DISCARDED DRAFT DIARY OF A COFFIN DODGER: CHAPTER G (DRAFT)

CHAPTER G (DRAFT)

What Happened Before The First Guy Fawkes Night

after

The Reverend Sadistic Bastard's Funeral

Bathed in an insipid dawn light, I desecrated my sneakers with ashes and soggy soil, looking for signs of joy.

Though not here.

The violated, cinder-streaked garden bed I squelched through on the southern side of the Reverend Sadistic Bastard's former cathedral of crime. A mere transit point to a place of expected happiness.

I shivered under shadows created by clumps of black clouds dispersing across the washed-out-blue morning sky. The clouds acted like capricious camera shutters as gloomy puddles, splattered across the garden bed, glistened and dulled under sporadic bursts of sunlight slipping through gaps between the clouds.

The puddles lapped the edges of track marks left the previous night by the first responders’ vehicles while they criss-crossed the garden as the vehicles moved either way between the street out the front of the house and the back paddock.

Activity that left mangled rose bushes and crushed chrysanthemum flowers drifting in muddy waters. Though this damage pleased me, it did not bring the happiness I was seeking.

But, here, I thought, I will find it as I followed the track marks out of the south side of the property and into the back paddock.

I stopped opposite the back door, on the blackened edge of the paddock, about three yards away from the house. With my hands on my hips, I scrutinised paint-blisters splayed out across the door.

Shifting my gaze, I ran it over the smoke-stained, heat-cracked first-storey windows of the house.

Tears of joy welled in my eyes. But the tears flowed no further than my eyelids.

My feeling of happiness at the sight of this damage mingled with the sour taste of disappointment I felt the previous night at the skills of first responders.

The damage had not reached the scale I desired. The first responders had succeeded.

Like the front of the Reverend S.B.’s palace of filth, the back of the house had not changed into a blackened shell. The roof remained in place; the walls were standing, and several windows remained undamaged.

This chapter narrates how and when I set out to turn the Reverend’s former domicile of decadence, both back, and front, into that blackened shell.

A narration which starts when, accompanied by a female ambulance officer, I walked over to a group of law enforcement officers as the witching hour on the first Guy Fawkes Night after the Reverend S.B.’s funeral approached.

Under blazing floodlights put in place by first responders, she spoke to the group.

I had buttonholed her about five minutes before she spoke to the officers while she stood beside an ambulance parked near a broken section of the southern boundary fence.

After I spoke to her, she suggested I go with her to a group of law enforcement officers. I considered what to say before I agreed.

She looked around at the group of officers as she finished talking about the meeting I had with her. As the officers turned their attention to me, she walked away.

Around us, as we stood in the front yard of the Reverend's cesspit of putrescent humanity, firefighters rolled up dripping hoses.

In the street outside the front yard, a Tactical Response Squad dispersed a lynch mob as I told a sorrowful tale to the law enforcement officers.

'Just after dark,' I sighed, 'when I lit the Guy Fawkes Night bonfire, I did not regard the soft evening breeze drifting across the back paddock as posing a fire safety hazard. However, within a matter of hours, the breeze had metamorphosed into a tempest.'

In a low, shocked voice, I said,

‘... I watched, horrified, when flames reached for the stars as the breeze developed in strength, aspiring to be a firestorm. In a manner beyond my wildest imagination, the wind blew the flames into the grass of the back paddock, sending an arc of fire racing towards my dear father’s former abode…’

After I finished telling my story, the officers had a discussion amongst themselves. When the discussion finished, a spokesperson for the group told me the development of a firestorm lay beyond the ability of anyone to predict.

She added,

'... given that the back paddock stretches for at least half-a-mile from the bonfire to your father's house, you are to be commended for building and lighting the bonfire at a safe distance from the house...'

I kept a straight face as she concluded,

'... only an act of God... placed the house in danger from the bonfire...'

Given this viewpoint, the police took no further action and did not charge me with having committed any offence.

As our group broke up, a law enforcement officer caught my eye before he looked up at the second storey.

