Chapter 83

I like to tell people my first job was counting gray kangaroos because I think they imagine me in the outback, lying on my stomach, wearing an Akubra hat, peering through a pair of binoculars, and clicking a counter with my thumb each time a kangaroo bounded across the horizon.

The reality was far less glamorous. Reality tends to be far less glamorous.

I was employed by the National Parks and Wildlife Service as a junior biometrician.

A biometrician, if you don’t know, applies statistical analysis to biological data. I was there to help my boss study Australia’s population of western grey kangaroos.

The western grey kangaroo is one of the largest species of kangaroo. They are nicknamed “stinkers” because mature males have an unpleasant smell. During breeding season, the males compete for the females in a kind of boxing contest where they lock arms and try to push each other over, like sumo wrestlers.

Look, I’m not an expert on the western grey kangaroo, I just collected a few “fun facts” because people expect me to be one. The truth is, I could have been counting frogs or crocodiles or tubes of toothpaste. The math would have been the same.

Most of my time was spent at a desk, ecstatically analyzing data. When I first started I used a slide rule. I know this makes me sound ancient. But we all have to sound ancient at some point. Scientific calculators were about to make the slide rule obsolete, but I resisted for longer than most. By the time I left, every desk had a computer.

It was solitary work, but I was well suited to solitary work, and I couldn’t believe I got paid to sit at a desk and do my favorite thing: problem-solving. To be paid to do what I once did so joyfully for free with Dad at the kitchen table! Nobody in my family could believe it either.

There was also occasional fieldwork required, which got me out of the office to see how my models were applied in the real world. I had to travel for my work! It felt very important, although I certainly wasn’t staying in fancy hotels with breakfast buffets but in the corrugated-iron staff quarters of some of Australia’s largest sheep and cattle stations.

Those big open landscapes gave me a not unpleasant sensation of vertigo. I enjoyed the feeling of being small and insignificant. It’s healthy to be reminded of your insignificance.

I enjoyed talking to the farmers’ wives. They were often “city girls,” desperate for company, and once I had overcome my initial shyness, I was pretty chatty (as you would have noticed by now—although if you meet me at a noisy, crowded party, you may still find me odd).

(On that note, I recently watched a fascinating documentary about the making of the charity single “We Are the World,” in 1985. There was the legendary Bob Dylan, surrounded by other “iconic pop stars,” and he looked exactly like me at a party! Kind of hunted. Wanting the ground to swallow him up. Poor darling Bob Dylan! And then beautiful Stevie Wonder helped him overcome his nerves and sing his solo by impersonating Bob’s unique style. He meant, Just be you, Bob Dylan. )

(It’s the answer to many a question: Just be you. It sounds easy, but it seems even icons struggle to be their iconic true selves.)

There was one woman who invited me in for tea and scones. Very thin with wild curly red hair and watery green eyes. Her name was Suzanne. It was clear she was unhappy in her marriage. She reassured me, “He’s not violent.” She lowered her voice and said, “He just shouts, that’s all. I’m not keen on the shouting.”

She told me her mother had said to her, “You’ve made your bed, Suzanne, now you’ve got to lie in it.”

She was older than me and clearly more sophisticated. I could see she was the sort of person who went to galleries and museums and stopped in front of paintings to make intelligent remarks. She didn’t belong in the country. It seemed to me she’d accidentally fallen into the wrong life. In normal circumstances she probably would never have shared such personal information with someone like me, but she was lonely and bored and phone calls can’t replace having another woman sit across the kitchen table from you, drinking your tea and eating scones. The scones, by the way, were rock-hard. The Country Women’s Association and my grandma would not have approved.

I put down my teacup and did something that shocked me.

I asked her if she’d like me to read her palm. I told her my mother and grandmother were well-known palm readers and implied I had the same skills.

It’s interesting when you suddenly behave out of character.

An example: I went tandem skydiving for my sixtieth birthday. It was exhilarating!

Obviously, I will never go skydiving again.

Not if you paid me. I still have nightmares about it.

Suzanne’s was the first palm I ever read. As a child I never mimicked my mother or grandmother by pretending to read palms or see the future. I never read my friend Ivy’s palm. I never read Jack’s palm, not even when he left for Vietnam, which you’d think I would have done if I believed there was any chance it might have told me something.

Not believing had become an important part of my identity. After Dad died, I never asked Mum to read my tea leaves. I swore allegiance to the sensible side of the family. The same side as Dad, Auntie Pat, and Grandpa.

