Thin (6 page)

[The light is taken away from the pub table and towards a woman talking to a girl. The woman is Grace’s mum. The girl is Grace’s best friend. Grace joins them.]

MUM
: So, did you have a good day?

GRACE (OUTSIDE VOICE
): Yep. Great. Fine. We just stayed in, watched videos and went into town.

MUM
[
turning to Best Friend
]: And have you eaten dinner? Did Grace eat some dinner at your house?

GRACE (INSIDE VOICE
):
Don’t ask her that. I’m not a little girl.

BEST FRIEND
: Yes, we did … she did actually. Don’t worry.
We had tea at my house. I’m keeping an eye on her!

GRACE (INSIDE VOICE
):
Don’t talk about me. It’s so demeaning, having your little secret chats in the kitchen, conspiring behind my back.

BEST FRIEND
: Well, I have to go, but I’ll see you tomorrow.
Are you OK?

GRACE (OUTSIDE VOICE
): I’m fine. I wish you wouldn’t talk
about things like that. I’m OK, you know. Bye-bye. See you tomorrow.

GRACE (INSIDE VOICE
):
Better alone. Be quiet. Don’t give anything away. I am not a little girl any more!

[Curtain closes.]

It is a hot, slow September Saturday. Grace’s head is fuzzy and empty through hunger. She has only eaten an apple today. Mum is eating lunch with her friend in the cathedral café. Grace joins them. She stares at the food and orders a large Diet Coke. She eats some green salad too. Normal enough. There is numbness in the room. Everything is at a distance removed from her body. There are conversations flying off the walls and there is noisy cutlery and an intense smell of coffee. She feels her body pulse and her head throb. She walks to the car with Mum and they start driving. They are going to buy some things for university – a suitcase, some pots and pans and plates. Grace has picked out self-catering accommodation so that she doesn’t have to eat the university food. The thought of being fed, like school dinners, is too terrifying.

Grace tells Mum that she is feeling tired. Mum implies that maybe it is because she isn’t eating enough and suggests that she makes her some food when they get home – some chicken and some potatoes. Grace chokes. There is a silence and a stiffening of her throat. The words get trapped. The throat won’t open to breathe or speak for fear that it might ingest something impossible. Food is now an impossibility.

There are two words. Two small words, which open up a crevice of pain in the car.

‘I can’t.’

Perhaps if the second word had been different, the blackness/whiteness of the controlling and the not-eating would have stayed, and the game would have carried on.
Perhaps if she had said, ‘I don’t’, ‘I refuse’, ‘I won’t’, then it might have sounded like there was someone in there fighting, someone with confidence and energy, someone on a determined drive, at least someone recognizable. But now there was an admission. An admission so strange that the silence compressed the air to such a degree that everything went tight. In the ‘can’t’ there was so little fight, so little voice. Just non-oxygenated air.

The car stops and there are tears and a strange, unallowable conversation which suggests that somebody is angry with her. The conversation does not exist in real time, but in a blurred slow-motion where things just fall out of mouths and into space. The very presence of this conversation threatens everything. Grace decides to improve tomorrow – she must cut back on those apples.

Monday morning and things are grey. There is a doctor’s waiting room and two parents. Then they are inside the doctor’s office, and there are questions and speeches on her behalf. Everything is blank. Blank words and numbness. There is a heavy weight on her chest as she feels the walls of her breastbone stiffen. There is a prescription pad and a doctor confused by the entrance of three people who all look grey with worry, and one of whom looks very thin.

Suddenly a voice: ‘She can’t eat. She won’t eat. At first she cut out sweets and chocolates, then all she would eat was pasta, then only rice cakes and tuna, and now … we should have noticed before, but we just didn’t know what to look for. It seemed normal – just a diet, and then a bit more of a diet – and now we are blaming ourselves that we have watched it get to this stage. Now she just seems sad. Not herself. She is secretive and quiet; she seems to be alone more. We don’t understand what is going on.’

The prescription pad is put down. Parents are ushered out.

