I know you’re going to want to know all about him so I might as well fill you in on what a disaster it was. I was thinking before that I wasn’t going to tell you about him because then you’d try and find him on Facebook and interview him, but he was a bastard so I don’t care if you do track him down.

You can tell him that from me.

So anyway, his name was Vincenzo Martinelli . . . and yes, I’m serious!

He was a wog, a New Australian, whatever you want to call it, and my mother’s worst nightmare, with a hotted-up car and crazy horn and mag wheels. He wore singlets that showed off all his chest hair, and shoes with no socks.

He was the full catastrophe in other words.

Somewhere in the boxes of stuff I’ve got stored away, I would have thirty school books with Vincenzo’s name scrawled all over them, which makes me laugh now but I had a real crush on him then, and we all know how that ends.

I was thirteen when I met him and it was actually Mum’s fault that I started going around with him because she was the one who let me go on the train by myself to see Grease with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John.

The movie had just come out and hardly any of the Catholic school mothers wanted to let their kids go and see it because there was no cinema in Deer Park in those days so if you were going to go you would have to go to the city on the train. Also, there was a bit in the film where a girl got pregnant and wasn’t married, and that was still taboo and not completely normal like now.

Nobody was surprised that my mum was going to let me go because, after all, she had Mr Cooper living with her and they weren’t married.

It felt like I’d been badgering Mum for about three months to let me go when she said, ‘Okay, you can go, but only if you go with Mrs Halfpenny’s girl.’

Mrs Halfpenny was a friend of Mum’s from when she worked at the Postmaster-General’s, and they had their babies at the same time. I didn’t really know Mrs Halfpenny’s daughter very well because they lived on the other side of town, but Mum was forever going on about how responsible and mature she was – not that I cared, I just wanted to see Grease.

Mum said, ‘Mrs Halfpenny’s daughter will meet you at Spencer Street station and you’ll walk from there up to Bourke Street, and I want you to go straight in the cinema and come straight back out and get straight back on the train and come straight home.’

I said yeah, yeah, whatever, and the minute she dropped me at the train station I forgot all about that.

Trains that went through Deer Park in those days were the old Red Rattlers with the compartments inside, and you could smoke in some of them. The train came and I walked along until I found a compartment that was empty and took the whole thing for myself. But I didn’t have it to myself for long because Vincenzo Martinelli got on at the next stop, which was Sunshine, and kind of looked in and saw me sitting there and came straight in and sat down next to me.