Penance

by Eliza Clark

Joan Wilson became a target for them. For things she had done, and for things the girls imagined she would do. They were playing pretend. And then they were not.

A few months after her death, I was suddenly so worried Frances’s perfume would get discontinued that I went to a shop and bought twenty bottles of the stuff. I started spraying it around my flat onto the soft furnishings – but I did it so much I couldn’t really smell the perfume anymore. When I realised, I had a complete meltdown and tried to donate all my furniture to the British Heart Foundation in the hope I could replace it all and get the smell back.

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.

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. And yes, arguably, the bad thing had happened to her. But much worse things happen to people every day. Statistically, she was really nothing special.