37) 1998-1999. Ainsworth Street, Salisbury (Brisbane) QLD 4107

March 18, 2015May 27, 2015 / Christopher / 1 Comment

In late 1998 we left the breezy, salty outskirts of Brisbane’s Redlands shire and headed inward to Salisbury: pronounced SOULS-bree or SAWLS-bree, depending on how fancy you feel, but never ever SALLIS-berry. If you’ve been saying it like that there’s something wrong with you.

In hindsight, that’s an excessive number of carports/driveways for a single house.

Coincidentally, while Weldon Street happened to be very similar to my family name, which meant no end of jokes about how the street was named after us; it turns out that many streets in Salisbury were actually named after members of my family: from my dad’s side, who helped establish the suburb way back when. Fairlie Terrace is a large street in Salisbury; Fairlie is my grandma’s maiden name (no, not that one; the other one. The nice one). And we lived just off Lillian Avenue: Lillian was my (great?) great (great?) aunt (I’m unsure on the correct number of greats). Luckily, I wouldn’t learn this for another six years, so everyone around me was spared me being a total insufferable nonce about it.

There were two excellent things about the house in Ainsworth Street. The first being the giant jacaranda tree that grew in the front yard. With its explosion of purple blooms that made a filthy mess of the footpath, hanging out on the front verandah was a feast for the eyes. And even when it wasn’t in bloom, it is still a beautiful big tree.

The second excellent thing was that Robby, who had lived with us in Cairns, Darwin, Moranbah and Crows Nest, now lived around the corner, on Lillian Avenue (did I mention it’s named after a relative of mine? I’m pretty important around here). Specifically, Robby lived so tightly around the nearest corner that our back fence was her side fence, and there was even a gate giving us access to each other’s backyards. We basically operated as one giant house that just happened to have an atrium in the middle of it. So while Natasha and Casey had both moved out and moved on with their own lives after we left Weldon Street, our unconventional extended family unit maintained its multitude of dysfunctional arms.

I had my 18th birthday in Robby’s backyard, which was the very first night I ever got drunk. Having extensively documented my capacity to be a goody-two-shoes, nobody should be surprised by this. Yes, it wasn’t until December 20, 1998 that I had more than one single mouthful of alcohol. As you can see, I took to it almost immediately.

This isn’t all my fault: My friends and family didn’t ease me into this “drinking” malarkey: Oh no, I was doing shots of Sambuca and Southern Comfort right off the bat. It was years before I would learn that alcohol needn’t taste like licking the back of a fridge.

Being my first time, I got drunk pretty quickly. But I didn’t get drunk as quickly as my mother.

The theme of the party was to come as something starting with my initials: C, B or W. Mum combined two and came as a “bitch with wings”. I’m not making this up.

I can only assume the relief at having gotten me all the way to 18 without either of us dying, by shark or toaster or boat or cactus garden or handsy babysitter or snake or Tina Arena cassingle, had given her cause to celebrate.

This is the most my mother has EVER posed for photos. This in itself is proof she was completely soused. PS: She doesn’t have three arms, that third arm is Robby’s, who is even better at avoiding having her picture taken than mum.

And celebrate she did. My mother is not a frequent drinker. In fact, she drinks so infrequently that it’s easier to just round it down and call her a teetotaller. And she’s a lightweight, so when she does drink the resulting spectacle is as surprising as it is shortlived.

Ladies and gentlemen: My mother. Looking classy as shit with her cigarette and unopened bottle of what looks from here to be a West Coast Cooler. Oy. Also in this photograph: Aimée, looking just thrilled at her choice of surrogate mother-figure.

She had passed out in Robby’s bed by 10:30pm.

She didn’t even get to cheer me on when Paul, who was also living in Brisbane by this stage and had come to the party, gave me a birthday kiss on Robby’s trampoline. (I’d actually forgotten about this until Paul reminded me in a conversation we had on Facebook a couple of weeks ago.) And yes, at this stage, on December 20, 1998, I am still five years from realising I’m gay, because I am. a fucking. idiot.

:+:+:+:+:+:+:

We did not rent the house on Ainsworth Street through a real estate agent, we rented it privately. I don’t normally remember the details of how we rented houses and who we rented them from, but I specifically remember this was a private rental because there were some specific stipulations in the lease agreement.

For a start, the covered carport was where the landlord kept his Winnebago. We didn’t have to do anything with it, it was just where it lived. Secondly, there was a downstairs room, separate to the rest of the house, which was always locked: it was a storage room, and it was packed to the gills with old spare furniture of his. The room was off limits to us. Both of these were fairly innocuous requests: there was plenty of driveway to fit mum’s car as well, and the remainder of the house was a perfect size for us.

You already know where this is going, right?

If you have already assumed that the landlord was a massive creeper who would sneak into either the Winnebago or the downstairs room without any notice so he could spy on us: congratulations, you are smarter than we were. Where the hell were you seventeen years ago?

But did you also guess that he would let himself into the house so he could do things in mum’s bedroom?

We discovered that last part because mum had a lightweight cotton bedspread that she pulled taut across the bed when she made it of a morning. One afternoon we came home after all being out all day, and she discovered the tautness of her bedspread had been compromised by something shaped like an old man’s butt.

I don’t even want to imagine what he got up to in there, so whenever I think of it I just picture this.

We never really got to the, er…bottom…of exactly what this guy’s damage was. Nor did we really dig too deep to find out what he did when we weren’t in the house (or worse still, when we were). Once we discovered he was a major creeper, we pretty much moved immediately.

It’s one of the silver linings of a private rental: If your landlord turns out to be a the-call-is-coming-from-inside-the-house kind of guy, you can pretty much just abscond without guilt.

36) 1998. Weldon Street, Birkdale (Brisbane) QLD 4159

March 11, 2015May 27, 2015 / Christopher / Leave a comment

In June of 1998, a lifelong dream finally came true. After an eighteen-year tour of the best and worst of Queensland’s rural hotspots—charming hamlets, desert mining towns, coastal gems, bigot strongholds and far-flung peripheries—we moved to Queensland’s capital city: Brisbane. A place I had literally dreamed of living in, but had barely dared to hope. It was the 18 months spent in Toowoomba—tantalisingly close to Brisbane, only an hour and a half-ish by car—that gave me the freedom to fantasise about perhaps, just one day, moving down the hill into an actual city.

And then it happened. We decided to go to Brisbane. From the day the decision was made until the day we moved the boxes into the house, I held my breath: it all seemed to good to be true. My life thus far had made it very easy to assume that everything would turn to shit; everything turning to shit was kind of our default position. Our family crest is an image of a second shoe falling, and our motto is “Giiiiive it a Minute”.

It was particularly easy to assume that moving to Brisbane was too good to be true given that the street we were moving into was our own stupid surname. It was all too surreal, and it made ordering pizza for delivery very difficult.

This was one of the most colourful houses I ever lived in. One bedroom was vivid purple. One bedroom was bright blue. The computer room was mint green. These verandah railings are actually the most subdued colour scheme in the whole house.

Living in Weldon Street as a Welldon really helped to fuel the fantasy that I was a fancy person. I could pretend to be so important that I lived on a street named after me. The horse-owning six-year-old me would have been so proud.

In reality I was a dumb, poor, first-year journalism student who was too lazy to transfer to a Brisbane university, and so instead kept travelling to Toowoomba three times a week to attend classes. I was too in love with the concept of living in Brisbane to realise how stupid it was to commute to Toowoomba from the outer south-eastern suburb of Birkdale: A twenty minute walk to Birkdale train station, a fifty-five minute train trip from Birkdale to the Roma Street bus terminal, a two hour bus ride to Toowoomba, and then another twenty-five minute bus trip from the Toowoomba terminal to USQ meant I was taking a seven hour and twenty minute round trip every Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. For three hours of class.

Unsurprisingly, this soon got super tedious, and after three months I just stopped going. I didn’t defer, I didn’t drop out: I just didn’t go anymore. No classes, no exams, no assignments handed in…there’s probably still a “MISSING” poster with my face on it in the refectory.

It was while living on Weldon Street that our family also continued its odd tradition, spearheaded by my mother, of taking in family friends and stray people and building unconventional family units. Aimée had moved out on her own and remained in Toowoomba, but Mum’s good friend Natasha had moved from Toowoomba to Brisbane at the same time as us. Naturally we all ended up living at the same house. There was a downstairs area at Weldon Street that was essentially just a rumpus room, but functioned as a self-contained unit. She was excellent to have around, both as a fun and lively addition to the house, and also, as a built in mum-distraction, which meant mum spent less time asking me to do things.

