Day 14

Insa

Mum's been stockpiling value chicken soup for weeks. The watery stuff that retails for less than dust. It's pathetic, like she's using her primitive medicinal skills to their utmost to try and solve what's wrong with my sister and coming up with nothing but tins and tins of liquified animal arsehole. Occasionally she'll detour via ginger, or lavender oil, but really I think her train of thought stops at three main backwaters: daytime chatshows, quiz books and chicken soup.

Right now we're all under house arrest. I must be the only 25 year old in the world who can still be grounded. Every day for the last three weeks I have sat indoors, osmosing in the gloopy, boneless TV, the shows soft and easy to digest like pulped carrot babyfood, and every day I have felt my brain head one step closer to reaching the same state. If a monkey is left in a room with a chair, science or rumour suggests that after a curious sniff and prod, it will engage with the chair until it can use it as a tool, a weapon, a climbing frame, a toilet. Well try this at home, kids. Leave a university professor in a room with a TV playing back-to-back episodes of Wakey Wakey with Garth Blakey, Sell My Hammer and Celine and within an hour they would be using their own frontal lobe as a tool, a weapon, a climbing frame, a toilet¦

It's not even like there's anything wrong with me. Mum's just decided that because one of us is loopy ' her favourite at that - the other one is either loopy through contamination or liable to go loopy through unsupervised contact with other humans. I mentioned the backwaters she stops at and omitted logic deliberately.

Frankly, I doubt there's much wrong with Cadderine herself. I mean, I haven't watched every episode of Doctor Grek on the Beautiful Inside channel, so I'm no qualified professional, but I wouldn't put it past her to do this for attention.

Her room, though. Seriously, I have to give kudos for the effort that's gone into that. It's a real mad little psycho nest. Clippings pinned up on every surface, pictures and pictures and dear Lord, pictures of one face repeated into a blurr. You feel like a fly, walking into that room. The multiple vision of faces that are all the same, albeit framed in different hairstyles and pasted onto different dresses ' dresses that are duplicated in minute detail by my sister and hung in her closet on initialled gold plastic star-shaped hangers. Yeah, like a fly, or like a cop in some LA serial killer race-against-time drama. You keep expecting to go in there and find a sobbing real version of those photographs tied up in the corner, blinking at the light flooding in. Yeah, and so grateful you got to her before Cadderine began stripping off her skin for sausages.

I don't see what's so amazing about Maren Gilligan anyway.