I followed his gaze and stared at the second-storey windows of the house.

Shattered glass in two window frames glinted in the light from the floodlights as the officer muttered, ‘Whoever hurled rocks through those windows had the bloody right idea.’ He did not wait for my reply, walking away as I turned towards him.

I wondered if that officer had been a member of the team that burst into the motel room.

The law enforcement team that found the Reverend S.B. lying starkers on the floor of that room.

A young naked girl sat on the edge of a double bed close to the Reverend's cooling body as his dick lost the blood pressure for a last hurrah.

An event and a rescue, months before my Guy Fawkes Night conversation with law enforcement officers, canvassed during the coroner’s inquiry into the Reverend S.B.’s death.

I read a copy of the report of that inquiry a week before Guy Fawkes Night.

The coroner noted the girl’s school uniform lay folded on the bedclothes at the foot of the bed. The girl acted as if she were at home. Following a routine where she undressed and folded her uniform ready for school the next morning before putting on her nightwear ready for bed.

This act, the coroner commented, showed the girl had the guileless innocence of a child. A child’s innocence that led to an unsought despicable encounter with a ‘sex-fiend.’ The coroner’s words for the person my three sisters’ misbegotten loyalty persisted in describing as a ‘dear loving preacher and father.’

Unlike that young girl, I have heard no one describe my character as 'guileless.' A view reinforced by my actions preceding that first Guy Fawkes Night after the Reverend S.B.'s funeral.

In the twilight of that night, hours before I met with law enforcement officers, a breeze rustled papers on the site of the bonfire. The papers lay scattered throughout the crap on top of the demolished shed.

Though I had accomplished an aim of my plan for Guy Fawkes Night, the one about collapsing the shed, I had to change the way I achieved that desired state.

One morning, several weeks before Guy Fawkes Night, I bought a coil of rope from a hardware store. I also went to a DIY store and hired a chainsaw. I put both items in my SUV.

However, I had squandered money when buying the coil of rope. I did not need it for pulling down the shed.

On the afternoon of my visit to those stores, I drove my SUV into the Reverend’s property and across the back paddock towards the western boundary fence.

When I reached a point about half-way between the shed and the northern boundary fence, I turned the vehicle towards that fence. I stopped before reaching the fence and reversed the SUV, backing it up towards the building, and parked the vehicle several yards away from the entrance to the shed.

I hopped out of the SUV, feeling exhilarated, and went to the back of the vehicle, where the chainsaw lay full of fuel and raring to go.

I opened the back door and picked up the chainsaw.

Singing the hymn, 'Guide me, Oh! My Great Redeemer' I strode towards the shed. When I reached it, I stepped through the doorway and paused.

I finished singing and muttered 'Fucking! Hell!' as I shook my head at the sickening sight stretching out before me: that shocking view showing why the good the Reverend did never held the fabric of his life together as an exemplar of virtuous conduct, making my sisters’ loyalty to him so moth-eaten that I wondered how they found any covering from that deluded cloak suitable to wear.

The view, spilling over the edge of the bench running along one wall, divulged evidence of the in-filling of the Reverend's life, not with a narrative of good and honourable deeds, but with the shameless waste of the gift of life by surfing in the sewer of sexual exploitation.

I smirked and thought, ‘Thank Christ! This lot will burn!’ As I yanked the starting cord of the chainsaw.

As the chainsaw buzzed with diverting destructive energy, I strode along the greasy wooden floorboards, under the gaping hole of the busted skylight, until I reached the back of the shed, carrying the chainsaw in one hand.

Starting with the back wall, I cut the wooden uprights spaced along the unlined walls, moving from the back wall to the side walls. And from there, cutting them turn and turn about as I moved from the uprights on one side wall to the uprights on the other, clouds of sawdust marking my progress from the end of the shed towards the entrance.

Cutting the uprights became difficult when I reached a point about halfway along the length of the shed because the chainsaw blade kept jamming in the cuts.

