Thin Read online

  Mummy, thank you for taking me to the private hospital with the nice nurses who smile and don’t shout, and who don’t ask me intrusive questions. It reminds me of a posh hotel with clean sheets and TVs with satellite channels and cosy towels. I think it would be nicer here than on the sofa at home, wouldn’t it, Mummy? It would be a nice change of scenery here. I think I would like it if it was all clean and nice, and people brought me things and looked after me. I am smiling, Mummy. I am smiling at the nurses. Does that make you happy? I know I have let you down, so I will try and make it better. I will try and sit on the bed in the room and let expensive doctors talk to me. If you want, Mummy. I don’t think you do, though. I don’t think you really want me to come here and let the expensive doctors take all your money. Money that you don’t even have. So it would probably be better, wouldn’t it, Mummy, if I just stay at home and we look for something else? Thank you for taking me, though, and thank you to the nice pleasant nurse with the smart blue uniform and the very pleasant hospital room. Perhaps we can look somewhere else – somewhere that is just for those with eating disorders. I haven’t met any people like me properly yet. I find myself staring at them if I come across them in the street, and I have read their books, but I haven’t met a real live one yet, a real live bulimic, anorexic or overeating person, and maybe it will help me if I did that. Maybe I will be able to make some friends or relate to their problems or something. That’s what they say, isn’t it, Mummy, that it helps to meet people who are like you because you have things in common and you can make sense of it together?

  So we are discussing it, and then suddenly we are all there, you, me and Dad, just like it was on that horrible day at the doctor’s surgery. We are in a big, empty house with high ceilings and white walls and I feel like I have been transported out of my world into someone else’s. I sit next to you on a sofa and a nurse makes you and Dad cheese sandwiches. I eat my WeightWatchers’ yoghurt. We make some brief chitchat. She shows us the kitchen. It is colourful and there are lots of charts and pictures on the walls. You stand and talk to the nurse while I am introduced to two of the girls who live there. They take me into the garden and tell me what fun it would be if I moved in. They talk about how they have pizza nights and how although it is difficult, ‘It’s a good place to be.’

  Then I am back in the kitchen, and I can see one of the girls making a list of foods that she wants to eat over the next week. A woman sits with her and tells her that she must add in some toffee pudding and some custard to her menu.

  ‘If you have tomatoes for lunch, then when are you going to have the pudding? Do you think you can manage it on Tuesday, or do you want to have it on Wednesday instead?’ The nurse holds her pen over the paper on which she is writing and lifts her eyes to the skinny girl, awaiting a response.

  Then I am in a bedroom and there are photos of a girl on the wardrobe. It looks nothing like the girl who is talking to me, but it is the same person.

  ‘And this would be your room. Claire stays here but she has been discharged so it will be good to have someone else in the house. Claire has got better. She still comes in though, as an outpatient.’

  She looks me up and down. The girls make me feel sick. I can’t look at them. They look disgusting. All the food talk is making me feel so bored.

  ‘What are you scared of eating?’ they ask me. ‘We all have something.’

  I tell them it is cheese. I don’t know. All I can hear is my inside voice shouting at me in a siren-sound, No way, no way. No way. Get out, get out, get out.

  ‘Thank you, thank you so much for showing me round. Thank you. Bye-bye.’

  ‘See you soon,’ they reply.

  No way, get me out, get me out, get me out.

  I walk to the car and smile. I put my seat belt on and eat my apple. Have I done OK? It is later than I usually eat my apple so I feel a bit shaky. Dad looks pleased with me. He turns round and smiles at me sitting in the back seat.

  ‘What did you think?’ he asks me.

  It’s just an apple. Big deal – what’s the fuss about?

  Fifty-five calories and counting …

  A letter

  Daddy Dear Dad,

  I don’t know how to start this.

