4.

It goes without saying that I awoke the next morning with a thumper of a hangover. Still, I leapt out of bed and into the shower, raring to get back into that mechanized workhorse and discover what other decaying delights my yard had in store for me.

Oh yeah, and there was a pool to dig.

The morning didn’t exactly get off to a flying start though. Water restrictions were in place for the whole region owing to the drought and the dams running low, and so I barely got a dribble out of my special massage showerhead.

Next on the agenda: a cane toad in my toilet bowl. As with most of its brethren, it had the half-lidded look of a plump mafia boss in a bad mood. I guess I’d be in a foul mood, too, if I was about to be defecated on.

This wasn’t the first time I’d discovered a toad taking a bath in my bowl. Somehow they were crawling in through my pipes and most likely contaminating my water supply with minute traces of hallucinogenic toad venom. My daydreams had been pretty vivid of late. Like the spiders, the cane toads had been on a bit of a breeding bender ever since the weather turned crazy. The junkies around Wonga supposedly resorted to smoking the skin of these toads whenever ultra-ice was in short supply. They were a pest introduced from South America via Hawaii – the toads, not the junkies – and had these little venomous glands that really only posed a threat to local wildlife and impecunious crackheads. Old Babefemi worried constantly about his dog biting into one of these wart bags. Some locals made sport of running them over in their cars. Others preferred sticking them in their freezer as a more humane method of execution. Me, I had my own modus operandi. I’ll spare you the details, but let’s just say it involved a handspear, sledgehammer and glass of wine.

***

An hour later I was ensconced in that smoke-belching loader and hacking at my yard with gleeful abandon, spinning about, vomiting dirt over the rear wire fence and going back for more at the all-you-can-eat buffet of dirt and worms.

The prospect of digging up more booty made me blind to everything else, like watching that pool installation DVD or drawing up some actual plans. Or waiting for those utility guys to come inspect my land for cables and pipes before I started digging.

I was a one-man archaeology team possessed by Asmodeus and all the demons of buried treasure; I was Indiana Jones on steroids, Heinrich Schliemann on crystal meth.

I don’t know what I was hoping to find – a buried alien spaceship maybe, the fossilized remains of a two-headed mutant dinosaur perhaps – but certainly not a corpse, not that.

There I was, gouging out another bucketful from that expanding pit, minding my own business, when this swarthy human arm just kind of flops out of the dirt wall, like a black brother wanting to give me some skin from the grave. I turned off the engine and sat there for the moment, waving the flies away, savouring that special moment when you dig up your very first body.

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The leathery flesh looked brittle, almost mummified, while there were wires sprouting from the crook of the arm.

Wires?

Well good golly Miss Molly, I’d really hit the jackpot. For this could be nothing else but a robot, planted here and programmed to kill me and take my place, with similar robots buried in yards across the country.

I wasn’t high on toady toilet water either, trust me. Because when I got out of the skiddy and took hold of that arm protruding from the dirt, it felt unnaturally hard and the hand was all swollen up like a club, with more wiring wrapped around the wrist.

And they all said I was crazy.

It was only when I pulled on that arm, drawing the rest of the body out, did I realize it was just a mannequin. A very old mannequin though, if that was any consolation.

Not shaped from plastic or fibreglass like your average dummy, but carved from timber and meticulously painted, the various body parts painstakingly wired together. The paintwork was now faded, the timber full of spongy rot, the wooden face blotched with the same yellowish stuff; yet there was enough artistry left to discern a pair of once smouldering eyes and a Clark Gable moustache.

Aside from this decrepit mannequin and a few strips of rotted plastic, the only other thing I found in the soil that morning was … drum roll please … an old punched card. You know, one of those electronic pieces of cardboard punched with rows of rectangular holes, with which the poor saps of yesteryear had to programme the first clunky computers. Better than nothing I guess.

I probably would’ve kept on hacking my yard to pieces and frothing at the mouth with gold fever if not for the Three Amigos, who yanked me back to reality with a barrage of text messages.

Stop jerking off at your Ikea desk and get back to work on that pool! wrote Pauli.

You know you have to dig the moat first before you add water? wrote Gordon.

Sounded like they were having lunch together, without me again.

Ivan simply sent a bunch of YouTube videos of seriously overweight people slipping on springboards and hurting themselves as they flopped into the water. Some of the clips were actually pretty funny.

He also sent me a link to an article about another furniture store being burnt to the ground. Not because of any bushfires mind you, but on account of our right-wing nationalists, swamping the land with Southern Cross flags and Aryan coffee mugs; inundating the social media with anti-Swede propaganda and quaint QAnon theories about Jews and Muslims sacrificing and eating halal children off Ikea dinner plates.

The Swedes, as you know, had been out of fashion ever since their antivaxxers blew up a critical shipment of antivirals and vaccines destined for Australia. Then the Swedish football team had the gall to cheat our Socceroos out of a place in the world cup finals. In response to the antivaxxer attack, our government refused to treat, let alone vaccinate, any Swedish backpackers at Australian hospitals. When an alt-right march in Stockholm showed skinheads burning fluffy koala dolls on sticks, followed by a video on social media of a huge Viking trying to sodomize a kangaroo at the zoo while singing the Swedish national anthem, our own tattooed hordes began hurling Ikea chairs and coffee tables through H&M store windows, although not raping any reindeers, bless their souls. This in turn provoked the Scandinavian QAnon-antivaxxers to beat up Aussie expats at Gothenburg pubs and smear them with vegemite, which indirectly resulted in a Swedish couple at Bondi Beach being held down at knifepoint and forced to eat vegemite, which probably outraged the Swedes more than anything else.

This diplomatic spat over vaccines and football in a post-pandemic world kept spiralling out of control, to the point where Swedish neo-Nazis were setting fire to Australian wine shops in Stockholm while entire furniture warehouses were being firebombed Down Under. Things got so bad that Australia and Sweden actually began rattling their sabres, making idle threats to go to war, like schoolkids hurling insults across a pond, in this case the Pacific Ocean, much to the embarrassment of the European Union on one side and the United States of Family Trump on the other.

Events eventually settled down, yet your average Australian idiot no longer bought H&M underwear, while the pea-brained women of this town refused to dye their hair blonde in a show of solidarity with… who the hell knows what. Anyway, to this day I couldn’t leave my Volvo parked in town for longer than half an hour for fear of it being vandalized yet again.