Incest in Another Dimension 1

INTRODUCTION & DISCLAIMER - When Corey, a university student from Brisbane Australia experiences an odd feeling of missing 10 seconds of time while driving, he is annoyed at himself for a lapse of concentration on the road, but nothing bad seems to have happened. However when peculiar things start to happen he cannot explain, Corey finds himself in a strange alternate dimension where some things are exactly the same, some slightly altered and some completely different from the real world he left behind. This includes major world events and closer to home Corey's family, who are now very different from the way they were just 24 hours earlier, not only in structure but the way they think about certain aspects of family dynamics...

Please enjoy the first chapter of 'Incest in Another Dimension', and be sure to rate and comment, as feedback is always welcome. All characters and events depicted are fictional, and any similarity to real people living, dead, or in a parallel universe are coincidental and unintentional.

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The feeling was a familiar but disconcerting one. A sensation of missing time but 30 seconds at most, and the concern of what I had done during this small amount of lost time I couldn't account for.

"Get yourself together Corey and concentrate on the road for fuck's sake," I said to myself, annoyed at the slip in concentration when I was driving, especially as it was starting to rain more consistently.

Driving wasn't the only time this had happened to me, but this sensation only ever happened to me while I was moving. It would never happen if I was sitting still studying, working or watching television. During my last year of high school -- three years ago now -- I had participated in the school's 5 kilometer cross country run on sport's day. I had been running towards a stand of pine trees that grew on the perimeter of the oval -- then all of a sudden I was past the pines and running towards the adjacent rugby field. I had no memory of running this 300 meters at all.

I had a similar experience just last year when participating in a large fun run in Brisbane, when I simply could not account for about 500 meters. I, along with thousands of other participants pounding the pavements around Brisbane city on a fine and sunny Sunday morning. I was running along the Brisbane River on the southern side underneath the towering cliffs of Kangaroo Point, and could see across the water on the city bank the distinctive white Riparian Plaza building approaching, and the iconic Story Bridge in the distance.

Then before I knew it I was level with Riparian Plaza which towered high above the Eagle Street Pier and which had been Brisbane's tallest skyscraper until about 2006, and the Story Bridge -- as iconic to Queenslanders as the Sydney Harbour Bridge was to residents of New South Wales -- was in full view, leaving me utterly perplexed. Could I remember every other step I took of the 12 kilometer fun run? No, of course I could not, but I could remember running in all of the other scenic spots around the city. Except for this half a kilometer. So what happened? I had no idea.

This odd feeling also happened when cycling. One Sunday my mother Marnie, my twin sister Morgan and I went to visit our maternal grandmother Dora. Grandma had been widowed a few years prior, and lived in a retirement village in the Gold Coast suburb of Varsity Lakes, a few kilometers inland from Burleigh Heads. With Mum driving an SUV and having an attachment to carry bicycles, this was not a problem and Mum drove down to Southport, parked the car at the Broadwater Parklands and the three of us commenced our ride down to see Grandma.

It was a scenic ride down the Gold Coast past all the stunning beaches, towering high rises and the plentiful green vegetation that grew in this region. Mum, Morgan and I cycled from Southport down through Main Beach, Surfers Paradise, Northcliffe, Broadbeach, Mermaid Beach and to Miami, the weather fine and the vibe on the Gold Coast great as usual.

But as we rode through Miami, I suddenly found myself along with Mum and Morgan riding down the Burleigh Beach foreshore towards the Burleigh Heads, through all the towering Norfolk Island pines that dominated this area of the Gold Coast. We must have crossed at least two sets of traffic lights plus turned off the Gold Coast Highway to ride down the coast. I remembered none of it, but my mother and sister seemed to sense nothing was amiss. So everything must have been okay, I obviously hadn't gone riding through red lights or in front of traffic and added the name Corey Gibson to the list of road fatalities for the year. But where the hell was my mind during that missing time?

However and for obvious reasons this feeling was most disconcerting if it happened when I was driving. Tonight wasn't so bad -- well it was still un-nerving to be driving along the Pacific Motorway connecting the Gold Coast with Brisbane in deteriorating weather conditions and see the freeway exit signs for the theme parks in the Oxenford and Helensvale plus the higher attractions at these parks to my left one minute, then the exit signs for the theme parks at Coomera and the higher attractions at these parks in the dim light and rain to my right side the next -- but it was Good Friday. This meant not too much traffic around me. Had it been an ordinary Friday with lots of traffic, this would have been far worse.

It was far worse when it happened on Brisbane's busy Gateway Bridge near the airport in Eagle Farm one time, with me remembering driving onto the bridge one second then off it the next, and nothing of how I crossed the Brisbane River. I had a similar experience in Brisbane's West End, where to my dismay I had no memory of driving through several busy intersections, and another in the Redlands area one day while driving to Victoria Point with my mother and sister in the car.

Yet nothing bad had ever happened during these experiences like a car crash or falling off my bike, so it didn't seem like I had a neurological condition like narcolepsy or mild epilepsy, and these events weren't frequent. And other people I had spoken to about this had experienced something similar. Claire, my manager at the discount store where I had a part time job said that this happened to everyone, and that during these seconds that were forgotten, we were completely lucid and aware of what we were doing and Scott, my best friend had also had similar experiences.

This made me feel a bit better, but still it was un-nerving when it did occur so I was hyper-vigilant for the rest of the drive home, especially as the weather conditions continued to deteriorate. I had seen the first lightning strikes above the Gold Coast hinterland somewhere near Mount Tambourine while driving along Smith Street to join the freeway. There were many signs along this major arterial road advising of pending roadworks as part of the tram extension to Helensvale, and of the upcoming Gold Coast Commonwealth Games in 2018.

I continued further north through the large drops of rain, seeing the flashes of lightning in the cloudy skies, my journey taking me through the Gold Coast's northernmost suburb of Ormeau and into the Logan region that separated the Gold Coast and Brisbane. Rain fell intermittently as I continued north and reached Mount Gravatt, and soon I was in Brisbane's inner southern suburbs, and able to make out the light towers of the Brisbane Cricket Ground as I drove through Woolloongabba.

The Story Bridge looked very pretty with the lighting over the metal structure, and to my left the tall buildings in Brisbane's CBD were lit up, the lights reflecting upon the dark waters of the Brisbane River. A car passed by me on the outside lane and I normally wouldn't have paid much attention to it, until I noticed that it had stickers on its back windows stickers for a rugby league club. It wasn't of course unusual to see cars with decorations for NRL, AFL or other sporting teams, but this one stood out due to the team involved, the South Queensland Crushers.

With distinctive dark gold, navy blue and red jumpers and a steam-train as an emblem, the Crushers would make their debut in March 1995 alongside North Queensland and two other new teams from Perth and Auckland. My sister and I did not remember this for the simple reason that we were month old infants at the time, however our father Rick apparently took an interest in the new Crushers team and supported them over the well-established powerhouse team the Brisbane Broncos or the Seagulls down the road on the Gold Coast.

But while the North Queensland Cowboys were still in the NRL and won their first senior title just last year, it was sadly a much different story for the South Queensland Crushers. Brisbane's second team lasted just three years and played their final game on Sunday 31st August 1997 -- the same day Princess Diana had died -- before being liquidated and becoming the first of quite a number of teams to depart top level rugby league in the late 1990s by folding, entering joint ventures with other teams or leaving for lower level competitions.

It seemed a bit strange that somebody would decorate their car with stickers for a short-lived and largely forgotten sporting team defunct for over 18 years. At first I thought it might be an older car from the 1990s, but no it was definitely post 2012. Perhaps though the car's owner like Dad had been a Crushers fan during their short existence, had found these stickers at a market stall, charity shop or a swap meet years later and purchased them for nostalgia's sake?

Yes, that was no doubt the explanation, and nostalgia seemed to be a big thing this evening as another car this time a white van drove by, and it displayed Golden Fleece bumper stickers, blue in color with a big gold ram. Golden Fleece was a brand long gone from the Australian petrol industry before I arrived into the world, but the brand was iconic. My friend Scott's grandfather had a big Golden Fleece sign on the walls of his workshop. And my late maternal grandfather Alf had told Morgan and I about Golden Fleece, and how when he and his siblings were younger a meal at one of their roadhouses was one of their favorite activities.

Continuing to drive north to the suburb where we lived -- close enough to the city for a handy commute but far enough away and high enough for us to avoid the floods that swept through the Brisbane River and inner city streets five years ago -- I turned into the street where my sister and I lived with our mother.

Morgan and I shared this small hatchback car, and Mum's SUV car was parked in the garage as I pulled in next to it. I closed up the garage and went inside the house. It was getting late, and Mum was no doubt asleep. The house was mostly in darkness, save for the living room where the overhead lights were illuminated and I could see the changing colors of the TV.

Going in there, I found Morgan sitting on the couch watching a movie on TV. My sister and I didn't really look like siblings, even less like twins aside from us both being tall and slim, which was almost inevitable given we had tall, slim parents. But I had inherited Dad's brown hair, brown eyes and more tanned complexion, while Mum's pretty face, blonde hair, blue eyes and fair complexion went to Morgan.

This Good Friday afternoon Morgan had worked the afternoon shift at the hospital and was still wearing her scrubs uniform, the color indicating that my sister was a trainee studying nursing at university, and not yet a qualified registered nurse. She was clearly winding down after her shift, sipping on a can of soda and had removed her white nurse's sneakers and socks, her bare feet resting on the table. Our pet cat Panther -- a pure black cat -- was curled up on the couch beside Morgan, allowing my sister the privilege of stroking her.

"Hey Morgan, are you watching a movie?" I asked, sitting down in an armchair adjacent to the couch.

Morgan rolled her blue eyes through her glasses which she always wore when on the computer or watching television. "Where's your Captain Obvious costume today, Corey?" she asked me sarcastically before returning her attention to the screen.

"Sorry, good point," I said. I was curious if Morgan was watching her movie on free to air television, on DVD or on streaming, but was worried I would annoy her if I asked so instead used my eyes. I could see the DVD player's lights operating and the DVD cover for the disc on the table near Morgan's bare feet, so obviously option two was the correct one.

I was curious what the movie was about having never seen or heard of it before, but I didn't want to disturb her as she was clearly glued to the screen, and I might as well have not been there. It took only a few minutes to realize what sort of movie it was, that it wouldn't be my sort of movie and why Morgan had a box of tissues close handy.

Probably it was something to do with my XY chromosome structure, but I couldn't work out ever why Morgan and her friends watched such sad and at times depressing movies that inevitably made them cry. This movie was no exception, a Romeo-Juliet story about a girl from a nice middle class family falling in love with a guy from a less stable family from the wrong side of the tracks and his own efforts to make things work, only the relationship is never going to be a long one as the girl has cystic fibrosis and therefore a limited lifespan.

Morgan would often watch these sort of movies when she was due for her period and experiencing PMS, but I knew that my sister's next time of the month was not for another two weeks. It was unfortunate I knew this because it had been two weeks since Morgan forgot to lock the bathroom door when she went to the toilet. I came home from work and failed to knock on the closed bathroom door, walking in on my menstruating sister while she was on the toilet having a poo, the pants of her scrubs uniform and her white knickers with a sanitary pad attached down around her ankles. I learned that my sister folded rather than scrunched her toilet paper, and thanks to Morgan's open knees I also learned that my sister completely shaved or waxed all pubic hair away from her pussy. Even though I set a world record for apologizing, Morgan was pissed at me for more than a week afterwards and had only defrosted this last week.

Given Morgan was a trainee nurse and would have to work with patients with serious medical conditions like cystic fibrosis and cancer, I thought she might be averse to these type of movies yet clearly this was not the case. After all, I was studying to be an accountant and I didn't want to watch movies about accountants, auditors and book-keepers doing accounting all day. But then again nobody would make movies about accountants doing accountancy; that would be weird.

So Morgan was obviously just in the mood to watch a sad movie, and it was only a matter of time before the waterworks started on the screen and off it. I didn't want to get depressed too so was about to get up and go to bed, when something interesting caught my eye.

"It must be an old movie," I said, observing that the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were visible in the background of this scene in the New York set movie.

Again, Morgan didn't seem to appreciate the interruption to her viewing and sighed. "It's not that old." My sister's tone was dismissive.

Again, I looked at the screen. Clearly the movie must have been set in the past, prior to 9/11. This made sense. The young woman afflicted with CF in the movie was played by Brittany Snow and her boyfriend by Zac Efron, both of whom were born in the mid 1980s, so it must have been made in the late 2000s or early 2010s.

I watched the scene as the girl's father played by John Ritter -- a protective and well-meaning if somewhat misguided man -- and his wife played by Helen Hunt tried to like and trust their daughter's boyfriend as they walked around Manhattan but were unable to bring themselves to do so. The daughter for her part was trying to convince her parents that her new boyfriend was a good guy and they were in love, but was hampered by her ill health, and had to stop and recover her breath on several occasions. Clearly the father was ill at ease watching his daughter's boyfriend assisting her.

It was amazing the way the Twin Towers had been superimposed into the more recent New York City skyline, modern film technology was really something. One couldn't tell the difference from the CGI World Trade Center buildings and the real New York City buildings like the Statue of Liberty across the water. And the World Trade Center site had since been redeveloped, how they cut the enormous Freedom Tower and other new buildings to replace them with the North and South towers was very impressive.

"So has Mum gone to bed?" I asked.

"Yeah, a few hours ago."

"And Jamie?"

"In bed too," Morgan confirmed.

"Well, I might do the same and leave you to enjoy your film," I said. "Goodnight Morgan."

"Night Corey," said Morgan, again taking a sip of her soda while watching as the CF-afflicted girl on screen despite trying her best to convince her boyfriend and parents she was okay, but collapsed with breathing difficulties, her mother immediately grabbing her smart phone to dial 911 and summons an ambulance.

In the bathroom I had a pee, took a quick shower, brushed my teeth, put on boxer shorts and a tee-shirt and went to bed, making doubly sure before I left the bathroom that I put the toilet seat down, something Morgan always was complaining that Jamie and I failed to do. Knowing my luck Morgan would be so tearful after watching her sad movie that she wouldn't notice the lifted toilet seat and would sit down on the loo with it still up, her bum vanishing into the bowl and me copping it in the neck tomorrow morning.

Turning out the light I again thought about how chicks liked sad movies, and how next week it would probably be another movie with a similar plot only this time the girl would be a paraplegic, have cancer or some auto immune disease rather than CF that my sister would watch either alone or with her friends.

I thought back further and to the mid-late 2000s and the more innocent American sitcoms and made for TV movies for tweens and teens that Morgan and her friends liked at the time, as well as Harry Potter. Oh, and Justin Bieber of course, Morgan and her friends went absolutely wild for him and were avid users of a Justin Bieber fan website when they were aged 12 and 13. Then as time passed and we moved into the early 2010s it was Glee and Twilight that held their attention, now it seemed to be romantic movies about serious illnesses.

Listening to the sub-tropical rain outside splattering against the patio roof, I wondered if the next of these doomed romance thanks to the girl having an incurable illness to be made might be about a young woman whose incurable brain tumor first was discovered when she had odd experiences while driving, suddenly further ahead with no memory of the last 30 seconds or so, like my own experience driving home tonight.

Outside it was getting stormy, the rain picked up and a strike of lightning illuminated my bedroom through the curtains, before the subsequent roll of thunder. I doubted that I had a brain tumor but as there came a second flash of lightning as the storm rolled through, it did cross my mind. Lucky I didn't like the same sort of movies as Morgan and her friends otherwise I would be a full-blown hypochondriac.

Changing position in bed, I again contemplated the strange experience and how everything I had done in about 30 to 60 seconds was completely blank. Yet I had a pretty good memory of all other events over the past two days.

On Thursday morning I had attended university, working on a group accounting assignment, then went to work for my afternoon shift at the discount store where I worked. With it being Easter Thursday and practically everywhere closed for Good Friday it was busy, very busy indeed.

My manager Claire, a slim and attractive woman with dark hair aged in her mid-30s had delivered me the bad news as I arrived for my shift. "Sorry to tell you this Corey, you're rostered on with Bella today." She rolled her eyes.

"That's okay Claire, I know you have to organize the shifts according to the staff you have," I said.

At face value for a 21-year-old guy being rostered on with 19-year-old Bella wouldn't have appeared such an unpleasant experience. A slim and pretty brunette relatively small in stature, Bella had a conservative sort of appearance and one would imagine that she would simply do her shift and go home. Anyone shopping at the store would not think anything unusual of her -- perhaps some guys might notice for a petite girl she was rather well endowed and her boobs swelled the front of her shirt -- but she wouldn't stay in anyone's mind. Just another student working her part time job.

Wrong. The world was filled with children benefitted by nepotism. These nepo-babies could be found in acting, music, sports and the like, and as it seemed with Bella, in department stores in ordinary suburban shopping centers in Australian cities too. Bella was the daughter of a director of the store's Queensland division, and boy did this bossy little brat ever push her weight around.

Thursday's shift was no exception. Despite me being two years older and more experienced, Bella bossed me around constantly reminding me what I wasn't doing right and even reprimanded me for using my phone during work hours. That I was using the phone to assist an elderly couple looking for a specific product but didn't have smart phones themselves didn't seem to matter to her. And it was of course okay for Bella to talk to her Daddy on her phone during the shift, as Bella was the apple of her Daddy's eye and Daddy was a company director.

Bella bossed around some other staff members too, and tried her luck with Claire as the shift manager and the store manager too, having more success with the latter as Claire didn't stand for nonsense but the middle-aged manager was kind of a brow-beaten guy, and tended to capitulated to this well-connected firebrand young enough to be his daughter whenever she was rostered on and was the self-appointed girl boss. I think he also feared word of anything adverse about him getting back to Bella's father courtesy of his darling daughter.

It was all a completely different story however when during a busy run Bella turned and left the area we were working. I simply asked where she was going as we were in danger of getting swamped, to which Bella turned, glared at me and spat, 'To the toilet, if you must know,' before storming away not listening to my apology.

As if it wasn't bad enough that I had to work with bossy little Bella, this exchange wasn't the first awkward exchange recently. About two weeks ago Bella was reaching into her purse for her phone as we were going on our break, and some items fell out. Instinctively I reached down to pick them up for her, only realizing too late that the two items in question were a pair of Bella's white knickers with blue polka dots and a sanitary napkin encased in a brightly colored plastic wrap. To say this was uncomfortable was perhaps the biggest understatement of 2016 to date.

While at work today I also had by chance encountered my aunts, along with three out of Morgan and my four first cousins. Both Mum and Dad had one sister, and it was Dad's sister Aunt Robyn who I first saw, along with her daughters Trina and Amy. Like her mother Trina aged 21 was a petite, pretty brunette with brown eyes; while younger girl Amy was equally pretty but taller and with light brown hair and blue eyes, taking after Uncle Jeremy, Robyn's husband.

I chatted with them as they purchased the items they needed, but as I was about to wish them a happy Easter as they went on their way I checked myself. Just like I did not wish Amy a happy birthday, despite my cousin turning 18 earlier in the week.

Aunt Robyn, Uncle Jeremy and my cousins Trina and Amy would not be celebrating Easter, just like they did not observe Christmas, New Year or observe birthdays. This was because they were Jehovah's Witnesses, and growing up Morgan and I were always amazed how happy our cousins were given they were hardly allowed to participate in any activities we perceived to be fun, not even sports outside of basic PE at school. Oh well, each to their own, and if they were happy at Kingdom Hall, it was up to them.