One Sunday afternoon there was a knock at the door, and Natasha answered it. A young English guy, presumably a backpacker, was going door-to-door selling—wait for it—encyclopaedias. Literally. Sure, they were interactive CD based encyclopaedias aimed at children, but still. DOOR TO DOOR ENCYCLOPAEDIA SALESMAN. Had we moved to Pleasantville by mistake?

Mum and Natasha immediately rejected his offer, despite all the wonderful discounts available to them. He took the rejection graciously, turned to leave and then sneezed. The sneeze triggered a cough, which led to a coughing fit, which led to another sneeze. He sounded like an idling two-stroke engine. He apologised, mentioning something about pollen and allergies. It was hard to understand him with all the coughing and sneezing. Natasha offered him a glass of water and a chair to sit on to collect himself while he tried, unsuccessfully, to keep all his air and spit on the inside.

Polite conversation followed, and it turned out that Casey (his name) had not had much luck selling his children’s encyclopaedias, and really didn’t enjoy trying to sell them. We didn’t blame him, it was an awful job: we knew because we’d just seen him do it. He wanted to quit the job but his original plan had been to quit only when it was time to return to the UK, and he didn’t want to do that. A lot of suggestions and advice and lengthy discussions about plans and travel flew back and forth, and that afternoon Casey quit his job and moved into our spare room, where he stayed for three months.

Hey, if you’re looking to move into Weldon Street, we were the people to talk to. Check the name.

Despite the fact I have no idea where Casey went after those few months, and I in fact had to ask mum what his name was before writing this story because I had forgotten it, he did have something of a lasting, positive impact on me. He is one of the only people to have done this. And he did it in the most innocuous of ways.

I was seventeen, a bit dumpy, right in the middle of some excellent acne, and I had stupid hair, very few friends, a dental plate that physically covered the fact that I was missing three teeth from a car accident but did not offer the same service on a psychological level, and worst of all, I had a giant mole in the middle of my neck. Exactly halfway between where the chin ended and the chest began, a disgusting brown sphere the size of a peppercorn mocked me endlessly.

This is from a few years earlier: 1994, when we living in Darwin. But it’s one of the few photos taken from close up enough for the mole to actually be visible. Also do I get a medal for bravery for posting an extreme close-up selfie of my face at 13?

I would cover it up in photos, I would stare at myself in the mirror with a finger pressed over it, trying to see what I would look like without it. I would fantasise of living somewhere cold enough to wear a scarf all the time: day and night. Of all the things wrong with me, it was in hindsight the least problematic, but it caused me the most grief.

It depressed me so much that one day I made an appointment with the nearest GP and went to ask how I would go about getting removed. I had no idea how these things worked, besides some vague notion of plastic surgeons charging thousands of dollars. But I had to at least ask the question.

I must have seemed pretty pathetic to the doctor, because he offered to remove it himself, the following week. He also mentioned some stuff about biopsies or something technical; I can’t remember what it was, but it meant I could even claim it on Medicare. He could make me pretty and he could do it for free.

A week later, the disgusting mole was gone. In its place was a white bandage the size of a playing card covering up a row of stitches, but in a fortnight they’d both be gone and my neck would be free of debris and I would be beautiful. Or something.

I raced in the door to tell everyone what had happened. I was so super excited about the new lease on life I had just been given. (This sentiment should highlight exactly the kind of vain idiot I was, and remain to this day.)

The first person I saw was Casey, who noticed the bandage immediately.
“What happened to your neck?”
“I had the mole removed!”
“Mole?”
“Yeah. Mole. THE mole. The Mole. THE MOLE. My mole?”
“What mole?”

That motherfucker had never even noticed I had a mole.

I couldn’t actually grasp the concept. This hideous disfigurement had dogged me every second of every day. It felt like a second head to me. It was all I saw when I looked in the mirror. It was all I thought about. And now Casey was telling me that he’d never even noticed this thing that was the bane of my existence?

He taught me a very valuable lesson about perspective without even realising he’d done it. I mean, it wasn’t that life-changing: I, like everyone else in the world, have never stopped being annoyed by my physical flaws. Casey did teach me to stop assuming everyone else was as annoyed as I was. It helped lessen the torment.

Well. I mean. having the mole cut out probably helped more. But the Casey thing seems emotionally healthier? I should focus on that.

35) 1997-1998. Canberra Street, Toowoomba QLD 4350

March 4, 2015March 18, 2015 / Christopher / Leave a comment

I can’t remember why we moved from Cavell Street, though I’m sure it has something to do with the fact we were living on the opposite side of town to both our high school and the USQ campus. We went from being a twenty minute walk followed by a twenty minute bus ride away from school, to only being a four minute walk away. And who wouldn’t want to live four minutes walk away from Harristown High School? I mean apart from people who’ve been there.

I JEST. The school was fine. Actually it was kind of progressive for a sport-centric school in a country town. They had a Performing Arts Day, which was exactly like a Sports Day, where students competed to earn points for their house, except instead of basketball and running it was singing and drama and dance and art. None of the other 21 schools I attended from 1986 to 1997 offered such a thing, so props where they’re due. The best part was I actually earned points for my school house for the first time in over five years. Not since the Tin Can Bay State School Swimming Carnival, when my togs fell down to my knees as I jumped into the water at the start of the 50 metre breaststroke and I had to swim to the bottom of the pool to pull them up again so that nobody would see my tiny butt HOWEVER a bout of gastro that swept through the school had meant there was only one other swimmer in this particular race so technically I still won second place, had I felt such a surge of school spirit.

So the school was fine; it was just a good solid chunk of the students in the school and the school song that sucked. Seriously, it was awful. The first two lines of the song just name the colours of things. Harristown High School’s school song remains the worst song I have ever heard in my entire life, and I say this as someone who at one time owned three different versions of the Macarena on three separate CD singles.

I’m pretty sure I’d thrown one out by the time we moved in here. I think this house was only a TWO Macarena house.

We lived in Canberra Street for twelve months: from July 1997 until July 1998. The story I want to tell about living here is this:

Nothing happened.

I know this technically means I don’t have a story for this address, but the fact I don’t have a story is a story in itself. This was twelve months of relatively quiet, idyllic nothingness. This was the house I lived in when I graduated from high school: I passed my subjects with walking colours. This was the house I lived in when Aimée moved out and started living independently as an adult, dating a boy from our school she would go on to marry and be with to this very day. This was the house I lived in when we first got the internet (a whopping 40 megabytes of download for only $40 per month!). If you’re a fan of landmark events: it’s the house I was in when Princess Diana died and when Jo Beth Taylor resigned as host of Australia’s Funniest Home Video Show; two events we can all agree have stayed with us. It’s also the house where I started university. And yet? It is only noteworthy for being not at all noteworthy. It was uneventful.

Look at the house. Small, square, brick. A wee fence. Palm trees. There was a decorative butterfly on the external wall, for heaven’s sake. I lived in this house, like really lived in this house, like an actual goddamn person. I walked to school/uni, I walked home. I watched Foxtel, and listened to music. I used the internet like a typically sexually confused teenager: typing “man penis” into Alta Vista, waiting 10-12 minutes (33k modem!) and getting disappointed at the results being nothing but medical journal diagrams.

This house was just a house on a street: not on an island with no plumbing in the middle of the ocean, not on the site of an abandoned drive-in, not on a property with untouchable horses, not in a rural cottage (with faux-crystal doorknobs) built by kindly religious zealots. And there was such little drama: no crazy mean teachers with witch tones, no boating accidents, no peckish burglars, no paedophile babysitters, no crazy drunken quasi-stepfathers, no snakes.

(Yes, I know that is a lot of links. Yes, I know I just made the blog equivalent of a clip show.)

If this had been the house I had grown up in…I think I would have been okay with that. I feel like I would have had a grounded, stable upbringing. I could have felt like a regular kid living a regular life. Like a Keaton.

“The Cosby Show”, “7th Heaven”, “Hey, Dad..!” I swear to god, if a cast member of THIS show turns out to be a vile garbage person, I’m burning something down. Don’t let me down Steven, Elyse, Alex, Mallory and Jennifer. ESPECIALLY ELYSE: YOU’RE MY ROCK MEREDITH BAXTER

Then again, if I’d grown up like a Keaton, I would most likely have also turned out to be an irretrievable BORE. And the world would have been deprived of the bucket of broken pieces artfully assembled into a human shape that I have become.

So I’m glad we didn’t live there forever. Besides, the place we moved to next? I was so happy to be going there I would have traded in a THOUSAND Keatons for the chance.

34) 1997. Cavell Street, Toowoomba QLD 4350

February 25, 2015March 18, 2015 / Christopher / Leave a comment

While still living in Rockhampton, in Turner Road, my friend Aimée moved in with my mum, sister, brother and me. Her family had moved away from the area, and she wanted to stay in the area. For nearly a year, Aimée was part of our Rockhampton family; my proxy twin sister (who was actually a year older than me) and in-house BFF.

