The Family Law (25 page)

‘Go
home
!' they hollered. And as the traffic lights turned green, they'd rev their engines, blast their horns and give us the finger before laughing like jackals, speeding off in a fumy cloud of black. Sometimes they threw stuff at us: apple cores, beer cans and burger wrappers. At first, this new experience was disorientating. What kind of person screams at a child in knee-high socks, holding a clarinet case? What had we ever done to them? It seemed so unfair.

‘No respect,' my mother said, watching them drive away in utes. ‘People have
no respect
.'

There was something so powerless about standing still while your tormentors got to drive away. It felt as though they got away with it, while you were left behind to shake your pathetic little fist in their dust. When stuff like this happened, I'd fantasise about owning guns or grenades, or make elaborate plans to fill water-bombs with rotten milk and shit. Eventually, we started giving the finger back, my mother included: a bunch of school-aged kids in private-school uniform and their tiny Asian mother, all flipping the bird. It might have been badly ventilated and packed full with clutter; it might have been roach-infested and a hive of domestic tension; but it was our home, and we weren't going anywhere.

 

*

 

Years later, when all the kids had moved out, my mother found herself living by herself in the house. The abuse from strangers had stopped, but the trash and beer bottles continued. By this stage, the house was falling apart. After thirty years, it was as though it had aged in dog years and was now on its last legs. Doorknobs had fallen off wardrobes. Kitchen cabinets sat at weird angles, leaning downwards to the stovetop like a pair of angry eyebrows. Light fittings had disappeared and rooms were now lit by naked bulbs. Our wooden cubby house had rotted away like an abandoned fort, its giant rusted nails exposed to the rain.

On one of those rainy days, I visited Mum and started talking about her future, now that she no longer had to take care of us.

I thought it would make for a happy, optimistic conversation, a forward-looking plan of adventure for a gung-ho empty-nester.

‘So, what do you think, Mum?' I asked brightly. ‘What's the plan?'

Mum looked at the wall blankly.

‘I will die in this house,' she said. ‘I will die here alone.'

There was an uncomfortable pause between us.

‘Right-o,' I said.

When I got back to the city, deflated and depressed, my boyfriend suggested she sell the house and move away from the coast. ‘If she sold the land and moved to the city, she'd have a better house as well as savings. Not only would she be in a better place, she wouldn't have to rely on your dad or the pension.' Scott had always been the one who could see my family from the outside, the one who came up with ideas when everyone else had run dry. ‘Your mum would be so much happier if she moved to the city,' he said. ‘And so would you. Everything she loves is here.'

After setting up a house and land valuation, we found she was sitting on prime real estate. Mum was thrilled.

‘Yes!' she said to Scott and me breathlessly. ‘
Yes!
Why didn't I think of this before? It will be like my second divorce. I'll
divorce
this house like I
divorced
your father. Yes, I will drive the bulldozer myself! So many bad memories in this house. We should just knock it
down
.'

When I called the other siblings, everyone was supportive, but I could also hear something else in their voices, a tinge of heartbreak. Michelle had only moved out a year earlier and still referred to the place as home.

‘Would they really knock it down?' she asked. ‘Would we watch?'

That night, thinking about Michelle's question, I surprised myself by starting to cry.

‘Benjamin?' Scott said, turning over. ‘What's wrong?'

I didn't know what to say. It was hard to articulate what I felt. As much as I hated that house, I think I felt sorry for it too.

 

*

 

Someone I know is having his house demolished soon, and I've asked to come along and watch. I'm curious to see how it all works. What sort of equipment do you need to tear down someone's house? How long does it take? Can the family who owned the house contribute to its destruction? Can they bring sledgehammers and drive the bulldozers, or does this represent an occupational health and safety violation? And what happens to the rubble afterwards? Where do the remains of a house get buried?

My childhood home might be bog-standard brick, but I'd like to think that standing there for thirty years has fortified it to the point where it will need dynamite and wrecking balls to break it down, some heavy-duty arsenal. But I know it doesn't take much to make a house like that disappear. I've watched houses being torn down on the internet, and usually all that's needed is a single bulldozer, while the former residents whoop and cheer in the background, getting high on watching their home be obliterated. It looks like fun.

