the platypus can wait

When I was seventeen, with a bennibag full of dreams and homesickness, I was packed up by my mother in a big indian jet and sent to Australia. Of the trip, nothing, I remember only a beauty of a hostess dressed in a yellow sari, a smiling sun going up and down the aisles of the airoplane. Her red, third eye blinking at me while she brought me, in a hush hush, banana crisps which were new to me like dawn in heaven...
I arrived in a sunny Sydney morning and Jane, the au pair of my heart and soul, came to pick me up, her bushy red hair beaming just like her eyes. Of those days spent in the bright winter of the Antipodes, a memory sticks out of the lot. I am, with two friends and a Mister Bellam (a little man with round Trotsky glasses and hair stiking up like the spikes of and Echidna), in a little hut in the Blue mountains, all around me the australian wilderness, next to a little barren hill, a merry brook dancing downwards down under. Perfect to spot a platypus, says Mr Bellam, jumping in his trainers. The girls, lazy and sleepy, stay inside, sitting by the fire, talkng the nonsense of teenager dumdrum. As for me, the italian,  I go platypus watching. There we are, in the middle of nowhere, a girl and a man, two strangers in the australian bush, with keen eyes and sawn mouths, and our mind focused on little wet platypus... We spent the morning, ate our lunch, and waited and waited, in vain, till the sun started to brush its teeth and go to bed...
"Did you spot the platypus?", asked one of the girls, as soon as we entered the shelter. Our long faces spoke much more than words. After a sausage dinner, off to bed.

In the middle of my sleep, with a ray of sunshine sleaking through the small window, I felt a hand shaking me hard, my italian name like an echo of me. It's mr Bellam. Not a word. I follow my Virgil, with eyes wide shut, in the break of day. And there, in front of our door, I see them: two kangaroos a-boxing.  The platypus can wait.