Which they had.
Ripping it all down again less than a week later was every bit as demoralising as it was satisfying.
And lucrative, of course!
And so for the next couple of months, we did quite well. Roo worked alongside me whenever they called in a big backpacker crew, and later on she got a job counting people on trains (no, seriously!). I worked ridiculous shifts, anywhere from ten to eighteen hours, often getting less than eight hours off before I was needed back again. I earned a reputation for never saying no to a job, for always being reliable, and for remaining relentless cheerful even when it was 5am, twelve hours into a fourteen-hour job that was going to take at least six more hours to finish. The backpackers dropped like flies under such conditions, or called in sick ahead of them; rarely was the crew the same from night to night, as heavy drinking and an inability to cope with long shifts culled the less dedicated workers on a daily basis.
We got to explore the city a bit, braving Melbourne’s infamously fickle weather to visit the hippie district of St. Kilda (where the op-shops were so trendy that the clothes in them cost more than they did brand new!). We spent hours forging our way up and down Flinders Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, because the foot traffic was so dense it was impossible to do it any quicker. It was a great street though, exemplifying the best things about Melbourne. It was busy and cosmopolitan, seeming much more like a major US city in this regard than Perth. The people thronging the streets were all stylishly dressed, and everything that was old, from pre-loved clothing to the archaic tram system to the buildings themselves, were well-preserved and proudly displaying their vintage status. The modern, from sharp suits to sports cars to the steel-and-glass behemoth looming over Federation Square, were crisp and clean and cutting-edge. Nothing looked broken or run-down or unintentional. Designer shops fought for space with sushi bars and bistros, spilling into narrow laneways either side of the main street and even underground; the redevelopment of the train stations had involved burying them beneath the city, along with scores of shops, food courts and plazas.
Roo and I both loved Melbourne.
Even the bridges were more like art installations, from ancient stone to plate-steel industrial to whimsical latticework – I can’t even begin to describe them all, so I’m going to take the coward’s way out, and direct you to Google.
It was a city of the future, high-tech and affluent, whilst still acknowledging its heritage with buildings like St Paul’s Cathedral and the gigantic Victorian edifice of Flinders Street Station taking pride of place. It’s a beaut, that station – the oldest in Australia, and one of the biggest – and more than a hundred-thousand people pass through it every single day!
Most days, I was one of them.
I commonly left for work at some ungodly hour, braving the chill fog with my oversized Balinese leather jacket wrapped tightly around me; lunch would be spent basking in the sun, and the journey home would be made in torrential rain. Four seasons in one day, they call it, and I’ve never found a place where this was more true. I even have two photos of Roo, taken a few hours apart on the same day off – in one she is sunbathing in Kat’s backyard, and in the second she is scooping up hailstones from it!
After three months on the job, Paul took me aside and said he was rewarding me with a brief stint as a carpenter’s assistant on a multi-storey office block building site. It was a Union job, he explained, which meant a significantly higher rate of pay – thirty-two dollars an hour, which was a hell of a jump from the already impressive nineteen dollars I was currently earning.
And all this time, Rusty sat rusting outside Crazy Kat’s house in Yarraville.
I’d become an expert in Melbourne’s public transport system (which is, as it should be, world class). I felt a bit sorry for Rusty, as he sat unmoving through everything the sky could throw at him. He never complained, of course, but the old van seemed lonely and decrepit. I started to wonder if he’d ever leave that spot again – if he’d even be able to, after so long without turning a wheel.
As the weather grew steadily colder, we bought a little electric fan-heater for our room. We had to wait until Kat was out to smuggle it in, and could only use it when we had music playing to mask its distinctive noise. Occasionally she would surprise us with a knock on the door, and we’d leap around like maniacs shoving stuff in front of the thing so she wouldn’t see it when she opened the door. Which she always did whether or not we answered, usually two heartbeats after knocking, rather than allowing us the leisure of doing it ourselves. Looking back, I’m sure she knew that something was going on – probably because she was paranoid. And spying on us. And she was determined to catch us in the act of whatever it was we were doing.
She came damn close to catching us in a different act on a number of occasions, but to be honest I don’t think she’d have recognised that one.
No way someone that uptight has ever been laid.
So yet again, we’d built a life for ourselves. It certainly had its quirks, but we were starting to get comfortable with them. And, as always happens at that point, our feet began to itch…
State of The Union
There’s a phrase: money for old rope. Well this was money for old wood – literally, as I was being paid an additional fifty cents an hour purely because I was working with second-hand timber! Danger money, you see, because that shit’ll kill you in a heartbeat.
Or maybe not. But that was just the beginning.
Working on any level above the third floor: an extra 50c.
Working with power tools? Another dollar.
It went crazy after that, with compensations for working on upper floors increasing with their distance from the ground, and all sorts of ridiculous extras. As a rule of thumb, if you needed some kind of protective gear – like a pair of gloves, say, or a dust-mask – then chances were, you’d be getting paid more for it.
And let’s not forget: my starting rate for this job was thirty-two bucks an hour!
