Guilty or Innocent: A Trial by Self

Guilty or Innocent: A Trial by Self

It was a bitter cool day in February. The day began like any other grey drab working winter morning; no breakfast, cigarettes and mascara juggled awkwardly, as I travelled to work, bleary eyed, in my new husband’s car.
I was just 17 years old.

After a busy morning whizzing endless numbers into my adding machine, the office manager told me my mother was on the phone.
I didn’t want to speak to her, not really. I had shut her out. She was placed – even then – in some dank and dusty corridor, that twisted and turned illusively, in the deep recesses of my mind.
‘Please, Jennah, Please’ she cried down the phone to me.
I told her ‘no!’, I’d come after work. Afterall, I’d reasoned, it’s only a few hours.

At 5.30 pm, on 14th February, 1976, I got the bus back from work, to my mother’s flat.
I wasn’t to remember that phone call for another nine years.

I found her with her wrists slit, alongside an empty bottle of barbiturates and a suicide note.
All my therapists said I wasn’t to blame. No, no, I was an abused child and an abused, neglected teenager:
I beg to differ, I only wish I couldn’t.