Thin (17 page)

I know she is impressed by my articulateness, the fact that I still have a brain. She decides to tell me all about the damage I am doing to my body and the long-term repercussions. She tells me about the weakening of my bones and the way I am affecting my electrolyte balance, and how it isn’t normal for me not to have periods for over a year, and how I might not be able to conceive in the future, and how I definitely can’t have a boyfriend because I am not strong enough to cope. But I am nineteen and things are a bit out of focus, to be honest, and so instead of being scared by what she says I learn it, store it and think to myself, ‘I should make sure I remember, just in case I am tested. I should be the expert on this.’

If I was honest, and not performing to make her happy, I might say to the nice lady doctor:

‘Thank you for the books that you’ve given me. There are some interesting points, which I have noted on the possible causes of an eating disorder. I am glad to see I fit the mould. I am not so abnormal as one would imagine, although where I come from, people aren’t used to such spectacles, and so they stare and comment which makes me feel rather uncomfortable. The books I have read about American high school girls and college students, or stories from girls at posh boarding schools, don’t fit with me. It’s like reading Judy Blume or
Malory Towers
, not like my normal life in Durham. Maybe in other places anorexics are common, but they aren’t here, at least not visibly. Here, anything different at all is magnified and examined and whispered about.

‘I have noted the diet plans to which you have referred me and I honestly don’t think they are achievable. Do you realize that one of the diets actually suggests that I eat 1,000
calories in one day? Can you see that this is impossible and unimaginable? I eat 300 calories a day at the moment so this is a 233.3 per cent increase on my current level. Can you do your maths? Would you be able to increase the amount you ate by that amount every day, if I asked you to? I suspect you will tell me that it is different, and that you do not need to increase your intake. But I look at the list of foods, and I am afraid that they are not things I can currently ingest and certainly not all at once. Your strategy seems to be to make me eat as much as possible, as quickly as possible. Surely if I could do this, I would have done it by now? I know how to eat, I just can’t, something inside me won’t let me. You are very nice, and I like you and your Laura Ashley dresses and your cluttered office, but I am not sure you are understanding me. Your books with their diet plans might seem to offer quick solutions, and your probing questions about my childhood might provide you with the answers you are looking for, but they don’t give me any. I have done the spider diagrams, the life maps and all the funny psycho-analytical exercises the books suggest, and I don’t mind because I’m bored sitting on the sofa and it gives me something to fill my time. I find it interesting, the psychological side of things. I might study it one day.

‘I understand what you are saying, and I suppose it adds up, but it doesn’t match my version of things. It’s like another colour, which is not on my rainbow. I can see the way this is going. Your plans don’t match mine. Eventually we will fall out, you and I, because the scales will give me away. If I keep dropping in weight you will eventually admit me into your horrible hospital. And I will say, “I’m sorry, I can’t come to your hospital because I’m going to Cambridge University to study English and to be the best and so, you see, it isn’t possible. I have other plans.”

‘And you will laugh, “Ha ha – silly little girl, you can’t
go anywhere. You are an anorexic and you are not allowed. We say so.”

‘Then there will be tears and disasters and unimaginable things.

‘So it won’t be like this for much longer. It is nearly New Year. I won’t be here next year. No. I won’t be doodling life plans and food diaries and chatting through my personal inside thoughts next year. I just can’t let it go that way.’

I want to prove everyone wrong. I want to prove I’m right and get to Cambridge, and be on my own. There, I can escape other people’s control and interference and their plans for me. I have written it all down, how it will be done. My plan is nothing like that of the whitecoats or the self-help anorexia books. There are things I can eat, and if I can just eat a bit more of them, then maybe this will keep them quiet and stop the questions about why I can’t eat chocolate and cheese and so on. I’ll make a lovely proposal, which I know will impress the nice lady doctor. I will increase my daily intake by 100 calories in week one, and then next week I will up it by another 100 and so on. It is the only way to make them leave me alone, and to make sure that they don’t make me join those other girls.

I know I will still have to come to the hospital and get weighed and have friendly-style chats, but I actually think nice lady doctor will be relieved that I am not taking up so much of her time. She will be able to cross me off her ‘danger’ list and she can run off with her files and find someone else to feed.

