“Something will come up,” Laura tells me and gives me one of those sympathetic smiles you never want to have aimed at you.
She then launches into a lengthy diatribe on how chocolate manufacturing out here is ten times more efficient than it is back home. I continue to rub her feet while drifting off into a morose fantasy where I have to offer sexual favours to passing Japanese tourists to earn enough money to buy myself a degree in creative writing from an online Australian university.
When this chance for a new life came along, I spent all my time fantasising about long golden beaches, ninety-degree temperatures, and barbecues. I really didn’t think about what I was going to do for a long-term career until we actually got here. I was so happy that Laura had been offered a well-paying job—and would therefore dig us out of the mire I’d resolutely put us in, thanks to getting fired from the paper—that I didn’t stop to think about the ramifications on my own future employment, and my sense of self-worth should I not find something remunerative to do with my time.
Right now I’m a kept man, and it frankly makes me feel a bit sick. I’m very proud of Laura for what she’s accomplishing with Worongabba, but I hate the idea of her having to support us both. Oh, I can clean the house from top to bottom every day and rub her feet until they’re worn down to nubs, but I still don’t feel like I’m providing much to the family unit. It’s a very caveman-like attitude to take I know, but I just can’t help myself.
The lack of work and acres of free time wouldn’t be so bad if it would just stop fucking raining for five minutes. In previous weeks I’ve been able to take constitutional walks along the breathtaking beaches we’re lucky enough to be living right alongside. Our apartment is less than a hundred yards’ walk to the kind of sandy slice of heaven you usually only see glaring at you from the pages of the nearest travel brochure. I’ve grown quite used to ambling my way along the boardwalk, dropping into the town centre to pick up the local paper, and spending the next twenty minutes in a fruitless search for employment before throwing my hands up and buying an ice cream. It’s the kind of lifestyle I’d be insanely jealous of if I weren’t the one living it.
But then it started to rain and my life became a living hell.
The two-bedroom apartment we live in isn’t all that big. It’s part of a three-storey complex built around a small swimming pool and is obviously designed with the transient vacationer in mind. Not a day goes by without seeing a new collection of tourists wheeling their suitcases in through the main gate, happy expectant looks on their faces.
The lack of floor space is fine when you can get out and about, but when you’re confined thanks to the inclement weather, it’s akin to being in a prison—admittedly, the minimum security kind with cable TV and attractive views from the window, but a prison nonetheless.
Thus I am bored out of my tiny mind.
Which is frankly ridiculous considering I’m in one of the most beautiful countries in the world, with access to a plethora of entertainment venues designed to keep the locals happy when the weather is a bit crappy, as now. The fine public transport system of Queensland could carry me to any number of cinemas, theatres, bowling alleys, amusement arcades, and shopping malls.
I’d also like to think I have a pretty creative intellect. I could be spending all this free time writing a novel of such great import and significance that it would change the face of modern literature.
So what have I accomplished in the past few days, you may ask? What constructive and proactive tasks has Jamie Newman completed in his days on the Gold Coast so far?
I have finished Plants vs Zombies, learned how to say “my elephant has a purple bum” in German, and jerked off a grand total of six times in one afternoon. By the end all I could produce was a fine dust. My life is truly blessed…or “mein elefant hat einen lila unten” as they say in Bavaria.
Thanks to this apartment block being largely full of tourists, I haven’t had much chance to get to know anyone. No sooner have I broken through my British sense of reserve and introduced myself to a neighbour, it’s then time for them to leave. There was a particularly nice couple from Munich I was trying to get to know last week. I’d just got to the point where I was attempting to work elephants into the conversation when Jurgen announced they were both leaving the next morning for Perth.
In fact, the only people I’ve seen on a regular basis so far have been Sandra the housekeeper, her husband, Bob, who tends the grounds, and Mindy, the pretty twenty-year-old letting agency trainee who sits in her small office at the rear of the apartment complex texting on her iPhone. Sandra comes from the UK so we have some common ground on which to base a conversation, Bob is quite happy to baffle me with the rules of Aussie football, and while Mindy isn’t the source of great conversation, I can at least stare idly at her fabulous breasts.
I can’t talk to the girl for more than five minutes at a time though, as she makes me feel older than shit. Mindy speaks in a language I can barely understand, using words like stoked and wrapped in contexts I am completely unfamiliar with. Apparently they are both indicators of excitement and happiness judging from the way she says them in a high-pitched squeal while bouncing around in one spot.
I have tried to put pen to paper (or fingertip to keyboard) and write something in the empty rain-soaked hours of the past week. It did not go altogether well.
I initially started to write a thriller about a British journalist living in Australia who has to fellate Asians to survive and gets embroiled in a human-trafficking operation, but decided after three thousand words that this was probably hitting a bit close to home and left it there.
Then I had a pop at writing erotica. I just can’t do it. Every time I start to describe how his throbbing manhood sailed majestically towards her heaving sex, I feel a combination of horny and nauseated—and start to giggle like a ten-year-old looking through a porno mag for the first time.