Overtime was unbelievable. Time-and-a-half for the first two hours – and then double-time for everything after that! When they needed volunteers to work the weekend, you can bet my hand went straight up.
All in all, that week I earned almost two-thousand dollars.
And I paid nearly eight-hundred bucks in tax for the privilege.
I didn’t mind one bit. For one thing, I could claim most of that money back; as a backpacker, I’d earned so little this year that I fell way under the threshold for even the lowest tax bracket. But more importantly, I had enough wages left over after rent, food and bills had come out of them, to buy two economy class tickets to New Zealand.
So that’s exactly what I did.
Roo was so excited she could hardly sit still. After months of a fairly mundane existence, we’d come up with the ultimate antidote for our boredom; it was time for a sea change.
No, screw that – it was time for a snow change…
I rang Gill in Sydney straight away. “Dude! How do you feel about going to New Zealand and learning to snowboard…?”
I hardly needed to make the call. We’d both dreamed about snowboarding, ever since the richer kids from our school got to go on an organised skiing trip. We’d cultivated a forced disinterest in snow sports from that point on, because it was clearly something that only rich people did – and we were perfectly-happy-without-being-rich-thank-you-very-much. Skiing was not something people like us should aspire to.
But snowboarding… well, that was a different matter.
I believe I mentioned my first attempt to become a snowboarder in my last book, but for those of you that haven’t read that one it went something like this:
Went to France.
Was molested by a French pensioner.
Arrived to find the resort closed.
Got a job sanding every inch of a giant wooden ski chalet.
Spent two months doing it.
And then got scammed out of most of my wages.
; Went home.
And that was only after I escaped a fiery death in the furnace of a gypsy-killing prune farmer…
It hadn’t really been my proudest moment.
A string of my least-proud moments in fact.
This time, I vowed, it would be different.
Or else I’d be really pissed off.
With the cash already spent, I seriously considered framing my latest pay slip. It was the most money I’d ever earned in my life, and only Air New Zealand’s carry-on policy dissuaded me.
Apparently they discourage travelling with breakable glass nowadays.
The only real doubt I had about leaving Australia, was about how good the country had been to me. It had provided me with plenty of adventures, an adoring (and adorable) girlfriend – and not always, but when I needed it most – a cold, hard, pile of cash. I was going to miss that.
While we’re on the subject of cash, if you’re reading this in the future then you can FUCK RIGHT OFF with your hover-boards, because WE WERE SUPPOSED TO HAVE THOSE BY NOW! And you probably don’t understand what the Global Financial Crisis was, because you don’t have money anymore. Or trees. In fact the chances are you’re either made entirely of nanobots, in which case you only speak binary, or you’re mind-controlled by crab-clawed alien overlords, in which case you only speak space-mollusc. Either way, I’m wasting my breath.
But to bring it back to the not-so-distant future, the Aussie economy is only getting stronger. Twice this year, one of our dollars bought one of America’s with change. And that insanely high minimum wage ($18 per hour!) even applies to people who work in McDonalds!
So, you know, think about it.
Anyway, around this time it occurred to me that if we were planning on working in New Zealand’s ski industry, we should probably apply for some jobs there.
So I applied for all of them.
Three times.
Once for Gill, once for Roo, and once for myself. It was neater that way.
The first place to get back to me was a company called Ruapehu Alpine Lifts, who ran the only two ski-fields in New Zealand’s North Island – they were back-to-back, on either side of a mountain called Mount Ruapehu. Of the two, I’d selected jobs on the ‘Turoa’ side, purely because the other side was called ‘Whakapapa’ – a Maori word, used to refer to their tribal hierarchy and genealogical structure. And in Maori, ‘WH’ is pronounced ‘F’.
I didn’t think I’d be able to keep a straight face if I ended up working there.
The employment people at Turoa agreed to give us a Skype call by way of an interview – me for the role of ‘Ski-Lift Operator/Attendant’, because that seemed to me like the whole point of being there; Roo as ‘Road Crew’, because the job description said it mainly involved parking cars, and she said “I can do that!” – and for Gill, I’d gone for ‘Ticket Checker/Customer Services’ – because if anyone could talk to customers – talk them into the ground, in fact – it was Gill.
They called me a fortnight later.
The interview went something like this:
So, Mr Slater, you’ve applied to be a liftie with us.”
“I have?”
“Yes. A ski-lift operator.”
“Oh, right. Yes, that’s me.”
“So let’s talk a bit about your experience.”
“Um, I haven’t got any.”
“Oh! Okay then, let’s talk a bit about your background in snow sports.”
“I haven’t got any of that, either.”
“Alright then, that’s okay. So what’s your reason for seeking employment in the snow-sport industry?”
“Ahhh… is ‘being cool’ an acceptable answer?”
“Ha ha! A joker. Great, we like the jokers!”
I thought that sounded fairly positive.
For the rest of the interview, I was grilled on my mechanical knowledge (none), driving ability (none), other sporting background (none), and education (none – okay, so I have a degree in Acting, but I’m pretty sure that counts as ‘none’).
