Prologue

LIKE SOME SLOB EMERGING from six weeks of self-quarantine, I lurch out the door in my underwear, an arm flung over my face, the morning sun hitting my eye like hydrochloric acid. My right eyeball is all swollen up and burning its own fever. Won’t stop weeping either, like I got some clinically depressed homunculus in there crying the house down for god’s sake.

There’s a whiff of wood smoke on the morning breeze, a discreet harbinger of worse things to come, perhaps. Couldn’t be worse than this pus-filled shiner I’ve awoken with.

I cup a protective hand over my ocular mess and glance around furtively with my other eye before heading next door. As usual the street’s deserted; aside from a small scabby dog atop our communal dumpster nosing through the refuse.

Not a dog, I realise with dismay, but a koala.

A genuine I-kid-you-the-fuck-not koala bear. Only, its cuddly fur is this withered patchwork of burn scars while its claws are all stubby and gnarled, as if they’d melted during the last bushfires, along with half its cuddly face. Another augury I can really do without this morning. Because in addition to all these horrible scars, it’s also missing an eyeball.

Ignoring me, the one-eyed koala sits atop the fly-blown garbage inspecting a soggy cereal box, Weet-bix I think. I should go fetch it some water or something – gum leaves, eucalyptus oil, anything – but I’m in pain myself and full of superstitious fear. Moreover, something gross is growing out of its eye socket, some sort of fungus that makes me wonder if this burn-scarred koala didn’t actually die during the last megafires before being raised from the dead by some doctor doolittle necromancer; and shit, if I were a zombie koala I wouldn’t be dining on gum leaves or crumbs, I’d be chowing down on brains, sushi style.

Luckily I’ve got with me this trophy to protect myself with. It’s surmounted by a gold effigy about to take a leap with arms outstretched into the great unknown. A fake gold thing, yet with real marble in the pedestal, the weight of which comforts me like a cudgel in the hands of a superstitious peasant.

Feverish I am, demonized I may be. Just get next door, dude.

I feel lousy about tapping on Sonia’s window at this hour. But I’m shitting big old fat bricks and not quite sure what I’m supposed to be afraid of. Moreover, it feels kind of weird to be at her bedroom window for once instead of the other way round.

I tap louder and louder until a pair of freckled hands appear from behind the curtain. The window shifts up, flushing out a small gecko. Sonia’s eyes are mere slits, her ginger hair spilling everywhere. “Back so soon?” she yawns, pulling on her glasses.

I take my hand away.

Her irises expand like ink blots on tissue paper, her expression catapulting from mild concern to fire alarm.

“Your eye is huge! Does it hurt?”

“Like I got barbed wire in there,” I whimper, rather pathetically.

“Crap, then we’d better get you to a doctor before…” She trails off, distracted by that object propped up on her windowsill. “Why’ve you got that trophy with you?”

I look down at it as if seeing it for the first time. “I won it years ago,” I say. “State diving championships, before the pandemics and all that.”

“Okay,” she says patiently, “but why are you carrying it round with you?”

“Protection,” I say.

“Protection from what?”

“From whatever did this to my eye, what else?”

My right eye is tearing up again. I feel like crying from my other.

“You’re not making sense, Dez. It was just an accident.”

“There’s a creepy koala in our garbage.”

“What?”

“No accident,” I mumble, gazing back at the dumpster. But Mr Zombie Koala is long gone. How’s that possible? Those things move slower than sloths. Unless of course they got walking-dead little legs to scuttle away on.

The air still reeks of bushfire smoke, hadn’t imagined that. And those grim feelings of foreboding – they haven’t gone anywhere either. The feeling that a parasitic worm is in my eye right now laying eggs like a motherfucker. The feeling that somewhere along the line I screwed up big time.

But did I really have only myself to blame? Couldn’t I lay the blame somewhere else for a change, just this once? Not necessarily at Sonia’s doorstep; although, she has played her role. Look, all I’m saying is that some of this shit is well and truly beyond my control, seriously.

“I’ll wake Kylie,” says Sonia, reaching out to give my trophy hand a comforting squeeze. “She can drive us to hospital.”

“But what will we tell her?”

“We’ll just tell her you were working on your pool.”

The pool, I realize with cold, hard clarity. The goddamned swimming pool. It’s to blame for all of this, not me. Not me at all.

1.

STOOPING ON ITS LAST LEGS, the signboard announced in big cheery lettering Welcome to Wonga Heights! Below this greeting, a larger-than-life family, a happily smiling suburban family; whose slender mother and blonde-haired boys had been graffitied and spray-painted with genitals and other vulgarities, whose foreheads and faces had been carved with swastikas, à la Manson family and their latter-day acolytes.

My dick-covered wife and Nazi-branded children, god love ’em. Always here, always waiting to welcome me home after a hard day of doing bugger all. This was my fill-in family for the one that had left me to rot. Even the father was out of the picture, literally. His head, at the edge of the billboard, had been singed away by the last fires, his body Swiss-cheesed by impromptu rifle practice soon after. His family was now mine, you better believe it.

