Crosswood was always known as ‘the land’ by us Crusaders but it was only five streets with a tramline and a creek running through it. It was a working-class suburb at the end of the world but it was my home. I loved it then and I love it now.

The prison shrink, Ms Prius, wants me to keep a journal. She’s a #MeToo greenie who lives in an inner suburban house with an inner suburban husband with no balls and two cats. I know who I am. I’m the antidote.

As a kid, I shared a bedroom with Mum in Grandma and Grandpa’s house. Her marriage had gone belly up just after I crawled out of it. Everyone in Crosswood was poor. You knew where you were. We lived in run-down houses with big backyards full of veggies, fruit trees and chooks.

We called the fights against the Syrian and Iraqi kids ‘getsome’, which meant blood. We’d attack them yelling getsome, getsome, getsome and bring our clubs down on their heads and stick the boot in. They called themselves the Crescents.

We had our own lingo. A battle was called ‘a do’. ‘Did you getsome at the do?’ Oh yeah. There might be 20 or 30 kids kicking the shit out of each other. If the cops came, it was a ‘Blue Light Disco’ with their sirens going whoop, whoop, whoop in the night air with their lights flashing. The oldest Crusader was 14. The youngest, seven. I was 12 and small for my age.

In winter the creek down the back of our house turns in to a raging torrent. It’s nine metres wide and three metres deep, with a concrete base that carries a shit load of fast moving water. Whole trees go flying down it. I’d lie awake at night and the river’s roar would draw me to it. I’d climb out of bed and walk naked along one of the big poplar tree branches jutting over the river. I’d hold my little cock and dance and scream. No one could hear me. I wanted the river to rage through my heart and fists. I wanted its power.

I hope you’re taking notes on this Ms Prius, especially about my cock and the raging torrent.

I was in love with Carmel who was 12 too but she looked older. She was smarter than me but that was OK. I could make her laugh and she liked that. We’d hide in the bamboo on the other side of the creek and kiss. I’d pick aniseed for her and she’d nibble it like a bird.

The Catholic orphanage up the road had vines growing over its black iron gates. Horror movie stuff. Mum said if I was bad, that’s where I’d end up. It put the willies up me. I found out later they only put girls in there. We gave it a wide berth.

The Crescents started arriving when I was seven. There were bloody thousands of them. They wandered around Crosswood like they owned the place. Big fucking mistake. We gave them no quarter, right from the start. Once we caught five of them riding the toy steam train down by the footy oval. By the time they got off, there were 20 of us waiting. No contest. Getsome.

I was thinking in the exercise yard about the Big Battle. That made the TV news. It was winter and Mum had just come home from the hospital with another baby. Grandpa was drowning kittens in a bucket in the back yard. She showed me the new baby. It was fuck ugly.

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My best friend Graham was lying on his back in a small clearing in the bamboo, looking up at the clouds. He had a scar on his knee where one of the Crescents had thrown a rock. He picked up the air rifle lying and tapped me on the arm to follow. 200 metres down the creek was a block of flats full of Iraqi and Syrian families. They were always screaming and carrying on.

Graham cracked the air gun, rammed in a dart and hid behind a peach tree. The flats were 50 metres away. It would take a hell of a shot. We waited 10 minutes for one of them to come out. Fatima stood on the first-floor balcony. She was talking to someone in the car park. Carmel liked Fatima. They were the same age. She was a good soccer player and helped out at the old folk’s home. Her brother was a tough Crescent fighter.

“It’s a girl. Let her go,” I said.

Graham smiled, checked the wind and steadied the barrel of the gun against a fig tree. He took a big breath and at the bottom of the exhale, pulled the trigger and hit Fatima in the left eye. He threw the gun at me and yelled ‘fucking run’ as we belted through the bamboo along the creek. Graham took off home and I hid the gun under an old pile of newspapers by the back shed, near the dead kittens. Grandpa hadn’t buried them yet.

