6.

Our three homes were originally slated as model residencies for other prospective buyers. The developers worked hard to pipe in water and electricity to the rear of this suburb being created from scratch, in addition to hooking up two small real estate offices behind the welcoming billboard. The sewage pipes were connected up to the town grid just days before the court injunction brought everything to a standstill. Citing nothing more specific than a ‘national security matter’ and ‘bushfire risks’, the bootlickers had stepped out of the shadows to claim the entire mountain for themselves.

There was to be a moratorium. No more construction and no more residents, with the sole exception of the three pesky homeowners who’d already slipped under the radar and dug themselves in.

We were assured the situation would be resolved swiftly. Little did anyone realize – especially we fools who rushed in to buy off the plans – that the Ministry of Defence would drag out every single court case, taking it all the way to the High Court. Then the megafires really did arrive, reducing to ashes those real estate offices and almost wiping out the rest of this nascent suburb. Ever since then we fools had been living in fear of the fires, the courts and the military drones.

Gordon meanwhile was still blabbering away on the phone, that furious soundtrack still throbbing in the background, only now it was a Pandemonium remix of some old bag called Taylor Swift.

“You fuckhead!” he shouted before reverting back to his normal tone. “Sorry about that. Bloody tourists can’t drive for shit. Listen, I found a loophole. Blue Lagoon submits applications for its pool customers and then just starts digging before getting full approval. So long as you have a receipt for your submission and you don’t finish your pool before full approval, the council can’t really fault you. So I filled out an application for you as vaguely as possible. Pauli said he’d camouflage your application among the official Blue Lagoon ones and get your receipt on the sly.”

“Did you have to bring Pauli into the loop?” I groaned, trying not to stare at Sonia bending over at the fridge in her skimpy hockey outfit. “He’s already told half the town about my diving board.”

“Is it really as big as they say? And I’m not talking about your – dickhead!” he yelled. I’m sure he suffered from bipolar road rage or something. “I also dropped off a copy of the building code for you – correct distance for swimming pools from the house, distance from electrical lines and so on. You’re also going to need to submit a detailed map of your property and the specs for your pool and board. But you know all about that already.”

“Yeah, yeah, of course.” I did not have the faintest.

“And you know that Ivan’s right, don’t you? That a pool won’t stop an ember attack?”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. That’s why I have my secret weapon.”

“What, your car fire extinguisher? Or a new garden sprinkler?”

“Actually, it’s a home-edition nuclear warhead, just add water.”

He laughed some more before changing the subject. “Do you wanna know where I’m pulling up right now?”

“The studios?”

“How’d you guess?”

Because Gordon, you anus-mouthed wannabe yuppie, you’re always big-noting your connections with the movie studios.

“They chose me to go over the accounts for a new American sci-fi film they want to shoot out here in both I-VR and h-Screen. Can’t tell you too much, except that it’s got a pandemic and zombies galore in it!”

“Jeez, that’s original.”

In my youth I naively believed the market already saturated with dystopian films and post-apocalyptic TV shows geared towards heartfelt friendships and weepy dialogue for the female demographics. Then along came the coronavirus and, holy fuck, was I ever wrong. If I had to sit through another post-2021 deadly virus film or VR pandemic adventure I think I’d rather shoot myself in the eyes with a Nigerian-made vaccine gun.

What I yearned for was the golden era of horror and sci-fi, as one might have guessed from certain embellishments to my extravagant chimneypiece. Apart from a few old diving trophies, this mantlepiece was crammed with statuettes of classic cinematic monsters, including a limited-edition Spider Head from John Carpenter’s The Thing, as well as a masterful reproduction of the dog-man hybrid from the 1978 version of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.

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If that wasn’t enough, ticking on the nearby wall was a Twilight Zone clock, behind which lived a gecko who only came out at night. The clock itself was adorned with holographic doorways, eyeballs and stopwatches, all of it swirling around a monochrome Rod Serling whose necktie formed the big and small hands, making it look like he was hanging himself at twelve each day. My house was basically one big honeycombed man cave. Who needed augmented reality when you were surrounded by all this? And now I’d added a dapper gentleman brought back from the grave, whose timber-carved jaw bore an uncanny resemblance to my own.

“So Dez, when are you giving up the crime gig and getting back on the horror bandwagon?” I heard Gordon ask.

“When this whole fad with zombies and viruses dies out,” I replied.

