“G’day, Howie, haven’t seen you in ages!”
“No, I’ve been keeping a low profile lately.”
“So what brings you here.”
“Well, I’ve come to set the record straight. You remember a few years ago when I went along with my mates and got rid of that low-life vermin who was terrorising the neighbourhood?”
“That foreign bloke, what was his name? Sad Damned Hussy. Yeah, I sort of vaguely remember…”
“Well, someone’s published this long, complicated report which says that we did the wrong thing.”
“Yeah, didn’t you break into his house on the grounds that he had a meth lab where he was forcing kidnapped children to work?”
“Yes, we complained to the police on several occasions but they did nothing.”
“I thought they searched his house and said they couldn’t find anything.”
“That’s right. That’s why George and Tony and I had to act, because the police were hopeless – they could never find anything. Tony, George and I formed a gang and we surrounded his house and told him that he had to release the children and give us all the drugs so that they could be destroyed. If he didn’t do it by midnight, we told him we were going to break in and destroy them ourselves.”
“The children?”
“No, the drugs. Pay attention!”
“But didn’t some children get killed?”
“Not by us… Well, not intentionally anyway.”
“Ok, so what did this Sad bloke do?”
“He just kept insisting that there was no meth lab. We reminded him that he’d be caught dealing marijuana from his hydroponic crop a few years earlier.”
“That was from the hydroponic equipment that George sold him, wasn’t it?”
“Exactly. That’s how we knew that he was sort of wicked, evil drug pusher who couldn’t be believed, because he’d been buying hydroponic equipment right up until the point that we stopped selling it to him.”
“Right, so he just kept claiming that he didn’t have anything illegal and then what happened. I can only remember bits and pieces.”
“Midnight comes around and we enter the house…”
“You broke the door down?”
“No, we’d already sent a few guys in there so that they’d be ready when the time came.”
“So you’d already broken into his house before the deadline was up…”
“Look, I think that we should concentrate on the important issue: The meth lab.”
“Sorry, go on.”
“Anyway, we started looking for him and nobody could find him.”
“And that was when you set fire to the house?”
“Yes, that was to force him out.”
“Didn’t some people die in the fire?”
“There was some collateral damage. But it turns out that he was hiding in the garage. When we found him, he was dragged out and hanged.”
“Without a trial?”
“Of course we had a trial. We had a trial on the spot. We asked him if he had anything to say, and he said something and then he was executed.”
“And what about the meth lab?”
“Sorry?”
“The meth lab was destroyed in the fire?”
“We never actually found the meth lab.”
“Oh. So he was telling the truth.”
“That’s your interpretation.”
“And the fire’s never been completely put out, has it? I read somewhere the other day that it keeps flaring up and that you three had no idea about how you’d put out the fire when you started it.”
“We didn’t start the fire, it was always burning…”
“Billy Joel?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I just thought you were quoting Billy Joel… Anyway, you’ve read the report and you’ve come here to set the record straight and apologise because you got it wrong.”
“I see no need to apologise. I did I believed was right based on the facts I had at my disposal.”
“Sort of like the stolen generation.”
“What!”
“Well, the stolen generation. You know, all those people doing what they thought was right at the time and that’s why there was no need for the government to apologise, because so long as you believe what you’re doing is right at the time, then you don’t need to apologise later.”
“Look, hindsight’s a wonderful thing. But I don’t see why people want to blame for the current fire when we got rid of someone who was a potential drug dealer. I mean even if didn’t have a meth lab at the time, he was probably planning to start one and, besides, he was a thoroughly nasty man and the whole neighbourhood is better now that he’s gone.”
“Apart from the fact that since he’s gone, a criminal gang’s moved in and they’re killing people and…”
“That’s got to nothing to do with me. Anyway, I must go. I need to set the record straight and then dash over to give some advice to a couple of old friends.”
“You mean in spite of getting things so spectularly wrong people still want your advice?”
“Of course. I mean, it’s not like I’ve ever made any mistakes, after all.”