With a determined tug, I yanked the chainsaw away from an up-right I was cutting, switched the chainsaw off and stared opened-mouthed at the side walls as they swayed backwards and forwards.

With my heart racing, I ran out of the building to the sounds of a creaking, groaning shed. The weight of the chainsaw I carried in my hand did not slow me down.

I stopped running several yards away from the building and whooped with delight as I watched the shed come crashing down.

A pleasant memory that brought a smile to my face as I drove my SUV deep into the forest that lay across the street that ran along the front of the Reverend’s mansion of misconduct.

In the fading afternoon light of the 5th of November hours before first responders rocked up to the house, I parked the vehicle and climbed out.

As I walked to the back of the vehicle, the gloominess of the forest oppressed me. I longed for the sun-dappled shadows of the Australian bush as I opened the vehicle’s back door.    

The sight of the items I purchased earlier that day from a servo across the road from Maccas, though, cheered me up.

I reached into the SUV towards those items, two five-gallon plastic containers of petrol standing on the vehicle’s floor waiting to play their part in a wicked enterprise.

After I picked up the containers and took them out of the SUV, I closed and locked the vehicle’s doors.

Carrying a container in each hand, I strode out of the forest, across the road, through the busted gap in the front fence and into the Reverend’s property.

I sang the hymn, 'Thine Be the Glory' to the tune, ‘See How the Conquering Hero Comes’ as I strode down the south side of the property along the tyre track marks left by my SUV when I belted through the garden and took out a downpipe several months before this current caper.

I looked with disappointment at the remaining rose bushes and chrysanthemum flowers as I marched past them, into the back paddock, and headed towards the busted shed.

Another part of my plan for Guy Fawkes Night lay within my reach. Using at least one container of petrol to boot the bonfire into the realms of a Hollywood extravaganza.

As twilight’s gentle, reflective calm settled over the property, I stopped at the site of my Guy Fawkes Night bonfire, now comprising the demolished shed, and on that wreckage a heap of combustible materials about eight feet high and twelve feet wide.

I placed the containers on the ground near that heap of joy-filled flammable stuff.

As I straightened my back, arms, and fingers, a gentle cool breeze whispered around the site of the bonfire, rustling the papers scattered through that heap of burnable items. The breeze lacked the power to lift these papers away from the site. I wanted the breeze to gain in strength and blow the papers across the back paddock towards the house after I lit the bonfire.

I turned my gaze from the pile of flammables and looked at the house and then at the boundary fences on either side of the paddock.

The distance between those boundary fences across the back paddock was about half a mile I reckoned, similar to the distance from the shed to the house, with the shed sitting about equidistant from either boundary fence, close to the western boundary of the Reverend’s property.

A neglected property going by the knee-high length of the grass and the clumps of brambles twisting their way across the back paddock. Signs that the paddock had not known the cutting power of mower blades or the sprayed mist of a herbicide for many months.

The fields on either side of the boundary fences were in a similar state of neglect to the Reverend’s back paddock. The thought of the fire I intended starting escaping from the back paddock and spreading into those fields did not trouble me.

I shifted my gaze from the paddocks, as the whiff of petrol fumes focused my attention on the two containers.

Their contents alluded to another component of my plan for Guy Fawkes Night - the use of part of a container of petrol in the making of a Molotov Cocktail.

A close friend showed me how to make Molotov Cocktails when she and I attended the same university decades before the Reverend S.B.’s funeral. We met for the first time during my first year at university, when we attended a tutorial on male constructs of power.

She never shared every detail of the incidents that claimed her allegiance when she lived in Ireland for a couple of years before we met, as she found the retelling led to nightmares.

The details she did share, though, related to the making of and the skills needed for the effective use of Molotov Cocktails.

During my second year at university, in the flat we shared with her girlfriend, my friend gifted those skills to me and her girlfriend through a series of lessons when the three of us were at home of an evening. The lessons started a couple of weeks after a sexual assault.