I will keep moving on with my own plans. Staying still gives me the worst feelings – I get tired and lethargic and I feel so disgusted with myself, all agitated and bored in the crowded house. No, her methods will not work. Instead I will make a New Year’s Resolution to get better and to
succeed. I have never really failed; I don’t like failures. It is best I don’t allow this to become my first one. I will stay away from the scales – that will my most impressive feat, almost unbelievable. I will get to Cambridge. I will reinvent myself. I will say to myself:

‘I have to get stronger to get better.’

‘I miss my friends. I miss going out.’

‘Life is slipping away from me every day. I just want my life back.’

This will motivate me to get better. And so I will. I will say it over and over again so that I can succeed. In the meantime I will continue to hide. I will continue to cover up my disgusting arms, and my bony face, and drape myself in baggy clothes so no one can see the outlines, so that I can blend into the background. So I can stop people staring. It is very hard to feel, when you can’t find the edges of yourself.

‘Surprise!’

‘Happy New Me.’

I have taken it into my own hands. I am good at this. I have made my own plan and it is something I can achieve. Everyone will be so surprised and pleased with me.

‘Ten points for making this work for you,’ they will tell me.

‘You can go back to being a normal girl now.’

And I will say, ‘You see, you just have to do it on your own. A few more calories every week for as long as it takes. That’s the way for me.’

They will marvel at how I can do it. But they forget my willpower, remember? I sit in my bedroom and I draw up my strategy. There are foods that I can eat – things from the ‘Yes’ list, and so I will just eat bigger quantities of them. Instead of one tomato, I make it two, and instead of 100 grams of cottage cheese, I scribble down ‘150 grams’.

I come in from the pub and I go straight into the kitchen.

‘Hello, I’m back.’

I take a plate (medium size) out of the cupboard (bang, bang). Listen to me, in the kitchen. Listen to me eating. I put small portions of my foods on to the plate: a piece of processed ham, two crackers, half a carrot and three low-fat crisps. The plate is full with a mix of different, brightly coloured foods. I take it into the room where Mum and Dad are sitting. I sit on the sofa and eat it all without stopping (chomp, chomp) and they watch me and I smile back
at them, and I put the plate down on the arm of the sofa and tuck my feet under my legs. See what I can do!

In my 400-calorie-a-day-week I have plenty of low-calorie bread. Sometimes the supermarket runs out, and I wonder if all the other anorexics have got there before me. I dip it in my reduced calorie Cup-a-Soup: a whole meal in under seventy calories. When I finish I need to clean it up. It’s just the way I do things, or I start thinking about more food and it spirals. I could eat all day, I think, if I allowed myself. I don’t allow myself, of course. I keep things bare and hollow and cold. I make sure that things are all placed and neat and ordered.

400, 500, 600, 700, 800 calories … Nearly at four figures … and counting.

My friends are back from university and I go to the pub with them to show them that I am are better. Can they see the difference? I can feel it. I can feel every sour mouthful for hours afterwards. They drink half-pints of lager and lime and I stick to my usual. Sometimes my Coke tastes like it might be the full-fat variety. I make sure I ask the barman more loudly next time, ‘DIET Coke, my friend!’

If it is full-fat Coke, then things are out of place. I can’t concentrate on the conversation because I am thinking of all the extra glucose and sugar and calories that will be turning to fat in my tummy. If that is the case, the 800-calorie-a-day plan is all out of sync and I don’t know how to handle that, not yet.

My friends and some other girls talk about ‘feeling fat’. I don’t understand why they do that. I wonder if they are angry with me as well. I think they want to tell me that they deserve as much attention as me. Maybe they are just talking about what they want to talk about, things that they would say if I wasn’t here. The loud girl with heavy black
eyeliner, fake eyelashes and tousled hair talks about how she puts her fingers down her throat and makes herself sick. Someone else joins in, and they laugh at their greediness:
Girl 1
: ‘A whole packet of biscuits, a box of chocolates! It seems perfectly normal to retch it up into the toilet.’
Girl 2
: ‘I mean that much eating is just going too far, and it’s only once in a while. It’s the same as drinking too much, and making yourself sick so that you can drink more.’