There must be a conversation because it ends.

‘I think you have anorexia nervosa.’

Then there are parents again and decisions and agreements.

Then there are just tears. Endless, streaming tears. There is not even any energy to push them out; they just fall out of her eyes apathetically.

And, secretly, there is a sense of pride and accomplishment. She now has a title: she is real and authentic. If she was an anorexic, then she was going to be the best anorexic there could be.

They drive back home in cold silence. The noise of the car heater drowns out the sound of their breathing. For the first time in ages she actually isn’t hungry. Her tears fill her mouth as she sits, rocking herself in front of the fire, dribbling over a bowl of Special K.

The evidence of Grace is still there: her make-up, her shoes, her toothbrush, everything still in place. The photos of her friends are stuck firmly on to the white MFI wardrobe with Blu-Tack, all smiling, all pretty, all ready. The wardrobe is filled with her clothes, hanging, not swinging, not moving at all.

There are callers for her still. There are letters marked with her name and posted through the letter box by the regular-as-clockwork postman whistling down an early-morning icy drive. Does he know? This is a place where gossip trips along the cobbled streets. He knew about her A-level results – the postman – he heard her on the radio; she was being interviewed about falling standards (an appropriate topic for someone with such high ones) and he recognized the name. She didn’t like that – the lack of anonymity. Not a place for secrets or secret-hiders.

The house is now filled only by a cruel silence and an uncomfortable hovering sense of emptiness, the Grace they thought they knew now distinctly absent. Mum and Dad sit silently in front of the six o’clock news. They sip their white wine and eat their tea. There is not much talking done. There is just loss and a hole, and vacuous feelings, which come from staring into the distance for hours with tired eyes, plus a roller-coaster-style sense of a wave, or a drop, in the seat of their stomachs.

They were not really watching at first, not deep-watching. Of course, as interested and engaged parents, they were always observing, looking out for stages and changes,
indications and signs, of what their children might be telling them, or not telling them. But this specific something they did not know how to look for. And when it did arrive, it took a while to be able to interpret it, and decipher what it was all about, and where it was heading. It came suddenly, over the course of a short few months. It came without warning and it came silently. So silently. She was there; a vibrant, full, loving daughter, maintaining a balanced control. She was not excessive or extreme, she was not overly rebellious, nor acutely shy and quiet, she was strong and she was fun, or so they thought. Then she disappeared behind an invisible layer – a see-through layer – and all of a sudden she was gone.

Dad and Grace go to the botanical gardens. They walk round and round. Grace feels a sort of excitement, tinged with a strange sense that she is outside of her body and that this can’t be happening to her. The cases are packed, her bedroom is cleared out, she surely couldn’t
not
go to university. How would that happen? How would that sort of thing work out? She has a room paid for, a place taken. What will they do when they call out the register and there is no answer to her name? What will the other students think about her? Will someone tell them the story, or will they just bypass it/her? Dad tells her that it is OK, those things will just be handled for her, because when you have anorexia people do things for you. Other people take care of the hard things, like ringing up a university and speaking to people over the phone, making cancellations, getting refunds, checking you out, without you having to do anything but listen through the door to phone conversations, where parents notify strangers of your illness on your eighteen-year-old behalf.

Grace lies on the beige carpet and finishes her sit-ups. She wonders what her friends are doing, the people who left her behind and went to university. It would have been her first week at university too, had this thing not got in the way. It would be Freshers’ week: a new, crazy, drunken start; a new room; new people. But instead, she has a sinking sense of reversion; like walking backwards, like a video on slow rewind. Things are all out of time. And so she slinks quietly into the background of her growing-up house.

‘I’m still here,’ she feels like saying. ‘Just a little less. A little less of me.’

But they look blankly straight through her: the pain is too much.

