Thin Page 15

  Grace unpacks most of her cases. She makes the room nice and tidy, all the boxes are put away. The room is much bigger than her bedroom at home and so it feels empty, with most of her things packed into the huge cupboards. Everything is so much bigger than she had imagined it would be.

  Grace sits in another student’s room. There are special introductory meetings with people from the year above to make the new students feel comfortable. The two boys in charge hand around mugs of tea and chocolate digestives. Grace’s eyes widen as the plate makes its way around. Grace doesn’t eat biscuits. Everybody takes one (even the girls!). Grace quickly grabs a biscuit from the plate, just so that she doesn’t stand out. This is not what she had intended, her sort-of-a-plan to keep things in balance is not going to be easy. Some of the boys and girls drink bottles of beer. Grace sips her tea and thinks of a way to excuse herself.

  First-year Freshers also get a first-night welcome dinner, a formal occasion where everyone has to wear special black gowns. On the menu is a three-course meal including chocolate pudding, port, coffee and further chocolates. Grace swallows it all down to make sure that no one thinks that the thin girl has a problem. It is the strangest day, everything is out of place, off centre. It gives her a thumping head that night thinking about all the thousands of calories she has eaten just to fit in. She can’t sleep because she is busy trying to calculate the numbers, but it is impossible because she has never eaten some of those foods before, and she does not know their value.

  200 for bread and approximately 600 for the pudding and the chocolates and then there was some orange juice I drank earlier, plus breakfast and lunch … and the wine.

  The numbers end up so big that she loses count.

  First morning in college and things are out of focus. Grace is up early before the alarm, pacing the room and wondering when to go to the breakfast hall. A girl from along the corridor knocks on the door.

  ‘Hi, Gracie, you coming to breakfast?’

  ‘Yeh, sure, great.’

  Please like me. I’ll do whatever you want to do.

  In the breakfast hall there are people nervously chatting. Grace hopes that they won’t notice that she is having a different breakfast from the rest of them. She manages some cereal.

  Stop looking at me. I don’t eat fry-ups. They are disgusting. What is so strange about me? I ate the whole dinner last night, isn’t that good enough for you? I proved it, OK? There are just some things that I don’t eat, even though I am all better now. I don’t eat: chips, crisps, pizza, cheese, ice cream, any fast food, any fried food, pastries, butter, chocolate, sweets, puddings, red meat, Coke (unless Diet). I will never touch them, not unless I am out of control. I am just eating healthily. OK?

  Grace shuffles in the plastic seat. She can’t wait to leave the table and go back to her room to sit on her own and smoke a cigarette. She decides that this will be the last time, definitely, that she breaks her rules. People will just have to get used to it. She will mend it tomorrow, she will get things back on track. Not in a backwards way, though. She is certainly not ill any more, no way. No help required here.

  It is 6.30 a.m. Grace is awake. The noise is too loud to stay in bed – the noise in her head from her own inside voice, played on the wrong speed, the wrong RPM. It still hits her as soon as she wakes up. The rest of the college is silent. She senses the sleeping hung-over bodies in the rooms next to hers.

  Get out, out, out.

  She jumps out of bed and puts on her tracksuit and running shoes. She doesn’t open the curtains; it is dark outside. She creeps out of her room, as silently as she can, shuffles down the steps and runs towards the back gate of the college. It is a cold, frosted morning. Her breath hangs on the air in front of her. She keeps her head down and her footsteps light, as she skips her way out of the college grounds.

  Don’t hear me. Don’t see me. I’m not really here.

  She takes a big, huge, freeing breath. She loves her morning runs, not the running part (she hates that. It hurts. She struggles. She has never been a good runner, she has never had much physical strength) but the feeling at the end of it.

  I’ve escaped. I am out.

  She does not have the energy to go far, or fast, but as long as she keeps moving and pounding her feet on the gravel then things are OK. Things are in balance. She jogs along the back alley behind the college, across the road and she runs by the foggy river, then back along the main street. She keeps her head down under her hat so that no one spots her.