Next I met Aunty Georgina, Mum's sister younger by two years. While the X chromosome was dominant with Dad's sister, the Y chromosome seemed dominant with the maternal side of the family. Georgina was married to Uncle Doug, a nice enough guy but who was always stressed and often grumpy due to their sons, Adam and Jamie.

My cousin Adam was with his mother today, and while I never expressed the thought aloud I didn't much care for him. Like Mum, Georgina was a pretty blonde with blue eyes and these features had been passed to Adam, a tall young guy born the same year as Morgan and I. Super-fit and always working out, Adam's tall muscular frame showed his arrogance as he swaggered through the store like he owned the place.

It was no different at home, where Adam who worked as a fitness trainer -- not a very good one I had to say due to his poor people skills -- treated the house like a hotel and his long-suffering parents like employees. Today he was texting on his phone, treating his poor mother like she didn't exist. I wished Aunty Georgina and Adam a happy Easter as they obviously were not Jehovah's Witnesses, but while Georgina wished me all the best Adam simply grunted, shrugged his shoulders and sighed, turning and walking in the opposite direction texting on his phone again.

Adam being a pig ignorant prick too arrogant to talk to his own cousin was nothing new. One of the strangest things about Adam was that he had no appreciation of fiction, possibly the only person I had ever met like this. There was not a single genre that seemed to appeal to him, nor movies, television or books. I had watched Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies with Adam when we were younger, and he had no emotional reaction to them all. And in real life he showed no interest in anyone except himself.

Finishing work on Thursday I had gone home, and sighed when I saw the visiting car parked in the driveway. It was Kate Bradshaw, my sister's best friend forever. At high school Morgan and Kate had been part of a larger group of female friends, and three years on since Year 12 the girls had obviously taken different paths in their careers and study paths and had drifted apart to some extent.

Morgan would still hang out with her girlfriends from high school either in Brisbane or down on the Gold Coast, or of course communicate with them online. However, Kate and Morgan were still in contact all the time, best friends forever or BFF's. I wished this wasn't the case.

One look at Kate's car immediately told one what sort of person the now 21-year-old journalism student was. It was adorned with stickers promoting every left wing cause in Australia and around the world, no matter how insane it was. Climate change, gay rights, trans rights, aboriginal rights, pro refugee groups, rights for criminals, condemnations of the patriarchy, banning horse racing and wildlife parks and zoos, you name it and it could be found on Kate's car.

Back when we were kids and then teenagers at school Kate had always been kind of irritating, definitely an annoying, politically correct, left-wing do-gooder type who didn't know when to stop being a busy body, such as lecturing the rest of her classmates on how we should be vegetarian like her. But since about 2012 things had really stepped up. It was no wonder when considering her family. Kate's parents were lefty academics and her younger brother Chris -- always an effeminate sort of boy -- was now officially non binary. Their house was like an indoctrination camp for social justice warriors. And they were all now vegans, as opposed to vegetarians as before.

Walking to the house I was thinking about Kate so much that I nearly tripped over a stump where a Norfolk Island pine tree had once stood, before Mum had gotten it cut down about four years ago when it got some sort of coniferous disease and began to die. The then 13-year-old Kate of 2008 had been perhaps the most enthusiastic fan of Justin Bieber of my sister and her posse of friends, even writing fan fiction about the young Canadian singer about them as adults being married and living happily ever after in Canada. I could not express how much I wished that Kate's tween dreams had come true, and she was now happily married to Justin Bieber and lived in Canada. Queensland and Canada were very far apart geographically. Poor Justin Bieber though!

I could hear Kate in the kitchen, talking Morgan's head off about some issue Kate had her knickers in a twist about. Kate was capable of getting her knickers in a twist about any political issue if one did not agree with her, but in the current year of 2016 that took precedence. But was the first issue or the second issue? Both were pretty bad, but the second issue was far worse than the first. I might have avoided the kitchen but was pretty thirsty and wanted to get a sports drink so listened, and to my relief it was the first issue.

"If the people in the UK vote in favor of leaving the European Union in the May referendum, then the Government must simply ignore the result and remain with the EU," Kate asserted.

I shook my head. I don't know why the prospect of Britain withdrawing from the EU was such a big deal to her, it didn't really affect us thousands of miles away in Australia to any great degree. Kate claimed that democracy was important to her, but not it seemed when democratic results didn't go the left-wing way she wanted.

This was at the center of Kate's second obsession, that with the upcoming US Presidential Election in November, in which Kate stated that Democrat Hilary Clinton must win the election and become the first female president of America. Kate was also concerned that a wildcard Republican candidate, tycoon named Donald Trump might end up contesting the election and stealing Clinton's thunder to take the White House for himself.

While this was all nearly eight months away and Hilary Clinton had not secured the Democrat nomination much less Trump the equivalent Republican nomination, it didn't stop Kate getting her panties in a bunch about the topic practically every day. While Kate appeared confident that there was no way Trump would defeat Clinton should they end up contesting the 2016 presidential election, she had two solutions should the unthinkable happen. One, run the election again so Hilary Clinton would win. Two, if this strategy should fail, change the US constitution so that the election was overturned and incumbent president Barrack Obama would serve a third term in the Oval office. Again, so much for democracy.

Entering the kitchen, I could see that Morgan was exasperated at the next leftie, greenie thing Kate was prattling on about, but had her game face on. Fortunately for Mum and me, Morgan seemed to be immune from being indoctrinated by Kate's left-wing views, and in fact had expressed frustration about this aspect of her friend when Kate wasn't around.

However, woe-betide anyone who spoke badly of Kate in front of Morgan. Nobody except Morgan was permitted to say anything even remotely critical about her bestie, something Scott and I had learned the hard way when we complained about the endlessly politically correct Kate reprimanding us for saying 'black boy' rather than 'grass tree' for this type of Australian plant that grew in our garden. It was like Scott and I had eaten my twin sister's supply of chocolate when she had PMS, even though Morgan herself was exasperated the time she innocently referred to Uluru by its old name of Ayers Rock, and was giving a lecture about it by her woke BFF.

Perhaps because neither Morgan nor Kate had a boyfriend I had sometimes pondered how close my twin and her BFF really were. While Morgan had other friends sleep over at our house sometimes, they always slept on a portable bed or on the couch. Morgan and Kate would sometimes share the same bed, or lie on top of Morgan's bed or on the couch together. Once when Kate slept over she forgot her toothbrush, and Morgan simply let Kate use hers.

Given my mistake the other week walking in on Morgan while she was on the loo, my sister obviously and quite reasonably valued her privacy when she went to the toilet. But with Kate, this rule seemed to be off the table. Not only would they would go into the bathroom together to shower or change, they would even sit on the toilet in front of each other, not just to pee but also if they needed to poo or were on their periods and needed pad and tampon changes.

True, in a larger group Morgan and Kate would go to the toilet with the other girls, but it was fairly standard behavior for young women and to my knowledge, they would just use cubicles next to each other. However, when Morgan had another female friend over and either she or the friend needed to use the loo, this would take place behind a closed and locked lavatory door. They never went in there with each other, unlike the case with Morgan and Kate.

To me it was weird and gross, but I was a guy, what the fuck did I know about it? Well, I did have the misfortune of having gone into the bathroom after Kate had been to the toilet, and nearly threw up because of the smell she left behind herself. It must have been Kate's vegan diet, I don't know how my sister managed to stay in the bathroom 5-10 minutes while Kate was pooing on the toilet and wiping her stinky arse. I would not want to be Kate's toilet paper that was for sure. Phew! Then again, as a trainee nurse Morgan would need to deal with some pretty gross things in her career. Perhaps going into the bathroom while her best friend was taking a shit was good training for my sister in the field of nursing?

"Hi Morgan, hi Kate," I said as I entered the kitchen and went to the fridge and Kate had taken a break from talking my sister's head off.

"Hi Corey," Morgan and Kate said in response. There was a five second break before Kate started up again.

"Morgan, please say that you'll come to the rally at my university next weekend," pleaded Kate. "It's really important we get as many people as we can, so we can get all refugees released from immigration detention and all future refugees allowed into Australia with less processing."

My sister was neutral in her reply. "Next weekend? I really don't think so, sorry Kate. I'll have at least one shift and I've got so much study to do..."

Kate as usual wasn't easily put off, and was prattling on and on about how important refugee rights were to her and how this should also be important to Morgan too rather than work and study. I discretely watched the two girls while drinking my juice, thinking this was nothing new.

Back in Year 12 we got to go to Melbourne on a school trip for our final year of school, and the insufferably woke Kate refused to go into the Fitzroy Gardens because Captain Cook's cottage was located there, and on another occasion at school several years earlier was upset about Australia's 1988 Bicentennial being referred to as such in history class. At present Kate's employment was at a bookshop so left wing that if even if Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin went there they would probably say it was too politically biased. And when graduating as a journalist, no doubt Kate would find employment at one of the many left-wing media outlets, and perhaps in ten years' time would run for parliament? God help Queensland and Australia if that happened.

So was there the danger that Kate and Morgan were more than friends, and I would end up with Kate as my lesbian sister-in-law, a nightmare scenario that had haunted my dreams many times? There was the closeness between them and a seeming lack of boundaries, but apart from that, nothing much.

Kate wore her brown hair long and dressed feminine, like today in a blouse, short floral skirt and sandals. Fortunately she never was into piercings and tattoos common to so many left-wingers -- like Morgan only Kate's ear lobes were pierced -- and while I couldn't be bothered saying it to her and setting off a drama, Kate's overall appearance was more conservative. She wasn't mannish in any way, and while one often saw same sex female partners with one woman femme and the other butch, it was far from unknown to see two lipstick lesbians together. Or two butch dykes.

It couldn't be more obvious that Kate, her parents and non-binary gay brother (or was he her sister this week) were pro-gay, lesbian and transgender. Only earlier this month they had gone to Sydney for the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, and couldn't have posted more about it online, with Kate sending Morgan so many selfies with drag queens and other photos my sister's phone never stopped beeping.

But this didn't mean Kate was herself a lesbian, or even bisexual. I had never seen Morgan nor Kate show any interest in women, but they did like guys. They had only ever dated boys. My sister had about as much interest in Kate's vagina as she did as her little finger, and the same was true with Kate's level of interest in Morgan's vagina. So my concern that Kate would become my sister-in-law in coming years was probably the result of an over-active imagination on my part, perhaps caused by the memory of Kate being mistaken for being my sister.

This was back in 2007 when Morgan and I were 12, and Mum had treated us to a day out at one of the theme parks on the Gold Coast, each of us allowed to take a friend, me obviously taking Scott and Morgan taking Kate. With Morgan and I looking nothing alike as a twin brother and sister, two ride attendants at one of the attractions thought that Kate and I with brown hair and brown eyes were brother and sister, and Scott and Kate with their blonde hair and blue eyes also siblings.

Scott and Morgan had always gotten along well so that wouldn't have been an issue for them, but I was horrified by the prospect and Kate had never really been friendly with me, so it would not have worked so well for us. And like me Scott found Kate thoroughly irritating, so if she was my twin rather than my twin's best friend, I doubt he would have visited my house very often when we were growing up.

So far this Thursday had involved working with the bossy and irritating Bella and then coming home to my sister's annoying woke BFF Kate who was even more irritating, but possibly the most irritating person regularly in my life I hadn't seen at all so far today, but this would change. In the background, I heard a door open and into the kitchen he walked, Morgan and my cousin Jamie, younger son of Aunty Georgina and Uncle Doug.

There wasn't much of Jamie, at age 19 he was a five feet five runt, skinny with untidy red hair, and the same fair skin and green eyes often seen with this people of this hair color. But while Jamie may have been small in stature, his personality was very large and filled the room whenever he entered. He was doing it right now, wearing his gaming headset and giggling his hyena-like laugh.

Jamie had come to live with us because he was causing his parents so much stress, Uncle Doug having to increase his heart medication and Aunty Georgina more powerful anti-depressants. While Adam stressed his parents enough with his arrogance and abrasive personality, Jamie brought their parents stress on levels that went right off the charts.

Long diagnosed with ADHD, Jamie could not be trusted to take his medication to make him less hyperactive, not that it seemed to do any good in curtailing his disruptive behavior either now or in the past. His catalogue of bad behavior at home, school, in sports, in the community and at work -- he was on his last warning at his part time job at a computer games store and failing at the IT course at TAFE he was supposed to be studying -- was extensive and made him one of the most annoying people I had met.

Jamie was today wearing a bright red tee-shirt with Donald Trump's face on Mount Rushmore among George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson. It certainly attracted Kate's attention making her look like she was sucking an unripe lemon or lime. I had no doubts Jamie had worn the tee-shirt to piss her off, it definitely wouldn't be the first time. He scratched his balls through the shorts he wore on his bottom half, and talked to whoever he was playing games with through his head-set.

"Sorry, just gotta get a drink, dying of thirst here," Jamie declared, again scratching his groin as he opened the fridge. "Some moo juice will do." Jamie took milk from the fridge, and despite being told not to drink from the carton directly so many times he did just this, milk dribbling down his face, Morgan and Kate regarding him with disgust.

His thirst sated, Jamie returned the carton to the fridge and spoke into the headset again about their success in online gaming. "Got through that level at last, blew away those Negro soldiers guarding the last staircase, like suck shit you stupid mother-fuckers, go and suck each other's dicks homos! Now let's go and fuck up those Chinamen karate experts up on the next stage."

Jamie evidently needed more nutrition to fuel his gaming, so got into the chocolate biscuits, taking six and stuffing one into his mouth.

"Oh you pig Jamie," Morgan said, but Jamie paid her no attention, clearly more interested in Kate and how much he had pissed her off and keen to get back to gaming with his online friends.

Although Jamie was an obnoxious little pain in the arse he did have at least one use in the world, offending the endlessly politically correct Kate. The way he did it showed more intelligence underneath than the slacker he normally presented as. His use of the archaic N and C words for Black and Asian people he knew would cause nearly as much offense to woke people like Kate, yet they were not so terrible as the really bad N and C words so he could get away with it and not be branded a bigot. The same as him using the term 'homo' for homosexuals, rather than poofter or faggot, both of which I had heard him use on other occasions.

I did some work on a my part of a group assignment from university and thankfully Kate went on her way, me hoping that it would be the last time I ever saw her, but of course this would not be the case. I could hear Morgan and Jamie squabbling as he disturbed her while she was trying to study too, before Jamie went back to playing his online games and Mum got home from work.

It was clear that Mum had endured a long day at work this Easter Thursday, as a travel agent no doubt dealing with pre-Easter travel chaos for the long weekend. It didn't take long for an argument to break out when Mum found that Jamie hadn't mopped the bathroom and laundry floors like she told him before leaving for work, Mum eventually winning the argument by screeching at her slacker nephew and he reluctantly removed himself from his gaming devices and did as he was told, mumbling and grumbling the whole time.

"I hope my sister and brother-in-law appreciate what I do for them taking on that nephew of mine," I heard Mum say under her breath as she took a bag of trash out to the wheelie bin.

This was true. Morgan and I knew what Jamie was like only too well, but we could understand why Mum would try to save Aunty Georgina from becoming a pill-addicted zombie in a mental institution or Uncle Doug one day snapping and either murdering his youngest son, killing himself or perhaps both. Jamie's list of bad behavior that drove his parents closer to insanity would fill a novel, and not just any novel -- novels written by JRR Tolkien or Leo Tolstoy.

Perhaps the incident that was the final straw was a long weekend trip for the family in Surfers Paradise, in which Jamie unfortunately got hold of a supersized cup of Fanta. Jamie was supposed to limit sugar intake due to his hyperactivity, but as evidenced as him taking six chocolate biscuits earlier, was a sugar addict. I don't know how that cousin of mine given his diet managed to look like the sole boy among a group of girls in a residential care program for anorexics but somehow he did. If I ate half of what Jamie did I would probably weigh close to 300 pounds.

In the case of the Fanta however, Jamie only drank a minimal amount of the sweet orange flavored soft drink in the high-rise apartment they were staying, but this was enough to set off his ADHD and think of a really great idea. This was going out onto the balcony and throwing the remainder of the soft drink over his two male cousins -- the sons of Uncle Doug's brothers -- who were standing talking on the pavement 12 floors below. Unfortunately, Jamie forgot to take into account the wind factor and other laws of physics, and rather than hit the two boys the cup and its contents went off the intended trajectory and instead showered Uncle Doug and another guest at the apartments -- a six foot six Maori guy built like a brick shithouse -- with orangeade and ice.

Uncle Doug was understandably incandescent with rage at being showered with a cup of cold, sticky orange soft drink, and not only had to deal with the furious Maori determined to kick Jamie's arse but the angry management at the apartments threatening to call the cops over the dangerous situation of objects being thrown off a high-rise balcony, ordering the family to leave and banning them from returning.

It was perhaps a pity that the angry Maori didn't teach Jamie a lesson that day, as my cousin learned absolutely nothing from the experience and was still pulling idiotic practical jokes any chance he got, and this evening Morgan was in the firing line. My sister had just loaded the dishwasher and turned it on, when in walked Jamie and before she could stop him, lifted up the cover while it was going, water spraying all over Morgan who screeched in rage, while Jamie collapsed in fits of laughter while holding up his phone to record the chaos he had created.

"Jamie, you fucking idiot, look at what you did!" screamed Morgan. She indicated the white tee-shirt and blue jeans she wore, now soaked on the chest and in the crotch area.

"You should see your fucking face Morgan," laughed Jamie. "In fact you will see it when I post your reaction online. But I don't think the thousands of pervy guys all over the world who watch it will be looking at your face, they'll be more interested in you looking like you're in a wet-tee shirt contest. Or that you're a girl who looks either way too old or way too young to have such serious bladder control issues." Jamie again collapsed in fits of laughter.

It did look as though Morgan had peed her pants with the huge wet patch at the front of her jeans. Not that I was going to say anything, I didn't want to piss her off any more than she was now. And while I didn't like to think about it, my sister did look like she was in a wet tee-shirt competition with the white fabric of her saturated tee-shirt showing off the shape of her breasts and the outline of her bra.

Wet tee-shirt contests of course no longer happened in the more politically correct world of the 2010s. This didn't stop men wishing them to return though, and in Year 12 there had been a controversy at high school when some graffiti was written on the walls in the boys' toilets in which the fact that my sister was a very well-endowed 18-year-old girl who wore D cup bras was mentioned. One pervert wrote that he would like to see Morgan Gibson compete in a wet tee-shirt contest, and others made distasteful comments that Morgan would have back problems in middle-age, that when she had a baby it would never go hungry, that they thought the Twin Towers had been destroyed and that if Morgan had been on the Titanic she would definitely not have drowned.

"You had better delete that video right now Jamie, or I am going to take that phone and ram it up your arse so hard no surgeon will ever find it," Morgan stormed.

"Wow, that's a coincidence, the first guy to comment on the site I posted the video to wanted to ram something up your arse too, Morgan," smirked Jamie. "Of course though, it wasn't your phone..."

"Give that to me right now Jamie, you disgusting little pervert!" snapped Morgan, reaching to grab the phone.

"What is going on in here?" came another female voice, and the tall blonde figure of Mum entered the kitchen. She had now changed out of her travel agents uniform, and like Morgan was now wearing a white tee-shirt and jeans, her feet bare.

