Introduction

Through my father’s passion for horror, I was exposed to a range of frightening films in my childhood. I was petrified, justifiably I think, to have my own room. I remember sleepless nights curled beneath my covers, slick with perspiration in the windless haze of summer ... terrified to let my limbs reveal themselves within the covers. Straining my bladder, scared to make the hallway run for fear of something other than a sleeping dog. Notwithstanding my familiarity with Regan MacNeil bound vomit-soiled to her bed ... Joseph Carmichael’s watery, childish hiccups ... the Grady daughters, butchered by their father in the Overlook ... or Danny Glick floating at his brother’s window - I harboured a bank of unsettling ideas already.

When my second brother was born, he had the vacant third room. My parents naturally slept together. I shared a room with my first brother, overlooking the busy main road. For years I recalled mum telling us over Chinese how she’d sleepily gone to the baby’s room one night. He was crying. Screaming not hungrily but in fear. In wild gestures, he kept pointing at the window.

Our house saw other strange, though subtle, occurrences after my Great Nanna died. Her printed diary kept disappearing then turning up in obvious places. My brother woke up to a cloudy figure resembling her outline, watching from the doorway. My dad was plagued with cryptic dreams where she begged him for a headstone. One night a thundering crash awoke him: a heavy wooden chair had toppled over quite impossibly in the dining room. To dad in his half-sleeping state, the slanted angle of the back-rest appeared remarkably headstone-like. These dreams stopped when her grave was properly adorned. Another incident almost coinciding – one we found more comical than anything - was when Mum and Dad were having a rough patch. A galah came out of nowhere. It came into our house, adopted a spot above the longue-room doors or waited near the back-door. Like Poe’s raven, it assumed an authoritative attitude over the household. And it had a bone to pick with Dad. Without provocation it went for him whenever he appeared. The bird violently hated him. Combine this with the fact that galah have a large beak and decent claws, and you would understand why Dad childishly refused to exit the house unless his wife kept the bird (often unsuccessfully) away. “Is it still out there?” he’d shout, peeking through the blinds. “I mean it, I’m not coming out there till it’s gone!!” After about a week it disappeared. It returned intermittently over the years. It would stay for a little while, then vanishing again. Dad is yet to make amends with that strange creature, and whenever it returns the half-joking thought that Dad has done something he shouldn’t have comes to our minds.

These things, plus other more obscure incidents, sufficiently ensured that I was scared to be alone at night. A delightful barrage of horror films – for which I am subversively grateful – sealed my phobic inability to sleep alone. Before I was more than distantly interested in girls or money or any real ambition save that of being a Sydney railway driver of all things, I knew I hoped to marry someday. Solely because I could not bear the thought of living alone. People feared their future. Their physical, psychological and fiscal wellbeing. I feared extortionate electricity bills for leaving my lights on permanently.

I did of course grow out of this. For a while I really thought I wouldn’t.

It happened one cold cramped night in 2005. In preparation for our first Duke of Edinburgh hike, two friends (Tommy; Austin) and I, camped in the deep wooded gully behind Tommy’s house. Like any teenage boy, I had many worries at the time. Most pressingly: that I would have to sleep inside my tent alone (despite the Sixth Sense ruining such a prospect). The alternative was to confess my fear, so guardedly secret, so shamefully debilitating. I would be the laughing stock of all my friends – not to mention the rest of my grade if word got out. I was awkward enough as it was.

That night was hardly fun before the dread of bedtime came. It was boring, depressing and very uncomfortable. Both my friends seemed so resourceful. I was capable of little more than fetching kindling. They appeared comfortable within themselves, assured of their skill, what they did, how they saw themselves. I was one of those kids that can’t maintain eye-contact more than two seconds. I had nothing interesting to offer and try as I might, I just couldn’t find interest in that which was offered by others. There is a point in life when accepting ourselves, our faults and our fears, is liberating. Hell, I do consider my introversion more of a blessing now. Such personal revelation cannot formulate before one endures a certain amount of personal revolution though. Here, of course, I do not mean the triumphant down-with-the-dictator revolution; rather the ill-guided, desperate, collapsible insurgence that ignites and peters out in brash reaction to subjective wrongs. I speak for myself here, but puberty is a time when one hasn’t the faintest idea who they are meant to be. High school is a time one doesn’t want to stand out amongst the crowd. One finds comfort in uniformity, in scoring average to high in many things but not truly excelling in anything; in telling the right kind of jokes; in projecting a balanced version of self neither flared with originality, nor dulled by passionless conformity. Such an approach to life as this is wont to incite a riot within one’s nomadic quest for self. One is constantly responding to the temporary preferences of others, to the general concept of what is and isn’t “cool”.

Case in point: I sucked at talking to girls. So much that I rarely tried. Sure, they had long attracted me: first grade, three figures short of double digits – confused, pervy kid that I was – I’d place myself upon the classroom floor at points where I could see their smooth white armpits every time one raised their hand. Story time, there I was inching tactically beside them so our knees touched. I was not aroused – such a statement, if true, would render this foray into unplanned writing more potentially disastrous than I’d care to risk. No, I think I was just allured by them in a way I couldn’t yet comprehend. But I digress ... Tommy and Austin, that night in the woods, were far ahead in the game of female interaction. They’d both had several girlfriends. Throughout all my high school years, I obsessively kept track of my remaining friends who still had not had some kind of relationship. They became alarmingly few. In other matters, I had only held one job. And hated it. First summer holidays I awoke to an alarm and worked ten hours on a shit-hole animal farm, you’d have thought I’d been conscripted into war. Guess I was, to gleefully stereotype, one of a million disillusioned millennials, set upon the gruelling road to learning life is not a party catering every individual whim. No, to me a lower-middleclass life in semi-rural Sydney was as low as it got. Take my dad and leave me in a broken slummy Harlem household any day. I saw a tough, disheartening future ahead. Not one of deprivation or lack of opportunity by any means – I’d always gotten things handed to me. Rather it was that I was too sheltered. Due to no fault whatsoever on my parents’ part, I’d been comfortably naïve in my simple home life. Nothing more complicated than mowing the lawn was asked of me. The only thing I was any good at was freestyle on the virtual slopes of SSX 3.