Jeanie - J. Morris (classic novels for teens .TXT) 📗

chilled her to the bone. She felt rejected by an indifferent world, a world that didn’t care. A world that would continue revolving even though her own private world had been knocked from its axis and was now hurtling uncontrollably through the cold, dark vacuum of nothingness.

 Jeanie tried to go to sleep. She was exhausted. She hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep since Justin had left. She lay there, tossing and turning until finally, in frustration, she climbed out of bed and put the kettle on to make coffee. She searched through her wardrobe and chose the pink skirt and button-up white top that Justin told her she looked so beautiful in. She sipped on her coffee as she tried to pull herself together emotionally, applying makeup to conceal her puffy eyes and the faintly emerging blemish on her cheek. She left her apartment and walked out onto the street.

 It was 8.30 PM on Friday night. The streets of London were bustling with people of all types. There were couples walking hand in hand. People headed home after working late at the office. Streams of people spilled onto the street from the Underground train station as she walked by. Jeanie walked slowly along the street toward Grosvenor Park, where she occasionally took Justin for a picnic she had packed. It was a beautiful evening. The night sky was clear, and in the softly-lit park away from the city lights she could see the stars. As she looked to the heavens a shooting star appeared in her peripheral vision, but burnt out just as her eyes turned to it. Jeanie thought how the moon and stars are always associated with love. The thought occurred to her that the love between her and Justin was like that shooting star. A bright flash in the night sky that is suddenly extinguished without warning and disintegrates into oblivion as though it had never existed.

She walked down the wide central path and sat on an empty seat where she could watch the passers-by. She watched dreamily and longingly at the young couples strolling through the park, laughing and sharing those little intimate moments that only lovers appreciate, just as she and Justin used to. How well she knew the power of hand touching hand. The connection of two souls from one lover to another through joined hands and interlocking fingers. Jeanie could still feel her hand in Justin’s, the exchange of love passing from heart to heart like subtle electric pulses through a conductor.

She watched the couples as they were lost in their pointless and meaningless conversations that bind together the hearts and souls of a man and woman; small, seemingly insignificant moments in time that they will still recall vividly in 20 or 30 years if they cast their minds back; spontaneous flashes of intimacy that last a lifetime and beyond.

Jeanie sat for 20 minutes or so, then rose and strolled toward the river. She walked along the boardwalk watching the boats rocking, and listening to the lapping of the water against the boardwalk’s pylons. She had often taken walks along the river with Justin but the experience was different now. In her newfound loneliness the sounds of the water seemed to agitate her, as though the river was teasing her, reminding her of what she had lost. She headed back onto the main street and continued on, planning on returning to her apartment via a 3 kilometre circuit that would take her past familiar haunts that she had often visited with Justin. Pizza places with customers milling around outside waiting for their order. Restaurants, fish and chip shops, couples and groups waiting at bus stops.

Something suddenly caught her eye. Up ahead, almost obscured between two other parked cars was Justin’s red sports car, opposite the nightclub where she and Justin first met. She walked on to the club and looked through the front entrance. The club was busy that night and she couldn’t see Justin anywhere. She walked inside and weaved her way through the crowd looking left and right for Justin. She spotted him at a table in the corner. He was sitting alongside a woman aged in her early twenties. Blonde and attractive, she wore a low-cut dress that showed off her ample assets and elegant neck and shoulders. Jeanie remembered the table as the same one they sat at the first time they met. She looked around the room. There were no empty tables so she stood by the wall where she could watch Justin and his female companion; obviously Jeanie’s replacement in Justin’s life and bed.

Justin and the woman seemed lost in their own world as if no one else in the room existed. Jeanie watched as Justin related some amazingly interesting story and the young blonde looked at him adoringly, her eyes wandering over his face and studying his lips as he spoke. She wondered if they were the same stories he had told her the night they met. Jeanie knew that feeling of being swept up in Justin’s world, hanging off his every word, falling in love. She herself had sat at that very table seven months before. Jeanie had been waiting at the bar for her work colleague Amy, when a young man sat down beside her.

“Drinking alone?” he had asked.

“No ..I’m…waiting for…” she couldn’t finish the sentence.  Jeanie looked into the eyes of the young man and that was the end of life as she knew it. He bought drinks and they moved to the table in the corner; the same table that Justin was now sharing with another woman. Justin’s and Jeanie’s table.

Amy had never met up with her that night. She told Jeanie the next day that she did arrive but when she saw Jeanie at the table with the young man she thought she should leave them alone and so she went home.

 

As Jeanie stood against the wall she had to constantly move her head to the left and right, to see through the crowd of people that kept walking through her line of vision. When the young woman gently put her hand on Justin’s and he leaned in to give her a short kiss on the cheek, her anger and jealousy began to rise. Justin whispered something in her ear, which made the woman giggle. Jeanie’s normally placid nature had given way to seething jealousy and an overwhelming feeling of helplessness. It was a feeling totally foreign to her.