Then I wrote a poem about the rain. I’d only got three stanzas into the bugger when I realised that all I’d been writing was a weather report in rhyming couplets: Heavy downpours all this morn, leaves me feeling all forlorn. Precipitation from the west, creates a weight inside my chest.
Complete crap, I’m sure you’ll agree.
I’ve come to the decision that I’m not cut out to write anything of great import and significance, so I should probably just knock out a derivative action potboiler featuring large explosions and women with chests that defy gravity. I am, therefore, now halfway through chapter one of Max Danger and the Boobatrons and am heartily looking forward to our muscular hero’s first confrontation with the evil Doctor Smegma.
We’ve been here in Australia for six weeks now, and that’s been long enough to get a pretty good idea of what it’s like as a country. So for your delight and edification, here’s the six-week report card:
The Good:
Free parking. I know I should probably start with the beautiful beaches and all that blather, but free parking, people—everywhere! We haven’t once had to pay for parking at any one of the various beauty spots and tourist attractions we’ve been to. The petrol’s cheap as well, even though the price is more up and down than an overworked prostitute some days.
The weather. Yep, here’s an inevitable one. It’s hot, and for the most part sunny. It hasn’t dropped below twenty-five degrees yet, and we’re all permanently living in shorts and flip-flops. This makes people happy and friendly, which makes us happy and friendly—those of us with jobs, that is. Yes, it’s summer here, but as their winter is generally the same temperature as our summer anyway, we’ll go ahead and give this one resoundingly to the Aussies, eh?
Safety. This place, or the Gold Coast at least, seems a lot bloody safer than a majority of UK cities. There’s little to no vandalism other than a smear of graffiti, the teenagers are all too busy rolling around on skateboards looking happy and suntanned to attack any pensioners in the s
treet, and folks are happy to leave their possessions lying around on the beaches with little fear of them being stolen. Some of the police cars here are partially coloured pink. Yes, pink. Can you imagine how that’d go down in the UK? What little respect the local scumbags have for the police would evaporate the second a unit drove by in a car that looked like a marshmallow. Here, on Friday and Saturday nights you’re just as likely to see a family out and about with little kids as you are drunken people. I’ve seen no antisocial behaviour whatsoever—unless you count middle-aged men flying past you on a skateboard as antisocial.
Scenery. The other inevitable one. Beach after beach of bright sand and roaring surf, mountains covered in lush rainforest, clean sun-dappled parks where people can congregate and look tanned together. Frankly, it’s sickening. These people are the luckiest bastards on the planet. Even the town centres look lovely.
Food. The food is excellent. Walk into your average British shopping mall and the meal choices you have will consist of a variety of brown fried shit from the fast-food outlets, or a limp bit of lettuce parked on a burned slice of bruschetta in one of those Italian café chains—a meal that is about as authentically Italian as a bowl of SpaghettiOs. In Australia the food courts are enormous and the variety is great. Laura and I must have spent at least a month trying to decide what to choose from the wide selection of cuisines from around the world (we generally go for Thai). The portions are big, too. Other than the mall food, the coffee, even the cheap stuff, is far better than the sludgy crap we are used to, and the meat is fabulous, especially the beef—none of that slightly grey stuff that generally lurks at the back of the Walmart meat counter. I’ve also found the best peanut butter I’ve ever had here, and you can buy a ton of delicious watermelon for next to nothing.
Friendly people. The people are friendly and open. This is largely because of all the things I’ve mentioned above, of course. Okay, you get one or two idiots who shout a bit and dress like they really want to be extras in the next Mad Max movie, but for the most part the Aussies are a happy, friendly bunch. It’s quite a culture shock to have somebody genuinely interested in helping you out, rather than getting the usual look of contempt and that walleyed vacant stare when talking to an official person in Britain. The Australian people live in a beautiful country, and that’s reflected in their demeanor, although I do wish they wouldn’t go around being so bloody smug about the place all the time. It’s just not British.
The Bad:
Communications. Let’s start with the Internet. The Internet in Australia is laughably bad. African bushmen in the middle of the Kalahari can’t believe how backwards Aussie broadband is. Slow, hideously expensive, and unreliable, it boggles the mind how it can be this awful. We’re currently paying over fifty dollars a month for a mobile broadband service that’d cost me less than half that at home. And it drops out all the time (twice since I started typing this). If somebody so much as sneezes anywhere near the Wi-Fi router, it refuses to work for twenty minutes.
TV. Woeful. We have free digital TV here, but it’s not like it is back home, where there are fifty channels to choose from, plus radio. Australian Freeview consists of sixteen stations, which are all the major mainstream broadcasters and no music channels at all. Fawlty Towers is still broadcast here, believe it or not. If you missed any UK dramas or comedies from about three years ago, no worries—just come to Australia because they’re all still on in prime-time slots. When you do find something half-decent to watch, the thirty-four commercial breaks an hour ruin it somewhat (Australia has the most unrestricted and worst advertising controls in the world, it seems). Australia has followed the USA in terms of its TV, rather than the UK. That’s the clinching indictment you need on the dubious standards here. I miss the BBC.
