by Mel Campbell
Dave frowned. ‘What about witchcraft?’
‘Oh, that’s totally real. I watched every season of Charmed.’
‘So, uh, how did your friend die?’ Dave said to George and Gino. ‘Was he a builder out here?’
‘Um, not exactly,’ George said.
‘He was an enterprising small businessman who used the opportunities provided by this abandoned and isolated location to streamline his distribution and marketing operations,’ Gino said.
‘He was a drug dealer who hid his stash out here,’ Moss the Boss said. ‘Now we think a disgruntled customer hid his body out here too.’
‘You could say we’re literally digging up the past,’ George said.
‘And we will be literally saying that,’ Gino said, ‘as that’s the name of our podcast.’
‘Don’t you think sometimes the past should stay buried?’ Dave said. ‘Isn’t it better for his friends and family to have hope that maybe he just ran off to a desert island or something?’
Gino and George shook their heads in unison. ‘Nope,’ they both said.
‘Maybe that’s not your decision to make,’ Dave said, his voice getting louder. ‘Maybe this is exactly how your friend wants things to stay – buried! Buried and forgotten!’ Dave turned and tried to jump the fence, but only managed to get one leg over the top.
‘Dammit,’ he muttered.
The walkie-talkie on Moss the Boss’s belt crackled. ‘Lunch is over,’ he said. ‘You two better get back to your site.’
Gino and George picked up their shovels and went back to digging. ‘Hey, if either of you want to be a guest on the podcast, just let us know,’ Gino said.
‘We’re covering both true crime and ghosts, so we’re good either way,’ George said.
‘Yeah, probably not,’ Rose said, turning to leave. ‘I’m not really great with either of those.’
She heard a cough and turned. Dave was still dangling from the back fence.
‘Little help,’ he said.
‘So you didn’t have sex at all today?’ Nicola said.
‘Nope,’ Rose said. ‘After we left Gino and George with Moss the psychic, it was back to installing shelving for the rest of the day. We didn’t even get a chance to talk properly.’
Rose was lying on her bed, still in her Mansions in the Sky T-shirt and shorts, her laptop open beside her. Nicola had made sure to cage up Harippo-chan so their regular viewing session could go ahead as scheduled, but neither of them was really into it.
Nicola was exhausted. Her work had been in an uproar for the last few days; it seemed that the love robot’s body was way behind schedule and months from being finished, so they were now going to put the entire software program online and test it with humans that way.
‘Everybody knows every time you put any kind of artificial intelligence software online to interact with people, it turns into a racist killbot in minutes,’ Nicola wailed. ‘And the love robot is so sweet and cute and adorable! I don’t want it hashtagging everything with #notallmen.’
‘Sounds like the love robot’s already passed its first test,’ Rose said. ‘When’s the wedding?’
‘Unfortunately for both me and the love robot, it’s been coded cis female. Which is only going to make it so much worse when it goes online! Arrgh!’
‘I’m sure they’ll have backups,’ Rose said, yawning. ‘Sorry.’
‘No, I’m sorry – tell me more about your frustrating no-sex day.’
‘It was frustrating! We had no sex!’
‘And did you talk to him, at least?’
‘No, not really. I thought we were going to have time and then we didn’t.’
‘Was there any other drama on the set?’
Rose frowned. ‘What, beside the usual contestants shouting at each other and discovering their wall panelling doesn’t fit and the back door is the wrong colour and their statement ceiling they spent all their money on is too heavy to be used as a ceiling so it’s now the statement floor?’
‘I’m thinking bigger,’ Nicola said. ‘Much bigger.’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ Rose said. ‘Everything seemed like business as usual.’
‘Nobody went online today, then?’
‘We’re not meant to use our phones on set, and the contestants don’t have them. They get to watch the news at night but all other communication goes through the producers. So just tell me what’s going on!’
‘It looks like Mansions has lost a major sponsor.’
