Diary Entry of Caitlin from Denial by David Belbin

2004

Dear Diary,

I don’t have a boyfriend. I don’t have a ‘best’ friend. I don’t have friends, really. My counsellor tries to get me to ‘express my emotions’ but I don’t want to. You can’t trust counsellors because it’s their job to care. They force out information and then analyse it and make conclusions about you as if they’ve known you all your life. They don’t know how I tick. They don’t know how I’m feeling.

I don’t have a dad. I killed him.

He was drunk in my room, cornering me, trying to get what he wanted. I thought he’d changed. I really had. But he hadn’t changed. The ‘new’ Dad was standing before me, messing up his words, pressuring me to ‘play’ with him, just like the old Dad had.

He told me how guilty he used to feel about it and how he couldn’t bring it up in his AA meetings because it sounded all too terrible. How could it not sound terrible? He was messing around with a 12 year old girl, for goodness sake- one that was related to him. Three years later he was trying to start it up again. When I commanded him to leave, he just stepped back a few inches. His drunken eyes were bloodshot and stressed, eyeing me all over.

After more failed attempts of getting him to leave, I started punching him hard. He seemed shocked and confused and amazed all at once. He didn’t fight back and he didn’t move until I kicked him in the shins. And even then he wouldn’t let me past. The neighbours claimed I was screaming horrible things at him… but I don’t remember any of that.

I wanted to get out of the house and to escape from it all but he wouldn’t let me do that. No, he had to stand there like a brick wall. I didn’t have the strength to break through this brick wall. I wanted to freeze time and move him aside, run down the stairs behind him and leave. I yelled at him to let me go. I tried to push around him and he took another step back, this time one too many.

I watched him reach for the banister… and miss. He tumbled down to the last stair, hitting his neck on the banister rail. Crack.

I guess starting from the beginning of this all would make more sense… but to whom? A flat segment of tree we like to call ‘paper’? What’s the point of this anyway? Why am I listening to those know-it-all counsellors and writing this?

They’ll diagnose me with something more, something that everyone out there has, but for some reason it’ll become another one of my ‘problems’ I need to talk to someone about. That’s why.

I use to be Goth, you know. I use to sneak out for a smoke; for a drink. I use to have several piercings. But ever since I moved to Sheffield with my dad, I’ve chosen a simple look. Can you believe I was expelled? 

Dad was a teacher at my new school. I didn’t tell anybody because it’d cause unnecessary embarrassment for the both of us. Instead, I stayed on the down low and kept quite, talking to those who talked to me. Pretty soon I had made a ‘friend’; a girl who liked to chatter away about everything and anything who had claimed me as her own. A week later, she delivered the gossip of how a girl at our school had been sexually assaulted; raped, even, and how they thought my dad did it…

I met Aaron at the library. He was a cute boy, approachable and easy to talk to. At first I was put off by Natasha, his very pretty female friend who I thought was his girlfriend. Once I found out she wasn’t, Aaron and I became a couple.

Natasha annoyed me throughout the whole relationship because Aaron was very close to her. They told each other secrets. I even opened his online-diary because of my suspicion and I found out that I wasn’t his first; he had had sex with Natasha a while back… he lied to me. But what he did tell me was that Natasha came running to him one afternoon, crying, shaking and unable to speak properly because a teacher had done ‘things’ to her.

Long story short, Natasha and my dad were having a small affair and Natasha didn’t want to look bad so she reported it as sexual assault. I broke up with Aaron because I couldn’t trust him anymore and vice versa. Natasha figured out that I snooped through his pathetic diary when I asked Aaron if he was telling the truth about his sex life. She then told him, thus ending Aaron and I.

Mum had to sit with me during the police interviews regarding dad’s death.

In the end, I wasn’t prosecuted. The inquest verdict was accidental death.

At my new school (once again), the teachers offered to keep my past quiet but I was sick of keeping secrets.

People know me. They know all about dad and Natasha. No-one messes with the girl who killed her father; whether it was accidental or not.

-Emily