Love...Under Different Skies (8 page)

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 street, 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 caf
é
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 happy 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.

What buildings it does have, though, are impressive. The collection of soaring monstrosities looms over the golden sandy beaches, casting their long shadows over the water at dusk. From the heights they reach, you’d be forgiven for thinking they were running out of space around here.

I once visited Miami for a few days back in my youth while on holiday, so I can appreciate the rampant plagiarism going on here. It’s like somebody picked up everything from Fort Lauderdale to the Everglades, put it on a hot wash until it shrunk four sizes, and plonked it down on the east coast of Australia.

I love it, though, partly because I haven’t seen a cloud in the sky for a week, and partly because this is where I work. I love living in the quieter, smaller town of Coolangatta farther south, but give me somewhere bustling and lively to go to every day to earn my daily crust. Surfer’s has more energy than a litter of puppies drunk on Red Bull. Hordes of tourists mingle with the local surfers and party people among the forest of glass and metal. The sun beats down relentlessly on thousands of people who know they are lucky enough to be in paradise and are damn well going to enjoy it every second they can.

Worongabba Chocolate is situated in the shopping mall underneath one of the skyscrapers right next to the beach. It’s a prime bit of real estate with very high foot traffic all day long. I saw how much the rent was for the floor space the first week I was here and nearly had a heart attack.

Today promises to be a particularly important day in Laura Newman’s new antipodean life. Alan Brookes, owner of Worongabba Chocolate and my boss, is visiting for the first time since he sent me down here to run the place and is expecting a report on what I’ve accomplished so far. Therefore, I drop Poppy off a good hour earlier than usual at Surf Tots Day Care and am upstairs in my office by eight, finishing off the Excel spreadsheet I’ve been compiling for the past week.

It’s a masterpiece of financial brilliance, even if I do say so myself. Not only have I collated an accurate overview of turnover from the past six months, I have also identified a $40,000 tax overspend that can be claimed back. I have no doubt Brookes will promote me instantly once he realises I’ve saved him that much money in barely six weeks of work. It may have taken all of my free time over the past seven days to complete, but the results will be totally worth it. Yes, I was one of those insufferable kids at school who always handed their work in early and made you look bad—how did you guess?

Alan is due in at ten thirty, and I have everything ready for him a good half an hour beforehand. The spreadsheet is projected on my white office wall in all its PowerPointy glory, a stack of neatly folded financial reports sits on my desk awaiting his eager gaze should he wish to view them, and I even have a selection of new chocolate flavours I intend to bring into our collections sitting on a plate next to the reports, awaiting his equally eager taste buds.

Everything is set. Everything is ready. This will be my finest hour.

My finest hour will have to wait it seems, as ten thirty comes and goes with no sign of Brookes. By 10:50 a.m. I’m boosting the air-con in my office to make sure the chocolates don’t melt. By eleven I’m pacing on the shop floor, worrying shop staff and customers alike.

By eleven fifteen I’m back in the office checking my diary to see if I’ve got the day right.

By 11:40 a.m. I’m back downstairs telling the shop floor manager Jake that he needs to rearrange the mint fondues in the front window so they don’t spell
MINTY
!
I appreciate his efforts at creativity, but I don’t think it’s really giving the right impression of the store, seeing as we’re supposed to be upmarket.

Being upmarket is obviously not something Alan Brookes is all that concerned about, either, as he eventually rolls in at 11:50 a.m., wearing an ancient bushman’s hat, a pair of board shorts, a bright orange vest, and a pair of leather flip-flops that look like they’re about to fall apart. He’s accompanied by a stern-looking Asian woman in a power suit and the number two man in the business, Brett Michaels, who is as shabbily dressed as his boss, given that he’s wearing a Captain America T-shirt over a pair of board shorts that look like they’ve been savaged by a shark.

“You alright, Laura?” Brookes says to me as he walks up.

“Yes Mr. Brookes,” I reply in accepted subordinate fashion.

“Ah, drop the formal crap there, Laura. Call me Brooky. Every other bastard does!”

“Okay…
Brooky
.”

“Sorry I’m late. Stopped to chat to a mate of mine down at the surf club. Great bloke he is. Got his left arm bit off by a saltwater crocodile up in Mackay last year. I wanted to see if it had grown back!” Brookes collapses into gales of laughter, as does Brett. The Asian woman doesn’t so much as crack a smile. I have no idea what Brookes is going on about, so I elect to maintain a neutral expression.

“Right!” he says, having got over his laughing fit. “Let’s get a look at what you’ve been up to, Laura. I brought Sangwen along to look at this spreadsheet you emailed me about.”

Sangwen gives me a short but courteous nod. “Pleased to meet you,” she says in a soft Aussie accent tinged with a subtle Thai flavour.

