The Last Girl Page 2

  Those seduced through The Grocery’s sliding doors entered a cornucopia where they weren’t ‘customers’ but ‘clients’ to be waited upon by the finest teenage ‘consultants’ that minimum wages could buy. Soft downlights, polished floorboards, scented candles and a classical violinist in the liquor enclave convinced them they’d rewarded themselves with a shopping destination superior to the plebian tap-app-scan-it-yourselfmarts. Beautopians bought it—literally. Coiffed women and their moisturised men purred up in European hybrids and wafted through the store sipping complimentary coffees as they hunted and gathered organic strawnanas and wild-farmed salmon.

  But on a mid-December Saturday afternoon The Grocery’s usual tranquillity was disturbed by a young couple arguing a few feet from where I was arranging cans of Canine Cuisine.

  ‘What do you mean I’ll get fat?’ Blonde gym bunny. Tight abs on crop-top display. Pretty face twisted into an ugly snarl. ‘You bastard!’

  ‘I didn’t say anything!’ Sleepy dude. Board shorts. Barely looked awake.

  ‘I heard you!’

  ‘I didn’t say a word.’ The guy looked guilty as charged. ‘Seriously, Patty, I didn’t.’

  ‘You’re such an asshole!’

  ‘Sssh! You’re only two months along. You look great.’

  She wasn’t having any of it. ‘I’m going to my mum’s. You can go to hell.’

  Ponytail swinging, she stalked off, leaving the dude stroking a box of Celebrity Cat. He hadn’t said she was fat. He hadn’t said anything. Crazy pregnant-lady hormones: that was my guess. But then two similar spats erupted in the next three hours.

  At the end of my shift, Jacinta was already in the staff room. Plonked in a beanbag with her head twitching behind Shades she could’ve been mistaken for a teen rock star in the throes of an overdose. But her rhythmic tics said she was playing Snots ’N’ Bots, her head and eye movements and alpha and beta waves harnessed to fire gooey boogers at the robot army marching across the inside of her lenses.

  ‘Jax.’

  ‘Yo.’

  ‘The weirdest thing’s been happening.’

  I told her about the freaks who’d been squabbling about nothing.

  Wet sneezes from my friend’s Shades announced that her Nasal Base was wiped. Game over.

  ‘Clear.’ Jacinta’s lenses went from tinted to translucent. She was looking at me now—albeit through an overlap of app info. ‘Are we outta here or what?’

  We walked across Beautopia Point towards TYZ.

  ‘Well, it’s weird, right?’ I said.

  Jacinta couldn’t have been less amazed. ‘People argue.’

  ‘I was there. I didn’t hear any insults.’

  ‘So you’re half deaf from all your mum’s punk crap.’

  I gave her the finger. ‘It was spooky.’

  She smirked and shook her head. ‘So you’ve taken too many knocks. Brain-damaged kids imagine the darnedest things.’

  Looking at her dead-eyed, I adopted a drone voice. ‘You. Are. Correct.’

  With a stiff cyborg hand, I showcased our suburb’s luxury residences blazing orange in the setting sun. ‘No one. Argues. In. Beautopia.’

  Jacinta nodded sombrely. ‘To. Do. So.’ She genuflected at the fake colonial church steeple that rose over the Commons. ‘Angers. The. Mighty. Phallus.’

  Our artificial paradise was good for a ton of laughs.

  Beautopia Point was for squibs but TYZ helped make it bearable. Thankfully the place’s signage was overgrown by vines so we could ignore that our favourite hangout’s naff official name was The Youth Zone. You know, for tha kidz.

  Jacinta got us drinks while I put on my pads and helmet. Up on the half-pipe I popped in my earbuds and pressed play on the vintage Walkman that Mum had given me so I could appreciate the mix-tapes she loved making for my benefit. Lee Ving wailed about having a war as I dropped down the transition, crouched across the bottom, pumped up the opposing arc, caught enough air for a three-sixty and then dropped back in. I wasn’t an innately talented skater but I’d gotten good because I’d give things a go and I bounced back from falls pretty fast.

