Right now

Right now it’s 2am and The Squeeze and I are sitting on the bed in the front room peeking through the blinds at about 3 thousands cops. Periodically a bloke on a megaphone asks ‘Paisley’ (Painsley? Ainsley?) and ‘Joseph’ at number 4 to come out the front door, down the path to the front gate with their hands up, where the police will give them more instructions. Apparently, this is the police, and they want to talk to them about a police matter. The house is surrounded. They will not be harmed.
Like I said, there are about 3 thousand police all over the intersection outside our house. But it’s quiet, except for every other dog in the neighbourhood barking and then not barking and then barking again. Every now and then the police give instructions and a car siren goes off. I hear a couple of bangs that I imagine are gun shots (as if I’d know what a gun shot sounded like), but are probably people throwing things around.
It’s a quiet Brunswick area, and while we have quite a few households of noisy teenagers in our street, there are far fewer problems in this area than others I’ve lived in. I’ve never had to call the police, not even for late night noise. My family used to live in a now-very-swish part of Brisvegas next to a boarding house with a few blokes who really scared me. We called the cops nearly every weekend because they were fighting and scary. I’ve lived in quiet suburban areas where I’ve called the cops while a frightened woman hid in our loungeroom from her abusive partner. When we lived in Fiji our house was broken into and we were scared quite a bit at night, until we left, and then there was a coup.
But this isn’t a noisy area. Which is kind of the point, I guess.
So there are all these cops on the street. The Squeeze went out a little while ago to have a sticky beak and was asked to return to the house. It’s kind of bizarre. We made jokes about the Victorian police and the promise that no one would be hurt. But they’re all out there now, very serious and square-shaped, and it doesn’t really seem all that funny any more. I have put on clothes, just in case. I’m not sure what the in case will be, but I want to be ready.