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Her name is Kerryn, she used to make up her own ABBA words

9 August 2006, around 8.21pm... A pot of beer in-hand, Kerryn leans back into the too-low, eggplant-coloured couch. The couch is one of four (or maybe five) in the recently renovated Mildura Settlers’ Club front bar, tonight all filled with multi-aged groups of families and friends.

Watching a man in all-black walk from couch-to-couch to note down team names and hand out pens and paper, she soon realises that this is no ordinary pub night. Unsure of what to expect, she automatically shakes her head “no” as Trivia Man asks if she would like to join in.

Leaning back, she rests her head on the too-low couch back and coolly scans the room. “See that woman over there with the lucky red shoes,” she asks her drinking partner, pointing to the other side of the large room. “That’s my daughter’s second grade teacher.”

Just six minutes and a few easy trivia questions pass before her mild observation becomes grinning participation. She suppresses the urge to yell out the answer to “what colour is a sapphire?”, but is unable to stop her wriggling her shoulders while singing along to a six-song Elvis medley.

Elvis posters lined her pre-teen bedroom walls. Her eyes grow distant as her mind travels through her childhood memories. “I had trouble working out all the words to ABBA songs,” she tells her 80s-child drinking partner. “So I would make up my own ABBA words.”

Her easy smile darkly fades as her stories travel back to childhood family dinners, where her truck-driving father would ban lively dinner-time conversation in preference to watching the evening news on the television deliberately positioned behind the three kids’ heads.

The disappointment over the absence of a healthy father-daughter relationship is still a consistent glitch in her current life happily full from a marriage to her girlhood crush, her own three kids and an eclectic work-life full of art, music and photography. She just could not find a way to connect with this man who felt so little for life, love and the world around him when she felt so damn much.

The cheesy disco-thump of ELO’s ‘Sweet Talking Woman’ pulls Kerryn back into the present. She stretches out her long former-runner’s legs and uses all ten fingers to drum the beat of the song on her flat stomach. “I was searching (searching!) on a one-way street,” she sings. “How is it I know the words to this song?!”

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