  I sit on my bed and I shut the curtains. I take my hot-water bottle out of the cover and replace the roasting rubber-smelling pink heater against my red skin. I pull up the duvet covering my knees and I bring it up to my chin. I put down my notepad and reach for my glass of hot water from the bedside table. I press my fingers against the steamy mug. Anything for heat, things are cold these days. Then I take up my notepad and start again:

  This letter will not reach you, Dad, but I will write it anyway. Dad, I don’t know what to do. But I can’t go to that place. It was so kind of you to drive me all the way there. You have always put me first, haven’t you? But now I just need my own duvet and my own hot-water bottle and the smell of my home near me. And I don’t want to go to that big, old, cold empty house. You don’t want me to go either, do you? I know you don’t, because when you ate your cheese sandwich in brown bread with butter and drank your tea with milk and ate two dark-chocolate-covered digestive biscuits that the nurse lady gave to you, you looked sort of uncomfortable. The nurses were trying to talk to you and you were nodding along, but you were probably thinking about all the pounds I was going to cost you and about all the loans and the debts that you would have as a result of me. I know you have always said, ‘Grace, if you end up working on the cash tills in Woolworths and you are happy, then I’ll be happy.’

  If I told you it wouldn’t make me happy to be in that cold house with the girls (who look nothing like their photos), then I think you wouldn’t want me to go.

  It’s not for me, Dad. I’m not like them. I don’t want to be like them. I didn’t do this to get the label. I did this to sort myself out, I think. I just needed some time. I didn’t become ill to make friends with other people who were doing the same thing. I know everybody thinks that, but no no no no.

  Thanks, Dad. Sorry.

  Grace

  Dad gets a letter from the cold house. They offer him a half-price discount for me, but I don’t want to go there. I promise him that I will change. I will. I promise. I am not going there, or anywhere like it, not ever. I am not one of those girls. I promise. I will make things better for them all.

  Twelve

  Then, there it is, a letter on the doormat, asking me to come for an interview at Cambridge University. There will be no calorie counters and wall charts and no toffee pudding if I don’t want it. Of course, nobody is really happy for me. They would like to be, I am sure, because they are always proud of me, but instead they look at me and then they feign a smile while thinking, ‘You’re not going anywhere.’ I know what they think.

  They let me go on the train on my own to Cambridge, well thank you so much. I am nineteen. I could have a job, or children, or be married, so thank you so much for letting me go on the train on my own.

  It’s cold and dark in Cambridge and I haven’t eaten all day because the train has upset my routine. I am quite nervous, anyway, so I think it is best not to eat at all. But now I have churning tummy pain – big, wide, stretching pains which are full of nothingness. It feels like my stomach is screwing itself up. There is no cottage cheese here, and I can’t see any sign of a shop which is open near the college. I stand in my temporary Cambridge room and try and imagine it as my real one. There is no carpet and so I sit on the bed shivering. I can’t get the pains out of me, so I decide I have to find some food. There is a pub near the entrance where I came in, so I walk over there on my own. I am not used to going out. I am sure people are staring. There is a bar and lots of people laughing. The barman smiles at me. Suddenly I order a Diet Coke and a jacket potato with tuna mayonnaise. I almost don’t mean to say it; it just falls out my mouth. It arrives on a plate bigger than I can ever remember eating from. The tastes are so strong – the creamy mayonnaise is thick and gloopy and the jac
ket potato is boiling hot. I can feel the hot stuff moving inside me through my throat, and then my chest, and down into my stomach. My stomach makes confused noises and the pain is digging. The barman keeps watching me. He must know. He comes over and makes small talk. I want him to shut-up-and-leave-me-alone. Maybe he is attractive? I have no idea. I don’t think about that any more. Not at all. He tells me that they serve lunch too. I wonder if he can tell. He must be able to tell. Thank you, no thank you. One jacket potato will keep me going for a long time.