She wakes up to the sound of the six-thirty milkman. Her sleep is now light and fragile, like her body. It is difficult to shut down the mind at night as a headful of words cascades towards her, thoughts thumping intensely. She re-counts the day of food and drink meticulously through tables, numbers and equations. Everything has to be weighed out, measured exactly, or she feels unable to breathe, seized by an embracing panic around her throat. She feels her chest tighten with each reminder of the day’s food failures, she turns over with the stabbing thought of each ingested item, aching inside with regret. Today, as always, there is no sense of quiet as she rolls over for the fiftieth time, attempting to find a position where her bones don’t rub against the springs of her old mattress, and where she cannot feel every ounce of skin as it moves and slides below her.

She always wakes up this same way, startled by the light; gripped by the fear that life can possibly exist without her; her own internal and petrifying alarm rising from her stomach through her ribcage and into the base of her throat. It jolts her with its force, pushing up from within, and she
is faced with an instant and horrifying reminder of her constant addiction. She simply can’t lie still for long. She tries to force her eyelids shut by pressing them together with her fingers, she tries to fall back into the dream world without physicality and without contact, but she seems to physically ingest each second and choke. Stifled by her own bed she can feel only her heart as it speeds and jumps and bangs inside her, reminding her of her own flesh.

Sometimes she forgets temporarily where she is and what day it is, and she finds, in that moment – that half-second – a relief from certainty, a real breath and a sense of weightlessness. But then the voice makes its formal entrance, like clockwork. Always a dual dialogue – never any silence:

So today you are not going to have any breakfast. A banana maybe? But no, after everything you greedily consumed yesterday, it makes you feel sick. Can’t you feel your legs weighing you down? Do some exercise – you can have a banana if you do some exercise.

She tries to stay in bed as long as possible, away from confronting the kitchen and the thought of breakfast, because the later she has breakfast, then the later she has lunch and then dinner, until it is so late that she won’t want to eat.

She is reassured only when others eat; she likes to feed them – watching them place every crumb in their mouths, filling with fear if their plates aren’t empty. She wants them to be weighed down, heavy and full, then she can be lighter and she can float above them. She can’t understand the inertia that grips most people, allowing them to lounge about, uncontrolled, eating all day, every day.

Grace shakes. She gets out of bed. Taking her pyjama top off over her head she examines her body. She can see no difference; it is always the same. She puts on her cycling shorts, T-shirt and trainers, and begins her usual aerobics routine: legs, arms, stomach – a bit of everything, just to
refresh her, give her a bit of energy, wake her up. Sometimes her pelvic bone rubs against the top of her thigh; that hurts a bit, but is to be expected. Sometimes the bottom of her back aches, right on the coccyx, as she lies on the floor, pushing it against the hard floor, but it has to be done; this way she will be allowed to feel worthy, worthy enough to eat. She treats herself today: only two sets of sit-ups. She is getting a blinding headache, half the room is black and blurred, a sharp piercing fuzz of the morning. She leaves the bedroom armed with her now cold hot-water bottle. Almost blinded by the pain, she can’t tell anyone. There will be no sympathy – only another reason to make her eat.

Nineteen:
She gets up to a tempered birthday celebration. She unwraps her presents as she shudders in front of the blazing hot fire. She looks at the faces of her family. She has failed them. She convulses with tears. She can only repeat, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.’

As they pass her the presents she struggles to gather the strength to open them. Why would anyone want to give gifts to her? She is damaging them, she is the guilty one, she deserves nothing. No-thing for her, inside or out.

They try to comfort her, throwing her a gesture, a smile or a hug, but she resents their intervention into her own mess. Their faces are stunned with pain and exasperation. The tears are welling up as she tries to breathe. She takes in air but has no room to hold it inside her. They sit and watch her, unable to move or speak, constrained by their own embarrassment and forcibly detached from her anguish. Suddenly, their strong and beautiful child, friend and sister no longer exists, all that remains is a fragile shell, held together only by her own determination. They begin to shout and scream at her because it seems to be the only thing that allows them to vent their helpless frustration, but she pushes
them away, as she has always done, intent on succeeding in whatever she is trying to do, although she isn’t sure what that is.