A Curious Girl: Caraline

Damn. This essay is getting too interesting. I'm worried. OK. The Disturbing Video. I'll get to the MSP later.

Caraline's eyes were the only things that were particularly out of the ordinary on her face. She had fairly normal looking features: a young face, short dark hair and pale skin. Her eyes struck me; the skin had sunken in all around them and the eyes that looked out were tired and scared. She seemed to me like someone who felt she had lived a long time, the weight of the years coming down on her and she was making her way towards the end, but she was too like a frightened child making an effort to be brave. She cried, but her voice was coherent, even though her cheeks were shiny and wet. "I want God to let me die soon. I hope I've done enough to get to Heaven. Each day I try to do something good... I don't know what to do to earn my passport to Heaven. I think maybe I've done enough... I eat too much to die, and not enough to stay alive. I'm just sitting in the middle waiting..." I have heard those words before, and I feel she described her own state in perfect clarity.

Caraline wore loose clothing, and discovering that she weighed 3.5 stone is surprising at first. Later on I caught glimpses of her emaciated legs as she sat down to eat, and her almost fleshless arms. She seemed quite tall to me, but she crouched a lot, sitting on the floor and hugging her knees close to her. We heard that she starved herself for twenty hours a day, and then ate in four hours what most people could hardly manage in two days. And then she purged it all from her body. Caraline told us about her beliefs about food, and how they relate to her mother. "I don't like convenience food. When you prepare food, you put love into it." Her mother used to cook beans from a tin, put them in a bowl and give the bowl to the children as their dinner. Just the one bowl, with one spoon. If it had been a bad day, she would make Caraline, the oldest of them all, kneel on the floor and one of the younger ones would feed her. This was humiliating. If the day had been worse, the mother would make them all kneel and feed them herself.

Caraline ate normally, at a normal speed. The only thing I find strange about it is how she ate alone every single night, so unlike me. She explains, "It gets lonely doing this every night. I try to put off the dreaded moment when I go to the bathroom as much as possible..." She spoke in earnest about her parents and homelife. After her mother had hurt her, jumping on her stomach in rage, Caraline said there would be one tear on one cheek when she looked in the bathroom mirror. Later, her mother said, "Sorry about yesterday. I was in a bad mood, you understand." Then, Caraline said, the tears really came. She didn't understand at all. She spoke of these things calmly, and her only halting point is at her father. She said she loved her Dad, he took her places and did nice things. But he was arrested for abusing her brother. She apologised for not being able to say the proper words, but she was better at saying the funny words for parts of the body. She said she could never say what her Dad did to her. We already know that she has been sexually abused.

I wondered how she could even talk of it at all. Maybe it was because at the time, her homelife had seemed normal to her, as she didn't know any different. She said that she didn't like to admit that there was something wrong with her homelife.

Darren E. turned it off there, as the pips for lunch had already gone. Personally, I would have rather gone on watching, but he said there was another half hour, so we'll get on to the more Disturbing parts tomorrow.

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