Unfortunately, the reason my sister ended up being discussed in graffiti in the boys' toilets was that the initial vandals had written a league table of the mothers, and Mum got top place. Comments about the daughters spun off from comments about their mothers, leading to a spider-web of graffiti fortunately quickly removed when school administrators found out about it.

There were numerous creepy comments about the size of Mum's boobs (like Morgan she was a D cup), and others about what they wanted to do with - or to be more exact to -- my mother. One comment was a recommendation to marry Morgan asserting that you need to look at the mother and Marnie Gibson was super-hot in her 40s, so therefore the same would be true of Morgan in middle age. Some other comments were even weirder, like one guy writing that he couldn't decide if he wanted to be a pair of Mum's panties or a pair of Morgan's panties.

"Jamie opened up the dishwasher, soaked me and recorded it and now he's going to post the video online for the world to see!" Morgan protested, indicating her soaked clothes.

Mum turned to Jamie. "You delete the video right now and apologize to Morgan."

Jamie smirked. "Anything you say Aunt Marnie." He pressed some buttons on his phone although whether he deleted the video I could not say, he was pretty sly with IT. He then turned to Morgan, grinning inanely, and with his fingers crossed he called out, "Sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry!"

Mum was not impressed. "Okay Jamie if you're going to act stupid, it's time out for you." She pushed my cousin into the corner, taking his phone and making him stand with his face to the wall. "It's ten minutes in the naughty corner for you."

Jamie's expression turned sour. "That's stupid Aunty Marnie, the naughty corner is for three-year-olds."

"Well Jamie, if you're going to act like a three-year-old then I'll treat you like a three-year-old," Mum asserted. "Now stand there and shut up."

"This is fucking stupid," protested Jamie, his face petulant and sulky.

"Fifteen minutes in the naughty corner then, you foul-mouthed little shit," said Mum, not budging an inch.

Morgan passed by on her bare feet, making for the bathroom to change out of her wet clothes, and the stupid smirk returned to Jamie's face.

"Hey Morgan, the adult incontinence products are in aisle six of the supermarket," he laughed, my sister's face becoming even angrier as she stormed away, and the door to her bedroom slammed closed.

"Twenty minutes, Jamie," said Mum.

Jamie clearly didn't believe her, and Panther entered the kitchen. Jamie immediately made a loud screeching and growling cat noise and hissed. Panther in turn hissed back, and ran off growling, Jamie laughing at freaking out the cat.

"Thirty minutes in the naughty corner," Mum said. "Just keep going, we can stand here all night if need be."

Mum certainly wasn't going to budge. Before Morgan and I were born she had been a flight attendant, and obviously had to be firm with problematic passengers in this role. Years later and Mum's ADHD nephew was no match for her in a battle of wills.

After some sulking about the affront to his dignity of being placed in the naughty corner at the age of 19, he accepted his fate and stood facing the wall for half an hour, while Mum stood by timing him on her phone before releasing from his punishment. Jamie headed off to bed, and so did the rest of us.

Jamie however never learned his lessons, and the next morning for Good Friday he was up to his old tricks at breakfast, hyperactive at making a nuisance of himself at breakfast. Mum and I weren't working today due to the holiday, but Morgan was already wearing her scrubs uniform, indicating that she had a shift later today.

However, Morgan and I had one thing we had to do today before starting our days properly. Neither my sister nor I spoke of it, until Mum said, "Morgan and Corey, don't forget you have to go and see your Grandma Hilda before you go about your days."

Both of us groaned. "Oh, why do we have to go and see her?" Morgan protested.

"Yeah, it's not like she's glad to see us," I pointed out.

"Aside from Trina and Amy, you are her only grandchildren," Mum pointed out. "Your grandfather Stan walked out on the family years ago and went to live in Darwin, your father lives in Tasmania and is estranged from his mother, and she is also estranged from your Aunty Robin, Uncle Jeremy and Trina and Amy due to them being Jehovah's Witnesses. I'm the first to admit Grandma Hilda can be a difficult woman at times ..."

"Yeah, tell me about it," I said. "She never says anything nice to us, never shows any gratitude."

"And if you heard some of the things that she says about you, Mum," Morgan pointed out.

"Don't worry, she's said them to my face plenty of times before I married your father, when I was married to your father and in all the years since your father and I divorced," said Mum. "Slut, tramp, harlot, floozy, bitch, tart; you think of it, she's said it to me directly and God only knows how many times behind my back. That's why I never go with you, and before you kids learned to drive, never went in the house with you, because she's banned me from ever setting foot on her property."

"Then why do you make us put up with her then?" Morgan protested. "She hates you."

"She's a lonely old lady who's had a hard life thanks to her husband walking out and leaving her to raise two kids on her own, and I don't think that having her grandson and granddaughter pay her a visit for her birthday, Christmas and on Good Friday is unreasonable, do you?" Mum asserted. "That's three days out of 365."

Jamie, his mouth full of cereal he was masticating, laughed and was unable to resist being a smart-ass. "You mean 366 days, Aunty Marnie. This is 2016, and it's a leap year."

"Did anyone ask your opinion Jamie?" Mum asked. "No, so keep quiet."

Jamie of course did not heed the advice. He turned to me and Morgan, and made an L shape on his forehead and laughed. "Suck shit losers, you have to go and see the stupid old bag today because she's your Grandma, but I don't have to because she's not my grandmother."

My sister and I glared back at him, me giving Jamie the 'up yours' hand gesture while Morgan returned the 'loser' gesture, by placing her own thumb and forefinger on her forehead and pointing at him.

Mum turned to her nephew. "Well congratulations Jamie, I was looking for a volunteer to scrub and clean the toilets today. And you just nominated yourself, so congratulations."

Jamie recoiled. "Clean the toilets? Yuck, that's gross Aunty Marnie. Do you have any idea what you and your two kids do in the toilets?" My cousin made it sound like he was some prototype of a new superior type of human who never needed to go to the toilet.

Mum answered dead-pan. "I think I have a fair idea, thank you Jamie."

"It's not Corey I'm worried about so much," Jamie guffawed, pointing at me. "It's you and Morgan. You're both women and you get your periods, that means blood goes into the toilet one week every month and then you expect me to clean it? That's so disgusting. And Morgan has her girlfriends over, and they pull their knickers down and sit their stinky butts on the toilet seats to piss, shit and fart. It's a proven scientific fact that girl's poo stinks worse than guy's poo, and on average one in four of them is menstruating at the time."

"Shut up Jamie," Morgan warned, giving him a death glare.

Jamie was not bothered in the slightest and carried on being a smart-ass. "And that stupid woke SJW friend of yours Kate, she's the fucking worst, how can anybody's shit stink that bad? Fucking hell, I go in there to chuck a piss after Kate's taken a crap, and the smells from her arse make me go blah!"

Thinking he was Australia's greatest comedian, Jamie feigned vomiting all over the kitchen table and continued. "Kate really needs to see a doctor about what comes out of her bowels," Jamie asserted. "To stink that bad, she probably has stomach, intestinal or rectal cancer or multiple organ failure. One day Morgan we're going to wake up to find you dead in your bed, and it will be because Kate slept over and farted in her sleep."

Although it was amusing hearing Jamie insulting Kate like that and getting Morgan madder and madder and madder, I kept a poker face, before Mum decided the best policy was to ignore Jamie's antics and ordered him to clear the kitchen table and then to get started scrubbing the toilets.

"But Aunty Marnie, it's Good Friday, a public holiday for the most important day on the Christian calendar," said Jamie. "You can't make me work on Good Friday."

"It might be different if you actually did some sort of work on every other day of the year Jamie, but as you don't I don't care, now get to work right now!"

Mum was clearly not in the mood to take any nonsense, and so after collecting some things and the hot cross buns and chocolates for our grandmother, Morgan and I made our escape, leaving Mum to try and get Jamie to comply with her orders. She would more likely have more success with getting a chimpanzee to obey and follow her directions.

Morgan drove on the way there, our grandmother's house in the suburb of Indooroopilly in Brisbane's inner west. It was a pretty suburb with lots of nice gardens and plenty of greenery, and lots of nice old-style homes many in the traditional Queenslander style and a large shopping precinct with all the amenities and good public transport. Unfortunately due to its close proximity to the Brisbane River and being low-lying like neighboring suburbs Toowong and Fig Tree Pocket Indooroopilly had experienced problems with flooding in 2011.

Not that it had affected Grandma's house in any way, despite problems in the street with excess water Grandma had not the slightest issue with flooding despite her undertaking no flood preparations. It seemed to defy the laws of physics. Mum had sarcastically commented to Aunty Georgina that witchcraft was the likely explanation for this.

So was Grandma grateful her house was spared even the slightest problem with flooding in one of Queensland's worst weather disasters? Not at all, she complained about the noise emergency services were making stemming the rising flows of the river, showed no empathy towards neighbors who had problems with water entering their property and was even scornful towards and distasteful of those affected by the floods, and dismissive of our concerns for her during the crisis, telling Mum to 'piss off' when she called her.

Morgan turned into Grandma's street, and then put on the car's indicator to go into the driveway of our grandmother's house. My sister pulled the car to a halt, turned off the engine and we sat looking at the worst house in the nice street, Grandma too cheap to pay for even the slightest maintenance on the property, the garden overgrown and no doubt attracting mice, rats and other pests.

"So, are you ready to go into the witch's house Corey?" Morgan asked me.

I sighed. "About as ready as I'll ever be, best to get it over with. Still, it's got to be better than listening to Jamie pissing off Mum all day."

"You're right there," said Morgan. My sister paused for a second, then said, "Talking about Jamie, have you ever noticed how he and Adam never interact at all?"

I nodded. "As a matter of fact I have. Like when they were kids I never remember them playing together, or talking or even just hanging out watching TV. They're brothers, it's kind of odd."

"Even today, they don't interact," Morgan observed. "I mean Adam is a selfish and arrogant prick and Jamie is an annoying little shit, but you never hear Adam complaining about Jamie, or Jamie trying to annoy Adam by playing practical jokes. Jamie never talks about Adam -- good, bad or indifferent - and if you happen to encounter Adam, he never asks about his younger brother."

"That is really odd, it's like they don't have any effect on each other at all," I said. "And even stranger, Jamie makes it his life's work to annoy as many people as he can, yet not Adam."

It certainly was a mystery about our cousins, together Adam and Jamie reacted as much as two noble gases placed in a laboratory test tube together. But wasn't a mystery was how our grandmother would react to us when we knocked on the door of her house.

The front door was flung open and Grandma Hilda glared at us, her eyes equally unblinking and unwelcoming. "I was wondering what time you two brats would get here to waste my time," she spat, before opening the fly-screen door. "Well come on, get inside, I don't have all day!"

Spending time with our paternal grandmother was the same awful experience as it always was. My sister and I heard nothing else but a diatribe about what an asshole Grandpa Stan was, what an awful son our father Rick was and what a terrible daughter Aunt Robyn was, marrying a Jehovah's Witness and raising two Jehovah's Witness daughters.

Our grandmother gave her daughter-in-law her usual diatribe, Morgan and I forced to sit there and listen to her slander our mother. The way Grandma carried on it was like Mum in the mid-1990s was going around having affairs with hundreds of men all over town, and all it took to get her into bed was to ask.

The real reason was that Mum and Dad's marriage ended was more unusual one. Dad despite having all the best intentions and going to marriage counselling with Mum and parenting classes simply could not adjust to being a husband and father, there was a trial separation which turned to full separation and divorce, with Dad leaving town and going to live in Tasmania after getting a new job in Hobart, where he remained to this day.

Growing up, Morgan and I would some contact with our father such as going to Hobart for school holidays or him arranging his leave so they would fall in school holidays and he could come to Queensland and spend time with us. Unfortunately Dad was never at ease with being a father and these times were awkward. Now Morgan and I were young adults we heard from him far less. In nearly 20 years since Dad and Mum split, Dad had never remarried nor found a girlfriend. Relationships and having kids were just not his thing I guess.

It was little wonder that Dad struggled as a husband and parent, with such lousy parents to raise him and Aunt Robyn. The bitter old lady in front of us who was a bitter middle aged woman and an equally bitter young woman in previous years and who never had a single nice thing to say about anyone or anything. The abrasive and irresponsible drinker and gambler who would chase anything in a skirt outside of his marriage in the form of Grandpa Stan whom Morgan and I had never actually met. Our paternal grandfather who abandoned his wife, son and daughter to run off to Darwin with some floozy who was showing off her shit all over Queensland when visiting from the Northern Territory, then not paid a cent of maintenance for his kids. Dad may have had his failings as a father, but at least he paid child support not like his own father and many other deadbeat Dads all over Australia.

Grandma was highly critical of the hot cross buns and chocolates we bought her, and severely reprimanded Morgan and I for our failings as grandchildren. Apparently as the hot cross buns contained glace cherries they were not genuine hot cross buns and therefore worthless. They would be fed to the many ibises that frequented her garden at the first available opportunity. The box of chocolates was also another blunder on behalf of my sister and I as it contained white, milk and dark chocolates, and the white chocolates were too sweet, the dark chocolates too bitter and the milk chocolates contained some with fillings not to Grandma's taste, and what were we planning to do anyway? Give her diabetes and reduce her time on the planet so we could get hold of her house and money when she died, at least according to our grandmother.

Morgan and I could only roll our eyes and look at the wall clock, which seemed to be ticking slower than usual. The complaints about the food were nothing new. For her last birthday we bought Grandma some marmalade, only for her to complain that the said marmalade contained grapefruit and lime in addition to oranges and lemons.

Having a granddaughter who was studying to become a nurse and a grandson who was studying to become an accountant would normally be a sense of pride for a grandparent. Unfortunately the reverse was true for Grandma Hilda. I was advised by my grandmother that she had never trusted me, and the reason that I was studying to become an accountant was so I could rip off people and steal their money. She then advise me that she knew I was after her money, but that I would never get my hands on it. It was probably true that she would not get scammed. Grandma's idea of banking was using a pass book and writing out cheques, which would make it hard for anyone to defraud her using modern technology.

According to my grandmother, the only reason that Morgan was studying to be a nurse was so she could land herself a doctor and become a trophy wife living a life of luxury on her future husband's dime. This was because like our mother, Morgan was a bad and promiscuous woman, and the source of all the trouble for my mother and sister had large breasts, which broadcasted their immorality to men similarly lacking in morals. The fact that Mum and Morgan had large boobs was all genetics, they could not help their breast size any more than they could help being tall or being blondes with blue eyes.

Fortunately it was Morgan's job that got us out of there. "Well happy Easter Grandma, but we really have to be going. Some of the girls and I need to study before our shift, and Corey has a busy day too."

"Have a nice Easter, Grandma," I said.

"Glad to see you're both going and have stopped wasting my time," Grandma snapped. "I suppose I'll next see you on my birthday, that's if you two rotten kids can even bother to call."

Morgan and I made our hasty exit as our Grandmother started on our mother and our father again, and my sister reversed fast out of the driveway and into the street. Morgan drove to the hospital for her shift, and she and I switched places in the car, me taking the wheel.

"Hope your shift goes well today," I said.

"Thanks Corey," said Morgan. "Hope your practice session goes well. Oh and give my regards to Scott and his um -- admirer - when you see them."

Morgan and I laughed and exchanged a wave as she headed for the hospital and I drove away. My next destination was my best friend Scott's house not too far away. I stopped the car and walked to the front door, and it was answered by Scott, the family's dog -- a blue heeler named Larry -- barking at my arrival.

"So how was your Grandma this morning when you and Morgan went so see her?" Scott asked after we said hello.

"About the same as usual, Grandma never changes," I said. "So, have your folks headed down to Byron Bay?"

Scott nodded. "Yeah, drove down there yesterday afternoon, so it's just me. Well it should be just me."

A voice was audible from another part of the house, young, high-pitched, female, Asian with broken English. "Hey Scott, is someone here?"

"No Vicki, I've just taken to talking to myself," Scott mumbled sarcastically, running his hand through his blonde hair, rolling his blue eyes and stifling a sigh. Turning around Scott then called out, "It's Corey, Vicki."

The tiny figure of Vicki entered, the 19-year-old just four feet ten when barefoot as she was now and built like a willow branch. She wore some jeans with a variety cartoon animal patches sewn into the denim, and a tee-shirt with cartoon cats on the front. Glasses covered her brown eyes, and her long dark hair was today styled into two loose pigtails.

"Oh hi Corey, how you today?" Vicki asked, smiling which made her even prettier.

I returned the smile. "Hi Vicki, good thanks. And you?"

"Really good, I look forward to seeing you guys play, you very talented." Vicki replied to me, but she looked at Scott the whole time, her pretty face filled with admiration.

She then addressed Scott directly. "Scott, washing machine just finish. It okay to wait five minutes while I hang my bras and my panties out to dry? You no leave without me?"

"I wouldn't dream of it Vicki," said Scott, me seeing my friend's relief as she left the room to take care of her underwear.

I couldn't resist teasing Scott about the situation. "So, you still regret the day your parents said they were taking on a pretty, 19-year-old female international student from Thailand?"

"Ah shut up, Corey," said Scott. "You know how when we were growing up my big sister used to boss me around?"

"Oh yeah," I smirked. My own sister could be bossy at times -- Morgan probably the dominant twin out of us -- but she had nothing on Scott's older sister Louise.

"I would give anything to go back in time and have Louise ordering me around than living with Vicki," Scott lamented. "Or Louise, her husband and their kids moving in here."

"Oh come on mate, Vicki isn't that bad," I said. "She's young and kind of naïve, doesn't speak English too well and is relatively new to Australia, and she's very pretty, really cute. I tell you what, I'll swap you, Vicki can come and live with us and Jamie can come and live with you and your parents."

Scott smiled wryly, knowing only too well what Jamie was like. "I'll have to think about that one, and my folks would never go for it. They think it's all really funny, Vicki having a crush on and stalking me."

"I don't think Vicki is a stalker," I said. "And she can't be that bad. Just how scary can a naïve, four feet ten girl from Thailand really be?"

"You have no idea," said Scott. "Following me around the house, looking over my shoulder, sketching pictures of me in a notebook and reading and correcting my university assignment when I had gone to get a drink."

"Was Vicki right about the corrections she made?" I asked.

"Yes," Scott admitted grudgingly. "But that's not the point. She turns up at work, walks around the house in her bra and her knickers to set up chance encounters with me and the other night I fell asleep in front of the TV and wake up close to midnight with Vicki sitting across the way looking at me. Just staring at me while I was asleep. Then there was the time she was lying on my bed, asleep in her underwear. She claimed she got up to get a drink of water when half asleep and got the wrong bedroom, but I don't believe her."

I laughed. "I'm sure you're not complaining about the bras and knickers thing."

"Vicki even left a pair of her knickers on my bedroom floor one time, worn knickers too," Scott said. "She claimed Mum and Dad's dog had brought them in, but I don't think so. And that's not even the strangest thing. The other morning, I was taking a shower and thought I heard the door open, thought I was imagining things, then I hear what sounds like water running. So I look out from the shower door, and there's Vicki sitting on the toilet, her skirt up around her waist and her knickers around her ankles taking a piss."

I couldn't help but laugh at this to Scott's annoyance. "That's really weird. Did she say why she came in the bathroom like that?"

