Ten Pound Pom Read Free Page B

‘Oo!’ The boy’s mother speaks to Tudor. Tells him that she doesn’t feel as if she’s in Australia and Tudor agrees:
    –No, no. It hasn’t quite hit me yet.
    He says this with such jowly seriousness that the boy cannot help but laugh. Tudor and Stuart will, later, be allocated lodgings together, and each night Stuart will tell the adults in the shared kitchen how Tudor repeatedly tries to climb into bed or the shower with him.
    –Ehs hamesick, eh sais. Tells ays ehs hamesick. Ah jist wish eh’d leave ehs alaine.
    They are taken to Yungaba, the Immigration Hostel, a sprawling colonial-style building beneath a giant clanking steel bridge on Kangaroo Point, a mile or two out of Brisbane city centre, across the river. Whitewash and balconies and large-leafed plants and ferns and big loud flowers that make the boy think of dinosaurs. Strange bird and animal noises, whoopings, in this thick vegetation. Dripping heat. Their accommodation is an apartment with very high ceilings and partition walls that do not reach those ceilings and it is strange and big and echoey and very un-cosy. Mosquito nets can be unrolled from a box above the headboard to cover the beds but the boy will like that; it’ll be like sleeping in a cave, or like being a spider in a web. Outside their block is a huge tree in which the boy’s brother discovers an embedded Chinese throwing star. By that tree is a little kitchenette where the British and Irish adults will gather of an evening to eat toast and complain. Huge fruitbats fly over at dusk; the boy and his siblings count them, one night, and reach 250. There are lizards, and birds, of astonishing colours. Yungaba used to be a convent. Mince on toast, or ‘shit on a shingle’ as the Americans call it, is served for breakfast. The frightening matron hovers to deter people from second helpings and ensures that, during the day, while the men are out working, the ladies get to eat steak, while the men get pumpkinin the evening. The canteen’s resident cleaner is from Liverpool and is called Thickbroom. That’s his real name. The children quickly discover that fun can be had on clothes-lines; they’re not simply cords strung between two fixed points, these are inverted pyramid-like structures, the likes of which they’ve never seen before, which can be hung on and spun. And they can be broken. And the shouting matron can be fled from, with much excited laughter.
    The boy and his siblings settle in quite quickly. Children do – they have the knack of shrinking the world, of living entirely in the moment. It is discovered that empty soda bottles lifted from behind the nearby pub can be exchanged for money at the general store and one day they take in a bottle filled with large aggressive ants which scatter in their hundreds over the counter into the sweet display and the shopkeeper in his apron bellows at the children:
    –Gerraht of it yer little pommie berstards!
    More fleeing. The boy now needs to go to another shop to buy his Snowflakes; crumbly white chocolate in a shell of milk chocolate. Maybe with desiccated coconut on; the man the boy will grow into will be unable to recall.
    The ants, and in fact the insects in general, fascinate the boy. Yungaba has a room with a ping-pong table in it and the boy is delightfully appalled to see the sea of scarpering cockroaches flee from the turned-on light in this room. Sometimes he and his friends dare each other to walk across this room in the darkness, to feel and hear the crunch underfoot, the tickling on their legs. And there’s a spider, a palm-sized spider which lays its eggs on a leaf of the throwing-star tree; every day, the boy checks up on this spider to see if the eggs have hatched, until a local worker, Bluey, gleefullyburns the egg sac with his lighter while his mates encourage him and laugh and the spider drops and scuttles into the grass and as boots stamp that grass the boy runs upstairs into his apartment and sits on his bed and