She got down on her knees next to her chest of drawers and pulled out an old photo album with a soft faded green vinyl cover.

She sat back up on the bed and slowly flipped the pages. Janie laughing. Janie dancing. Janie eating. Janie sulking. Janie with her friends.

Including him. That boy. His head turned away from the camera, looking at Janie as if she’d just said something smart and funny. What did she say? Every time she always wondered that. What did you just say, Janie?

Rachel pressed her fingertip to his grinning, freckled face and watched her mildly arthritic, age-spotted hand curl into a fist.

6 April 1984

The first thing Janie Crowley did when she got out of bed that chilly April morning was jam the back of a chair beneath her door handle so neither of her parents could walk in on her. Then she got down on her knees next to her bed and heaved up the corner of her mattress to retrieve a pale blue box. She sat on the edge of her bed and removed a tiny yellow pill from its packet, holding it up on her fingertip, considering it and all that it symbolised, before placing it on the centre of her tongue as reverently as a communion wafer. Then she rehid the box under her mattress and jumped back into her warm bed, pulled the covers up and turned on her clock radio, to the tinny sound of Madonna singing ‘Like a Virgin’.

The tiny pill tasted chemical, sweet and deliciously sinful.

‘Think of your virginity as a gift. Don’t just hand it over to any old fellow,’ her mother had said to her in one of those conversations where she was trying to pretend to be cool, as if any form of premarital sex would be okay, as if her father wouldn’t fall to his knees and pray a thousand novenas at the thought of someone touching his pristine little girl.

Janie had no intention of handing it over to just anyone. There had been an application process, and today she would be informing the successful candidate.

The news came on, and most of it was boring, sliding right off her consciousness, nothing to do with her; the only part that was interesting was that Canada’s first test-tube baby had been born. Australia already had a test-tube baby! So we win, Canada! Ha, ha. (She had older Canadian cousins who made her feel inferior with their sophisticated niceness and their not-quite-American accents.) She sat up in bed, grabbed her school diary and drew a long thin baby squashed into a test tube, its little hands pressed up against the glass, its mouth gaping. Let me out, let me out! It would make the girls at school laugh. She snapped the diary shut. The idea of a test-tube baby was somehow repellent. It reminded her of the day her science teacher started talking about a woman’s ‘eggs’. Dis-gus-ting! And the worst part? Their science teacher was a man. A man talking about a woman’s eggs. That was just so inappropriate. Janie and her friends were furious. Also, he probably wanted to look down all their shirts. They’d never actually caught him in the act, but they sensed his repulsive desire.

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?