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than a pile of beans. I still have enough floating capital to pay the rent. From my share of the general booty of $15,140 I have remained a model of frugality. However, I now hate you. I want to vandalise all your innocent suits. I want to break your windows, smash your crockery, poison your pets.
    The game proceeds. The night is long. Your tycoon’s empire expands. In my poverty, I plot my leap-frogging way around the board, pausing clumsily on the refuge islands of Chance and Community Chest. I have become a burden on society. A threat to your peace of mind. You move me on. My one simple ambition: to return to my roots, to scrimp and save enough to put a down payment on Old Kent Road, and perhaps a new pair of glasses. Thus, from humble beginnings. But the vicissitudes of life are not so simple. Social justice is a myth. Eventually, I bow to my recidivist nature and return to jail. Safe. Once in jug, I plot and plan. You think I am being defeatist. I do acknowledge the point, however, that this game is called
Monopoly
and not
Social Rift
. On we go unto our needle’s eye.
    Thus you can see the subtle analogies that a game of chance affords the dedicated student. Such a wealth of material cannot be ignored in the cause of research. The poetry of loaded dice and chance. Genetic predisposition versus social engineering. Such issues imply some point of comparison, even bequeath meaning.
    Let me add as a postscript, that, at the conclusion of my research and upon the submission of my thesis (which I pray will be published by Routledge at the turn of the decade) I ran from the faculty office screeching for joy and for liberty. I flung my
Monopoly
board from the nearest balcony, not caring who it struck. Paper money drifting on the wind. Red hotels raining down. The game is over, the exegesis is over, welcome the jubilant freedom of ruin.

THE INGOT
    W hen I was much littler than I am now, our hot water system blew up and the house filled with steam. I thought a car had crashed into the house, the noise of it was that loud. You couldn’t even see the walls. Hot rain dripped off the ceiling as the water went everywhere, gushing out of a broken pipe, drenching the clothes hanging off the backs of chairs.
    Mum ran around bumping into things, yelling, ‘Jayden, Bianca, wake up. Get out of the house.’
    The lights still worked and, when we got out of bed, it was like wandering around in a warm fog. Mum looked like a soggy ghost coming out of the mist.
    When she realised that a car hadn’t crashed through the house and that the hot water system had blown up, she sat down on the floor with Bianca in her arms and cried. It was just one more thing. Dad, Bianca getting measles, something about a pink slip and some big bills and now this. It was too much. I opened a window to let the steam out. Piss off steam.
    After the mist cleared and things began to dry out, Dad came round to dismantle the hot water service. That’s what he called it—dismantling. The big tank looked like a robot dead in the front yard with all its innards stripped out. I crawled through it, where every noise echoed like a metal cave. I asked Dad if he would like to be invited in for dinner but he didn’t say anything, just looked at the grease on his hands. Mum didn’t say anything either, staring at us through the flywire of the front door. Then I asked him why he didn’t want to live with us anymore.
    â€˜I can’t answer that at the moment, Jayden,’ he said. ‘I have to get home.’
    He packed up his tools and chucked them in the boot of his boss’s car that he had borrowed, gunned the engine and took off. Home was a single room in the Family Hotel. It was a rough and scary place. Once, shots were fired through the windows from a real gun. The police were always being called. We hurried past there, walking to and from school. I always checked the windows for bullet holes. It was called the Family Hotel