"Only that she had a bathroom emergency and couldn't hold it, and that my parents were still asleep and she didn't want to wake them up to use the ensuite toilet," Scott lamented. "It would have been bad enough if she had just needed a piss, but she stayed sitting on the toilet for the next five minutes to have a shit, talking to me the whole time, even when she was wiping her arse. And she didn't sit on the loo with her knees closed, her legs were wide apart showing off her pussy. And Vicki is really, really hairy down there. It looked like a spider between her legs, you know, 1970s porn type hairy? And even when she finished and flushed the toilet, she stayed in the bathroom to chat when I was drying off and getting dressed."

I shook my head, thinking about the time I had walked in on Morgan while she was using the toilet, and decided to offer something positive. "At least Vicki wasn't on her period that day, I guess."

"No, but that's another thing, she has it now and keeps talking to me about it," sighed Scott. "Like I'm her gay BFF or something. It happens every time it's Vicki's time of the month. I could go on a quiz show and my special subject would be Vicki's menstrual cycle."

Again, I was unable to stop laughing. "Yeah Corey, laugh it up," Scott grumbled. "You're as bad as my parents, Mum and Dad think it's cute and funny that Vicki has a crush on me and won't leave me alone. Imagine if this was years ago, before Louise moved out, got married and had kids, and they took on a male overseas student who got a crush on my sister and wouldn't leave her alone? It wouldn't be so funny then, would it?"

Scott probably did have a point, there was a bit of a double standard there, and an overseas male student harassing the daughter would be viewed far worse than a young overseas female student harassing the son. However, as Vicki returned inside having finished hanging out her bras and her knickers on the line she entered the lounge room it was impossible to see the teenager as a crazy and obsessive yandere- type stalker.

With her petite size, glasses and pretty innocent face coupled with her cartoon cats tee-shirt and jeans with patches of cartoon animals on them, Vicki looked as harmless as a rabbit as she sat down in an armchair, putting on first a pair of white ankle socks with cartoon animals on the cotton to cover her bare feet, then some cute white sneakers.

After several delays -- over-sharing Vicki said she needed to get some extra period pads to put in her purse - and Scott first forgot to leave food for the dog and then forgot some Easter Eggs he planned to take to his younger cousins -- we were in the car. Scott sat in the passenger seat, Vicki in the back and we were off to our next destination for Good Friday afternoon -- practice for the band.

At school Scott and I had been into musical, and with three likewise musical friends Rosie, Trent and Emma we had formed a band, of which I played the bass guitar. The problem was that we were nothing more than a garage band, and that finding time to practice with all five of us having study, work and sports commitments was difficult, so meet-ups for practice sessions were fewer and further between. Plus the only place we could practice was interstate, however living in Brisbane this was not as dramatic as it would have been in other states or territories.

Scott's grandparents owned a property which was a bit unusual, having a large barn-like structure out the back from the house and a garage to the side. It was a semi-rural sort of property, and just across the border in New South Wales in Tweed Heads, Coolangatta on the Queensland side just a five minute walk away.

The sunlight that filled the bright blue Queensland skies earlier in the morning was intermittent now during the drive down the Pacific Motorway to the Gold Coast. Large fluffy white clouds had filled the sky along with larger grey ones, and it seemed that the weather forecast for Good Friday of a sunny morning turning cloudy in the afternoon and rain by evening was accurate.

Soon we were in the southern part of the Gold Coast beyond Burleigh Heads, and driving down through Palm Beach and Currumbin, a plane coming down low over the highway on descent to land at the nearby airport on the border. I seemed to have made good time, but to Scott he must have felt as though I was driving to Port Macquarie on the New South Wales mid-north coast given he had his admirer in the back seat fawning all over him the whole way. My biggest challenge was keeping a straight face.

I drove through Tugun, and into the streets of Coolangatta filled with high rise apartments and Norfolk Island pines and palm trees, Point Danger and its iconic lighthouse in view as the New South Wales border and Tweed Heads approached.

"Oh, we travel through time," Vicki giggled from the back seat as we crossed over into the Tweed Coast.

Scott was clearly exasperated and had to hide his annoyance, while I played along with the time travel joke and laughed. Technically Vicki was correct; we had changed time zone due to daylight savings which New South Wales followed from October to April, but Queensland did not.

It was a real novelty for interstate and overseas tourists, but not so much for locals who lived and worked in South Queensland and the New South Wales Northern Rivers region. The change of time-zones over the summer months often led to confusion, and Mum had lost count of the number of times tourists she had booked on flights from the Gold Coast airport had gotten it wrong.

I saw some people taking selfies of themselves standing in the median strip of Boundary Road taking selfies of themselves standing half in New South Wales and half in Queensland, a white ibis photo-bombing one family's group selfie as the bird came in to land behind them. We continued on to the street where Scott's grandparents lived -- Scott had advised they weren't home today but he had the keys to the building where we practiced -- and I pulled the car to a halt in the driveway. Less than 30 seconds later a second car driven by Trent with Rosie in the front seat and Emma in the back pulled in.

The garage where we practiced was perfect because Scott's grandfather had sound-proofed it, allowing him to pursue his hobbies of woodworking and fixing classic cars without disturbing his neighbors. A large Golden Fleece sign on the wall showed Scott's grandfather's love of cars. We got set up and began our practice sets -- me on my bass guitar, Trent on drums, Emma on the keyboard and backing vocalist while Scott and Rosie were lead guitarists and vocalists.

Playing music with my friends was something I always enjoyed and this Friday was no exception, however I like the rest of my band-mates doubted we could turn our music into success. For one, not one of us could write songs so we could only play covers.

Another was that we were possibly the most establishment-type band ever formed, nothing edgy about us at all. Had we been American and around in the mid-late 1950s, we would have been a band that parents and grandparents would have bought the records for and tried to get their teenagers and kids to listen to rather than this new-fangled rock and roll music. When we went to a music festival in Toowoomba to see amateur groups perform and to get some ideas for ourselves, there was a Christian band and a family Bluegrass band that were edgier than us.

Finally though, we had no special talents musically. Nothing about us stood out. Sure, the very attractive Rosie with her long strawberry blonde hair and pretty blonde Emma attracted positive male attention, but it didn't save us from the time we actually got to play for an audience for real, at a pub in Logan one Saturday afternoon, organized by Trent's older brother.

Unfortunately, the pub was in one of the Logan region's worst regions and the 'Bogans of Logan' were unimpressed with our music, to put it mildly. So much so that our set lasted just 15 minutes, we had beer, other drinks and half-eaten food thrown at us. All we could do is grab our instruments and get off stage, before racing out of there as fast as we could. It was a wonder the angry bogans didn't chase us all the way back to Brisbane with the sounds of the Benny Hill music playing in the background.

However, there were a couple of factors that might suggest that we might find success in the world of music. Rosie and Trent, who like everyone else had known each other since primary school had the year before become a couple. Nothing unusual there, except for the fact that Trent's surname was Taylor and Rosie's surname was Swift. How could that not be a sign that musical success wasn't on the horizon for us?

There was also the strange conundrum that despite us being a garage band with no success to speak of that we had a groupie. Well, one groupie in the form of Vicki who watched as perform -- to be exact her attention was all on Scott -- and acted like she was having a private concert by one of the world's most famous international bands.

I think that Vicki would have been open to the idea of taking off her panties and throwing them at Scott, but for the simple reason that she was menstruating, it would have been a bad idea. Scott would have been freaked out enough had Vicki thrown a pair of her knickers at him on a regular day; if Vicki's knickers had a blood filled period pad attached to them as would be the case today I think my friend would have run away so fast he would have arrived back in Brisbane within 5 minutes, then kept running all the way up to the Sunshine Coast.

We stopped playing for a break, and Vicki raised her hand like she was a schoolgirl. "Yes Vicki?" Scott asked.

"Scott, can I please go to the toilet?" Vicki asked.

Clearly weary of his admirer but remaining polite, Scott said, "Of course Vicki, it's just in there, in the laundry."

One unusual feature of the house was that the laundry and a spare room which Scott's grandmother used as a sewing room were on the back verandah, the laundry containing a toilet. "Thank you Scott, I be right back."

Vicki collected her shoulder bag and made her way to the toilet. "Take as much time as you need, and then more time on top of that Vicki," Scott said as soon as the teenager was out of earshot.

Trent smiled and laughed. "Don't tell me there's trouble in paradise, Scott."

"Yeah, how come you get your own personal groupie?" Rosie asked.

"Oh shut up you two, I've heard enough from Corey for one day," Scott lamented.

"Guys, keep it down, she's already on her way back," said Emma.

We looked over, and there was the petite figure of Vicki walking across the lawn. "Scott, can you help me? There no toilet paper."

"Are you sure?" Scott asked, not happy to see his fan back.

"I check, there no toilet paper anywhere," said Vicki. "I desperate to pee and go poo-poos, plus I on my period today."

Scott stifled a sigh. "Okay, I'll come and find some toilet paper for you, Vicki."

We watched as he led the young girl back to the verandah, and opening some storage cupboards near the laundry, and retrieved Vicki a roll of loo paper.

"Thank you so much Scott, you are my hero!" Vicki squealed, as she took the roll of toilet tissue, then threw her arms around her 'rescuer', the four of us watching from across the lawn, all amused by the scene.

Scott, taken aback, in turn hugged Vicki I guess to humor her, but this time the giggling, pig-tailed teen pulled back. "Ooh, better be careful, don't press my tummy too hard otherwise I do number two in my panties!" she exclaimed.

Vicki then took her toilet paper and headed for the lavatory, while Scott headed back to us. I saw the frosted glass of the toilet window illuminate, and the sound of Vicki closing and locking the toilet door was audible.

"My hero!" exclaimed Emma as Scott returned.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's all so funny," Scott grumbled. "That seems to be my role in life, finding crazy chicks who are having their periods toilet paper to wipe their arse."

"How do you mean?" I asked.

"Crazy Alice in Wonderland," said Scott. "Remember back in high school, that missing rich girl who was all over the news, turned up at our school complaining there was no toilet paper in the girls' toilets, and asking me to get her some out of the boys' toilets?"

"Oh God yes, I remember that," said Rosie. "She was bat-shit crazy."

"Wow - that was back in 2010," said Trent. He shook his head. "Can you believe it's been nearly six years now?"

Getting cold drinks, we went onto the lawn and stood under the jacaranda tree under a now completely overcast sky reminiscing about how we unexpectedly had our five minutes of fame in high school, when a 19-year-old woman by the name of Alice from one of Queensland's most wealthy and influential families left the house where she lived with her parents and younger siblings -- an amazing mansion on the Gold Coast canals that most people could never hope to live in a million years -- to go on a short walk and vanished without trace, the only thing found her mobile phone left at a bus stop in Southport.

The case of the missing rich girl became front page news and created headlines all over Australia, across the sea in New Zealand and all over the world, pictures of pretty Alice with her big blue eyes and long blonde hair becoming known to most of the human race. There were extensive police investigations, the rich family offered a huge reward and of course there were no end of theories, both in conversation and online.

A serial killer was mooted as a possible culprit, given there were several unexplained disappearances of pretty blonde young women in Brisbane, the Gold Coast and from Logan in previous years. A kidnapping for ransom was suggested, but no demand was received. Others believed that some dangerous people held a grudge against her tycoon father, and had abducted his daughter in revenge. Some suggested she had ran off with a boyfriend to start a new life. Was she kidnapped and being held against her will by a stalker, or a victim of human trafficking? Perhaps it was a publicity stunt? Was it a suicide or death by misadventure or accident such as drowning with her body not found? Could there have been a scandalous death covered up like a drug overdose, or maybe a case of amnesia?

People spoke of the disappearances of girls from wealthy and influential American families many years ago, like Dorothy Arnold, Paula Welden and Patricia Hearst. Reported sightings of the missing heiress were reported all over Southern Queensland and Northern New South Wales, one as far away as Sydney, none of these substantiated. The only one thought to be credible an alleged sighting of her in Mount Tambourine's main street the day after she went missing, leading to a huge but fruitless search of the Hinterland region. The sky was the limit, with some people suggesting that aliens had abducted the missing heiress by means of a UFO, or that she had been sucked into another dimension. And as outlandish as such theories were, nobody else could explain how somebody could simply vanish into thin air.

As high students aged about 15 at the time, we discussed the case of course, and that our corner of the world was the center of worldwide media attention. My sister's irritating left-wing BFF friend Kate complained at length that this was a classic case of 'Missing White Woman Syndrome' and that if missing heiress Alice hadn't been from a rich family and very pretty with her blonde hair and blue eyes that it wouldn't get that much attention, and that if an Aboriginal or other non-white woman had disappeared without trace from the Gold Coast it would not have even made the news.

What none of us expected was that we would be part of this extraordinary case when on an ordinary grey Tuesday at high school where absolutely nothing interesting was happening we were all together at lunchtime, when to our surprise a pretty young woman aged in her late teens with long, messy blonde hair came walking towards us from the direction of the nearest block of girls' toilets, wearing a black heavy metal tee-shirt that barely covered her white knickers, thongs on her otherwise bare feet.

All of us -- my friends and Morgan and her friends -- could only stare as she walked towards us, sounding like a bogan as she said, "Hey kids, there's no fucking toilet paper in the girl's dunny, you need to get me some tissues so I can take a shit."

We were all too stunned about what was happening -- was this the missing heiress Alice or just some fruitcake bogan girl -- and could only at a snail's pace go looking for any tissues we had on ourselves. That we were looking at her and moving so slowly seemed to irritate this strange young woman.

"Oh come on you lot, is this a school for spastics, retards or mongoloids or something? I don't have all day, I'm having a toilet emergency and I'm on my fucking period, I'm about 30 seconds away from pissing my pants and if I fart or bend over I'm going to shit everywhere in my knickers!" she snapped angrily. "And if you can stop staring at me, it would be so fucking nice."

While the young woman certainly sounded like a bogan, there was another quality about her, she definitely had a diva attitude about her like she was used to getting whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. She was also not making up the fact that she was menstruating, her bad mood for one and with her underwear exposed we could see the shape of her maxi pad in her knickers and the wings to hold it in place plus she was carrying a packet of maxi-pads in a plastic shopping bag, causing the boys even more discomfort.

"That all you fucking stupid fucking kids fucking got?" she demanded angrily at the meagre number of facial tissues we had given her. "Jesus fucking Christ, how hard can it be for me to wipe my cunt and my arse when I go to the toilet for a shit while I'm on my rags?"

She then seemed to single out Scott. "Yeah you, the blonde boy, get me some loo paper out of the boy's toilets." When Scott didn't move, she snapped her fingers in his face. "Hello, are you deaf or don't speak English? Get into the boys' toilets and get me some toilet paper right now."

Chastened, Scott did as he was told, handing the impolite young woman a roll of toilet paper he had retrieved, the young blonde snatching it from him without thanks and vanishing back into the girls' toilets. When we were all sure that what we had seen was real and not a shared hallucination, we informed some teachers.

While a male teacher called the cops, a female teacher entered the girls' bathroom where Alice occupied one of the stalls. When the teacher attempted to address her through the closed stall door, she received the charming response, 'Fuck off I'm on the toilet!' from a young woman who clearly didn't appreciate being disturbed while she was having a poo, and she had to wait another ten minutes until the half-dressed young woman flushed the loo and emerged to wash her hands.

Things moved very fast after that, with the police and a wave of journalists arriving at our school when it was confirmed that our strange visitor was indeed the missing rich girl Alice, now missing over two weeks since she was last seen on the Gold Coast. Our school was on the news all over the world, and as we were the ones who 'found' the lost heiress, we had our five minutes of fame.

"Well, if that was our five minutes of fame, I think there's no hope for our band to find fame," I said.

"True," Trent agreed. "Even at the time they forgot us pretty soon after even though the case stayed in the news weeks afterwards."

"What was that mental condition Alice was found to be suffering from?" Rosie asked. "I can never remember."

"Dissociative fugue," said Scott. "It's weird and very rare, apparently people who suffer it go wandering off with no memories of their lives and no idea what they are doing now."

"That explanation didn't satisfy everyone," said Emma. "Especially the online true crime fans."

"Oh, that's for sure," I said.

This was true. Upon her recovery Alice was immediately taken into the care of her family for medical treatment for the ordeal, with only a comment from their lawyers requesting privacy. As the strange case was unraveled it was revealed that she had been seen three times in Brisbane that morning -- once stealing maxi pads from a convenience store in Fortitude Valley, waiting for a City Cat at New Farm before running off when the ferry arrived, and being disruptive in a games arcade in South Bank before steeling lollies from a nearby candy store -- before somehow making her way to our school around lunchtime.

It was also found that for most of her two week disappearance, Alice had spent her time living in a very dodgy caravan park in a bad area of Logan, with some unemployed bogan called Dwayne. People seemed happy by the news that police had made an arrest; this bogan had kidnapped the pretty young heiress and kept her as a prisoner, he was the Fred Clegg to her Miranda. There was a villain to blame in the case, a villain who would be prosecuted and punished to the full extent of the law.

But this wasn't the case at all. Dwayne -- who probably should have thought twice before allowing himself to be interviewed on national television especially not wearing a black tee-shirt with an outline of Australia and 'No Poofs' within it -- was telling the truth when he said that Alice simply turned up outside his caravan one day and they got to talking and one thing led to another. Dwayne, who in interviews proved himself to be as thick as two short planks, said that he hadn't heard of the case because the news was boring, and when asked why he hadn't questioned who this mysterious blonde girl, responded by saying that she was 'hot' and he was 'too busy banging her, drinking goon and beer with her and playing video games' and she wouldn't tell him her name anyway. And when he had been to Centrelink on the day before Alice turned up, he had returned to find her gone but decided not to let it worry him too much, hoping that she would return to the caravan. And the first he had known there was any trouble was 'when the pigs arrived at his caravan and busted him' the next day.

Outrage soon followed aimed at the family who had not even thanked the authorities for the massive search efforts to find their daughter let alone contributed to the huge costs and had largely said nothing since, but most of it was at Alice herself. From the pretty blonde-haired, blue-eyed damsel in distress loved by the media, she soon became the villain of the piece. Now she was a stuck-up and spoiled little rich girl who never had to work and lived a life of luxury thanks to her wealthy Daddy and huge trust fund had run off with some rough trade, selfishly enjoying herself drinking, playing video games and having sex with him the whole time while a massive search was undertaken at huge costs. On social media, words like 'brat' and 'bitch' to describe Alice were very mild indeed.

Alice did not help herself by being aloof and snippy and threatening to call in her family's lawyers when approached by journalists, but eventually interest in the case died away. With so many memories rekindled I picked up my phone and searched her name, and was surprised to see that she had suffered two more fugue incidents since then; one in 2012 when she was in Melbourne on holidays and somehow ended up in Colac with no idea how she got there, and another in 2015 where she managed to walk over 100 kilometers from the Gold Coast to Brisbane and ended hospitalized with heat exhaustion when found on the Redcliffe Pier with no idea who or where she was, and was taken to hospital in an ambulance.

A large raindrop falling from the skies and landing on my arm bought me back to the present day, and as we finished our soft drinks. From the nearby laundry we heard Vicki flush the toilet, then the sound of her opening the lavatory door, the light turning off at the same time before the noise of her washing her hands at the sink was audible.

