Thin Read online

  ‘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.

  Fourteen

  ‘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 hav
e 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.

  Fifteen

  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.

  There is no kitchen here and no skimmed milk, and no scales to weigh out my portions. We go to the bar for breakfast, but because we are late we have missed it, so my friend orders an orange juice and I order a Coke. I daren’t ask for a Diet Coke in case they don’t understand, or in case they look at me strangely, which I wouldn’t like.

  It is easy to get drunk here. There are bars full of cocktails and happy hours and the alcoholic lemonade is still jumping on my tongue. It makes it easier if you are drunk to deal with the bread, chips, fried things and kebabs. I would never touch these kinds of foods at home but for some inexplicable reason I can here. It doesn’t feel real, it is like I am sleepwalking through every day. We go out, my friend and I, on an organized bar crawl. In one of the pubs we have to stand in a line and down shots of strange spirits one by one and play party games. In the darkness/drunkenness, I manage to throw my drink over my shoulder on to the floor behind me. I can’t drink it when I am forced like that. As people come close to me, I start to panic.

  Don’t make me. Don’t make me. Get out, get out.

  The music is loud and it hurts my head. The people are too noisy and too close to my skin.

  It is hard when you are lying by the pool and there are hours until dinnertime. Other people are reading books and listening to Walkmans and falling asleep. I am sitting up, lying down, jumping in the pool, walking up to the room, sighing, coming back to the pool, getting hot and feeling like I need to put something in my mouth to stop the over-thinking. I walk to the shop and buy some fruit sweets. I eat the whole packet by the pool, frantically chewing, and then smoke one cigarette after another and pretend to rest. Nothing rests in me – everything moves and flips and jumps and spins and does cartwheels and then dives and lurches.

  When I speak to my friend, I cry, but only once, because now I have force-fed myself a bit everything must be better. I have a tan and I am a bit fatter. I must definitely be fatter, and so they will all be pleased with me.

  After the eating and drinking holiday (I am not sure how I just did that), I feel like I must be a lot bigger. With every forkful I felt myself grow and widen. I get home to Mum and Dad but they don’t seem to think that I have been transformed. I have been eating to make them feel better because they were feeling sad about things, but it doesn’t seem to have any immediate effect. I am sure the whitecoats have told them to think that I am always deceiving them, which is not necessarily my intention.

  I ask my dad for a lift to town to see my friends, and to half-listen to their conversations. I walk into the pub and people seem happy to see me. I think they are shocked when I order a Bacardi Breezer. They are all staring at me.

  It’s just a drink, or two, or three. Yes, I have got fatter, thanks for commenting on how well I look.

  I block my ears and float around. I am not going backwards. I am going forwards, and so that means lots of drinking, dancing and forgetting things because they are all too strange and blurry to cope with.

  I am glad that they let me work in the pub now. I spend most of my time there, eating thick, salty, full-flavoured crisps and drinking alcopops and going out with students who are mad and drunk and fun-out-of-control. I serve the hungry customers with hot food from under the hot plate. I am shaking with the weight of the plates piled high with beef and potatoes and Yorkshire puddings and vegetables and gravy. I am walking through the hot, smelly pub and my arms are straining as I carry the steaming plates to the beer-filled tables, in my thick black woollen tights under my thick black trousers. I like feeding people. At the end of the lunchtime rush, I get to sit down and eat my food with the rest of the staff. They get excited about the free Sunday lunch and pile their plates high, talking about the rich lamb and thick gravy. I take a big plate of salad with tablespoons of pickle. I like the taste of the pickle – a strong taste on my tongue. This is against the rules, because salad is not part of the staff meal deal at the pub, but no one dares tell me because they are so pleased that I am eating something. I can see them, though; they just can’t help looking at my green and brown plate.

  I asked my GP to write a letter saying that going to work would be good for my health. I convinced him that I needed something to do to make me socialize and feel a part of teenage life, instead of sitting in front of the TV on my own all day. He didn’t seem to know that much about eating disorders. He seemed a bit embarrassed so I was too. He has been my GP ever since I was a little girl when I had chicken pox and measles and running noses; normal illnesses he could solve with antibiotics and sugary medicine. I don’t think he quite understands why I can’t eat. I mu
st be strange if even he thinks that. I thought he would understand all medical things but, for some reason, I think this one is different. I think it is because I am a girl and he thinks that this is an illness that little girls get, and he is not a girl, and he doesn’t seem to understand it simply because of that.

  Sixteen

  Pretty girls, I see them everywhere. Ones that other people may have missed because they only cross the eye for a second, but I take them all in. Things like that don’t blend in for me. I see it all. Everything pricks me hard. There are girls sipping white wine, with beery boyfriends on their arms, and they have perfect seamless figures. I watch their thighs, and there is no dimpling or wobbling, their legs seem to be welded apart, they don’t rub together as they walk. They are all taller and thinner than me. I watch them on the streets, in the pub, the shops, the magazines, and I wonder if they were born that way. Are they natural or are they shutting themselves up in the bathroom and flushing their insides down the toilet? Maybe they are all at it in secret, and are trying to get me to stop so that they can win and be better and slimmer and neat-edged. This is what I am thinking every time I have to eat more. It makes it hard, but I am trying to get back to normality.

  People look at me with different eyes now that I am a bit bigger, a bit more normal-shaped. Suddenly, they almost see me as I was before, even though I am no longer the same. I have small curves, which I can just about grab in my hands and squash – I spent a long time trying to get rid of this. Strangers have stopped staring in the same way. I am almost acceptable now that I am sevenish stone. People are not sure of their reactions. They look at each other, and then at me, and then they squint their eyes as if they are trying to figure me out. So I keep quiet. I merge into the background. I take deep breaths before I feel sure enough to speak. I want to submerge, hold back and listen like a little body should.