  Don’t spot me. Don’t think I’m strange, I’m not different. I’m fine. Perfectly normal to be running.

  She sneaks back into college and dashes to the bathroom to stand under a hot shower. No one has seen her. No one has woken up yet, and she is already ahead. She pulls on her clothes straight away, before she is dry, so that she cannot see or feel her body. She holds in her stomach.

  Yuk, fat, yuk.

  Grace moves around the room, tidying and moving pieces of paper from one side of the desk to the other. She keeps going, keeps moving. She doesn’t like to sit with herself. She is wet and cosy in her warm clothes. She needs to have something to eat, to stop her thinking about food any longer. She has bags of muesli (diet and sugar-free) stored in her special food cupboard. She pours herself a big bowl and covers it in skimmed milk. She sits in the armchair in the corner of the room and watches every mouthful from the bowl to the spoon and into her mouth. When she has finished, she pours some more. Never a full bowl, but half a bowl, to stop the ringing voices.

  The only person who sees her eating is the cleaning lady who comes into the room to collect the wastepaper bin.

  ‘’Morning, love. You OK today?’

  ‘Great. Fine. Thanks.’

  Grace isn’t one for chatter when she is eating. She wonders what the cleaning lady thinks about her, when every day, at an early hour, she is sitting in her chair all alone, eating her diet muesli. Grace imagines the dissenting voices of the whitecoats who would tell her that, ‘This is not normal behaviour. You could try eating with other people in college. What about just trying to eat a fry-up with bacon and sausages? Try and let go of your control. Why not just eat a little bit of fried bread?’

  Fat fat fat dripping off everything. No way. It’s fine not to eat those things. Leave me alone.

  Grace walks quickly to her lectures. She is always early and always turns up, unlike most people who don’t go to lectures because they aren’t compulsory. The other students on the course think that Grace is very controlled. They always say:

  ‘Grace will have done her essay on time.’

  ‘Grace is thin and toned.’

  ‘Grace will know where we are supposed to go.’

  ‘Grace eats nice and healthy.’

  Grace thinks they are right, but she wishes that they wouldn’t make a point of it. She has to work hard to get to the top again, and things are much more difficult here than they were at school. Everyone seems to be loud and clever and talkative. A lot of people spent time at schools where getting into Oxbridge was their only goal. They are very clever. Grace wonders if she really deserves to be here. She has to lock herself away at her desk and push really hard, late nights, early mornings. Better, much better, best.

  Grace turns twenty in her second week at Cambridge. It is a year on from the cold, crying nineteenth birthday. A year on from people leaving, Boyfriend leaving, weight drop, drop, dropping off. Most of the people in Grace’s year are only eighteen or nineteen. Many of them have been travelling and have done some amazing things in Third World countries. Grace can’t imagine what that must be like, to be away in another country, on your own; she can’t even see an image in her head. Some of the other students have come straight from school. All they can talk about is their A-level results, their school uniforms and their teachers. Nothing really fits with Grace’s story. No one has a story like hers, or at least not one that they are willing to share. Grace has to make up some stories to be normal and to explain things. />
  Story number one:

  ‘Hello. My name is Grace. I took a year off because I had glandular fever. I got it the week before I was supposed to go to university, can you believe it? I had my suitcases packed and I had bought pots and pans as well. I was really ill and so they said I shouldn’t do something as stressful as start university. I had a place somewhere else actually, but then I decided to rethink, so I am here now. I thought I should make the best of a bad situation. It took a few months to really recover and sometimes I feel weak because of the repercussions. I get ill sometimes because of it, it sort of hangs around. I am fine now, though.’

  Story number two:

  ‘Hello. My name is Grace. I come from the north-east of England (no, that is not Manchester). I’m studying English. It feels really strange, doesn’t it, to actually be here. Does it look like you thought it would? I imagined it differently. I kept reimagining it, making it look different ways inside. But we made it here, didn’t we? Are you like me? Are we the same, or similar? I am very friendly, just like you. I worked in a pub in my year off, just to get some money together and to have a break. I liked working behind a bar. I wanted to do something ‘real’, you know, explore what that was like, away from the studying and from the pressure. It’s great fun to be here, isn’t it?’

