And anyway, we couldn’t afford vodka.
Most of all, I missed Roo.
Gill missed her too of course – the three of us had been together for so long, through so many ridiculous adventures, that we’d bonded to an almost unhealthy degree. But I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say that I missed Roo more than Gill did. Certainly in more different ways, than Gill did.
Or so I hoped!
And I also hoped, as she relaxed in Perth with her Dad and her sisters, that she missed me too.
Roo flying back in was one of the happiest moments of my life up to that point.
I wasn’t sure if I’d been harbouring lingering doubts about our relationship – specifically about the likelihood of her deciding to remain in Perth with her family – but all that was blown away when she stepped out of the Arrivals gate in Sydney airport.
Rusty was delighted to see her too – the old van had hardly turned a wheel in the month since he’d dropped her off at the same airport, and he was on his best behaviour. I think he was worried about being left behind when we headed off on the next leg of our grand adventure…
To Melbourne!
We’d been discussing our next move over Skype and email ever since Christmas, as Roo’s return meant we only had a few days left in Leo’s flat.
With no real prospects in Sydney, we’d decided to try our luck further afield – and Melbourne fit that bill perfectly.
That night Roo moved into the master bedroom, and poor Gill was relocated to the couch. I really did feel sorry for her – but not enough to stop me doing it!
This cut right to the heart of a situation I’d been worrying over in the back of my mind, ever since it had first occurred to me in the middle of the Bibbulmun Track.
Gill and me together were great.
Gill and Roo together were great.
Roo and me together were more than great – off the charts great in fact, and somehow managing to get greater all the time.
Gill, Roo and me – that was fun. It had been great. But more and more, I was starting to feel that it wasn’t healthy – and that it wasn’t fair.
On Gill.
I came out to sit with her after Roo went to sleep that night, and we had a glass of wine from a rapidly diminishing box of goon.
“So, Roo’s back,” I started.
“She is,” Gill agreed.
“I feel a bit bad about how this has all worked out for you,” I explained. “I’m aware that I kind of…”
“Stole her.”
“Yes. I kind of stole her…”
“No, you actually stole her. She was mine – now she’s yours. That’s stealing.”
“Okay, fair point.”
“Thank-you.”
“Right well, I think I’ve figured out a way to make it up to you.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. I’m kicking you out. Here, in Sydney. When me and Roo carry on to Melbourne, we’re going to leave you here.”
“WHAT?? Are you fucking kidding me? What the hell do you mean, staying here? What the hell would I do in Sydney?”
“Well, you’ve said yourself – you don’t want to leave kung fu. You like it here.”
“Of course I do, but that doesn’t mean I want to stay! Not on my own!”
“Ah, I see. Oh well – you haven’t got a choice. Roo and I need some time alone. And you need… well, you need to meet people. To have some fun without us for a change. Make some new friends – and maybe even a boyfriend? You need to see what adventures you can get up to when we’re not around to cramp your style.”
I won’t write what she said next. Not because I’m a stranger to swear-words, but because I’ve never heard quite so many of them overlapping each other. Her tirade continued at some length. I don’t know why, but I got the feeling that Gill wasn’t too pleased with my decision.
So I gave her some space to think it over.
I’m sensitive like that.
Melbourne Bound
Secretly I knew I’d cave – if Gill really did want to come to Melbourne with us, there was no way I was going to stop her.
But I hoped that by hard-lining it, I’d tricked her into thinking about it on a much more serious level than she’d have bothered with otherwise. We talked about it almost exclusively for the next few days. The downsides, which Gill was good at enumerating, were obvious; she’d have to start completely from scratch, in terms of… well, everything. Work. Home. Friends. Life.
But the benefits? They were less tangible, nebulous possibilities with the potential to be transformational – but also, as Gill loved to point out, a load of pointless bollocks. Why did she need to find new friends, when she had us right there? She wasn’t desperately seeking a life partner at the moment, but felt she could handle that particular hurdle when she came to it. As for ‘increased confidence, self-reliance and personal fulfilment?’ Pah. It was easy to see why she usually won these arguments.
Leo came back from his sojourn overseas, and presented us with the exact same bundle of banknotes we’d given to him. So Gill and I were both in funds, albeit temporarily. No mention was made of what Gill and I had come to call our Christmas miracle, so we graciously took our money and left. We moved back to the same hostel we’d been staying in with Mum, and even ended up in the same pair of rooms.
We took a few long walks into the city, marvelling at how ceaselessly busy it was, how the floods of tourists and floods of locals all blended seamlessly on the streets, creating an atmosphere so vibrant it was palpable. We watched buskers with violins, and performance artists with chainsaws and unicycles, and saw the gleaming white hulls of the yachts ranked tightly in the harbour. Sydney was a great place, with a far stronger backpacker vibe than we’d experienced in Perth. It was closer to what a real capital city should feel like: massive and scary, but crazy and exciting with it. Here lives were being lived to their maximum potential, at high speed; thousands of coffees were being drank, and books read in parks, and bicycles ridden, and text messages sent from crowded commuter trains full of people who wished they could be doing exactly what we were doing; which was nothing.
