Penance

by Eliza Clark

Crow voted Leave – and that had nothing to do with the murder. There was nothing to be gained from reporting on this story. There were no grooming gangs or immigrants to blame, no vicious foreign teens. Just four white British girls, in an overwhelmingly white British seaside town in decline.

I didn’t have to spend the rest of my life locked in my bedroom, and I wouldn’t be forgetting about Joni or being disrespectful because my life wasn’t 100% focussed on missing her and thinking about her. And you know . . . people didn’t like that. They didn’t like it at all.’

It’s so horrible, what happened to her is so horrible, I reckon they think it’s the only appropriate reaction. Nobody understands how anything so awful could happen, so nobody knows how to act, or how I should act, or how I could possibly be coping. They all have their little fucking ideas about what I’m supposed to do, or who I’m supposed to be. So I can’t do anything right for anyone.

She was a roly-poly baby who grew into a stocky, broad-shouldered girl. She was never self-conscious of her size until the other girls made sure she was.

Because if one lives on Warren’s Place, one is ‘down the Warrens’, and if one is down the Warrens they are, by default, liable to have committed any variety of crimes.

After all, these alleged ‘victims’ coming forward were outsiders to the community – they’d gone from the care system to the prison system, or they’d spent their lives bouncing between psychiatric hospitals. It was not until more ‘respectable’ victims came forward that the tide turned.

Malleus Maleficarum – The Hammer of Witches – a treatise on witchcraft written in 1486. The book was used throughout history to persecute and prosecute suspected witches.

‘There’s a bit of you that’s always a teenager, isn’t there? It’s the most traumatic time of loads of people’s lives, and . . . even the most mentally healthy and put-together adults are still . . . there.’

Play is something which can be corrupted: ‘any contamination by ordinary life runs the risk of corrupting and destroying its very nature’. The boundaries between real life and play are blurred, and the purity of the act of play is corrupted by the mundanity of everyday life. It ceases to be