  Jacinta sat in the bleachers, head in social media. I joined her, gulping electrolytes.

  ‘They might’ve been spamming a product,’ she said, taking off her Shades.

  I didn’t get her drift. ‘A sphincter says what?’

  Jacinta grinned. ‘You are. I’m talking about the couples who were arguing? They might’ve been spamming. SPonsored Argument Marketing. They get your attention by having a fight while they’re standing near some product, or they mention it in passing. We absorb it subliminally. Pass it on. Next thing we know it’s viral.’

  ‘Are you for real?’

  Jacinta nodded proudly. Marketing was how she was going to make her millions.

  ‘It’s not working very well,’ I said. ‘I didn’t brand-drop when I told you. But I guess that first guy was kinda fondling Celebrity Cat.’

  ‘There you go,’ Jacinta said. ‘You’re welcome.’

  Her Shades chirruped.

  ‘But the others didn’t—’ I began.

  ‘Check this out!’

  Jacinta’s lenses had the news: Mollie was throwing a VIP Christmas party.

  ‘We are so going,’ Jacinta said.

  My heart was hitting speeds it never did skating. ‘Do you think he’ll be there?’

  Finn’s movements were still the subject of conversation when we reached the gate to Goldrise.

  ‘Dan, you’re going,’ Jacinta said. ‘It’s time to put yourself out there.’

  I rolled my shoulders. ‘It’d help if we were invited.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that. We’re cool. Leave it to me.’

  I laughed and offered her my fist. ‘TBC?’

  ‘TBC,’ she agreed, giving me a bump.

  Jacinta went into her apartment building. Chomping a piece of gum into submission, I skated down the hill towards my house. I passed beige towers and townhouses that rose behind precision hedges. The brass nameplates on the estates’ serious fences always made me smile. Skybrook, Cloudvale, Sunshower: they sounded like retirement homes for gay hobbits.

  I veered into Reflection Road. Stage Three’s cranes filled the sky with concrete that cast more of Beautopia Point into shadow. Carving across the First Street walkway I passed an ornate red-brick building. A century ago this was company headquarters where dockside workers collected their meagre earnings for offloading coal and contracting black lung. Now it was the sales office where paper pushers pledged and borrowed millions to buy a piece of the city’s most ambitious waterside development. Billboards showed sunny scenes of Blue Ribbon Bliss™. A young mother bounced her baby in a crystal swimming pool. Families laughed in unison while enjoying a seafood picnic. Professional dads bonded as they rowed along the river. Fit seniors walked the water’s edge.

  I popped ollies along that promontory path and the foundation stones of the Beautopia Point dream came into view. This eastern shore was where the first dozen houses were built on rehabilitated wasteland. As the population had swollen Stephanie had insisted on calling us and our immediate neighbours ‘The First Families’ as though we’d landed with the Mayflower rather than just bought the development’s first McMansions.

  The layout, luxury and land size of our houses were almost identical. What provided the all-important status stratification was the quality of views. Only the three places nearest to the tip of Beautopia Point stared straight up the river at the city skyline. In recognition of such prestige, each was crowned with a widow’s walk, though the little cupolas had been rebranded ‘Captain’s Nests’ by some manly marketing genius. Not that Dad ever ventured up to his roost, which Stephanie had claimed as her own. Though it was barely big enough to swing a cat, she delighted in doing the downward dog up there each morning. She claimed she was saluting the sun but I’m pretty sure she was telling high-rise arrivistes to kiss her toned ass.

  We, the Armstrong Family 2.0, li
ved at number three. Stephanie’s cat, Upton, glared as I stepped over him on the path. Upstairs and downstairs, every light blazed. Infuriating but inevitable. For a long time I thought Dad and Stephanie were just forgetful. That was before I realised not caring about power bills or carbon in the atmosphere was a subliminal status symbol. Like being fat in pre-revolutionary France.

  I slipped inside, turning off lights as I went. Dad wouldn’t be home that night. He’d been away doing a corporate geotagging marathon. Or maybe it was a water archery adventure. He was always embracing some new sports fad and buying all the accompanying gear.