“Dies out! Ha, ha, ha, good one! Okay, gotta go make some more money, see you—”

“Wait, Gordon, one more thing,” I said, throwing a gaze over at Clark Gable, whose blotched features were turned towards the television, as if he were watching it. Sonia had helped herself to my breakfast cereals and was sitting cross-legged on the sofa, munching away as she giggled at some old children’s cartoon called Rick and Morty. “Do you know if the council ever tested the soil around Wonga Heights? You know, for contamination?”

“Contamination? What? Stop worrying, Dezzy Baby. Just hang tight. Once this thing goes through the High Court you’ll be able to sell up or you’ll suddenly have a thousand neighbours and your house price will triple. You’re sitting pretty up there on your mountain of luxury. Catch you soon, bro.”

“More like the Mountain of Purgatory,” I muttered, but he’d already hung up. “Il Purgatorio!” I exclaimed in a cheesy Italian accent, pinching my index finger and thumb.

“Second book of Dante’s Divine Comedy,” mumbled Sonia without taking her eyes off the curve screen. “Wasn’t nearly as good as the Inferno, kind of boring actually. No way am I reading the third book, leave me out of heaven. Although, it is kind of interesting that the Mountain of Purgatory is located in the Southern Hemisphere, don’t you think?”

I stared at her for a few incredulous seconds before asking, “Shouldn’t you be in Miss Peregrine’s home for peculiar children or something?”

I only used this reference because Netflix had just come out with yet another adaption of this story skewed towards generation Alpha, complete with a coronavirus subplot and rising seas. Anyway, I must have accidentally hit a nerve because she frowned at me and unconsciously touched an acne spot on her forehead, something she only did when anxious.

“Shit, you were accepted into some brainy school of freaks!” She pretended not to hear me, to be too engrossed in grandpa Rick and his grandson Morty, who were stranded in some alternate dimension beset with testicle monsters. “Sonia, why the silent treatment every time I bring up your past?”

She continued to brush me off.

Everybody knew my big sob story, of how the pandemics forced me to move back to Australia, how my TV series flopped, how my trophy wife walked out on me with the kids and how I had to move up here to the boondocks as a penniless divorcee with only a collection of French wine and man-child statuettes to my name. And everybody knew Babefemi’s sob story, of how he moved to Australia to start a new life, only for his wife to die and for his nose to fall off and for his home computer to start spying on him. But how the Stantons landed here at the gates of purgatory was something of an Agatha Christie mystery.

In the two years I’d known them, mother and daughter had told me diddly squat. It was as if they were running from something or hiding from someone, such as an abusive ex-husband or a religious cult that dabbled in sarin gas and sexual slavery. In an unguarded moment, Sonia’s mother, Kylie, once jokingly referred to our neighbourhood as ‘the perfect hideout’. From the titbits I’d been able to glean, mostly from Kylie after plying her with alcohol, Sonia had missed a whole year of school along the way while Kylie once had this mysterious son – a half-brother to Sonia – who died young. That’s pretty much all I knew.

Since I was getting nowhere with Sonia and her sob story, I told the television to switch back to the AV outlet, cutting off grandpa Rick mid-soliloquy.

“Hey, I was watching that!” protested Sonia.

“Sorry, but I’ve got a pool to install.”

“Wait, what’s that weird box with the cables you’ve added to your tele?”

“It’s Babefemi’s naked lady DVD player.”

“His what?”

“His device for playing digital discs, what you used to watch movies on back in the day.” She stared at me blankly. “You mean to tell me you know all about microbes and Dante but you know nothing about DVDs?”

“Sure I do, people used them as drink coasters.” She got down on the rug to take a closer a look at the machine. “We could probably get more for this DV thingy than that gasmask or mannequin. Hey, did you know that people used to record sounds on little cassette things. My grandfather owned something called a Dictaphone.”

I was almost tempted to dig out my dad’s VCR from the garage, along with his collection of Troma video cassettes, just to see her reaction.

The instructional DVD was one of the most amateurish things I’ve ever sat through and let me tell you, as a kid I had to sit through some pretty awful things with my father during his association with Troma Pictures. Toxic Avenger III anyone? What about Return to Nuke ’Em High? The instructional video must have been put together by some half-wit cousin who had only the vaguest grasp of editing techniques, as there were some pretty jarring transitions, not to mention a special guest appearance by a boyish Pauli helping out his uncles.

“…after the pool base is set you can install the vinyl liner,” the monotonous voiceover droned. “Be sure to read the unfolding directions. While stretching the liner across the pool opening, be sure not to drag it…”

“Well this certainly beats a dance battle in the abandoned power plants of 1990s Berlin,” Sonia sighed, returning to her phone.