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

Olympians decorating the banisters at regular intervals—a moving shrine and testament to the soaring endurance of the human spirit. But Sir Steve is all on his own, staring out over the rambling Australian garden like a watchful guardian. Whatever else happens, I must question Grant about this later. I have to know the reason behind this oddity.
    “I’ll take you through to your room,” Grant says as we walk across the wide veranda towards the front door.
    Every door and window in the place is thrown open. This is not a good sign that cooling air-conditioning is to be had inside.
    “Do you have air-con?” I ask as we enter the confines of the house proper.
    “Nah! Don’t need it,” he replies, pointing up at one of four fans in the ceiling that are doing a good job of pushing the baking air around the broad expanse of the living room we’ve just walked into.
    I say living room, but flea market would be more appropriate.
    Every surface is covered with crap.
    Plastic crap, metal crap, wooden crap, ceramic crap, glass crap.
    A lot of it has a nautical theme. There are at least three of those lifesaving rings that always hang off the side of a boat. One is for the HMS Purbright , another is for the HMAS Sandcroft , and the last came from the HMS Chucklebottom —which I assume is a joke, unless the navy got really drunk once while naming the new fleet.
    I could list every item included in the room, but this diary only has two hundred pages available to write on, and I still have something of a life to lead. Suffice it to say that an episode of Antiques Roadshow has raped eBay, and this room is the unholy product of that union.
    “Fuck me,” I hear Jamie whisper under his breath. Poppy giggles from his arms and points at a plastic flamingo sitting on a small black-and-white portable TV, which probably last saw action when Jimmy Tarbuck was still popular.
    “Through here,” Grant says, oblivious to the fact that he has a serious hoarding disorder, and shuffles through a broad open doorway. I enter the room and my heart sinks so far even the ring off the HMS Chucklebottom couldn’t save it.
    We’ve walked into 1957.
    I’m sure that’s when the gigantic wooden bed squatting in the centre of the room was built, anyway. Another smaller but equally ancient single bed sits along the wall opposite.
    “Here you go, guys,” Grant says, depositing my suitcase on the mattress. The ancient bed emits a protesting creak loud enough to echo round the room.
    I’m struck dumb. The walls are painted with what I assume was once canary yellow but is now roughly the same shade as the stuff that comes out of a large blackhead when squeezed. The floorboards are bare and look like they’d insert several nasty splinters into your feet should you walk across them without shoes on. A monstrosity of a ceiling fan squeaks its way round slowly above, and the large oak wardrobe in the corner looks like it’s been there for so long it’s now fused to the walls and floor like a giant wooden limpet. A wide set of double doors lead back out onto the veranda, which then gives way to the chaos of the back garden.
    The fan and the open doors do nothing for the temperature. It’s like an oven in here.
    “Quaint,” says Jamie, doing his best to maintain an air of polite Britishness—and keep the shrill tones of insanity out of his voice.
    “Glad you like it!” Grant says happily.
    I turn round and notice something. “Er…is there a door?”
    “Nah! We don’t like doors, me and Ellie. Too restrictive in the heat, you know? You got this blind though.” Grant grabs a thin bit of rope next to the doorway and proceeds to lower a set of blinds that wouldn’t look out of place on the set of the next Texas Chain Saw Massacre movie.
    Fantastic. Not only are we now expected to spend the next few nights in a house Pig-Pen would run screaming from, we won’t even have enough privacy to argue about how stupid I am for agreeing to it.
    “Right. A