Sing with me darling wife and my little kinder surprises as our old car meanders on bald tyres back to the rental shack on the treeless side of town. Out bid again by the Inheritors.

This is the 33^rd Saturday house auction we’ve been to, surrounded by young, anxious bidders. We’ve been looking for three years but the prices keep going up. There were 70 people at todays auction, all holding little numbered bidding bats, praying that a two bedroom rat and termite infested hole, which should be bulldozed, will be their home. Home sweet home. Home is where the heart is. Then 70 heads turn, sigh and fall as the Mercedes’ and BMWs’ roll up and Mum and Dad with a young clean skinned son or daughter, flush of face and as keen as mustard, gazump the highest bid by $50,000. The clean skins with nice smiles and ironed collars are the Inheritors. They use their Baby boomer parents wealth, collected over 50 years from inheritances, rent, shares, tax breaks and property inflation, to buy what they like.

We’ve got the dreamer’s disease. We’ve saved $30,000 for a deposit and Cindy’s Dad will give us another $5000. He can’t afford it because he’s on the pension but that’s the type of guy he is. Cindy works at Bed, Bath and Table, flogging tables, baths and beds. She takes in laundry on the weekends. We’re not short of laundry with two rug rats. Davy is two and Marcia is three. Had kids young. I drive a truck but work is low tide because of roaring inflation. I only get three shifts a week now, if that. We’re struggling to make rent, which went up $100 last month on a two bedroom, fibro place which needs re-stumping. The house leans to the south west. Cold in winter and hot in summer.

We met in Year 12 at Le Fever High School for Lunchtime Combat. Cindy had long, blonde hair cut square at the back. Little freckles on a button nose. A pixie. She was in the smart class. Light poured from her hair and finger tips. Her Mum owned ‘Twist and Shout’ hairdressers off the high street, next to the chicken shop. I was standing next to her watching two administration officers try put out the fire which engulfed Mr Snell, our maths teacher. Smelly Snelly. He made the fatal mistake of reprimanding Connor Parkinson, a mental defective, on the front oval. Connor went to the gardener’s shed, filled up a Coke bottle of petrol, poured it over Mr Snell and set him alight. The foam fire extinguisher was empty. Connor used it to chase screaming girls and squirt them with foam, telling them it was cum. The ambulance came and four days later, Cindy asked after the memorial service, if I wanted to share a milkshake. No one drinks milkshakes any more. I said, yeah. That’s how it started.

When we first went house hunting we’d sing songs in the car like ‘What’s the Time, Mr Wolf?’, ‘Waltzing Matilda’, ‘Margery Daw’. The kids wriggle and giggle in their tiny seats. I’d sing the Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald’s jingles. We drive in silence now. Not much to say. Every Saturday we cop a beating from the Inheritors. It’s pointless but I don’t tell Cindy that. She’s a glass half full girl.

One generation of Inheritors begets another generation of Inheritors, tax exemptions on the family home begets more exemptions and superannuation tax breaks beget more tax breaks. The Inheritors’ buy a house, renovate it and sell it for 30 per cent more than they paid. Then they buy another one and another.

In my dreams, I’m driving the truck and everywhere I go, it’s one way streets and stop signs. I sometimes dream Cindy falls in love with a doctor, leaves me and takes the kids. I’m standing there and can’t move or talk. Like a man who has fallen off his yacht far out to sea and watches it sail off into the distance. When I wake up, my heart is roaring in my chest.

Cindy starts to come home late. Has to help her Mum at the shop. It’s wedding season. We don’t talk so much over dinner like we used to. When we do, it’s about power and gas bills. We’re shoring up the marriage. We still smile and smile when we see friends but it’s an act. We know our lines well. Something is up. I read it in her girlfriend’s faces.

The Allsorts are a whacko social media group who reckon young people are the new proles. They reckon old people who slag off us should be shot. They say the economy is loading us with the ‘old bastards’ health care debt. That we’re born to wipe the arses of the ageing Boomers and deliver Amazon parcels. I sent them an email and they invited me to a function.

