No Stopping for Lions Read Free Page B

camera. The older kids made home movies in which the final scene was always my younger brother on the ground in the last spasms of death. We all had bikes as well, and it was nothing to ride for miles, way out beyond the airstrip, to creep through the old cemetery or to check for zebra finches in my brother’s bird traps.
    My dolls were dressed in kilts and grass skirts, and my books were picture books of bullfighters in Spain and maharajahs in Rajasthan. I’d save copies of church missionary booklets and stare at the photos of New Guinea natives with albinos among them staring back flateyed and unsmiling. In high school I loved geography but had no time for history. It was the here and now I was interested in, and who all those people out there were and what they were thinking.
    I’d been in Sydney for two years and was about to sit my final radiography exams when I met Neil in a pub. He was the blind date for my flat-mate and in my ignorance I thought that his unfamiliar accent was from somewhere in the United Kingdom, like the rugby mates with him. This accent plus his unusual phrasing was a bit of a turn-on to a country girl who’d never been outside her own country, rarely even her own state, and when the flat-mate declined an impromptu visit to Luna Park my hand shot up in a flash. We still have a strip of photos taken that night: three couples crammed into an instant photo booth, me looking startled after the uncharacteristic number of beers I’d downed earlier in an attempt to appear sophisticated and worldly. We fell into bed on the second date, fell in love on a Queensland beach and were married within a year.
    Early married life was not quite the bed of roses I’d imagined. Living blissfully together was overshadowed by the banalities of keeping house, sticking to a budget, watching Saturday rugby games with other new and uninterested wives. Before the wedding I’d sit in my car outside Neil’s flat under cover of darkness just to catch a glimpse of him; now I saw him every day, all the time. Where’s the romance in that? Before, I’d spend ages on my clothes and make-up before seeing him; now he’d come home to find me in hair rollers, with cucumber slices on my eyes. Neil wanted rugby training nights and I wanted flowers. He wanted to travel; I wanted to shop. The one thing we both wanted was each other, it was just that we didn’t know how to compromise or to share.
    Neil did, however, know what to do about it and twelve months after our honeymoon we both quit our jobs and headed overseas for six months. This first trip outside Australia was a bombshell for me. It was one thing reading about these places, but actually being there, surrounded by strange languages, different customs and unusual smells, not to mention the volumes of people, was the first time in my life that I felt truly intimidated. France was our first stop and after flying into Charles de Gaulle airport we caught the train in to the George V Métro stop. I was ready to come home after my first mumbled, laughable attempts at ‘ Ou est rue Vernet, s’il vous plaît? ’ And Neil did laugh. It was his reaction as much as my inadequacy that upset me, and I’ve hated that part of Paris ever since. My confidence improved as we went along but unfortunately my linguistic skills didn’t.
    We had many arguments in these first months of our holiday as I came to grips with new environments and experiences. I suspect that I was hard work, becoming despondent when I couldn’t make myself understood and sulking when Neil’s strict adherence to budget deprived me of a souvenir or a second bottle of Coke. On top of this, being together for 24 hours a day for weeks on end was trying on both sides, and small things like ordering beans and bacon over artichokes and bacon turned into a battle of wills. But gradually, without being conscious of making compromises, we began to consider the