chapter forty-two
‘This is sort of the ultimate second date,’ said Tess.
She and Connor were sitting on a low brick wall overlooking Dee Why Beach, drinking hot chocolate in takeaway cups. The bike was parked behind them, the chrome gleaming in the moonlight. The night was cold but Tess was warm in the big leather jacket Connor had lent her. It smelled of aftershave. ‘Yeah, it normally works like a charm,’ said Connor.
‘Except you already scored with me on the first date,’ said Tess. ‘So you know, you don’t need to waste all your seductive charms.’
She sounded odd, as if she was trying out someone else’s personality: one of those sassy, feisty girls. Actually, it was like she was trying to be Felicity and not doing a very good job of it. The magical, heightened sensations she’d felt on the bike seemed to have dissipated, and now she felt awkward. It was too much. The moonlight, the bike, the leather jacket and the hot chocolate. It was horribly romantic. She’d never been fond of classic romantic moments. They made her snicker.
Connor turned to look at her with a deadly serious expression. ‘So you’re saying the other night was a first date.’ He had grey, serious eyes. Unlike Will, Connor didn’t laugh a lot. It made his occasional deep chuckles all the more precious. See, quality, not quantity, Will.
‘Oh, well,’ said Tess. Did he think they were dating? ‘I don’t know. I mean –’
Connor put his hand on her arm. ‘I was joking. Relax. I told you. I’m just happy to spend time with you.’
Tess drank some of the hot chocolate and changed the subject. ‘What did you do this afternoon? After school?’
Connor squinted, as if considering his answer, and then shrugged. ‘I went for a run, had a coffee with Ben and his girlfriend, and ah, well, I saw my shrink. Thursday evening I see her. At six pm. There’s an Indian restaurant next door. I always have a curry afterwards. Therapy and an excellent lamb curry. I don’t know why I keep telling you about my therapy.’
‘Did you tell your therapist about me?’ said Tess.
‘Of course not.’ He smiled.
‘You did.’ She poked his leg gently with her finger.
‘All right, I did. Sorry. It was news. I like to make myself interesting for her.’
Tess put her cup of hot chocolate down on the wall next to her. ‘What did she say?’
He glanced at her. ‘You’ve obviously never been in therapy. They don’t say a word. They say things like, “And how did that make you feel?” and “Why do you think you did that?”’
‘I bet she didn’t approve of me,’ said Tess. She saw herself through the therapist’s eyes: an ex-girlfriend who broke his heart years ago suddenly reappears in his life when she’s right in the middle of a marriage crisis. Tess felt defensive. But I’m not leading him on. He’s a grown man. Anyway, maybe it will go somewhere. It’s true I never thought about him after we broke up, but maybe I could fall in love with him. In fact, maybe I am falling in love with him. I know he’s all messed up about his murdered first girlfriend. I’m not going to break his heart. I’m a good person.
Wasn’t she a good person? She felt a dim awareness of something almost shameful about the way she’d lived her life. Wasn’t there something closed off, even small-minded and mean, about the way she cut herself off from people, ducking down behind the convenient wall of her shyness, her ‘social anxiety’? When she sensed overtures of friendship she took too long to respond to phone calls and emails, and eventually people gave up, and Tess was always relieved. If she was a better mother, a more social mother, she would have helped Liam cultivate friendships with kids other than Marcus. But no, she’d just sat back with Felicity, giggling over their wine and sniping. She and Felicity didn’t tolerate the overly skinny, the overly sporty, the overly rich or overly intellectual. They laughed at people with personal trainers and small dogs, people who put overly intellectual or misspelled comments on Facebook, people who used the phrase, ‘I’m in a very good place right now’ and people who always got ‘involved’ – people like Cecilia Fitzpatrick.
Tess and Felicity sat on the sidelines of life smirking at the players.
If Tess had a wider social network, then perhaps Will wouldn’t have fallen in love with Felicity. Or at least he would have had a wider range of potential mistresses at his disposal.
When her life fell apart there wasn’t one friend Tess could call. Not one friend. That’s why she was behaving like this with Connor. She needed a friend.
‘I fit the pattern, don’t I?’ said Tess suddenly. ‘You keep choosing the wrong women. I’m another wrong woman.’
‘Mmmm,’ said Connor. ‘Also, you didn’t even bring the hot cross buns you promised.’
He tipped back his paper cup and drained the last of his hot chocolate. He put it down on the ledge next to him and shifted closer to her.
‘I’m using you,’ said Tess. ‘I’m a bad person.’
He put one warm hand on the back of her neck and pulled her close enough so she could smell the chocolate on his breath. He took the paper cup from her unresisting hand.
‘I’m using you to help me not think about my husband,’ she clarified. She wanted him to understand.
‘Tess. Honey. Do you think I don’t know that?’ Then he kissed her so deeply and so completely that she felt like she was falling, floating, spiralling down, down, down, like Alice in Wonderland.
6 April 1984
Janie didn’t know that boys could blush. Her brother Rob blushed, but obviously he didn’t count as a proper boy. She didn’t know that a smart, good-looking, private-school boy like John-Paul Fitzpatrick could blush. It was late in the afternoon, and the light was changing, making everything indistinct and shadowy, but still she could see that John-Paul’s face was glowing. Even his ears, she noticed, were a translucent pink.
She’d just said her little speech about how there was this ‘other guy’ she’d been seeing and he wanted her to be his ‘sort of, um, girlfriend’. So she really couldn’t see John-Paul any more, because the other guy wanted to ‘make things sort of official’.
She’d had this vague idea that it would be better to make it sound as if it were Connor’s fault, as if he was making her break up with John-Paul, but now, as John-Paul’s face reddened, she wondered if it had been a mistake to mention another boy at all. She could have blamed it on her father. She could have said that she was too nervous about him finding out that she was seeing a boy.
But part of her had wanted John-Paul to know that she was in demand.
‘But Janie,’ John-Paul’s voice sounded girly and squeaky, as if he was about to cry. ‘I thought you were my girlfriend.’
Janie was horrified. Her own face flushed in sympathy and she looked away towards the swings and heard herself giggle. A strange, high-pitched giggle. It was a bad habit she had, of laughing when she was nervous, when she didn’t find anything at all funny about a situation. It had happened, for example, when Janie was thirteen and the school principal had come into their homeroom with such a sombre, mournful expression on his normally jolly face and told them that their geography teacher’s husband had died. Janie had been so shocked and distressed, and then she’d laughed. It was inexplicable. The whole class had turned to look at her accusingly and she’d just about died of shame.
John-Paul lunged at her. Her first fleeting thought was that he was going to kiss her, and this was his odd yet masterful technique, and she was pleased and excited. He wasn’t going to let her break up with him. He wasn’t going to stand for it!
But then his hands grabbed her neck. She tried to say, ‘That’s hurting, John-Paul,’ but she couldn’t speak, and she wanted to clear up this dreadful misunderstanding, to explain that she actually liked him more than Connor, and she’d never meant to hurt his feelings, and she wanted to be his girlfriend, and she tried to convey that with her eyes, which were staring straight into his, his beautiful eyes, and she thought for a second that she saw a shift, a shocked recognition and she felt a loosening of hands, but there was something else happening; something very wrong and unfamiliar was happening to her body, and in that instant a far-off part of her mind remembered that her mother had been going to pick her up from school today to take her to a doctor’s appointment, and she’d forgotten all about it and gone to Connor’s house instead. Her mother would be ropable.
Her last properly articulated thought was: Oh, shit.
After that there were no more thoughts, just helpless, flailing panic.