About 200 people are dancing, drinking and pogoing like it was 1977. Is nothing original? Lots of attractive women but I think of Cindy sweeping the hair and mixing the tints. The kids are at her Dads. A guy my age says come out the back. There’s a room with a group of people knocking back beers. A young man with a beard covering bad acne shakes my hand.

“Thanks for coming and welcome,” Nigel says.

They’re all in their 20’s with the worst haircuts I’ve seen. One guy is so fat, he’s sweating sitting down. Looks like your average university student club with the guys who can’t get girlfriends. I’m expecting someone to do a Monty Python impersonation. A woman at the back with long black hair, a green woollen top and leather skirt, gives me the once over, then knocks back her vodka and tonic. She looks like Morticia from The Addams Family.

The haircuts debate the merits of our two main political parties they call the Red Ties and the Blue Ties. Fatty says there’s no difference. The Blue Ties will slash taxes and sell off public companies quicker than the Red Ties. There’s a large picture of a dove carrying an AK47 blue tacked on the wall.

Morticia pours herself another V&T and says to me, “You drive a truck?”

I nod and she says have another drink and I do.

xxxxxxxx

It’s Saturday morning and the sun is hot and high. We’re stopped in traffic banked up half a kilometre. Cindy left the kids at her Dad’s. They’ll be on a sugar high when we pick them up after the auction. Cindy sits quietly in the passenger seat, fiddling with the radio. The last three months she has taken a vow of silence. When I ask what’s wrong, it’s always ‘nothing’. I turn down Dubus Street and look for somewhere to park. There’s 100 people outside the auction. A couple of black BMWs have arrived before us. I wind up the window when Cindy grabs my wrist.

“I need to tell you something”

“Better make it quick. The bidding starts soon and we gotta register”

Two crows sit on a powerline above the car. It would be my luck if they took a crap on the bonnet.

“I’ve been seeing someone”

The engine clicks as it cools. The shadow of a large passenger plane quickly passes over the car as it descends to the airport. The oleanders are in bloom. I undo the seatbelt.

“Who?”

“It doesn’t matter. You don’t know him”

“It’s not a doctor is it?”

“What? No. He’s an executive in the public service”

“Have you slept with him?”

Young couples are walking past the car to the auction. One father has his son on his shoulders and the boys is messing up his hair. Cindy picks some fluff from her black tights and turned to me.

“Yes”

“How many times?”

“Does it really matter?”

“I want to know how many times you’ve crawled in to our bed after fucking another man. These are the small details which I can use later to torture myself at 3:00am. How many times have you fucked this paper pusher?”

The bidding starts. The numbered bats rise and fall. The auctioneer has started at a figure we’d never be able to repay.

“You haven’t answered my question”

“I don’t think it’s material to discuss this right now. I think it would be best if I moved out and stayed with my Mum for a while. The kids can stay in the sunroom”

“You don’t think it’s material…”

The crows tilt their heads towards the clapping at the auction and another plane roars overhead as I drive my fist into her nose. Cindy is stunned and covers her nose as the blood crawls down her wrist.

“You hit me” she hisses, “you arsehole”

I open the car door and stand on the verge. My stomach is back flipping. I’ve hit the woman I love. I’ve never hit a woman before. It was a reflex, I tell the prosecuting lawyer, squatting toad-like in the back of my mind. There goes the kids and our dreams. The auction is over and people are walking back to their cars. I vomit my bacon and eggs up. Cindy walks behind the car with a tissue fixed to her nose and knees me in the balls. A favourite move of Fever High girls. She gets in the car and drives off as I lie curled up on the grass. Failed young bidders walk past. There are carrots dotted amongst the egg. How can that be?

Three days later I move into a dilapidated two bedroom unit with Nigel, next to the clubrooms of an outlaw motorcycle gang, in the industrial estate. Cindy takes the kids and moves in with the public servant. I followed her once. He’s in his mid 30’s and owns his own home in a tree-lined street in the eastern suburbs with a front lawn and garden. An Inheritor.

xxxxxxx

Morticia cuts her hair revealing an attractive face, high cheekbones and aquamarine eyes. I was impaled on misery when she applied just the right amount of alcohol and sympathy to get me in to bed. Afterwards, we stare at the grey ceiling.