The assault happened one night, while my friend and her girlfriend were having drinks at a hotel near the university campus, when members of the university rugby club pack-raped the two women.

'Boys being boys', the governing body of the university, the university council, reinforced the misogynistic culture of the university by trotting out that trope through unofficial university channels when the incident leaked out.

A trope the council took steps to action through rebuffing attempts to have the university rugby club and its members held accountable for their vicious ransacking of the women's lives.

The council did not hold an inquiry into the incident. They refused to see a students' union delegation demanding the university provide every available care and help for the women. As well, the council did not accept a petition from university and community women's groups advocating the university bar the rugby club from the campus.

Like the white-anting of humanity, kindness, and dignity that men work at in their relationships with women and girls, the trope sprouted and spread.

Through the local rag, when it discussed the assault in its weekly column on university matters. In this, its only reporting on the assault, the paper boosted the trope and twisted it further into a deep pit of dark ugliness. The newspaper column claimed the women were ‘asking for it.’

The local rag sought to give credence to that heinous claim by naming several other hotels close to the university campus, any of which the women were welcome to visit on that night.

Instead, the paper claimed the women made a conscious decision to visit a hotel when members of the university rugby club were using the same venue to celebrate a grand final victory.

The local rag brought a metaphorical garbage compactor to the trashing of the women’s lives when, according to the paper, what the women were looking for, the university rugby club members were happy to give those ‘…busty young tarts with their short skirts and low-cut blouses.’

This paper, as a spruiker of male centric values, promoted the invisibility of women’s lives, by not interviewing my friend and her girlfriend.

By doing that, the newspaper appealed to the heterosexual male’s unkind fantasy world.

A world that feasts on images of women and girls divorced from the flesh and blood strength of girls and women.

A nastiness stretching over centuries like the images, spruiked by spin-meisters of the Christian faith tradition, to illustrate their fantasy myths about Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ.

Myths that in a diabolical, sickening way romanticise the rape of Mary and glamorise an ideal of womanhood, those spin-meisters trumpet as the only sequel to that hideous event for women and girls to follow.

A model of behaviour the Christian faith tradition exhorts, manipulates and coerces women and girls to adopt by giving up a sense of agency and keeping quiet, as men flog the shit out of the lives of girls and women in any aspect of that lived experience men choose to do so.

In this world, untroubled by the lived experience of girls and women, heterosexual men gorge themselves in a make-believe world of lust-laden images of women and girls.

A world that has no room for narratives of my friend and her girlfriend as regular visitors to the pub, a favoured watering hole for women who liked to share their lives with women.

Or for images of my friend and her girl friend wearing jeans and their favourite sloppy joes on the night of the assault.

The comments regarding the women’s physicality showed that heterosexual men are only a few years out from achieving the skill of changing their own nappies.

We discussed the newspapers' fucked-up reporting of the assault and my friend’s and her girlfriend’s take on the reporting one evening as we shared a meal at our flat.

As we finished the meal, my friend took her girlfriend’s hand and said in a quiet, determined voice, ‘…as university rugby club members have taken from us what is priceless …we have a plan to take what is priceless for club members. We want your help with the plan.’  

I answered without hesitation.

Men raped my friend and her girlfriend. The women told me men raped them. As plain as daylight, the assault happened. My response did not depend upon details of the assault.

Now the assault became a matter of retaliation, a statement against men's lives and the way those lives revolve around sex: where to get it and how to get it.

Men add spice when the getting involves refusal. An added thrill surging through the loins of heterosexual men when a woman or girl does not worship a dick the way its owner does.

Worshipping that demands a woman or girl honour the dick by permitting the entrance of that dick into any of the girl’s or woman’s holes when a heterosexual male demands the worshipping must happen.

These holes become sordid, disembodied images that heterosexual men love to weave into their unrestrained, lip-smacking fantasy worlds. Fantasy worlds built on the foundations of viewing women and girls as blow up sex dolls. Dolls where exaggerated anatomical features are the focus of these men’s attention.

