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
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 innocence, and I knew the taint would remain for some time.
When Joss had finished her bath and was in her bedroom, I knocked on her door and went in.
‘What?’ she asked, already on the defensive. I guessed she knew what I wanted.
‘Paula is upset by what she found in her doll’s house,’ I said gently.
‘Not half as upset as I was!’ Joss snapped, referring, I assumed, to her father’s actual death.
‘I appreciate that, love. It must have been absolutely horrendous for you. I can’t imagine how you coped.’
‘I didn’t,’ she said, climbing into bed. ‘But shit happens. There’s nothing you or anyone can do about it. And before you ask me, no, I don’t want to talk about it.’ She picked up a magazine and pulled it open.
I waited. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘All right, I’ll leave you to it, then, but you know where I am if you need me.’
Joss gave a small nod and I said goodnight and came out of her room.
That night she had a nightmare. It was about her father. As I soothed her back to sleep, she whispered, ‘Daddy. Daddy gone. Dead.’ And a tear slipped from the corner of her eye. It was heartbreaking. I knew she had all that hurt buried deep inside her and it was trying to find a way out. Interestingly, the following morning she remembered some of her dream, which she didn’t usually.
‘I had a really bad dream last night,’ she told me.
‘Do you remember what it was about?’ I asked carefully, aware I needed to handle this sensitively.
‘It was about my daddy,’ she said quietly. ‘I think, the day he died.’
‘Do you remember anything else?’
‘Not sure. Were you there?’
‘I heard you call out and came into your room to make sure you were all right. I always check if I hear one of you call out in the night. You went back to sleep quite quickly.’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t really remember. It’s a blur.’
Joss didn’t offer any more and I left it at that, but my amateur psychology told me that Joss hanging the doll and then starting to remember her dreams could mean that the shocking memories of her father’s suicide were starting to work their way to the surface to be dealt with.
That afternoon Jill came for one of her scheduled four-weekly visits – to make sure I was fostering Joss to the required standard, to give support and advice as necessary and to sign off my log notes. I updated her on events since the last time we’d spoken on the phone, finishing with the incident of the doll and Joss’s most recent nightmare.
‘I’m