Afraid to Tell by Heidi Harding

Author:Heidi Harding
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

Chloe

It must have been after he was arrested that I saw him in the village one day. I was walking to the shop with a friend when he drove past in the van, then stopped and waited for us to catch up. Mum had told me that he wasn’t allowed to speak to me, but he wound down the window and said, ‘Oh, you’ve got a new dog. Where’s Lexi?’ Tom was sitting next to him, in the passenger seat, but he looked away and didn’t say anything. And I didn’t either. I just carried on walking, and after hesitating for a moment, my friend scuttled after me.

She didn’t know that he’d been arrested or that he was out on bail, so she was completely bemused when she asked me, ‘Isn’t that your dad? Why didn’t you speak to him?’ But I just shrugged and kept on walking.

It can’t have been very long after that when Mum and Heidi told me I had to see a counsellor, which made me even angrier with Heidi. I told Mum I didn’t want to do it, and she said, ‘Just go to the first one and see what it’s like.’

I spent the whole day before my first session dreading it, and by the time Mum met me off the bus after school I was in tears. She must have taken a break at work, and we sat in the park behind the cathedral while I cried, ate the prawn sandwich she’d bought for me and told her repeatedly that I didn’t want to go. I can’t remember how she persuaded me, but I do remember crossing the road from the park on my own, then sitting in a cold, dimly lit room until a woman came in and took me to another, equally gloomy room, where I sat in stony silence, deflecting all her attempts to engage me in conversation.

‘I could just run out of here,’ I thought. ‘They wouldn’t be able to stop me. I could run away for good.’ Then I thought about all the trouble I’d get into and, even more importantly, ‘What if he hurt Mum? Or caught me?’ So I stayed. And as if just being there wasn’t bad enough, the woman tried to get me to draw a family tree. I thought she was crazy to believe it could possibly help in any way. It was like saying to me, ‘Your father abused you, your sister betrayed your trust, we’ve all read your secret diary, but never mind, just write the names of your grandparents on this piece of paper and none of it will matter anymore.’ Sitting there in that room, I felt as though I was a small child again, screaming to get out, but no one was listening.

Despite the fact that my dread had proved well-founded, I did go back the following week, and this time the woman got me to make some papier mâché balloons and paint my emotions on them. I think the counsellor called it something like ‘modelling about my emotions’.

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