  I can’t sleep in the cold, hard room. I read my notes and reread them. I toss and turn. I need the toilet, but am too scared to go down the stone steps to find one. There are some boys playing music. I don’t know them and I don’t want them to see me or hear me or even know I exist. I set the alarm early because I need to get up to do my exercises, especially after the jacket potato. So I get up at 5 a.m. and do my press-ups on the hard concrete floor.

  In the morning I go to the breakfast hall. I stand in a long line of people with trays full of eggs and beans and toast and cereal and sausages – for breakfast! My eyes dart around the room looking for something I can manage. I am relieved to see a diet yoghurt and an apple. I sit down in the hall at the end of a long table, but I don’t want to talk to anyone so I don’t make eye contact or smile. I finish quickly and walk away leaving the others to their second helpings.

  I don’t like the other candidates in the waiting room because they are all focused and nervous. I am convinced they must be better than me, trained by their schools and their parents for success, so I am glad when the interviewers call me into the interview room, which has a real fire. I am happy about the fire because of the cold inside me. I am also glad that the interviewers are men. I don’t think they even notice that I look different, and I have put on lots of layers so it is harder to tell. It hurts my back and my bottom sitting in the interview, everything is hard and unforgiving. I answer the questions, but I know that I could do better. When I am this cold and this stiff I can’t seem to reach for things to say. The men are very friendly and they don’t really ask me anything difficult, which is nice of them. They read my essays and they liked them. They liked my writing, so I like them.

  ‘What kind of thing do you do socially?’

  I tell them I love acting. I love being on stage. They smile at me. Do they know? Did someone tell them?

  I have a new best friend now. Somebody who picks me up in her car and takes me to the pub. (I am not allowed to drive because doctors and families and friends say that I am too weak. I disagree. I am strong.) My friend is bored too; she has taken a year off from university and so she is pleased that she has got me for company. She doesn’t make a fuss about my eating situation. In fact, she tells me that she always feels fat. It makes me a bit jealous and I worry that she isn’t eating enough, but at least I don’t think I’m such a failure. She seems to eat OK when I see her, so that makes me feel better. I am glad she takes me to the pub. It makes me seem more normal. I have got someone to drink my Diet Cokes with. The only thing that bothers me is the noise. All the people in the pub shout and scream above each other. They have so much energy, they make jokes, they laugh too loudly and I have to join in. It hurts my head and I feel drowned. Sometimes the drowning helps, because it means that I have some head space when I am not thinking about the next thing I have to eat. I get down to 95 per cent food thoughts, and the 5 per cent relief is like a cool slither of air. I still get excited when my friend tells me she is taking me home because I can think about being able to eat my afternoon snack, which makes me calmer. The pub is freezing and my mouth is too cold to speak.

  Sometimes we drive around because my friend gets bored sitting in the same place all day. We pick up another girl and they sit in the front playing their favourite music loud, singing and laughing along, and it hurts my ears. I can hear better since I stopped eating; it is amplified, so the music makes me want to be sick. I am cold in the back of the car and I don’t want to open my mouth in case some heat escapes. I pack myself up by folding my arms under my armpits and pulling my knees up to my chin. I feel like a tight ball of ice as I huddle in the back, waiting until I am taken home. I don’t want to tell anyone that I am feeling like this. They will only shut me away in a room and I will have lost. It is better to be out. I don’t like to lounge around all day as if I am sad.

  I go to my friend’s house most days too, just to get some space and to get some air. Her family are grown-up, they sit around chatting and drinking wine. Today they had smoked salmon on brown bread with butter (little triangles arranged beautifully on big, white, solid plates). I ate several little triangles. All my rules were broken; snapped in two. I have never eaten smoked salmon before because mostly, in my family, we have traditional northern food, or we have frozen meals, not things like smoked salmon. I don’t know why I am able to eat the smoked salmon; I can’t explain it. I wouldn’t eat it at home. I won’t feel good tomorrow, I will wake up in a panic and I will keep running to the scales, but I let myself, just this once, without knowing why.

