“Right! You got all that?”
We nodded.
“Great. Let’s go see the pool.”
Ever hear that phrase ‘how the other half live’? Well, now I knew. This was how they live – and for the next month, it was how I would be living!
The basement of Leo’s building contained a 15 metre heated swimming pool, a separate Jacuzzi/hot tub, a fairly decent gym, and a sauna. Our plastic dongle gave us access to the lot – and it was available 24/7. The rest of the basement was an underground car park, which sadly we couldn’t use for Rusty as Leo was leaving his own car there. Then again, the place was full of BMW’s and gleaming 4x4s; Rusty wouldn’t last a day down here before someone called the cops and had him towed. Poor Rusty! Somehow we kept him going, but I had a feeling his end was near. And it wouldn’t be pretty.
Back upstairs, we thanked Leo for his hospitality and tried not to act overawed by the place. We’d have it all to ourselves until January the 2nd, when Leo and his girlfriend would be returning from Europe.
I did a quick calculation in my head as we handed over the money. We were paying Leo’s half of the rent – at $300 per week. So together with his flat mate, they were paying $600. And this was only because his parents let him rent the place at ‘cost price’…
Ouch.
My hand shook as I let go of the wad of bank notes, and not without good reason.
Leo was being incredibly generous, letting us stay here for the same price he’d have been paying, especially over the holiday season, when accommodation prices in the city went absolutely nuts.
But none of this changed the fact that we couldn’t afford it.
That six-hundred bucks I’d given him, on top of the deposit I’d sent him earlier, had cleaned us both out.
Gill and I were practically penniless.
Which meant we had two weeks to come up with another $600 to pay the other half of the rent…
Or we’d still be sleeping on the street over Christmas.
As I explained to Gill while we packed our stuff in the hostel, we didn’t have to worry about a thing. It would all work out.
We just have to believe in it, I reminded her.
No pressure.
A Christmas Miracle
You’d think that with such a potent incentive hanging over our heads, the very first thing we’d do would be to pound the pavement looking for jobs.
That certainly would have been the most sensible move.
But neither Gill nor I have ever been accused of being sensible.
So instead we signed up for a month-long, full-time kung fu course.
The thought process behind this decision went something like this: ‘lalalalalalalalalalalalalalalala’
Looking back, I’d say we were deep in denial – and I don’t mean the river in Egypt.
Kung fu was something we’d both studied at different times, but never had the chance to practice together. One of the few downsides of travelling is the difficulty of keeping up any sort of regular training, and by this point all forms of physical exercise had long since fallen by the wayside. Now, with free access to our own private gym and swimming pool, we finally had both the time and the opportunity to get in shape – so we took it.
I won’t say it was the cleverest decision I’ve ever made, but I’ve always felt that something was guiding me – some shadowy hand of fate that moves me from place to place, and beckons me into the actions I choose.
Of course, it could just be that I’m an idiot.
But anyway, the kung fu school gave us an amazing deal!
It was such good value that more than half the students there had no interest in kung fu whatsoever. For a foreigner to meet the conditions of their student visa, they had to be enrolled in a course of full-time education, at a registered and recognised school. The traditional way to achieve this was with any one of dozens of English language schools, many of which had sprung up to cater specifically to visa-seekers. Learning English was, after all, why most of these people were here. The only trouble was, these English schools knew their market, and they’d been slowly ratcheting up the prices. Now, suddenly, there was a new player in town – the kung fu school, wanting to expand their clientele, had registered for visa-granting status. And they were way cheaper than the language schools…
And so Gill and I came to spend most of our afternoons trading punches with a wide variety of Asian students – none of whom knew kung fu, and none of whom really wanted to. But they couldn’t really complain about it to us, as none of them spoke English either.
And they could take a good beating, so we all enjoyed ourselves royally.
One day, on the long walk home from training, we broached the topic of work.
“We’ll have to find some eventually,” I said, “or we literally won’t be able to afford Christmas. As in, we won’t be able to eat.”
“I know,” said Gill, “but I’ve been scouring the Gumtree website. There’s nothing around, and I keep getting emails back saying that all the Christmas recruitment was done in September. I hate to say it, but…”
“Don’t say it! We’ll manage. We always do, remember?”
“True enough.”
“Imagine this; a year ago we were in Margaret River, living in a pair of tents, and getting up at 5am to pick grapes. Bloody hell! I can hardly believe we got here, struggling across the Nullarbor with Rusty boiling up every ten miles, but we made it. And now… well, we’ll do it again. God only knows how, but we always come out on top.”
“You’re right!” Gill brightened visibly. “It’s our positive attitude, and our belief that everything will work out. That’s what makes everything… work out. And so long as we keep believing in ourselves, it always will.”
“You know what? We should write a book about this! Something motivational.”
“As bloody if! You’ve been working on That Frigging Bear That Ate Whatever The Hell It Ate for how long now, three years?”
“About that, yeah.”
“I’ll be married and have grandkids before you write a book about this!”
And you know what? As I sit here writing this, I’ve just come back from visiting a certain someone. I don’t want to spoil any of what’s to come, so all I’ll say is this: I spent an awful lot of time changing nappies while I was there.
