Watching Women & Girls by Danielle Pender

Author:Danielle Pender
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2022-04-25T18:50:42+00:00

Externally life went on after the funeral, but internally time stood still. Carmen sat in a hazy stupor during double maths on a Thursday afternoon after smoking weed in the underpass close to school. Mr Pearson would ask her to repeat what he had just explained about finding the length of the hypotenuse in a right-angled triangle and she’d wonder where she was. Before she was due to take her final exams, she stopped going to school altogether. She spent her days watching TV, sleeping or staring out of the window, amazed that her body was remembering to breathe. Her mother carried on working long shifts at the pub, often only speaking to Carmen if she hadn’t finished the list of jobs she’d left for her each morning. ‘You’re not lying around the house doing naff all, you can make yourself useful,’ she’d shouted up the stairs when Carmen had forgotten to take the bins out one day.

Two of the girls from their group got pregnant shortly after Leanne died. Carmen thought about them years later when she planted sunflowers in her own garden. Some had flowered earlier than others, her neighbour mentioned that they must have experienced a trauma at some stage in their growth process. ‘If flowers get stressed or feel under threat, they bloom early so that they can secure their future. It’s a defence mechanism,’ he’d explained over the low fence separating their gardens. Carmen had suddenly wished the fence was higher.

In her relationships as an adult, Carmen was disappointing. She entered into a new friendship in good faith, excited by the possibility of connection, but somewhere along the way she became exhausted by the banality of adult friendships. With her late replies to text messages and emails, cancelled plans and unreturned phone calls, she was trying to communicate what she couldn’t say out loud: I’m not that person, don’t rely on me for anything. Routinely she put physical distance or a barrier of frustration between herself and anyone who tried to form a meaningful bond. She chose not to share stories of Leanne with the friends who had learnt to operate at a comfortable distance. How could she distil her down into an understandable package without flattening out her existence? It was the millions of small details that made her who she was. Who would want to know that she loved pickled onion crisps but couldn’t stand real pickled onions? How could someone picture her round, gnawed fingernails, and what it was like to hold her warm, dry hands? Carmen wouldn’t be able to describe how she smelt or her deep throaty voice and her high-pitched giggle. They wouldn’t be able to visualise her hyperextended knees, or the diamond-shaped pupil in her left eye, or the look on her face when she took acid at fourteen and saw a Care Bear surfing on her kitchen floor. No one would react the way Carmen wanted them to if she described Leanne, so she didn’t try.

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