Girl Alone: Part 2 of 3: Joss came home from school to discover her father’s suicide. Angry and hurting, she’s out of control.. Cathy Glass

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СКАЧАТЬ if you stop your unsafe behaviour,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to help you do that.’ I pushed open the front garden gate and Joss followed me through. I paused on the doorstep and looked at her. ‘I know you’ve suffered, love, but don’t keep punishing yourself. You can start afresh and have a great life.’

      ‘What’s the point?’ she said. ‘We all end up dead anyway.’

      ‘Oh, Joss.’ I touched her arm reassuringly. ‘Let’s go indoors and have a talk. You shouldn’t be feeling like this.’

      I unlocked the front door and we went in. I thought Joss might want to talk now and open up a little, but once inside she said, ‘Are Lucy and Paula in?’

      ‘Yes, they’re in the front room on the computer.’

      ‘You can come and join us if you like,’ Lucy called, having heard.

      ‘Yeah, OK.’ Joss disappeared into the front room, all animosity gone.

      She spent most of the evening with Paula and Lucy, so it wasn’t until bedtime that I had a chance to talk to her again. Although Joss never wanted a hug or a kiss goodnight, I always looked in on her to make sure she was all right. She was propped up in bed, flipping through a magazine. She loved her girly magazines and seemed to be spending most of her pocket money on them.

      ‘You had a pleasant evening in the end,’ I said, standing near her bed.

      ‘It wasn’t bad,’ she returned, concentrating on the magazine.

      ‘You know what you said about friends?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Well, Paula and Lucy are your friends.’

      ‘Yeah, good,’ she said without looking up.

      ‘Can we talk?’ I asked.

      ‘What about?’ She turned a page.

      ‘Anything you like. I was worried by your comment earlier about not seeing any point in life. It sounded as though you might be depressed.’

      She glanced up briefly. ‘Nah. I’m OK.’

      ‘Are you sure?’

      ‘Yeah.’

      I hesitated. ‘You would tell me if you were feeling very low, wouldn’t you?’

      ‘Yeah, I guess.’

      I hesitated. What else could I say? She didn’t want to talk to me. I couldn’t force her. ‘Well, goodnight then, love. You know where I am if you want me.’

      ‘Yeah.’

      ‘See you in the morning.’

      ‘Yeah.’

      I came out and closed her bedroom door, but I was worried. Being a teenager can be difficult enough with all the confusing emotions and decisions that have to be made, without the baggage Joss carried. However, I couldn’t make her talk or seek counselling if she didn’t want to. She knew it was on offer, so, frustratingly, all I could do was be on hand, ready for if and when she needed me.

      The following day was Wednesday, and the contract of behaviour, which we still hadn’t received a copy of or signed, and which Amelia said may now need updating, stipulated that Joss had to stay in on Wednesdays. Joss accepted this without argument and appeared a little relieved that the decision had been made for her. She did an hour’s homework and then after dinner she spent some time in Paula’s room playing with her doll’s house, while Paula sat on her bed reading Joss’s magazines. Wonderful, domestic harmony, I thought, and hoped we’d enjoy more evenings like this. Teenagers often appear grown up and in control of their lives, but inside they are children trying to find a way into adult life. It’s a bit like buying a new outfit: you try on different clothes until eventually you find something that suits you and feels comfortable. So teenagers try different personas until they find the one that fits them best, but during the process they need a lot of direction. It’s not cramping their style; it’s helping them choose a good outcome.

      Unfortunately, the glimpse of domestic harmony I’d seen earlier, when Joss had been playing with Paula’s doll’s house, hid a more sinister picture, one that served as a harrowing reminder of just how disturbed Joss really was.

      It was nearly nine o’clock. Joss was in the bath and I was downstairs talking to Lucy, who’d just returned from a friend’s house where she’d been working on an end-of-year presentation for school, which they could do in pairs. Paula was in her bedroom getting ready for bed when suddenly I heard her footsteps running down the stairs.

      ‘Mum, come quickly!’ she cried, arriving in the living room, her face pale from shock. ‘Come and see what Joss has done. It’s horrible.’

      ‘Whatever is it?’ I asked, immediately on my feet.

      ‘You need to see. Come.’

      Lucy and I ran down the hall behind Paula and upstairs to her room.

      ‘Go and look,’ Paula said, standing just inside the door and pointing to her doll’s house.

      Lucy was there before me. ‘Oh, my God!’ she gasped. ‘That’s horrible.’

      I joined her at the front of the doll’s house and my heart lurched. Like many doll’s houses, the front of this one opened to show all the rooms with their furniture and doll people inside. The garage was at the bottom to the right, and the daddy doll, which Paula had previously told me Joss never played with, was now hanging by its neck with a piece of string from the roof of the garage. Its head had been bent grotesquely to one side in a parody of a broken neck, and the corpse dangled beside the car as though it had jumped off the bonnet. This was obviously a grizzly reproduction of what Joss had seen when her father had committed suicide in the garage, and it was truly disturbing.

      ‘Why would Joss do that with the doll?’ Lucy asked, still staring at the corpse.

      My family knew that Joss’s father had died in distressing circumstances, but they didn’t know the details.

      ‘Joss’s father committed suicide,’ I said.

      ‘By hanging himself in the garage?’ Lucy asked, clamping her hand over her mouth in horror.

      ‘Yes,’ I said.

      I reached in and unpinned the doll from the ceiling and then untied the string from its neck. Paula was still by the door, watching from a distance, and I returned the daddy doll to the miniature sofa in the living room. ‘That’s better,’ I said, hiding my shock and trying to restore normality.

      ‘I’m not letting Joss play with the doll’s house again,’ Paula said, clearly upset.

      ‘No, I wouldn’t,’ Lucy agreed.

      ‘I’ll talk to Joss when she’s finished in the bath,’ I said, closing the front of the house. ‘But you know, girls, perhaps this is a positive sign that Joss is getting ready to talk about what happened, which would be a very good thing.’ Although I wished she hadn’t used Paula’s doll’s house to express it. The atrocity had sullied its childlike СКАЧАТЬ