Can you imagine being nearly 18 and having to move in with a family as crazy as mine? Aimée must have felt like a real outsi—oh no, never mind, she was as nuts as we were. Excellent.

This made it extraordinarily awkward when mum transferred her university studies from Central Queensland University to the University of Southern Queensland (if there’s one thing Queensland is good at, it’s naming its universities imaginatively), meaning we were all moving to Toowoomba.

The awkwardness didn’t last, because Aimée decided to move with us. Why? I was never game to ask, lest she change her mind. I was too grateful she’d decided to come. As well as not questioning her reasons, did I also intentionally keep very tight-lipped about my previous (horrible) experiences in the Darling Downs area, for fear of scaring her off? Yes. Yes I did.

I’ll say this much about Toowoomba: they have cute little houses.

Cavell Street was a very quiet little street on Toowoomba’s east side. It should be noted: Toowoomba’s east side was very close to Toowoomba’s west side. To paraphrase Buffy‘s Cordelia Chase: We didn’t have a whole lot of town, there. But the school we attended, Harristown State High School, was on the “other” “side” of “town”, and we did have to catch a “bus” to get there (actually it was a real bus: scrap that last pair of sarcastic quotation marks). This meant a walk through the enormous Queen’s Park where, during our first few weeks of school, the Moscow Circus had set itself up for a series of shows. Every day for five days we walked past where the elephants were held, waving and saying hello. By the fourth day they’d started to recognise us and walked over to say hello back.

Turns out they really DO remember everything. Including friendly local teenagers?

If only the students at Harristown High had been as friendly as the elephants. Harristown’s student body didn’t take kindly to our sort (I still don’t know which sort that was, particularly), and we were under constant scrutiny. The rumours of who and/or what we were flew thick and fast. We were twins, we were from a cult, we had been previously married, Lauren and Tommy were our children: our classmates were at least imaginative, if not completely fucking brainless.

:+:+:+:+:+:

Not long after we had moved in at Cavell Street, mum had to go away for a week, so Aimée and I were left in charge. While we had both often taken care of ourselves before, we had never actually taken care of ourselves, and younger siblings, for an extended period of time, so it was a pretty big deal for us. We were left with a small amount of money to cover food, and given free reign of the house.

We decided we wouldn’t be like other teenagers, who would probably immediately spend the bulk of the money on nonsense, leaving only a pittance to actually feed ourselves. We decided we’d spend the pittance first: two dozen packets of two-minute noodles. Financial responsibility! That way we’d have money left over in case of an emergency.

See how mature and ready and prepared we were to take over a household?

To ensure that we would be kept busy, thus removing temptation to spend the leftover money, we decided we would learn Spanish. This is an actual decision that we made. We went down to the local library, grabbed three books and some kind of language-learning audiocassette, and took them home, determined to be fluent in Spanish by week’s end.

We lasted twenty minutes. Bored, dejected by our failure, and a little dizzy after two days of nothing but two minute noodles, we belligerently spent every last cent we had on a giant pizza order.

By the Saturday of our week of independence, we realised we were rapidly running out of clothes. I am embarrassed to say that at this point, neither Aimée nor myself really knew how to use the washing machine. And kids, this was back in the old days before they had buttons. There was just one dial and you had to push it and twist it and pull it: it was all very complicated. You young people today don’t know how good you’ve got it, etc. Anyway, while we were vaguely aware of the push-turn-pull manoeuvre, the intricacies eluded us.

As did the idea of sorting our washing, but we’ll get to that later.

We threw in our clothes, threw in the powder and the fabric softener (yes, all in the one place), and push-turn-pulled. The machine flicked into life, so we assumed we were good to go.

About half an hour later, while we were distracted doing something else (I can’t remember what it is, but it definitely wasn’t learning Spanish or paying attention to the washing machine), we heard a weird, terrible sound. Like a cassette of Yello’s “Oh Yeah” being chewed up by the player (kids, a “cassette” is…oh never mind.) What was the quiet digga-digga-digga-digga-digga-digga of (what I now know to be) the spin cycle suddenly became

digga-digga-digga-dinka-dinka-dinka-donka-DONKA-DONKA-DONK-DONK-DONK-DONK-KONK-KONK-CHONK-CHONK-CHOCK-CHOCK-CHURK-KURK-HURK-CHUGGAHHHHHHHHHHHhhhh…

And then terrifying silence.

From opposite ends of the house, we ran to the laundry. As we saw each other running in the same direction, we both realised it would be better to not get to the machine first, because the first person to look at it would probably have to make the call on what to do next. The frantic run became a slow jog with the look of a frantic run, which became a brisk walk with the look of a slow jog, which became a genial amble with the look of a brisk walk. By the time we actually reached the laundry, we were so reluctant to be first we were both doing Bob Fosse’s “The Aloof” from Sweet Charity:

“The minute you walked in the joint (BOM BOM) I could see you were a washing machine expert, so you get up in there and have a look, I’ll stay back here and watch…”

I was first to take decisive action.
“WHAT DID YOU DO TO IT!?” (My decision was to throw blame as hard as I could.)
“NOTHING! WHAT DID YOU DO TO IT!?” Aimée yelled back. I could see I had met my match in this fight.

Very carefully, we lifted the lid on the machine, shielding our eyes as if hornets were going to fly out of if. The machine was completely filled with soapy water. It refused to drain, no matter what we did with the button/wheel thing. No amount of turning it on and off again at the wall seemed to reset it. We even disconnected and reconnected the taps in the hope that whatever was causing this blockage (hornets?) would maybe just fall out. Short of tipping it onto its side and letting the water spill where it may (the laundry floor, the bathroom floor, and eventually our bedrooms), we were completely out of options.

We realised the only thing left to do was to siphon the water out of the machine into the sink, if only to get the level low enough to see if there was a blockage in the drum itself. Physics not being either of our chosen senior subjects, we could only siphon based on what we’d learnt in the earlier years of high school. We found a length of garden hose and absolutely nothing else, so we were going to have to use the old suction method. We knew what was supposed to happen: we’d suck the water up the hose, and then gravity and suction would take care of the rest, but it didn’t work. Gravity and suction failed to participate. Eventually Aimée and I were just sucking up and spitting out hose-lengthfuls of soapy washing machine water, from the machine into the laundry tub. It tasted pretty gross.

But not as gross as it tasted once the water levels finally dropped enough for us to see that the machine was filled with our underwear. Not just our white underwear, not just our black underwear: we had sorted by clothing type, not clothing colour, so the washing machine contained every. single. item. of dirty underwear Aimée, Lauren, Thomas and I owned.

For twenty minutes, we had sucked up each other’s filthy soapy jock water. We had become like blood brothers, but much much much much much much much much worse.

33) 1995-1996. Turner Road, Rockhampton QLD 4700

February 18, 2015July 30, 2015 / Christopher / 2 Comments

With Dale completely de-fanged, Mum took another step toward freedom by moving us out from underneath his shitheadery and into a place of our own. He wouldn’t follow us this time.

We moved into yet another unconventional structure: Once an old Queenslander, a temporary wall had been erected right up the middle of it, turning it into an unofficial duplex. As Queenslanders aren’t built to be split up the guts, it made for an odd house shape: my bedroom, which had no windows, was only accessible through my sister’s bedroom. My bedroom also had a door that led to the kitchen via an unlit hallway that doubled as a storage cupboard—part of the hallway of the original house. The verandah that wrapped around the house—a standard feature of this style of house—had had walls built around the verandah railings, closing them in and giving us a giant, L-shaped sleepout.

As you can QUITE CLEARLY see, this house is no longer a makeshift duplex. It has been restored to some level of former glory that we never saw when we lived there. They rebuilt those front stairs, turned the front verandah back into a verandah, and painted EVERYTHING. For reference: We lived on the right hand side: our front door was actually half way up that side wall.

I am a little taken aback at how fancy our old, weirdo half-house looks now. Luckily, this story has very little to do with the house itself, so we can forget about the loss of what could have been and move forward. Forward to the story of a very important adolescent first.

When I was fifteen, I was very much like Drew Barrymore. My voice was slightly nasal, I never knew quite what to do with my hair, and I had Never Been Kissed.

Me IRL. #josiegrossie4lyf

It was 1996, and I was at a high school dance. Being 1996, The Presidents of the United States of America’s third charting single “Peaches” was blasting out of the speakers in the school auditorium, and my friends and I were standing in a circle, head banging. Because that’s what you did at a school dance when “Peaches” came on.

