A lawyer called Cameron whose office was in the mall helped them out with this, a good-looking young man with a calm, Buddhist manner. They would split the house and assets down the middle, fifty-fifty, according to the agreement Cameron drew up for them, and share the kids on a three-four-four-three-days-a-week basis. So the house went on the market, but it was only a week before they both realised that, however much they got for it, fifty per cent each would never be anywhere near enough to buy another house in a ludicrously inflated housing market. How am I going to buy myself another house or even a flat with that sort of money? Steve said a little hysterically to Nicole, who, you see, by now, by the way, was not so concerned as her ex-husband about the price their old house might fetch since she and the kids had in the meantime moved in with Jay, the glazier, himself divorced, and who, Steve realised with a slap to the forehead, she’d been sleeping with all along.

So Steve rang around some of his mates, bought a couple of slabs and some bottles of bourbon and in the dead of night the happy party cut the couple’s old weatherboard house in Grafton Street down the middle and jacked what Steve called his half off the stumps up onto his mate Marty’s rig with the plan of taking it to the block in M—— that his Uncle Ian owned and which had been sitting there vacant, growing weeds, for years. Sure, said Uncle Ian, who now lived on the Gold Coast with a Croat woman called Jelka, and if that old bloke next door gives you any trouble tell him I’ll come down there and punch his fucking head in.

They set off just before dawn; all the mates, now very drunk, waving Steve goodbye. Marty had wanted a police escort, but Steve, for obvious reasons, said no. Marty put his flashing beacons on and tied a fluoro safety jacket to the protruding edge. Steve rode in the kitchen – or the half-a-kitchen, as it was – sitting on one of the pine kitchen chairs he had claimed at the half-a-pine-table he had bracketed to the wall. He also had half the bedroom, half the bed, half the bathroom (though not the half with the toilet in it), one of the kids’ rooms, and half the sunroom (but not the laundry). They made slow progress, pulling over occasionally onto the verge to let the queue of cars go past. Dawn was beautiful, a sky of vivid orange then a soft watercolour blue; the road hummed, a cool breeze blew through the rooms of the house. Steve had dust in his eyes, or so he thought: how else to explain the fact that they were watering?

After a while the rattle that had started just after they’d left Grafton Street got worse, you could hear it very clearly over the noise of the engine, so Marty, erring on the side of caution, pulled over at the next roadside stop to take a look. But something about his demeanour had changed. He poked around under the chassis for a while as Steve sat rigid at his table, his hair all wind-blown, a glisten on his cheeks. Listen, said Marty; listen, Steve, mate, this is crazy, we’re going to get in trouble. Steve was silent. I think we should turn around and go back; it’s not too late, we can put the house back together, you can patch things up with Nicki, everything will be all right. Steve said nothing.

Marty went back to the prime mover and started talking on the phone, but when he came back around to tell his mate Steve that the cops were coming, Steve had already let down four of the flatbed’s tyres and was sitting back up at the half-a-table like a man who needed his breakfast. Marty started screaming at him, calling him all sorts of names – I couldn’t repeat them here – and was still shouting and waving his arms when the police car from T—— arrived. The cops immediately took charge of the situation. One of them, leaning casually on the cutaway floor, started talking to Steve; the other interviewed Marty. Yes, said Marty, sure it was his rig, but it wasn’t his idea, it was that idiot up there’s – he, Marty, was already late for a big interstate job and the boss was going to kill him.

After taking his details down in a pad and giving him a brief but stern lecture, the policeman let Marty disconnect the prime mover from the flatbed (jacked up with the half-a-house still on it) and go. Marty wasn’t happy with this, but under the circumstances what could he do? He turned the prime mover around (without a load it looked like a toy) and drove away.

Negotiations went on all day. The senior policeman – Sergeant Matthews, he’d only recently got rid of the moustache – had no time at all for this idiot sitting up there at the half-a-kitchen-table trying to get his ugly head in the papers and would have been happy to pull out his pistol and see what the roof tiler thought of that if the rules hadn’t strictly forbidden it, but his offsider, an easygoing young constable by the name of Heyward, had from the beginning struck up an easy rapport with Steve and willingly given him his ear. By lunchtime, much to Sergeant Matthews’s chagrin, Constable Heyward had managed to prise the whole sad sorry story from him – the story, that is, that we have heard up to now – and establish in almost textbook fashion that the most likely circuit-breaker to this delicate situation would be the intervention of the man’s wife. A patrol car was radioed, an address and description given, and two young Constables, Riccoli and Halpin, were sent off to find her.

