A monster's centenary.

You came into this world around three months after the cessation of hostilities - the war to end all wars.
Model T Fords wouldn't become a regular sight until you were six or seven here in Australia.
It is said that your older brother and you would wait out on the street after school for the two younger girls to come home. If you heard and saw your parents visiting drunken horrors upon each other the four of you would troop up William Street, Leichhardt and look for a place to sleep the night in Balmain Cemetery. If the weather was fine, it would be you four children against the headstones gazing up at the stars. If it was inclement you weren't above breaking into a mausoleum to stave off the cold and rain.
That hunger, though. Phew! Enough to drive generations insane.
Later, as it was told to me, the two sisters would go and work for Kate Leigh or her pale and forgotten imitations on Palmer Street or whichever house might take them in, to sell for a pittance their innocence and their hopes and their dreams. I never asked how old they were.
By all accounts you seem to have shot for honest back then. You would travel far and wide to turn a coin.
On returning you would bring what money you managed to earn or hustle or swindle home to that house on Charles Street where the stink of the Hawthorne Canal would still manage to permeate the darkened rooms, in spite of being a decent sized block away.
Then came the Second World War followed days later by the incident up the back of Gloucester, followed some months later by the wedding, followed soon after that by the arrival of your first born.
By now you were poor and troubled and handsome, dishonest and gifted with the gab. And they all wanted you but our mother wanted you most.
I could never even remotely understand why. Why love you? How? You were just too damned broken, old man. Even then you were just too damned broken.
It is said that during the war, you paid a pretty amount to an arms dealer up the Cross. Ma would later imitate your voice as you dragged the stenciled locker 'round under the back stairs to the house off Young Street.
"What the bloody hell're you doing with that, Jack?!"
" ... Just in case they invade," was your best effort.
Together you cracked the lock, you to marvel and to gloat and her to cajole and ridicule, but the moment gave way to the dust of ignominy as you instantly realised the cache was filled with children's air rifles and not .303s. I can't pass judgement. It could have happened to any thug. Any fool. Any would be gangster of the era and you, to all intents and purposes, definitely fitted the bill for all three.
It is said you perforated your ear to avoid serving, yet after the war, you heard about the island girls and enlisted to defend a different kind of honour. Cooking and fucking your way in the former protectorates.
By the time i came along, you couldn't even cook well.
The fifties came and went in a whirl of hate, love and hate, love and hate, and by the end of them, the brood had grown to six.
Finally the youngest in sixty three and the collapse of your little empire two years later.
Oh of course you'd drag the kid from lover's house to lover's house, pillar to post, St Ives to Roselands, Dundas to Maroubra. Sydney to Perth. At one point nailed the kid's bedroom window to stop him running away in the middle of the night, as he did so often. As all the others had done before him to finally get away from the stinging tongue, the stinging words, the stinging back of the hand.
And the kid got it easy. Easier by far.
So finally I too ran away and you died some months later. Some say holding presents for the grandkids down on George Street. Someone once even tried the whole Black Irish Died Of A Broken Heart routine. But I doubt it.
I missed the funeral. I missed the ashes scattered under the lemon tree on Eastview Ave. For a brief moment in history, I felt thirteen year old guiltybad but that was a million lifetimes ago, a thousand miles away and an era of shadowboxing gone. I've long stopped caring about feeling anywhere near that helpless since. Truth be told, before long you'd become too much the stranger crowding out the madmen already socialising in our young, fractured heads.
One day I may write at length about it all. Especially the made up portions. You'd like the fantasist tracts. You, like me, would like the fictional non-dramas that bind the narrative. You, like me, would swear on the bible that it was all true.
You, like me ...
Somewhere deep down in the mire, still like you.
But most likely, outside this unmistakably vitriolic screed, you'll get nothing more out of me. Or us. Or history.
On this, your hundredth birthday.
22/2/2019