Chapter 48

One sticky gray February day, a week after my tenth birthday, my father balanced a penny on his thumb and sent it spinning high.

He was thirty-two, a young man, although of course to me he was as grown-up as it was possible to be. His fishing rod in its smart canvas tube (Mum gave it to him for Christmas), his tackle box and swag were in the hallway next to the front door. He and his friends Ralph and Angelo were catching the train up to Gosford and then the bus to Avoca Beach, to camp overnight. The wives and children often went with them, but not this time because there was a school fete we didn’t want to miss. (Now that I think about it, the mothers probably would have been very happy to miss the fete.)

Dad caught the penny and placed it on top of his hand. “Heads or tails, Cherry?”

I said heads, and I said heads the next time too, and got it right.

The third time I said tails.

“Why do you say tails?” asked Dad.

I said, feeling kind of proud and knowing, “Because we just got two heads, Dad, so now it’s more likely to be tails.”

Dad said, “I know it feels that way. It feels that way to me too! But the coin has no memory. If it’s a fair coin the chances of it being heads or tails are always one in two.”

The outcomes of a coin toss are statistically independent. That’s what he was trying to say. He didn’t use those words. He wouldn’t have known them and I wouldn’t have understood them. But that was the principle. I don’t know why he chose that moment to talk about it. Perhaps he’d just learned it himself.

I thought for a moment and then I said, “But what if you got ten heads in a row? Then it would definitely be more likely that the next one was tails.”

That’s when he told me about what had happened in Monte Carlo.

There was initial confusion, because I understood Monte Carlo to be the name of my favorite biscuit from the Arnott’s Assortment tin, not a famous district in Monaco, on the French Riviera, but we sorted that out.

It happened in 1913 at the Monte Carlo casino. The roulette table. The ball kept landing on black, causing more and more people to crowd around the table, placing bigger and bigger bets on red because they were convinced the streak was surely about to end. There were twenty-six consecutive blacks before the ball landed on red. People lost millions of francs.

The belief that the probability of future events changes based on past events (assuming those events are independent) is known as the Monte Carlo fallacy, or the gambler’s fallacy.

I didn’t fully grasp what my dad was saying as I was only a child.

In fact, history shows that many “financial gurus” don’t understand the basics of probability. These highly successful, charismatic men (they are nearly always men) ride high on a streak of good luck that they attribute to their own remarkable intelligence, right up until the day the streak ends, and their clients’ losses are catastrophic. But it’s never the guru’s fault. Then it’s just bad luck. Past performance is no guarantee of future results, folks!

—

Maybe you’ve already guessed that this was the last conversation I had with my dad, and that’s why I remember it so clearly and why I’ve thought about it so often, and given it more significance than perhaps it deserves.

My dad was struck by lightning while he, Angelo, and Ralph were rock fishing. They’d had a marvelous afternoon. The fish were biting. They’d all agreed on just five minutes more.

Never turn your back on the ocean, Dad always told me, but lightning doesn’t care which way you’re facing, it strikes the tallest thing it can find, whether it’s a tree, a church steeple, or a human, and my dad was the most cautious of those three fishermen, but he was also the tallest.

It’s rare to be killed by lightning, but it happens. Around two thousand people die by lightning strikes every year. I would say none of them expected it.

Nine out of ten people survive a lightning strike.

A cloud-to-ground lightning strike can contain up to one billion bolts of electricity. Cardiac injury is the main cause of death. The lightning stopped my dad’s heart. My dad’s big beautiful anxious worried loving ambitious funny heart.

I often wonder about the last thought he didn’t get to finish. Was it about bait or statistical independence or homework with me or dancing with Mum or Monte Carlo biscuits or Gus the pilot from Queensland and his teddy bear or the beer he was looking forward to enjoying back at the campsite or swimming in the ocean or an itch he needed to scratch on the back of his knee? It doesn’t really matter. He had millions of thoughts during his thirty-two years. I just wonder about that last one.

I have no memory of hearing the news that my dad died. There is an empty space where that memory should be, as if the lightning cauterized it. I was told I behaved “oddly”: I didn’t cry or ask questions. Apparently I nodded, as though to say Message received, picked up my pencil, and returned to my homework.

For years I was ashamed of this, as if I’d failed one of the most significant moments of my life, as if it meant I didn’t love my dad, but later, when I’d just turned forty, I got talking to a friend of a friend at a party. We sat on white plastic chairs that sank into the grass and drank West Coast Coolers, and got into one of those strangely intimate conversations that sometimes happen between strangers when there is too much alcohol and not enough food, and we discovered we’d both lost our fathers as children.

She said, “It was too big for you to comprehend, you were in shock.”

It’s interesting how a simple kind comment from a stranger can make you feel better.

I do remember my mother’s reaction. She fell, almost to the floor, as if the lightning had struck her heart, too, but Auntie Pat caught her with a chair, just in the nick of time, and Mum put her head down on the kitchen table and said, over and over again, No, no, no, no.

I looked away from her. I found it undignified. I didn’t think Dad would like it.

The day after my dad’s funeral, Ivy and I were heading to the creek when I saw Jiminy Cricket trot down the pathway of someone’s house. I was thrilled. What good timing. I ran up to him and I said, “My dad died, so now you have to pay us money!”

Ivy said I had a big creepy smile on my face, as if I’d won a bet, and it was no wonder that Jiminy looked so alarmed.

Insurance is like a bet. You’re betting on your own bad luck. The insurance company mostly wins because mostly you don’t crash your car and mostly your house doesn’t burn down.

Life insurance is a bet on when you’re going to die.

We won, because it was unlikely a big strong clever man like my dad would die at thirty-two.

But that’s what he did.