They tell each other that they haven’t eaten all day, just to get especially drunk. I start counting my six small food sessions. I curl up and try and block them out, but I keep catching bits of the food conversation, and I can’t stop the counting.

That’s eighty-five calories per biscuit and 4.5 grams of fat and so if she has a whole packet then that’s 2,125 calories and even if she throws up she probably won’t get it all out. Anyway, now she’s drinking lager and lime and she doesn’t know that it is over 100 calories and if she has five of those she has drunk near to what I have eaten all day. I’m sure she doesn’t do this every day or she would be fatter. I have been looking at her arms and I think they might have got bigger. I need to look in more detail but I think she might have even put on weight. Maybe.

I sit on the loo in the pub. I bite my lip really hard until it bleeds, and a few tears make their way out of my eyes, but I am too cold to really cry. That is lucky because I don’t want them to know I am like this. I know that they are trying to tell me something, even if they don’t mean it, about how they are fed up with me having all the attention and hogging the limelight. I know this must be the reality of life; girls will talk about diets and their bodies. I just have to accept it. I suppose I have to be strong. It is not their fault; it is mine.

They will be glad to know that I am forcing in the fats gram by gram without looking, so I can start to get away from all of them. Run away. Run right away.

When I booked the holiday to Rhodes with my friend I didn’t forget that there would be no diet bread and diet soup in Greece, I just thought more about escaping. I thought about being able to smoke my cigarettes in public places without choking on my fast-pumping heart. Usually I am scared of being spotted by my mum and dad doing a bad thing like smoking. Every night I have a cigarette out of my bedroom window. I sit on the edge of the windowsill, blowing the smoke as far away from the house as possible, fanning it away with my hands, then I dart back into bed, diving deep under the duvet with the imagined sound of footsteps, my cigarette tossed wildly into the freezing black air.

But on holiday I can smoke freely, which sounds a funny reason to go on holiday, but that is my reason. I can also get a tan, which might mean that I will dare to expose my thin arms in public. My best friend is coming with me. She is kind because she hasn’t asked me about what I will eat in another country, and what she will do if she gets hungry and wants a packet of crisps or something, like normal people do. I use some of the money that my family has put aside for me for university, which I keep spending. I don’t mean to keep wasting it on non-achievement-related items. I feel guilty for it; I am not at university because of my let-down. I must have let everybody down.

My dad drives my friend and me to the airport. I know he thinks it is strange that he is taking his faded, eldest, childlike, breakable-bones daughter to the airport to go on
a package holiday in the sun. I know that because I can see it in his face, even though he doesn’t say much, because he can’t, because I have hurt the family and because it is all too much for him. He has got angry with me a couple of times because I wanted to drive the car (which I can do, because I passed my test) but he says that I don’t have the strength and that I am a ‘danger to the roads’. I prefer it when he is quiet; that is easier for me. I know he thinks that going on holiday will make me worse. I don’t think anyone is happy about it, because they still think that I don’t really have enough energy to walk to town, let alone go on an 18–30s package holiday, but things are changing, can’t they see that?

When I get to the airport departure lounge I can’t believe it when I order a bottle of alcoholic lemonade. I just walk up to the bar and I order it. When I drink it I feel dizzy-high, and I want another one, but then we have to get on the plane and I am counting the extra calories all the way there. I feel as though I should be happy because I just did something really good, but I don’t feel happy or sad at the moment, just controlled and uncontrolled. These are a much more scary set of opposites, because uncontrollable equals unbearable.

We get to the hotel late and usually I am not up late, so the whole thing disorientates me and I can’t sleep. I don’t sleep at the moment; I am super-alert. It is a strange feeling. I look at the clock and it is three in the morning. I have been lying under the cold, white sheets in the white-tiled room. I have been drifting in a banging kind of a daze. My body jumps and moves and it feels like I am on the top level of sleep, next to awake. I am thinking about what I am going to eat for breakfast and how I must sunbathe for at least six hours a day and swim for one hour a day, so as not to let things get out of order.