On this particular occasion, I must have really been feeling the emotion in Chris Ballew’s voice, because I was head banging with ardent fervour. In fact, my fervour was so ardent; I didn’t even notice that I’d slowly started to rotate on the spot, so that I was no longer facing the rest of the circle. I continued to not notice when, after turning 180 degrees, I started to drift away from the group like a delicate snowflake. What I did notice, however, was the very centre of my forehead connecting with the corner of the auditorium stage.

Connecting…with ardent fervour.

There was an immediate jab of pain, followed by a wave of nausea, and then more pain. I snapped upright, and the momentum of this sudden movement made me topple all the way over backwards and, as I collapsed in a heap, I slammed the back of my head into the floor also.

My friends couldn’t decide whether to rush to my aid or laugh at me, so they did both. Among them was one of my best friends, Kristel. As my friends helped my throbbing, vibrating form up onto the stage to lie down—something about keeping something elevated? I’m sure it was a misguided medical precaution, as I still ended up horizontal, just higher—Kristel sat over me and rested my head in her cross-legged lap. She ran her fingers through my hair, stroked my cheek, and kept asking if I was okay. Despite the red-hot pulsing ache just above my eyes, I felt so relaxed, so cared for, that I could have stayed there all night.

At this point in the story I need to give a quick splash of background. Kristel had spent the entire tenure of our friendship flirting with me, and making jokes about kissing me. These jokes completely failed to land because my horrified, prudish teflon coating kept deflecting them. The whole kissing/hormones/sex thing was a source of constant terror for me. I can’t hang an air freshener on this one: for a teenage boy I was obtuse and frigid.

Now, while I was as comfortable as a very comfortable thing (despite possible internal bleeding), Kristel was not. The weight of my (even then) oversized head was causing her legs to go numb. She asked me to get up, I said I wouldn’t. She demanded I get up, I said I couldn’t. She reasoned, she begged, she whined, she bargained – but there was no way I was leaving the comfort of the stage floor and her lap to face the throbbing, dizzying torment of verticality. Her gentle hands and innocuous conversation were the only things distracting me from the searing pain in the front, back, and ego parts of my head, so I. was. not. moving.

Finally, she decided that extreme measures had to be taken. She knew the one thing that would get me moving, and fast:

If you don’t get up in the next five seconds, I am going to kiss you.

I decided to let it happen. Either she was bluffing, or I was about to have one of those Momentous Adolescent Moments.

She wasn’t bluffing. She kissed me.

Despite everything that came after that, that kiss is one of the most perfect I’ve ever had. It is certainly, to date, the most genuine. It was soft, it was innocent, it represented nothing, but meant everything. I will remember that utterly sublime moment for as long as I live.

And by the time she had pulled her lips away from mine, I was completely in love with her.

:+:+:+:+:+:+:

Unfortunately, teenage love doesn’t work like that. In fact, not only was our friendship going to remain exactly as it already was, but not long afterward Kristel started dating someone. An actual boyfriend. I can’t remember his name, so in the interests of continuing the shoddy Drew/Never Been Kissed metaphor I’ll call him Barry More.

I was devastated by the development. I’d seen Disney movies. Weren’t we supposed to live happily ever after now? She confused me. She crushed me. And she kicked off what has been, to date, a lifelong habit of falling for people who don’t fall back. (Okay, granted, that says more about me than it does about Kristel.)

But hey, we were fifteen years old. Not only was I pretty resilient, I also had the attention span of—well, a fifteen year old. So I got over it pretty quickly. Kristel and I were back to being friends within, oh I don’t know, nine minutes or so.

Besides, Barry More was a cool guy. He wore a leather jacket, and had the thickest, shiniest hair I had ever seen on a dude. It was like an entire shampoo commercial was sitting on his head at all times. Sometimes the three of us even hung out together. Not often, because he didn’t go to Rocky High like Kristel and I did. But we hung out on weekends often enough that, despite the threat of a teen drama-esque love triangle developing, we were all comfortable with each other.

It was during one of these weekend times, hanging out at Kristel’s house, that the topic of her and I kissing came up. Barry More knew that before they had started dating, Kristel had kissed me, and it had been my first. Barry More joked that he had kissed Kristel, and that I had kissed Kristel: the only two people out of the three of us who hadn’t kissed were he and I. As a savage bolt of electricity that I didn’t quite understand shot through me, Barry More merely snickered at the hilarious homo joke he had just made.

Later that afternoon Barry More had to go, so we went out to Kristel’s front yard to say goodbye to him. Out of politeness, I turned and took a step away when Barry More leaned down to kiss Kristel goodbye, so that I wasn’t looking right at their PDA. I might have been at ease with the situation, but that didn’t mean I wanted great dirty teenage pashes all up in my face.

I was putting such a concerted effort into not looking or listening that I was completely unaware that they’d stopped, and that Barry More had walked up behind me. What happened next took me by complete surprise: Barry More put one hand on my shoulder, spun me around, grabbed the back of my head with his other hand and started kissing me. It was all done in one quick, fluid motion and I had no time to react, or process, or do anything except kiss back.

To summarise: the first boy I ever kissed was the first girl I’d ever kissed’s boyfriend. I mean. I guess at least I was efficient?

I’d like to say that kissing Barry More completely blitzed any feeling I had for Kristel, and opened me up to a whole new world where I could discover who I really was – but no. He found the whole notion hilarious, and I…I didn’t know how I found it. All it really did was confuse the hell out of me.

It did, however, pave the way for me to build the courage to hold hands with Paul at the cinema a few months later. Though, not that much courage: my teeth chattered with nerves as our fingers touched and, eventually, interlocked (I was in year 11! He was in year 12! Also HE WAS A BOY!), and the blood was pumping so ferociously it rang in my ears: I lost all track of the movie. I never did find out how Michelle Pfeiffer got on at that dodgy school.

I’m sure she did fiiiiiiiine. She had Coolio to help her.

Oh hey, I just remembered a way I can tie this winding story back to this address!

The point of this whole blog. Remember, idiot?

Paul and I had our first kiss—blowing Barry More’s right out of the water, by the way—as we sat on the back steps of this very house. It was actually intended to be our first and last kiss: we didn’t know what to do with our hand-holding feelings, so we’d decided to abandon them altogether and part ways. That resolve lasted exactly four hours: Cut to an eight person, all-genders game of Spin the Bottle out in the middle of the street that night, and Paul and I ended up making out for so long everyone else had to move three feet to the left, so they could re-form the circle and continue the game without us. After that, Paul and I realised that maybe we should just go ahead and date like proper teenagers.

What comes next I’ve already described: I freaked out, decided I didn’t want to be gay, and broke up with Paul in the most assholic way: telling him I was done “experimenting”. A boy-on-boy crime I paid for by staying confused and closeted until I was 23 years old.

In hindsight, this goes a long way to explaining my slapdash, stop-start approach to dating and sexuality. Kristel, Barry More, Peaches, a school dance-induced concussion, Michelle Pfeiffer, Paul, Spin the Bottle. It’s hard to decide what you want for dinner when you’re handed the ingredients for five different meals all at once.

[Editor’s Note: Holy shit, fifteen year old Christopher had better game than any future iteration of Christopher has ever had. I…I’m not sure how I feel about this?]

32) 1995. Smith Street, Rockhampton QLD 4700

February 11, 2015March 18, 2015 / Christopher / 3 Comments

Much larger than Pennycuick Street, and able to hold all of us properly (remember, I didn’t decide I was going to Rockhampton until after mum had found the Pennycuick Street house), Smith Street was located in a quiet part of Rockhampton called The Range. I only just now learnt that it’s called The Range, but it makes sense: it would explain the extreme slope of the street and backyard, which turned the relatively simple task of mowing the lawn into a dangerous battle against both the petulance of a two-stroke engine and Newtonian physics.

“Hoooome, home on The Raaaange, where the deer and the antelope plaaay. Where seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the lawnmower threatens to barrel roll across the backyard every time you turn a cornerrrrrr…”

My change of heart wasn’t the only reason we needed somewhere a bit bigger than Pennycuick Street: Dale found us. Again. He moved himself back in, as he was wont to do, and started throwing his arrogant, muscular weight around once more. Tommy, his only biological son, apple of his eye and baby of the family, was allowed to run bratty, amok-running rings around the household, while either Lauren or I was blamed for every single act of his four-year-old terrorism (I was once, at fifteen years old, blamed for stuffing pegs into the slot of the VCR. I mean, how dare you: I only ever stuffed the VCR with episodes of The X Files or Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman that I’d recorded off the telly).

Meanwhile, mum…I don’t even know what mum ended up living with. At least, not the details. And even if I did know, I don’t think I would want to write them down.

