The Husband's Secret(76)
“Tell me,” he said.
TWENTY-TWO
WEDNESDAY
The alarm clock wrenched Cecilia cruelly, instantly awake at six thirty a.m. She was lying on her side, facing John-Paul, and their eyes opened simultaneously. They were so close, their noses were almost touching.
She looked at the delicate scribbles of red veins in the whites of John-Paul’s blue eyes, the pores on his nose, the gray stubble on his strong, firm, honest chin.
Who was this man?
Last night they had gone back to bed and lain together in the darkness, staring blindly at the ceiling, while John-Paul had talked. How he’d talked. There had been no need to probe for information. She didn’t ask a single question. He wanted to talk, to tell her everything. His voice had been low and fervent, without modulation, almost monotonous, except there was nothing monotonous about what he was telling her. The more he talked, the hoarser his voice got. It was like a nightmare, lying in the dark, listening to that raspy whisper of his going on and on and on. She’d had to bite her lip to stop herself from screaming, Shut up, shut up, shut up!
He’d been in love with Janie Crowley. Crazy in love. Obsessed, even. The way you think you’re in love when you’re a teenager. He met her one day at the Hornsby McDonald’s when they were both filling in applications for part-time work. Janie recognized him from when they’d been at primary school together, before he’d gone off to his exclusive boys’ school. They’d been in the same year at St. Angela’s, but in different classes. He didn’t actually remember Janie at all, although he sort of knew the Crowley name. Neither of them ended up working at McDonald’s. Janie got a job at the dry cleaner, and John-Paul got a job at the deli, but they had this amazing intense conversation about God knows what, and she gave him her phone number, and he rang her the next day.
He thought she was his girlfriend. He thought he was going to lose his virginity to her. It all had to be really secretive, because Janie’s dad was one of those crazy Catholic dads and he said she couldn’t even have a boyfriend until she was eighteen. Their relationship, such as it was, had to be completely secret. That only made it more exciting. It was like they were secret agents. If he rang her house and anyone but Janie answered, the rule was that he had to hang up. They never held hands in public. None of their friends knew. Janie insisted on this. They went to the movies once and held hands in the dark. They kissed on a train in an empty carriage. They’d sat in the rotunda at Wattle Valley Park and smoked cigarettes and talked about how they wanted to go to Europe before uni. And that was it, really. Except that he thought about her day and night. He wrote her poetry he was too embarrassed to give her.
He never wrote me poetry, thought Cecilia irrelevantly.
That night Janie asked him to meet her in Wattle Valley Park, where they’d met often before. It was always deserted, and there was the rotunda where they could sit and kiss. She said she had something to tell him. He thought she was going to tell him that she’d gone to the family planning center to get a prescription for the pill, they’d talked about that, but instead she said that she was sorry, but she was in love with another boy. John-Paul had been stunned. Bewildered. He didn’t know there was another boy in the running! He said, “But I thought you were my girlfriend!” And she’d laughed. She’d seemed so happy, John-Paul said, so happy that she wasn’t his girlfriend, and he was just crushed, and humiliated, and filled with this incredible rage. It was his pride more than anything. He felt like a fool, and for that, he wanted to kill her.
John-Paul seemed horribly desperate for Cecilia to know this. He said he didn’t want to justify it, or mitigate it, or pretend it was an accident—because for a few seconds, he absolutely felt the desire to kill.
He didn’t remember making the decision to put his hands around her neck. But he remembered the moment when he was suddenly aware of the slender, girlish neck between his hands and realized it wasn’t one of his brothers he had in a choke hold. He was hurting a girl. He remembered thinking, What the fuck am I doing? and dropping his hands so fast, he actually felt relieved because he was so sure he’d caught himself in time, that he hadn’t killed her. Except that she was limp in his arms, her eyes staring over his shoulder, and he thought, No, this can’t be possible. He thought it had only been a second, maybe two seconds, of crazy rage; definitely not long enough to kill her.