Vicki emerged from the laundry with her bag over her shoulder, and in her left hand the empty cardboard tube from the first toilet roll, now with Vicki's used sanitary napkin rolled up and stuffed inside, Vicki also carrying the floral plastic cover and peel-back strip from her new period pad. The teenager stopped to adjust her knickers and pad through her jeans, they must have been riding up after Vicki had been to the toilet, before she approached us and gave Scott a big smile and wave.

"Hi Scott, you miss me?" the pretty young Asian asked.

"I um, did wonder why you were in there so long," Scott said in a perfect, non-committal way.

"Sorry!" Vicki giggled. "My poo-poos were runny, messy and very, very smelly so I on toilet for ages dealing with my back bottom. And because I have my period, there all this blood come out of my front bottom, so I go through lots of toilet paper to wipe both my bottoms." The young girl held up her sanitary waste, several blowflies already interested in her smelly napkin within the empty toilet roll. "It okay if I put this in your grandparent's bin?" She indicated the wheelie bin not far away.

"Yes Vicki, that's what the bin is for," said Scott patiently.

"Be right back, don't miss me too much!" the teenager exclaimed as she sort of skipped towards the wheelie bin, her pig-tails flying about. Having disposed of her feminine hygiene products, she came back and was all over Scott again.

"You play special song I like?" she implored, staring at him through the lenses of her glasses.

"Yes of course Vicki," said Scott, as we went back into the workshop and played some more songs. Vicki sat on a nearby chair sipping on a can of soda, watching Scott intently the whole time, only getting distracted once from the object of her affections when she clearly had problems with period pain.

With it now getting later, we packed up and left, and with it being Good Friday, we decided to get some fish and chips for tea. There were of course plenty of places to get fish and chips on the Gold Coast, but we decided on one of our favorite places, a little café not far from the Northcliffe end of Surfers Paradise. There was a bit of a queue but it was well worth it, as we took our fish and chips and drinks to a picnic table near the Northcliffe beach.

The skies were now a dark ominous grey with the large drops of rain more frequent and twilight not too far away, but it was still pretty enjoyable. The constant roll of the Pacific Ocean waves on the beach was audible, as was the singing of the currawongs in the Norfolk Pines and palms that lined the Surfers Paradise streets, and the high-rises dominated the skyline, the nearby Q1 Tower tallest of all. Looking further south to Point Danger we could see the other skyscrapers all the way down the coast to Coolangatta. Some bats -- there were large colonies living in the Cascade Gardens not far away -- made an early appearance when they flew overhead. And it wouldn't be a picnic or fish and chips by the beach anywhere on the Gold Coast or Brisbane without ibises or seagulls trying to help themselves, which is exactly what happened to us.

Scott was the first to depart, saying that he wanted to go over to his relatives place and deliver the Easter chocolates for his younger cousins, and his admirer was right at his side. I offered to give them a lift, but Scott said this was okay, they would just use public transport.

Vicki looked very happy indeed to be one on one with the object of her affections -- Scott nearly not so much -- as they set off for the tram at Northcliffe Station, Scott saying that he would see me tomorrow evening so we could watch the NRL game between his NRL team the Gold Coast Titans against the Wests Tigers, me confirming I would be there as planned.

Rosie, Trent, Emma and I laughed about how Vicki would be hoping that everyone on the tram to Broadbeach South, on the bus to Carrara, the second bus to Nerang Station and on the train all the way back to Brisbane would think that she and Scott were a couple. We talked another five minutes or so, then Rosie, Trent and Emma headed off too for the drive to Brisbane.

I stayed longer, walking along the beachfront to the Surfers Paradise sign at the end of Cavill Mall, before walking back to the car along Surfers Paradise Boulevard. Due to it being Good Friday many places were closed, there were no beachfront markets and there were fewer people around than usual, but there were plenty still walking around as twilight turned to dusk and then nightfall as I started the car and began the drive back to Brisbane, the weather conditions starting to deteriorate.

Of course, I'd then had that odd experience when I 'spaced out' on the Pacific Motorway between Helensvale and Coomera, then seen that car adorned with stickers of the long-defunct South Queensland Crushers on Story Bridge, before returning home.

In bed with the rain falling heavily now, thunder sounding as lightning illuminated my bedroom curtains and sleep nearly upon me I had that feeling of having forgotten something. Turning over, I realized what it was, I had left my guitar in the back of the car. I thought about going to get it, but was so tired now and with the inclement weather outside I figured it would be fine in the locked car in the locked garage. Plus by now Morgan would probably be blubbering in the living room over her sad 'young love doomed by terminal illness' movie, and I didn't want to see that, so I allowed sleep to overtake me.

*

It was still raining outside when I awoke on Saturday, but more drizzle than anything too heavy. It was still dark outside as I got up for a pee, then dressed in a tee-shirt, shorts, undies and running shoes. Remembering my guitar I went outside to go to the garage, misty rain still falling, when I paused at what I heard or to be precise what I did not hear but should have done.

Mum liked plenty of trees so we had a number growing in our garden, our neighbors also sporting verdant properties, and this attracted birdlife to the area. But this morning I could hear nothing, no singing magpies, no crows and no laughing kookaburras and no cockatoos or parrots. There was also a park not far away which had a large lake, and this of course meant ducks, swans, geese, ibises and other water-birds flying back and forth sometimes over our house.

The swans and ibises with their loud honking made most noise, the ducks to a lesser degree, but there were none of these sounds today. I could hear frogs croaking due to the wet weather and crickets chirping, but no birds making an early morning appearance.

The drizzle was lessening and the fitness fanatics next door, a good-looking young couple in their late 20s Nicole and Tim came out of their house for their morning run. We greeted each other as they stretched, boy were they ever fit and they really loved sports, their favorite AFL.

Both Nicole and Tim were huge fans of the Brisbane Lions, and often wore clothes of their favorite football team, this including sleeveless running shirts that they wearing today. However this morning their shirts did not feature the Brisbane Lions, but rather that of the Brisbane Bears. This was Brisbane's first AFL team that had only a decade long tenure from 1987-1996 before merging with insolvent Melbourne team the Fitzroy Lions, and becoming the Brisbane Lions from 1997 onwards.

This was a little odd given the Bears lay 20 years in the past, but I thought maybe the club was selling merchandise to reflect its pre-merger heritage, and Nicole and Tim had purchased Brisbane Bears running shirts. Yes, that had to be it, this wasn't so strange. After all if I travelled to Melbourne and visited the suburb of Fitzroy, I wouldn't be surprised to see people wearing Fitzroy Lions clothes.

Nicole and Tim ran off and I headed to the garage, pausing when I thought about how I had seen that car with South Queensland Crushers stickers on the Story Bridge last night. Coupled with Nicole and Tim's Bears tee-shirts it was kind of strange to see merchandise for two long-defunct sports teams twice in less than 24 hours and I chalked it off as coincidence, but not without a nagging feeling that something this morning just did not seem quite right.

My disquiet increased as I opened the garage and turned on the light, and was struck by how dark it was outside. Sure, there had been a thunderstorm overnight and it was a damp and gloomy morning, but it had gone 5.30, and in March in Queensland while it would not be fully light, dawn would have broken. It wouldn't be fully dark as it was now.

I checked first my watch and then my phone to see if I might have gotten the time wrong, woken up early and it was in fact just gone 4.30 but no, the time was beyond 5.30. Trying to think up explanations for this -- maybe there was an eclipse -- I went to the car and opened the rear hatch and was struck dumb with surprise -- no guitar.

Feeling that panic at having lost something important, I took some deep breaths. Maybe I brought it inside with me last night after all. Or maybe I put it in Rosie and Trent's car by mistake? Scott had done the same with his guitar saying he would pick it up from them later, perhaps I had subconsciously done the same.

Turning off the light and closing the garage door I went back inside and into the kitchen, where Morgan was awake and getting herself a drink, dressed in an over-sized tee-shirt, her legs and feet bare. "Oh hi Corey, how are you?" she greeted me, before she took in my facial expression. "Corey is everything okay? You look worried."

"Morgan, why is it so dark outside?" I asked. "Is there an eclipse or something?"

My sister looked puzzled, as she returned the carton of juice back to the fridge. "No, not that I'm aware of but it's not even dawn yet, plus it's raining."

"Yes, but it's gone 5.30, it should be first light by now," I pointed out.

Morgan nodded. "Yeah, they should really put the clocks back to end daylight savings on the first weekend of March not the first weekend of April. It's just too dark in the mornings now."

I felt utter confusion. "But Morgan, Queensland doesn't have daylight savings. We don't put the clocks forward in October, not do WA or the Northern Territory unlike the other states and territories."

"Corey, are you feeling okay?" Morgan regarded me with an expression of curiosity and concern.

I shook my head. "Yes -- I mean no -- I mean I don't know," I said, beginning to pace up and down the kitchen.

"You don't seem okay," said Morgan. "Have you hit your head? Or did you smoke something you shouldn't have?"

"No, I haven't hit my head, and I don't smoke dope any more than you do," I said. "This is a dream, it had to be a dream, some very weird vivid fever dream, but just a dream."

Morgan ran the cold tap, then threw some of the cold water into my face. "What did you do that for?" I asked.

"To prove to you that you are awake and aren't dreaming," she said.

Within the house I heard a door opening, then the toilet door close followed by the sound of peeing. Great, Jamie was up and about, probably pissing all over the seat and the floor and not bothering to clean it up, then he would be up to all his old tricks.

"Come and sit in the living room with me, and we'll talk about what's causing you so much anxiety," said Morgan, leading the way on her bare feet.

I followed my sister into the living room, where I sat on the couch and Morgan sat opposite in an armchair. All was quiet in the house but I could hear the toilet roll advancing in the lavatory, so maybe Jamie was cleaning up after peeing everywhere? But more likely he was using it to set up some stupid prank to antagonize Mum or Morgan.

Morgan's sleep-shirt only just covered her underwear, a little too much margin for error than I would have liked, but when she sat down in her chair Morgan sat with her knees slightly open, showing me that she was wearing white panties with pink flowers today. Maybe she was unaware of what angle she was sitting at? And it seemed like I had bigger problems than seeing my twin sister's undies.

"So Corey, you claim Queensland doesn't have daylight savings?" Morgan asked. "What's brought all this on?"

"We've never had daylight saving -- well we might have some years in the past -- but people voted against it and not since we were born," I said. "It's the same for WA and the Northern Territory. You know all the problems it causes every summer at Coolangatta and Tweed Heads down on the border."

Morgan shook her head, looking very confused. "No, everyone in Australia has had daylight saving since about the late 1960s I think."

"It's not just the daylight savings," I said. "This morning I saw Nicole and Tim going running in Brisbane Bears shirts."

Again, Morgan couldn't seem to see anything wrong. "Well, why wouldn't they? They're members, and go to all the games at the GABBA."

"And last night I saw a car on the Story Bridge covered in South Queensland Crushers stickers." Hopefully this should convince my sister that something was off this morning, and it wasn't just me.

Morgan laughed. "It was probably Dad's car. You know how much Dad loves the Crushers."

I shook my head. "Morgan, I think you're missing the point. And why would Dad be driving on the Story Bridge last night? Since when did he arrive from Tasmania?"

"Again Corey, what are you talking about?" Morgan asked. "You know Dad lives in Burleigh Heads with Kevin."

"Who's Kevin?" I asked.

"Dad's husband."

It took several seconds for this to process with me, and then I gasped, "What?"

Morgan didn't answer, because at that moment we heard the toilet door open -- but not the toilet flush -- a cupboard door open and then a voice, a young female voice call out, "Some nurse you are Morgan, I texted you three times to get me some more toilet paper, and you never responded once, just left me stranded on the loo with my knickers around my ankles."

"Sorry Heather, my phone's on charge and I was just talking to Corey," Morgan called back.

"Heather?" I mumbled to myself. Since when did Morgan have a friend called Heather? The girl's voice also had a very distinct New Zealand accent by the way she pronounced several words, and I knew of no Kiwis among my sister's circle of friends.

"There's also no toilet paper in the laundry cupboard, I think Corey must have put it in the main storage cupboard again," Heather called back.

Morgan giggled as she got to her feet and headed into the hallway. "Yeah, let's blame Corey, I always do, he's the spare Y chromosome in the house."

"The toilet seat was up when I went in there, so Corey's definitely the one to blame for that," the as yet unseen Heather giggled. "That's six times in a row by my counting." Again, the way Heather said the word 'six' gave away her New Zealand origins.

Following Morgan into the hallway, my mouth dropped open as this mysterious girl Heather came into sight. Like Morgan, Heather wore an oversized sleep-shirt over panties this morning. Also like Morgan, Heather was tall and very well endowed, her large breasts filling the front of her nightwear.

Without doubt Heather was very beautiful with a pretty face and big brown eyes, and she sported long, lush, dark brown, wavy hair that cascaded down over her shoulders. However, the hair on her head was not the only lush, dark, curly hair that Heather sported.

My mouth dropped open and I somehow felt dry yet salivated at the same time as my eyes took in Heather's entire figure, and I noticed that she had tucked up her sleep-shirt around her waist. This should have exposed her underwear, but Heather's knickers -- white cotton bikini-style panties with blue flowers -- were down around her ankles as she shuffled towards the storage cupboard on her bare feet.

This left Heather's feminine mound completely exposed and showing looked like a rainforest of dark brown, curly pubic hair growing all over it and between her legs to her genitals. I looked at the floor, but my eyes of course took in Heather's bare feet and her panties, creamy cunt stains clear on her panty saddle probably from her vagina self-cleansing during the night. So I looked up again and saw Heather's super-hairy brunette pussy and courtesy of a reflection in a mirror, the firm white cheeks of her bare bottom.

"We'd better go easy on Corey this morning, Heather," laughed Morgan. "He doesn't seem to be feeling too well."

Heather laughed good-naturedly, reached up and ruffled my hair, then reached into the cupboard and retrieved herself a roll of toilet paper, blue in color. "Sorry Corey, you know I'm mucking around. I just kind of enjoy the novelty of not being the only person with an XX chromosome structure, like at Dad's place."

I finally managed to find my voice, amazed at what was going on. Who was this young woman who seemed to know me, and why was she not embarrassed at me seeing her with her knickers around her ankles and her hairy box on display? "I'm sorry, but who are you?"

Morgan and Heather looked at each other and laughed. "Come on Corey, now I think you're playing around with us, trying to fool us," said Morgan. "But you're a week early, April Fool's Day isn't until next Friday. Seriously though, good try, but you went one step too far then. As if you don't recognize Heather."

"Yeah, good performance Corey, perhaps you should become an actor rather than an accountant?" Heather suggested.

I again managed to speak. "Are you one of Morgan and Kate's friends?"

This time it was Morgan and Heather's turn to look puzzled. "Who's Kate?" Morgan asked. Both she and Heather looked equally blank.

"Your best friend, Kate Bradshaw," I said. "Journalism major student, we went to school together, wanted to marry Justin Bieber when she was a kid, average height, brown hair, her parents are academics and she has a gay, non-binary younger brother."

Morgan shook her head. "No, I don't know any Kate, and Heather's my best friend."

"Oh, that's so nice and same with you Morgan," Heather said. "Sorry Corey, I don't know Kate, the girl you're describing either. Perhaps you dreamed her one night? And her brother too."

"No, now I think you two are playing a practical joke on me." I didn't believe it even as I said it. Kate had drawn such a complete blank with both Heather and Morgan that their reactions were genuine.

"If I was setting you up for a prank, how do you explain the daylight savings, the neighbors wearing Brisbane Bears tee-shirts and the car with South Queensland stickers that seemed to get you so upset?" Morgan asked.

"What's all this about daylight savings, the Bears and the Crushers?" Heather asked.

Morgan shook her head. "Actually Heather, help me out with this, Corey insists that Queensland didn't have daylight savings, please set him straight, he wouldn't believe me."

"Yeah Australia has always had daylight savings, it's the same in New Zealand when I was growing up in Auckland," Heather asserted. She looked at me and giggled. "And Corey, what is it with you staring at my pussy this morning? You're acting like you've never seen my pussy before." She pointed at her hairy pubic mound.

"Sorry." I blushed and looked away from Heather's hairy crotch.

This seemed to amuse my sister. "It's just Heather's pussy, what's the big deal? You've seen my pussy heaps of times, only I've got a blonde pussy and Heather has a brunette pussy. See?"

Before I could stop her, my twin lifted her sleep-shirt to show her white cotton panties with pink flowers, and pulled them down to her upper thighs, exposing her pubic mound. Like Heather, Morgan's pussy was very hairy, only my sister sported a forest of blonde curls over her female mound.

The morning was getting stranger and stranger, why was Morgan acting like this? I regarded my sister with horror as she pulled up her pants, and another anomaly struck me. When I had accidentally walked in on my sister when she was on the toilet two weeks ago, her pussy was completely shaved. Now Morgan like mystery girl Heather sported a 1970s style bush. Could Morgan's pubic hair have really grown back so fast? Sure, it would have grown back somewhat if she hadn't shaved or waxed since then, but to this extent? I didn't think so.

Heather then spoke up. "As interesting as this is, can we possibly move it to the laundry? As you can see, there's only one place I should be, and that place is sitting on the toilet." She indicated her lowered knickers, and that she was carrying a roll of toilet paper.

"Yeah sure, sorry Heather, come on Corey," Morgan instructed me.

Like a zombie, I followed Morgan and she followed Heather, who shuffled ahead of us with her knickers down around her ankles and bare feet. Reaching the laundry Heather went towards the toilet, and I could see that there were only a few squares of yellow toilet paper on the existing toilet roll.

Heather paused before she went in, "So Corey, are you still saying you don't know who I am?" she asked teasingly. She closed the door but not all the way, she left it slightly ajar so that she could still have some privacy while she finished having her poo, but so she could still contribute to the conversation. Regardless, I could see Heather's bare feet and lowered knickers through the partially open door as she sat back down on the toilet.

"You really don't remember who Heather is?" Morgan implored.

I didn't reply right away. I was too confused and too distracted from Heather's private toilet noises from within the lavatory, the sounds of her moving her bowels, rustling the toilet paper as she used the last of the yellow toilet paper from the roll then the sounds of her changing it for the blue toilet roll and advancing more toilet tissue from this to wipe her bottom again and from something Morgan had said just before Heather made her presence known.

"What was it you were saying about Dad earlier?" I asked. "About Dad getting married again? And how he doesn't live in Tasmania anymore?"

"Well Dad, has never lived in Tasmania," said Morgan. "But yes, he got remarried about five years ago to Kevin and they live together in Burleigh Heads. From Kevin's first marriage -- to a woman -- he had two kids. One is a son called Ollie, he's 18 and he lives with them in Burleigh and goes to high school. And Kevin's second kid is older, she's his daughter and her name is Heather and she's right there."

Heather leaned forward on the toilet, opening the door more, smiling and waving, me noting that she had an unused length of blue toilet paper in her fingers. "Hi stepbrother!"

"Stepbrother?" I felt even more confused as I tried to process the fact that this strange girl who was currently sitting on the toilet and rustling her loo paper as she wiped her bum and whom I could not recall until about five minutes ago was mine and Morgan's stepsister. And we had a stepbrother too? Both of whom we had apparently known for years. But our Dad being married to another man? Surely he couldn't be?

"So our Dad Rick, and your Dad -- Kevin - are married?" I asked my newfound stepsister through the partially open toilet door still hoping I was going to wake up any second. "They're gay?"