It had now been nearly seven years of this. Mum had tried everything she could within this trapped, hopeless situation. She tried going with the flow: it ended up with us stuck on the Papua New Guinea side of the Torres Strait. She’d tried running, again and again and again and again: he kept finding us (in case you missed it: Dale’s sister worked for the Child Safety Services division of the Queensland Government, and just kept giving Dale our continually updating address). She’d moved to Rockhampton to study at CQU and find a way to better her life, and Dale was there to tear it all down again.

I guess after seven years of such suffering, one might end up thinking there is nothing left to lose. Maybe there isn’t anything left to lose. Maybe when every single available surface is coated in fear, it’s impossible to become any more afraid. So the fear just sets, and rusts over, and turns into hopelessness. Hopelessness is almost indistinguishable from emptiness. And once you’re empty…

…what is there to be afraid of anymore?

I’m no expert, and I’m only an observer in this scenario, but I think that is what happened to mum. I think that’s why, one mid-Saturday morning, during one of Dale’s alarmingly regular rampages about god knows what, with nothing left to lose, mum took a step towards him, planted her foot, and punched him as hard as she could right in his stupid disgusting drunken abusive cunt of a face.

Kapow.

The punch landed squarely enough (and, one assumes, with enough of a surprise) to make Dale stagger back a step. When you’re over six foot three, a kickboxer, and occasionally a bouncer by trade, it must sting when a short, round mother of three clocks you so hard you stumble. It did sting, and the sting made him mad. He strode forward to close the gap she’d mad between them, and said in the low, aggressive voice I’d heard many times before “Don’t you EVER do that again.”

“Do what,” mum asked, “this?” and she swiftly punched him again, in the exact same place on his stupid disgusting drunken abusive cunt of a face.

Kapow II: The Kapowening.

He staggered back a second time. This time, he didn’t step forward again. He didn’t do anything.

And I don’t just mean in that particular fight. I mean he never did anything to hurt any of us ever again. Shortly after this incident, mum, Lauren, Tommy and I would move to another house and Dale would not follow.

Mum was free. We were free. It was over.

:+:+:+:+:+:

So, here’s the thing. Obviously I was, and still am, nothing but thrilled that Dale’s control over the family had evaporated, almost overnight. It was what I’d wanted since at least 1991. But the way it happened. The children’s-textbook manner in which a bully, once confronted, immediately crumbled is insidious and repugnant. This man physically, emotionally, and mentally tormented my mother, and by extension me and my siblings, for years. To discover that all it took was two punches from a tee-totalling cross-stitch enthusiast to cower him is galling. It is almost embarrassing in its Very Special Episode predictability. That his menace was so hollow. Not that his menace wasn’t menacing—the ferocity of his drunken abuse was life threatening—it’s just that it was so brittle. So bafflingly, almost amusingly cliche. To this day I’m as embarrassed for him as I am furious at him. You’d think that the desire to beat a woman and torment her children for the better part of a decade would come with a bit of fucking follow-through.

But no.

None of this is the point, however. To disappear into my own head-hole over the semantics of Dale’s behaviour is to completely overlook the very wonderful things that happened: Mum discovered a strength she never knew she had, and we were free of Dale. Never again would we be moving house because of his volatile caprice.

I mean, we’d still move house a lot. You’re reading this from the top, one assumes, so you already know there are sixty stories: I’ve still got twenty-eight to go. But at least the remaining moves are for reasons a lot more capricious and whimsical and nonsensical!

H…ooray?

31) 1995. Pennycuick Street, Rockhampton QLD 4700

February 4, 2015March 18, 2015 / Christopher / 9 Comments

Crows Nest continued to be just the worst. My only solace remained in line dancing classes, populated by the town’s supply of old ladies, including my grandmother. A friendless, gawky 14 year old grape-vining with a room full of CWA members: entire runs of British sitcoms have been produced with less bumbling awkwardness.

Meanwhile my mother, trying to keep her head above water in a fake-nonchalant “No No I’m Not On The Run From Dale, I Just Coincidentally Enjoy Moving Very Quickly To Wherever Dale Isn’t” sort of way, was trying to find a way to regain some agency over her life’s trajectory. She decided to get herself a degree, and was enrolled at CQU: the Central Queensland University. Meaning? We were moving to Rockhampton.

Did you ever visit the Pennycuick St house? You didn’t? Good. This is DEFINITELY the house. I didn’t find myself unsure after an hour of searching Google Street View and then take a bit of a stab. Nosirree.

Except: well, I wasn’t. I decided to not move across the country again. I was going to spend the three weeks of school holidays in Brisbane, working for my Uncle Ken at his sign-writing company (SPOILER: The skills I picked up there were never, ever used again). Then I would go back to Crows Nest, move in with my grandparents again, and continue my schooling.

I know what you’re thinking. And no, I don’t know what the hell was wrong with me either. Staying at that school? Living with my grandparents? Voluntarily? Teenagers, man. They’re fucking idiots.

Thank goodness, then, for manual labour. For three weeks, I worked at Greenwood Signs, mostly scrubbing down old real estate signboards. Peel off the contact, scrape off the paint, patch up the screwholes, and repaint the boards white so they could be used again. I did this all day, every day, at one stage getting a sunburn so severe, at night my skin audibly hummed. It was physically intense work, and it put my pale, weak, indoor-specialist body through its paces.

“Did you work as hard as you could today?” my Uncle Ken would ask at the end of the day.
“Frrmfhm” I would reply from face-down on the floor.
“Well, I’m sure you worked harder than you’ve ever worked before, but I don’t reckon you worked as hard as you could“, he would smug, while I attempted to plot his murder. (I never followed through, I was too weak and puny. Uncle Ken is alive and well in 2015.)

It was tough, but it was exactly what I needed. It’s like the extreme physical workout over those three weeks cleared my mind. Firstly, I realised that on the list of things I wanted to be when I grew up, “signwriter” was at the bottom. Of a different list. On a piece of paper on the opposite side of town. More importantly, this realisation triggered a larger epiphany: I was free to choose what I did and did not want to do with my life. And I did not want to live in Crows Nest. I did not want to live with my grandparents. And I was free to choose not to. I chose, plans were rearranged, and I moved up to Pennycuick Street and started the new school term at Rockhampton High School, a full nine hours drive away from the place I hated most.

The backyard at Pennycuick St. This picture is not related to the story, but my sister made me promise to include it to show what a “filthy fucking snitch” I was. Look. I DID take this photo of her and Tommy to dob them in to mum because they kept denying swinging from the clothesline. I was indeed…ahem… a “filthy fucking snitch”. HAPPY LAUREN?

Rockhampton High School was, and remains, a complete riddle of a place. I had by this stage been to twenty schools before it, so I was kind of an expert in the process of starting a new school: I would keep to myself for safety, and would be summarily ignored by most of the student body. The resident dickheads would come for me straight away, and that was to be expected. I just had to stay low, stay quiet, and stay in the library: I knew the routine. If I was lucky, I’d end up on brief speaking terms with some of the kids I shared classes with, but it was kept very casual, partly because I would inevitably end up moving again before long, and partly because you never knew who to trust: A very common ploy among some of the more torture-happy bullies was to lure a kid into a false sense of security by “befriending” them, before pulling the rug out from under them at a later date in some cruel, calculated (and nearly always public) manner. I’d been caught out that way a couple of times, so this ruse no longer worked on me. I’d learnt to see it coming, and just to be extra careful, I never trusted anyone that came at me all smiles and friendliness.

So I was immediately on guard, hackles raised, eye to the nearest exit when, on only my second day, as I sat under a small tree doing a very good impression of an invisible person, Marguerita Smith bounced up to me.

“Hey! What are you doing?”
“Eating lunch.” (Never give too much away. I would have been a great spy during my teen years.)

“You don’t have to sit there all by yourself!”

“I’m fine.”

“No, come sit with us! You look so alone!”

“I am alone. That’s the point.”

“Ugh, don’t be boring. Come with me.”And she grabbed me by the hand and pulled me over to another part of the yard where about ten students sat in a circle.

I knew I was being had. However, the problem with the Carrie-style false-friend ruse is that calling it out too quickly can be just as bad as falling for it. Letting on that you know their game straight away gives them months of ammunition, as they were “only trying to be nice” when you “turned into a freak”. It’s a win-win situation for your tormentor. So, like finding a leech on your leg, it’s safer to just let them fill up, because if you try to rip them off straight away you bleed more and their mouthparts stay embedded in your flesh—I’m sorry, I completely lost control of that metaphor. What I’m saying is I really had no choice but to go with Marguerita to her coven of monsters who were no doubt plotting something terrible. I was trapped, and had to, for the time being, be complicit in my own torture, at least up until the point where they played their evil hand.

That point never came.

On that day, Marguerita introduced me to the people who became the best friends I’d ever had.