“That was the worst sex I’ve had in my life,” Morticia says. “It was like having all five senses smothered in cold sand.”

She switches on her phone. The media are running stories on new drugs to help old people live and work longer.

“First of all they call us lazy,” she says. “Now these old bastards are going to work until they drop.”

She points to another story. A demographer has been shot coming out of his house. David Pepper wrote a column in a Murdoch rag which said the under 30’s lived a cafe latte and almond bread lifestyle, while complaining they couldn’t afford to save for a house deposit. Police are asking the public for help.

Another story reports the CEO of the Business Council was killed in a car accident. A large rock thrown from a bridge smashed through the windscreen, sending the car careening into oncoming traffic. Police are investigating.

“A double header! That makes me feel a bit better,” she says. “By the way, Nigel has taken a holiday”.

I hang out with the Allsorts. We play pool, chess and drink a lot. To take my mind off Cindy and the kids, I read websites and books on generational change, the casualisation of the workforce, wage theft, inherited debt and the flow of monies passing between the old bastards and the young. I want to help. My time will come, Morticia says.

More young men and women attend the meetings but I’m not included in the inner circle. In a drunken moment, Fatty says only those ‘anointed’ by Morticia are chosen to sit with her in the Star Chamber.

“You can tell ‘em,” Fatty says. “They’ve got encrypted satellite phones”

Single mothers with children walk in single file down highways, coming from nowhere, going nowhere. The young poor and homeless gather in city streets in large groups until the police move them on. They gather in the parks, sleep under trees or in shanties on the edge of town and the police move them on. From a distance, they look like hippies with long dirty hair and clothes but up close, poverty gives birth to fist-clenched anger. They yell at the Inheritors and their kids, driving past in Alfa Romeos and BMWs, ‘Fuck the social contract and fuck you!’

One Friday just before Christmas, the boss, a man with a Rottweiler head and an overfed Labrador stomach, calls me into his office.

“Sorry mate, I’m afraid we have to let you go,” he says staring out the window. “We’re reorganising and your job has been made redundant. You can use me for a reference. You were a good worker but that’s the breaks.” He didn’t look me in the eye once.

I spend the day in Centrelink trying to get the dole, when a news flash hits the TV. 100 young people dressed up as evil clowns have walked through the House of Representatives entrance in Canberra. They sat next to the MPs and didn’t say a word. The press gallery reporters upstairs – not known for their courage – went apoplectic. ‘What was security doing?’ ‘How did they get in?’ ‘The Prime Minister could have been killed’. The clowns said it was a stunt. For the next two weeks, news and current affairs programs were filled with images of evil clowns. Talk back radio shock jocks said we need another Vietnam. These lazy bastards should be conscripted. A few blamed the clown’s parents and the education system.

The fault was traced to the security guard roster system. They’d all been rostered off.

I was waiting at Nigel’s for The Bold and the Beautiful to start when the afternoon TV news said 10,000 young public service workers across the nation, had stood frozen at their desks for two minutes at exactly 2.00pm. They hadn’t told management they were doing it.

A female TV reporter stood in front of the Department of Employment in Canberra with a microphone.

“A source inside Parliament House says it was a silent protest against domestic violence. Another says it was about government inaction on climate change. This is Stephanie Seal reporting from Canberra.”

Cindy calls. The Inheritor was a disappointment. How was I meant to handle that? I did something I’d never done before. I shut up and listened. The pen pusher lacked a sense of humour and Davy and Marcia didn’t like him. Didn’t play with them after work. Didn’t sing stupid songs. She was taking the kids and moving in to her Mums for a while.

“You’ll miss the big wall screen TV, comfy furniture and pool,” I say.

“What I really miss, is you. Can I come and see you?”

“I’m dropping a truck in Canberra next week. After that, lets catch up”

I wanted to see her straight away. Next week was a thousand miles away. Cindy was my navigator and co-pilot.

“OK. Sounds good,” she said, a little disappointed. “Any chance you might see someone about that temper of yours?”