In my mind, I can already see what will happen leading up to the demolition of our house. Tammy, the photographer, will document the entire process, from the signing of the papers to the boxing-up of childhood artefacts for storage. She'll be the one who'll zoom in close to archive the childhood vandalism left on the walls, the stuff we scrawled as kids that we'll never see again. Michelle, a writer, will pen some tragi-comedy about it, something heartbreaking and absurd. Candy and Andrew, the practical, sensible ones, will look over the paperwork and make sure things are in order. And when we've finally kissed the house goodbye, offering it our thousand quiet apologies, we'll take turns recording the carnage on video: trees being uprooted, our termite-infested cubby house being smashed into the ground, the graveyards of long-dead mice, guinea pigs and goldfish exposed by the bulldozer, before its giant metal claw tears down the walls, smashing it all into the dirt.

Or maybe we won't be there at all. Perhaps we'll be as far away as possible, pretending there's nothing to see. I can picture my family in the city, at my mother's new place,
100
kilometres away from ground zero. By that stage, she'll be pouring champagne as we unwrap her furniture, willing ourselves to forget that the other place existed at all.

Whatever happens, we'll eventually have to drive past our old place. To visit my boyfriend's mother, my cousins or my dad, we'll need to take the main road where the house once stood. It will be disorienting to see it gone, and I'll probably pull a right at the traffic lights out of habit. Who knows what will have replaced our house by then? Maybe there'll be shops or a block of apartments, a government office or a real-estate agent, or maybe a combination of those things stacked one on top of the other. People who've driven past the house for decades will struggle to remember what once stood there, the same way you struggle to remember old businesses once they've been replaced by shiny new shopfronts.
There was this Asian family
who used to live there,
they'll think.
A whole bunch of kids. Four?
Five? Six? I can't remember. And their weird mother: this funny
Chinese woman who referred to herself in the third person and let the
grass grow long.
Really, it would be so easy to forget anyone ever lived there at all. In the end, the house could be something I only imagined or dreamed about, something only a select few of us remember, or just something I made up for a story.

A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Even though this book is dedicated to them, it would be insane not to thank my family properly. So Mum, Dad, Candy, Andrew, Tammy and Michelle: thank you – not only for providing the source material, but also for letting me get away with this. You are my favourite people. I am proud to share your genetics, as well as your medical disorders.

I'm grateful to everyone at Black Inc. Chris Feik, my publisher and editor, is a prince. For his foresight (he knew this was a book before I did), patience, good humour and exceptional brain, I am completely indebted. Thanks to Sophy Williams, Denise O'Dea for her eagle eyes, Andrew Joyner for his exceptional illustrations, Thomas Deverall for his smart design and Nina Kenwood for championing me. Special thanks also to my agent and coconspirator Benython Oldfield.

Many thanks to my various editors over the years, for encouraging me to write: Louise Bannister, Jo Walker and Lara Burke (
frankie
); Ben Naparstek (the
Monthly
); Sally Warhaft (formerly of the
Monthly
); Christine Middap, Karen Milliner and Cathy Osmond (
Qweekend
); Alan Attwood and co. (the
Big
Issue
); Alison Boleyn and Michelle Hurley (
Sunday Life
); Rick Bannister (formerly of
Transit
), Ronnie Scott (
The Lifted Brow
); Kellie Chandler and Tom Doig (formerly of
Voiceworks
); Pat Whyte (formerly of
Scene
); and Rosemary Sorensen (formerly of the
Courier-Mail
). Thank you also to David Marr and Robyn Davidson for including two of these stories in their volumes of
The Best Australian Essays
.

Over the course of writing this book, Caro Cooper, Matthew Condon, Stuart Glover, Ben Green, Chloe Hooper, Bethany Jones and Alice Pung all answered odd questions, and I am much obliged. I have also been supported by the QUT Creative Writing department, Fiona Stager and the staff at Avid Reader bookstore and café, and the National Young Writers' Festival.

Thanks to my writing buddies – Romy, Rhianna, Christopher, Chris, Fiona, Daniel, Rowena, Dion, Anthony, Kris, Kirsten, Belinda, Cory, Mia, Kári and Sam, to name but a few – and especially Michaela McGuire, Krissy Kneen, Alice Pung (again) and Marieke Hardy for being the book's first readers. Extra thanks to Lorelei Vashti for late-night conversations, and to my glorious wife Anna Krien (another first reader), without whom, I would have gone insane. To all my non-writerly friends between Brisbane and Melbourne: thank you too. My mother's right. I
am
lucky.

Thank you to Val Spark, for the food and support, and to Ken Spark, whom we all miss. And finally, thank you to Scott Spark – my smart, criminally handsome, funny-as-a-bastard boyfriend – whom I not only adore, but who makes all things, including this book, possible.