Katrina, the prototype for the kind of independent, zero-fuck-giving alpha women to whom, in later years, I would always find myself drawn: who was rebellious but fiercely loyal; dominating but surprisingly gentle; prone to vulgar humour (my favourite kind) but always full of love.

Aimée, who we were sure was at least part elf; a creature of delicate hippie-ish whimsy who would eventually move in with my family for nearly two years, becoming the older sister I never had. Who—much to the disgust of the rest of us—entirely skipped her awkward teenage years, evolving from cute kid to fully grown fairy-woman with the speed of a mogwai that was fed after midnight.

Yes, that’s me in the centre. Katrina is to my left, Aimee second from the right. And yes, my hair really is doing that. I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT IS. Wait until you see my centre part…

Fabienne, who is today an elegant 34 year old woman, but who has been an elegant 34 year old woman since she was 15. Fabienne, who started calling me on my shit in 1995 and has never stopped: who would take my left arm hostage in Maths B so she could draw on it, sometimes filling most of my forearm with abstract doodling (she never took any notes because her pen was occupied on my arm, and I never took any notes because my arm was occupied by her pen: we both failed that maths class. Okay maybe she wasn’t always an elegant 34 year old woman).

Steven, who completely redefined what I thought “cool” was, and who served as proof that I could make friends with a guy, and not secretly fear being punched in the face (I assumed that’s what guys did). Steven showed me it was possible to be a non-sporty, bookish kind of boy and hold some level of popularity at the same time. Not that I was under any delusion that I had what it took to be popular; it was enough just to not have to be invisible.

And there’s the centre part. (And quite a pale inner thigh, it turns out.) Katrina is to the immediate right of me, Marguerita is far left.

Paul, whose pinkie finger I “accidentally” brushed with my pinkie finger while we sat together at the movies, which built—agonisingly slowly—to a full holding of hands by the end credits. The second boy I ever kissed (but the first boy I ever kissed with intent), and the first boy I actually “dated” for a short time, before I imploded in a fit of gay panic and ending it, cruelly citing it as “a phase I was over”. (The sharp regret of that callousness stings me to this day: but I paid the price, and then some, by struggling with my sexuality for the next eight years. I wouldn’t date another boy for fourteen years.)

Kristel, who gave me my first EVER kiss, which is the subject of the next story so you’re going to have to wait for a week for elaboration.

Those six people changed me in ways I didn’t even realise until, really, I wrote this story. There were other people too: Jodie, Stacey, Becca, Emma(s), Charmaine, and more. I loved them all. The group often grew and shrunk, plus there were peripheral members, but that core group remained solid. I was part of a clique: a clique of dorky semi-outcasts, but a clique nonetheless. We hung out at a pergola on the school grounds, and due to our semi-outcast status, nobody else came near the pergola. It became our safe space, and we became known as “The Pergola People”: at least, according to several statements written on toilet walls.

This is incomplete, but, from left to right: Aimée in black, Katrina in the hat, me in the front (yes, again, that’s my hair), Steven at the back, Becca in glasses, resting her head on Paul, who’s standing in front of Marguerita, with Jodie at the end (Fabienne took the photo). Also pictured: the infamous Pergola: Our Turf.

I was at Rocky High for 16 months, and they were the very best of all twelve of my schooling years. I have lost contact with many of these people, but I’m still in touch with three of them to this very day. But contact or not, every person I befriended at that school means so much to me.

They are the reason I learnt how to live. They kickstarted the adolescence I’d forgotten to have until that point. Because of them, I had, among other things, my first detention, my first existential crisis, my first kiss, my first sexual experience, my first failed school subject, my first taste of adulthood, and my first sense of real belonging. They taught me to be funny, to be fun, to embrace what I’m good at, and to enjoy myself.

I guess the bulk of the credit goes to Marguerita, for forcing me to join her group in the first place. Marguerita was one of the first people I lost contact with after I left Rockhampton, and I doubt we have much in common as adults. But I owe her so much. She saved me. Or rather, she created me. The person who writes this today would not exist if she hadn’t taken my hand. I would still be a dull, quiet, invisible goody-two shoes hiding in libraries. So much of who I am now can be traced back to a single catalyst: an act of kindness from Marguerita Smith.

I will never be able to thank her enough.

30) 1995. William Street, Crows Nest QLD 4355

January 28, 2015March 18, 2015 / Christopher / 3 Comments

After only a short stay in Ravensbourne, we moved into the township of Crows Nest itself. A very large house on Williams Street, completely free of any kind of nightmarish qualities (real or imagined: I swear that house in Ravensbourne was scarier when we lived there). It was just a home.

Okay. This is better. This looks exactly how I remember it. EXACTLY. No distorted memories here. My bedroom was the window on the far right.

Not only did this home not cause night terrors, it was actually kind of cool. It was massive, for a start. As the oldest kid, I got a large bedroom at the front of the house: it was a converted sleepout, so my bedroom was actually a giant L shape. It was like having my own little pad. Plus, Robby and her daughter Taren came back to live with us again, and the house easily fit the six of us. I always felt like our family was complete when Robby was around. Despite this, Mum and Robby still stubbornly refused to even try being a lesbian couple, which strikes me as rank selfishness on their parts.

But the best part of the house was the phone cord. This was the first home I’d lived in that had an American-style loooooong phone cord. Just like in Roseanne, a wall-mounted phone hung on the wall in the middle of the house, and the cord meant you could go all the way to the kitchen, the front door, and the master bedroom. That’s what I remember most about that house: it being full of people I loved, and that long-ass phone cord.

Things outside the home, however, weren’t so great. The school I went to was the worst school I have ever attended. And by the time I finished grade 12 I’d attended twenty-two of them, so I say that with some gravity.

I had been bullied a lot at school throughout my years. Even as far back as grade three, when I was tortured by—and I’ve never admitted this before—a grade two kid. By grade 10, however, the bullying at stepped up a notch, and the school in Crows Nest was packed with horrible little notches. I don’t want to go into too much detail because that’s a massive drag, but I can say that the bullying got so bad that it made me actually skip class. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know that one of the common threads of my childhood is that I was an insufferable goody-two-shoes, so this is a Big Deal. Not once, in nine and a half years of schooling, had I ever even considered not being in class. But on this particularly bad day, after being pushed down a flight of stairs, I simply walked off school grounds and didn’t return until the next day.

I’m not sure why it got so bad at this school at this time. Normally when I went to a new school, the sporty kids would find out early on that I was not one of theirs, and usually come after me. That was to be expected. But I would find, if not friendship, then at least an absence of torment in the bookish kids. At this school, though, it didn’t happen. Either the bookish kids were also sporty kids, or there just weren’t any bookish kids at all (he said, shadily).

Or, much more likely, perhaps we were all 14 year olds and all had preternaturally shitty dispositions and didn’t deserve any friends, myself included.

Truthfully, I know for a fact that I was certainly going through an objectionable phase. Hot on the heels of my one and only teenage temper tantrum (five months earlier), it was while living at this house, and attending this school, that I ran away from home. For the second time.

I swear I made it further this time.

After an extended argument with mum, I was in my room at the absolute end of my rope, and I decided then and there that I would leave. I had no long term plan, I was just going to leave to prove that I could. Though the term had yet to be coined, I was essentially ragequitting my life.

After fuming on my bed for a while, trying (and failing) to come up with a plan, and playing my Rednex CD as obnoxiously loud as I could (yes I had the whole album), I set to work.

I grabbed my school bag and emptied it to make room for all my belongings. I almost immediately repacked it with the same items because I didn’t own a lot of stuff: “my belongings” were primarily made up of my school stuff anyway. On top of that I put my uniform, so that I would be prepared for the next day: adolescent emancipation is no excuse to shirk on your studies.

To recap, I had so far prepared for my new life by packing all the items I would need for a school I hated. Though the term had yet to be coined, I was essentially emo as fuck.

Then, satisfied I had everything I needed to free myself of the tyranny of the horrible people to whom I was shackled, I left the house…

…by climbing out my quite narrow bedroom window and shimmying down the weatherboards. Look, I may have been an angsty, rage-filled teenager ready to run away and never come back and make his family sorry they ever made him so miserable, but you know. The telly was on. I didn’t want to make a big fuss.

Having freed myself from the William Street Family Prison, I gathered my bag, turned around, and just walked away. I walked for two blocks, and found myself in the middle of the town square.

Look how much further I got running away from home this time! I think we can all agree that’s much more impressive. Brave, even.

I sat, aimlessly, on a bench: IGA to the left of me, Wingett’s Plumbing & Hardware to the right of me, Heritage Building Society at my rear. Nowhere to go. I tried to contemplate my options. Walk down to my grandparents at Short Street? They’d be no help. They’d side with mum without question. Go to my dad’s? He was too far away: it would be impossible to even get to Toowoomba on foot, let alone all the way to Brisbane. Run away and join the circus? I’d never been that good at hammering tent pegs.

