There was one of those couches covered in that old bobbly fabric that everybody had in those days, and it was all sticky from whatever he’d spilled on it. There was a TV sitting on a cardboard box, and all these posters of half-naked men on the walls, which was a bit of a shock since I thought blokes were supposed to have pictures of naked women on the walls. But not the wogs, they had half-naked bodybuilders on the walls.

We sat on the couch and Vincent was rubbing my knee and saying, ‘You don’t know how beautiful you are, do you?’ and all that stuff that blokes say when they’re basically trying to get into your pants. I was brushing him away because that’s what girls are supposed to do, and he was pretending to get sick of me saying no, and I was going on about how much trouble I was going to be in for not being on the train. So he said, ‘Alright, I’ll just take you home.’ He kind of dragged me up onto my feet and shoved me out the door.

He was driving pretty fast and he kept going on about why didn’t I want to kiss him and badgering me about how old I was, and somehow we got to the idea that I should go around with him, officially. But then he was asking about Russell Cooper, saying, ‘Is your mum’s boyfriend a big bastard? Is he going to knock my block off when he finds out we’re going around together?’

I said, ‘It’s not like he’s my dad.’ And Vincent said, ‘You better not tell anyone we’re going around together because if anyone finds out the cops will come and bash me.’

I probably don’t need to tell you that I got into so much trouble when I finally got home that day, Jack. My mother had the wooden spoon in her hand – not actually a wooden spoon but a stick thing that she called the wooden spoon – and she was yelling at me for being out of her mind with worry, and what was I playing at, and where had I been?

I made up a big lie, saying, ‘Oh, I missed the train. I waited for the next one but it didn’t come so I had to get the bus instead.’ And my mother was saying, ‘Do you think I came down in the last shower, Snow?’

I got grounded for two weeks, but there comes a point where you can’t really ground a kid who won’t be grounded and I had no intention of staying in because Vincent was ringing me up all the time and saying, ‘Come out.’

It was driving Mum crazy because the phone would go all the time and I’d just snatch it up and Vincent would say, ‘I’m in the phone box across the road,’ and I’d run out and get in his car. It wasn’t long before he wasn’t even trying to hide. He’d just pull up outside the house in his Monaro and sound the comedy horn and I’d run out.