1966, Sydney
If Janet had written a diary we would know more of what she’d felt about the weeks following her first dinner date with Inspector Colin Connolly. But Janet was coy about writing things down.
There’d been a diary once. A present from her Pop George for Christmas just before she turned twelve. Ruby red leather with a pink satin ribbon to slide between the pages (or across her lips when she was struggling for a word). The paper was butter thick, and there was a whole page to fill up for each day of the year. But any girl with two younger brothers knows the dangers of journal writing.
One drab Saturday afternoon in late April, Philip had found the diary in a shoe box under Janet’s bed. Roaring in triumph, he’d run out into the garden where Edward was playing with several other boys from their street. The diary was seized with glee, tossed from one grubby pair of hands to the other, until Peter, the oldest at thirteen, had climbed onto the shed roof, stood with the diary held aloft, and read out several passages to what had quickly become a shrieking mocking mob.
Janet, who’d been helping her mother with the dishes when Philip had run past them with the diary, had thrown her tea towel at the fridge, and screamed at her mother to get it back. Bernadette, for reasons that she didn’t explain to her daughter, had carried on with the dishes. Janet, with no one else to turn to for help, fled the kitchen, slammed the door, and threw herself face down onto her bed, sobbing. Her father had retrieved the diary that evening, attempted to wipe it clean, and had taken it into Janet, who was still fretting in her room. But it was too late. Janet’s secret adoration of Mr Bennett, her English teacher, was public, and Philip would continue to bait her about it for months.
So Janet didn’t write down her feelings about the Inspector, nor did she have anyone to share them with. She had yet to start her new job, she was wary of the neighbours, and the only people outside the family that came into the house were Edward’s friends.
We could, however, get a sense of her feelings from the small wooden box she kept in the locked drawer of her dressing table. Not a written diary this time, but information of a personal nature nonetheless. There were receipts for green eye shadow, tangerine lipstick, black kohl eye liner. There were swatches of parakeet-coloured fabrics from the haberdashery store down town. There were pictures torn from her father’s newspapers – Jean Shrimpton with her big hair and her sweltry lips and her fervid eyes. And, neatly folded under all of these, the well-thumbed Cosmopolitan articles: The Pill of Liberation. Sex Without Guilt. Six Positions With YOU In Control.
Nothing was found in the wooden box on how to cover up a murder.
To be continued.
SANDERLINGS 