Something Only We Know (25 page)

After a minute or so she stopped. ‘Better not let him have too much at once. Little and often, that’s the way.’

The puppy was still rooting about hopefully. Hel slid her palm under his body, lifted him up and placed him against her shoulder so she could pat his back, the way you might a baby.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Burping him.’

Objective achieved, she placed him on a towel and, using cotton wool dipped in water from the bowl, she started to wipe round his willy. ‘You have to do this to mimic the action of the
mother licking him,’ she explained. ‘Otherwise he can’t pee.’

Newborn pups weren’t capable of widdling unaided? I couldn’t help but marvel at the competent way my sister was handling him. She was like a vet or a nurse, measured and deliberate
in every action. Eventually some wee did come out and a bit of poo as well. Hel tidied up his rear end, checked the heat pad in his box by pressing it with her knuckles, and popped him down in his
bed. She pulled the blanket so it was against his body. ‘They are utterly useless at this age. They can’t even shiver. Normally they’d leach their mother’s body heat, only
poor old Pepper doesn’t have that option.’

A final fuss round the box and then she was up and at the sink, scrubbing her hands and the bottle and making up sterilising solution in a plastic jug.

‘Have you been doing this routine all night?’

‘Yup.’

‘Bloody hell. It’s like being a new mum.’

‘I suppose it is.’

‘Can you ever see yourself—’ I’d begun before I’d thought the sentence through.

‘See myself what?’

Too late now. ‘Kids. Having babies. With Ned, I mean.’

She shook her head vigorously. ‘No way. Not ever. Not with Ned or anyone else.’

‘You seem very sure.’

‘I am.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘I’m not going to try and justify it. I don’t want children, end of.’

‘OK.’

And what about Ned?
I thought.
Does he know this? Does he feel the same?

She shook the rinsed-out bottle and then submerged it carefully in the steriliser.

I said, ‘It’s gone half-three, you know. You must be knackered.’

‘I was. I’ve kind of got my second wind. How about you?’

‘Wide awake.’

‘Well.’ She shot me a conspiratorial look. ‘How about I make us some nice hot toast?’

As soon as she said it, I wanted nothing so badly. ‘I’ll do it.’

‘No, you stay there, Jen. I’m already up.’ Plus she’d rather prepare her own food. I knew the drill.

Helen took the unsliced loaf out of the bread bin and proceeded to cut three slices, two the depth of doorstops and one thin as a wafer. She set them under the grill and assembled butter,
Marmite and some fancy strawberry conserve Mum had got in for Christmas. She checked the bread, flipped it, brought out plates and knives. The scent was making my mouth water. When the toast was
cooked she brought it out and scraped her single slice with a tiny smear of Marmite, then began to slather my two with butter and jam. I laughed as a vast blob of strawberry gunk fell off the knife
and landed on the floor.

‘What you want to do, sis, is pile more jam on because there’s only about half a pot on there.’

She smiled and pushed the plate at me. I rose and followed her out of the kitchen, and we settled together on the sofa next door.

‘It’s running down my sleeve,’ I said, trying to intercept the trickle of melted butter as it slid along the side of my palm.

‘That’s why I have Marmite. An altogether better-behaved spread.’

‘I’ll say.’

We studied each other as we ate: Hel’s small teeth nibbling primly at her brittle slice; me biting great chunks of still-doughy bread and chewing them eagerly, jam clinging to my lips.
‘You’re enjoying that,’ she said.

‘My compliments to the chef.’ There was something moist on my chin. I wiped it away with my dressing gown sleeve.

‘Good.’

And it struck me once again how weird she was, the way she loved to feed other people and yet continually denied herself. I said, ‘I could never do what you did, Hel. Cutting everything
right back. I love my food too much.’

She nodded. ‘Yeah, I love food too. Some days it’s all I can think about. I could sit down and eat and eat and eat and eat.’

I paused, mid-bite. This revelation stunned me. If I’d ever stopped to think about it, I suppose I’d always assumed the basis of my sister’s illness was that she’d
effectively killed her appetite, that it had become easy for her to deny herself food because she simply didn’t feel the same urges as the rest of us. But here she was saying no, she was as
hungry as me. Hungrier, probably. It was outrageous.