And so it came to pass that the morning before we were due to set off for Melbourne, Gill came to me with a decision.
“I’m going to stay,” she told me. Bravely.
Instantly, my fear that she would become old and grey still travelling with us, and never branch out to find someone of her very own, vanished – and was replaced by terror.
What was she going to do? How was she going to cope? What about money, about jobs, about a place to live? What if she didn’t meet anyone – or what if she did, and they weren’t right for her? What if something went drastically wrong?
These fears, of course, were the same ones that Gill was feeling – the same ones she’d wrestled with late into the night, every night, since I’d first made the ‘suggestion’ that had led her down this path.
Poor girl, she must have been shitting herself.
But she did it anyway.
The next day was a blur.
Gill and I toured every hostel in the city, settling on one that had old railway carriages as dorm rooms, and was considerably closer both to town, and to the kung fu school.
Then she packed her backpack, trying to squeeze a year-plus of accumulated possessions a third the size of a van into something she could carry on her back.
Every time she shook her head sadly at something too big to take, and replaced it in Rusty, my heart quailed. I’m doing this to her, I thought. Even though it’s for her own good.
And I firmly believed that. I still do.
Gill was – and is – one of the people I love most on the entire planet.
I would never have intentionally caused her pain (well, let’s just forget about the infamous bean-bag incident, and the log I dropped on her head, shall we?) – but there was no two ways about it; this was going to hurt.
For both of us.
We posed for a last photo, the th
ree of us and Rusty, with Roo’s camera set on timer perched on the wall outside Gill’s new home.
We exchanged the longest group hug I think you’re allowed to have in a public place. Then Roo retreated into Rusty, to give Gill and me a last moment together.
“Well, this is it,” I told her. “It’s been a great two years, dude.”
“It has. The best.”
“Take care of yourself.”
“And you. Drive safely.”
“We will. You… ah, walk safely! And call us if you need anything.”
“I will.” Gill sniffed, on the brink of tears. “Now bugger off before I change my mind!”
“Okay then. See you soon.”
I climbed into Rusty’s passenger seat and gave Gill a last thumbs-up through the windscreen.
“You’re right you know,” she called to me, “you do cramp my style!”
And with that, we were gone.
This is one of those moments where Roo’s account of the story differs somewhat from mine. I distinctly remember giving a cheerful wave, and setting forth on our journey like the emboldened explorer I was becoming. Whereas Roo says I wept like a little girl for the next two hours straight. I’m man enough to admit, in hindsight, that the truth probably lies somewhere between the two.
I do remember being in a supermarket some time later, feeling fairly miserable, and being quite surprised when a burly, leather-clad biker came up to me in the cereal aisle and asked if I was okay. Roo covered for me, telling the biker that I was upset because I’d just thrown my sister out of the van. I’m not sure he took the right meaning from that, but he certainly kept his distance when he reached for a packet of Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes.
Letting Gill go had been one of the hardest decisions of my life.
Convincing her to go… Well, let’s just say I still had both testicles, so I’d got away easier than expected.
The scars were all on the inside…
Because only Roo could now drive Rusty, and because this was the first time the two of us had been properly alone together, we stopped often on our way to Melbourne. The land between Australia’s two greatest cities was much greener and more appealing than the harsh north-west of the country, with vast stretches of woodland accompanying the road on several occasions. We found plenty of secluded groves, well away from the prying eyes of other travellers, to park Rusty in so we could…
Well, you know.
It took us three days to do little over six-hundred miles, free camping in the woods every night and feeling like we were pioneering explorers from another age.
We also felt, almost for the first time, like we were a proper couple.
It also helped to nurse Rusty, as he was up to his old tricks again; boiling up frequently, regardless of traffic or weather. Whatever was wrong with the old van, it was clearly serious – and more than likely, terminal.
“Just get us to Melbourne,” we routinely asked him, “then you can rest.”
But it looked worrying like it would be rest of the eternal kind.
For ourselves though, we were happy – deliriously so, apart from occasional moments when one or the other, or both of us, would suddenly miss Gill so hard it was like a stab in the chest.
But at the risk of sounding trite, what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. Unless it’s some kind of crippling, wasting disease, but no-one ever talks about those.
Whatever we were feeling, no doubt Gill was feeling doubly.
And every time she managed to shrug that feeling off, and go out to meet new friends in the bar, she’d be growing as a person. Gaining in strength and self-belief every day that she was on her own.
Or so I hoped.
Inflatable Love
We coasted Rusty into a Big Four campsite in Frankston, on the outskirts of Melbourne, and pitched our tiny tent in the shade of two giant Winnebagos and a bus conversion the size of a 747.
And there we stayed for the next three months.
To say that we were deliriously happy, Roo and I, is actually an understatement.
