The Husband’s Secret

all, although he sort of knew the Crowley name. Neither of them ended up working at the McDonald’s. Janie got a job at the dry-cleaners and John-Paul got a job at the milk bar, 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 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 familyplanning centre and got 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 was stunned. Bewildered. He didn’t know there was another boy in the running! He said, ‘But I thought you were my girlfriend!’ And she laughed. She 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 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 suddenly became aware of the slender girlish neck between his hands and realised it wasn’t one of his brothers he had in a chokehold. He was hurting a girl . He remembered thinking, What the fuck am I doing ? and he dropped his hands so fast, and 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 couldn’t be possible. He thought it had only been a second, maybe two seconds of crazy rage; definitely not long enough to kill her.
    He couldn’t believe it. Even now. After all these years. He was still shocked and horrified by what he’d done.
    She was still warm, but he knew, without a shadow of doubt, that she was dead.
    Although later he wondered if he could have been wrong. Why hadn’t he even tried to revive her? He must have asked himself that question a million times. But at the time he had felt so sure. She was gone. She felt gone.
    So he laid her carefully at the bottom of the slide, and he remembered thinking that the night was getting cold, so he put her school blazer over the top of her, and he had his mum’s rosary beads in his pocket, because he’d done an exam that day and he always took them for luck. So he placed them carefully in Janie’s hands. It was his way of saying sorry, to Janie and to God. And then he ran. He ran and ran until he couldn’t breathe.
    He thought for sure he would be caught. He kept waiting for the heavy weight of a policeman’s hand to drop on his shoulder.
    But he was never even questioned. He and Janie weren’t at the same school, or in the same youth group. Neither their parents nor friends had known about them. It seemed that nobody had ever seen them together. It was like it had never happened.
    He said that if the police had ever questioned him he would have confessed immediately. He said that if someone else had been accused of the murder, he would have given himself up. He wouldn’t have let anyone