I heard Heather wiping her bottom again, then once more she leaned forward on the loo so her face was visible, and she and Morgan regarded me curiously.

"Yes, I guess my Dad and your Dad are very happy together," said Heather. "But what a strange thing to say."

"Earlier, when you were describing that strange girl Kate's brother who is non-binary and you said he was gay too," my equally confused sister said.

I was equally confused. "What do you mean?"

"Well, who says 'gay' anymore when they feel happy?" Morgan asked. "It's kind of archaic, it would be like if Heather or I asked how your day was and you said it was swell."

"Or if we asked how you liked a new app on your phone, and you said it was neat," said Heather. "I can't remember the last time anyone said they were feeling gay when they were happy -- probably it was in 1979 and before we were born - then you say it twice in five minutes."

"No it means, well never mind, my mistake." I didn't think I had the strength to explain it, nor would Morgan and Heather believe me anyway.

"Corey, are you sure you couldn't have hit your head and not known it?" Morgan asked. "Maybe you turned over in bed and did it, or got up in the night half asleep and don't remember it?"

"How about you ask him some questions Morgan?" our stepsister suggested as she continued to sit on the toilet. "You would have learned about it when testing patients for concussion or head trauma at the hospital."

"Good idea, Heather," Morgan said. So while Heather remained sitting on the loo behind the partially open door, Morgan asked me a few simple questions.

The first was the date -- which I answered correctly as Saturday, 26th March 2016 -- and then some simple spelling and arithmetic questions, again which I passed easily, confirmed by Morgan and our 'new' stepsister.

"So I'll just test you out on some famous people Corey," Morgan said, before asking me in turn who was Britain's reigning monarch; who was the current Pope; who were the Prime Ministers of Australia and the UK and who was the incumbent President of the United States of America?"

These were easy questions too, and accordingly I answered Queen Elizabeth II, Pope Francis and Malcolm Turnbull, David Cameron and Barack Obama respectively. This time there was a confused silence from both Morgan and Heather.

"Well, I got those right didn't I?" I asked hopefully.

Heather didn't say anything, I could hear her advancing the toilet roll a number of times and presumed she was close to done. Morgan however looked most puzzled and said, "Well Corey, you got the Queen and the Pope right but the Prime Ministers and US President?" She shook her head.

My theory that Heather was finished on the toilet was confirmed when I heard my stepsister -- and it was still unbelievable to even think I had a stepsister -- put down the toilet lid, then her flush the toilet. With the sound of the toilet cistern still refilling, Heather opened the ajar lavatory door and turned off the light. Her knickers were still lowered, and I watched her reach down to her ankles and pull them up to cover her hairy pussy, adjusting them around her box and her bum and pulling down her oversized tee-shirt to cover her undies from view.

After a delay of a few seconds in which Heather reached for the can of toilet freshener on the cistern and sprayed it around, Heather walked to the laundry sink and as she thoroughly washed her hands with plenty of soap and water to complete her visit to the toilet, Heather said, "Morgan is right, you got the Pope and Queen correct, but not the Prime Ministers or the President."

The three of us walked back towards the living room, Heather adjusting her panties as she did so. "Well humor me please," I said. "Who are the current Australian and UK Prime Ministers and the US President?"

"Well, Tony Abbott is the Australian Prime Minister, and you should know that at least," said Morgan.

"Tony Abbott? No, he was replaced by Malcolm Turnbull last year," I said.

"No, it's always been Tony Abbott, ever since John Howard retired before the 2013 Election," said Morgan.

"John Howard?" I was even more astounded. "But he hasn't been -- I mean well Labor won in 2007 and 2010 --what about Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard?"

"Howard smashed Rudd in 2007 and then trounced Gillard in 2010," said Heather. "There hasn't been a Labor Government in Australia for 20 years now, not since Paul Keating in 1996."

"This is all wrong," I said. "So, who is UK Prime Minister if not David Cameron?"

"Liz Truss," said Morgan. "Very young in the role only 40-years-old, but very popular."

"I've never heard of Liz Truss," I said.

Heather, who had left her phone in the living room, now picked it up, bringing up a picture. "There you go, proof we're not bullshitting you."

"She's very pretty," was all I could mutter at the image of the attractive, petite blonde Conservative politician who held the UK's top job and resided at 10 Downing Street with her husband and kids. "So, who is the US President? Barack Obama won the last two elections, I remember it."

Morgan shook her head. "No, John McCain won both times." Heather brought up another image on her phone, showing the images of Republican McCain declaring victory in 2008 after an easy win over Democrat Obama and then again in 2012 with another big win this time over Delaware Joe Biden, Alaskan Vice President Sarah Palin at President John McCain's shoulder both times.

"Jesus, Kate would really hate that," I said, shaking my head.

Morgan seemed to be getting irritated. "Again Corey, who is this Kate?"

"I think she's Corey's imaginary friend," laughed Heather.

I didn't respond to the girls, as my eyes picked up on something in the living room that definitely was wrong, and I could feel the anxiety filling every part of my body, again feeling hot and cold at the same time.

"So what is it now Corey?" Morgan asked.

"How did that thing get back here?" I pointed at the wall.

"Well, it never went anywhere in the first place, so far as I know," said Morgan. "Corey, you are really starting to worry me now. If this is some kind of joke, time to stop now."

Clearly Morgan and Heather could not see anything wrong with the picture I was indicating. With Mum a travel agent and formerly a flight attendant she obviously was interested in different places around the world, and from the time before Morgan and I were born she had four panoramic pictures of famous city skylines.

One was of Sydney, showing the blue waters of the Harbour, the Bridge, the Opera House, Circular Quay and the city skyline dominated by Sydney Tower behind them. The second was the London skyline, St Paul's Cathedral with its iconic dome the dominant feature, while the Eiffel Tower obviously took central position in the photo of Paris.

The fourth photo had been of New York at sunset, the skyline beginning to light up illuminating the many tall skyscrapers of Manhattan including the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, the Statue of Liberty in the background across the Hudson River. The dominant center of this picture however was the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, which dwarfed the adjacent Woolworth Building and glowed yellow in the twilight, a massive full moon over the top of the towers.

When we were really little kids Morgan and I were fascinated by the picture and said when we were grown-ups we would like to visit New York City for ourselves. But in the school holidays immediately after September 11, Mum not only packed Morgan and I into the back of the car for an outing to the local shopping center, but her prized New York City panoramic picture as well.

First stop on the trip was a charity shop where Mum donated it, saying that it made her too sad to look at it after what happened. Now it was back; now that nearly fifteen years had gone by since 9/11, perhaps Mum had now found another print of the picture and recently replaced it, and I had never noticed it before?

I hoped so, this was the logical explanation, but I stopped as I saw on the table the DVD Morgan had been watching last night, the sad movie about the young woman struggling with cystic fibrosis and her family not accepting the guy she loves.

My mind raced back to the limited amount of the movie I had seen. The Twin Towers were in it, that was for sure, but they were superimposed. Or were they? I thought about the actors in the film and their ages, and like with everything else this morning the figures just didn't add up. And the phone the mother used to call an ambulance for her daughter, it was a modern day smart phone, not a late 1990s or early 2000s phone. No surely not, there had to be a logical explanation.

I picked up the DVD and held it up to my sister and stepsister. "Morgan, where did this movie come from?"

Morgan shrugged. "Jamie recommended it."

"Jamie?" I couldn't imagine Jamie watching and liking a romance with a girl stricken by CF given his taste in films, which was immature at best. Scenes involving lots of farting were high cinema in his opinion. This was perhaps even weirder than the anomalies of this film with everything I knew.

"Yeah, our cousin Jamie." Morgan shook her head. "Corey, what's the problem now?"

"I've got to see this for myself," I said, turning on the TV and DVD player and inserting the disc.

"I thought you don't like movies like this, Corey," said Morgan.

"I don't want to see this movie, I have to see it," I said, frantically trying to navigate the menus with the remote control.

"I still haven't seen it, so don't spoil it for me please," said Heather. "What's it like?"

"Really great but so sad, make sure you have the tissues handy, I cried so much," said Morgan.

Finally I got the movie to I guessed somewhere around the mid-point in the film, after the female lead played by Brittany Snow had been taken to hospital with CF complications. She was sitting up in bed looking somewhat the worse for wear and tubes in her nose, with her family at her side.

Her mother played by Helen Hunt was clearly on edge as she and her husband were talking with their daughter's doctor, an actor who I didn't recognize. I did however recognize the actress who was the young medic assisting the senior doctor -- she was Amanda Bynes, a very fit and healthy looking Amanda Bynes. I also had no difficulty recognizing the actress in the cutaway scene playing Zac Efron's character's older sister, she was Anna Kendrick. She was attempting to convince her brother as they entered the hospital reception with him holding a bunch of flowers that going to see his ill girlfriend was a good idea, the brother having reservations that her family would be pleased to see him.

I looked intently at Zac Efron, Anna Kendrick and then Brittany Snow and Amanda Bynes as the action switched back to the hospital room upstairs. The quartet of actors were definitely young adults when this was filmed; had it been before September 2001 all of them would have been in high school. There was also the main girl's younger sister cheering up her sickly big sister by means of them watching cat videos on Youtube courtesy of an I-phone. She was played by rising star Chloe Grace Moretz, who looked to be in her mid-teens. Looking at the movie's DVD cover, I could see it was made in 2011, which supported this.

The father was also being cheerful, opening the curtains of the hospital ward's window to show the wonderful view of the Manhattan skyline, the World Trade Center's Twin Towers dominating the scenery and the father joking that he might move in here himself just to enjoy the views.

Okay, so the inclusion of a smart phone and the two sisters watching cat videos on a website four years from creation in a movie set in or before 2001 might be an anachronism, a mistake by the film-makers. A pretty big mistake, but it would still place it in the real world.

But as I watched John Ritter's father character turn unwelcoming and stand-offish when his daughter's boyfriend walked in accompanied by his sister, the mother equally stand-offish while the younger sister was openly rude, I realized that this movie confirmed that everything was very wrong not only with my life, but the rest of the world. The movie simply could not exist. John Ritter could not have been in a movie made in 2011 for the simple reason that he had died in the early 2000s, about 2003 I thought but I wasn't sure.

"No, no, that's not right, that movie's not right, it's not right at all," I said, backing away from the screen knowing now that everything I knew was wrong.

"Corey, what's wrong? Why has this movie upset you so much?" Morgan asked.

"That movie simply can't be real, it can't exist," I said, feeling like I was close to passing out. "It's impossible!"

I yelled the last words, Morgan indicating for me to tone it down. "Corey, be quiet, you'll wake up Mum and Jamie. Why are you acting like this about a harmless movie? I'll turn it off if it's going to cause this much drama."

My sister did just this as I paced back and forth. Heather spoke up. "Why do you say that the movie can't exist Corey -- when very clearly it does?"

"Because it can't have been made when it said it was given the ages of the young actors in it, and John Ritter is dead. He is dead, he died years ago from a heart condition and dead people can't be in movies made years after they died," I insisted, trying to stay calm.

"Wow, lucky his wife and kids aren't here with you being so sensitive and tactful Corey," said Morgan. "Yes, John Ritter has since died, but at the time he made this movie he was alive. It does happen you know."

"When did he die, when did he die?" I asked, feeling the overwhelming stress.

Heather showed me her phone. "Relax Corey, he died in 2013. September 11 2013 and from a heart condition, like you said."

"And doesn't that date alone -- September 11 - mean anything to you?" I asked. The confused looks of Morgan and Heather indicated that neither my twin sister nor my stepsister thought that date stood out. "Heather, can you please bring up a picture of the current New York city skyline?"

A few swipes and presses from Heather brought up the current images of New York. I looked from her phone to the photo of the wall that had been gone 15 years and was now back, and back again. There were some subtle differences as there would be for any large city, but in both the dominant feature of the skyline was the World Trade Center's twin towers in Manhattan.

"Maybe it will be better if Jamie takes this movie back to work with her this morning?" Heather asked Morgan. "I can rent it at the shop near Dad and Rick's and watch it there."

I stopped short. "Sorry, what did you say about Jamie?"

Heather shrugged. "Well, Morgan rented it from the DVD hire shop where Jamie works, so when Jamie goes to work today she can take the DVD back with her and save it causing any more trouble."

"She?" I gasped. "But Jamie is a boy."

Morgan and Heather looked at each other and burst out laughing, to my dismay.

"Sorry Corey, but now you're getting to the 'we need to call the authorities' on you stage," said Morgan.

The next voice came from the area of the house where our bedrooms aside from Mum's were located. It was young and female, "Hey, what are you guys talking about?"

If I was shocked to meet my new stepsister Heather who was the daughter of another man my father had married, I was even more astounded to meet the person who entered the living room. "Corey, let me present to you our cousin Jamie, and as you can see she is 100 percent female," said Morgan.

My mouth dropped open at the sight of my cousin. Gone was the scrawny, small-statured unruly 19-year-old boy with messy red hair. The new arrival was a petite and very pretty girl of the same age, very small in stature barely four feet eleven, her long red hair tied back in a pony-tail. Unlike Morgan and Heather whose nightwear consisted of oversized tee-shirts over panties, Jamie wore a pair of long, lightweight pajamas light blue in color with cartoon rabbits as the pattern, which I guess was appropriate as it was Easter, her feet bare.

"Hi Corey, you seem to be upset about something this morning," Jamie said, regarding me with her green eyes, this and the red hair and fair skin something she shared with my male cousin she seemed to have replaced overnight. "What's all this you were saying about me being a boy?"

"You are a boy, you should be a boy, you always were a boy, like your brother Adam..." I said, knowing I was babbling, but thinking about Heather's odd quip earlier about me being the only one in the house with a Y-chromosome. Now it made sense.

"I don't get it," Jamie said, her pretty face looking most confused. "If it's some sort of April Fool's Day joke, it's still another week away."

"That's what we said Jamie," Morgan said.

"You've got the wrong sibling, Corey," said Jamie, laughing lightly. "My brother Adam, he's the one who's confused about what sex he is, not me."

"But Adam is a boy, he knows he's a boy, like you are a boy too, you're Uncle Doug and Aunty Georgina's kids, and they have two sons, they don't have any daughters," I insisted.

"Okay, I'll play along Corey," said Jamie. "But if I was a boy, would I have these?"

I watched in amazement as Jamie unbuttoned her pajama top, and flashed her bare breasts at me. Unlike Heather and Morgan who were very well-endowed young women, Jamie's breasts were much smaller, an A cup, struggling to a B maybe, but breasts regardless.

"And this will convince you 100 percent, even though you've seen it all before." With that, Jamie pulled down her pajama bottoms to her thighs, showing me that she was wearing white bikini-style panties underneath, cute cartoon frogs the pattern of her underwear.

Then Jamie took hold of the elastic waistband of her pretty little knickers, and pulled them down to join her pajama bottoms around her thighs. I stared in amazement at Jamie's full bush, curls of red hair growing on her feminine mound, a mirror catching the reflection of her bare bum from behind. Her thighs were slightly apart, allowing me to see Jamie's cunt stains on her double cotton panty saddle.

"See, I'm definitely a girl, no penis, to testicles, just my pussy," said Jamie, looking down at her own redhead crotch before pulling up her cartoon animal knickers and her pajama bottoms to cover her pussy, and then buttoned up her pajama top, covering her tits. Despite this my eyes went to Jamie's throat to see if there might be an Adam 's apple, but no her throat was flat and feminine.

I couldn't stop staring, but not at my cousin who had somehow turned from a boy to a girl overnight and had always been a girl apparently, but at what was behind her. I had seen three pussies this morning although I should have seen none, my twin sister's blonde pussy, my stepsister's brunette pussy and now my 'new' cousin's redhead pussy.

Now I was seeing a literal feline pussy, as our cat Panther had followed Jamie out of her bedroom, the long, lean black cat washing her whiskers and waiting to be served her breakfast. But it wasn't the familiar form of Panther that held my attention and suddenly feel I was naked in the middle of the winter of Antarctica or Lapland, it was the second cat that was beside her, washing her own whiskers.

The second cat was a black and white tuxedo cat, and had the same long lean body shape as Panther. She decided that service wasn't fast enough this morning, so rubbed around Jamie's bare feet and let out a loud meow. "Okay Cougar, I'll feed you and Panther soon," Jamie assured the cat, bending down to pet her.

"That's Cougar?" I managed to say. "Panther's sister?"

"Well of course it's Cougar," said Morgan. "Who else would she be?"

"What's wrong now Corey?" Heather asked. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

"I think I'm looking at one now," I said weakly. "A literal ghost."

I thought back as to how in 2007 Mum had taken Morgan and me to a cat rescue shelter to adopt a pet cat that needed a new home. However at the shelter sharing a cage together were two little kittens, sisters from the same litter, one a pure black cat and the other a black and white tuxedo cat, both of whom had been dumped at the shelter.

It was impossible not to fall in love with them, the shelter said they had to be adopted together and nobody with a heart could have separated them anyway, so we adopted both kittens and named them Panther and Cougar. Everything went well with the cats until 2013 when they were six, and Cougar started showing health problems. At a young age and with the early intervention of vets it seemed Cougar would be alright, but unfortunately her health just went further and further downhill and we had to make the horrible decision to have her euthanized.

It was terrible, all three of us were devastated and Panther pined her lost sister for weeks. The situation was like something out of a sad movie where animals die only playing out for real. Now it seemed that in this reality I had somehow slipped into, none of those memories were real.

"I um, have to get out of here, I can't be here, something's not normal," I said, running into my bedroom and grabbing my phone and wallet which I put into my backpack, and then my bike helmet.

The three girls said I didn't seem well enough to be going anywhere and the two cats regarded me with concerned expressions as to why this Homo Sapien was acting so strangely in their house, but I knew I had to get out of there. I would go and see Scott, and get assurances that I wasn't going completely mad. But if Kate didn't seem to be in this reality then maybe Scott and his family didn't either. I shook my head, I didn't even want to think about it.

Going to the garage I got my bike and set off, it not taking me long to notice something else out of place. The other night I had nearly tripped over the stump of a Norfolk Island pine which once grew in our front garden alongside a large pencil pine, a second Norfolk Island pine growing in our back garden. Now it was back between the pencil pine and the second Norfolk Island pine, as though it had never been cut down in the first place.

Outside it was now light and the familiar birdsong was back and the skies were grey, drizzle falling. I ignored the light rain as I sped down the road, a flock of ibises flying overhead. I noticed a possum in a banksia tree nearby and wondered if the small marsupial had like me awoken in a strange alternate reality where things were correct in some way, but so wrong in others, the Twin Towers still standing nearly 15 years after they were destroyed probably topping the list.

I pedaled faster and faster, trying to psycho-analyze myself and what the fuck could have caused this. The route to Scott's house included a long straight street lined with jacarandas which produced magnificent purple blooms in the spring, but which in autumn was now less spectacular.

So absorbed was I in my thoughts that I failed to notice two things as I approached a roundabout. One, a large puddle of muddy water courtesy of a backed-up storm water drain and two, a great big fat man of some 350 pounds dressed in a white tee-shirt and shorts standing by the side of the road adjacent to the puddle.

By the time I had noticed the puddle and the fat man and realized what the outcome would be given the simple rules of physics, it was already happening and too late to prevent it. I sped through the puddle, my bicycle tires sending a spray of muddy rainwater all over the fat man and the white tee-shirt that barely covered his enormous gut.