‘Then why don’t you?’ I heard myself blurt. ‘Why don’t you just let go and eat what you want?’

‘It’s hard to explain.’

‘Try. Please, Hel. I want to understand. Why would it be so terrible if you did get fat? Why would it matter? Plenty of people are fat and happy, fat and healthy, fat and successful. If
you put on a few pounds, it wouldn’t be the end of the world, would it?’

Her brow crinkled. ‘It would. For me. Because . . . the way I am with food, the rules I have in place, it’s sort of . . . at the centre of me. It’s like a reference point that
helps me negotiate the world. It’s what makes me feel I’m me.’ She saw me looking doubtful. ‘It’s like a charm almost, a talisman, warding off the chaos. A guarantee.
Like that programme we watched about OCD where a man thought his family would die unless he did certain actions in multiples of four. And he was washing plates over and over, and locking and
relocking the door. Oh, and like the way Mum has to have everything neat and tidy or she gets in a fluster, and I know you and Dad laugh at her for it, but I actually get where she’s coming
from. It genuinely matters to her. It’s her security. So if the numbers on the bathroom scales stay steady, to me that’s order. It’s my reassurance.’ She paused and raised
her beautiful eyes to mine. ‘Does that make any sense to you, Jen?’

‘Perhaps. Some of it. But you’re recovered.’

‘I am. Only, when you’ve been used to thinking a certain way for years – especially the years when you’re growing up and your personality’s forming –
it’s a mind-set you get into and I can’t imagine ever getting completely out of. Even though I’ve got things contained.’

‘It’s not right, though, is it, even now?’

She laughed. ‘My head, you mean?’

‘I just meant—’

‘No, it’s OK. It’s difficult to find the right words to talk about anorexia. I
am
recovered, Jen. I think of myself as recovered. But we all need our talismans. Do you
remember when you were learning to drive? You wouldn’t go out for a lesson unless you had Dad’s St Christopher with you. You said it made you feel in control. You knew it was only
superstition, but still you wouldn’t be parted from it. In fact, you freaked that time you thought you’d lost it. You turned the house upside-down.’

‘Yeah, I suppose.’

‘That’s a little bit how I am today. But then multiply that need for one small, specific area of control by about a thousand, and that’s what it’s like when you have
full-blown anorexia. Till it becomes the single most important thing in your life and what holds everything else together. And even though a tiny, shrinking part of you knows it’s not a right
or normal way of thinking, there’s this other voice, the anorexia, going, “OK, then, but what have you got left if you reject me, hey? Nothing. You’re nothing.” That’s
what was playing on a loop in my head when I was at my worst.’

‘Even though we loved you and wanted you to get well?’

‘It was even stronger than that, Jen. When it speaks, it’s deafening.’

I paused, wondering whether to push further, decided to try. I don’t know what it was – the late hour, the earlier shared laughter – but I felt very close to her just then.
‘Can I ask you something else? You don’t have to answer.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Well . . . I’ve always wondered, how do you
not
-eat? I mean, when you’re desperately hungry and you need to fill your stomach, how do you stop yourself from clawing
open the biscuit tin or grabbing a chunk of cheese out of the fridge? Because when I need refuelling, the idea of food completely fills my head till I satisfy the craving. That’s the
body’s normal impulse, isn’t it? It must be nearly impossible to fight it.’

Hel looked shifty. ‘There are tricks. Techniques. You learn to fool your body.’

‘How?’

‘Well – having loads of water, tea, diet fizzy drinks to fill you up. If you’re feeling like you need to eat but instead you have a glass of water, the urge quite often passes.
And ice cubes and ice lollies are good because they take a while to finish, and they keep your mouth busy. Oh, and I got through a lots of mugs of Oxo. A lot of sugar-free jelly. A lot of
sugar-free boiled sweets.’

‘I remember your jelly phase. All those pots in the fridge.’

‘Yeah. And as well as tricking yourself, you have to trick other people. So I’d say I was taking my plate through to wash up when really I was scraping half my dinner into the
kitchen bin. I got away with that for ages. Before they started watching me. There are loads of ways you can hide food, dispose of it discreetly. Then what happens is, you find the less you eat,
the less you want. Your stomach shrinks. You get accustomed to living on very little. In fact it’s quite a nice, light, buzzy sensation – you feel clean and energised. Being hungry
actually gives you this amazing feeling of achievement, of being “on top of yourself – I know, it sounds weird, but that’s how it is – and that offsets the physical
discomfort of an empty belly. Hunger becomes something you have to beat. And meanwhile the other threads of your life seem to—’ She broke off. ‘No. I’m not telling you any
more.’