What had begun as an evening stroll to relax her and clear her head had now become something much more, something sinister. A feeling of jealousy and rage had taken over her thought process. She felt she was going somewhere she didn’t want to go, that she had lost control and there was no way back. Jeanie was a spectator to her own actions, seemingly unable to prevent or control what was about to transpire. She felt disoriented and disassociated from her surroundings and her irrational actions.

It was a surreal feeling as Jeanie picked up an empty wine glass from a table and she walked toward them. She stood directly in front of Justin and his new woman, her sudden appearance interrupting their intimate conversation. The young woman’s eyes darted from Jeanie to Justin, silently asking if he knew this strange woman who was clearly nervous, but at the same time agitated and agressive. The normally meek and quietly spoken Jeanie smashed the glass on the edge of the table as Justin could only sit and stare in stunned silence and shock. To Jeanie it was as if someone else was in her place, someone other than herself had smashed the glass.

“What the Hell?!” shouted the woman and leaned back into her chair, out of Jeanie’s reach.

 Jeanie looked at the woman. “You’ll never love him like I do," she said. "You never could.” She began sobbing. Her pleading eyes turned to Justin. “What did I do, Justin? Please tell me what I did.”

Justin’s lips twitched but he said nothing. No words would come to him.

The club bouncer had spotted the incident from the front entrance and began running toward them, pushing through the crowd. He came up behind Jeanie and put his huge arm around her throat to subdue her while his other hand grabbed her wrist to prevent her from attacking with the broken glass.

“Drop it!” he shouted. Jeanie complied and the glass fell safely to the carpeted floor.

“I’m so sorry,” she said to the bouncer. “I didn't...I wasn't... Oh God, I’m so sorry.”

A hush fell over the room as the patrons turned to watch the excitement unfolding. To some it was their night’s entertainment. Some heckled and whistled at the distraught and embarrassed woman who had become the centre of attention to the club full of people.

“Let’s go,” he said and forcefully turned her around, marching her to the front door with her arm twisted behind her back, forcing her to walk on her tiptoes.

"Please," she winced, "you're hurting me."

“Crazy bitch,” said Justin’s female companion. “Who is she anyway?”

“Some woman I used to date.”

“You used to date her? Isn’t she a bit old for you?”

Their voices faded into the rising murmur that was spreading around the room, the bar returning to normal after the little fracas the patrons had just witnessed.

‘Some woman?’ thought Jeanie. Was that all she was to him? She loved him more than life itself, but to Justin she was just ‘some woman.’

 The world was spinning as the bouncer unceremoniously threw her out onto the footpath and she fell to the concrete, grazing her knee.

“Come back here again and I’ll call the cops,” he said. He then resumed his position at the entrance, folding his arms and keeping a close eye on Jeanie.

Pedestrians made a wide berth around her as she pushed herself to a kneeling position. She sat back on her heels and began crying. “What did I do, Justin?” she sobbed quietly to herself.

‘Disgusting,” said a woman around Jeanie’s age to her male companion as they walked past. “Does she have no dignity?” but Jeanie was oblivious to the people around her.

She rose to her feet and brushed the dirt from her clothes. She took the shortest route home, which was back the way she came. Vaguely aware of her surroundings, she took no notice of people she passed, young men and women laughing and talking exuberantly on their way to some venue somewhere. She no longer looked longingly at couples, young and old as they walked hand in hand, arm in arm. She walked in a dull confusion, arriving home with no memory of the journey and only a vague recollection of the events at the club, like dissipating remnants of a dream after waking. She entered her small apartment and went to the kitchen drawer. She rummaged through the drawer until she found what she was looking for; the carving knife with the sharpest blade.

 Jeanie sat on the edge of her bed, surrounded by the prison of not just her silent, lonely apartment, but by the inescapable walls of her despair. She played with the knife, feeling the sharpness of the point and lightly running her thumb over the slightly serrated but razor-like edge of the blade, wincing when a drop of blood appeared. Her heart broken, her mind confused by lack of sleep, she leaned back against the bedhead. Tears trickled down her cheeks. She asked herself how, in seven short months, she had arrived at this point where there seemed only one way to escape; only one way to finally find peace.  A way to sleep once again; a sleep that she knew would ultimately be eternal.

Jeanie put the blade to her lower arm, lengthways along the artery. She had heard that it was the most successful method. She pressed the blade to her skin and blood appeared, accompanied by the stinging sensation of the slight nick in her skin. She couldn’t continue. Jeanie was a coward when it came to pain. What made it worse in her