‘Not Bad Bart’s? Um, I mean, Bartlett’s.’
‘No, that crap shack is still on board. It’s the company that provides the light fittings.’
‘Huh. Well, that’s hardly going to matter much. They can just drive down the shops for those.’
‘No, you don’t understand,’ Nicola said. ‘These shows have very finely balanced budgets. The whole reason they’re all over TV is that they don’t cost the networks anything to make. Mansions is basically a Rube Goldberg machine of in-kind sponsorships, covering everything from building materials and workwear to that food truck where you get your lunches. Anything Endeavour can’t get for free is funded by the income from product placements and advertising.’
‘Can’t they just get a new sponsor?’
‘Not this far into the season. Mansions can’t offer a new sponsor enough airtime to make a product placement attractive. Like, it’s not as if they can go back and reshoot new renovation scenes when most of the houses have already been finished.’
Rose shrugged. ‘They’re still just light fittings, though.’
‘Yeah,’ Nicola said, ‘but they literally have no money in the budget to buy them. Now they’ll have to, and so the whole budget is totally out of whack. Three seasons ago a tiling sponsor dropped out and they had to axe one couple from the show just to cover the loss.’
‘Oh shit.’
‘Exactly. So did anybody say anything today about firing any of the couples? You don’t think they’re going to fire Dave, do you?’
‘No,’ Rose said, not exactly brimming with confidence. ‘I mean, I guess they could, but Dave and Michelle seem to be one of the frontrunner couples. And even if the producers said they were picking who to dump at random, it wouldn’t really be at random.’
‘The producers run everything on that show.’
‘Oh, I did see the head producer, Leary, coming out of the house after talking to Michelle. But she wasn’t acting any weirder than usual afterwards, so I don’t think he was firing her or anything.’
‘Maybe they’re going to do an elimination special,’ Nicola said. ‘That’s what they did two seasons ago.’
‘I’m telling you, nothing seems to have changed,’ Rose said.
‘You haven’t exactly been paying attention to the big picture lately.’
‘Hey! Dave is not “small”,’ Rose said indignantly. ‘Anyway, if the producers were planning a major shift in the show, I’d have seen them paying more attention to what’s going on. I mean, one of the couples has spent almost the entire season just digging holes in the backyard; if they’re going to fire anyone, Gino and George would be the ones to go, right?’
‘Maybe they’ll fire the couple where the husband is cheating with a tradie?’
‘Nicola!’ Rose said.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean it,’ Nicola said. ‘Okay, I did mean it, but didn’t you say Michelle was fine with you and Dave?’
‘She’s fine with it so long as Dave stops making her look bad, and I don’t think even my magical tradie skills can manage that.’
‘So, have you ever wondered why Dave is so bad at making things with his hands?’ Nicola saw the look that crossed Rose’s face. ‘I mean, why he is so bad at constructing things using basic tools?’
‘He’s just a klutz? A … hot klutz?’
‘That’s what I thought, too. But then I remembered a little thing called … the internet.’
‘You didn’t!’
‘Well, it didn’t look like you were ever going to Google him,’ Nicola said, matter-of-factly. ‘And once I logged on to the dark web –’
‘You mean you looked beyond the first page of search results.’
‘I went all the way to page four for you, hon,’ Nicola said. ‘And I have to say, there were a lot of results to go through.’
‘Oh God,’ Rose said, ‘he’s not a sex pest or anything, is he?’
‘No, but he is kind of famous. Well, he was famous for one reason, and then he was slightly more famous for something else. Do you want the good news first, or the bad?’
‘Um, I don’t know.’ Rose screwed her eyes closed tight. ‘Good?’
‘Chronological order it is,’ Rose said. ‘It seems that at age eighteen, Dave was something of an inventor.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yep, he invented a water purifying device called – cop this – “The Purisiser”.’
‘I hope he didn’t invent that name.’
