7.

The next morning I made a terrible discovery. Having already photocopied my property map and pool design, I was about to print out the specs for the Steelmaster when I noticed an unidentifiable spider crawling out of the paper feed.

This paper printer was tacked onto my 3D printing system as a sop to another era. I was surprised it still even worked, so seldom did I use it. The main 3D unit, by contrast, was in use all the time. Out of all the possessions I lost in that last big bushfire, it was my top-end deluxe 3D printer that I probably missed the most. As a replacement, all I could afford was this crappy student edition, which came with just twenty pre-programmed blueprints for your basic household needs: tape dispenser, shitty screwdriver, bottle opener, butt plug, etcetera. The Student Home Depot was slow as well, needing at least half an hour to produce any one of these items. At least I could still reproduce little plastic parts from around my house, such the rings for my ventilation fans, provided I had the right pellets, powders or resins on hand. Moreover, with the right hacker codes you could download a ton of other blueprints into the machine and rip off an N95 respirator or jail shiv. In fact, only after purchasing the Student Home Depot did I learn that this affordable 3D printer was quite popular amongst the meth-heads; not just for replacing missing lab equipment, but also for mass-producing octopus rigs, the Swiss army knife of crack pipes.

Anyhow, this wasn’t the first time I’d found a spider in or around the Student Home Depot and I was starting to despair there was a whole brood of eggs in there somewhere progressively hatching. Either that or the same spider was secretly cloning himself in that printer each night.

But that wasn’t the terrible discovery.

After killing that eight-legged interloper and then spraying insecticide all around my 3D printer and its paper feed in a bid to gas any unborn brethren, I had to wait for these toxic fumes to clear before I could print out the rest of my documents. Jesus Christ, actual freaking paperwork. Anyway, I took the opportunity to read through the online Steelmaster manual, something I should have done long ago. What I discovered was that you didn’t need a minimum of eleven feet pool depth for this mini diving tower, as suggested by Pauli. No, no, not at all – you needed at least thirteen feet. That was almost four fucking metres. Half the sapphire mines in Africa weren’t that deep.

This was terrible. Extra depth meant extra-hard labour, extra expenses, extra, extra, read all about it.

Checking through my bank accounts on my phone, like I did most mornings as a form of self-flagellation, I was amazed to see some goddamned zeroes for once in one of those bare cupboards. Netflix, which had bankrolled my disastrous Blacktown Cops series, had finally coughed up the rest of my screenwriting fee. My agent had transferred it directly into my account without informing me. Guess she was still sore at me. Don’t know what her problem was. All I did was fondle the itsy-bitsy balls of her prized Shi Tzu in front of her dinner guests before punching one of those pompous fools right in his Google glasses (that had been slyly recording my drunken antics) and shortly thereafter regurgitating my red wine and foie gras one stride short of her tastefully decorated bathroom while that Shi Tzu lapped up my vomit as I continued to barf.

For some reason she dumped me after that dinner party. No more agent, no more proverbial cheques in the mail, and no more screenplays on the horizon, not paying gigs anyway. This last payment was going to have to feed me for months to come. Because let’s face it, my career was stuck in a big fat hairy cul-de-sac.

***

“Thirteen feet, thirteen feet, …” I rapped to myself as I drove past that billboard imprisoning my de facto family, behind which you could just make out the carbonized frames of those former reality offices. “Fuck me, f-f-f-four metres …”

I wasn’t a very good rapper.

My brakes whined on the hairpins as I slalomed down the mountain. Sagging vegetation squeezed at both sides of the road while the tree-top canopies still managed to filter out most of the sunlight. “Look on the bright side,” I tried to reason with myself, “the deeper the pool, the more ammunition for your nuclear weapon.” And the better the odds of halting any fires that managed to claw their way up here again.

But how was I ever going to fill such a pool? As it was, I could barely shower or water my plants. Man, if only I could seize the Chapel and its wellspring from those goddamned beasties.

In any event, the kids were going to come out to Oz for sure once they heard I had a mega-springboard and supersized swimming pool.

I just wish I didn’t have to dig the fucker all on my own.

But dig I must.

Even now my nostrils could detect a smoky odour on the morning air rushing in through my car window. Those bushfires out west were creeping closer every day. And everything was as dry as a dead dingo’s donga.

Not long ago this mountain had been a lush, tropical forest sheltering a eucalyptus grove and colony of koalas. Now you had this big ugly swathe of scorched trees and drought-stunted regrowth running parallel to the looping access road I was driving down. In the midst of this black gash sat a burnt-out police car, its beacon lighters melted like cake, its paintwork blistered with black rust polyps. Greenish plant life had since sprouted up and around this abandoned cop car while leaves were returning to the Red Box and Grey Gum of this charred forest belt. Yet this regeneration was already starting to whither on the vine, as if god had not only forgotten to water his garden before going on holidays, but had also left the oven on.

