SANDPIT APOCALYPSE

The quiet. Write about the quiet. Write about the silence that crawled over our homes every night as if something just beyond the door had inhaled all of the world's sounds and held that breath until morning. The nights felt like the spaces between words, like the world was trying to think of something meaningful to say and failing at every turn. Write about how quickly we forgot the way things had been before, or rather misremembered them, and how we grew to believe that things would not return to their faded glory, that we had crossed an absolute line marking the border between what had occurred before and what lay ahead. Write about the stories we used to plaster the void. We were very good at writing stories on account of our teacher Mr Otomo – don't forget to write about how Mr Otomo lost his mind and started screaming from his balcony – and don't forget how Indigo's dad got stoned when everyone realised his daughter was doing witchcraft in the cemetery, or the swimming pool murders, or the streets piling up with garbage, or the wartime trenches that began appearing in the park. Write about the monster house. The fires and the flood. Write about Black Lung. But shoosh – no you shoosh – we're ahead of ourselves. Write about the place first. Write about Belgravia. Write about the suburb always described as sleepy, before sleep was ripped from us.

Jack Lumm must be written about. Jack Lumm was Belgravia. One hundred years ago his grandparents fled the plague and landed here in Belgravia, Jack Lumm told us. It was a strange time people your age probably can't imagine, his grandparents told him. People said bless you to everyone. Strangers stooped to retrieve your dropped handkerchief. The soldiers wore brutalist coifs. Their wives hid their legs. There was widespread constipation. People looked to their diets differently. Jack's father John Lumm was conscripted and sent to the Europe his parents had escaped. He worked on a navy boat. Some shipmates donned nail polish in their berth and snaked an arm beyond the curtain separating them from their brethren to pretend that the hand returning to stroke their tummy or whatever was that of a beautiful lady. Soldiers had sweethearts back home. Letters were sent. John Lumm and Sarah Vilner exchanged dozens. Theirs had always been a love of letters, an epistolary romance, and the passion for words that had tethered them quickly grew commercial. John's shipmates ached to be held by their distant beaus and belles, and he began to mass-produce love letters that they might copy out in their own hand. Sarah, meantime, performed the same sleight for landlocked partners to volley back to their wartime lovers. There was a price, of course, moreso when a romanticist was bereft of a hand, or letters, or funds. There was also a cost. Both John and Sarah confessed to concerns about this enterprise, feeling a certain chagrin at exploiting the inarticulate and word-lorn. Most of what they had been selling were phrases they had traded with one another during these wartime years, after all. Recycling their love letters as heartfelt missives to strangers clanged monstrous, which was an easy take given the unspoken fact that neither saw much of a future between them, between Sarah and John, that is. Until the war was out this pantomime of an engagement was merely for show, bragging rights, defence, or masturbation.

Sadly the war ended. Sarah and John married and bought a cottage in Belgravia. They gave birth to Jack and Jack never travelled further than a few eyeblinks beyond the suburb's limits. Jack knew everyone. He'd been in all of our homes. Odds jobs that needed doing were his to do. Jack painted and plumbed and filled gaps and cleared drains. Some interiors he had painted four or five times, feeling as though he knew them more intimately than the succession of owners who had claimed their title. Some of us suspected that Jack Lumm was secretly Santa. There was certainly some overlap, we all agreed. It was early in that summer when Korean Taylor Swift was dominating the airwaves. Teenagers sported decorative muscles of cartoonish dimensions. Weird kids were interesting from a distance. We asked each other: does your house have podcasts? We heard about Greta, who was important. We heard about rollercoasters, though none of us had ever been a rollercoastee. We heard about the mainstream media and to some of us it sounded like our parents believed in the boogeyman. Our boogeyman was a family who lived in Indi's street, in the crumbling home half-hidden by the overgrown trees that lurched around it, mocking it. The inhabitants were nothing more than a rumour until the time that Indi and Jivan turned up claiming to have seen a pale resident hovering in the yard one fable-like dusk. We must write about the monster house, for sure, and the time we ventured inside, willius nillius.

