There’s no time difference between Malaysia and Perth which is a blessing because we arrive at midnight and it’s 2am before we’re in bed. It’s freezing cold, early spring and the heating’s turned off in the room where we spend what’s left of the night. It’s a wonderfully old-fashioned motel room, complete with kitchenette and more beds than two people can possibly sleep in, particularly given that there’s very little bedding on any of them we need to huddle together. We set the heating to twenty six degrees (ridiculously high, we think) and drag the only two blankets out of a cupboard, but none of this has much effect and we lie awake, dead tired but too cold to sleep. Finally Adrian cranks the heating up to sauna levels and, just before dawn, we warm up and doze off.
Breakfast is served in a room dominated by an enormous television screen that no-one is watching. There’s only one occupied table, some men who look like they could be visiting construction workers; the rest are empty. We walk in and greet the waitress who’s standing at a machine behind the cafe counter. ‘You’ll have to give me a minute,’ she shouts gravely – the television is very loud. ‘I have a lot of coffees to make for these men. You’ll want one of those,’ she adds and wafts a hand towards a couple of A3 sized laminated menus sitting at the end of the counter. Everything about her body language tells us that she’s a very busy woman and, right now, the construction workers are her priority.
We pick up the menus and I’m just getting excited about the food on offer – it’s a long time since our last meal – when the waitress yells, ‘What’s your room number?’ ‘Forty nine,’ we reply and she immediately whisks the menu out my hand. ‘I’ll have that,’ she says as if I’ve stolen it and hands me another one a quarter of the size. Adrian and I choose a table as distant from the tv as we can find and burst into weary laughter. ‘Welcome to Australia,’ A says.
In fact, the breakfast offerings look deliciously imaginative and we’re hungry people, but I still have some negotiating to do with our waitress. I return to the counter to place our order, but she’s holding a phone and looks at me with dismay. ‘Look, I’m sorry but I’m just going to have to do this,’ and she taps at her keypad. The chef, a large handsome young man with dreadlocks, wanders out of his kitchen and casually raises an eyebrow. He clearly has nothing to do.
’Can I give you my order?’ I ask hesitantly. ‘Fire away,’ he says. I order smashed avocado and poached eggs (yum) and add, ‘Two teas please.’ At this, the waitress finishes her call and beckons me towards her end of the counter. ‘You say you want two teas,’ she shouts and I nod. ‘Well, she says, lifting up a cafeteria-style metal teapot, ‘this will hold two of those cups over there.’ She points. ‘Now, do you really want two pots? That’s four cups of tea.’ ‘Yes, please,’ I reply, a sleepless person in true need. She pauses briefly, eyeing me to make sure I’m serious. ’Okay, then,’ she finally says with the gravity of someone about to diffuse a bomb.
We spend the rest of the morning organising our Australian technology and car rental. Our nephew, Christopher, has kindly lent us an old iPhone (in fact, it’s more recent than the one I routinely use) and, with its new sim card in place, I like to think of it as our ‘burner phone’, part of our incognito identities in the southern hemisphere. But of course, I immediately rejoin my Signal groups and let everyone know the number. We link it to the console in our hybrid Toyota (eventually – it needs a much younger person to make it co-operate, though how she operates anything with nails that long is beyond me) and we’re away.
Today’s destination is a townhouse on a marina near Busselton, two hundred and twenty kilometres south of Perth and close to the Margaret River wine area. We sweep through the local IGA supermarket and find ourselves so tired once we’ve unloaded the car that we can do no more than vaguely appreciate our location and fall into bed. Just on dusk, I open my eyes to see the lavender sky above the marina and am instantly overcome by the need to be out there. As quietly as I can, I pull on running clothes, shut the door behind me and leave Adrian to sleep. It’s a clear, still evening and very quiet. Without knowing where I’m going, I arrive at the shore of the bay, the gently lapping waves just discernible in the gloaming. I’ll explore this in the morning, I think, and I run back in the hush of the night.