It took 20 minutes for the police to find Graham, me and the gun. They hauled us to the cop shop. There was a lot of pushing and shoving as Fatima’s father and brothers wanted payback. Graham lifted his knee in to the older brother’s balls and it was all on. Fatima lost her left eye. Graham said nothing at the court case and neither did I. Everyone thought I was the shooter. We got a conviction but no Boys Home.

That’s how the Big Battle shaped up. The Crescents wanted revenge and we were happy to oblige.

Carmel knew I hadn’t shot Fatima but that didn’t matter because her stepfather had taken to coming in to her room at night. He was a fat pig, pissed half of the time. She’d cry and I’d put my arm around her. I told her she could live with us but I knew that was bullshit. Carmel’s Mum had taken off with some guy to Brisbane and the social workers were coming around to her house almost every day. They could see the bruises on her arms and legs. Carmel knew the code. She said nothing.

It was late on a Saturday afternoon when the Crescents and the Crusaders met on the right bank of the creek. There were about 60 fighters with some girls fighting on each side. Both sides carried bamboo sticks, stones, sling shots and bows and arrows. The Crescents had driven sharpened nails in to the heads of their bamboo sticks. Pretty good thinking. They carried a Green flag with a large white crescent on it. We carried a black flag with a red lightning bolt.

We stood where our fathers and brothers had stood before us. The water that careened down the creek was the same water they saw. The onion weed was the same. The peach and cumquat trees were the same. A cold wind blew from the south. We were part of the great cycle of fighting for the land.

There were no speeches. No one quoted from Henry V. No ‘fighting on the beaches’. Most of us had never seen a beach. Graham stood in front of the Crusaders with his bamboo staff held aloft. To his right, the boys pulled back their slingshots loaded with stones and ball bearings and aimed them at the front row of the Crescents. Pigeons exploded from the bushes and the two sides ran at each other with Graham screaming getsome, getsome, getsome and the Crescent’s screaming some foreign shit.

I learnt two important lessons that day. People with nowhere to go will fight harder than people with a home. If your back is against the wall, you fight like a mad dog. The other lesson I learnt is to never to turn your back in a fight. I didn’t see the young Sudanese kid come past me until I felt the side of my knee collapse. I fell to the ground and went foetal. I dragged myself to the creek and vomited. Busted knees make you do that.

The side of my left knee didn’t look right. There was a bit of bone sticking through white pus. I had to think the pain away. I thought of me and Carmel sitting on the ferris wheel at the Royal Show and how I won her a small stuffed dog on the laughing clowns. Then I thought of the smell of the onion grass. It was good. Then I did something I’d never done before. I played dead.

As darkness fell, I saw Graham wresting with one of the Iranian boys down by the river’s edge. The young kid could fight. Graham knocked him off balance and pushed him in to the muddy torrent. The boy tried to catch hold of branches but the water was moving too fast. A large tree was barreling down the creek behind him. Its roots looked like the bottom of a pulled tooth. A Crusader kid heard me yell and pulled the by from the water. Then the cops rolled up and it turned in to a Blue Light Disco.

I crawled along a secret track through the bamboo and hobbled up the street. A cop car was parked outside of Carmel’s house. She was sitting in the back seat with a small suitcase on her lap. A policewoman sat in the driver’s seat. Carmel saw me and tried to wind the window down but the cop stopped her. The car did a slow u-turn and drove off.

Once I got out of hospital, I went to the orphanage fence looking for her. I went every day for a month but I never saw her. I wrote her letters but never got a reply. She was gone.

Years later, Graham and me got done for an armed holdup. The getaway driver was high on ice and instead of picking us up outside the bank, waxed some serious road rage on a pensioner, which drew the cops down on us. Graham did a plea bargain and turned me in. He got two years and I got eight. With good behaviour, I’ll be out in three years. I’m not well behaved. Not malleable. That’s a ten dollar word.

I don’t need to write my life down in some piss ant journal. I’m not the subject of pity by wankers who spent half their life reading books. I know who I am. I’m the fucking antidote and when I get out, I’ll pay Graham a visit. I’ll go back to Crosswood and find Carmel. Stick your journal up your arse.