By the third round I would always hear, ‘Let’s get the boys to buy us drinks, I’m skint!’ I refuse to be a gin and tonic whore, so I would purchase my own drinks, and usually drinks for my friend’s newly acquired friends to keep them placated, just so we didn’t owe them anything in return for their generosity towards my friend. By the wee hours of the morning I would call a cab and no doubt pay the fare back to my place, with a quick stop off at the local kebab store for good measure. These kinds of friends didn’t appreciate my generosity, rather they held the belief that I earnt so much money for doing little to no real work that I should pay the lion’s share of any or all costs. These sort of freeloading friends were very easy to offend and therefore lose completely, all I needed to do was send them a bill for what they owed me. I never saw them again.
One such friend and I decided to hire a four-wheel drive and see a bit of Western Australia’s beautiful outback, namely Karajini. We hired the car for a week, paid up front and split the cost down the centre—so far so good. At the first petrol stop, my friend asked me to pay for the petrol and I retorted with: ‘No, you get the first fill, I’ll take the second fill.’ To my surprise she had expected me to pay for all the petrol and had not brought any cash with her at all! I turned the car around and drove back to Perth in silence.
After I’d been left with quite a few outstanding debts I also learnt the adage: ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be.’ Once this became my mantra, I started to only get fucked at work by clients and no longer by my so-called friends in my spare time.
An average day’s earnings was between $800 and $1000, but considering I took every school holidays off and only ever worked nine to five, somehow I was only ever scraping by. Doing the calculations on these figures would imply that I was still on a good wicket but I was still trying to set up a house for my family. We needed a car and some savings behind us. I had left Queensland with hardly any furniture as it would have been too expensive to bring it all over, so for the first year prior to living with Austin, I was replacing household incidentals.
When you are earning so much money it is easy to lose track of the true value of a dollar. I recall one Saturday going bed shopping for a new mattress. I had estimated that a new mattress was going to cost around $500. I was talked into parting with $1700. I didn’t think much of spending that sort of money as it seemed I could afford it, after all, it was only two days’ work for me, and surely it was tax deductible? Another example of my extravagance was when I took Poppy overseas for Christmas. We flew business class and stayed in deluxe accommodation at the Sheraton.
It is easy to forget that beauty only lasts so long. Most girls spent like there was no tomorrow. It was sort of like dieting—I’ll do it tomorrow. Every week I told myself that I would start putting money into a super fund, but tomorrow never came.
The problem with saving is where to do it? Banking was an issue because there was always a fear that Big Brother was watching your accounts, and what you declared to the tax man and what you deposited were like chalk and cheese. Hiding cash around the house is always a scary endeavour, as it is always in arm's reach or at the mercy of burglars or phone girls with an axe to grind.
Thanks to my numerous bank manager clients, I found a way to save that was out of reach to the tax man—Christmas club accounts. At the time they were tax free and could be put in the name of any person under the age of eighteen, providing you had a birth certificate. Well, young Poppy was a prodigious saver, her pocket money came in at about $2000 per month, and amazingly she was able to save every cent. The only problem was that you couldn’t touch this money until 1 December.
When I bought my first house one December for $77,000, I paid $30,000 in cash. My real estate agent was blown away and very put out having to count it all out.
The clichéd dream of most girls was that there was no need to save because a rich older man would come along in a limousine and escort them off to his palatial home overlooking the river. It was very easy to believe the fantasy. It was very easy to come to believe that you deserve no less when most of your clients were extremely wealthy business men who visited you regularly and showered you with compliments and gifts and comments like, ‘If I wasn’t married I would take you away from all this.’ I would even get proposed to at least once a month, but at least I had the common sense to know that they were proposing to Cleo and not to Annika.
Late January and February were the slowest months of the year for any working girl. We put this down to wives overspending at Christmas time and school fees for all our clients’ offspring. During these difficult months it was not uncommon to earn as little as $150 a day, which in reality meant a negative income after you paid your phone girl and for advertising. I took the lack of phone calls personally: I thought that my regulars had found someone better.