***

Wonga itself was what you might call a sedate rural town that had gradually morphed into a quaint tourist trap, then quaint firetrap. There were cute little cafés and antique stores waiting to go up in smoke, a highly combustible sugar refinery, not to mention shitloads of pubs to drink yourself to death in as the world came down around your ears. The town hadn’t lost touch with its agricultural roots either. There was still tropical fruit and raw sugar coming in from the fields, when they weren’t burning, and there was even a passionfruit parade every year, culminating in the Miss Mango beauty pageant, or as some of the pub regulars liked to smirk, the beauty with the best mangoes. The passionfruit parade was something of a religious cult around here, along with the Truth Church and rugby league, and of course the doomsday cult of coal mining.

So what was the irresistible charm of this place for a seasoned Hollywood screenwriter like myself? Well, Los Angeles just wasn’t what it used to be. The rioting and home invasions, the child stars being eaten alive by their own pet tigers, the less-than-zero sex slaves controlled by iPhone implants, the gay pool orgies ending in mass shootings at the hands of Pentecostalists screaming in tongues while wielding high-capacity AR-15s baptised by the Holy Spirit … well, that kind of soured the whole Hollywood vibe for me. The rest of Trumpian America wasn’t in much better shape. It was time to come home.

Wonga was advertised as a cheap, fresh-aired alternative to the Gold Coast, only a few hours’ drive from the Australian movie studios. Moreover, the town itself had its own movie production suites and FX studio, as well as a big classic IMAX cinema. Schmuck screenwriters like myself thought there’d be plenty of well-paid work wherever they put down roots … just before the economic shockwaves came rolling in, followed by the fires. Then everything basically turned to shit. If it weren’t for the rise and fall of virtual reality adventures I would’ve starved years ago.

Wonga these days was what you might affectionately describe as a Shitsville Stopover for thirsty coal miners heading out west or returning home. Hence all the seedy pubs and drugs. The bootlickers – another source of steady income for the town – didn’t mind a drink either. Yet they tended to keep to themselves behind their razor-wired, machinegun-nested military base on the far side of Mount Wonga, where they supposedly had their own minimarket, McDonalds, Starbucks, and even their own high-end R&R sports-bar-slash-virtual-porn-theatre.

The size of this military base notwithstanding, the soldiers there kept a low profile. Almost everything could be flown in and out thanks to their private airfield, and there were never any military exercises or anything so flamboyant. Shadows in the rain, Pauli liked to say. The few soldiers that did venture into town for a beer or ice cream preferred to wear civies. If you got talking to them, they’d more often than not claim they were just simple tourists passing through. The shadows in the rain mystique was somewhat undermined by the brash American drawl and the baseball cap worn backwards.

Despite all the secrecy, the inhabitants of Wonga had learnt never to complain too loudly or pry too deeply, for the simple reason that the military generated harmonious year-round business that offset the town’s dwindling revenues. Well, it had been harmonious until those local property developers came up with the bright idea of Wonga Heights.

***

I found Pauli in the fishing section of the Blue Lagoon Sports and Camping Store, where he liked to stand on a pallet behind the counter so as to make himself look taller and more impressive in front of the customers, including myself. Quite pathetic really, as everyone knew I was at least two millimetres taller than him. The store was empty but for the plump neo-Nazi at the checkout counter, perusing 3D photos on his phone of rifles for sale. At least I presumed it was a ‘he’, hard to tell really, never mind his/her tattoo of Charles Manson on the nape and a long scribbly quote from the Bible of White Power dissimulating his/her possible Adam’s apple. There was also Pauli’s special assistant, Joanna Morgan, puttering around the camping section. Hunched shoulders, a huge rump, hearing aids, facial hair, smattering of brain damage – Joanna had it all. She was actually in Sonia’s class at school and only ‘worked’ here during her free time.

“There isn’t something wrong with the kit you sold me, is there?” I asked Pauli as I filled out the forms for the pool application that Gordon had dropped off. I couldn’t believe I had to fill out actual paperwork instead of doing it all online. Country towns and their councils, oh boy. “Like, you sold it to me for nearly half price.”

“It’s all quality material,” he assured me, stroking his moustache, which, together with his granny glasses and corona of remaining hair twisted into a middle-aged rattail, inevitably brought to mind a certain R&R porn director in Los Angeles who liked nothing better than to brag about his collection of self-gratifying sounding rods. Only for Pauli, it was fishing rods that got his rocks off. “They don’t make pool material like that anymore. Most pool models these days are churned out of a massive 3D printer in Sydney. In fact, the Blue Lagoon makes most its profit skimming the cream off the labour and installation of those babies over there.”

