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.

good friday

chapter forty-three

‘Juice!’ demanded Jacob.

‘What do you want, sweetie?’ whispered Lauren.

Juice, thought Rachel. He wants a juice. Are you deaf?

It was only just light, and Rachel, Rob and Lauren were standing in a shivery little circle at Wattle Valley Park, rubbing their hands together and stamping their feet, while Jacob slithered in and out between their legs. He was rugged up in a parka that Rachel suspected was too small for him, his arms sticking straight out like a snowman.

As expected, Lauren was wearing her trench coat, although her ponytail didn’t look quite as perfect as normal – there were a few strands escaping from her hairband – and she looked tired. She was carrying a single red rose, which Rachel thought was a silly choice. It was like those roses in long plastic cylinders that young men gave to their girlfriends on Valentine’s Day.

Rachel herself was carrying a small posy of sweet peas she’d picked from her own backyard, tied up with a piece of green velvet ribbon like Janie used to wear when she was very little.

‘Do you leave the flowers where she was found? At the bottom of the slide?’ Marla had once asked.

‘Yes, Marla, I leave them there to be trampled by hundreds of little feet,’ Rachel had said.

‘Oh, yes, good point,’ Marla had said, not at all offended.

It wasn’t even the same slide. All the clunky old metal equipment had been replaced by fancy space-age-looking stuff, just like the park near Rachel’s house where she took Jacob, and the ground had a rubbery surface that gave an astronaut-like bounce to your step.

‘Juice!’ said Jacob again.

‘I don’t understand, sweetie.’ Lauren flipped her ponytail back over one shoulder. ‘You want me to loosen your jacket?’

For heaven’s sake. Rachel sighed. It wasn’t like she ever really felt Janie’s presence when she came here. She couldn’t imagine her here, couldn’t conceive how she had come to be here. None of Janie’s friends had ever known her to come to this particular park. It was a boy, obviously, who had brought her here. A boy called Connor Whitby. He probably wanted sex and Janie said no. She should have had sex with him. That was Rachel’s fault, for going on about it so much, as if losing her virginity was this momentous event. Dying was far more momentous. She should have said to her, ‘Have sex with whoever you want, Janie. Just stay safe.’