"Sorry!" I called out to him, giving him an apologetic wave.

The fat guy was anything but impressed. "You fucking idiot!" he roared, shaking his fist at me. "Look at what you did! Come back here so I can get you!"

There was no way of course I was going to do that so sped away, hearing the fat man bellowing at me as I cycled away. "Wait, just wait until I get my hands on you, you fucking asshole! I'm going to smash your face in cunt, you'll see!"

Probably all I would have to do to escape from a man so morbidly obese was to walk briskly in the other direction, but I didn't want to put the theory to the test and I had bigger things to worry about. The rain seemed to get heavier as I reached the street where Scott lived, until I reached his house and wondering what the fuck I was going to say, knocked on his front door. In the back garden their dog Larry barked, at least I hoped it was Larry, the bark did sound a bit different, higher in pitch.

To my utter relief Scott answered the door wearing a tee-shirt and boxer shorts. "Oh hi Corey, you're a bit early," he laughed. "The game doesn't start until this evening."

I took off my helmet. "Scott, I really need your help. There's something wrong, something seriously wrong, and I don't know what to do."

"Well sure Corey, come in," he said. "I'm sure it can't be that bad, if it was you probably should call the main police number or triple zero."

I was chaining up my bike on the front porch, and stopped when I thought about what Scott was saying. "How do you mean? About the police."

"Well, I'm off duty," said Scott. "So if you need the police you need to call them, rather than coming to see me."

"You're a police officer?" I stood astounded.

"Yeah, of course, you know that," said Scott. "Corey, you really seem on edge this morning. You'd better come in."

Scott and I went and sat in the living room. "Well, what's wrong mate?" he asked. "You've gotten me worried now."

I had been thinking about things, and remembered about yesterday, discussing that crazy rich girl Alice who six years ago had turned up at our high school suffering from Dissociative Fugue. Perhaps I had gotten into a state like this and that's why everything was wrong to me.

"Scott, do you remember that strange rich girl Alice who went missing until she turned up at our high school?" I asked, hoping the incident had happened in this strange world too. "How she was suffering from the condition Dissociative Fugue and was really confused?"

"Oh yes, I remember her, she was nuts," said Scott. "Funny you should mention her, I was just thinking yesterday how rude, demanding and entitled she was. Our five minutes of fame."

"I think I'm suffering from that now, some sort of Fugue state," I said. "It's the only thing that makes sense."

"What makes you think this?" Scott asked.

Before I could answer, there came a young female voice with a strong Asian accent. "Scott? I thought you come back to bed after you answer door?"

I thought Scott would be irritated by the interruption but to my astonishment he called out, "Sorry Vicki, Corey turned up, he seems to be having a bit of a problem."

"Oh that too bad," I heard Vicki say, before she entered the room causing me even more surprise on this very strange Saturday.

The petite figure of Vicki was just the same as I remembered her yesterday, with her hair up in pigtails and her glasses giving her a nerdy, studious look. However she wore a blue police shirt that covered her tiny little figure -- I guessed one of Scott's police shirts -- her legs and her feet bare.

Vicki greeted me with a smile and friendly wave. "Hi Corey, sorry things not so good for you."

"Hi Vicki," I said, then watching stunned as she went over to Scott leaned over and the two of them kissed. Not just a shallow kiss, a deep kiss on the lips, French-kissing. What the fuck was going on? Scott couldn't stand Vicki and was thoroughly irritated by her, while she adored him to stalker-like levels. Now they were together?

Vicki leaped onto Scott's knee, his police shirt riding up to show that she wasn't wearing her panties this morning. Scott had always been irritated by couples who made out in front of other people, but he and Vicki had no such hesitations now. Vicki's bare bottom with her perfect Asian skin was on display, her pretty pink vagina visible between her legs and the forest of black pubic hair that grew all over the teenager's feminine mound and her pussy.

Clearly overcome by passion Scott and Vicki were all over each other, Vicki's hand was stroking Scott's expanding groin and his hand was between her legs, fingering her on her tight teenage twat, on her buttocks, the sensitive skin separating her vulva from her anus, and her anal area itself.

Finally though they seemed to remember I was there and pulled apart from each other, although Vicki remained sitting on Scott's knee, her legs wide apart showing off her pubic hair and her genitals to me between her thighs.

"Sorry Corey, we were in bed and I was just about to bang Vicki when you turned up, we kind of forgot where we were, you know how it is," said Scott. He couldn't have been more direct.

"So um, how long have you and Vicki been, um together?" I asked.

"Oh, since about three days after I get off plane from Siam to come study in Australia," said Vicki.

"Seriously, what else did my parents think was going to happen bringing a sexy girl from Siam into the house to live with us?" Scott asked. His hand went under the shirt Vicki wore, stroking her pubic hair.

"But your parents are Ron and Caroline?" I asked. "And you've got a sister called Louise who is older than you? She's married to Mark and has a daughter Ellie who's four, and their son is Josh, who just turned two?"

"Yes of course," said Scott. "Corey, are you sure you haven't hit your head and gotten a concussion somehow?"

"I can only wish that was the case," I said, noticing another anomaly between yesterday and today. Thanks to Vicki oversharing about feminine hygiene matters, I knew that yesterday she was on her period. But she wasn't wearing any panties today so no sanitary napkin, and as she moved around to sate an itch near her vagina her legs went wider, no tampon string and no visual menstrual blood either. Was Vicki's menstrual cycle affected by this odd shift too?

I then thought of something else. "You said Vicki is from Siam."

"That's right, I grow up in Bangkok," said Vicki.

"But Siam, not Thailand?" I asked.

Scott looked puzzled, as did Vicki. "What is Thailand?" they asked at once.

Vicki couldn't seem to keep still on Scott's lap, and the temptation to play with her naked, hairy pussy -- not to mention the sight of her exposed crotch was distracting to me -- so he said, "Vicki, as great as you look in my police shirt with no knickers, it might be best for everyone if you put your panties back on."

"Yeah, I mean I not shy but probably I think I distract Corey," she said, before leaping off Scott's lap. "I be right back."

"And please don't tell my Sergeant that you're wearing part of my police uniform, and that you look so hot in it," Scott joked as she departed.

She ran on her bare feet for the bedroom, before returning carrying a pair of white bikini-style panties with different colored stars, which she held out and stepped her bare feet into them, pulling them up and adjusting them around her bum and her box. I could see Vicki and Scott were hot for each other, but this time Vicki sat on the couch while Scott remained in the chair to avoid them getting distracted.

"Okay mate, you're getting me worried, what is really going on this morning?" Scott asked.

"It is the weirdest thing, it is so hard to explain it," I said. "It's like I'm in a combination of a Doctor Who episode, a Matrix and Back to the Future film and a Narnia book all at once. Things just seem so wrong, I can't remember things or remember them all wrong. It's like I'm a passenger from a plane or ship that vanished in the Bermuda Triangle, or a crew member from the Marie Celeste or was on MH370 and I've suddenly returned."

Neither Vicki nor Scott reacted to any of the things I said until the last one. "What's an MH370?" Scott asked. Again he and Vicki looked confused.

"That's that Malaysian Airlines plane that vanished without trace in 2014, two years now and they haven't found it since," I said.

Scott shook his head. "No, they do know what happened to it. Some militia group shot it down over Ukraine and it crashed with no survivors."

"No, that's the other Malaysian Airlines plane that crashed that year," I said. Both Scott and Vicki looked incredulous and I said, "This one completely vanished earlier in the year, it was flying between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing, but it never arrived, no Mayday call, no distress signal, nothing. It's one of the biggest aviation mysteries ever."

Scott and Vicki looked all at sea, and remembering I had my phone in my backpack, I retrieved it and looked it up to show them -- and not a single thing appeared to back up my assertions. "This is crazy," I said. "There has to be something."

"So, where's Beijing, I've never heard of it before?" Vicki said.

"It's the capital of China," I said, looking it up on my phone, only to find that while Shanghai was the largest Chinese city, its capital was still called Peking. "So the 2008 Olympics were held in Peking?"

"That's right," said Scott. He clearly didn't know any different.

"So, the Olympics in 2012 were still in London though?" I asked.

"Yes, of course," Scott affirmed.

"And this year's Olympics are set to be held in Brazil -- in Rio?" I asked hopefully.

Scott shook his head. "No, closer to home. Just across the Tasman in New Zealand. Christchurch to be exact."

"Christchurch?" I was astounded. "They must be doing well, considering it's just five years since that big earthquake."

"Earthquake?" Scott asked. "That's the first I've heard of an earthquake in Christchurch. I mean they often get tremors there but nothing huge."

"It was five years ago, in early 2011, just after we had the floods here," I said. "The Brisbane River broke its banks and inundated parts of the city and low-lying suburbs. And Toowoomba was a total disaster."

"Floods?" Scott again seemed surprised. "I mean, they had big floods in Queensland back in 74, my parents told me about it. I mean, that summer was unusually wet, but no floods."

Again, I tried to use my phone but it was to no avail. There was no mention of extensive flooding anywhere in Queensland and brief mention of a small tremor in Christchurch on the day of the quake, the shock of which set off my maternal grandfather's fatal heart attack. Was this the same for other recent disasters in our part of the world?

Accordingly, I looked up the Black Saturday bushfire disaster in Victoria in February 2009, but while it mentioned that this was a severe heatwave and there were some bushfires around Kinglake, Bunyip, Bendigo, Gippsland and in the Dandenong Ranges East of Melbourne, the fire crews although over-stretched managed to contain them with the assistance of a sub-tropical rainstorm that hit Victoria later that weekend. There was no catastrophic destruction, no loss of life and no injuries. The only casualties were one hay shed and one bus stop on a country road.

"I guess you're right," I said.

"So when did this strange feeling come on?" Scott asked.

"It was when I was driving back to Brisbane from the Gold Coast last night," I said. "It was nothing at first, I just sort of blanked out for ten seconds or so, on the highway between Helensvale and Coomera."

"Well, that doesn't seem like much," said Scott. "We've all had that feeling of forgetting ten seconds or so while we're driving, it's a bit un-nerving, but completely natural like de ja vu."

"Yes, I have same experience," said Vicki.

"Normally I'd agree with you," I said. "I mean I've had that feeling before too, and de ja vu, but this time things went really strange, you know, small at first but then it just got bigger."

I described the car I had seen with stickers for the long-defunct South Queensland Crushers team, and the neighbors wearing Brisbane Bears not Brisbane Lions shirts, and how my sister Morgan didn't see anything wrong with this. I also mentioned how Morgan was watching that sad movie, and how one of the actors, the late John Ritter was starring in it some 7 or 8 years after he died, and that daylight savings had suddenly been introduced in Queensland when it wasn't there before.

Scott picked up his phone, him getting a text message. "It's Morgan, she's worried about you," he said, before letting her know I was here and okay. He then used the phone to show me the evidence that daylight savings, having been used in World War I and World War II was reintroduced in all Australian states and territories in the late 1960s -- and had been here ever since.

He then brought up first the AFL and then the NRL fixtures for the round of matches played over the Easter Long Weekend. I could only look on in amazement as I saw the evidence that the Brisbane Bears were playing the West Coast Eagles in Perth in a twilight game tomorrow afternoon, while Fitzroy were scheduled to meet reigning premiers Hawthorn this afternoon, the venue for the Lions vs. Hawks match Ballarat in Regional Victoria. I then looked at the NRL fixture, seeing that the South Queensland Crushers were also playing in Victoria this weekend, meeting the Melbourne Storm in Melbourne tomorrow afternoon, having lost in an upset to the Adelaide Rams in Brisbane last weekend.

"Your Dad will be watching that game," Scott said.

"Talking about my Dad, why didn't anyone ever tell me he was gay?" I blurted out.

Scott again looked puzzled. "Well, I guess your Dad and his husband Kevin are very happy. But who uses the word gay anymore when they say that they're happy?"

"I never hear of gay mean happy before," said Vicki.

"Sorry, my mistake," I said. "Look, I know this is going to sound odd, but if I say some strange things, or ask a dumb question or two or don't seem to know something obvious, could you please forgive me?"

"Sure," said Scott. For the next five minutes or so, I learned from my best friend that Heather and Ollie were the kids of Dad's new husband Kevin and they all lived together in Burleigh Heads, although Heather was living between Brisbane and the Gold Coast at the moment, boarding with us during the week to save on commuting so far every day for university. I also saw a picture of Ollie and I, along with Heather and Morgan at Dad and Kevin's wedding at Coolangatta, an event I had no memory of attending, and found out that same sex marriage was legalized in Australia in 2010 after a referendum on the issue.

I also found out that Jamie was born a girl, had always been a girl and never anything else. "I had this strange dream, it must be part of this fugue thing, that Jamie was a boy. It was so confusing." Lying seemed the best way to describe this situation.

Scott laughed. "You're worried about the wrong kid in that family, it's that brother of hers who you need to worry about, Adam."

Recalling that Jamie had said something similar, I looked up social media posts and recoiled when I saw my male cousin's social media. This was the same Adam I knew, the face was the same and the sulky and arrogant expression was unmistakable. But this Adam was fat, not as fat as the morbidly obese man I upset earlier but flabby, and he sat with his hair long and died bright pink, dressed in a skirt and blouse.

His social media was weird too, off the scale weird, talking about how he was non-binary but felt like a woman most days. He also had some post about Jamie's recent 19th birthday about how he (Adam) loved being her big sister. There was all sorts of other things too, mainly weird transgender things and about fictional franchises he liked, such as Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, as well as online gaming.

While I noted that boy Jamie and girl Jamie shared the exact same birthdate which I guess they should, I couldn't believe that fit and masculine Adam in this reality was a fat and creepy tranny, who wrote sexually explicit things about other guys and how being non-binary he could enjoy sex with them both as a homosexual man and as a woman. And that he loved these fictional franchises was perhaps even stranger, given the Adam I knew had such disinterest in fiction this in itself was strange.

"That's disturbing," I said. "But Morgan's friend Kate would love him, her brother is very similar."

"So, who is Morgan's friend Kate?" Scott looked very puzzled.

"Kate Bradshaw, she went through school with us the whole time." I described Kate and her family in great detail to Scott, and drew no reaction.

"I don't remember her at all, I think I would have remembered somebody as annoying as you describe," said Scott. "Have you tried looking her up online?"

I got my phone, and attempted to look up Kate Bradshaw and Katherine Bradshaw, added other information I knew about her and her brother and parents. Her academic parents had left-wing publications published online, but of them now there was no trace at all. It was like the family didn't exist at all.

"Nothing. This is so weird, I saw her just on Thursday night," I said. "Kate was getting her knickers in a twist as usual. Like Britain potentially withdrawing from the European Union, or America not getting their first female president in November."

Again, that look of puzzlement from my friend and his girlfriend. "Well, I don't know what the European Union is," said Scott. "Does she mean NATO? And as for America, this mysterious Kate should be in luck. Sarah Palin is hot favorite to get the Republication Nomination, and become the first female US President."

"No, it's not Sarah Palin, she wants Hilary Clinton to win for the Democrats," I clarified.

"Hilary Clinton?" Scott shook his head. "No way is Hilary Clinton going to become US President."

"How do you figure that?" I asked.

"Because she's been dead twelve years now," said Scott. He took up his phone and showed me a picture of Hilary Clinton with her husband and daughter circa 2004 with her having no hair and wearing a head-scarf, and her date of death also listed in the year 2004.

"That is so strange," I said. "Like John Ritter, the actor, I thought he died in the early 2000s, but it turned out he died in 2013, well in this strange place he did. But I know Hilary Clinton is still alive, I swear it."

"Well it's all there in black and white," Scott said. "And anyone can make that mistake, sometimes you think that someone died years ago and they turn out to have died not too long ago, or even still alive. Then other times you think someone died quite recently, and you find out they've been gone ten years or more."

"This feels very different, it is so confusing," I said. "Like I know Barack Obama has been US President since 2009, but Morgan said John McCain has been president since then."

"Morgan is right, it's always been John McCain," said Scott.

"So what became of Barack Obama then?" I asked.

"I think he became American ambassador to West Germany if I remember correctly," said Scott. He checked it on his phone. "Yes, he did."

"Wait a minute, West Germany?" I asked.

"Yes, West Germany," said Scott.

Again, I picked up my phone to look at the Germanic area of Western Europe. There was Austria as it had always been, but to my astonishment above it sat West Germany with Bonn as its capital, and East Germany with Berlin as its capital. I glanced towards Eastern Europe, noting that the states that had formed the USSR and Yugoslavia back in the day had split into separate countries as I knew them. Likewise Czechoslovakia had split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

"So, is East Germany still communist?" I asked. "Is it still like North and South Korea? Is there still the Berlin Wall?"

"No, of course not," said Scott. "You were good at history and geography in high school Corey, you must remember when we learned about it? How they tried to reunify West and East Germany in the early 1990s, and how they had been apart so long and neither country could agree or compromise on anything? So they ended up keeping West Germany and East Germany as two separate countries."

"I think if I took a history or geography test now I would get an F," I said. "Or more likely a Z."

Scott's phone beeped again. "That's Jamie, she says she's coming over to collect you and take you home."

It was still weird to hear people talk about Jamie as being female rather than being male, but I simply nodded and thought about possibly the biggest thing I had encountered so far in this strange new reality, on a global scale anyway.

"Scott, Vicki, if I say the date September 11, what does it mean to you?" I asked.

"It's Louise's birthday," volunteered Scott.

"So, do you remember any serious terrorist events or plane crashes in New York and Washington in the year 2001?" I asked. "Specifically at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Or a hijacked plane crashing in Pennsylvania on the same day?"

"Corey, as a cop, I think I'd better advise you, don't go talking about anything like that to any of my colleagues, especially the Feds," Scott advised. "And definitely don't go talking about it at the airport if you happen to run your Mum to the airport for work."

"Don't worry, I won't be doing that," I said. "So none of that sounds familiar to you at all?"

"Fair go mate, I was 6 and Vicki 4 at the time, and in any case, it sounds like some 1990s action movie" said Scott. He then paused. "Hang on, now you mention it, there was a terrorist event at the World Trade Centre, but it was years earlier, before we were born. Was it 1993 or 1994, I can't remember. I think they set a bomb in the basement under the Twin Towers, tried to collapse them but it obviously failed."

"I do remember that," I said.

"And yeah, you're right, there was a plane crash in New York City in 2001, I remember now," Scott said, again confirming it with his phone. "Yes, here we go, a plane crashed in November 2001 in Queens, shortly after take-off from Joseph P Kennedy airport."

"Joseph P Kennedy airport?" I asked.

"Yes, the US President in the early 1960s, he was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas in November 1963," said Scott. "Corey, I know you're very confused this morning, but you have to remember him."

"What about John F Kennedy?" I asked.

"Younger brother, President in the mid-1960s until he vanished in 1967 I think it was."

"Disappeared?" I was bewildered.

"Yes, it was all very strange really from what I read," said Scott. "He was with his wife Jackie and his two kids Caroline and John Junior, swam out a bit deeper and was never seen again. There was speculation he got swept out in a rip and drowned with his body never found, was taken by a shark or was either murdered or abducted, but nothing ever was proved and it's still a big mystery today."

"That sounds just like Harold Holt," I said.

"Harold Holt?" We all know what happened to him, he died in a Melbourne nursing home at age 100 in 2008, first ever Australian Prime Minister to live to 100."

