Chapter 77

Six months after we met, I found it necessary to inform my devout Catholic grandmother I loved Jack Murphy more than God.

Sometimes you can’t believe the things you said or the feelings you felt.

“Oh, darling,” winced Grandma, and she patted my shoulder consolingly.

Everything was better because of Jack. Food tasted better. The stars shone brighter, my studies were even more fascinating and they were already so fascinating!

I never thought, This can’t last.

I thought, This is just how my life is now. Perfect.

It was a special time. Jack was a social boy. He took me to parties and dances I would otherwise have avoided like the plague. With him by my side I found I could walk through any door, always on the count of three, and even enjoy myself, especially if I could find myself a spot in the corner with my back against the wall and a view of the nearest exit.

I took him fishing and canoeing and camping. He was very cowardly about cold water and wasn’t a strong swimmer. I’d count him in—one, two, three— when it came to the ocean.

I remember standing with him at the blowhole at Avoca Beach, watching the water being sucked in and out and then exploding volcanically, splashing our faces, while a group of local boys with shiny tanned shoulders, their hair slick against their heads like seals, timed their moment to jump.

I wore a purple “ring and string” bikini. The top was two triangles connected by a plastic ring. The bottom was another two triangles tied together in loose bows on my hips. I had not a care in the world about melanoma.

Poor Jack said gamely, “So…we’re going in there?”

He was so relieved when I said we were certainly not swimming in the blowhole (for one thing my bikini would not have withstood it) and he kissed me right there on the rocks while the boys hollered and whistled.

Blowholes can be treacherous, and blowhole swimming can be deadly. Please don’t do it. Even if you are a young boy with shiny tanned shoulders and think you are capable of anything, you are not.

When I was a child, I saw a boy I knew by sight from the campground dragged from the sea by his father. His head lolled at a ghastly angle in his father’s arms, and his gang of friends, who had been swimming in the blowhole with him, watched on in silence, when normally they were so noisy. He could not be revived. My dad hurried me away, but the sound of his mother’s wails followed us.

Sometimes I think those wails may have followed me forever.

Jack said if he’d jumped in that blowhole he probably would have vanished like the Australian prime minister Harold Holt, who a few years prior had gone for a swim on a Victorian beach and was never seen again. There were many conspiracy theories, one of which was that he’d been a Chinese spy and was picked up by a submarine. People didn’t believe a prime minister could drown. Prime ministers can drown. Princesses can die in car crashes.

Sometimes we went out in a foursome with Ivy and her boyfriend at the time. Jack was undeniably superior in every way to Ivy’s boyfriend, so I enjoyed that. I take after my dad, but I am also my mother’s daughter. (You may have noticed.)

Jack’s dad was a ruddy man with a dodgy knee. He liked me, but Jack’s mother preferred his previous girlfriend, a trainee nurse, who was more her sort of person.

She found me odd. “So you’re saying you really don’t want to be a math teacher?”

“That’s what she’s saying, Mum,” sighed Jack.

“But what else can you do with a math degree, Clever Clogs?” That’s what she called me. I called her Mrs. Murphy. I said I’d find something to do with my math degree.

I don’t know if Jack loved me more than God, but I know he loved me. I still have the cards and notes he wrote during that time, in which he told me I was “his girl” and he was “keeping me forever” and “his heart belonged to me.” His handwriting was beautiful. His spelling was not the best.

After my mother died I found a drawer full of notes my parents had exchanged from when they first met. I still have them too. There are notes about how excited they were about their upcoming wedding and then the arrival of the new baby (me). There are apologies for unspecified misdemeanors: I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Some are suggestive. Even raunchy. I will protect their privacy by not repeating them here.

Some are sad, because they had both wanted more children but never got them. Dad wrote, It doesn’t matter, we already hit the jackpot first time round.

To be clear: He meant me. I was their jackpot.

Jack wanted four children: two girls and two boys.

He said their names would be Harry, Henry, Helen, and Hope. I don’t remember why all their initials had to be H . He just found that funny. I laughed along although I didn’t really get it.

I will be honest: I think if I’d had the capacity to look deep into my heart back then, I would have found that I didn’t actually want any children, let alone four of them, but I had no idea it was possible or permitted for a woman to feel that way. Everyone wanted children. I just assumed Jack would make children fun and bearable, in the same way he made parties fun and bearable.

My dad carefully dated each of his notes. My mother drew tiny love hearts all around the borders of hers. It seems like theirs was a happy marriage, perhaps the perfect marriage, but obviously I don’t have all the data. There is a lot I never knew and can never know.

Marriage is a mysterious institution, even from the inside.

Sometimes it can feel like a softly furnished minimum-security prison.

That was my experience anyway.