READ AN EXTRACT FROM PENANCE

Joan Margaret Wilson was born on 19 December 1999. Like her death, her birth was overshadowed by a major historical event.

Amanda Wilson told me how irritated she was that her daughter’s arrival into the world was swallowed by the turn of the millennium.

‘It was the millennium-bug stuff that really did my head in,’ she said. ‘When my friends kept talking to me about how they were going to go to these massive parties or club nights or whatever for New Year’s Eve – that was annoying. But the millennium-bug shit was just . . . stupid. Kept bringing it up while I was stressed and knackered. You know, asking daft stuff like: Is that baby monitor millennium-bug proof? Do you have a plan in place in case we lose power? Have you taken all your money out of the bank? That kind of shit.’

Amanda was twenty-five when she had Joan. She was ‘kind of a hippy’ then, and she still is. She wears harem pants and has very long hair. She smokes roll-up cigarettes and eats tofu. She has tattoos, a pierced belly button, and named her daughter after the folk singer Joni Mitchell. Amanda wanted everyone to call the baby Joni.

Amanda’s divorce from Joni’s father, Freddy, had just been finalised as of my interview with her. Though this is the first interview you will read, Amanda was one of the last people I spoke to. I’d been living in Crow for a few months before she agreed to speak to me in early March of 2020. We were just beginning to understand how much of a threat the COVID-19 virus might be, and I was planning to wrap up my work in Crow and return home to London – just in case things got worse.

Amanda and I chatted about the virus, at first. She was a little sceptical about it, not seeing how it could be much worse than a flu. At the time, I agreed with her. She was also sceptical about me. She said she hadn’t spoken to anyone in the press about her daughter’s death, even though she’d had offers (increasingly so, after the I Peed on Your Grave episode was released). She didn’t know what to make of it. Four years on, she was still in shock – she probably always would be.

She led me to her conservatory, where she’d stacked some photo albums. There were mandalas on her wall which she drew herself, as well as watercolours of Hindu and Buddhist iconography and lots of animals and plants.

She was thin as a rail. Blue veins crept around the long, delicate bones of her hands and the puffy bags under her eyes. In old photographs her hair is glossy and auburn. In the light of the conservatory, I could see it had become dry, and thin. Grey spilled down from the crown of her skull, as if someone had upended a bucket of silver paint over her head. Amanda told me she didn’t want to discuss finding out about Joni’s death, identifying the body or the funeral. She didn’t wish to go into detail about the breakdown of her marriage.

She told me she didn’t remember much of 2016, beyond June. She spent a lot of it in bed, and Freddy spent a lot of time with his parents. Neither could cope with their own guilt, or the weight of the other’s grief. After the funeral, they more or less began living separate lives.

Amanda’s parents were both dead and she was an only child. Her friends took care of her. They would bring her meals and tidy her house while Amanda lay in bed or took showers lasting several hours.

‘I didn’t like leaving my bedroom because I could see her everywhere,’ said Amanda. ‘Just out of the corner of my eye. Peeking round corners or going back into her room. Just the back of her. And I would get a whiff of her now and again; I’d be able to smell her or . . . I would smell the hospital. And then I’d get in the shower.

When I could smell the hospital, I’d shower and try to drown out the smell with this shower gel she used to use. She never used to go into my bedroom, so I . . . If I couldn’t cope with it, I’d stay there. But sometimes I would . . . wander around the house, hoping to see her. Just to feel normal for a second.’

I told Amanda I’d felt the same way after my own daughter’s death. The circumstances were different, and my daughter hadn’t lived with me for a few years – but that I could swear I had seen the end of Frances’s ponytail disappearing around a corner, or that I could smell the perfume she wore. A few months after her death, I was suddenly so worried Frances’s perfume would get discontinued that I went to a shop and bought twenty bottles of the stuff. I started spraying it around my flat onto the soft furnishings – but I did it so much I couldn’t really smell the perfume anymore. When I realised, I had a complete meltdown and tried to donate all my furniture to the British Heart Foundation in the hope I could replace it all and get the smell back.

Amanda said she’d done something similar with Joni’s shower gel – gotten in a bulk order of it one day.

‘Whenever I heard a floorboard creaking downstairs, the kettle boiling or the TV turning on – logically I’d know it was just . . . Julie or one of my other friends, but . . . I’d feel like it was her. And that’s mostly what I remember. This constant feeling of like . . . knowing she wasn’t there but feeling like she was’

‘Logically knowing that she couldn’t be there, then feeling like I shouldn’t be here either. If she wasn’t here, I should be where she was. And that I just wanted her. But I couldn’t have her. And when all of this hit me, it made me feel like I’d lost a lung. I couldn’t breathe without her.’

She spent that first Christmas with Freddy’s family. The day was miserable – bitter, spiteful, alcohol-fuelled arguments which led to their official break-up in early January. After Christmas, Amanda’s friends visited less. She lost a great deal of weight and stopped sleeping.

She began watching a lot of documentaries about murdered children, because they often spoke to the mothers. That was who she was watching for, the mothers. They were dressed and out of the house and speaking about their child’s death. Amanda said she started studying them – as if she was hoping to discover a secret. If she watched the other mothers, she might learn how to put her clothes on again. She might learn how to leave the house. She might discover how to continue to function after such a massive loss.

After she ran out of documentaries, she read their blogs and columns and memoirs. She started to feel bitter and jealous of the mothers of victims of school shootings and police violence because they had something to organise around. She couldn’t see a cause to attach to Joni’s murder; she could not find a purpose in it the way these women had.

‘And then I found this woman – Marcia. She’s American. And her daughter was fourteen, and she was murdered by two girls she went to school with. And her blog was all about how she’d like . . . forgiven her daughter’s murderers and she was appealing for lighter sentences for them and had even like . . . One of the killers was training guide dogs in prison, and Marcia donated a puppy to this girl’s training programme. It boiled my piss. I’ve never been so infuriated in my life. I wrote her this mental email, this absolutely insane like fivepage email about everything that’d happened to me and how I thought she was sick in the head and insane and how I would never ever forgive the monsters who took away my daughter.’

I asked how Marcia replied.

‘Totally magnanimous. I hear your pain. I feel your pain, was what she said. And she . . . I don’t want to get into it but she did end up really helping me,’ Amanda said. ‘We’re still friends. I probably wouldn’t be talking to you without Marcia, but she said that helping the journalist that did the book about her daughter was really cathartic.’

Plus: Joni’s story was already out there. After a few years of mercifully being ignored by everyone but the local press, the true-crime industrial complex had found Amanda. And as much as she did not want people to hear about her daughter’s murder between adverts for mattresses and meal-delivery kits, it had already begun. And people wanted to speak to her. There’d be no escaping them now, the true-crime people. People like me, really.
‘The I Pissed on Your Face or whatever blokes emailed me, you know. They got some shit for the episode, for being disrespectful. And they emailed me to ask if I’d like . . . if I wanted to come on or something so they could apologise. How fucking mad is that? How fucking weird is that?’

Other journalists had knocked on her door offering interviews and book deals and handfuls of cash. I had the benefit of being in Crow, of having been vouched for by friends (despite my reputation) and – most of all – I also had a daughter dead under terrible circumstances. Very different – but still terrible.

Even short lives are complex and rich. Even dead children are full of contradictions and flaws and mysteries that will never be fully understood or solved.

Even a writer as well versed in this genre as I could never create a perfect photograph of my subject. I could create a beautiful, accurate sketch of Joni, but a sketch from a skilled artist is still a sketch.