But when Nicki did turn up, at about two o’clock that afternoon, with, audaciously, Jay the glazier behind the wheel (Riccoli and Halpin were in the patrol car behind), she had no time at all for her former husband’s antics. You’re a fucking idiot, Steve, she screamed, you always were, and without further comment they drove away. Now the situation stalled; at Steve’s request Riccoli and Halpin brought back from nearby T—— a double cheeseburger with medium fries and a two-litre bottle of Coke on which he dined quietly at his half-a-table while various and frantic negotiations went on around him.

The fact was, the story had got out. The local radio station had been the first to run with it, spinning the tale of an unemployed tradesman caught up in the housing affordability crisis and soon various media outlets nationwide were giving it a spin of their own. At around four o’clock that afternoon the local MP arrived. He was an obnoxious little man – for legal reasons I can’t tell you his name – who had waltzed into politics on the back of his daddy’s dubiously acquired wealth with a silver spoon in his mouth. He had neat, brown, barber-cut hair and always wore a light-blue suit and navy-blue tie – even, God help us, to the football. His voice was very high-pitched, like a mouse caught in a trap, and had been known to strip the paint off walls at ladies’ luncheons. He asked the police could he have a megaphone, which of course was completely unnecessary, and began what he optimistically called ‘negotiations’ with the unemployed roof tiler in the half-a-house on a jacked-up lowboy on one of the better roads in his electorate. The gist of his speech was that the staggering increase in median house prices, the rampant rise in unregulated lending and the frightening number of mortgage defaults was entirely unrelated to his government’s policies and was in fact demonstrably due to external factors. Unemployment was running at record low rates, infrastructure investment had doubled and we were now better positioned than at any other time to take advantage of a booming global market, particularly in the South-East Asian region.

He went on like this for about half an hour – it was a very impressive performance and no one could fault his command of the facts – but unfortunately Steve the roof tiler wasn’t listening. He’d begun bawling again, a miserable wail, which, by some trick that only politicians and blue-chip company executives are capable of, was of insufficient volume to disturb the ears of the red-faced, barber-cut, blue-suited, eunuch-voiced MP. He handed the megaphone back to the police, got in his taxpayer-subsidised car and went off to attend to matters of greater import. Sergeant Matthews followed with Constable Riccoli (he also had better things to do) leaving behind Constable Halpin (a policewoman, recently graduated) to assist the easygoing Constable Heyward who had now become by default the chief negotiator. He moved up to the edge of the flatbed trailer again and, in a soft voice, tried to console the roof tiler who now looked truly inconsolable.

Then at around five o’clock that day Steve’s ex-wife Nicki unexpectedly returned. Jay the glazier dropped her off and turned the car around. The two constables helped her up into the half-a-kitchen and stood at a discreet distance while she sat with her former husband at the half-a-table and began the difficult process of working out what went wrong.

Evening fell. Constable Halpin drove into town and came back with a packet of candles and a jumbo-sized pizza with the lot. The cops sat in the front seat of their patrol car, listening to the crackling stories unfolding on the two-way radio. After about half an hour of candlelit talk, Steve called out and asked did they have a plastic cup or something so he could share his leftover Coke with his ex-wife? They found an old coffee cup on the floor in the back and rinsed it out. Another hour went by. Eventually Steve and Nicki climbed down off the flatbed and approached the patrol car holding hands. They would like a lift back to Jay’s place, they said, to pick up the kids, and after that to Nicki’s mother’s. Constable Halpin snuffed out the candles and packed up the leftover pizza (they would eat it later, in the patrol car, she thought) while Constable Heyward radioed base and at around nine o’clock that evening the drama was over.

Or almost. Because of course as dawn broke the next day the half-a-house was still sitting up on the flatbed trailer in a roadside stop on the highway outside T——. The shire council said removal of it was the trucking company’s responsibility; the trucking company said, on the contrary, as sub-contractor the driver must bear the cost, but of course by this time Marty and his prime mover were halfway to Perth where he had a mate who knew a friend who knew someone who said they could get him work in the mines. The half-a-house stayed there, eye-sore and symbol, until, two days prior to the recent federal election, which the local MP would be fighting with a margin of less than three per cent, the ready-made roadside theatre set was used for a hilarious piece of performance art by a local theatre group that received wide coverage in the national media. Suffice to say it had a political edge. The following day – one day too late to save him, as it happened – the local MP used his substantial personal funds to have the damaging symbol removed. It was last seen in a junkyard on the outskirts of M——, in the care of a fat man called Geoff, and to the best of our knowledge it is still there now.