Down Under Read Free Page B

gently through the Blue Mountains, chunters across endless milesof big-sky sheep country, traces the Darling River to the Murray and the Murray on towards Adelaide, and finally crosses the mighty Nullarbor Plain to the goldfields around Kalgoorlie before sighing to a well-earned halt in distant Perth. The Nullarbor, an almost inconceivable expanse of murderous desert, was something I particularly longed to see.
    The colour magazine of the Mail on Sunday was doing a special issue on Australia, and I had agreed to file a report. I had been planning for some time anyway to come out to write a book, so this was in the nature of a bonus trip – a chance to get the measure of the country in an exceedingly comfortable way at someone else’s expense. Sounded awfully good to me. To that end, I would be travelling for the next week or so in the company of a young English photographer named Trevor Ray Hart, who was flying in from London and whom I would meet for the first time the next morning.
    But first I had a day to call my own, and I was inordinately pleased about that. I had never been to Sydney other than on book tours, so my acquaintance with the city was based almost entirely on cab journeys through unsung districts like Ultimo and Annandale. The only time I had seen anything at all of the real city was some years before, on my first visit, when a kindly sales rep from my local publisher had taken me out for the day in his car, with his wife and two little girls in the back, and I had disgraced myself by falling asleep. It wasn’t from lack of interest or appreciation, believe me. It’s just that the day was warm and I was newly arrived in the country. At some unfortunate point, quite early on, jet lag asserted itself and I slumped helplessly into a coma.
    I am not, I regret to say, a discreet and fetching sleeper.Most people when they nod off look as if they could do with a blanket; I look as if I could do with medical attention. I sleep as if injected with a powerful experimental muscle relaxant. My legs fall open in a grotesque come-hither manner; my knuckles brush the floor. Whatever is inside – tongue, uvula, moist bubbles of intestinal air – decides to leak out. From time to time, like one of those nodding-duck toys, my head tips forward to empty a quart or so of viscous drool onto my lap, then falls back to begin loading again with a noise like a toilet cistern filling. And I snore, hugely and helplessly, like a cartoon character, with rubbery flapping lips and prolonged steam-valve exhalations. For long periods I grow unnaturally still, in a way that inclines onlookers to exchange glances and lean forward in concern, then dramatically I stiffen and, after a tantalizing pause, begin to bounce and jostle in a series of whole-body spasms of the sort that bring to mind an electric chair when the switch is thrown. Then I shriek once or twice in a piercing and effeminate manner and wake up to find that all motion within 500 feet has stopped and all children under eight are clutching their mothers’ hems. It is a terrible burden to bear.
    I have no idea how long I slept in that car other than that it was not a short while. All I know is that when I came to there was a certain heavy silence in the car – the kind of silence that would close over you if you found yourself driving around your own city conveying a slumped and twitching heap from one unperceived landmark to another.
    I looked around dumbly, not certain for the moment who these people were, cleared my throat and pulled myself to a more upright position.
    ‘We were wondering if you might like some lunch,’ my guide said quietly when he saw that I had abandoned for the moment the private ambition to flood his car with saliva.
    ‘That would be very nice,’ I replied in a small, abject voice, discovering in the same instant, with a customary inward horror, that while I had dozed a 400-pound fly had evidently been sick over me. In an attempt to distract