  Story number three: (reserved for best friends or very drunken conversations) ‘Hello. My name is Grace. I know you a bit better now and I think we might be proper friends. But you can’t really know me unless I tell you about why I really had a year off. I had a problem with food and the doctors said that I was anorexic. That’s why I have got so many different sizes of clothes in my wardrobe. Some of them don’t fit any more. Anyway, I’m fine now, but that’s why I might be a bit quiet sometimes. It was only a small problem. I got over it very quickly. It never got that bad, not to a hospitalization level, anyway. I worked it out all on my own. Nobody really helped me much, but I think it is better that way. Anyway, let’s not talk about it. Let’s go out and have some fun. It’s all over now and I’m a normal student. Over. Finished.’

  Grace worries that she has let the true story slip through too many times. She told her new best friends and they seemed to be very understanding. They both went to boarding school and said there were lots of people there who had anorexia and bulimia. Grace’s school was different from theirs, so different – at her school there were more pregnant sixteen-year-old girls than skinny intellectual ones – it wasn’t cool to be that way.

  Grace tells a few other people the real story. She doesn’t mean to. It is dark and drunken in the college bar and she doesn’t really know what to say. It fills awkward silences with strange people. At least it is an interesting story, rather than the other ones about where she comes from, and her northern state school, which seem to be boring in comparison to everyone else’s. Anyway, there is not much else she can say about herself. Anorexia has been her life and the things before it seem somewhat irrelevant now.

  She wakes up the day after the night in the college bar and shouts at herself. She decides that it is best to just avoid those people, and hopes that they were too drunk to remember, anyway. It is now possible, however, that everyone knows, and that they will see her altogether differently.

  Stupid girl. I wasn’t meant to let it out. Not to anyone. It was going to be a new me.

  Grace decides that she shouldn’t talk to anyone in much detail again, but the story seems to drip out of her, like she can’t contain it. She is still overflowing with it.

  Stop it up.

  Story number four:

  ‘I used to have a boyfriend. We were together for two years and I loved him. We were a perfect couple, but then he went off with someone else. No, no, I’m not sure why. We were just very different. I was desperate to get away from the place where we grew up and he wanted to stay there. I just feel like being single now. It’s more fun. I think a boyfriend might get in the way.

  ‘I am sort of seeing this boy at college, but it has to be a secret. We were in the bar and I was dancing on a chair, and I stared at him until he noticed me. I can do that – I can get a reaction if I try hard enough. But he isn’t my boyfriend because he has a girlfriend at home, and she’s a model. I don’t know why I picked a boy like that to get obsessed with, but I did. Now I keep staring at him all the time. I have seen the pictures of his model girlfriend who is very thin and pretty, but I think that means that I need to be thin and pretty because he wants to see me, too. I keep thinking about the size and shape of my growing thighs and how I must make sure they look the best, so that he will still like me. I really want him to like me, because that makes me feel nice … nicer.’

  Grace’s stories are mixed up. She can’t remember which bits she has told to which person and which act she has to put on for whom. It is better to keep a bit of a distance, she decides. It is best to start a new chapter and leave the old ones at the back of her memory – just let them slip away. It is easier to be friendly, it is easier to go to the college bar and join in with the drunken nights, and leave the old Grace behind and have a sort-of-fun time. It just takes a bit of time to learn how to answer people’s questions. Sometimes it is better not to say anything, not to give too much away, but that is hard, when you feel like it needs to come out.

  Grace likes the attention from the boys in college. It makes her forget herself. It gives her a nice feeling when they like her. Some people don’t like this behaviour, though. The girls in the year above don’t want her getting the attention. They write about her in the college gossip magazine. They call her a ‘Dis-Grace’ because they think she has been flirting with some boys in their year. The girls think that they are very funny, coining such an apt phrase. Clever Cambridge students. Grace doesn’t think it is funny. She tries to imagine what Mum might say if she told her about their attacking words (which she wouldn’t, because she wouldn’t want Mum to think that she wasn’t having a nice time): ‘They’re just jealous.’