Trailer in tow, I cruised past half-finished houses, abandoned duplexes and really sad mailboxes. Like a film set abandoned at the last moment, the main avenue of Wonga Heights was flanked by street lamps that had never provided light and footpaths and driveways that led nowhere. Think of that classic family film The Hills Have Eyes minus the mutant rapist hillbillies, although you could probably find a few of those in the local pubs below this mountain.

Many of these houses had only gotten as far as the first foundations; their land-surveying gadgets permanently stuck in the ground, their founding concrete overrun with Jurassic-sized weeds. Mounds of construction material was lying around everywhere, somehow overlooked by the first wave of meth-heads. They ripped out all the copper wiring though, sexually violated all the garden gnomes. Probably would’ve stripped the place to its bare bones had not the bootlickers stepped in and started cracking crackheads.

These half-houses were now wreathed in thickets of brown vines and other parasitic plants you’d be hard pressed to find in any botany textbooks. It was all slowly dying away anyway, as if the surrounding rainforest had tried its best to reclaim this village of the damned, only to be thwarted at the last minute by the encroaching drought and wildfires.

Reaching the end of this boulevard of broken dreams, I turned right onto the only other tarred road up here. It too was fringed by weed-strewn cinderblocks and toilets smashed to porcelain pieces. But there, at the end of this cheerless street, at the very edge of this godforsaken mesa, where the earth dropped away and all ye who entered here abandoned hope, stood three houses that had actually been completed.

Three homes where people actually lived. The only residents in all of Wonga Heights.

And I was one of the lucky lottery winners.

I had to park behind the communal dumpster, as the entrance to my driveway was blocked by several large bundles of building material. Not the old abandoned shit you found lying about this neighbourhood of ours, but brand new shit.

The Blue Lagoon extra-large premium pool kit had arrived. It certainly was bigger than I’d anticipated, a hell of a lot bigger.

Nothing to go weak-kneed over. I’d brought the cavalry with me, hadn’t I? A warhorse of a skid-steer loader strapped to the trailer of my vandalized Volvo. You could move heaven and earth with a skiddy at your side, Ivan assured me.

There was work to be done, heaven and earth to be moved, not a moment to lose. So I went inside and poured myself a wine. Then I checked my phone messages and scrolled through Instagram. Then I made myself a late lunch, took a little nap.

Only then did I call up Charlie the Gut, who was supposedly in charge of utilities at the Wonga Council. The Gut promised to send out someone first thing tomorrow morning, to mark out my pipes and whatnot. “No worries,” the Gut assured me several times on the phone. “Any mate of Gordon’s is a mate of mine.”

The Gut was a stand-up kind of guy.

Utility guys coming out tomorrow, other red-tape crap being taken care of by Gordon. Check.

Do-it-yourself pool kit purchased at a generous discount and delivered to my door at no extra cost, thanks to Pauli. Check.

Digging machine gassed up and ready to go at no extra charge, thanks to Ivan. Check.

When I stopped to think about it, everything seemed to be falling into place a little too neatly. As if the Three Amigos were conspiring amongst themselves to set me up for a big fall, over which they could piss themselves laughing. Wouldn’t be a first. These were the same clowns who’d rechristened my Volvo The Man V, who told everyone I once accidentally locked myself in my Dombås wardrobe, who constantly asked me what I’ve been doing all day at my Jerker office desk. That’s what you got for buying Swedish around these parts.

Returning out front, I found Mr Babefemi from next door poking around my pool kit.

“What is all this?” he demanded in his heavily accented English, “What is? What?”

He was always sticking his nose into my business. Although perhaps this wasn’t the most apt metaphor, considering he’d had his nose surgically removed on account of a giant basal cell carcinoma. The operation left him with a pitted cavity in the middle of his face that just made you want to shove a Groucho Marx nose-and-glasses on him and stick a cigar in his mouth. He got face cancer not long after migrating to Australia. Then covid took his wife and suddenly he was all alone in this new land without a wife or a nose; doubly alone in this stillborn suburb of ours.

Another lucky lottery winner, ladies and gentlemen.

I might have felt sorry for this nose-less hobgoblin if he didn’t do such a swell job of creeping me out half the time. “It’s for a pool,” I told him, letting his German Shepherd sniff my shoes, but not my crotch.

“What pool? Where?”

“I’m putting a pool into my backyard,” I patiently explained, not for the first time. I had learnt the hard way to keep my answers short and sweet, no sarcasm. And loud, because on top of everything else old Babefemi was hard of hearing, never mind that cheap 3D-printed hearing aid hanging off his overgrown ear. And please don’t ask me about the time he tried wearing a prosthetic nose from the same el cheapo medical printing company using a substandard cosmetic glue, please.

“How you get permit?” he demanded, almost shouting. “How, how?”

