That first week in the second teller’s box was a revelation. I had no idea I could handle so much money, or even that I could handle money. When I wrote home I made no mention of my success. On the Friday night we all went over to the Pacific Hotel and drank like dogs in a spring after a run in a desert, and then I walked back to my little cockroach-infested room drunk, so drunk I slept the entire night in my designated room, the room without the massive ceiling fan and the stored documents. When I woke up at three a.m. to piss, I got a shock, I thought I was back home, in Genoralup, and I wondered why the room was facing the wrong way, why it was hot, so muggy and my arm was a mass of bulging mosquitoes on heat and what were those soft noises like tiny things scratching? By the time I got to the toilet, I remembered. And when I got back to the room I decided to leave the cockroaches to my underpants, the mosquitoes to Robbo down the hall, and shift back to the paperwork and the fan.
The sad thing about getting pissed on a Friday night was that you had to get up again on Saturday morning and work until midday. Then, of course, unless you played sport, you could go off and get pissed again. My Saturday in the teller’s box was marred by a small error. I finished the day fifty dollars over, but I was forgiven quickly, because I was over and not under and because fifty dollars in a float of fifty thousand was not deemed a disaster.
The next week was another major success, except I was getting a little bored. Life seemed to be all about work. You got up, you went to breakfast, you went to work, you bought lunch, you worked, you closed the doors, you went to your room, you went to dinner, you went out and got a little pissed, you went to bed. If you got a little too pissed you might have to get up and chuck your guts, you got up, chucked them, and on and on it went until you died and the mosquitoes sucked the last of your blood and the cockroaches consumed what was left and thirty-five years later someone noticed you were missing, went upstairs to the old document storage room and found your clothes and a letter from your mother reminding you to eat plenty of salt because you were once diagnosed with mercury poisoning.
By the third week the boredom was getting to me. The mixed race girl at Friday night rugby was still only smiling at me, laughing at an occasional comment, but not inviting me to share her secrets, her bed or her vagina, and my old school chum Bainbridge was about to leave town and go south.