Like those dolls, to these men, women, and girls' only attribute is the holes they provide for the worshipping of a heterosexual man’s dick.

When a woman or girl does not want to worship or will not honour a heterosexual bloke’s cock through refusing to give either her permission or her consent for it to enter any of her holes, then that bloke, as men are violent by nature, will go for the spice, the thrill of forced entry.

A couple of months after the assault, I validated my answer to my friend's request when myself, my close friend and her girlfriend, stood late one night beside a wooden crate containing three Molotov Cocktails and a cardboard box of metal bolts.

We made the Molotov Cocktails in our flat that evening as the conclusion to the practical component of our lessons. The time had now arrived to put the lessons to the test.

We took turns carrying the crate from our flat to a road. A road that meandered its way around one side of a white picket fence.

On the other side of that fence was an oval, the home ground for the university rugby team.

When we reached the road, as we faced the oval, to our right, a few yards away from where we stood, lay the dark mass of the university rugby club’s grandstand.

About four yards behind us, a cold breeze moaned as it meandered through the long black, like an elongated liquorice strap, shadowy density of a yew tree hedge.

To our left, a couple of yards away, was the university rugby clubhouse.

We set the crate down at the entrance to a laneway, leading down to the oval, that ran between the clubhouse and the grandstand.

I looked along the murky laneway and watched, in the light of a setting sickle-shaped moon, mist sliding out of a creek. The creek marked the boundary between the far side of the oval and the university grounds.

A benign silvery moonlight that silhouetted the long two-storey bulk of the darkened clubhouse as we stood beside the crate and wrapped our arms around each other, giving each other a hug.

After my friend whispered, ‘Let’s screw the bastards!’ we separated.

With our gloved hands, we reached into the crate as the mist crept across the oval.

First, we picked up a heavy metal bolt from the box lying at the bottom of the crate. I bought the box of twelve bolts from a city high street hardware store, miles away from our flat, ten days before we stood outside the clubhouse.

Next, we each picked up a Molotov Cocktail.

Then, with stealthy steps, we spaced ourselves about four yards apart in line along the road, making sure we faced a first-storey clubhouse window.

My friend and then her girlfriend threw a bolt at a window as the mist came slinking out of the oval.

As the glass shattered, they took turns taking a lighter from the pocket of their jeans, tilting their Molotov Cocktails, lighting the wicks, and hurling the bottles at the broken windows.

Windows that exploded in flames, creating a fierce flickering light that broke into writhing shadows the still darkness of the clubhouse interior.

During the two years I had been at university, in several editions of the local paper and the university newsletter, I had seen photographs of what that light illuminated, items like curtains and other furnishings. 

As well, these photos, showing the interior of the 100-year-old clubhouse, revealed the club’s history and achievements. 

Along the walls were photographs of rugby teams and club events. In the entrance foyer, along the back wall, behind a service desk were several glass-fronted cabinets displaying trophies and signed memorabilia. 

The photos went beyond what the flames only later illuminated by showing a glassed-in, second-storey veranda overlooking the oval, a dining room, and another bar on the second floor.

Several articles, illustrated by photos, highlighted the unsatisfactory storage conditions of archival materials relating to the history of the club and its members. The club management had crammed these items into a box room behind the dining room.

In the first-storey bar area, both the photos and now, after a Molotov Cocktail sailed through a broken window, and the aroma of alcohol enriched the night air, light from leaping flames showed, along a wall between the bar and a darts board, several varnished wooden boards.

The boards listed, in gold letters, items like the names of team members, the years they played for the club and the scores of every rugby game played by the various teams since the foundation of the club and the teams they played against.

However, on the night of the sexual assault on my friend and her girlfriend at the pub, a light of compassion and shared humanity did not blaze forth from the hearts and minds of the university rugby club members

On that night, the two women decided, as the group my friend and her girlfriend were with broke up, to have a final drink as the women sat on a bench seat, snuggled into a corner, their drinks resting on a wooden table in front of them.