I couldn’t even go hide out at a friend’s house because, uh, I didn’t have any.

I realised I hadn’t thought my plan through very well at all. When they did discover I was gone, they would find me immediately: the town was too small to hide anywhere. It occurred to me that all that would come of this was whole episode that I would get into trouble. BIG trouble. So much trouble that they might not let me go to line-dancing class anymore. Those Thursday nights line dancing with all the little old ladies at the Crows Nest CWA hall were sometimes the only bright spot in my miserable week.

I’M JUST GOING TO LEAVE A GAP HERE WHILE YOU LET THOSE LAST TWO SENTENCES SINK IN AND GET A SENSE OF JUST WHAT KIND OF TEENAGER I WAS.

…

So, I had spectacularly bollocksed up this “running away from home” thing. The best thing to do was cut my losses and go back home. However, I was so filled with embarrassment that I couldn’t bring myself to go back in the front door. So instead I shimmied back up the weatherboards and hauled my petulant self back in through my bedroom window. I briefly got stuck halfway: half in, half out, like Winnie-the-Pooh. But I managed to fold myself up and negotiate the narrow confines of the window: not without losing a shoe and getting a tremendous cramp in my left buttcheek in the process.

I half clambered, half rolled, half fell onto my bedroom floor, head first. I didn’t get up immediately. I decided I would hide in my room for a bit longer. I would even, perhaps, just stay on the floor a bit longer.

As I lay there, idly massaging my buttcheek and trying to figure out how I would sneak outside to fetch my shoe from the garden, I thought about the dextrous, gazelle-like grace I had just showcased and wondered if line dancing was actually doing anything for my coordination.

Note I didn’t give any consideration to what the line dancing was doing for my social standing. Just my dance skills. But honestly, who needs friends when you have the Boot Scootin’ Boogie?

29) 1995. Post Office Road, Ravensbourne QLD 4352

January 21, 2015January 22, 2015 / Christopher / 2 Comments

It was around Easter when we left Belyando Avenue: Drive-In House of Nightmares, and moved 1000 kilometres south to Ravensbourne, a rural locale outside Crows Nest, the town my grandparents still lived in. The best part about this? The “we” in question did not include Dale. It was only mum, Lauren, Tommy and me.

(We did briefly consider moving to Mackay, only 270 kilometres from Moranbah. We even enlisted the services of a real estate agent to take us to look at some rental properties. But by then my hair was so long that the real estate agent addressed my mother, my sister and I collectively as “ladies”, and the subsequent embarrassment was so strong that we left Mackay immediately and never looked back. Or maybe it just made more sense to move closer to our family. Whatever, all I know is I haven’t been to Mackay since.)

I’m not sure how the local council designated where Ravensbourne began and ended, because there really were no visible borders to the place. It wasn’t a town, it had no shops. There wasn’t a school or a bank or a town hall. We lived on Post Office Road, but there was no post office. The road wasn’t even sealed. The only reason there even was an area called Ravensbourne is because it was adjacent to Ravensbourne National Park, which lies west of Esk. I guess “dirt road west of Esk” looks stupid on an envelope and would make a postman angry, so they slapped a name on the place.

They sealed the road! Meanwhile, this is another example of the Google Street View vans just sort of stopping. Our house is further up the road, but I can’t get there. So, here’s….the road. And the bush. Ta-da.

The house we moved into was notable for being an A-frame house entirely built from timber, and for having a spiral staircase. Well, I guess it was more of a U-turn staircase, but it was inside the building and it made me feel super fancy. It had been some years since the snobby little boy who owned horses had been able to feel fancy. And here we were, Dale-free and with a spiral staircase. What more could we ask for?

If, at any other time in my life, you had put me in a creaky A-frame timber house nestled in the side of a hill on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, I would have been terrified. But, having just moved from the Wes Craven wet dream that was the abandoned drive-in house, it was like coming home to a warm hug.

It’s probably for the best that the house felt comparatively warm and inviting, because it creaked like a bastard. Timber A-frame houses are very…connected. Look, I’m not an architect or anything, all I know is that a sneeze upstairs at one end of the house would cause a creaking, clunking, juddering noise at the other end of the house. The house was like a physical, inhabitable science exhibit showcasing the tremendous power of the Butterfly Effect.

And yet? Not scary. Had the previous house been anything else, then this place would have been a terrifying horror shack. The dark hillside into which the house was nestled was ominous enough: deep in the bush, surrounded on all sides by the endless, suffocating tangle of lantana. The backyard was a steep slope of this dark bushland, which led down into a gully that was darker still. Even the name of the area—Ravensbourne—is mortifying. The cat refused to go outside at night and spiders were common. Sometimes the outside got so creepy that it would take me upwards of ten minutes just to empty the cat litter tray because I couldn’t bear to turn my back on the wilderness surrounding us. But despite all that…

…wait. No, wait. WAIT. The more I think about it, the more I…THIS PLACE WAS NOT A WARM HUG. IT WAS TERRIBLE!? Who am I trying to kid? I can’t sugar coat this. I can’t dress it up to ensure that the narrative flow of this blog has light and shade: two houses I lived in in a row were grim terror factories. A snake-filled pit backing onto an abandoned drive-in, and a creaking, howling timber cabin buried in the middle of what could pass for the set of a found-footage horror film. No street lights. The nearest civilisation a minimum of twenty-five minutes drive away. And the light-absorbing hellscape of the Australian wilderness on all sides.

Oh no, not again.

Now, while preparing this story, an old family friend by the name of Bonnie got in touch with me. She still lives in the Darling Downs area and, knowing how patchy Google Street View can be in the rural areas, asked if I wanted her to photograph the house for me. I said yes, but only if she didn’t have to risk her life doing it. It may have been nineteen years since I was there, but I remember what a grim, inhospitable nightmare area it was. So yes, I said to Bonnie, do take photos but PLEASE go in broad daylight and if there’s even the tiniest hint of danger, RUN.

Bonnie made it back. She got the photos. Please don’t read any further if you have a weak constitution. These images may be disturbing. Remember, they were only taken a week ago. The horror you are about to see is real, and it is happening right now.

Avert your eyes.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH WHAT A FUCKING NIGHTMARE

I mean, can you believed we lived in this? It’s a wonder we any got any sleep. I mean, sure, the edge might have been taken off by the charming paint job, and the new staircase off the balcony that wasn’t there before. And that little garden at the front helps minimise the need to scream in fear I guess. And there’s been some landscaping around that big tree to help the lawn grow. And there’s that lovely flowering bush at the back now. But I mean. Look again.

ALL SHALL LOOK UPON ME AND DESPAIR

Okay fine. It’s the most charmingly whimsical elven wonderland cottage I’ve ever seen. It’s like if Galadriel bought herself a holiday home in Stars Hollow. But I am telling you, it did NOT look like this when I lived there. At least, I don’t remember it looking like this. If I’m remembering it wrong, and it did look like this? Then I’m suddenly super mad that there are still 31 stories to go in this series.

Look, it was still in the middle of nowhere. Living twenty minutes out of a town (Crows Nest) which was itself thirty minutes from the nearest city (Toowoomba) did get kind of isolating. While us kids were at school, Mum coped with the loneliness by turning to crafts. She’d always been a crafter: during her time in Townsville (while I was living with my grandparents in Tin Can Bay), she’d made jewellery and sold it at the local markets. She loved cross-stitches and tapestries, made clothes, did ceramics, at one point in the early 1980s she even filled glass jars with layers of coloured sand. (Nobody said that craft had to be useful.)

IDEK

To fill the time in A-Frame House of Apparent Non-Horrors, however, she opted for crochet. But not just any old crochet. She wanted to go big. She wanted to crochet a floor rug. First, she took all her fabric off-cuts and cut them down into strips, which she then tied together into one long string. Then she enlisted the help of my grandfather to make her a crochet hook as thick as a broom handle. Throughout the day and most evenings, she would do this giant crochet. Round and round she went, until the rug was too big to sit on her lap. Then she’d sit on the floor in the middle of the lounge room, where the rug was going to go, spinning it round and round.

After a few weeks, it was finished: the thickest, largest, most colourful crocheted floor rug you’d ever seen. Crafted by hand out of multi-coloured rags by a poor woman living in the mountains? It was a Dolly Parton song.

However. When it came time to leave Post Office Road, we discovered the downside to making a floor rug out of hundred and hundreds of metres of fabric in situ: You have no idea how much it weighs. That rug took three people to lift, and when we finally got it into the truck, it immediately crushed every box underneath it.