Write about the dawn, too. During an ideal sunrise every one of Belgravia's cross streets looked out past the river that bordered its eastern edge to the crashed vista of the distant glittering city beyond, glass surfaces holding the light captive in a million mute specks of stardust. The river was beautiful in a way that made you feel sleepy, said Mr Otomo, who had once read that the rivers of Hiroshima before the bomb were beautiful in a way that made you feel sleepy. Here at the end of the world the terror of the bomb felt like a half-forgotten dream. People had once practised hiding from annihilation. Classroom choreography had been produced. A leader was swallowed by the sea. In the USA leaders had been murdered for a long time, we were told, there was quite a miserable tradition. This was when people still spoke about America in public, before 'Kids in America would kill for that.' We must be careful not to write about America. Write about class instead. Write about what made a person classy. Wearing a jacket without arms in the sleeves made a person classy. None of us ever dared. Walking with a book balanced on your head bore some association with classiness, as did having people do things for you. We thought throwing a peanut in the air and catching it in your mouth displayed class, though we failed to agree if class was the same as cool. Tyler's dad was cool. Tyler's dad yelled 'car' and waved the offending vehicle past the interrupted players. His Kurt Russell hair rippled like a cuttlefish as he moved. His singlets always declared his commitment to rooting, beer, motorcross or some combination thereof. Tyler's dad stood out the front every evening with both arms pressed against the verandah roof, as though he were preventing it from collapsing through muscle mass alone. He sniffed the air and smelled the arrival of the smoke first. The distant fires could be felt even here, so far away. The smoke from the fires reached Belgravia. The city at the end of the street disappeared. Pools dried up. Birdsong grew absent. People lacked air. Grown ups worried. We were small consolations.

We were teased, or we weren't. Not being teased was its own form of insult. We were armed with all sorts of tools to combat low self-esteem, and each proved curiously edgeless. Like trying to tickle yourself. Like trying to make yourself laugh. We could laugh at each other but we took ourselves seriously. We thought about crowns. The best crown was the simple gold circlet with the zigzag top, or else a fairy crown, a circle of flowers and leaves, or the Caesar crown, which was a ring of jagged leaves from some plant we couldn't name, but Big Vivaan said that Caesar Salad had lettuce leaves so it was determined that the crown in question was a lettuce crown. Last came the crown jewels. We were interested in the pain occasioned by wearing something so heavy. Grown ups worried. We didn't worry. We were in good hands. Our parents had our backs. We could outsource our insomnia. We could call out for someone to sleep in our bed. There was someone available to sleep in our bed. We knew that we were lucky, if we were lucky, if we had beds. We thanked heavens, some of us. Some sang the outtakes to Moana. Some replied a polite 'no thank you' to every request sent their way. Some enjoyed staying in. Some of us enjoyed home. We were blessed with kittens and puppies. We were given telescopes and star charts and allowed to camp in the backyard. We grew presumptuous from all the attention. There was increased presence. There was increased cortisol, which caused us to wake between two and four am. We were all waking in the middle of the night. The waking felt medieval. The silence outside felt prehistoric. It stole our breath.

People jogged in jeans. Elastic made grown-up ears all sticky outy. Shops closed. Signs went up. We rarely worried. We were in someone's hands. We felt they had our backs. Parking fines grew rusty. Petrol was basically free. We composted. There was widespread composting. There were rumours that people were just doing their jobs. It was a break from the murdered women. It was a break from the children being killed and the children killing themselves. We couldn't die. But we also couldn't get our Switch fixed if we dropped it from the olive tree while spying on Noah Potnik.

Noah Potnik vaped. It gave him tiny asthmatic coughs that he tried to contain; they came stumbling out like children on a forced march. Some hated him for what might, who knew, endanger his life – it drove them to despair, hair-tearing-out despair – not because they envied children their youth or even their youthful obliviousness, but because it reminded them of the very thing a person of advanced age cannot allow into the frame of their waking mind, which is that a child might die, and that a child might die after enduring sustained and terrible suffering.

We posted rainbows on our windows and wrote 'Stay Safe' and sometimes 'Stay Home'. We were all in this together.

We watched so much TV. We watched so much iPad. We feared there was no point to the puzzles and the colouring. We avoided jump scares. People still borrowed things, did karaoke, got pregnant. New pillows were ordered online. There was some screaming into pillows. There was a brief ban on evictions. Opinions were rife and confident. Our grown ups tried to remember if it was radius or diameter. Chemistry and birdlife conspired to wake them grumpy. We tired of sourdough. Funerals went unattended. Jack Lumm was seen on the streets. We were told to cross the streets. He sat outside shops. He called our names. He knew all of our names. He knew the insides of our homes. He knew the things by which we measured our world. I was playing Animal Crossing when my mum told me that Felix's mum had Facetimed her because he wanted to ask me a question. This was a labour for me because I felt at this point in the game that I had finally achieved what my dad called a 'flow state' and also that if I put down the controller then my dad would snatch it up and start playing FIFA. Sighing, I took the phone from my mum and stared at Felix's image. What is up, I asked. I'm leaning towards gorillas now, he said, and I slapped my face so that he could see my frustration. Baboons are clearly superior, I said. We'd spent far too long the previous day arguing about which primate was best. Especially baby baboons, I went on, which are A+++ primates. I think we didn't give enough credit to the sign language thing, he said, and I was willing to concede that it bought gorillas points. Can bend iron bars, he added, but are mostly gentle. Don't have too many babies (at that age, the b-word was about the worst thing you could call someone).