As they sat at that table, a wall of men and boys wearing university rugby club jerseys formed a semi-circular barrier around the edges of the table opposite to the bench seat.

These foul-smelling men, with their backs to the interior of the pub and their minds made up to live out a bog-standard heterosexual male fantasy, loomed over the once smiling, laughing, chatting women.

The women huddled together on the bench, pressing themselves into the corner, wishing the wall behind them did not exist, as their drinks disappeared and someone from within the wall of men purred ‘let’s deal with the sex-starved bitches.’

As band music started thumping around the walls of the hotel, men, under the dim pub lighting, tore my friend away from the arms of her girlfriend.

They held her on the table, stripped the clothes off her and as she continued calling out, ‘Help! Help! Please! Stop! Someone help us!’ shoved her panties into her mouth.

Then the men grabbed her girlfriend and sniggered as they tore the clothes off her and stretched her out on the table.

A smooth face with the light of illicit lust dancing in its eyes loomed into her face and snarled, 'Shut it! Bitch!' as she shouted 'Help us! Please Help! Stop! Please stop!'

A handkerchief rammed into her mouth, concomitant with a savage squeezing of her breasts, turned her shouts into muffled screams of spiritual and physical anguish.

These family men then dragged the naked women to the edge of the table closest to the pub interior and held them, face up, with their legs pulled apart.

As the women lay together on the shaking table, their arms contoured into uncomfortable positions, making it impossible for them to hold hands, men’s hands dug cruel, sharp fingers into the women’s thighs, keeping their legs where the men wanted them to be as time stood still and the women's bodies froze.

After the first dick finished squirting inside them, the women turned their heads to one side. They needed to protect their eyes from the globules of spit these mothers’ sons lobbed on the women’s faces as a rancid penis drooped after spewing sperm inside a dry violated space.

One night, a couple of weeks before our nighttime visit to the clubhouse, the women went through a detailed narrative of their sickening, terrifying ordeal as we sat together on the couch in the living room of our flat, holding each other close.

Details like the above account. Facts like hearing male voices as the women drifted in and out of a ‘…weird experience where I was in my body and out of my body,’ my friend said as her girlfriend nodded.

Voices saying things like ‘…don’t hold back grandad. They’re lesbo's. They're at the lesbos' pub. You're doing them a favour. Lesbo's need a fuck to make them real women…’

Or ‘…cheaper than the bucks night at Amsterdam we planned…’

Or '…come on, lad. Don't be shy. Your mum won’t know. Think how jealous your schoolmates will be...'

And then to raucous laughter, ‘…the team that showers together, fucks together…’

My friend said she heard nothing further after that comment as she slipped into unconsciousness.

When she came to, the men had gone.

Her girlfriend lay beside her, naked on the table, shrouded in a preternatural stillness; no sobs disturbed her weeping, as the life of the pub swirled around them.

We decided as we made the Molotov Cocktails on the evening of our visit to the clubhouse, that rather than throwing the Molotov Cocktails together, the honour and thrill of throwing the first Molotov Cocktail belonged to my friend, as she was the first to be stripped and dehumanised.

We gave my Molotov Cocktail the first act in the concluding drama of the night's events, after my friend’s girlfriend, as the second person to be stripped and dehumanised, threw the second Molotov Cocktail.

I also had the second and final act in the concluding drama, with a role to play in destroying evidence.

The first act arrived after I watched my friend’s girlfriend hurl her Molotov Cocktail and I glared at the window I had targeted.

I snarled, ‘you dick-led arseholes, shame on you bastards!’ as I threw the bolt I had picked up from the cardboard box.

The window glass shattered as the mist slithered around the building and I took a lighter from the pocket of my jeans.

I tilted the Molotov Cocktail I held in my hand, lit the wick and hurled the bottle at the busted window.

As the bottle broke, sending flames cascading over the wooden walls of the building, I walked to where we had put the crate.

To fulfil my part in the second act of the night's concluding drama, I reached into the crate and picked up the cardboard box containing the remaining bolts.

