word had spread the length and breadth of Brisbane, Ipswich and Redcliffe that there was to be a catfight. There were motorbike gangs from just about every area. There were at least two hundred people there to watch me thrash it out with this overgrown Amazon of a girl. We stood there facing each other, if you could call it that. She towered over me and someone instructed us to shake hands and come out fighting. We both refused to shake hands but I noticed that she was wearing a ring with a stone the size of the rock of Gibraltar when she thrust her fist towards me. She missed me by a country mile and I moved to the side and dived into the air as if I was on the springboard at the baths. I grabbed her hair and entwined it around my fingers and kept pulling and pulling as hard as I could. I brought her to her knees and she was screaming top note to let go. There was no way I was going to, I knew if I did, she would’ve overpowered me and that would’ve meant goodnight nurse for me.
I managed to punch her with my left fist but that would have had the impact of a dab of melted butter. She twisted herself around and lifted her hands to claw at my face and eyes. I felt her nails go down my cheeks and just as I had done a few years earlier with my dentist, I opened my mouth and sunk my fangs onto her thumb. I held onto her hair and my teeth clasped her thumb as tight as a grey nurse shark. She was screaming and the crowd was cheering. The next thing, I felt more than heard, a large cracking noise. I was biting with such ferocity that my false teeth snapped in half. I let go of her thumb and yelled, ‘I’ve busted my false teeth,’ Someone yelled above the roar of the crowd, ‘Spit them out.’ But I wouldn’t and I said, No one sees me without my teeth, I’m giving up.’ The crowd went wild telling me not to give up because I was winning. They tried their hardest to make me spit my teeth out with promises of, ‘No one will laugh at you.’
But I was adamant, I’d had enough taunts when I was younger and I’d made a secret vow to myself that no one would ever see me without my teeth ever again. I said to Pat, ‘I’m giving up and you can claim victory, okay?’ She agreed only too readily. I let go of the grip on her hair and it took five minutes to untangle it from my fingers. The crowd roared its disapproval at my decision because most of them had backed me to win. Pat and I shook hands and she said, ‘You are one hell of a fighter for such a little person.’
Her thumb was in a sore and sorry state and we both apologised to each other and went our ways and never saw each other from that night onwards.
Carmen visited me one Sunday arvo a week or so later and after she had left I discovered my beautiful gold watch Mum had bought me had gone as well.
It wasn’t long after the second fight that I received a visit from my father. He walked up to the counter and said, ‘Hello, little darlin’ how’s my princess today?’ I was still very angry with him for the way he’d treated Edith and I wanted nothing whatsoever to do with him. I just glared at him and said, ‘What can I do for you, little man?’ I knew that remark would hurt his feelings more than anything and I enjoyed humiliating him. A few days later, Edith told me that Dad had been in touch with her. He told her that he had seen me and that he was coming back to live because he believed I was becoming too wild and out of control, he had said that I needed to be disciplined more. Neither James, Edward or I wanted him back, but we had no say in the matter.
Not long after that, I had arrived at work and was busy arranging the stock and getting the order ready for the disposable cups. I had my back to the counter and I became aware of someone standing in front of the counter. I turned to see the store manager standing in front of the counter. I smiled sweetly but he was stony faced and held up a canvas bag and said, ‘What’s this doing here?’
I blinked in disbelief as I recognised the cash register float bag. I had completely forgotten to put it in the register. The following pay day I was dismissed. It had been the longest drama packed five months of my life.
I went through a number of jobs in rapid succession after that, I was a slave in a laundry for three weeks. I had to start at six in the morning and work like a slave until three o’clock with only half an hour for lunch. I was dismissed for yawning too much. The woman who owned the business was a fair dinkum slave driver. I reckon if she had’ve had her way, we three girls who worked for her would’ve been chained by the ankles to the presses and only given bread and water once a day.
Then I worked for a corner store at Ironside for about a month, but the woman who owned the shop didn’t like the way I swept the floor. It wasn’t that I left the floor dirty she wanted me to hold the broom the same way she did. I didn’t realise that there was a law preventing people from holding the handle of a broom differently to others. But apparently there was, because I got swept out the door with the rest of the rubbish.
I worked at a milk/sandwich bar in Adelaide Street for a while. I can’t remember why I didn’t stay there for any length of time, but I do remember the man who owned the shop wanted desperately to take my co-worker into the back room. She was a very beautiful girl with olive skin and jet-black hair. She was nineteen, which in my opinion then, ranked her as being a sophisticated woman of the world. She goes down in my history book as having made the quote of the twentieth century. I can still here her saying to me about our boss, ‘He’s got no chance, the greasy old bastard. Christ it would be like putting a marshmallow into a money box.’
I finally landed a job making sandwiches and milkshakes and selling cigarettes and lollies. You didn’t have to be Einstein to figure out that the family who owned this business was not Mr and Mrs Average. They were far from being a normal, healthy, wholesome family. There was Mr and Mrs Grady and their two adult sons, one daughter-in-law with a three-month old baby girl and the Grady’s daughter who was in her early twenties. Nothing wrong with that, but this family was decidedly odd, to say the least.
In between serving customers and making sandwiches I was required to tend to the baby, which included feeding and bathing her. Every morning without fail I was made to put a suppository in the baby’s bottom. Now keep in mind that I had just turned fifteen and I had no knowledge about babies whatsoever. Every Wednesday like clockwork, Mr and Mrs Grady and their two sons, daughter-in-law and granddaughter would go out leaving Sonia (their daughter) and me to look after the shop, but not for long. About half an hour after the Grady’s left, Sonia’s ‘boyfriend’ would arrive and they would disappear into the back of the shop to her bedroom and they didn’t emerge until lunchtime. He would leave after having a passionate farewell with her in the doorway of the shop, she telling him that she wished he could stay longer, and he telling her that he didn’t want to go. She’d watch him walk away until he had disappeared out of sight then she’d hurry through to the back of the shop and emerge twenty minutes later with her long blonde hair still wet from the shower.
Ten minutes later at twelve thirty on the dot, her second ‘boyfriend’ would arrive. She greeted him with as much passion as she had farewelled the first ‘boyfriend’ and they would go to the back of the shop and wouldn’t surface for air until three o’clock. She would again go through the process bidding this poor sap a fond farewell. Then she’d go back to the shower and alight as fresh as a daisy. A few minutes later, her parents, brothers and sister-in-law would arrive home.
Whoever said the fifties were the innocent years were sadly mistaken.
I would’ve beaten a hasty retreat from that job within the first week but for one reason. The second day I was there a handsome familiar face came in and I was transfixed as I observed from afar, how friendly and at ease he was with all the members of the Grady family. Mrs Grady told him that they had employed a new girl and called me over to meet Tony. He was more handsome than what I remembered him from our first meeting eighteen months or so previously, when he had introduced himself as Constable Potlick. He didn’t show any signs of recognising me but he gave me a beautiful smile and a wink of approval as if he liked what he saw. I knew I looked older than what I was but I secretly wished I was at least two years older. I was given strict instructions by the Grady’s that Tony was a good friend and that I had to make sure that I didn’t