‘Sadly, yes. He won some young inventor prize for it, too. Supposedly it was this amazing device for cleaning the toxins from even really badly polluted water. The device itself was environmentally friendly and reusable; it wasn’t like it just cleaned the water once and then you had to throw away a filter full of concentrated toxic waste. I have to admit it sounded pretty clever, really.’
‘High praise, coming from someone living on the cutting edge of technology.’
‘Ha ha,’ Nicola said. ‘Anyway, it was a massive innovation – the future of sustainable resources management, people were saying. There were companies lining up to make it here on an industrial scale. Big export dollars, blah blah blah.’
‘So he’s secretly a millionaire who’s come on a reality show to get in touch with regular people, and as soon as the show finishes he’s going to whisk me off to his mansion where we’ll spend the rest of our days lounging by a pool the size of a football ground?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Nicola. ‘It was a bit hard to figure out exactly what happened, but according to the inquest –’
‘Oh fuck.’
‘Dave was absolved of all responsibility for the poisoning.’
‘Oh no.’
‘It wasn’t fatal or anything,’ Nicola said quickly. ‘Dave had come up with this great idea, but he didn’t have the skills to make it all himself. The core ideas were sound, though, and there are a few companies today making versions of what he came up with. They don’t seem to be paying him patent royalties, though.’
‘Who did he poison? What happened?’
‘Um, well, he had this great idea but instead of just announcing the idea and bringing it to a manufacturer, he pushed on and got a prototype made by himself, which is what won him the inventing award. And it did work the first few times, but …’ Nicola shook her head. ‘Do you really want to hear this?’
‘Tell me,’ Rose said flatly.
‘He fucked it up. He trusted the people he got to make the device, and he didn’t follow a rigorous testing procedure. So he didn’t realise the filter wasn’t really filtering properly, and that after the first few times the device was used, it stopped working altogether. He was invited back to his old school to show the Purisiser off, and a couple of kids got sick. One of them got really sick.’
‘Did they get better?’
‘Oh yeah. Yeah, they seem to have recovered okay. It was only Dave’s reputation that died. The media started calling his invention “The Poisoniser”. It’s pretty hard to come back from that.’
Rose was silent for a moment. ‘Was there anything about him after that?’
Nicola typed away for a moment on her keyboard. ‘The sick kids got better, but there was a massive scandal in some of the papers that a government body had awarded a big prize to a faulty device. It was political, really, but it kept the Poisoniser in the headlines for long enough to kill Dave’s career as a young inventor. This all happened seven years ago.’
‘So what’s he up to now?’
‘He went to uni, got an engineering degree, and now has his own business – Fluid Mechanics Limited. He wrote some kind of traffic software, but for sewerage systems – seems like there’s good money in that, even though it’s as boring as shit.’
Rose laughed.
‘He does a lot of consulting with governments and local councils … guest lectures at universities sometimes … seems like a pretty clued-in guy.’ Nicola shook her head. ‘They’ve really done a number on him on the show. They’re making him look like a real dumdum.’
‘So is his poison past a big secret?’
‘Nope,’ Nicola said. ‘I found out about it right away, and Mansions must do stronger background checks than just typing his name into Google. It’s been mentioned on the fan forums a couple of times too, but it’s old news. Sometimes people make jokes about not letting him near the plumbing, but that’s it.’
‘They’re not even connected to the mains out there yet,’ Rose said. ‘They’ll get real professionals in to do that.’
‘It’s a little strange they haven’t made more out of it,’ Nicola said. ‘He’s clearly trying to make good after his dark past – it’d be good publicity for the show.’ She smiled. ‘It’s kind of touching, really.’
‘Maybe that’s why Dave’s being so weird, though,’ Rose said. ‘If he still feels guilty about what happened, he’d want to keep it on the down-low. And Michelle would be fine with that – it’d keep the attention focused on her.’
‘See? Nothing to worry about,’ Nicola said. ‘I’m sure Dave wants it kept a secret, but nobody else cares any more. It’s all in the past.’
