When I was a kid, my family lived on 5 acres of bushland out north-west of Sydney. We had neighbouring properties on either side, but they were invisible to us and separated by thick scrub. One day, my uncle, who was staying with us, was alone in our house and accidentally set off the burglar alarm. Within minutes, the neighbours from each side came running down the driveway, one with a cricket bat, the other with an axe. It was awkward for my uncle, but my parents marveled at the speedy and protective response from our neighbours.

Now we live in suburbia. Recently my mother was at home during the day, watching television, when our next door neighbour’s alarm started going off because they were, in fact, being robbed. Annoyed at the noise, my mother turned up the TV and continued watching. A few hours later, one of the neighbours came over to say that their house had been burgled, and were we all ok?

“You’re a bad person,” I told Mum that night over dinner, “You’re going straight to hell when you die, and they’ll put you in the Lazy & Selfish cell block.”

“Well I didn’t know they were actually being robbed,” she replied, “Besides, they have a dog.”

“He’s a pet, not a home security system.”

“Whatever,” she said, pouring herself a glass of wine, “If anybody asks, you tell them I was out shopping.”

Most people who grew up in Sydney were probably dragged down to the Hawkesbury at some stage during their childhood to visit a popular tourist destination known as Butterfly Farm. This is a magical place where many rare species of insects reside and you are free to roam among them, observing and absorbing at will.

One weekend in the early nineties, my parents decided that my brother and I should experience the faunal wonders of this Butterfly Farm.

“But I hate bugs!” I whined in the car.

“Don’t be silly, they’re harmless,” my parents reassured me.

And so we made the long drive while I whinged and sulked and everyone ignored my pathological fear of insects.

When we arrived, my parents led me around, pointing out various beetles and spiders, while I hovered near the exit and glanced, terrified, towards the glass cabinets that writhed with creepy crawlies.

“Shall we go look at the butterflies?” my father suggested.

“I hate things with wings,” I reminded him.

“That’s ridiculous,” my mother said, “How will you ever travel internationally or select sanitary products?”

And so I was forced to enter a room filled entirely with winged creatures that flapped around my head and cast evil stares in my direction and scared the shit out of me.

I was trying to be brave and enjoy the butterflies the way all the other kids were, but after a few minutes, one of the hideous beasts suddenly made its way over and settled upon my upper arm.

I let out a blood curdling scream and swiftly clapped my hand down on the butterfly, whose lifeless body then dropped onto the dirt floor.

A moment of silence passed, not in respect for the delicate and endangered life that was just lost, but in horror of the four year old child who had snuffed such a (generally considered) beautiful creature.

“I’ll bet that happens all the time, huh?” my mother joked nervously to a Butterfly Farm employee standing nearby.

“No, that was the first time,” he replied.

And we left very quickly.

• told me I was adopted.
• punched me repeatedly.
• headbutted me when he broke his arm and couldn’t punch me.
• used my skipping ropes to tie nooses and “hanged” my dolls from the curtain rod in my room, so that when I walked home from school and approached the house, I saw a mass suicide happening in my bedroom window.
  
• told me that I was retarded and had been inside a mental institution for my entire life. Mum and Dad were the “doctors”, my teachers and friends were “nurses” and “orderlies” or other people hired to amuse me and keep me company so I could live a “normal life.” I was so out of touch with reality that I had no idea.
  
• slapped me repeatedly.
  
• pooped in the bathtub because he knew it would uspet me. I got so scared that I jumped out and ran naked through the house, then slipped on the lino and smashed my head against a ceramic step, resulting in a wound requiring three stitches.
  
• pinched me repeatedly.
  
• held me down on the couch and farted in my face.
  
• cut all the hair off my dolls. Then cut off their arms and legs.
• told me that Taz, our first family dog who I only remembered vaguely, had to be put down because I cried whenever she came near me. In fact, the dog just barked too much and gave the neighbours the shits.
  
• sang this song constantly, often late at night, until I was driven to borderline insanity.
  
• kicked me repeatedly.
• called me a “fudge packer”, “back door stabber” and various other derogatory terms for homosexuals. I had no idea what they meant until late highschool.
  
• forced various things into my mouth, including cat food, dirt, and batteries.
  
• told Mum that I broke the neighbour’s windscreen, after he had thrown a brick at their car.
  
• gave me a noogie every time I walked past.
  
• told me that my high hairline/large forehead was actually premature baldness.
  