  By now Evan would be tucked in bed. Stephanie had claimed the lounge room, curled up on the couch, purring into her phone. She didn’t look up as I crept past to the kitchen. After making a sandwich, I retreated upstairs to sprawl on my bed underneath a painting Mum had done of me. Exaggerated black hair and saucer eyes. It wasn’t a realistic portrait. More like a manga cartoon. I loved it anyway.

  Facial recognition logged me into my screens so I was ready to chat, message, update, comment and stream. But first I wanted another tiny snoop of Finn’s social self. We weren’t friends but he was on everything and his privacy settings were just lax enough for me to keep tabs. Relationship status: still single, most excellently. Photo wall: new taco shot, uploaded at lunchtime. Interests: updated to include R.E.M. and ‘general anarchy’. Mum had played me that band a couple of times and she’d been in my ear about countercultural stuff more often than I could remember. If and when Finn and I met at Mollie’s party, I’d be sure to casually reference listening to Document on vinyl and try to remember Mum’s theory that Resist had really only been a corporate-funded Occupy.

  I was about to message Jacinta when my windows went wild with the news. Videos of a girl our age reciting her depressive poems had found their way onto a comedy aggregator and racked up millions of views in the past hour. Mashups already had her tortured verse autotuned and sung by zombie kittens. Exposure trolls had unleashed a torrent of her personal information. She’d slit her throat in front of her webcam a few minutes ago.

  Sadness and shock were duly expressed. Then the ‘conversation’ really got going. She should’ve enjoyed the fame rather than feeling shame. She might’ve been happier if she lost weight. She clearly suffered from underlying depression. She died because the health establishment prescribed medication rather than meditation. She was damned because she didn’t accept Jesus. She was an oxygen thief who did the world a favour. Geeks made mirror sites to ensure the death footage stayed online forever and comedians made cruel jokes and mockingly sought absolution by asking ‘Too soon?’ Sharing in her tragedy was a chance to be serious or controversial or religious or cynical or funny or techie or whatever.

  I couldn’t finish my sandwich. I felt sad for her and sick for us. The online world would mourn for a moment, make it all about our opinions and emotions and then move on like it had never mattered in the first place. I didn’t want to be part of it again. So I used the off button on all my screens.

  Connectivity cold turkey wasn’t a completely alien concept for me. Mum’s place in Shadow Valley was a black spot no matter what anyone said about total coverage and whenever I visited her I was obliged to do a few days without access. But this was different. This was voluntary. The phone, the tablet, the computer: they were all right there and a click or touch or word away from channelling the universe. Seconds, minutes, hours: it was tough. To stave off temptation I dipped into Dad’s old book-form dictionary. Opening random pages and reading bite-sized definitions: it was a bit like web surfing.

  Next morning Jacinta resorted to calling the landline I’d forgotten we had. Me dropping off our networks had worried her. #suicidalsolidarity had apparently trended overnight. I told her I was fine. Said that I’d dropped my phone in the bath and that our wi-fi was being buggy. I didn’t want to hear that I’d overreacted to the girl’s death—or that it was me personalising a distant tragedy. But being offline overnight left me feeling strangely liberated. A bit like Mum living proudly ‘out of the loop’. So for shits and giggles I decided to see if I could last one week without logging back on.

  That night Dad, Evan and I went to Rubber Thaime, Beautopia’s slow-food–Asian-fusion experience. Stephanie didn’t join us because she was catching up with an old schoolfriend who’d arrived in the city unexpectedly.

  ‘What’s everyone eating?’ Dad asked, eyes on his phone as it whooshed like a missile. Either he’d just sent a message or he was piloting an American drone bombing Iran.

  ‘Fririce!’ Evan squealed, chewing on his napkin.

  Dad disappeared behind his menu. ‘Plate o’ shrimp and a Miller for me. Danby?’

  I told him green chicken curry.

  ‘Sounds good. Beers for you guys, too?’ It was a joke he’d been using since I can remember. He’d get a brew and we’d get lemonades. ‘Where’s that waiter?’

  Silence filled the space between us.