“I have friends at the council,” I said, wincing at the smell wafting off that garbage dumpster abuzz with flies. The council only came and emptied it once a month and only when we complained loud and long enough. Babefemi was the only one who never complained about the smell.

The afternoon sun was whaling on us like there was no tomorrow, while some scruffy thing was observing us from the shadows of those derelict houses opposite ours. A mean-looking magpie, hopping around on one leg amongst the gnarled roots of those deadwood ruins that might have been nice, normal neighbours in another life.

“Aah, friends in high place,” Babefemi rasped with a knowing wink. “We too in Cairo have high friends!”

As he reminisced about whacking off on the pyramids as a boy (I think he meant to say slacking off), I began sorting through the boxes of my pool kit, pretending I was like really, really busy. Hundreds of homes and apartments planned for this mountain-top oasis and its only inhabitants end up having to live side by side, practically in each other’s laps. That’s karma for you.

I managed to slip away from the old gasbag with the excuse of fetching a knife from my garage, not to stab him with mind you, but to cut open the plastic wrapping of those pool panels.

My Stanley knife was lying near a large pile of fibreglass and zinc-plated steel, from which protruded a rectangular white tongue. According to the website, the Steelmaster diving board was suitable for children and adults weighing up to 400 pounds. Okay, I wasn’t planning on throwing any pool parties for a family of sumo wrestlers, yet it was nice to know the Steelmaster was a solid piece of engineering. In fact, it was more of a mini diving tower than mere backyard springboard. The shipping alone had cost me an arm and a leg. It would soon all be worth it though. With this baby I could show off my front pike somersault. I could teach Dillon and Tyler the basics of diving in my own backyard. I could start all over again being a dad and maybe do it properly this time.

Now all I needed was a swimming pool to go with my diving tower.

Let me give you a free piece of advice: a credit card, two bottles of red and a desperate yearning to please your boys after a divorce is not the shrewdest way to shop online at three in the morning. Nor was doing Molly followed by Tequila shots and airing your grievances on Facebook, not that I’d ever done that.

This diving tower had been sitting in my garage for ages already, along with my secret fire-fighting weapon, which was also sort of contingent on a swimming pool. I’d put the cart before the old horse alright. In my defence I’d been planning on a pool all along. I just couldn’t decide on the right one until now. Because my ideal swimming pool had to be cheap enough and large enough to intercept the next big one while also providing endless hours of fun and entertainment in between horrific fires.

Killing two birds with the one pool, so to speak.

I was back out on the street cutting through the shrink wrap of that do-it-yourself redemption kit when a whole bunch of panels and other shit came tumbling out, including a spider. A funnel-web, I think. There was also the instructional DVD that Pauli had warned me about. An actual DVD. I hadn’t seen one in donkey’s years. In any case, its dust jacket was just the thing for pounding to death that funnel web or whatever it was

“Hey Mister Babefemi!” I called out. “You don’t happen to own a DVD player, do you?”

He was now over by my trailer, inspecting that mini-excavator in the role of a self-appointed police officer, his police dog pissing on my car tyres. I don’t know why that German Shepherd bothered marking its territory: there were no other dogs around here for at least twenty kilometres. Just plenty of everything else that liked to bite, sting, spit and rummage through your garbage.

I had to shout my question several times to be heard.

“A what?” he scowled.

“A DVD player or an old computer with a disc drive.”

“You want drive where? You just come back home.”

“Something to watch movies on for fuck’s sake, a CD-Blu-Ray-disc-thing!”

Catching on, my nose-less neighbour smiled, and it was a truly hideous smile. “Ah, a boo-ray machine for watch naked-lady movies. You not have?”

“I wouldn’t be asking if … ah, forget it.”

I couldn’t even remember the last time my laptop had an optical disc drive. Everything was downloaded these days. Lately they’d even started downloading stuff straight into people’s heads. Try explaining that to someone like Babefemi. Pre-pandemic it was almost obligatory to have at least one old person with computer phobias living nearby. These days you could count yourself lucky to know such a technophobe. Not that I felt very lucky. Shit, set fire to that dumpster over there and it could symbolize my life.

While he went off to walk his dog around our ghost town – thank god – I got down to loosening the straps on the skiddy and prying open those corroded bolts on the trailer, sweating like a motherfucker in the late-afternoon heat. After finally lowering the twin loading ramps, I climbed up and into the cabin cage of that machine.

It felt like I was readying for a rickety amusement park ride, stained with the vomit and blood of previous victims. This feeling was reinforced by the creaky rollover bar that you pulled down over your head to secure yourself into the seat. Instead of a steering wheel, there were these toggles located on the armrests either side of the ratty seat, each equipped with buttons and control triggers.

The keys were dangling from the ignition.

I fired her up.

The motor sounded like a gaggle of antique lawnmowers, complete with clouds of smoke and a seat vibrating so violently that I started to get turned on, just a little. Checking the faded diagrams, I gripped the right handle and pushed it into the slot marked with the rabbit symbol. I probably should have chosen the turtle, seeing how I’d never actually driven one of these things before.