It was the best-looking shop Keith had ever seen.
It was more of a cottage than a shop, with a gleaming galvanised iron roof and fresh cream paint on the wooden walls and coloured plastic strips hanging in the doorway.
And it was a good ten yards from the nearest palm tree.
All it needs, thought Keith happily, is a sign on the front.
Paradise Fish Bar.
‘Good position,’ said Mum, pointing to the other shops nearby. ‘General store, chemist, hardware, swimwear boutique and cake shop. Good assortment of customers and no direct competition.’
Dad looked up and down the dusty main street of Orchid Cove, then over the road at the beach.
For an awful moment Keith thought Dad had heard about the jellyfish.
‘Should be some trade from the petrol station down on the corner’ said Dad.
Keith stopped holding his breath.
See, he said to himself, it’s going to be alright.
Mum led them in through the coloured plastic strips.
Keith looked around. The shop was dark and cool inside, and empty except for dusty shop fittings. Leaning against a wall were some old posters for something called a Chiko Roll.
‘The woman who owns it retired last month,’ said Mum. ‘Sold all her stock and put the place up for rent.’
‘What about equipment?’ asked Dad.
‘Fridge,’ said Mum, pointing to a fridge. ‘Sink,’ she said, pointing to a sink. She pulled aside a pile of cardboard boxes. ‘Fryer,’ she said, pointing to a fryer. She gave Dad a grin. ‘We’re in business. We can be open in a week.’
Dad looked at her. ‘What about the paperwork?’
‘The place is still registered as a takeaway food shop,’ said Mum. ‘Mrs Mclntyre is happy for us to leave things as they are for now and when the renewal comes up we can change it over then.’
Dad looked doubtful.
‘Look,’ said Mum, ‘if we’re going to make a new life here, there’s going to be lots of paperwork to sort out later on. First we’ve got to make the shop a success, right?’
‘Right,’ said Keith loudly.
Mum smiled and slipped her arm around Keith and gave him a squeeze.
They both looked at Dad, who was staring at the fryer with a gloomy face.
‘Probably hasn’t been serviced for ten years,’ he said.
Don’t think about that stuff, thought Keith. Don’t. He’d given up telepathy but this was an emergency.
Mum grabbed Dad and turned him towards the window.
‘Look,’ she said, pointing across the road at the sea sparkling through the palm fronds. ‘Does this look like the sort of place where fryers break down?’
Dad stared at the sea for a good minute.
If a jellyfish jumps out of the water now we’ve had it, thought Keith.
Then Dad turned back to them and rubbed his hands together.
‘Let’s get started,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a big job ahead of us.’
You’re not kidding, thought Keith.
He hadn’t checked under the shop for snakes yet.
While Mum started cleaning up the shop and Dad got on the phone to Cairns to order oil and potatoes and matzo flour, Keith checked under the shop for snakes.
The shop was built on wooden stumps, which meant he could walk around under it if he crouched low enough. It also meant he had room to swing the old machete he found hanging on one of the stumps.
He had to do that twice.
The first time was when he put his foot on a thirty foot diamond-bellied black snake which he chopped into eight pieces before he saw the metal nozzle which connected it to the garden tap.
The second time was when he backed into a crocodile.
He felt its rough skin scrape the back of his legs.
Heart pounding, he slowly raised the machete, spun round, slipped, and sat down on the crocodile.
The crocodile had arm rests.
What a stupid place to leave an old vinyl settee, thought Keith. He sat back and waited for his heart to calm down.
He could hear Mum and Dad banging around above him with mops and brooms.
At least, he thought, they’re too busy to be planning any picnics in the rainforest or paddles at the beach.
He’d still hide their swimming costumes and the picnic plates, just in case.
The people of Orchid Cove were everything Keith had hoped they would be.
Cheerful.
Ron in the general store was cheerful. Clarrie the chemist was cheerful. Doug at the petrol station was so cheerful you could hear him whistling even when he was taking wheel nuts off with a power tool.
Complete strangers were cheerful. They nodded to each other on the street and said ‘G’day’ and complimented each other on their new hats and cars and, in Keith’s case, the new zinc cream on his nose. They said blue was a good choice of colour.
Only twice did Keith come across people in Orchid Cove who were not what he had hoped they would be.
The first time was early one morning, before Mum and Dad were awake, while Keith was making his daily circuit of the shower block, bashing the long grass with a stick to scare away snakes. (The caravan park owner had taken his machete away.)
Suddenly, from one of the other caravans, Keith heard two people shouting at each other.
‘I’m sick of this and I’m sick of you, you lazy, dirty pig,’ shouted a woman’s voice.
‘Yeah well, if I’m a pig,’ shouted a man’s voice, ‘it’s because this place is a pigsty.’
Keith went over and banged on the caravan door. It was opened by a man with a bare chest and a red face.
‘Do you mind,’ said Keith. ‘There are plenty of big cities for that sort of thing. People have come here to be cheered up.’
The man scowled at him and slammed the door.
Later that day Keith spent some of Uncle Derek’s going away money on a bunch of flowers and a bar of chocolate, which he left on the red-faced man’s caravan step. It was what Mum and Dad gave each other when they’d been fighting and it seemed to work for them.
The second incident was in the hardware store when Keith was waiting to buy some tile adhesive for Dad.
The old man in front of Keith asked for twelve nails and a young assistant with pimples and a thin moustache rolled his eyes and made a sarcastic comment about building a new house.
Keith stepped forward.
‘If you do anything like that again,’ he said to the assistant, ‘I’ll report you to the Far North Queensland Tourist Office.’
The assistant stared at him, open-mouthed.
‘Next time you feel grumpy,’ said Keith, ‘go out the back and read this.’
He pulled a comic from his back pocket and gave it to the startled assistant.
It was the only comic he’d brought from England, and he knew he was going to miss it, but it was for a good cause.