Kindle Edition
Category:
Young Adult/Teen
Type: Fiction
Price: $2.99 (eBook)
Gerry's life is a disaster waiting to happen, and her mother is too wrapped up in her own troubles to care. Then help comes from an unexpected source. A story about seeing your life differently.
Gerry Aarons has always known she’s unwanted. But she’s never understood why. Until one night her mother reveals the dark secret she’s been carrying, and Gerry’s self-destructive streak escalates out of control.
A chance meeting in a park with a thin yellow dog and a man in crimson robes enjoying the sun is the turning point that steers Gerry’s disastrous life onto an unexpected course. Both she and her mother are forced, finally, to confront the unspeakable truths that lie between them, with dramatic results.
This is a story about precarious families; about the more difficult aspects of the human journey; about accepting what we are and what our lives ask of us, whatever the set of circumstances that we’ve been born to; about finding the escape hatch that allows us to emerge from our self-hating, broken interiors, and find meaning and beauty in the life we were given.
Excerpt
It was chilly out of bed, barely light outside. Winter breathed in through the partly open window. Her mother was up. Gerry could hear the abrupt flushing of the toilet, the groaning protest of the geyser as the hot water tap went on.
She stood shivering on bare feet on the floorboards, ignoring her gooseflesh, her heart thumping in anticipation of what she was about to do. Above her head, the flying ugly lady watched her with piggy eyes, black crow’s wings extended like a vampire’s cape.
Gerry unhooked the papier maché figure from the loop of dangling cord that attached it to the ceiling hook. She placed it on the end of her bed, took up her woollen scarf and wound its soft, warm length around her throat. Reaching for her school tie, she knotted it deftly into the cunning exploding knot that she had copied off a helpful online site. She slotted the longer end through the loop vacated by the ugly lady. The other end acted as the rip cord. One firm tug in the right direction and the noose would unravel like a magic trick. Or so the theory went. Of course it wasn’t foolproof. There was always the chance that the knot would snag and fail to release. That was part of the reckless thrill of the game.
Gerry stood for a moment, listening to the familiar sounds of activity from the room next to hers: the moody thuds of sticky drawers; the painful screech of the warped cupboard door being wrenched open and forced shut again; the whine of the basin tap with its broken washer. Everything in this flat was so unhappy. Neglected and unloved.
Rising on tiptoe, she eased her head through the noose of the tie. She could see herself reflected in the full-length mirror opposite: a pasty-faced ragdoll in an oversized sweatshirt that said: ‘loveLife. Be safe.’ Her black hair straggled untidily around her shoulders and the brassy twinkle of studs looked like they belonged on some other face. What a dweeb, she thought derisively.
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