down. In between, “Honey how was your day and have you got any homework?” our eyes would flick hungrily towards those tantalizing images of Hogan’s Heroes, Richie and the Fonz, that crazy, crazy bunch of Brady people or the beautiful blonde witch with the nose that just wouldn’t stop, and her uptight, but somehow adorable husband. Who knew that he would turn out to be gay? Go figure. Over time, like it grew legs of its own, the television sidled up to the very edge of the dining table like a puppy begging for scraps. But this isn’t where it would end, like I said, the television always wins. Eventually, we moved dinner to ‘the rumpus room’, a room, with, not so much rumpus going on, as television going on, and, from that day, dinner conversation came to a stop, and the dining room became this kind of non-place that we didn’t quite know what to do with. I think that the idea of renovating it to be something actually practical, would be the same as admitting that we had finally succumbed to the charms of the television set, so, instead, the dining room remained static, preserved, intact, like some museum display.

After dinner, we all met at the leader’s house, and made the final plans. It was still not dark at this time. In the suburbs of Australia, in mid-summer, the darkness takes its own good time to come on. A real night dark, only really settling in about 9:30pm; all that bright light is not so easily extinguished. From the time that day begins its slow shift to night, to make its gradual transformation, the temperature, degree by slow degree, cools, and the shadows begin to congeal. One by one, the sounds of the day insects give way to the night insects, and the sky is injected with the pinks of galahs and reds and purples that slowly deepen in wide bands across the horizon. It is at this time, that the eucalyptus trees put on their show, and glow in complex colours like they are on fire from within, feeding on the red of the sky.

Darkness finally came, and we ventured out to the park and took up our positions opposite the vacant house, its windows in darkness. Looking across the road at the house, it was like sitting in the ghost train, looking at the curtain of black rubber you were about to go through, knowing, the moment you pass through, everything will change. We lay down flat on the dry grass. Each of us had a small pile of stones and a hand-made slingshot, of which, through much practice, we were all fairly accomplished. Even though it was summer, the streets were deserted and we were safely in the dark place between the streetlights. No one spoke. We all knew the plan. Apart from the sound of the night insects around us, there was no sound, no breeze, time had stopped. But, even in my dark hiding place, I felt completely exposed. Who was watching me at this very moment? God? My Parents? I literally shook with the anticipation of it. I’m sure we all did. We were anything but hardened criminals. We all loaded our slingshots. We knew that we would have to work fast. We would give ourselves, perhaps ten seconds to get as many shots in as we could, before we took flight. Looking at each other, we all felt safe in the knowledge that we were in this together; if one went down, we all went down. That kind of loyalty is rare, though, I wonder if it was loyalty borne from the fact that we had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do, and didn’t know any better. Still, loyalty.

Minutes later, hiding in the dirt, in the middle of the canopy of a tree, I found myself alone. We had decided it safer to split up. I had run, fast, and I was trying to quieten my breathing as best I could. I sharpened my ears and sent them out there to hear what was going on. Where were the others? I listened for the voices of grownups or the sound of sirens, expecting the worst at any moment. I heard nothing but the night insects. I reflected on what, only moments earlier, we had done. The sound of shattering glass had cut open the suburban night like a bomb, just like we had wanted it to. We were powerful and we had carved open a fissure in the suburbs where nothing ever happens. And, as the minutes ticked by, it began to appear as if we had gotten away with it. But, that’s the thing about being young: you do. It really is best to get these things out of the way when you’re young, because, if you do them when you’re old, you are going down for them, you’re a cat who is down to its last life. When you’re young, you might fall, but you don’t get hurt, at least nothing you won’t get over.