Here One Moment

Monte Carlo biscuits are a real Australian cookie, with biscuit layers enclosing a creamy vanilla and raspberry filling. Cherry’s favorite biscuit, they represent logic and free will. When Cherry relates how her father died in a lightning strike, she compares the unlikely event to the “Monte Carlo fallacy” (193). This is the false belief that the probability of future events changes based on past events.

Cherry finds the fact of “statistical independence” so comforting that she always thinks of it when she eats her favorite cookie. She is horrified to see her friend Bert bite into one instead of savoring it slowly. Bert replies, “I like to live dangerously, Cherry” (201)—a memory so discomforting that Cherry refuses to eat anything, even Monte Carlo biscuits, the night before her flight to Sydney. At this point in the story, her beloved logic has no power to cure her grief.

Cherry puts a plate of the biscuits out when she meets Paula to tell her that she has no ability to see the future and that it was pure chance that any of her predictions came true. She is essentially using logic to reassure Paula. Finally, she gives Monte Carlo biscuits to Bridie during her math tutoring sessions.