And yet here I was, my hand out, waiting for her to give me hers, and Suzanne did, without hesitation, and I recognized the expression on her face because I had seen it on the faces of so many of my mother’s customers: equal parts skeptical and hopeful, a nonbeliever desperate to believe.

It was strange how easily it came to me. It was strange, too, the sense of power I felt. My breathing slowed and my voice became deeper. Even as I had been scoffing, I had apparently been learning. There was no door to the back veranda where Mum saw her customers, just a purple curtain that she drew to give the illusion of privacy. I could hear every word, and in that first year after Dad died, I lay on the floor on my stomach and listened in, not because I was impressed by Mum’s skills but because I was enthralled by the intimate, grown-up details her customers shared about their broken hearts, their disappointing sex lives, their pain, their dreams of something better, something more, something different.

I heard myself telling Suzanne, with absolute confidence, that her lifeline had nothing to do with the length of her life but with the richness of experiences that were in her future, and hers was deep, so there were many, many experiences ahead of her.

All of Mum’s customers had rich experiences in their future.

I said her broken heart line suggested she would have multiple partners in her life.

Then I said those words I’d heard Mum say to some women, with more conviction than any of her other predictions.

I said, “I see you leaving.”

I see you leaving. It’s what my mother would say to women who cried into soggy, balled-up handkerchiefs while they asked, “Will I ever be happy, Madame Mae?”

She’d say it over and over, at every reading: I see you leaving, I see you leaving, I see you leaving. Until finally they saw themselves leaving too.

Some of her customers had violent husbands, and Mum’s predictions for those women became very specific and instructive: “I see you packing a bag without him knowing. I see you catching the train to Gosford. I see you going to the first phone booth you find and dialing a number that I am writing down for you now. I see you never going back. I see you finding happiness and peace.”

Well, those women weren’t stupid. They knew Mum had slipped from fortune teller to counselor, but they nodded along respectfully and took the number for Mum’s old schoolfriend Dulcie, who, with her mother, ran a kind of unofficial women’s refuge on the Central Coast and helped many women and their children get back on their feet. Some of Mum’s customers did exactly as she suggested and some of them only temporarily changed their destinies and returned to their unhappy marriages.

When I came back to the office after that field trip I was overcome with shame. I could not believe I’d taken that woman’s hand in mine and behaved as I had. It was like I’d been drunk. Perhaps I got myself drunk on a shot of power. The power of Madame Mae. Seeing the truth I wanted to see and the future I thought was right for her. Perhaps she and her husband just needed better communication! Did she even ask him to please stop shouting? Perhaps he had hearing problems like my grandfather and didn’t realize he shouted. What if she ruined her life because of my reckless meddling?

I never heard if she left, and I didn’t read another palm for many years after that.

—

My boss with the musical Scottish accent was Scottish but of Pakistani descent. His name was Baashir and he was the first openly gay person I had ever met, if you don’t count Don, the gorgeous gay character on Number 96. To be honest I do count Don. Gosh, I was fond of Don.

Baashir’s passion was travel. He’d taken two years to reach Australia from Scotland. He’d hitchhiked all over Europe and North Africa, via Greece, Turkey, the Middle East, India, Iran, Nepal, and Thailand. He planned to work in Australia for two years, and then take another two years to make his way back to Scotland.

Before I met Baashir, “travel” wasn’t in my vocabulary except as a way to get places. The only people I knew who had left Australia did so to fight wars. Air travel at the time was impossibly expensive. Nobody took “gap years.”

Baashir had no photos to show me. No slides, either. Thank goodness. If you think your friends post too many photos of their travels on social media, be grateful you won’t ever have to sit in their living room watching those photos projected onto a wall while you eat hard cheese and cocktail onions. Those have been some of the longest nights of my life.

Anyhow, Baashir just told me stories, about visiting the Taj Mahal at sunrise, soaking in the steaming hot springs in Iceland, camping just outside of Cairo, eating crisp perfect Wiener schnitzel in the world’s oldest restaurant in Salzburg. He was like a carpet salesman, unfurling rug after rug, each more exquisite than the last.

The only travel I’d ever done was to see the Big Banana in Coffs Harbour.

Baashir very kindly listened to my detailed description of the Big Banana. Everything interested Baashir. Curiosity is such an attractive quality. He said he would have to check it out. I said I wasn’t sure how it would stack up against the Taj Mahal.

I never overhear a Scottish accent without quickly turning in the irrational hope that it may be Baashir. He gave me my first job, an interest in travel, a taste for red wine, and he invited me to a Swiss fondue party, which supposedly “changed my destiny.”

I consider that phrase to be a logical fallacy.

Don’t try to be funny, Cherry.