  I need to get away like that. Away from my family, who sit on the sofas every Friday night and eat newspaper-wrapped fish and chips and mushy peas and cans of full-fat Pepsi. All I can think about when they do that is about how I want to break out of it, break out of the growing-up house. All I want is to find my own space, go to Cambridge and be a success. I grind my teeth and I pull a face and I think about how I should be somewhere else. This isn’t right any more. I don’t know where that came from; where this longing grew up, but I know I have always felt different from everyone else, eating their fish and chips on the sofas.

  I have to go to my best friend’s birthday party at a pizza restaurant. I haven’t been to a party in a while. I haven’t been to a restaurant either. People round the table watch me – staring at my plate, my mouth, my fork and at my reactions. They are shocked that I know how to eat, but of course I do! It’s just that usually I eat on my own so they don’t see me do it. I don’t like being watched. They eat pizza and drink wine and I have salad. I have a huge salad with beans and mayonnaise and pasta. As I take in every mouthful I try to work out the calories in my head. Usually I have all the labels in front of me, but here there is nothing, no information. I am glad I didn’t eat anything else today. I finish my plate and I feel like there is a huge hole. I don’t know if I feel full, empty or hungry. I just can’t believe I have come to the end of the plate. I start to panic. I think I need more. I think I want more. I knew that this would happen. So I go to the salad bar and I get some more. People look at me. They tell me, ‘Your salad looks so appetizing.’

  They actually want to try some. All of sudden, there are other people’s forks in my salad and they are commenting on it and eating the best bits. Maybe they are trying to make things normal but I want them to get back to eating their own doughy-smelling pizza.

  Eat your pizza, leave me alone.

  I sit perfectly still while they eat their desserts. I wish I had the strength and power to throw it all up.

  Perception

  I can barely see my anorexic self in my head now. I look inside my memories for clues as to how I then appeared to the outside world. All I can see are people’s dropped mouths and uncomfortable faces looking back at me, around a pizza restaurant table, in a clothes shop, on the street, trying to conceal their true feelings. I can imagine the shape they saw, hauntingly thin, drawn, hollow – certainly not the same shape I perceived myself. I try to figure out how I saw my body – what it really looked like to me, how it appeared to me then. There are few photos of me at the worst time – at the lowest weight. Like my feelings, which have been whitewashed out of my memory, the brutal photos have been destroyed, as if no one wanted to admit me to any part of history.

  Such a different, and yet similar, body lies before me now. I walk along the edge of the sea on a windy summer’s day. I look down and out at my shadow, which is outlined in the sand, blown up, distorted and fuzzy-
edged. I pull my hands into my sides and my body becomes an amorphous mass, this black shape lying in front of me. I move my arms up and out to the sides, waving them in the air and my trunk is suddenly smaller, lesser, lighter, freer. My shadow shows up the object of me – I am there on a second substance, which is fickle, and as I turn, it moves. There is no light; there is no enlightenment here. There is only an insubstantial image, which moves with the water of the tide beneath my feet, and the wind, which blows my image into different shapes.

  I stand in front of a mirrored bathroom cabinet, where the two doors of the cabinet meet. My body is reflected half in one side and half in the other. I look at the whole and it makes me shrink. I move my eyes from the shrunken image to the reality, shrunken image to reality and wonder just what the reality is. It is all about perception. The power of the mirror is only as strong as the person reflected in it.

  When an anorexic looks in the mirror, her own form looks large, rounded and curved. Her eyes sharpen on the other bodies around her while her interpretation of her own image is skewed. Others see her as thin – skeletal – but she struggles to understand their perspective. Two sets of eyes see the size of the body completely differently. She fears her own shape – it becomes, like a monstrous creation, the seat of all discomfort, pain and anxiety, while the idea of an alternative, thinner shape provides comfort, stability and reassurance. We translate our own shape and size through a myriad of other emotions and sensations internally, and end up with something removed from the starting point.