Read Online Love...Under Different Skies by Nick Spalding - Free Book Online

itchy, right?”
    “Don’ wanna sleep here,” she continues.
    “It’s not for long, Poppet.”
    “Too hot, daddy. Want the airy con.”
    I want the airy con too. More than anything else in the world right now. “They don’t have it here Pops. Just the fan.”
    “Why’s it broken?” she asks, looking up.
    “Er…Daddy had to kill the mosquito honey. The fan broke while I was doing it.”
    “Daddy broke it,” Poppy says in her most accusatory tone.
    My daughter is developing so fast these days it amazes me. It seems like it wasn’t five minutes since I was spoon-feeding her brown mush, and here she is at two in the morning, halfway across the other side of the world, berating me for removing the only form of air cooling available in this wooden monstrosity of a house.
    “Just try and go back to sleep Pops. And don’t touch your forehead.”
    “Daddy…stinks.”
    I don’t know if she’s insulting me or just reiterating her displeasure with the sting cream’s aroma, but I’m frankly way too tired to care and blow her a halfhearted kiss before shuffling back to bed.
    “That’s some wicked parenting there, Newman,” Laura says, her words muffled by the pillow.
    “I’m up for this year’s award,” I say sarcastically, before I close my eyes and try not to think about the temperature of the air or the solidness of the bed.
    The night. It clings to me…
    Snorg!
    So that’s been our first day and night at Grant and Ellie’s. There will not be a second one. We’re supposed to be here for weeks , but I don’t think I can handle even one more day. That’s an awful thing to say, I know, but I can’t help myself. Uprooting your entire life to travel thousands of miles is bad enough, but when you get to the other end and find it’s unbearably uncomfortable, you have to do something about it.
    I haven’t as yet thought of a good enough reason for us to leave tomorrow, one that will not mortally offend our hosts, but I’m hoping that one will spring to mind as I sit here, enjoying the slightly less stifling heat afforded to me by being outside. This does mean I can hear the koala bears snorging their way across the garden even more loudly, but it’s a small price to pay for not having sweaty teeth.
    Mind you, as I look out across the ramshackle expanse of grounds to the rear of the house, I can see a disconcerting lump sitting square in the middle of the grass. In the dim light of a moonless sky, the lump could be any one of a number of things. Most of them with teeth.
    The chances are it’s just one of a number of thick tree branches dotted around the place—I can see three of them just off to my left near the veranda as I type—but it could equally be a ravenous crocodile or thirty-three-foot snake just waiting for me to make the wrong move.
    Intellectually I know that neither is that likely. I’ve been staring at the lump for a good few minutes now, and it hasn’t budged. If it were alive, it would have surely shown some signs of movement by now, wouldn’t it?
    This is one of the less attractive aspects of trading the British Isles for the sunny climes of Australia. If the disconcerting lump were sitting in the middle of an English garden, I could be fairly sure it was either (a) a large sleeping badger, (b) a bin liner dragged out of the wheelie bin by one of the local foxes, (c) somebody very drunk and lost on their way home from the pub, or (d) a large dead badger. None of these would present much of a danger to me. Here in Australia, though, I can be damn well sure that if the lump is not a thick tree branch, then it probably has the capacity to deny me my continued existence on this planet in a heartbeat.
    There’s part of me that wants to retire—slowly—to the relative safety of our bedroom. The thing is we’re going to be in this country for a long time, so I have to get used to the local flora and fauna, no matter how scary it may or may not be. I can’t run away in terror at the