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My Sixteen Year Old Self Completes a Religion and Society Assignment.

I was looking through things I’ve written as a teenager (classic sign that I have an essay that urgently needs to be written) and found this assignment from high school. The task was to interview someone about their religious beliefs. If we had no one, we were to recount what we’d been told by a priest who had come to class. I left it to the last minute, so I decided (with my teacher’s permission) to interview my 15 year old brother.

This is what I submitted (with pseudonyms):

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Pretty much got everything I ever wanted by the end of this year.

Got into Law, went to Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam and London - alone! - drove around the British countryside with a friend, swam with sharks, met so many awesome people, I even made Grandad’s yearly family bulletin.

2012, with its trips to China (Shanghai, Hong Kong, Chengdu, Xian, Harbin and Beijing), Fiji, Vanuatu, New Caledonia and hopefully - maybe - an application for exchange, is more than welcome.

The four people living there, a mother and three children, were probably murdered before burning with everything else.

I wondered what was going on as Kyle and I had to detour around police roadblocks on our way to my home.

Later, Mum called me to tell me that it wasn’t just a house. It was the house that her family lived in from its days as a commission house in 1961 until my Nanna died while living there in 2000. The place that was, when I was small, a bit of a second home, and an exciting playground for my brother and I with its “snow”-like carpet and rainforest ferns and the spooky, charred remains of the shed my aunt burnt down 40 years ago.

I’m not quite sure what else to say about it, except that it’s surreal to think that the house is gone, and horrible things happened there.

 I now live not too far from my Nanna’s old house. After hearing my neighbour threaten to stab his tenant a couple of days ago, and finding out that the clearly dodgy house around the corner is, in fact, a meth lab, I’m starting to feel that the “character” that I loved about this area is no longer quite so endearing.

NB: The mother killed the children, burnt the house down and killed herself.

During a family game of Articulate on Boxing Day, my brother tries to describe a word without saying it.

Liam: “Um, I call Lucy this sometimes.”

Various family members simultaneously: “Moron!” “Idiot!” “Retard!”

Best. Family. Ever.

My dad called me a skank today.

He thought it meant that I was smelly.