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.