The Husband's Secret

John-Paul could be so odd at times.

She hurried over the thought. Besides, she was pretty sure all men were odd at times.

Also, six months wasn’t actually that long, was it? Not for a married middle-aged couple. Penny Maroni said they did it once a year if they were lucky.

Recently, though, Cecilia had felt like a teenage boy, thinking constantly about sex. Mildly  p**n ographic images flickered across her mind as she stood at the check-out. She chatted in the playground with the other parents about the upcoming excursion to Canberra while simultaneously remembering a hotel in Canberra where John-Paul had tied her wrists together with the blue plastic band the physio had given her for her ankle exercises.

They’d left the blue band in the hotel room.

Cecilia’s ankle still clicked when she turned it a certain way.

How did Father Joe cope? She was a forty-two-year-old woman, an exhausted mother of three daughters, with menopause right there on the horizon, and she was desperate for sex, so surely Father Joe Mackenzie, a fit young man who got plenty of sleep, found it difficult.

Did he masturbate? Were Catholic priests allowed, or was that considered not within the spirit of the whole celibacy thing?

Wait, wasn’t mast***ation a sin for everyone? This was something her non-Catholic friends would expect her to know. They seemed to think she was a walking Bible.

Truth be told, if she ever had time to think about it, she wasn’t sure she was even that enthusiastic a fan of God any more. He seemed to have dropped the ball a long time ago. Appalling things happened to children, across the world, every single day. It was inexcusable.

Little Spiderman.

She closed her eyes, blinked the image away.

Cecilia didn’t care what the fine print said about free will and God’s mysterious ways and blahdy blah. If God had a supervisor, she would have sent off one of her famous letters of complaint a long time ago. You have lost me as a customer.

She looked at Father Joe’s humble smooth-skinned face. Once he’d told her that he found it ‘really interesting when people questioned their faith’. But she didn’t find her doubts all that relevant. She believed in Saint Angela’s with all her heart: the school, the parish, the community it represented. She believed that ‘Love one another’ was a lovely moral code by which to live her life. The sacraments were beautiful, timeless ceremonies. The Catholic Church was the team for which she’d always barracked. As for God, and whether he (or she!) was doing that great a job, well, that was another matter altogether.

And yet everyone thought she was the ultimate Catholic.

She thought of Bridget, saying at dinner the other night, ‘How did you get to be so Catholic?’ when Cecilia mentioned something perfectly ordinary about Polly’s First Confession next year (or Reconciliation as they called it these days), as if her sister hadn’t been quite the little liturgical dance queen when they were at school.

Cecilia would have given her sister a kidney without hesitation, but sometimes she really wanted to straddle her and hold a pillow over her face. It had been an effective way of keeping her in line when they were kids. It was unfortunate the way adults had to repress their true feelings.

Of course, Bridget would give Cecilia a kidney too. She’d just groan a lot more during the recovery process, and mention it at every opportunity, and make sure Cecilia covered all her expenses.

Father Joe had wrapped things up. The scattered group of people in the church got to their feet for the final hymn with a gentle murmur of suppressed sighs, subdued coughs and the cracking of middle-aged knees. Cecilia caught Melissa McNulty’s eye across the aisle; Melissa raised her eyebrows to indicate, Aren’t we good people for coming to Sister Ursula’s funeral when she was so awful and we’re so busy?

Cecilia gave her a rueful half-shrug that said, But isn’t that always the way?!

She had a Tupperware order in the car to give to Melissa after the funeral, and she must remember to confirm with her that she would be taking care of Polly at ballet this afternoon, because she had Esther’s speech therapy and Isabel’s haircut. Speaking of which, Melissa really needed to get her colour redone. Her black roots looked dreadful. It was uncharitable of Cecilia to notice, but she couldn’t help but remember being on canteen with Melissa last month and hearing her complain about how her husband wanted sex every second day, like clockwork.

As Cecilia sang along to ‘How Great Thou Art’, she thought about Bridget’s teasing remark at dinner and knew why it had bothered her.

It was because of the sex. Because if she wasn’t having sex she wasn’t anything else except an uncool, middle-aged, frumpy mum. And, by the way, she was not frumpy. Just yesterday, a truck driver had given her a long slow wolf-whistle when she was running against the lights to buy coriander.

The whistle had definitely been for her. She’d checked to make sure there hadn’t been any other younger, more attractive women in sight. The previous week she’d had the disconcerting experience of hearing someone whistle when she was walking with the girls through the shopping centre, and she’d turned to see Isabel looking resolutely ahead, her cheeks flushed pink. Isabel had suddenly shot up, she was already as tall as Cecilia, and she was starting to curve, in at the waist, out at the hips and bust. Lately she’d been wearing her hair up in a high ponytail with a heavy straight fringe hanging too low over her eyes. She was growing up, and it wasn’t only her mother who was noticing.

It’s starting, Cecilia had thought sadly. She wished she could give Isabel a shield, like the ones riot police held, to protect her from male attention: that feeling of being scored each time you walked down a street, the demeaning comments yelled out of cars, that casual sweep of the eyes. She’d wanted to sit down and talk to Isabel about it, but then she hadn’t known what to say. She’d never quite got her head around it herself. It’s no big deal. It is a big deal. They have no right to make you feel that way. Or, just ignore it, one day you’ll turn forty and you’ll slowly realise you don’t feel the eyes any more, and the freedom is a relief, but you’ll also sort of miss it, and when a truck driver whistles at you while you’re crossing the road, you’ll think, Really? For me?