I actually really like…
Delete.
The problem is I think I maybe love you.
She thinks of herself as a little girl running as fast as she could and jumping off her grandmother’s back veranda, arms straight and horizontal like wings. It wasn’t really that high, but you couldn’t see the ground before you jumped, you just had to believe it was there, and every time there was a terrifyingly glorious moment of freefall.
She presses send.
Her regret is instant. Her back clamors for attention. Her pain soars to a nine. Such a weird message. You don’t say “I love you” for the first time in a text. You don’t say “I love you” when you’ve not yet confirmed you’re in a relationship. He’ll go running for the hills!
Her mother says, “She sounds just like an actuary.”
Allegra doesn’t respond because she is looking at the words that have appeared so quickly on her phone it feels like magic, it feels like a miracle.
The ground was there all the time.
She just flipped her whole day. Maybe she just flipped her whole life.
It says: It’s not a problem, Allegra, and it’s not a maybe for me.
Chapter 105
I’m retired now, but yes, that is correct, I was an actuary.
In other words I was a “fortune teller of the business world.”
An actuary uses probability, statistics, and financial mathematics to project the future. I love my profession! Quite passionately. I have delivered many speeches on its fascinating history! To be clear, I delivered these speeches at industry events, not to cornered people at parties.
Well, all right, there was one cornered person at a party, but he seemed very interested. I will resist the temptation to share it with you. (But you should look it up!)
People prefer jokes to history, so here are some actuarial jokes:
Old actuaries never die; they just get broken down by age and sex.
I find that quite amusing. You may not.
How can you tell if an actuary is an extrovert? He looks at YOUR shoes when he talks to you!
That one is a little offensive, as it makes fun of our social skills. It’s true we tend to be analytical, introverted people and some of us are “boffins” who disappear into a back room and emerge forty years later for our retirement party, but that is no reason to call us “strange” or “weird.” Everyone is different!
What is the difference between an English actuary and an Italian actuary? An English actuary can tell you how many people are going to die next year. An Italian actuary can give you their names and addresses.
That one is insulting to Italians who are not involved in organized crime, which is obviously the vast majority.
Anyhow, this is how I became an actuary.
After my divorce and my mother’s death, I went through a difficult period. It’s possible I was suffering from depression. You would have thought Auntie Pat and I would have leaned on each other after Mum died, but we did the opposite. We drew away. I think Auntie Pat might have suffered a kind of breakdown. She made oblique references to it in later years. We eventually both apologized for abandoning each other, but I think we had no choice. We were like two drowning people. We needed to work out how to swim on our own. Auntie Pat went back to her own home the day after Mum’s funeral. Mum’s house was now mine. I didn’t want it, but it didn’t occur to me to sell it. That felt like bad manners. (I still own it. I have very nice tenants living there. I’m sorry to mention real estate, like a typical baby boomer. I know I’m lucky, although I would have preferred not to have inherited when I did.)
My dad used to say to my mother and me, “This too shall pass.” We didn’t find it helpful. In fact, I recall my mother stamping her foot over some baking disaster one hot Christmas Day, wiping her sweaty forehead with a tea towel, and crying, “Oh, do shut up, Arthur, it will only bloody pass after I’ve done it all again!”
Every day that year I woke up, cleaned my teeth, looked at myself in the mirror, and said, “This too shall pass, Cherry.”
One day I was thinking about Mum laughing about the Swiss fondue, which led me to think about Eliza in her leopard-print dress. I was worried she wouldn’t remember me, but she did, right away. We met for lunch in the city and I told Eliza I was looking for career advice, and she dabbed her mouth with a cloth napkin and said, “Right.” She mapped out my future as decisively as Madame Mae mapped out the future of a woman needing to escape a violent marriage.
She said the Australian insurance industry needed more actuaries. She said that unlike management positions, my gender would not hold me back because an actuary is an actuary is an actuary. I didn’t understand what she meant at the time, but I do now, and she was right. She said the exams were brutal and she was right about that too. It was like signing up for a triathlon. I have never done a triathlon, but when I gained my final actuarial accreditation, I felt some affinity to those athletes who stagger, seemingly half dead, across the finishing line.
I worked in the insurance industry for many years, eventually at quite a senior level. I analyzed statistical data related to mortality and then developed probability tables to forecast risk and liability for payment of future insurance benefits. I studied historical data for patterns specifically in relation to CODs (causes of death). I do apologize. You’re not interviewing me for a job.
I’m trying to say I spent my career asking and answering this question: How and when will people die? To put it as simply as possible, it was my job to work out how much an insurance salesman like Jiminy Cricket should charge someone like my dad for life insurance. To be clear: my job was not to determine how and when any one individual would die, but a group of individuals, which is why my actions on the plane continue to mystify—never mind.
I believe I’d been working in my first actuarial position for about eighteen months and enjoying it immensely when one Saturday morning while catching up on errands, I happened to walk by a Hornsby hairdressing salon called Hazel’s Hair. I normally went to a salon in Wahroonga, but that hairdresser always remembered everything I’d said at my previous appointment. I think she wrote it down. I found that invasive.
So, on impulse, I went into Hazel’s Hair. You’ll be surprised to know that I rarely do things on impulse.
(That was a joke.)
(As I assume you would not be surprised.)
As soon as I walked in the door, a girl sitting behind the counter reading a copy of the Women’s Weekly looked up at me and said, “Madame Mae’s daughter!” Then she said, “Don’t tell me, don’t tell me!”
“Don’t tell you what?” I said, confused.
“It’s Sharon—no it’s not, it’s Cheryl! No, not Cheryl, Cherry!”
I didn’t know her from a bar of soap. She knew me because of Mum’s fame. It was Hazel, of course, who attended the same high school as me and would go on to become a significant person in my life, not solely because of her excellent hairdressing skills.
She cut my hair that day, and I liked the way she cut it, and we chatted and, eventually, after a number of appointments, we became friends. One day she invited me to a dinner party at her place in Terrey Hills. She said her husband, who worked at a university, was inviting some very “clever” friends, and I was clever, so I would fit right in.