I was asked if I had any previous work references, and I agonised over this for a good few minutes. InstallEx still didn’t know I was leaving, because if I didn’t get this job, there was a good chance I wasn’t. Beyond that, my most recent job had been for Trevor. Given that I’d had to threaten Trevor with reporting him to the government just to get paid, he didn’t seem like the ideal source of a work-related reference. Previous to that I’d been working for Goldie… I seriously doubted he could read or write, and anyway he only knew me as Andy… and prior to that, I’d single-handedly depopulated a Sandalwood plantation one tree at a time. Then there was my stint at The Underground, where I failed miserably to make a bar fail miserably… and a handful of days cleaning toilets for the City of Canning.
It didn’t look good.
In the end I asked Lindsey of Buildcraft, figuring that even though I’d left abruptly, I’d been good at what I did for him. Brick paving was about as irrelevant to the winter sports industry as its possible to get (short of, say, volunteering with exotic animals in a sub-tropical climate) – but my options were fairly limited.
Roo’s interview was conducted a couple of hours later.
She’d sat listening to my call, so she was prepared for the first few questions.
“So, Miss Reynen, you’ve applied to be a roadie here at Mount Ruapehu?”
“Yes, but I’m afraid I have no real experience in the winter sports environment. Because I’m from Australia. I’m very enthusiastic though!”
“Well that’s good to hear. So what makes you want to come and work for us?”
“I’ve never seen snow before!”
In the silence that followed, I could almost hear the interviewer’s head hitting his desk.
When I called Gill in Sydney to see how her interview had gone, she was (as always) relentlessly positive about it. “They only asked me a couple of questions,” she explained.
“Oh? We got a proper grilling.”
“No, I had a really nice lady. She asked if I’d been skiing before, so I told her I’d had some ice skating lessons, and she asked if I had any customer service experience, and I said a little bit. Then she asked how I was at talking to people, and that was it.”
“Really? Our interviews were half an hour long!”
“So was mine.”
“But what..? What else did she ask you?”
“Nothing. We just got chatting. She’s always wanted a horse.”
“I…? What? Bloody hell Gill, you were supposed to be telling her why you’d be good at the job!”
“Yeah… we kind of ran out of time for that. But she was very friendly. I told her all about Camp America, and driving around in Rusty. She loved the idea of doing a road trip around Oz.”
“Oh. My. God.”
Gill got the job straight away.
And a week later, amongst many feelings of anxiousness and indecision, both Roo and I were offered the positions we’d applied for. I can only think, it must have been a slow year for applications; we were seriously bottom-of-the-barrel stuff. But no matter! Roo was going to get her wish – she was going to the land of Hobbits, to see snow for the first time in her life.
And I was going to have to tell InstallEx that I was leaving.
Tricky Situations
I didn’t get chance to mention my imminent departure, because work on the Union Job dried up after the first week – not for me, but for everyone else on the entire building site.
I still maintain that this wasn’t my fault.
I spent a day bouncing back and forth between angry meetings, fielding evasive calls from the big boss of my company and threatening ones from the big boss of theirs.
The trouble was, I was not a member of the Union.
And every other worker on the site was. There was a subtle clue to this fact in the title ‘Union Job.’
Now it turns out, this Builder’s Union is big deal in Australia. By uniting workers across all
the construction trades, they’d used their collective bargaining power to create a list of demands, mostly about rates of pay and working conditions. It was for this reason I’d been paid so handsomely, for doing so little – the almighty Union had made it so, and for that they were heavily rewarded. Membership of the union didn’t require any special skills – it just required a yearly payment of six-hundred and fifty dollars.
Obviously, I didn’t have that kind of cash stuffed under my mattress. Hell, I barely had a mattress. Technically my employers, as in InstallEx, should have supplied a Union-appointed labourer to the site, or else turned the job down. Now, after a flash credential inspection revealed me to be non-Union labourer, two things happened: first I was suspended, pending a round of discussions with my boss; and second, the entire job site was shut down. Lock, stock, and bearded carpenter – to a man, the Union members downed tools at the behest of their official representative, and refused to move another muscle until all the non-Union labour was expelled from site.
It was, for want of a better word, awkward.
It was also a shame, because I’d been getting on quite well. The tradies on the site all seemed to like me. As usual, my enthusiasm outstripped my ability somewhat, and I’d managed to accidentally chop up a series of ceiling-cladding tiles that were due to be installed that day. But one thing those guys understood was that mistakes were for the making, and no-one got through a career in construction without making a few of them – so they were happy enough to cover them up and carry on.
Unless the mistake is not belonging to the correct organisation, in which case summary execution is the only permitted response.
I’d quite enjoyed working on the site, money notwithstanding, and I considered ending the dispute by telling my boss I’d use my credit card to join the Union on the spot – only, I knew I was leaving soon. Six-hundred and fifty bucks would take one hell of a bite out of my salary, with no guarantee of me being allowed back here to earn more.
Kamikaze Kangaroos! Page 32