“And you.” I turn back to Brookes. “Shall we go up?”

I lead the trio up the stairs and through to the expansive office at the rear of the shop.

“Hey, chocs!” Alan Brookes exclaims happily and proceeds to polish off two of my carefully selected tasters before he’s so much as sat down. I’d planned on a good fifteen-minute buildup to those. Never mind, I’ll just have to give him the speech without them.

I stand behind my desk and clear my throat. “Thank you for coming today. I’m going to take you through my findings so far in a presentation that should last no more than half an hour.”

“Half an hour?” Brookes protests. “I don’t bloody think so, Laura!”

“Er…but I thought you wanted a report on how I’m doing?”

“I do. So, how are you doing?”

“What? You mean the shop?”

“Yeah! Things going alright, are they?”

“Yes.”

“No big problems on the horizon?”

“No.”

“We’re in profit?”

“Yes.”

“And your lot have settled in okay?”

“Yes.”

“Great stuff!” He turns to address Sangwen. “Give Laura your email address and she can send you the spreadsheet to have a look over.” He then looks back at me. “Right, you got anything else?”

“Er. The chocolates on the desk…”

“New flavours?”

“Yes.”

“You like ’em?”

“Yes.”

“Great! Chuck ’em in, then. I trust your judgment.”

“Er…thank you.”

“No worries.” He leans forward. “Now, then, how about we all go for a swim before lunch?”

Brett nods his head enthusiastically. Even Sangwen cracks a smile.

I do neither. This meeting has slipped out of my grasp faster than a greasy halibut. I was prepared for some awkward questions and a concerted grilling of my facts and figures. I was not prepared for an invite to go paddle around in the surf.

I don’t want to go for a swim. I want to dazzle my new employer with my prowess. Besides, I don’t have my swimming costume. I say as much to Alan and company.

“Oh yeah, good point,” Brookes says. “Should’ve told you ahead of time really. Bit of a silly suggestion all round, I guess! Going for a swim before lunch. I should get my head tested!”

Thank God for that.

“We’ll go after lunch!”

What?

“Yeah, we’ll have a bite to eat next door at Hong’s, then you can go grab yourself a swimming costume with some petty cash. Sangwen can go with you to help you choose if you like.”

The Thai woman can’t help but look me up and down in a disconcerting way that makes me feel extremely self-conscious.

This is horrible. This is absolutely
awful
. I’m being ordered by my employer to take the afternoon off and go have some fun.

“Do you think it’s…it’s appropriate, Mr. Brookes?”

“Brooky!”

“Sorry…do you think it’s appropriate, Brooky? I really should be working.”

“It’s my flaming company Laura, and if I say we’re gonna cool off in this heat, then that’s what we’re doing!”

Oh God.

This is the worst boss I’ve ever had.

We pop over to the Chinese restaurant next door for lunch and end up sitting outside in the sun, alfresco. In the hideous knowledge that I’m shortly going to be in a bathing suit in the company of my employer, I elect to eat a small salad and drink a bottle of sparkling water.

I try to join in on the conversation my colleagues are having, but my mind keeps going back to the potential embarrassment factory that the next couple of hours of my life are likely to be.

“Right then,” Brookes says, downing the last of his beer in one swift gulp. “That’s us fed and watered. Let’s go see what the waves are like.” He looks at me. “You surf, Laura?”

Oh no. It just gets worse.

I know how this conversation will go. I’m going to tell him I don’t know how to surf, and then he’s going to suggest he give me some lessons. An excruciating hour of me repeatedly falling off a floating plank of wood will then ensue. At some point, the swimming costume that I have yet to buy will probably fall off. Some things are just written in the stars.

I have to head off any suggestion of me surfing to avoid all of this.

“No, sorry. I have an inner ear problem that stops me from doing it. Shame really, but the doctor warned me not to.”

Well done girl.

An excuse of fiendish brilliance.

“Ah pity,” Brookes says. “Sangwen doesn’t surf either, so you two can just have a swim about. The surf looks a bit low anyway so Brett and I probably won’t do much ourselves.”

Phew.

Brookes takes a look at his watch. “You go find a costume, we’ll go get our boards and see you back here at the shop in twenty minutes.”

Twenty minutes?

Does this man have no comprehension of how long it takes a woman to clothes shop, especially when it’s an item that
revealing
? It takes me an hour just to pick out the right chunky-knit sweater in December, for crying out loud. Purchasing a swimming costume is enough to take up an entire morning—and that’s mostly just dealing with the self-loathing.

If Jamie had suggested such a short timescale, I would have probably punched him. As it is, this is the man who writes my pay cheques. “Okay,” I say in a strangled voice.

“Great.” Brookes gets to his feet. “See you in a bit then,” he tells me before marching off with Brett and Sangwen dutifully in tow.