There were spectres on the horizon of course; we were broke, and getting broker; jobs proved considerably more elusive than they ever had been in the west; and Gill, bless her, was still coming to terms with being out there all alone – she was struggling with the same issues we were, namely finances, employment, and finding a place to live. I felt terrible for her, but this was the teething part of solo world travel, and the chances were it was going to get worse before it got better.
I sent her a multitude of supportive emails, full of phrases like ‘Of course it won’t get worse before it gets better,’ and ‘Who needs money when you’ve got… well, everything that you’ve got,’ and ‘No, you cannot come to Melbourne and stay with us.’
Deep down I knew that Gill was a strong, confident, savvy world traveller; she was just hiding it under the guise of crying herself to sleep every night.
She was a caterpillar on the verge of becoming a butterfly – except that I’d kicked her out of her cocoon and buggered off to Melbourne in it.
One day she’d thank me.
I hoped.
It’s fair to say though, that for Roo and I, those months were blissful. We tried as hard as we could be bothered to secure work and accommodation, but not so hard that we were ever in danger of, you know, finding any.
Instead we eked out our paltry savings – which were, in fact, Roo’s paltry savings – yes, I am that sponging, layabout boyfriend your mother warned you of! We lived cheap, buying all the reduced-price food from a wide range of supermarkets, and cooking it in the camp kitchen. We had early nights and late mornings, and did precious little in-between. Every waking moment was spent together, and as many of them as possible were spent in each other’s arms. At night, when the temperature plummeted, we snuggled up together under a pile of blankets, and let the rest of the world do whatever it wanted to. It was, in a word, glorious.
Oh, and I should probably mention the Giant Jumping Pillow.
You’ll recall the no-nonsense Aussie attitude towards naming things? Good. So it shouldn’t be too hard to extrapolate what I’m talking about here: it was a pillow, for jumping on – and it was giant. Y’see how that works?
This brightly-coloured, stripy inflatable was like the bottom half of a bouncy castle – only it was the size of a tennis court. I re-learned the fabled Art Of Bouncing with the help of a series of tutors, the oldest of whom was about twelve. It’s possible that the pillow was placed there for children, but there were no rules against adults using it – the people in the office just shrugged when I asked them, as though it had never come up. So I carried right on, whilst taking extra care not to crush anyone.
Between 10am, when the heat in the tent became unbearable, until about seven in the evening, when the pillow closed for the night, I was more often than not to be found on it or by it – either bouncing around like a maniac, or recovering from injuries sustained in this manner. As is often the case, the kids were disgustingly good at it; I asked a few how they’d learnt their tricks, and they all replied “Oh, we got a trampoline in the back yard.” As though it was the most normal thing in the world. Because of course, it is in Australia – everyone’s got ‘em. Big things too, of the kind I was lucky enough to see at the fair once a year.
Just one more thing that Australians have got right, in their quest to embrace the great outdoors.
Want your kids to play in the garden more? Worried that they’re spending too much time on the Xbox?
GIVE THEM A TRAMPOLINE!
My parents are the most loving, caring people in the world, but I will never forgive them for not digging up our entire back garden and turning it into a trampoline.
Or a swimming pool.
But anyway, for the purposes of this book, all you need to know is that I performed my first ever back-flips, somersaults, back-somersaults, hand-springs and assorted combinations of the above, on that giant jumping pillow in Frankston.
; I gave Roo a nightly display of my achievements, which amongst other things, stopped me getting fat on a diet of marked-down sausages and burgers.
Roo was suitably impressed by my developing skill, and took it upon herself to be supportive of my endeavour. Every afternoon she would sit there with a book, applauding my efforts in between chapters, and shouting things like, “Very nice, dear,” and “Who’s a clever boy then?” and “Come in Tony, your dinner’s ready!”
I was quite proud of myself. I’d gained a skill that meshed neatly with almost every other skill I posses, in that it is absolutely, completely and utterly useless.
But so much fun!
All good things must come to an end, or so they say. Frankston, though idyllic (for us – I’m sure that’s not a common perception of the place), was a damn long way from the city. Like most satellite suburbs, it had its own shopping centres, banks, supermarkets and so on – but Melbourne is a massive place, with the population of any other big city contrasted with a significantly lower population density. In other words, it sprawls – so from our little campsite it was a full two-hour journey, first by Rusty, then by train, to get into the city centre. This got old very quickly, especially once the backpacker job agency I’d signed up with began to throw me odd days of work. It was fairly brainless stuff, laying carpet floor tiles for upcoming exhibitions, but it was the missing piece of the puzzle – an income. So we crammed our tent, mattresses, heater and lights, bedding and chairs, pots, pans, crockery, books, backpacks, clothes and shoes, Esky and food – not to mention one giant bag of SCUBA diving gear – back into Rusty, and drove him parallel to the train tracks, right into the heart of Melbourne.
To the amusingly-named suburb of Balaclava, where I was disappointed to see not a ski mask in sight.
Kamikaze Kangaroos! Page 30