5.

After eating a lunch of pasta and Swedish meatballs off my Oftast dinner plate, just to spite those hillbilly fucks, I spent the next hour ransacking my odds-and-ends drawers in search of a cable that would allow Babefemi’s two-thousand-year-old DVD player to communicate with my full-ultra-HD-VR-3D-capable-of-something-or-other-curve-screen. This entertainment system had cost me an arm and more a few years back. Nowadays you could get it for a song. There’s progress for you.

I had just got the DVD player up and running and was skipping the copyright crap (who’d wanna pirate a pool installation video anyway?) when Sonia noiselessly slunk into my living room, giving me a small fright.

“Konnichiwa!” she shrieked in my ear.

“Fuck! Sonia, I told you to stop doing that. Shouldn’t you be at school or something?”

“Sports half day,” she sighed, collapsing onto the sofa next to me. She was sunburnt and grass-stained, still garbed in her field-hockey outfit, a sleeveless vest clinging to a pair of matching shorts that left exposed a lot of lanky white flesh and freckles. “Plus, our hockey match was cut short when a flock of cockatoos came down and started pecking people’s heads and scratching one girl’s face and biting another on the ear, who began bleeding everywhere.”

“For real?” I’d heard about these random attacks by bird species other than magpies, but was yet to experience one first hand myself despite the avian ruffians that loitered around this plateau. More than one bird species had turned carnivorous in recent drought years, feeding on carrion and even the flesh of the covid dead, so it was rumoured.

“I swear to god, Dez, they were swooping down in the middle of the match and attacking us. Not only that, but they were squawking out fuck you and cocksucker as they tried to peck out our eyeballs!”

“Now I know you’re messing with me.”

“No, I swear it’s true – wait, what’s that?”

Her mouth dropped open as she flung a finger at the wooden mannequin sitting in the armchair. I had dragged him up here as he was, dirt and all. The only thing keeping him together was probably that dirt and the wiring in his joints.

“I found him buried in my yard.”

“You serious?” She got up from the sofa to take a closer look at my newest houseguest. “You could have at least put some pants on him.”

“Why? He’s not exactly packing.”

Scraps of a collared shirt and coat hung off his torso and segmented arms, whereas his lower half was naked, exposing a mound-like wooden crotch colonized by some sort of fungus, as if he had a nasty case of the clap.

“Why the hell was this dummy buried in your backyard?”

“Beats me. But I can just imagine him wearing a necktie and fedora in some department store window of yesteryear.”

Peering into its chipped facial features, Sonia said, “He kind of looks like you.”

“Get outta here,” I chuckled, somewhat uneasily.

“No seriously, he looks like you with a sleazy pencil moustache. He’s got your eyes, your dimpled chin … your lack of penis.”

Throwing a cushion at her, I got up to reappraise those features for myself. Much to my consternation, there was indeed a slight yet uncanny resemblance in those painted eyes and that literally chiselled jawline now tarnished by time. Slipping my hands underneath his mucky armpits and raising him up, I judged him to be as short as myself as well.

Standing there like a courteous dancer propping up his sloshed partner, I heard Sonia say, “So you finally meet your doppelganger, Mister Knappen.”

“Or my evil twin.” I gingerly set him back down in the wingchair.

“So did you find anything else in your garden besides Fred Astaire?”

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“Clark Gable, you mean. Clark Gable was the one with the pencil moustache. Fred Astaire was the dancer.”

“Whatever,” she grunted, like a true teenager, thumbs dancing across her phone screen as she soaked up the breeze from my pedestal fan. Not only was it muggy today, but that mannequin had suffused the room with a dank earthy smell, hence the fan. I really ought to get my air cons fixed though. Goddamned summers were getting hotter every year.

“Oh yeah, and I found this.” I handed her the card with the holes in it. “Looks like it could be an old punched card.”

“An old what?”

“An electronic piece of cardboard for programming those first generations of computers, you know, big reels of tape, lots of blinking little lights.”

I watched her as she turned over the card and rubbed off the dirt, curious as ever. Her glasses were too big, her skin too freckly, her voice too deep, and her physique too tall and gawky; but through all these superficial flaws was an untapped beauty and a voracious intelligence that went a long way to restoring my faith in the future of humanity. That is, if the seas didn’t continue to rise and the cities didn’t all burn down and the funnel-webs didn’t inherit the earth.

