3.

When you’re a wog kid in a country town, any city where mustard is not considered exotic holds a special allure.

The idea of being in a place large enough to get lost in, of not being confined to the one main street (not to mention the fenced perimeters of a boarding school) always made me excited, made me want to live.

There’s just one problem: money. I can’t even afford a sharehouse in Sydney, not to mention my own apartment.

When I left school I got a job at a chicken plant. If you’ve never worked with chickens then trust me: all childhood notions of romantic little farms and hen houses are about as real as Santa Claus when it comes to chicken processing. Think of hundreds of chooks in a room, the air tight with the stench of blood and shit, feathers flying … it would literally haunt my dreams. I swore I’d never eat chooks again and I still haven’t.

I was staying with my grandfather, a bent old man who lived on black coffee, Winnie Blue ciggies and childhood memories of Italy, and who wheezed every time he breathed. He was dying of asbestos and dirt poor. For him, the Winnies were a luxury and I needed to bring cash in.

After he was hospitalised he didn’t hold out for long. The lack of Winnies in hospital possibly killed him faster than anything else – they were his one consolation in life.

Then it was just me in that shack of his, killing days at the chicken plant and killing nights at the local pub with co-workers desperate to drown out the horrors of poultry processing.

It didn’t take me long to realise Grandad’s death gave me an excuse to quit town and the chicken plant for good. I don’t mean that in a bad way – even though his idea of conversation was grunting and he sent me to that hellhole of a boarding school, Grandad was the only family I had – but I was desperate to get away from those feathered fuckers.

The plan was to sell Grandad’s shack and use the money to make a go of it in Sydney but it didn’t work out that way. No one wanted to buy it and even when I finally found a renter, I still had to pay off Grandad’s debts and medical bills.

That’s how I ended up moving from one town to the next, leaving every time I got sick of whatever crappy job I landed.

I’ve picked fruit in a dehydrated orchard where the shrivelled plums looked like deaths heads, I’ve been a petrol station attendant where the acidic tang of fuel coated my lungs, and I worked in a bottling plant where I had to pull the same lever all day like a pensioner in a pokie room – except there was never any risk of a big pay-off, just repetitive stress injury.

In fact, my shoulder hurt so bad in the end I had to quit and take a break from working. I drifted into Port Macquarie and bunked in a bedbug-riddled backpackers that even by boarding school standards (and trust me, mine was not out of any Enid Blyton novel) was disgusting.

I can still recall the cloying smell of baked beans and foot odour embedded in the unventilated air, my roommates’ soiled socks and jocks hanging from their bunks while they strummed an acoustic guitar badly and talked non-stop about shagging other backpackers. It’s as if my fellow travellers were on a baked-bean-fuelled movable orgy – and my one salvation was Katja.

Katja was a German backpacker who I saw around the hostel but never spoke to until she bumped into me in a bookshop one day – and I was looking (maybe a little too closely) at a Goya nude in an art book when she did.

You see, my favourite subject in school was art and luckily our art teacher was also the footy coach. Unlike the English teacher who forced us to read endless Jane Austen novels (which put off every guy from ever wanting to read again), the art teacher wisely realised none of us were going to become the Australian answer to Picasso and focused on the only type of art that spoke to him: nudes.

We studied everything from classic nudes and Picasso’s cubist renditions to Penthouse (although I’m not sure the school principle was aware of that), but the lesson that resonated most was when Mr Johnson told us to focus on the naked women’s eyes. It turns out most artists painted nudes that looked demurely away from the viewer so no-one would feel self-conscious gazing openly at the girls’ naked bits, but a few artists realised it was only when their painted lady stared directly at the voyeur that electricity happened.

This, Mr Johnson proudly informed us, was a lesson Penthouse took to the bank before internet porn killed it off.

All of a sudden, art suddenly seemed a whole lot more interesting.

Anyway, so I was in this bookstore ogling the nude when I felt someone staring and looked up to see Katja (not that I knew her name then). Mortified, I nervously babbled something about Mr Johnson’s theory of eye contact when Katja laughed.

“It’s ok,” she said, her German accent as thick as the ones you hear on TV and in the movies. “I understand.”

It turned out Katja was an art student training to become a burlesque performer. Over coffees in a shopping centre food court she told me how burlesque performers lock eyes with their audience just as the old classic nudes did.

“There’s no hiding on stage,” she said. “That’s what makes it sexy. A good dancer connects with every single audience member to make sure they’re part of the act.”

As Katja talked more about her burlesque training, all I could think of was her bronzed Germanic skin, of how black lace would look on it during performances, of what it would be like to touch. It even seemed possible that I might touch it when, later that night after a few vodka shots, we kissed and she promised to meet me the following night.

The next day she left the hostel without telling me and I never saw her again.

It might seem odd that I ended up becoming a nude model myself, but then maybe that’s just how things go. Although I don’t believe in fate – why would the universe think I’m any more special than the chooks in my old processing plant or the cows in the abattoir at the edge of town? – if it weren’t for Mr Johnson and Katja then maybe I’d have ignored the ad for a nude model that was taped to Carly’s shop window.

Then again, by the time I hit town I was down to my last $90 and in desperate need of coin – I’d have applied for anything.