Number Seventeen...

If you've ever accidentally started a largish sort of fire in your house then you will know what I mean and understand why I say that I will always make sure that I've put my cigarettes out properly from now on.

Fire is a sneaky thing- one minute it's not there at all and the next it's too far beyond your control to deal with anymore. And my fire didn't even have that much to feed it; just Mickey's old flea-blankets that he rarely slept on, a broken guitar and a plastic table. Oh, and most of the wooden wall, tin frame and fly screen of my back verandah also burnt down- which I've been known at times to, disparagingly, call my Bird Cage.

I suppose the red-eye of my cigaretter was to blame- that and my drunken self. I must have accidentally flicked some of it into the cat's cushions; but by the time I had smelled the smoke the table was also on fire, melting upwards with such an intense heat that the glass ashtray was fused into the molten mess that remained on the floor after the fire-men had gone...

I'm not even dobbing Myself in- I drunkenly told them exactly how the fire had started. No one's even asked me yet if I did it deliberately.

They're calling me Fire Starter at the pub now. Funnily enough, or not, the only things that I didn't find amongst the ashes were my bong, cigarettes and frog-lighter case that my eldest Son bought for me on his travels round the country. I guess the gas in the lighter blew up and the thin metal of the case shattered. I suppose it's ironic in a funny sort of a way, huh, that my various smoking apparatus's, along with my smoking table and ashtray, and an old guitar that nobody even played anymore, were the only things to be destroyed. If I was religious I'd probably take that as a sign from Someone up above to quit smoking- but I'm not; so that's that little problem solved.

It's not a sign from some god- it's just really fucking lucky. That's what it was. Last week on the news I heard that a four year old twin and his parents were killed, whilst trying to save him- orphaning their three other children in the process. On the Saturday after that, four children died in another house fire down the Coast. A few weeks ago, another little boy couldn't be reached in time and was found incinerated underneath what was left of his bed. Last night it was a middle-aged man in a caraven...

And then I consider the Facts; that I was comfortably drunk and about to go to sleep in my smoke-detector-less house, like my little Son and his two visiting cousins already were.

I think I could have grabbed a bucket of water from the kitchen and tried to douse the flames, myself then, when I first noticed the flames, but because I had been drinking I thought it would be best to get the sleeping kids out first, and leave them with the neighbours- briefly- while I dealt with it if I still could.

I grabbed my little Son from his warm bed, frightening him awake as I yelled for the two bigger kids to Get Outside. I had, somewhere, at some stage, grabbed the cordless phone and was ringing Triple Oh- five times no less- calling out to my neighbours by their first names, identifying Myself and the problem at hand so they wouldn't think it was some childish prank or a mere domestic that had spilled out into the street...

I'm sure that they heard me and I'm certain that they were home- which is why I still can't understand why the light on the front porch suddenly flicked off and a shadow moved backwards behind the door. Humph. I thought we got on okay...

My friend Bbbb tells me not to judge them too harshly- but I'd like to see how she'd feel if it was her house on fire, and her kid the one in danger, how she'd feel Then if her nighbours did nothing to help her. Maybe she thinks her neighbours are different to mine and would help her- I don't know. Besides, Bbbb's the one who went and dunked herself in a giant font and became Born-Again recently. I don't have to be so forgiving.

Personally- I'm never speaking to those bastards at Number Seventeen ever again, and if I owned the overgrown footpath out the front of my house I wouldn't let them use it to park their shit-house car there anymore, either. Because I'm vindictive like that.

Does anyone blame me?

What's happened to the world when three grown adults won't come to the help of one holding three crying children on the cold street in the middle of the night while their house is burning?

I want to move.