  But it doesn’t seem to help. Grace sits in her room and cries. She is supposed to go for mince pies and wine at the College President’s rooms.

  Everyone will know. Everyone hates me. They are all laughing and bitching about me. Having secret whispers behind my back. I don’t understand what I have done wrong. I don’t know what I am supposed to say to make it better.

  Grace decides not to go to the drinks party. She doesn’t know how to react. She feels like shouting out: ‘I have had anorexia, and people have been most worried that I will get even thinner and die, if they are too nasty to me.’

  Over the last year or so people have been scared of Grace, and have not known what to say to her.

  ‘Weirdo.’

  ‘Thin-girl.’

  ‘Freak.’

  They weren’t able to talk to her because it made them uncomfortable. They didn’t understand what she was doing, and so they stayed away and kept quiet. Now it seems that everyone talks to her. They say what they like, and act exactly how they want to, because anorexia is no longer a shield. Grace decides to hide in her room. She decides that she will not be the sociable, drunken, college person that she thought she should be, because that route has not been successful. She will stay away, so they can’t find out any more about her and they can’t hurt her. She will just be a different Grace. A quiet Grace; a Grace that no one can write things about. She decides that this is a better strategy because it means that she won’t have to go to so many parties and drink creamy cocktails and eat student meals. It will be better if she sits at her desk, and works hard at reading all the plays of Shakespeare, and tries to be the best, and eats her WeightWatchers’ soup.

  Eighteen

  Grace smiles at her friend and says goodbye, hazy-drunk, at the door of her college room. She walks in and puts her coat on the bed. She sits down at the edge of the bed and hurriedly pulls off her shoes. She walks to the bathroom and shuts the door. She looks in the mirror and sighs. She washes her hands under the cold tap, flicking off the excess wa
ter. She takes her hands behind her head and pulls her hair back, twisting it away from her face. She takes the bobble from her wrist and ties the hair loosely up. She looks in the mirror again.

  Right, Grace. This has to be done.

  Grace walks towards the toilet. She leans over the toilet, facing the bowl, legs slightly bent. She places her hand at the edge of her mouth. She puts the first two fingers of her right hand into her mouth until she feels the back of her mouth, and then the throat, pushing down on her tongue and sliding and inching the fingers back. She repeats this a couple of times, removing them as she coughs, splutters and retches. After a few attempts of pushing the fingers down into the base of her throat, she jerks and pulls her fingers out, as the sick bursts out of her mouth. She then quickly sticks her fingers back down her throat, she coughs and more sick comes up. She takes a breath and wipes her mouth. She walks to the mirror and looks at her face.

  Come on, Grace, just one more time. That will be enough. See how much better you feel already.

  She walks back to the toilet, bends over, left hand on left thigh, right fingers in the mouth and throat. She repeats the action until there is coughing and retching and the sick isn’t coming out with such force. She walks back to the mirror. There are tears running down her blotchy face. She takes her shaky and reddened, tooth-marked hand and picks up a glass by the sink. She fills it with cold water. She drinks, swirling the water around her mouth and her sore, aching throat and spits it into the sink before taking a gulp. She walks over to the toilet and grabs some toilet roll to wipe the seat, inside and out. Then she looks at the sick in the toilet as if to measure the volume capacity, and pulls the chain. Next she picks up some bleach and pours it down the toilet. Another flush and it is all gone. Then she sprays the room with air freshener. She leaves the bathroom and immediately returns, lifting up the toilet lid and checking under the rim, just to be safe. She then walks to the sink and looks in the mirror above it. She cries a few tears and watches them run down her face. She picks up her toothbrush, puts a large blob of toothpaste on it and brushes her teeth. She washes her mouth out with sharp, burning, minty mouthwash and sighs.