Penance

by Eliza Clark

Did you see pictures? Did you look for them?

Even a writer as well versed in this genre as I could never create a perfect photograph of my subject. I could create a beautiful, accurate sketch of Joni, but a sketch from a skilled artist is still a sketch.

Friends of the deceased are often left out of these narratives, as if we feel their grief must pale so much in comparison to that of the nuclear family unit, it is not worth mentioning. We like to ignore the shockwaves of a crime like this – we want the pain confined to a small space, lest it ripple out and touch us.

Dawn took her to a GP and was told that some babies simply did not like to be babies. And that was that. No rash, no toothache, no terrible but identifiable internal problem; just some vague existential dread. She did not like being a baby. She was so distressed by being a baby that she screamed with the horror of it. She hated being a baby so much she couldn’t sleep. Dawn told me that she felt cruel for bringing the child into the world; she resented the baby for resenting being alive so much.

They’d endured and inflicted some of the most extreme acts a human could commit – how could you not be fascinated?

Sometimes she wondered if she was a psychopath. She googled it all the time and tried to make the diagnosis fit. But she was too sad, and too fearful and too well behaved to qualify. She was another lightly depressed, middle-class-ish teen. A poster girl for the ‘Teen Mental Health Crisis Plaguing Our Youth’ – a girl among a million other somewhat sad girls, with no real problems beyond a vague existential angst.

Nothing was so delicate and precious as that which had already begun to fall to pieces.

but he’d probably try,’ Violet said. What kind of scary thing should they try to make? Should they create something powerful, or something weak? If Crow was a ‘thin’ place, a tiny hell, did they want to embrace the darkness, or attempt to combat it? Should they sink further down into the depths, or attempt to lift themselves out from underneath it?

‘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.’

Like everything Jayde did was going to be stupid and trivial and obvious until she was twenty-five.

For all the people who seemed to be sorry Frances was dead, talking about her on the ‘dashboard’, sending private ‘rest in peace’ messages to her blog, few reached out to her when she had posted cries for help in the dead of night.

These online friends of Frances, of Dolly, they had such intimate access to young women in such extreme states of mind – yet they lacked any real access to them.

Get off your high horse bitch youre literally reading school shooter fanfic.

The idea that McKnight and Dolly were in some way kindred spirits was sheer fantasy. The version of Matty in Dolly’s head was a lost soul and an abuse victim who had reclaimed his power through an act of extreme violence. The real Matthew McKnight was a violent, sexually sadistic neo-Nazi.

Teenagers can be extremely strange, especially as they experiment with the boundaries around societal norms.

Large, human dolls had no place in Dolly’s tiny little universe.

‘You’re a creep. And I want you to write that into your nasty little book.’

Each is the could-be hero of her own story.

they’d asked her (without her mum or anyone else there) what she’d get out of lying about a young man with his whole life ahead of him.

And now we’re back where we began, aren’t we? Back at the end of the story.

One of corrupted play – girls who were playing at being villains, playing at magic, playing at killing – and then they acted out in real life what they had merely played at.

And perhaps this was part of the issue for Carelli – his refusal to be shamed for the shameful. In a society which is increasingly constructed around the fear and avoidance of public humiliation – the recording and sharing and mocking of failures, mistakes and malicious behaviours – men like Carelli may be ill-suited to a public platform.