• told me that Stripe, the stray cat we found who was very violent and frequently attacked my bare legs, was nowhere to be seen. I would emerge from the bathroom, where I had been hiding, to find Stripe waiting outside the door, claws ready.
  
• gave me a wet willy every time I walked past.
• told me that Santa Claus was not real on Christmas morning, 1989. I was three years old.
  

What did your brothers and sisters do to torture you? Or what did you do to them, you sick bastard?

Believe it or not, I once dated somebody with a questionable friendship circle. They were nice enough boys, but they had a habit of going to the pub on Friday night and waking up on Sunday morning.

One such Sunday morning, I was requested to pick up a few of the boys and transport them to a BBQ. And so I was happily driving along, enjoying the sunshine and attempting to ignore the smell of hangover in my backseat, when a certain gentleman named Daniel grabbed my arm. “PULL OVER” he said, opening the car door.

I sat in my car and waited while Daniel vomited profusely on somebody’s rose bushes and swore in between heaves. “Cunt.. Haaaggguuhh.. Fucking.. ggarrhgh.. Mother.. snergggh.” And then I waited while he turned on the nearby garden hose and held it over his head, washing off the spew that had splashed onto his face and shirt. “What a fucking yak!” he declared, chunks of vomit flying as he violently shook out his hair, not unlike some kind of wildebeest.

It was then that we both noticed the young couple and their children, sitting on their front porch and staring at the rose bushes, untouched bowls of cereal in front of them.

Somewhere around grade 10, my friends and I started hanging around a particular group of guys. They were mostly apprentices who’d dropped out of school and they hung around our local shopping centre when they finished work in the afternoons. We caught the bus there after class and smoked cigarettes on the loading docks in our private school uniforms while these guys tried to source pot and mooch free pizza. They were the type of guys who considered taking a dump on somebody who was passed out at a party as “witty.”

When I stopped going to house parties and got drunk in bars instead, I fell out a little with these guys. I still saw them around, but when I did, I pretended not to know them. But after uni, our circles started overlapping again and I decided to give one of the boy’s house parties another go. Maybe they had grown up, toned down their behaviour and learned not to be so silly?

The party was going well. Nobody had spun a bottle or stuck their hands down my pants, the bathroom didn’t smell like vomit, and the police hadn’t visited. Then around midnight, the boys began passing around glow sticks.

“Are we going to a rave?” I asked.

“Not quite – wait and see,” somebody named Willo winked at me.

Each guy pulled down his jeans, cracked open his glow stick, and rubbed the contents onto his penis. Then they ran in a line down the dark street and shouted out to all the neighbours. Bleary eyed citizens shuffled to their bedroom windows and looked out to see a trail of bobbing wangs lit up and making their way past their rose bushes.

The boys then ran back to our yard and threw themselves one by one into the pool, screaming, “IT BURNS! FUCK, IT BURNS..”

A few moons ago, one of my friends was undertaking a massage course. One night she decided to practise some newly-learned techniques on her boyfriend.

“Now, just relax your diaphragm,” she instructed.

“Diaphragm!” he said, “Only girls have those!”

• put my cat underneath an upside-down washing basket and placed phone books on top.

• climbed over the backyard fence and squirted tomato sauce on the neighbour’s washing.

• head-butted another kid on my first day of Play Group and told him to “shut the hell up” when he started crying.

• stole money from my dad’s bottom drawer nearly every day to buy Zooper Doopers and carob buds from the canteen.

• put fairy wings on my younger cousin and told her she was a fly, then sprayed her with Mortein.

• wrote my mum hate-mail.

• lured a friend who was terrified of dogs into the back paddock and then let the dogs out of their enclosure and listened to her scream.

• lured same friend into the shed and told her I was going to bludgeon her to death with a hammer, then admitted I was just kidding after she started crying.

• picked pieces of cat poo out of the kitty litter tray and put them in the neighbour’s letter box.

• asked my mum what a condom was in front of her bible study group, then asked “DOES THAT MEAN YOU CAN HAVE SEX AND YOU WON’T GET PREGNANT?”

• cheated on the 1997 Maths Olympiad and accepted a trophy at an all-student assembly and had my picture in the paper for it.

• stuck a highlighter up my brother’s cat’s bum to “check his temperature.”

• cut pictures of diseased penises out of my dad’s medical journals and pasted them in my kindergarten homework book while learning about the letter P.