Page 88 of Here One Moment

That’s very upsetting, but she’s not a parrot.

We need to talk. It’s never good when your partner needs to talk.

She looks up at Paula. “We need to find her fast.”

Chapter 81

I thought I couldn’t live after I lost Jack, but I just kept right on living.

I had three women in my life—my auntie Pat, my mother, and my grandmother—who had all lost the men they loved, and they refused to let me sink too far into the dark muddy depths of grief and depression. There was always someone there to yank me back up by the elbow. It was a combined effort, involving endless cups of tea, long walks I didn’t want to take, hot baths and hot water bottles, and sometimes just a hand on my back while I lay on my bed and cried a million tears for the future that was no longer mine.

And there was television.

Every weeknight at 8:30 p.m., the four of us watched Number 96, a racy, groundbreaking soap opera following the lives of the residents of an apartment block in Paddington, which caused us to gasp and laugh and my grandmother to make the sign of the cross, even as her eyes stayed glued to the screen. Its first episode was advertised with the tagline Tonight Australian television loses its virginity, and that was not an exaggeration. We were all four as deeply addicted as Auntie Pat was to her ciggies and Bex. I can still see the enthralled profiles of my mother, grandmother, and aunt illuminated in the flickering monochrome light from the television.

Of course, I kept up with my studies and my marks didn’t drop, but I walked through the grounds of Sydney University in a daze. Nobody felt quite real to me. Bev, Don, and Aldo—characters from Number 96—felt more real to me than the people seated next to me in lectures.

It feels trite to admit a television series helped with my grief for Jack, but it’s true. You can avoid grief but you can’t do it for twenty-four hours a day. You need distraction, and as long as it’s legal and doesn’t hurt you or anyone else, I recommend you take that distraction where you can find it.

Ivy and I had a terrible falling out during this time. She wanted me to get on with things. One day she snapped, “You weren’t even engaged to him, Cherry, stop wallowing! You will waste your life like your auntie Pat did for a man you hardly knew!”

I found that deeply offensive to both Auntie Pat and to me. Jack and I might not have announced an engagement but we planned to marry and have four children.

A year later Ivy sent me a letter of apology. It was a very nice letter and of course I forgave her.

It’s never too late for an apology.

Correction:

Sometimes it is too late.

Never mind.

After I graduated, everybody smugly waited for me to accept the fact that the only job I was now qualified for was teaching math, but I was determined. I went through the White Pages and wrote down the names and addresses of any organization I thought might be able to find some use for someone with a math degree. I posted forty letters.

Two weeks later, the phone rang, and a man with a musical Scottish accent said, “Cherry Hetherington?”

That’s how I got my first job. It was not teaching math.

It was counting gray kangaroos.

Chapter 82

Leo drives home at two p.m. on a Monday. It’s a revelation. Traffic is great at this time of day! He glides through green light after green light like he’s in a presidential motorcade. Sometimes rush hour feels like a personal attack, and he feels hatred toward every set of taillights blocking his way. He has to remind himself that every car represents another poor soul stuck in traffic, just like him.

“I won’t be back in the office after the site meeting,” he’d said, elaborately casual, to Kath, his office manager. “I’ll work from home.”

He is proving to himself and to Neve that he isn’t micromanaged, but Kath seemed annoyingly taken aback when he mentioned his innocuous plan for the day, and then she said, even more annoyingly: “Does Lilith know this?”

He feels like he’s losing his grip on what’s appropriate workplace behavior. Surely at his level he doesn’t need to ask Lilith’s “permission” to work from home after a site meeting. Does he? No. She’s interstate, speaking inspirationally at a Women in Engineering conference. It makes sense for Leo to plan his working day like this. But wait, is he being misogynistic? Would he ask permission if Lilith was a man? Surely not. He’s not a junior employee. He doesn’t need to clock in and clock out. Why is he even thinking about this?

Multiple safety issues had been on the agenda at this morning’s meeting and Leo had mentioned—he’s not sure if it was to entertain the team or genuinely to caution them—that it seemed he was destined to die in a workplace accident when he turned forty-three inalittle over a month’s time, so could everyone please bring their Agame when it came to safety? (Bring your A game. What the hell? Every time he leaves a meeting there is always one particular phrase that comes out of his mouth that causes him anguish.)

“I hope it wasn’t that plane psychic,” said the project architect. “Did anyone see that terrible video of the kid in the car accident?”

“Well,” said Leo, and he can’t deny he enjoyed the moment. Mouths dropped. The meeting went nearly an hour over schedule. Turns out a lot of people had seen the video and read about the plane psychic.

“I’m not coming within ten feet of you, mate,” said someone jocularly.

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