“Sure is. If you see someone about keeping stray dicks away from your vagina”

Cindy laughed, “Ok, deal”

“Deal”

xxxxxxxx

A young security guard at Parliament House waves me through and I park the B-double truck in underground Bay 27, like I was told. I’d never been to Parliament House. People are buzzing around in golf buggies with little flashing yellow lights on top. I wanted to go to the gift shop and buy some stuff for the kids. But what kid is interested in political shit? A calendar of the Blue Tie cabinet smiling like baboons? A colour-in book of the House of Representatives? A lot of green pencil there. Morticia’s instructions were clear. Leave my phone with her. Park the truck, lock it, extend the truck aerial and wait out the front for a black Ford.

I walk out in to the light. No security guard. A black Ford pulls up with Nigel in the passenger seat. The driver wears a black hoodie. The radio is on Question Time with the unmistakable nasal voice of the Prime Minister on full drone.

These are hard times for not just young people but everyone. When I was a kid I sold lemonade out the front of our house every Saturday. Sure, I could have been playing with other kids but as a 12 year old, I wanted to get ahead. I washed cars and collected cans and bottles to sell. I invested the money in BHP shares. For every share I bought, Dad bought one for me. By the time I was 17, I had saved $20,000 and had a share portfolio worth $70,000. How many teenagers at 17 can say that? I left school, went to university and became a lawyer.

“Welcome aboard, Amigo,” Nigel says. “Better make it snappy. We’ve got a long drive ahead of us and I’d like to put some distance between us and this place”

“Where we going?”

“Crabbes Creek, north of Byron Bay. We have a house – a fortress really – gunna lie low for a couple of weeks. A beautiful area. Lots of macadamias, passionfruit and avocados. You’ll like it”

“But I’ve got to get back and see Cindy and the kids”

The driver turns to me and sneers, “Get in, Fuckwit”

I bought my first home at 23 and an investment property when I was 27. Kids today want everything handed to them on a plate. Sure, I didn’t pay student fees but remember, I had to survive two massive recessions care of the Labor Party. I not only survived but I prospered. When my Mum died, I invested her money in offshore money markets. I made enough to buy a three bedroom seaside apartment. By that time, I had plenty of friends. I pulled myself up by my boot straps.

We speed up the hill towards the Pacific Highway. Nigel has a satellite phone plastered to his ear. I want to borrow it and call Cindy. He’s talking to Morticia. There’s a loud explosion and in the rear window, the centre of Parliament House rises 150 metres skywards, eclipsed by fire, smoke and debris. It looks like that storage silo in Beirut going off. The radio hisses and crackles.

“The spectacular has done its job, darling,” Nigel says and hangs up.

“Jesus fucking Christ, what happened?”

“There will be no Question Time in the House today,” Nigel says with a mordant chuckle. “Because we huffed and puffed…”

I’m the hand that rocked the cradle. The truck was heavy and smelt like fertiliser. The antenna was connected to a detonator. We fly past sheep in open fields as the ramifications sink in: mass murderer, terrorist, life in solitary confinement. I’ll see the sky once a week. Plenty of time to think.

Nigel is playing with the radio and moves back and forward over a station then locks in to Elvis’ Burning Love.

“The good news Guy Fawkes,” Nigel yells, “is you’re famous. The bad news is no one will ever find out it was you”

“How come?”

“We haven’t decided how the history will be written yet. Thirty minutes ago we took control of the the defence department’s communication system. We also hacked in to the mainframes of the four largest banks. Should be easier to get a home loan now. Your wife and kids are at Crabbes Creek. We thought it best, you know, for emotional support. We’ve got a guest too. The Governor General will be staying with us for a while. He’s not too happy about it”

We drive past cane fields outside of Grafton where a large crowd of young people are dancing around a bonfire. The sparks mingle with the stars. An army helicopter swoops in low from the east, a blood red moon behind it. Soldiers with rifles stand in the doorway. A missile rises majestically from the cane like a skyrocket and the helicopter explodes and falls from the air. Nigel cheers and hoodie puts his foot down. We’ve still got along way to go.