‘I guess so,’ Rose said. ‘Do you want to go back to the episode? They’ve still got three houses to judge.’
The judges had really ripped into the Muellers’ latest round of renovations, calling their signature dining table ‘something out of a bad ’80s boardroom’ and saying that their hallway ‘lacked oxygen’. Rose stopped for a second to see Karen shouting about how she was going to divorce Alex and that she would ‘take a shit in that sink’ if he didn’t get rid of it.
As things had started to go south for the Muellers, Karen was providing Mansions fans with a steady supply of meme-able moments with her constant freak-outs and threats; they might not win the series, but they were definitely winning as far as media coverage was concerned.
Gino and George’s house was obviously a disaster even before Bob the Builder had put his foot through a rotten floorboard, but Jane had said some nice things about their backyard water feature – they’d clearly just grabbed a hose and filled all the holes with water before the judges arrived.
‘Let’s fast forward to Michelle and Dave,’ Nicola said. ‘I don’t care about those other losers.’
Skipping ahead, Rose could tell that Sahara and Mick’s kitchen had not been completed in time; Sahara was crying again while Mick was pointing at an ornate set of taps that were clearly completely useless.
The Morgans didn’t even seem to be working together; Jenny was showing off a downstairs laundry with three washing machines in a row, while Chloe was standing in a bathroom that seemed to basically be one giant shower. Pandora Hampstead-Jones was standing next to her holding her nose; Rose guessed that probably wasn’t a good sign.
‘I’m at Dave’s bit now,’ Nicola said. ‘It starts at 41:30.’
Rose skipped to that point. ‘Let’s go.’ She steeled herself for an onslaught of abuse. But the whole segment was basically a love-in; the judges were smiling away as they complimented everything in sight.
‘Spacious, comfortable,’ Bob said.
‘Visually striking, without overwhelming the eye,’ Pandora said.
&nb
sp; ‘That’s not what they said when I was there,’ Rose said.
‘You know what I reckon?’ Nicola said. ‘Everyone else was so shit that Dave and Michelle got to be the winners by default. Their lounge room is okay, but it’s not ground-breaking or anything.’
‘I love the shelving,’ Jane said on screen.
Rose and Nicola squealed in unison.
‘You’re a star,’ Nicola said. ‘You’ll be able to start your own business after this.’
‘Maybe if they’d actually shown me in any of the episodes,’ Rose said. ‘The Ninja Tradie helping the Morgans got loads of airtime.’
‘You mean “Lightning” Rod the electrician? That guy’s a dick.’
‘And they gave “Toilet Duck” his own segment last week.’
‘His name is Toilet! I don’t care how good a plumber he is, they could give him his own show and he’d still be poo.’
‘His real name is Donald Dark,’ Rose said. ‘He seems like a nice guy.’
‘Maybe you need your own cool nickname,’ Nicola said. ‘I dunno, like “Thorny” Rose?’ Her face lit up. ‘Oh, I know!’
‘Please don’t,’ Rose said.
‘Rose Bush,’ Nicola said in glee. ‘Or is that one just between you and Dave?’
‘Dave has never called me Rose Bush. And he never will.’
‘Because –’
‘Because he’s a nice guy and a gentleman,’ Rose said. ‘He’s on the show because he wants to learn how to repair things. He wants to repair himself.’
Nicola laughed. ‘And bone you.’
Rose closed the laptop without saying goodbye.
Sunday was Rose’s day off. Well, day off from Mansions in the Sky; her parents and Renton had done next to nothing to tidy up after their viewing party, so she spent most of the day restoring the backyard to some semblance of order while everyone else hid in their rooms. Sarah came out around lunchtime to make her a sandwich, which was something at least, and in the afternoon Renton left for a shift at the cinema where he worked, but otherwise she was alone. She couldn’t even message Dave, thanks to Mansions’ no-phone policy.