Cross.

This is mostly a need to vent. So yesterday, after a series of circumstances that can mostly easily be defined as accidents or possibly misunderstandings, my brother put petrol in a diesel car. This was dumb, but not as bad as doing it the other way around I believe. There's a reasonable chance that the petrol hasn't made it's way into the engine as yet - there should still have been a skin of diesel on the bottom of the tank which will hopefully mean that the petrol is still in the tank and thus need only be siphoned off, but that's actually beside the point.

My brother rang my dad to tell him about this, and after a brief discussion, they came to the above conclusions and David was left with instructions about which garage to ring and what to ask for etc. Fine. We went to sit down for dinner, and my mum asked David if he'd told my dad that he'd put petrol in the car because she had told him to, to which he answered yes. It should be noted that this car is nearly new - we've only had it about 6 weeks. It was the first time David had filled it up, and the car he usually drives IS a petrol car, unlike the cars the rest of us drive. My mum had probably used the word petrol though, in a distracted kind of way, because we do, habitually. Hence nobody was really to blame - David thinking he'd been told, and my mum thinking he knew. David could have answered the dinner time question more tactfully, it's true, but it still should not have resulted in my mother telling us to 'get our own food' (it was on the table in front of us by this point) and that 'if she was going to be that stupid we were better off without her anyway'. David and I carried on with dinner - what else could we do? She stormed in ten minutes later, grabbed the key to the (single operable) car from the hook and disappeared in it. Neither of us was that worried, though it would be a lie to say I wasn't worried at all. She has done that before, with reasonable regularity. I got more worried as the evening went on and she still wasn't back by the time I went to bed at 11ish. (I was also worried when David and I had to remove a cat from the roof at about 9, but that was different.) I was severely stressed when I woke up this morning to find she wasn't here and that she didn't appear to have been home all night.

I spent a while debating whether to ring the hospitals or the police first, and compromised by ringing my dad. He was as worried as we were, but he and I decided to leave it at lunchtime - if she'd checked into a hotel she wouldn't have been back before then anyway. I'd just about given it up and had tried to ring my dad again when I saw the car pull into the drive. She came into the house clutching sleeping bag and a kit bag, which suggested she slept in the back of the car - it is big enough. No explanation. No apology. No nothing. I went from being sick with worry to sick with fury, and that is where I remain. I hate living at home. Incidents like this are the reason I can't stand to come back for any length of time and the reason for the stresses of my teens that resulted in some really unpleasant events a few years ago.

Thank God I'm leaving here tomorrow.