Again, I picked up my phone and confirmed what Scott was saying by looking up Australian Prime Ministers, US Presidents and the Kennedy family. Harold Holt it seemed did not vanish at all in 1967, but did hand over the top job to John Gorton in 1968, preferring to return to the role of Treasurer. Then the Prime Ministers seemed to run as normal -- Gorton, McMahon, Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke, Keating and Howard - before the timeline skewed again in 2007.

As for US Presidents and the Kennedy family, I found that Joseph P Kennedy Junior did not die in action in a World War II plane crash as I thought, he had survived and won the 1960 US Presidential Election, his term obviously cut short in 1963. There was a hitherto unknown fifth Kennedy brother -- Michael Kennedy the fraternal twin of Kathleen -- who was killed in action in a plane crash in 1944, his twin sister also dying in a plane crash in 1948 as I had remembered.

When Joe Kennedy Junior died, Vice President Lyndon Johnson had served in the top job until 1964, John F Kennedy becoming US President in that year's election and taking the office from 1965, Johnson as his vice president before Johnson again became President following JFK's mysterious 1967 disappearance. As for the other Kennedy brothers, Robert as I had believed also died by assassination in 1968, while Edward served as Vice President under Jimmy Carter and had a long political career before dying in 2009.

Like with the Australian Prime Ministers, the US Presidents seemed to run as I remembered them for some four decades -- Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Senior, Clinton and Bush Junior -- before the timeline again skewed in 2008.

I could see that Vicki was getting impatient, her bare toes clenching and her fingers fidgeting, clearly the teenager wanted Scott's attention. She went and sat on his knee again, the two of them kissing and running their hands on each other, while I looked up big events of the world in the 20th century.

"So the Titanic sank in 1912, there was the First World War in 1914-1918, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918 and 1919, there was the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, Dustbowl and the Hindenburg Disaster in the 1930s, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany, there was the Second World War from 1939 and 1945 and the Holocaust, the Cold War afterwards with Korea and Vietnam, plus the Chernobyl catastrophe in 1986, all with heavy losses of life?" I asked.

"Yes, that's right," said Scott.

"Oh, that's so good!" I exclaimed, relieved that some major things in this strange timeline I was now in matched my own, before I realized how tactless I must have sounded when Vicki and Scott stared at me in disbelief.

"Sorry, I didn't mean that," I apologized, before we were distracted by Mum's SUV pulling into the driveway, and the petite figure of Jamie, still dressed in her cute cartoon rabbit long pajamas, turned off the engine and stepped out of the car.

Larry the dog barked again, but while as he knew me he didn't bother to come inside and check me out when I arrived, this time as Jamie wasn't so familiar he came in to investigate. Again, I was surprised, because as Larry was still a cattle dog and still wore the same collar he always did, yesterday was he was a blue heeler and today he was a red heeler. Still, given our late cat had arisen from the grave in this timeline, a blue heeler turning into a red heeler shouldn't have surprised.

While Larry made a fuss of Jamie and she petted him I said, "Wow Larry, you really look like a dingo today. Don't you go eating any babies, will you?"

The comment seemed to go over Vicki's head, while Jamie and Scott looked puzzled, then at me, then at each other, and back to me again. "We don't get it," they said blankly.

One quick search on my phone confirmed why this was the case, when I looked at a website for professionals, and saw a 36-year-old vet named Azaria Chamberlain practicing in Adelaide's southern suburbs, the young woman thanking a number of people including her mother Lindy and father Michael for their support in her long journey to become a veterinarian.

"So, is Corey feeling better?" Jamie asked. "We were so worried."

Scott nodded. "I think so, I don't know what's confused him so much, but he does seem a bit better than when he got here."

Vicki clearly wanted to be only one place -- the bedroom with her boyfriend -- and Scott could see it. "So Jamie and Corey, is it okay if I leave you together. If Vicki and I don't -- well you know -- right now I might be late for my shift, and Vicki won't be able to study today."

"I so horny, I can't wait until you get home," said Vicki. "You are such handsome policeman..."

The two headed off to Scott's parents' bedroom, and the door closed.

"I think I can guess what they'll be up to the next 15 minutes or so," said Jamie.

"Yeah," I agreed, still confused about how yesterday in the 'normal' world Scott didn't like Vicki, viewing her as a potential stalker, yet today in the new timeline, they were crazy for each other.

"Well, I think that might work for you today Corey, getting you out of that strange state you've been in," said Jamie.

"Yeah, you might be right," I said. Perhaps sex with a pretty girl would help me on this very strange day, but obviously it wasn't going to happen.

"I know I'm right." Despite being such a tiny girl, Jamie was very strong, and she took me aback when she pulled me into the lounge room and to the couch, me too taken aback to offer up any resistance.

Jamie pushed me onto the couch, leaped on top of me, the barefoot, pajama-clad teenager kissing me on the lips with vigor, and despite being very much out of sorts and taken by surprise, could feel my erection in my undies as my pretty girl cousin -- who had been my very not pretty boy cousin until yesterday -- made out with me.

Opening her pajama top to display her pert little breasts, her flat tummy and her cute little naval, Jamie then moved her hand to my groin, feeling my erection as our tongues intertwined. Again her strength took me by surprise given her petite little size, Jamie ripping down my shorts and undies, freeing my cock and giving me a hand-job, her fingers sneaking to my balls and massaging them too, me worrying I would cover my cousin's hands with a sticky white substance that looked like, but most definitely was not mayonnaise.

"Don't be shy, put your hand down my knickers like you love to do, Corey," Jamie urged me.

Wait, we had done this before? I decided it was best not to waste time making sense of this as I never would, so instead stuck my hand down the front of Jamie's pajama bottoms, feeling the soft cotton of her teen panties. I felt the outline of Jamie's vagina in the fabric, a slight dampness in her crotch, then put my hand down the front of my cousin's knickers, feeling Jamie's soft pubic hair and her feminine mound.

"Go deeper between my legs," Jamie urged me, and I did as my cousin suggested, my fingers eagerly exploring Jamie's tight teenage pussy, my fingers getting sticky and wet from her feminine excitement. Jamie giggled as my fingers made contact with her clitoris, her toes clenching as the pajama-clad, barefoot teen responded to my touch to her fanny flaps, and went up into her wet love hole.

"Don't forget my back bottom," Jamie urged me, mischief in her pretty green eyes.

"You've got it Jamie," I said, allowing my fingers to go through her pussy hair to the sensitive skin separating Jamie's vulva from her anus, before touching her rear entrance. Fingering my pretty cousin in the private place where she pooped was so hot. I pressed my index finger at the tight, puckered opening of Jamie's anus, before pushing up into her bowels.

My God, if I thought Jamie's box was tight, it had nothing on her bum as I went further up into her anal sphincter, the hot walls of the teenager's bowels closing around the digit as with the rest of my hand, I continued to have a good rummage around inside her knickers and we made out, Jamie playing with my cock and balls as we did.

"Come on now Mister, fingers out of my pussy and my ass, hopefully Scott is fucking Vicki's ass off right now, but we don't have that much time to do the things we love," said Jamie.

"Okay," I said, somewhat reluctantly withdrawing my eager fingers from Jamie's genitals and her rear end, sliding them out of her knickers and her pajamas. Jamie then put her hand into her own pants, and from the side panel of her panties removed a wrapped condom.

"That's for later. Time's an issue so I'd normally say skip 69 but I know how much you love it, and how much I love it I think we'll fit it in," said Jamie. "Now lie down on the couch, nice and flat. And shoes off, it isn't polite to put your shoes on someone else's couch."

My cock throbbed at the thought of what was going to happen next as I followed my cousin's directions and removed my socks and shoes. "Oh yeah."

Jamie straddled me one bare foot each side of my pulled down her pajamas to her knees, exposing her cute white cartoon frog knickers. Jamie pulled her panties down to her knees, then lowered her fanny down to sit on my face.

The sight of Jamie's red pubic hair, her pussy and her bare bottom as she sat down on my face, me able to see Jamie's anus as she got closer. The smell of aroused teen pussy as Jamie sat on my face was a massive aphrodisiac, her pubic hair growing in abundance around her pussy aiding in keeping her feminine smells between her legs.

Eagerly I began to lick at Jamie's tight teenage twat, her pussy juice flowing into my mouth as I circled around her clitoris, her pubes tickling my nose. Due to the height difference -- me over six feet and Jamie just four feet eleven -- I had to bring my legs up and Jamie had to lean her petite little body far forward to get to my cock, but Jamie was so eager to suck my dick no way was she going to fail at this.

She only paused to say, "Remember both my front bottom and my back bottom like tongue," before eagerly going down on me, my cousin sucking my cock with great enthusiasm. It was she was eating a popsicle, she sucked me off nice and hard, while her tongue eagerly licked at my shaft, teasing me slow and sensual.

Getting a blow job from my pretty redhead cousin was hot, but it was equally hot eating her out as she sucked me off, every smell and sensation from between Jamie's legs a major turn-on as well as the way she squirmed her petite little arse on my face. Pussy juice flowed from Jamie's vag so much that it was almost like she was menstruating, and tracing my tongue back from her vulva to her anus was pure heaven. And licking Jamie's arsehole like my tongue was her toilet paper, the forbidden feeling coupled with the fact that we were cousins nearly had me premature ejaculating into her mouth.

I think Jamie sensed this, as she stopped giving me fellatio and pulled her pussy and ass out of my face. She kicked off her pajama bottoms over her bare feet and then her knickers, which she picked up and handed to me. "Something to keep you occupied while I put this on you," she said, picking up the condom and starting to unwrap it.

I could see Jamie's cunt stains on her double-cotton panty saddle, and eagerly sniffed her knickers, absorbing all the feminine smells from between her legs, the smell of snatch sending even more blood to my groin. Jamie's touch to my penis as she fitted the condom onto me added to the sexy sensations.

With me lying down, Jamie again straddled me, this time facing me and lowered herself down, pushing my erection up into her tight, teen pussy, her pretty face showing her delight as I entered and pushed up into her.

"Stop smelling my knickers and fuck me Corey, you great big perve," Jamie giggled in mock indignation, grabbing her smelly little panties from me and leaning forward to kiss me. I took the opportunity to reach up and put my hands on my cousin's breasts, feeling Jamie's small but sexy teenage tits, her nipples rock hard showing how much she was turned on almost as much as her wet pussy.

Jamie began to ride my erection, bouncing up and down on my groin, soaking me with pussy juice, me thrusting my condom-covered cock up into her, Jamie's pretty face showing her delight at this, her pony-tail bouncing down as I fucked her. Until yesterday this cousin was a boy, in this strange alternate universe I had somehow ended up in she was a girl and she was hot. And we were fucking right now on the couch, something it seemed we had done before only I had no memory of it.

One thing I did know was that I was close to orgasm, and by the expression on Jamie's pretty face, I sensed she was too. I reached the point of no return, the feeling of orgasm sweeping my body and my balls releasing a tidal wave of white semen.

It shot out of my cock and up into my cousin's cooch, the condom thankfully capturing my orgasm and preventing the results of my ejaculation spraying up past Jamie's cervix and exploring her reproductive system in search of eggs. I was sweating and breathing heavily as I came, and Jamie reaching her own orgasm at the same time made it even hotter.

Jamie's face contorted, the toes on her pretty bare feet clenched tight, and she stifled a scream, this coming out as a mouse-like squeak. I felt her hot sticky orgasm soak my groin, and the delicate smell of Jamie's aroused teenage pussy became stronger as her own climax went from her clitoris through her vagina, then onto her anus and up her bowels.

With both of us breathing hard post orgasm, my cousin removed my cock from her pussy and Jamie and I lay together, her running one of her bare feet up and down my lower leg, me stroking Jamie's triangle of pubic hair on her redhead pussy.

"Well Corey, there doesn't seem anything wrong with your cock this morning at least," Jamie said, her tone playful and teasing.

"No," I agreed. In my post orgasmic clarity, I was processing the fact that in this reality, I was a cousin fucker.

"And look at all that cum," said Jamie, moving around and looking at the tip of my condom and all the sticky white semen within. "Lucky you didn't shoot that up into my pussy. It's been two weeks since my last period, so if that got into my uterus, nine months from now I'm going to have an albino asthmatic baby, and we'd have to move to Tasmania. Or emigrate to America and live in Arkansas."

"You're right there," I said. It was true. I had cum big time, and the thought of all that sperm swimming up Jamie's birth canal, into her uterus and fallopian tubes in the mid-point of her menstrual cycle was a scary one. At least one of them would no doubt find their target released from Jamie's ovaries in the current 28 days.

I was also struck by Jamie's little joke about cousins and Tasmania. Some things clearly were the same between my world and this strange alternate world I seemed to have slipped into.

"I think I'd better help you with that," said Jamie. She removed my condom, and used her delicate tongue to lick away the residual semen from my cock. Then with a naughty grin on her pretty face, and sitting in an unladylike position showing off her snatch, Jamie emptied the contents of my condom into her mouth, showed my her tongue covered in semen, and then swallowed it with a big grin.

"Please pass me those tissues Corey," said Jamie, indicating a tissue box that sat on the nearby table.

"Sure Jamie," I said, doing just this and watching as Jamie grabbed a handful of the pink tissues within, scrunched them up, and put them between her legs to wipe her pussy and clean up the sticky results of her orgasm. Watching her do this, my cock started to get interested, despite me having cum less than five minutes ago.

I got dressed, and Jamie put on her knickers and her pajama bottoms, before buttoning up her pajama top to cover her breasts and we removed any evidence that she and I were cousin fuckers, such as the condom, its wrapper and the tissues covered in Jamie's pussy juice.

"We'd better be getting back, we have work this morning, and Heather just texted me again, wondering if you are okay," Jamie said, looking at her phone. "We'll just go and say goodbye to Scott and Vicki if well, you know they're decent."

Jamie and I walked to where Scott's parents' bedroom was located, and immediately Scott stepped out, handsome and dashing in his police uniform. It was the first time I had seen him dressed as a police officer, but I reminded myself that in this reality I would have done so many times.

"Well hello Mr. Policeman, have I done something this morning?" Jamie joked, Scott laughing along.

"Well, Corey does seem to look a bit better than when he turned up," Scott observed, looking me up and down.

"Yeah, I do a bit thanks," I said. It was mostly a lie -- I was still confused as fuck -- but if I went around talking to people about how I thought I had slipped into a parallel dimension and that Scott was indeed a policeman, I might end up in a non-voluntary psychiatric hold in a mental institution.

"We'd better be heading back, we both have work," Jamie said.

"Yeah, same for me," said Scott.

"So, give our regards to Vicki, not sure where she is," said Jamie, before we heard her voice from within the main bedroom's ensuite bathroom, thanks to an ajar door.

"Just a minute, I sit on toilet, I nearly finish!" Vicki called out. The sound of Vicki advancing the toilet roll three times as she finished wiping her bottom was audible, then Vicki flushed the toilet, washed her hands and her petite figure emerged from the bathroom, still pulling up her white polka-dot knickers with which she wore in conjunction with a white bra on her top half.

Vicki's white underwear contrasted with her swarthy Thai -- make that Siamese -- skin, but that was a pretty nice contrast, and as she walked towards us on her petite little bare feet, I could see the swelling of Vicki's breasts in her bra, and the shape of her pussy in her panties.

"Sorry I take so long to go number twos when I go to toilet," Vicki said, smiling and giggling.

Scott laughed, and put his arm around his girlfriend, bring her closer and I could see him fondling the cheeks of Vicki's bottom through the back panel of her knickers. "That's okay Vicki, but I was starting to worry you'd fallen in. Then I would have had to call in my colleagues from the police rescue squad to free you."

Vicki also laughed. "And it would be all your fault, Scott."

Scott feigned indignation. "Me? How's that?"

"When we have sex, I say to 'fuck shit out of me' and you take it too literal," Vicki joked.

"Now you put it like that..." Scott smiled, touching up Vicki on her tits through the fabric of her bra.

Vicki turned to Jamie and me. "Don't worry, I not really cross," she assured us. "In fact, Scott can have sex with me in any hole he like, as hard as he like and as many time he like after he got us ticket to Michael Jackson."

"Michael Jackson?" I was struck dumb.

"Yes, Michael Jackson," said Vicki. "He come to Australia for concerts next month, and Scott get us ticket for Gold Coast concert." She turned back to her boyfriend. "Scott, I still can't thank you enough, I so grateful."

Scott smiled. "Please Vicki, there's no need to keep thanking me. It's my pleasure, and the least I could do for my girlfriend, I know how much you love him and his music." They exchanged a kiss on the lips.

"I need get dressed now," said Vicki. Scott followed her as did Jamie, and I just went along like a sheep, Vicki not objecting. Well, she was in her bra and her knickers anyway, so I guess it didn't really matter.

In Vicki's bedroom she put on a tee-shirt -- a Gold Coast tourist tee-shirt featuring the Surfers skyline -- and the same cartoon animal jeans she had been wearing yesterday. I couldn't resist a joke. "So who is the opening act for the Michael Jackson concert? Marvin Gaye?"

Scott looked puzzled. "He'd find that hard, he's dead, has been for more than 30 years now."

Jamie seemed excited about Scott and Vicki attending a Michael Jackson concert. "I can't believe you're going to see Michael Jackson for real," she said. "I remember the time I saw Princess Diana, I still can't believe it happened."

"You saw Princess Diana in person?" I asked. "When?"

Jamie now looked confused. "I thought you already knew about that, Corey. It was about two years ago, my friends and I had gotten out of high school early and we were walking through the middle of Brisbane, and there's Princess Diana signing copies of her latest book at a book store near the Queen Street Mall. My friends and I just couldn't believe it was her, and we just stopped, staring. Anyway, she looks over at us, smiles, and gives us a wave, and we wave back."

My cousin paused, reflecting on this obviously happy memory of hers. "We were just star-struck for days, couldn't believe we just saw Princess Diana in person and she smiled and waved to us. Even now, I still can't believe I actually saw her."

"Neither can I," I said, sounding sarcastic although I didn't mean to.

Jamie's phone indicated that she had a text message. "Oh, we'd better be getting back, that's from your Mum. She's getting more worried about you, Corey."

As we walked towards the front door, I thought about my totally bizarre situation. My best friend who yesterday was an IT major and an intern at a large IT company was today a cop. The young girl from Thailand he didn't like yesterday was today from Siam and they were boyfriend and girlfriend. My obnoxious male cousin Jamie was now my hot female cousin, and her brother Adam seemed to be a tranny in this new reality. A dog had changed from a blue heeler to a red heeler, and a late cat had been resurrected from the grave. My father was a homosexual married to another man, and we had stepsiblings as a result, one of whom Heather I had met for the first time this morning. Oh, and in this timeline gay was an archaic term for being happy, nothing to do with homosexuals at all.

Outside of my own world, defunct sports teams were still in operation. Countries and cities had their old names. Famous people I thought dead were still alive, vice versa or had died at different times than I remembered. Politics in Australia, England and the USA had skewed at some times, but not others. Some natural disasters had not occurred, and most significantly of all, THERE NEVER WAS 9/11 AND THE TWIN TOWERS OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER STILL DOMINATED NEW YORK TO THIS VERY DAY.

However, I had not so far met my own mother in this new alternate dimension. So what would the new version of Marnie Gibson be like in my new reality? I felt both nervous and excited to find out.

END OF CHAPTER 1 - TO BE CONTINUED...