The box had no identifying marks, as I had removed them before we set out for the clubhouse that night. We wanted to make sure that the box appeared to be an unremarkable piece of cardboard if any of it survived the fire.

My pent-up fury, despite the heaviness of the box and its contents, gave me the strength to throw the box several yards into the fire, as flames, like lascivious tongues, licked the outside wooden surrounds of the broken windows.

To the sound of a clanging alarm, I picked up the crate and, carrying it in one hand, walked in the dancing light of the fire towards my two companions who were standing in front of the yew tree hedge.

The sound of the alarm did not bother me. I thought, if they caught us, who faces the greater punishment?

Us for torching the clubhouse? Or the university rugby club members as we told a court why we took out the building?

As a breeze swirled the mist into long damp, wispy strands that twirled their way onto the road, around the crate in my hand and into the yew tree hedge, I reached my two companions.

The glow from the fire lit up the ski masks covering our faces as we watched flames spreading through the building.

My friend chuckled as she turned towards her girlfriend and me.

'You fucking heroines,' my friend's voice sang with delight, 'First time with Molotov Cocktails, and look what you wicked harpies have done!'

'Not just us,' my friend's girlfriend chimed in eagerly, 'we had a great demonstration from a great teacher!'

We burst into laughter.

I sighed with happiness while I watched as, with a screeching, clanging roar, a section of the clubhouse roof collapsed, sending flames and sparks cascading in every direction.

With a smile on my face, with my free hand, I took the hand my friend offered me, as with her other hand she took the hand of her girlfriend.

With my friend in the middle and I and her girlfriend on either side, hand in hand, in silence, we walked away from the crackling flames and back to the flat as a line of blues and twos drew closer to the oval.

However, the grandstand also became a focus of attention when the first responders reached the oval. The fire had jumped from the clubhouse and into the stands.

While first responders were busy dealing with burning buildings at the oval, we entered the flat and jumped on the crate, breaking it into pieces.

We lit a fire in the only room with a fireplace, the living room, and burnt the broken up crate, our ski masks, and gloves and rubbish from the kitchen garbage bin.

We then went to the laundry and took off the clothes we wore for our night of retaliation against the men and boys of the university rugby club.

Standing naked, uncaring of the chilly, damp air of the laundry, we wrapped our arms around each other and cheered, laughed, sobbed and chatted as the clothes started an extended cycle in the washing machine.

While the cycle continued, we left the laundry and took turns having a shower, paying attention to washing our hair. After we dressed in our nightwear, the wash cycle finished and we put the clothes in the dryer.

As the clothes tumbled around the dryer, we put the sneakers we had worn into a mesh bag and put them through the cold cycle of the washing machine.

When the dryer and the washing machine finished their cycles, we put the clothes into three separate plastic bags and left them in the laundry. We placed the sneakers beside the bags to dry overnight. After cocoa and supper, we went to bed.

The next day, the first day of a long university holiday, we packed a pair of sneakers into each plastic bag.

We then staggered the times we left the flat in the order by which we hurled the bottles. Every departure was at least ten minutes after the previous one.

Each of us, as we stepped out of the flat, carried hand luggage and a backpack.

Though both pieces of luggage held clothes and various sundry items we needed for our holiday away from the flat, the backpack also contained one of the three plastic bags that held the clothes and sneakers we wore the previous night.

As we went our separate ways for the university holiday, we each dropped a bag into a clothing bin in a city that our different paths led us through, a bin on a busy city high street miles away from the university.

When we returned to university several weeks later at the commencement of term, the blackened ruins of the clubhouse stood in contrast to the grandstand. Fire officers had saved the main structure of the grandstand. The fire had only burned a few rows of seats.

I chuckled as I recalled seeing those blackened ruins as I stood beside the site of my Guy Fawkes Night bonfire.

Photographs of those ruins in several editions of the local paper and the university newsletter adorned advertisements for a fundraising drive for a new clubhouse.

They also had articles on the repairs to the seating in the grandstand after the fire jumped across the laneway from the clubhouse and into the grandstand.