  ‘So,’ Dad said, ‘where’s your phone?’ He looked around the table as though it must be somewhere. My first no-screen day had been tough. I’d skated harder and longer, read an entire novel from start to finish. Now it was about to get tougher.

  ‘At home,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to be less . . . connected.’

  ‘Why?’

  Dad wasn’t being sarcastic. He genuinely had no idea.

  After Dad and Mum split for the last time, Brendan adopted the idea that kids should be screened and not heard. My bedroom gradually came to resemble a NASA control room. At five I had a TV wider than I was tall. I got all the Disney princesses on DVD and then Blu-Ray and then 3-D UHD. Dad regularly upgraded my consoles and cameras and phones and tablets. I never needed a night-light. Going to sleep in my room was to drift off in a galaxy of stand-by stars.

  Dad bought me things to buy himself time. Every hour that I was immersed in a screen was an hour he could use to brainstorm his business plans. But technology couldn’t contain me all the time. After school and during term breaks, he relied on babysitters. When I was nine I woke up and found the latest one hadn’t left, but was all made up and making him breakfast. A few days later Dad casually announced that this ‘Stephanie’ would be a live-in nanny. A few weeks later they told me they were getting married. A few months after that the newsflash was I’d be getting a new brother and we’d all be living in a big new house.

  I hated Stephanie for all the usual reasons—she’d put the King under her spell, she’d shut the door on the Queen’s return, she’d given him a Prince he loved more than me. If Dad had wanted me to give my stepmother a better chance, he shouldn’t have deferred so much of my childhood to Disney.

  Dad blinked at me across the restaurant table.

  ‘So . . . the last few days of the school year,’ he ventured cautiously, a man feeling his way into a dark room. ‘How’s that all going?’

  ‘Good.’

  His eyes dipped to his phone. ‘Have you got any grades back yet?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I did get an A-plus in Aristotelian astronomy.’

  I wasn’t just being a smart ass. I was daring him to show he was listening.

  Dad’s phone burbled. He tapped away. Evan randomly clicked his Rubik’s Cube.

  I wished I had my phone. Then we could iGnore each other in peace. When Dad had returned email fire, I launched my next-best defence.

  ‘How’s work going?’

  Show the tiniest interest in what Dad did and he’d talk for hours.

  ‘Oh, right, good,’ he said. ‘Well, things will be great after the upcoming trip. I’m getting a lot of interest over there . . .’

  Dad’s business was in the toilet. A sales joke I’d heard once if I’d heard it a million times. But now his company, Captive Audience, was embracing a new frontier by making sure people could safely stay digital when they sat down to take a dump.

  After he started life as a single father, Dad faced up to the fact that his writing career was going now
here and so he quit the bookstore to join an ad agency owned by an old schoolmate. Brendan quickly discovered his true talent didn’t lie in the deep and meaningful, but in the short and superficial. He made more money in a month from writing catchphrases than he did in a year by selling books—and more than he would have in a lifetime spent writing them. He refined the art of the blurb and taught himself graphic design at night. After a year, he left to launch Captive Audience.

  While Dad prided himself on ‘thinking outside the cubicle’, he had recently lost ground where it counted most. People were ignoring stall ads because so few had a problem using their phones and tablets in public toilets. So Dad gave them a problem. He commissioned studies whose results were a germophobe’s nightmare and issued press releases that became news stories that bred public-health paranoia. Now he was ready to launch his solution. Enter a stall and Screen Door would sync with your device so you could sit and airswipe and airtype to your heart’s content while absorbing banner ads and offers. Tagline: ‘Enjoy everything E but the coli’.

  ‘. . . think it’s already been eclipsed by Shades and other glasses,’ Dad was spieling. ‘But older people won’t abandon their handhelds. They’ll use our system intuitively. It’s about making the restroom part of the revenue stream and recreation experience. Resorts, cruise ships. Casinos, especially. Why stop playing poker just because you have to go! I’m pitching them with “Give Everyone A Royal Flush”.’

  I giggled. I’d always been partial to his dad jokes.

  ‘Okay, let’s order.’

  The waiter had arrived balancing three plates.