Chapter 75

Something extraordinary happened to me on a cloudy, breezy Saturday morning three days after my eighteenth birthday.

At the time I was studying for a double degree at Sydney University: a Bachelor of Science in Pure and Applied Mathematics and aBachelor of Arts in Statistics. I was fulfilling my father’s dream forme.

I don’t mean to imply I only studied math to honor Dad’s memory, and I would have preferred, for example, to be a ballet dancer. Imagine me dancing Swan Lake with my two left feet! That would defy the laws of physics.

(It is obviously impossible to defy the laws of physics, I was using hyperbolic language.)

I loved university. Not for the social life, of course. I didn’t make any friends. Most of the time I was the only woman among hundreds of men, but that didn’t bother me, and it’s not why I didn’t make friends. I can’t recall making eye contact with a single person. I wasn’t there to socialize. I was there to learn. If someone asked to borrow a pen or pencil I would hand it over without even looking. It was like I lost my peripheral vision. All I could see was the board or the figures on the overhead projector.

Everyone I knew thought my studies were useless, like learning a language nobody spoke. Math, by the way, is a language, I would argue a beautiful one, and it’s the only universal language there is, because it’s the same all over the world.

People said I would be qualified for only one job, and it was one I didn’t want: teaching math to children who didn’t want to learn it. I wasn’t known for my love of children.

I didn’t care. I was in seventh heaven.

One day, I was at home in my bedroom absorbed in my work. Auntie Pat was over, she was over more often than not, but this time she was there for a particular purpose: floating shelves. Mum had seen a picture in a magazine she wanted to replicate and she’d found a carpenter in the Yellow Pages: Jack Murphy, EXPERIENCED CARPENTER, prompt, reliable service, quality work. For all your carpentry needs! Auntie Pat was there to make sure this experienced carpenter didn’t charge Mum an inflated price for these fancy shelves.

Nineteen years old. Tall, lanky, but graceful in his lankiness. The most vulnerable of necks and the kindest of eyes. Jack was the tallest man who had ever entered our house, which meant that he was the first and only person to nearly bang his head on our mother-of-pearl hanging light fixture. He swerved his head in a nimble, sporty way as if he were changing direction in a rugby game.

I saw this, because I happened to walk into the room at that exact moment, on my way to the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea. I stopped dead and looked down at myself in a panic. I wore bell-bottomed blue jeans, a tight blue-and-yellow-striped T-shirt, and silver hoop earrings. I’d washed my hair that morning. It reached the middle of my back, long and straight. I was relieved to find that, by pure chance, my appearance was excellent.

Mum said perfunctorily, “My daughter, Cherry.”

“Cherry is a pretty name,” said Jack.

My mother and I said, “Thank you,” at the same time.

Jack held out his hand for me to shake, which was a little odd. Carpenters wouldn’t normally shake hands with the potential customer’s daughter as she walked by, but that’s what he did.

I said, “Hi, Jack.”

He said, “Hi, Cherry.”

The handshake lasted perhaps one or two seconds longer than socially acceptable. I can still feel that moment in the palm of my hand.

That’s all we said. I made my tea and returned to my abstract algebra. Jack took out his tape measure.

After he left, Mum and Auntie Pat shrieked and jumped about like girls in a teen movie.

“Did you see that?”

“Of course I saw it! Blind Freddy could have seen it!”

They talked about that moment for years.

I note with interest that something similar happened to the world-famous “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin and his wife, Terri, on the day they met. I have seen interviews where they discussed that moment, and my experience with Jack was very similar to theirs, although obviously there were no crocodiles at our house in Hornsby.

Perhaps you think this is a commonplace story where two young people catch each other’s eye and “sparks fly.”

Perhaps you think describing this incident as “extraordinary” is hyperbolic language.

But I know you will understand if it has ever happened to you.