It was a shame that Janie’s life was going to end in just over eight hours because she wasn’t her nicest self. She had been an adorable baby, a winsome little girl, a shy, sweet young teen, but around the time of her seventeenth birthday last May, she’d changed. She was dimly aware of her mild awfulness. It wasn’t her fault. She was terrified of everything (university, driving a car, ringing up to make a hairdresser’s appointment), and her hormones were making her crazy, and so many boys were starting to act kind of angrily interested in her, as if maybe she was pretty, which was nice but confusing because when she looked in the mirror all she could see was her ordinary, loathsome face and her weird long skinny body. She looked like a praying mantis. One of the girls at school had told her that, and it was true. Her limbs were too long. Her arms, especially. She was all out of proportion.
Also, her mother had something odd going on at the moment, which meant she wasn’t concentrating on Janie and up until recently she’d always concentrated on her with such irritating fierceness. (Her mother was forty! What could possibly be going on in her life that was so interesting?) It was unsettling to have that bright spotlight of attention vanish without warning. Hurtful, really, although she wouldn’t have admitted that, or even been aware that she was hurt.
If Janie had lived, her mother would have returned to her normal, fiercely concentrating self, and Janie would have become lovely again around the time of her nineteenth birthday, and they would have been as close as a mother and daughter can be, and Janie would have buried her mother, instead of the other way around.
If Janie had lived, she would have dabbled in soft drugs and rough boys, water aerobics and gardening, Botox and tantric sex. During the course of her lifetime, she would have had three minor car crashes, thirty-four bad colds and two major surgeries. She would have been a moderately successful graphic designer, a nervy scuba diver, a whiny camper, an enthusiastic bushwalker and an earlier adopter of the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. She would have divorced her first husband and had IVF twins with her second, and the words ‘test-tube babies’ would have flitted like an old joke across her mind while she posted their photos on Facebook for her Canadian cousins to like. She would have changed her name to Jane when she was twenty and back to Janie when she was thirty.
If Janie Crowley had lived, she would have travelled and dieted, danced and cooked, laughed and cried, watched a lot of television and tried her very best.
But none of that was going to happen, because it was the morning of the last day of her life, and although she would have enjoyed watching the mascara-streaked faces of her friends as they made a spectacle of themselves, clutching each other and sobbing at her gravesite in an orgy of grief, she really would have preferred to have found out all the things that were waiting to happen to her.
tuesday
chapter six
Cecilia spent most of Sister Ursula’s funeral thinking about sex.
Not kinky sex. Nice, married, approved-by-the-Pope sex. But still. Sister Ursula probably wouldn’t have appreciated it.
‘Sister Ursula was devoted to the children of St Angela’s.’ Father Joe gripped both sides of the lectern, gazing solemnly at the tiny group of mourners (although, truthfully now, was anyone in this entire church really mourning Sister Ursula?) and for a moment his eyes seemed to meet Cecilia’s as if for approval. Cecilia bobbed her head and smiled slightly to show him that he was doing a good job.
Father Joe was only thirty and not an unattractive man. What made a man in this day and age choose the priesthood? Choose celibacy?
So back to sex. Sorry, Sister Ursula.
She first remembered noticing that there was a problem with their sex life last Christmas. She and John-Paul didn’t seem to be going to bed at the same time. Either he’d be up late, working or surfing the net, and she’d be asleep before he came to bed, or else he’d suddenly announce he was exhausted and go to bed at nine o’clock. The weeks slipped on by, and every now and then she’d think, ‘Gosh, it’s been a while’, and then forget about it.
Then there was that night back in February when she’d gone out to dinner with some of the Year 4 mums and she’d drunk more than usual because Penny Maroni was driving. Cecilia had felt amorous when she’d got into bed, but John-Paul had brushed her hand away and mumbled, ‘Too tired. Leave me alone, you drunken woman.’ She’d laughed and fallen asleep, not at all offended. The next time he initiated sex she was going to make a jokey remark, like, ‘Oh, so now you want it.’ But she never got the opportunity. That’s when she started to register the days ticking on by. What was going on?
She thought it had probably been about six months now, and the more time that passed, the more confused she got. Yet whenever the words started to form in her mouth, ‘Hey, what’s going on, honey?’, something stopped her. Sex had never been an issue of contention between them, the way she knew it was between many couples. She didn’t use it as a weapon or a bargaining tool. It was something unspoken and natural and beautiful. She didn’t want to ruin that.
Maybe she just didn’t want to hear his answer.
Or, worse, his lack of an answer. Last year John-Paul had taken up rowing. He’d loved it, and come home each Sunday raving about how much he enjoyed it. But then he’d unexpectedly, inexplicably quit the team. ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ he’d said when she’d kept asking, desperate for a reason. ‘Give it a rest.’
John-Paul could be so odd at times.
She hurried over the thought. Besides, she was pretty sure all men were odd at times.
Also, six months wasn’t actually that long, was it? Not for a married middle-aged couple. Penny Maroni said they did it once a year if they were lucky.
Recently, though, Cecilia had felt like a teenage boy, thinking constantly about sex. Mildly pornographic images flickered across her mind as she stood at the check-out. She chatted in the playground with the other parents about the upcoming excursion to Canberra while simultaneously remembering a hotel in Canberra where John-Paul had tied her wrists together with the blue plastic band the physio had given her for her ankle exercises.
They’d left the blue band in the hotel room.
Cecilia’s ankle still clicked when she turned it a certain way.
How did Father Joe cope? She was a forty-two-year-old woman, an exhausted mother of three daughters, with menopause right there on the horizon, and she was desperate for sex, so surely Father Joe Mackenzie, a fit young man who got plenty of sleep, found it difficult.
Did he masturbate? Were Catholic priests allowed, or was that considered not within the spirit of the whole celibacy thing?
Wait, wasn’t masturbation a sin for everyone? This was something her non-Catholic friends would expect her to know. They seemed to think she was a walking Bible.
Truth be told, if she ever had time to think about it, she wasn’t sure she was even that enthusiastic a fan of God any more. He seemed to have dropped the ball a long time ago. Appalling things happened to children, across the world, every single day. It was inexcusable.
Little Spiderman.
She closed her eyes, blinked the image away.
Cecilia didn’t care what the fine print said about free will and God’s mysterious ways and blahdy blah. If God had a supervisor, she would have sent off one of her famous letters of complaint a long time ago. You have lost me as a customer.
She looked at Father Joe’s humble smooth-skinned face. Once he’d told her that he found it ‘really interesting when people questioned their faith’. But she didn’t find her doubts all that relevant. She believed in Saint Angela’s with all her heart: the school, the parish, the community it represented. She believed that ‘Love one another’ was a lovely moral code by which to live her life. The sacraments were beautiful, timeless ceremonies. The Catholic Church was the team for which she’d always barracked. As for God, and whether he (or she!) was doing that great a job, well, that was another matter altogether.