What is that? I asked, pointing past him.

What's what?

Have you been drawing on the wall? One time I got in the biggest trouble for that.

The video went crazy as Felix spun around to figure out what I was referring to. He came back into frame. You mean the height chart?

What's a height chart?

We measure my height. It marks how tall I was when I was two and three and whatever and now. See the little lines, I'll show you.

Who did that?

Felix spun the camera back. Everyone does that, he said.

Everyone was measured that way? I thought. I was careful not to appear upset. But I couldn't help thinking: why wasn't my life on a wall?

Over time I realised that this urge to be measured, recorded, defined, wasn't some individual perversity, the desire of a butterfly to be pinned to velvet. Other kids confided concerns that attempts to start a diary had only left weeks and weeks of blank pages; Goran spoke darkly of the betrayal he had felt the first time he'd spotted his finger-paintings in the recycling. Gada worried that there wouldn't be a school photo this year. Probably for the best, we grimly agreed, as we considered the state of our hair.

Write about Kyle McFerrell. We all tried to keep Kyle McFerrell appeased, because at that age it seemed actually possible that another child could kill you if you stepped out of line. But write also about the reprieve. Write about the conflagration of sighs. The city returned to view, indeed became more visible by the day. We had never seen it so crisply rendered. Works began. The distant machines woke us at all hours with their noisome agitation. The grumble of bored earth felt too close, like a sibling kicking the shared bedclothes.

When the playgrounds opened up freedom arrived, the hollering mornings in our closest park, children allowed to scream their daylights out willius nillius. The grass stood proud and tall, ready to be crushed. There was a lot to report. Leo had seen a spider with an orange back. Luna could spell words like 'spider' but also words like 'wealthy' and 'scowl' which sounded made up. Big Vivaan had grown muscles. Billie got solar. Dirali had seen Billie's solar. Ivy had seen Mr Otomo singing on his balcony. Indigo had seen big boys fighting. Aviv had seen a video where boys smashed chairs on each other for real life. That's the same as my fighting boys, said Indigo. It wasn't, yelled Aviv, because the boys wanted to get smashed on by the chairs. To the rest of us the argument felt like when your little sister beat you in Mario Kart, which wasn't the same as losing because beating a five-year-old isn't the same as winning.

We had staked out the sandpit to rehearse our future. The world was ending there. Interpretations varied. Zombies had finally gotten a decent foothold. Radioactive asteroid dust had turned everyone cannibal. Nuclear and sometimes nucular bombs had laid general waste. Aliens had proven uncharitable. Mutants ascended. Robots uprose. To model this carnage toy cars had been stripped of parts and repurposed as jacked up dune buggies and armoured convoys. Licensed action figures had been similarly shaven and mutilated so that the sandpit apocalypse could be populated by mohawked albino muscle-people who favoured snappy catchphrases such as “I LOVE CHAOS!” We had learnt of these scenarios from our elder siblings, End Times enthusiasts who had seen movies and related them with zeal. The second-hand nature of our Armageddons thus left them riddled with blindspots. Our mutants expounded the value of sharing. Our cannibals developed plant-based alternatives. No soul had explained to us that the end of the world was supposed to draw a curtain on compassion. Our own state, what was called by others childhood, was unknowable to us. It was the sun, giving form to everything we knew, but unable to be looked at directly because it will make you go blind. Here in the sorry shadow of grown-upness we can see it for the simple thing that it was. A small circle in which true death had not yet found purchase.

Pet adoption shelters ran out of animals around this time. Kindness required outlet. Indi and Felix and Jivan fashioned dolls out of sticks and strings and in the dead of night hung them from the trees that formed a halo around the monster house. They hoped that the ghost family who lived inside would emerge and feel encouraged by these tiny totems to become a more vital element in the Belgravian community, but looking back now the hanging effigies definitely contributed to the place's Blair Witch vibe. (If I can intrude: I have no memory of hanging the stick dolls!!)

And then once again our homes inhaled us without warning. The drawbridges went up, the blinds came down. We tried to hide our crumbling. We worried. No one had us. We were alone. There was widespread constipation once more. We cried on the toilet. We tried not to wake the neighbours with our night screams. Things were forever impending. The feeling of doom was a regular house guest. Some of us were afraid to play in the front yard in case we saw a friend driven past and we started crying and they saw us crying. Shops closed. Signs went up. Shops stayed closed despite the reassurances of the signs, or transformed into pop ups, pale phantoms. There were ghosts everywhere, unremarked upon. Jack Lumm was seen sleeping under a bridge. He stank of the poor person's cologne. We fell silent as we passed any facade that had been dark too long. The milk bar disappeared. The shoe shop disappeared. The purple shop disappeared. The shop next door had always been hidden by sliced curtains but one day people marched chairs and tables out onto the street and through the now-naked glass we saw that there was almost nothing left in there. We stared through our reflections and tried to work out what had once been in there. The playgrounds wore shrouds. People accustomed to just doing their job found they had no job. They had never had a job.