He pointed towards the store’s pool section, behind Joanna and the tents, where stood a mock aboveground swimming pool surrounded by shelves of chlorine and pool cleaning products, as well as vibrant 3D poster-screens of ecstatic families splashing around in perfectly chlorinated water, manipulated to make the bathers look smaller and the pools far larger than what they really were.

“There’s not too many people who buy the do-it-yourself kit,” Pauli was saying, “with the intention of actually doing it themselves. You’re one of the golden few, Dez. Never really pegged you for the type though.”

He made a show of snickering theatrically as he sorted through a heap of fishhooks on the glass counter. Who still went fishing anyway? The Wonga River was clogged with dead fish and ash, to speak nothing of the crocs and cane toads lurking on the banks. I’d know, I’d tried fishing there myself enough times.

“I built a veranda, didn’t I?”

“Oh, that’s right, your illustrious veranda. Still standing is it, that heap of shit?”

“Fuck you ass-muncher.”

“It’s pronounced arse here, you’re not living in the States anymore, Dez.”

“Fuck you in the arse then.”

“Promises, promises.”

“Arse-muncher!” Joanna moaned from the nearby camping section. “Arse-muncher! Fuck in the arse! Ass fucky munchy muesli!”

She continued to curse louder and louder, dancing and drooling and losing snot; that androgynous neo-Nazi over by the checkout laughing weirdly while videoing Joanna’s Tourettesque meltdown.

“Settle down now, Joanna,” Pauli said gently. “Go and grab the vacuum cleaner and give the carpet a once over. Now there’s a good girl.”

Wiping the drool from her downy chin and readjusting one of her cyborg-like hearing aids, Joanna did as she was told, albeit groaning one last time under her breath, “Fucky muesli arsewipe…”

Luckily it was midmorning and there were no customers around to hear the shop assistant hurling expletives. Most people wouldn’t have batted an eyelid anyway. Everyone knew that Joanna had never been the same since the car accident, in which her father became trapped and roasted alive. Then her mother, crazed with grief, joined the Truth Church, subjecting herself to their wacky rituals of trial by fire and handing over the passwords to your bank accounts.

“I’m sure you’ll make a fist of it,” Pauli said to me. “Maybe even surprise us. But an eleven-foot-deep pool is no cakewalk, my arse-munching friend.”

“If only it was eleven,” I muttered as I finished signing everything. After adding my photocopies and cash to the dossier – actual cash, demanded by the council – I slid it all over to Pauli. In return he handed me a thick A5 ring-bound booklet, which I promptly slammed down on the counter. Peeling the booklet back, Pauli and I both leaned in close to examine the squashed remains.

“Redback?” I suggested.

“Nah, that’s just its blood. This here’s a window spider,” said Pauli, squinting through his granny glasses. “Badumna insignis is its scientific name. Charlie the Gut got bitten by one the other week. Pretty painful bite but otherwise harmless. My mother found a taipan in her shower the other night, by the way,” he added as an afterthought. “Big fucker too.”

“What is this anyway?” I asked, holding up the ring-bound booklet, now besmirched with Badumna insignis.

“That’s the municipal building code. Gordon told you about it, didn’t he?”

“Great, I can read through this while watching your enthralling installation DVD.”

“Did you spot me in it? Great video, huh? My uncle Leo filmed and edited it all on his phone years ago, even added the copyright. He’s a genius. By the way, how’s that crime script of yours coming along, the serial-killer thing?”

“It’s crap,” I said, perusing the spearguns on the wall above the fishing rods directly behind Pauli. A pneumatic speargun might be a more humane way of dealing with those amphibious interlopers in my bathroom. Yet I was troubled by the sight of a larger, hairier spider crawling along one of those said spearguns. A wolf spider, I think.

“Why don’t you just go back to writing sci-fi and horror, Dez? Uncle Leo and me have some unreal ideas for you. What about a fisherman who catches this giant alien fish that turns into a kind of armoured knight from another planet that crawls out of—”

“So how many people,” I butted in, still observing that wolf spider, “have actually bought this pool kit without your turn-key solution. I mean, who actually installed it all by themselves?”

“Post-pandemic?” he whistled. “Only two or three. Grant Rutherford’s one. You know him, the hardware guy who got all burnt up trying to save his home and family. Then there’s Bill Horton, who’s a pretty good carpenter.”

“So these guys must have finished their pools in record time, what, being skilled tradesmen and all.”

“You kidding?” he laughed. “I think Grant Rutherford got the furthest before throwing in the towel and calling us in to finish the job … and then his pool and his poor wife and daughter, they … they…” Pauli trailed off into a look of pained embarrassment for a long awkward moment before suddenly brightening again. “But there’ll be no cavalry for you, Dez, not unless you ditch that diving board!”