I read those publications in our flat with my companions as we continued our studies and lived our lives unencumbered by regrets over our response to male violence.

Except for one disappointment. The absence of male club members in the building when we torched it.

Now, several decades after that glorious clubhouse fire, I took a torch from the pocket of my coat as the last rays of sunlight left the Reverend’s former property on the occasion of the Guy Fawkes Night I planned a similar conflagration.

I flicked on the torch and pulled a shirt and a beer bottle out from the fuel for the bonfire.

I filled the bottle about three quarters full of petrol from one plastic container by using the container’s spout.

After I ripped a strip of cloth from the shirt, I forced the strip into the neck of the bottle, leaving about a finger’s length of cloth hanging down the outside to form a wick.

I placed the Molotov Cocktail on the ground and emptied the rest of the plastic container into a funnel connected to a piece of plastic pipe, which I had rigged up earlier that day.

The pipe, on the side of the combustibles facing the house, led into the base of the bonfire close to where I had placed three boxes of fireworks I bought the previous day and put in place when I rigged up the pipe.

The petrol from the other container I splashed willy-nilly over the crap piled on top of the flattened shed and threw the empty containers onto the top of the pile.

I picked up the Molotov Cocktail, moved away from the stench of petrol fumes, tipped the bottle so that the petrol soaked the cloth and lit the wick with a lighter I took from the pocket of my jeans.

I faced the house with the breeze behind me and hurled the Molotov Cocktail onto the fuel laden pile.

Within minutes of the Molotov Cocktail slamming into the top of the busted shed and its crap, I heard a loud ‘whoomph.’ Followed soon after by another loud ‘whoomph’ from deep inside the escalating bonfire amidst the sound of the fireworks booming.

The exploding fireworks whizzed out of the bonfire, starting fires across the back paddock between the bonfire and the Reverend’s shrine to sin.

I looked forward to my Guy Fawkes Night bonfire, achieving a scenario like that portrayed in a newsreel clip of burning buildings in the Blitz or reaching the heights of a scene from Gone With The Wind.

I switched off the torch and walked towards the south-west corner of the property, my way lit by the bonfire.

I leant against a fence post in the south-west corner, singing 'We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder,' and watched the potency of the various elements of the bonfire’s fuel sending flames and billowing smoke high into the night sky.

However, after about an hour, the increasing force of the breeze pushed the smoke and flames towards the house. My eyes gleamed with delight as I watched those flames ignite the grass and brambles of the back paddock.

I chuckled as the flames linked up with fires ignited by the fireworks.

'Yes!' I yelled as I clenched my fists at the thought of a wall of flames, with the vigour of an Australian bushfire, racing towards the Reverend’s den of depravity.

A beatific vision I thought it best not to share with law enforcement officers during our chat while we stood in the front yard of the Reverend’s domicile of filth at a few minutes to midnight on that first Guy Fawkes Night after the Reverend’s death.

A vision that glowed and faded away as the acid of disappointment corroded my dreams.

A line of blues and twos on the street running between the forest and the Reverend’s pinnacle of pornography were the bearers of this acid.

As the first fire truck came down the southern side of the property, to crucify my happy state of mind, a frustrated rage built inside me.

I strode towards the house and into a blackened patch of grass and brambles on the south side of the property. I glared at the first responders running out hoses.

I watched the fire officers' spiteful shadows, fashioned by flames leaping and gyrating across the back paddock, dance across the back wall of the house as I shook my fists at these officers.

While the bonfire roared, I shouted in anger at the destroyers of dreams as streams of water pummelled flames and cascading embers,

‘Who’s the bastard who got you scungy lot out of bed? Who told you to meddle in my private affairs? Piss off you lousy mongrels and let the pedo’s palace burn.’

I shed tears of frustration and fury as my vision of a flaming Hollywood scenario turned to ashes like the wall of fire, raging across the back paddock unconstrained by the legal boundaries of the Reverend’s property.

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