“It’s not made of cardboard,” she said. “If it was, it would have rotted years ago. It’s some kind of thin, light-yellow metal.”

I took it from her. She was right, as usual. It appeared to be some sort of extra-special metallic punchcard. “Do people buy antique punchcards online?”

“No idea, but I’m sure you’ll have more luck with Mister Mannequin over there. He looks old, maybe art deco. He could have been a life-sized model for some tortured artist or medical students, for all we know. Or your long-lost ancestor,” she smirked. “Just let me know when you dig up any guns and grenades so we can set ourselves up on the Dark Net as international arms dealers.”

She then lost all interest in punchcards and disinterred dummies.

“Hey, what about we open up that Chrissy present over there and have ourselves a little boogie in Studio 54 or London’s Torture Garden?”

She was referring to the festively wrapped giftbox in my fake fireplace. The present had been sitting there since last Christmas. It contained a holographic Xbox gaming bundle, essentially E-VR, the descendant of an earlier technology called Kinect, which was apparently used for tracking down something called Pokemons in public toilets. In contrast to I-VR goggles and their piss-in-a-bottle addictiveness, the smartglasses of this system allowed you to externalize your virtual reality; to superimpose large chunks of the video game upon the real world. The game Sonia was dying to play was a re-issue of Just Dance, which recreated fifteen legendary dance clubs right there within your own living room, sleazebags chatting you up at the bar and all.

This augmented-reality games bundle had cost me aplenty a year and half ago, then my kids didn’t even come out to Australia. Then the price for the system dropped dramatically when Sony released a new Playstation with integrated R&R – Remote virtual viewing Reconnaissance. R&R was essentially only good for experiencing sport and porn up close, so I’d heard. Mostly sport though. The technology had been on the up and up ever since they shut out human spectators from the sports arenas during the pandemics. Sports stadiums around the world still bristled with forests of WALL-E lenses and h-Screens trembling on robotic sticks fixed to seating once reserved for warm backsides.

“Sorry, Sonia, but—”

“—you swore a promise,” she continued in rote mechanical fashion, “that you wouldn’t open this stupid present until your boys visited you again in the far-flung future. Come on Dez, we could just make sure it works, test out the Kraftwerk of pre-pandemic Berlin, then pack it all away again. Your kids would never know the difference.”

You had to feel for her. Here she was, the only teen for miles around, bored out of her brain half the time, too embarrassed to invite friends up here, her mother too tight to buy her what she really wanted, her biological father hardly ever in the country, and all she could do was sit and stare at that brightly wrapped gift of untold hours of holographic nostalgia.

My phone started singing. It was Gordon, one of the Three Amigos. “Tried to get your pool application through, but there were some hiccups with the status of your land…”

He had me on speaker phone as he drove, the car stereo thumping in the background.

“What’s that song playing?” I asked him. “It’s not that horrible mashup of DJ Doggystyle and Wagner, is it?”

“Yeah, it’s from the new soundtrack of Fast and Furious 16. It’s preloaded on every new Audi, along with Grand Theft Auto Eleven, both the I-VR version and the E-VR.”

What a waste of German engineering.

“Anyway, about that High Court case coming up—”

I cut over the top of him. “Your friend Charlie at the council promised to send up his utility guys.”

“Don’t hold your breath. They’re scared of giving the military any kind of advantage before the High Court, so they’re unofficially bending you over and giving it to you. Now, as you know, half the mountain was supposed to have been crown land but the Ministry of Defence…”

As he droned on about the impending court case, my mind wandered back to when the Wonga Council first announced that crown land was being released to a big-cheese property developer. They planned to create a whole new suburb atop Mount Wonga with views all the way to the coast on one side and the mountain range on the other. This was when I was flush with cash and enjoying the last rays of success with my screenplays, living the dream with Crystal and the kids in a veritable mansion down by that crocodile-infested river. It had been Gordon who suggested buying a house off the plans for this newly proposed suburb.

A shrewd investment, were his exact words, I think.

Crystal readily agreed. A little too readily, it occurred to me only later, as if she was already planning to stab me in the heart with an oyster knife, but still had enough feminine compassion to want to arrange a nice Ikea coffin for me.