The Pink Pussycat - as cryptic a name as I could think of to drop at the next student party - was not the only source of income, little as it was, including tips. Melbourne Airport was arguably an even better conversation starter (what, you fly planes? - people always think the obvious) but the work here was even more mundane than pouring a ‘taste’ (a charade that even then was embarrassingly outdated) of Yalumba Carte d’Or riesling or McWilliams Shiraz Cabernet into the glass of the male half of a dining couple so that, after making a method acting impression of a furrow-browed, purse-lipped judge at Mundus Vini, he would decide whether they would drink it or not. Indeed, the airport job - money is obviously tight in this anonymous early 1980s Carltonian mise en scène - involved little more than bussing Budget rental cars from their terminal drop-off point to a depot back in the endless sun-parched acres of tarmac in the backblocks of Tullamarine, where I cleared their overflowing ashtrays of Peter Stuyvesant butts and fumigated their 1980s velour interiors colour-matched to their yellow or pale green exteriors; while a sunburnt hose-wielding employee, face glass-distorted into a rictus grin, washed the exterior. I then delivered the car back to the silk-gloved ministrations of the customer service girls who (collectively) had graduated in recent years from orange (corporate shade) mini-skirts to longer, more tangerine, skirts more befitting the current zeitgeist. Hey, it’s the eighties, troglodyte!
The terrace house was small: an eight-year-old boy and his five-year-old sister, sharing a room, would soon need their own spaces, and sooner than later. We watched the real estate market, and waited. But this tiny wedge, a cave in an urban protectorate of academia, cafes, and inner city parkland, was gold. It would take a lot of leaving. We watched Minder and repeats of Telford’s Change in the front high-ceilinged bedroom on a brand new curvaceous white Toshiba television with a single elegant upright antenna, probably the last new black and white television ever purchased (from Brashs, no ‘e’.) British television now teetered on the edge of a cliff: its gritty cinematography might remain but its scripts would lose, word by Middle English word, its vitality (vide Johnny Speight, Johnnie Mortimer, Brian Clark et al.) and become the committee-approved epistles of a brave new century.
The house had no heating. This is not a ‘we were so poor …’ boast: rental houses were frequently not heated or cooled. We used our ever-reliable and transportable kerosene heater that had been cheap, effective and safe, but try telling that to today’s home maker. We moved eventually; bought a house, Edwardian double-fronted four-bedroomed palatial luxury - inbuilt gas heater! - at auction in August 1985. It was several hundred metres north of Princes Park and felt, then, as if we’d moved to the outer suburbs.
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