‘Why?’

‘Because.’

‘I won’t say anything to Mum, I promise.’

‘It’s not that. It’s the look on your face.’

‘What look?’

‘Fascinated. As if you want to give it a try.’

I laughed. ‘No way. Truly, Hel! God, I’ve never even been on a diet. Not a proper one. I last about three hours and then I think, “Sod it” and scoff a Twix.’

‘Good. You don’t need to diet. You’ve got a lovely figure. You know, Ned’s always checking out your cleavage.’

‘He is not.’

‘I don’t blame him. It’s not like there’s much going on in my chest department, is there?’ She patted her breastbone ruefully.

I put down my plate.

‘How did it start? Were you trying to lose a couple of pounds so you could get Joe back? Because I know when Owen dumped me, I had days hating the way I looked, wondering how I could
reinvent myself so he’d regret what he’d done. So I can see how that might have triggered something in you. Trying to look like that Saskia girl. Or was it the bullies? Did they try and
say you were fat?’

Over the quiet of the room I could hear the house night-creaking, the gurgle of the radiators. I imagined Mum and Dad upstairs, their breathing deep and even, oblivious. All in the kitchen
seemed peaceful. Pepper must be out for the count. The night was ours. I waited for my sister to unpack her madness.

‘Again, it’s hard to explain,’ she said at last. ‘I honestly don’t remember why I decided I had to lose weight. Maybe I didn’t know what else to do with
myself. Maybe half a stone came off naturally because I was upset, and then that sort of became important. Like a little tiny island of positiveness in the middle of a great sea of shit. And so you
get this boost, which you need, and so you try a bit harder and lose some more. It’s easy at first. The weight drops off. People pay you compliments. Next thing you’ve developed a
habit, you’ve got yourself into patterns of eating and meal-avoidance which are regulating your day. That’s when the trouble starts because your family notice and ask questions and put
pressure on you to break those patterns. Obviously you’re not going to, because that would be undoing the one area of your life where you’re succeeding, the one that feels as if it
makes any sense. Plus it seems outrageous – how dare anyone dictate to you how much you should weigh? So you react by becoming secretive and lying. It becomes you against the rest of the
world, and the harder they push, the stronger you resist. You know, like the lock gates at The Poacher, where the more weight of water’s behind them, the tighter they shut. So for me that was
when the eating disorder bedded in. God, there was this one evening Mum followed me upstairs with a plate of steak pie and she said she was going to stand over me till I ate it. The level of
emotion I felt then was unbelievable. I actually hated her. I wanted to stab her with my fork and run out of the house. ’

‘Hang on. You’re saying that if we’d simply left you to starve yourself, you’d have been OK?’

‘
No
.’

‘What, then?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t . . .’ She held out her palms in a gesture of bafflement. ‘I’m telling you how it took hold, that’s all.’

‘Have you ever explained any of this to Mum?’

‘How could I? We’re not allowed to talk about it, are we? In any case, for ages I couldn’t have articulated what was going on. I didn’t understand and I didn’t have
the words. I was just a seething ball of self-loathing and paranoia. It’s only in the last few years I’ve begun to see how anorexia works. And even then, only how it worked for me, and
only some of it. So much of the disease contradicts itself. You have to be twisted in your head to see any logic there.’

‘OK.’ With every question I was edging further and further out onto an ice-covered lake. Each step forward was a risk, a potential plunge into disaster. Mum had drilled me over the
years and I knew there were things I hadn’t ever to ask – what her weight was now or what it had been, for example. I must never say she looked well, in case she heard it as
‘fat’, and I must never say to her face she looked thin in case she took it as praise. But there was so much I longed to know. ‘And did you – did you ever make yourself
sick, Hel?’

She shook her head. ‘Thought about it, couldn’t bring myself to do it. I tried laxatives a couple of times and they were a disaster. They gave me the most awful cramps and then,
eugh. It was pretty rank. You don’t want to hear the details.’