And I wasn’t even wearing one.
So, you’re weren’t quite right Gill, but then you weren’t entirely wrong, either!
For the next couple of days, we compromised our incredible lifestyle and headed to Sydney’s backpacker district of Kings Cross to look for work. The first day was a complete bust – seeking out noticeboards in youth hostels, we crossed and then criss-crossed town, becoming more and more cheesed off with each successive failure. There wasn’t anything advertised in the few places that even allowed us in to look at their noticeboards, and the newspapers we picked up carried only the usual adverts for commission-based telesales positions, and hookers.
Bored, tired and miserable, we came home to a dinner of leftovers that we’d been eking out for more days than was probably healthy.
“It’ll all work out,” I reminded Gill – though even to my own ears, it sounded a bit feeble.
The next day, however, I had a change of tune. I woke up in a mood so positive I could have drowned a unicorn in it. I tried to explain this to Gill, as we packed a bag with stacks of CVs and certificates.
“You know,” I told her, “I’ve got one of those feelings.”
“Oh hell! It wasn’t the furry sausages was it? I told you they were too far gone.”
“NO! Dude, for once I am not talking about my bowel movements.”
“Oh!” She seemed genuinely surprised for a second. “Sorry – carry on then!”
“Okay, so I have this feeling…”
“If you’re about to burst into song, I think you should warn me.”
“Gill!”
“Sorry!”
“Right, well I’ve been th
inking. This is a sweet gig we’ve got going on here. It’s too good for us to waste. I mean, here we are, penniless backpackers, and we’re living in the penthouse. Training kung fu six days a week just for the hell of it, swimming in our private pool, and living life to the max in this incredible apartment.”
“True enough.”
“So, what I’m thinking, is that maybe we weren’t meant to get jobs! Imagine what a pity it would be, to live in a place like this and yet to have to drag ourselves out of bed every day and go to work in some crappy backpacker-y type job.”
That caught her interest. “So what do you think we should do?”
“Well, I think we should go out looking for jobs, just like we were going to. It’s the right thing to do, because we have to at least make an effort. But I also don’t think we’re going to find any jobs. It doesn’t feel right – it’s like, I can tell that there isn’t anything out there for us. Why would there be? And, to be honest, would we want there to be?”
“So what do we do?” she repeated.
“We look for jobs. But we won’t get them. But something is going to happen to help us out of this situation. I know it. Not jobs – at least, I don’t think so. Something else is going to happen, and it’s going to solve all our problems, and leave us free to enjoy ourselves this Christmas. I can feel it.”
“Fair enough,” Gill said. “I trust you.”
And she did, which was an amazing thing all by itself. After all the dramas I’d put that poor girl through, she still believed in me – even when I came out with something that made it sound like I was losing touch with reality.
You know what? Honestly, I think she felt it too.
But there was no point in both of us sounding like lunatics, so she chose to keep quiet.
For the second day of our doomed quest, we headed once more to Sydney’s backpacker area (and, coincidentally, the red light district. It worries the backpacker part of me, just how often those two things go together). It was a good hour’s hike from the apartment, which gave us plenty of chance to chat about what we expected to find. Gill is the only person I know who can convincingly carry on a conversation for over an hour on the topic of ‘nothing’.
This time we started at the opposite end of the Kings Cross strip, hitting up the places we’d been too disillusioned to try the previous day. Our heads revolved like radar dishes, eyes peeled for flyers on walls and in windows. ‘Flat wanted,’ ‘Flat Wanted,’ ‘FLAT WANTED!’ read the messages we saw.
Predictably, every hostel was rammed solid over the Christmas period.
Equally predictably, they were all charging outrageous prices for even the most basic accommodation.
The net result of this was a city bursting at the seams with backpackers – all of whom were frantically chasing the slightest glimmer of a job opportunity.
And most of them had a double-jump on me and Gill; they not only had a head start, but they were all living right in the area where any jobs to be found, would be found.
When Gill and I called it a day, and made the long, hungry trek back to Leo’s, we had to recognise the facts: there weren’t any jobs. And if there were, we wouldn’t be the ones to get them. And, if we were perfectly honest, we didn’t really want to be. The kind of crappy employment prospects the other backpackers would be fighting over risked a serious cramping of our style.
“And anyway,” I told Gill as we headed for home, “something will happen. Don’t worry. I just know it.”
That evening, taking advantage of Leo’s breathtakingly-fast broadband connection, I checked my email. There was a message sitting there from Leo himself, which was as expected; our second rent cheque was now due.
I turned the screen towards Gill, and asked her if she’d like to help me write the reply. If nothing else, I figured I could beg Leo to keep the bond we’d paid him, to use that to cover the rent we owed and to promise him that if anything was damaged when he got back, we’d sort it out with him then. I didn’t plan on breaking anything worth six-hundred dollars, but in a place like this it was hard to tell – I’d broken three or four things already just by being me, and any one of them could have turned out to be valuable. Rich people almost never fill their apartments with cheap crap for me to break.