Prices. Everything here is bloody expensive. This is partly due to the pound being weaker than an asthmatic vegetarian mountain climber against the Aussie dollar—but, even so, things here are a lot pricier than they are back home. A takeout meal is double what it would be in the UK, cars are astronomically priced, groceries vary from mildly expensive to frickin’ ridiculous, and you have to carefully pick and choose what entertainment you want to indulge in if you don’t want to bankrupt yourself. As far as I can see, this is all due to some of the dumbest competition and commercial rules I’ve ever seen in Western civilisation. There are just two supermarket chains here (as opposed to our eight or more): Coles and Woolworths. Nobody else seems allowed to get into the game. There’s no real competition so prices stay high. The banks (there are actually four or five of these) operate like UK banking institutions did fifteen years ago. You can’t draw cash out of a competitor’s ATM without being charged, for instance.
Australia is a lovely place, but if they think I’m paying ten bucks for a small bag of M&M’s, they’ve got another think coming.
Bugger. I forgot one last thing that’s bad about this place: mosquitoes.
Utter bastards of the highest order. Like small multi-limbed insect ninjas, they sneak up on you unawares and bite you where you least expect it. To prevent the little sods from having a go at you, you need to spray yourself with so much insect repellent that you end up smelling like a malfunctioning chemical plant. And even then a few of the hardier ones slip through the net and find the one place on your body you didn’t smother in the cancerous gas. I know Australia is supposed to be full of murderous creatures poised to rip your face off as soon as you debark from a plane, but I’ve not seen any of them yet, and most of the wildlife has actually seemed pretty friendly. The mosquitoes, though, they’re evil buggers with no remorse, and I want them all dead. My back looks like the surface of Mars right now and Poppy’s forehead still shows evidence of the golf ball–sized bite she was subjected to back at Grant and Ellie’s.
Anyway, that’s quite enough of all that. It’s been at least half an hour since I last stared forlornly at the clouds trying their best to squeeze out every drop of rain they can. If I’m not there to watch them, they may start to think all their hard work is being underappreciated.
I’ll just make myself a peanut butter sandwich and get back to it.
LAURA’S DIARY
Friday, March 3
Dear Mum,
I could get used to being an Australian.
I’ll never like watching cricket and will never idol-worship Ned Kelly, take up surfing, or end every sentence with a question mark, but by gum I could get used to everything else this country has to offer.
The past few weeks have been amazing, not least because my legs are beginning to take on a very healthy golden tan and my hair has achieved a natural bounce I couldn’t reproduce back home with $500 worth of John Frieda.
The job is everything I wanted it to be.
Hell, it’s everything I needed it to be.
Since I was forced to close the shop back home, my career in the wonderful world of chocolate consumables had been royally in the toilet. Morton & Slacks sucked the life out of me every day, and it got to the point where I never wanted to look at another chocolate fondue set ever again. That was the worst thing about the job—it made me start to hate one of the major passions in my life.
I really feel like I’ve won the lottery now, though. Working for Worongabba is the best job I could possibly have without owning my own business again. The money is great, the working conditions are fantastic, Poppy is in the best day care I’ve ever come across, and I get to go to work every day in a series of light summer dresses that make me look and feel about ten years younger.
I always wake up with a smile on my face, and Jamie gets the biggest kiss possible at the door before I leave. This, if nothing else, should give ample evidence that I am enjoying life again.
Kissing my husband goodbye in the morning is something I haven’t been all that keen on doing in recent months. Jamie and I have lived what can only be described as a strained existence this past year. The mere fact that I am h
appy to give him a big smacker as I leave for work now marks a very healthy and much-needed change in our relationship. Things still aren’t quite how they used to be when we were first married, but this move to Australia has improved matters to no end, and I’m confident that any damage that might have been done back home thanks to all the stresses and tensions we were under will be mended out here in the sun in no time at all.
After Poppy and I say goodbye to Jamie, I drive us up the highway in the monstrous white car we own, with its exhaust that’s several decibels above the safe limit for most people’s eardrums. I try to ignore the looks from the passing pedestrians as much as I can and just turn up the radio.
Australian radio is very strange. They don’t seem to have any stations dedicated to new songs. I was listening to the area’s most popular station yesterday, and they played a Foo Fighters song back-to-back with Eddy Grant’s “Electric Avenue” with no trace of irony whatsoever.
Usually by the time Poppy and I reach Surfer’s Paradise we’ve been treated to hits from the last three decades. And Crowded House. There always must be Crowded House. It’s written into the Australian constitution.
Surfer’s Paradise is the crown jewel in the Gold Coast’s expansive tiara. It’s the nearest you get to a proper city anywhere in these parts. By Australian standards it’s huge, but all New Yorkers would laugh at the notion that this collection of skyscrapers perched right on the edge of the ocean could in any way be classed as a city. You can cheerfully walk the entire length of the place in an afternoon if you had a mind to.
Love...Under Different Skies Page 8