Look. Please don’t take this as a recommendation to enter a life of crime, but if you are already there: might I suggest crocheting your own blankets to wrap the bodies in? Those bastards will SINK.

28) 1995. Belyando Avenue (AGAIN) Moranbah QLD 4744

January 14, 2015January 18, 2015 / Christopher / 1 Comment

YES. WE WENT BACK. During the few weeks we spent at Grout Street, Basin and his shriekmonster had left Belyando Drive, Robyn had moved back to the southern part of Queensland to be closer to her family, and we had to find somewhere else to live, as our “short-term” at the emergency accommodation had run out. There weren’t a lot of options in Moranbah, and technically Dale was still on the lease, so we ended up back at Belyando Drive: Abandoned Drive-In House of Nightmares.

My backyard, probably. I don’t know, I was generally too scared to look out the windows.

Admittedly, it was much better when it was just us. There was room to move. We had bedrooms to ourselves. A tiny, ferocious woman didn’t scream obscenities at the top of her lungs at random intervals. Saucepans of half-eaten two minute noodles didn’t rot on the stovetop. It was better.

I notice Google Street View has failed to become any more informative in the last two weeks.

Still, the drive-in continued to menace us from every window, all steel and rust and crumbling structure. One night I swear I saw a man standing out in the middle of it. Just standing still in the centre of the asphalt, not moving. After turning away in disbelief, when I looked back, he was gone. Have you ever played Silent Hill? That was my backyard.

But, as it turns out, the inside of the house was able to provide scares even greater than the outside.

One night, Lauren and Thomas were asleep in bed, while mum and I watched TV. Suddenly, mum did her best meerkat impersonation. She jolted upright in her armchair, staring intently at the corner of the room.

“What’s that over there?”

“What’s what?”

“In the corner?”

“Where?”

“WHERE I’M LOOKING.”
“I can’t see anything.”

Spoiler alert: at this point, and at every point for the rest of this story, I am completely fucking useless. Part teenage gawkiness, part me-specific uselessness, part shattered nerves from living full-time inside a Stephen King brainfart: I am zero help to my mother whatsoever. What she was looking at, crawling across the carpet in the corner of the room, was a medium-sized brown snake.

“IT’S A SNAKE, CHRISTOPHER.”

I immediately yelp and clamber up the back of the couch.

“Wha-wha huhhh? Snaaaaake?”

“YES.”

“Is it…is it dead?”

“NO.”

I whimper helpfully.

The snake, now aware that two very startled people are staring at it, stops briefly. It quickly realises that we are not of any threat whatsoever (HOORAY FOR COMPETENT HUMANS), and starts to move again. Problem is, it’s heading towards the hallway, which leads to where Lauren and Thomas are sleeping. Mum’s maternal adrenalin starts pumping, and she is kicked into gear.

“Find something.”

“What?”

“SOMETHING?” (Sure, I was useless, but hello, details please.)

“I don’t knoooow what you meeeean!?” I have no such maternal adrenalin, so continue to be as much help as a chocolate teapot.

The snake has stopped again, and is lifting its head and flicking its tongue. It is smelling the air. It can smell my fear. Or possibly it can smell the delicious warm flesh of my brother and sister, because it heads back towards the hallway.

“GET. SOMETHING. LONG.”

All I can think about is that whenever my Grandad encountered a snake, he would either shoot it, or chop its head off by running it through with the edge of a shovel. I know we own neither gun nor shovel, and that’s as far as my brain is willing to think before it snaps shut. So I just start jumping up and down on the spot, flapping my hands and squealing. It is exactly how you imagine it.

“CHRISTOPHER.”

I run in a small circle on the spot, still leaping from foot to foot and flapping my hands and demonstrating to my mother how very, very gay I will turn out in approximately nine years time. The snake is now a metre from the hallway entrance. Mum moves closer to the hallway in an attempt to herd the snake. The snake stops.

“CHRISTOPHER! I can’t take my eyes off it I need to know where it is you have to go NOW.”

I finally remember how feet and eyeballs work and run out of the room. The closest room to me? The one I run into? The sun room. Do you know what is usually in a sunroom? Fucking SUN. The room is completely bare. It’s a converted garage and we weren’t using it for anything. It’s just carpet and walls and nothing else. There aren’t even any curtains hanging from the bare rods—

Bingo.

I jump, knock a curtain rod to the ground, grab it and run back into the lounge room like a half-sized, half-assed pole-vaulter.

Mum holds her hand out for the weapon I was tasked with bringing her. Feeling the flimsy, wobbly curtain rod in her hand, she takes a second from SnakeWatch to fix me a look of sheer disbelief. “THAT’S ALL THERE WAS!” I scream, and resume my earlier stance of vibrating, wordless terror.

Me IRL.

The snake has now reached the hallway, and mum has no choice but to use the item at hand. Her only goal at this stage is to prevent the snake from reaching the hallway, where there are four or five open doorways, two sleeping children, and not nearly enough lights to see what’s going on. She figures if she just whacks the floor near the snake, it will turn and go in the other direction.

She swings the curtain rod.

THWAPANG!

The flimsy, wobbly curtain rod bends on impact and cracks like a steel whip, belting the carpet with such ferocity that a bit of dust flies up.

Inspired by the whipping action, mum changes tactic. “Ohhhh no wait,” she says, “I can hit it!”

I finally stop jumping on the spot.

Mum swings the curtain rod over her head and slices it downwards.

THWAPANG!

The snake flips over onto its back, arches itself into the air in anger, and tries to right itself.

THWAPANG!

The snake curls into a ball for a second, but immediately unravels, then coils into another angry stance.

THWAPANG!

Something bounces off the carpet, then the wall, and flies up in the air back towards mum and me. Thinking it’s the snake’s head, detached and after vengeance, Mum yodels a noise that is the closest thing to singing I’ve ever heard from her, and half-skips-half-leaps out of the way. Once again the family resemblance is on display: we both jump like drunk frogs. Luckily, it wasn’t a snake’s head, it was just the stopper from the end of the curtain rod.

Meanwhile the snake, with its head still attached, has stopped moving.

Unsure if it is dead, unconscious or just lulling us into a false sense of security, mum tests it.

THWAPANG!

Nothing.

The combination of relief, fear and anger at the snake turn my mother briefly into some kind of cold-eyed snake hitman, and she double-taps the snake like it owes her money.

THWAPANG-FOOM-THWAPANG!

It is probably *quite* dead by this point.

But now what? Neither of us are willing to pick it up with our bare hands, but we can’t just leave it there or the cat will probably try to eat it. We could flick it outside with the curtain rod, but we wouldn’t be able to flick it nearly far away enough to feel comfortable, and we can’t stray too far outside because it’s 11pm and the abandoned drive-in nightmare backyard is at its most terrifying at this time of night.

Just a reminder of the bullshit that was outside at all times. Probably.

On top of all those problems, I’m also not convinced it’s dead enough. So, it needs to be kept somewhere sealed AND indoors AND out of the cat’s way until morning. And that’s how it ended up inside a pasta jar which was screwed tight, taped over, and left on the kitchen bench with two phone books and three photo albums stacked on top of it.

I wasn’t taking any chances.

The next morning the snake was still there, still dead, and still in the sealed, taped, weighted jar. Overnight, the terror of the incident had galvanised, and I decided that I now couldn’t touch the snake OR the jar. So, using the same curtain rod, I pushed the jar onto the floor, and rolled it out the door, down the driveway, and out onto the curb to the wheelie bin. I tipped the wheelie bin onto its side (I kicked it with my feet, because I now couldn’t touch the snake OR the jar OR the thing the jar was going into), rolled the jar into the bin, and used the curtain rod to flip the bin upright again. Then I bent the curtain rod in half and jammed it into the bin as well, because now I couldn’t touch the snake OR the jar OR the bin OR the thing that touched the bin, the snake and the jar.

Having used the rod to kill the snake, I’m surprised I didn’t go back to the house and ask mum to climb into the bin as well.

Christopher Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Sixty-Five Addresses. Sixty-Five Stories.

37) 1998-1999. Ainsworth Street, Salisbury (Brisbane) QLD 4107

36) 1998. Weldon Street, Birkdale (Brisbane) QLD 4159

35) 1997-1998. Canberra Street, Toowoomba QLD 4350

34) 1997. Cavell Street, Toowoomba QLD 4350

33) 1995-1996. Turner Road, Rockhampton QLD 4700

32) 1995. Smith Street, Rockhampton QLD 4700

31) 1995. Pennycuick Street, Rockhampton QLD 4700

30) 1995. William Street, Crows Nest QLD 4355

29) 1995. Post Office Road, Ravensbourne QLD 4352

28) 1995. Belyando Avenue (AGAIN) Moranbah QLD 4744