People did not say bless you to strangers. There had been no break from the murdered women. There had been no break from the children killing themselves or the children being killed. We hid our faces. We forgot parts of our neighbours, lost Mr Hamisi's chins, the smiles of the vegetable garden lady, the lines of the Petronas brothers' jaws. Deflated plastic octopus sprinklers ruined yards. We asked questions about Santa and the Tooth Fairy. The science just didn't stack up.

It seemed possible to go months without exhaling. Perhaps the hallucinatory quality of those days was amplified by a collective lack of oxygen, a moment of history suffering the bends. Our parents went quiet when we enquired about suffering. We heard the numbers every day. There were too many commas in that number, we were told. At odd moments our grown-ups seemed stricken low by an unbearable sadness. Driving to the milk bar or typing on the internet or accepting a bag of dinner, they would find something in themselves rising up to flood their thoughts, a grey tide drenching their thinking, and they would not realise it then but what they felt was grief, a profound grief. They were grieving for the selves they had lost, who had been left outside and would not return. Some of them accepted this sadness. Some turned it on others. It became rage. It became indignation. It sought fault. The dying was elsewhere. They were looking for someone to pinion the cycle of our distress. They found great comfort in blame. Some couldn't get out of bed before the numbers were announced. Some felt that the passage of human affairs had taken on the absurdity of a game of musical chairs, and that their bungled timing had left them standing in naked history. Some of those seated jeered.

We got well soon. True death did not exist. The announcement brought us running. The first overheard skateboard squeak saw us pounding down the hallway. An era had been departed. We arrived at the threshold only to hesitate. We wondered if our houses smelled funny. Gut flora had evolved. Our hair had taken on exciting otherworldly dimensions. The averted eye and the backward step. There have been essays on our curt smiles and contained breath with well-meaning hurtful titles like Children of the Mask. When we met again some of us pretended to have phones. We pretended to know what you could do with a phone back then, pretended we could see what was going to happen that hadn't yet happened. We pretended we knew what everyone thought about things likes ooshies and The Hulk and who was cool but rude. We rummaged boxes of books on footpaths. Grandparents could look after us and sometimes on an afternoon the wrinkled man in the hilarious shirt would sip his mojito and settle into his Minesweeper and we would sneak into the monster house through the torn flyscreen, pacing our way around rooms walled off by ancient dressers and box towers. We scampered and scuttled around these wings of the house inaccessible from the rest, listening breathlessly to the spectral figure we heard beyond sealed doors. If our parents had known we were in someone else's house we would have felt hell.

The park reintroduced them to terror. Not at first. Playgrounds had become tenable again. Sand felt safe. Thick plastic was disinfected by the returning sun. Scaffolded mutants and psychoanalysed zombies were left unloved. Sightlines were clear. Our parents smiled with their eyes. Connective tissue formed. We could play alone, or sit alone with our screens while others played alone. Two sisters invented a game. They lay at the top of the climbing frame, playing sleeping princesses. They whispered to a bow-tied and side-parted younger boy that they needed rescuing. The kid clambered up and tried to rescue them but the pretend-sleepers pretended sleeping and tapped their mouths, because this was the thing they wanted. This was how you woke a sleeper. The outsider leaned in and the whole park tensed its shoulders and raced screaming to prevent the possibility. They were too late to prevent Belgravia's first kiss between strangers in what is now recalled as a troubled time.

This was before the internet got busted. This was back when opinions on the internet felt like they had gravity. People still talked about America. People still thought about swiping when they weren't swiping. Thoughts were fleet of foot. Thoughts were fleet of finger. The stench of family beefs returned. Rain arrived. Noted local boofheads abandoned their masks. Teenagers congregated in the cemetery. Halloween passed by without alighting. Curfews melted. The river rose and took Jack Lumm with it. The flood moved with a violence that would drag all of Belgravia in its wake. The disaster left none unscathed within its radius, or was it diameter? And then the sun kept rising and falling, willius nillius. Willius nillius was something Jack Lumm said and we all said it in turn. Willius nillius was a phrase never heard more than a few eyeblinks beyond the borders of Belgravia. It was a strange time people your age can probably remember. We were very good at stories. We were proficient at banging pots and pans and making a general ruckus. But at that time we still thought of ourselves as poorly populated planets. We felt under-noticed. We felt larger than anyone appreciated. We were planets waiting to become worlds. Let's write about that.