Gill sat next to me on the bed, and I took a deep breath, sighed it out – and clicked on Leo’s email.
‘Hi Tony and Gill,’ it said.
‘Thanks so much for paying the second instalment of your rent. The money went into my account this morning, so we’re all good. Please find attached your receipt for $600. I hope you both have a great Christmas, and I’ll see you when I get back.
All the best,
Leo’
We stared at the message in silence long enough for galaxies to be formed.
“But, we didn’t…?” she said finally. “Is that… what you expected?”
“I dunno. I guess so,” I said.
And to this day, neither of us has any clue as to how that happened.
Miscounting of funds? By a mathematician and geneticist?
Bank error in our favour?
What are the odds of that?
Trust to Fate, I told myself, and I’ve told myself the same thing every single day since that moment.
It always works out.
Trust to Fate.
Separation Anxiety
I fulfilled a long-held wish that year; I got to have pizza for Christmas dinner. In fact we had pizza for dinner three days either side of Christmas too, as it was on mega-cheap special offer at the supermarket. Gill and I had developed a habit; every evening we’d rock up just before closing time, and scour the shelves for all the food that had been reduced for quick sale.
We’d brandish our discoveries at each other, calling things like, “DUDE! Cottage cheese for ninety-nine cents!” across the shop. Then, cackling madly in triumph, we’d head towards the check-out chicks, and watch them sigh as we approached. Every item in our baskets would be heavily discounted, they knew. And that meant most of them wouldn’t scan properly. I could actually see them slowing down whilst serving their next customers, in the hope of keeping their queue so long we’d move to the next register over.
The walk back from the shop, heavily laden, felt like victory; up in Leo’s flat, we’d assemble and admire our purchases, swapping them around like puzzle pieces until we decided what combinations would make the most interesting meals.
Thus was born devilled-pasta salad on toast, sausage-and-meatball-kebabs, and Medley of Special-Offer Soups. Gill has always been somewhat creative when it comes to food (pie-and-mushy-pea-sandwiches being a particular favourite of hers) – and over years of extended travel I have developed the ability to eat absolutely anything. To me, a sell-by-date three weeks past is just a number; better than that, it’s a challenge. ‘This will make you sick if you eat it,’ some food technician or scientist somewhere has decreed – to which I can’t help but reply ‘Wanna bet?’
For the record I’d like to say, I was not sick once over Christmas.
And the only thing I ate that was within its sell-by-date was the pizza.
Which was rubbish.
Plans for a Christmas party had been scaled back repeatedly until one day, walking home tired but satisfied, having pummelled a whole bunch of Asians, Gill went to check her bank balance.
And discovered it was $10.
My own account had been empty since our first payment to Leo.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and the impending horror of a Christmas without any kind of alcohol – not to mention food – drove Gill to a sudden act of vandalism.
She grabbed Christmas cards from the pile we’d received, and started tearing them open. “Come on,” she encouraged me, “these ones are from Mum and Dad!”
And then it dawned on me.
My parents, bless them, are from a different generation. While my sister and I feel content to swan around the world, expecting it to somehow provide for us, our
parents know better. They’ve worked hard – damn hard – their entire lives, and they’ve done most of it to support Gillian and I.
Every year, wherever we are, at birthdays and holidays they send us a bit of money – and right now, that money was going to be our salvation.
Thanks, guys!
And parents, if you are reading this, and you are the kind that gives money to your children – on their behalf, I’d like to say THANK-YOU! We really appreciate it. Yes I know, ideally we should be working hard to build a stable career, pursuing realistic goals and a sensible relationship, putting in those 9-5 hours and working our way up the corporate ladde… ZNORG? Eh? Oh, sorry, I fell asleep writing that last sentence.
But you know that, deep down, you really want us to follow our dreams, right?
I’m sure I speak for all your offspring when I say: donations to this cause are very gratefully received!
And now, we return to our scheduled programming…
Oh yes. It was around this time that we got a parking ticket for Rusty – not because he was in the wrong place, but because we’d parked him facing the wrong direction! We couldn’t believe it, but Roo later confirmed it; in Australia, the law says you have to park facing the appropriate direction of travel. Supposedly, this is because in order to park the other way around, you must have done some illegal manoeuvring on the wrong side of the road. Incredible.
Apparently it’s the law in some other places too, but where the hell do they actually enforce that shit?
Sydney, that’s where.
That was one little piece of the bad karma that was balancing out our good fortune, I guess. A much bigger part was the general feeling of loneliness we were experiencing. Gill and I have always had a great time hanging out together, but now Christmas Day was upon us yet again. It made us painfully aware that we were alone, adrift in a strange country, with all our family and friends literally on the other side of the world. This is one aspect of travel which I’ve always struggled with – this feeling that somewhere back at home, people I care deeply about are living happy, contented lives – and I’m not involved in any way. My usual antidote to this is to find something crazy to do, go off on a trip, or, failing that, get heavily drunk. But I had to be responsible now, as the figurative head of our little family unit. I had to look after Gill, and make sure she was safe, and that she was happy, too.
Kamikaze Kangaroos! Page 29
