Thin Read online

  ‘It’s because they’re jealous,’ Mum says.

  Jealous of what? Grace thinks.

  How can she be popular? What can she do to make them like her? There must be something she can do to get them to talk to her. There are a couple of girls she is obsessed with. The pretty ones who stand out, who seem like they are always surrounded by the most popular people and who smoke on the school bus and go out and rebel. She stares at them, completely transfixed. She knows where they live and what they wear and they probably don’t even know her name. She would do anything to be like them. Just anything. Everything would be OK if they accepted her. She hears about their adventures – drinking at the weekends, getting their stomachs pumped, going to concerts, hanging out with boys from the year above. She harbours her desires secretly, folds them inside her tummy, away from everything.

  Thirteen: Grace sits at her wooden, stale varnish-smelling desk in a boring geography lesson. The teacher is talking about the movement and collision of tectonic plates. Grace is thinking about the nature of time, and how she can’t seem to get a grasp on it. She repeats to herself over and over in her head, ‘Remember this moment, no, remember this moment, no, this moment.’

  She feels like time is pulsing beneath her and inside her and yet she can’t understand how it works. She can’t seem to find herself in the present; she is always ahead of it. She is not speaking or acting or even thinking in it. She can’t understand it; it makes no sense.

  Fourteen: Grace is always the last girl in the line to be picked when the class has to play games in PE lessons. She doesn’t really care because she doesn’t like things like that. She is not good at sport. She doesn’t much see the point of it either. She is not interested in running or physical body activities. And she certainly doesn’t want to win at something she can’t do properly.

  Food is a practicality; eating is simply something you do every day. Grace never really thinks about it. Occasionally, when friends talk about their weight, she thinks about how she has grown a bit, that she is no longer the shape that she used to be. But change has been quite exciting: there was a classroom competition of armpit hair, then a race to start your period, watching each other’s growing breasts to guess who might have started early.

  As Grace catches up with some of the early developers she feels such pride as she stands in the bathroom after school on her fourteenth birthday and her period finally arrives. She wants to tell all her friends, let them know, but she decides not to and feels a special power in her secret achievement.

  Grace’s new Best Friend has had her periods for years. She is way ahead of the rest of the girls in all respects. She is the cleverest person. She writes essays and they are read out in front of the class. It’s really hard to catch up with her. Things at the big comprehensive are much more complicated. Grace has to push, push, push to try and compete with Best Friend and she struggles. Best Friend is busy dieting and wearing red lipstick and short black dresses, while Grace is still grappling with how to use a tampon. Best Friend is always dieting. She has one bar of chocolate and a Diet Coke for her lunch and she never eats breakfast. At least, that is what she says. Grace tries it; she eats a bread roll for lunch with no butter, nothing else. It feels strange – the emptiness in her stomach – but she is not sure what it means. She stands outside the classroom, ready for the lesson after lunch. She wants to tell people how she hasn’t eaten anything much, but for some reason it feels better to keep it inside.

  Best Friend tells Grace that she sometimes faints because she doesn’t eat. Grace doesn’t get it. Best Friend is always crying and angry. Grace doesn’t think it makes sense. Why wouldn’t she just eat some more? Grace doesn’t really think about diets or food or anything like that.

  Grace goes to Best Friend’s house and Best Friend buys her a chip buttie. Grace is full so she decides not to eat it all. Best Friend storms into a rage and tells Grace that she is a really bad person.

  ‘Think of all the people in Ethiopia!’

  Best Friend doesn’t speak to Grace for the rest of the night. Grace sits on the bed and reads magazines and waits to be spoken to. She goes over and over things in her head but daren’t talk to Best Friend about any of them. She doesn’t like confrontation or angry voices. All she wants is for people to like her, and she will do just about anything for that.

  Fifteen: Grace doesn’t like the fighting and the dieting and the intensity of things with Best Friend. So she decides to make friends with a group of girls who go out into town on Friday nights. They sit by the river and drink plastic bottles of strong, sweet cider. They dance and dance and drink and drink. It is what she has always wanted to do. She is even hanging out in the same places as the girls she used to stare at, and they actually speak to her! She stands, with her dyed black hair, in her black DM boots, which she has decorated with Tippex, her blue vintage velvet jacket and she pulls at her short skirt. She watches the world spin around her as she stands at the back of the rowing club on the river and lets a boy find his way up her top. The kissing is full and intrusive. She can hardly breathe as he takes over her mouth. She imagines telling people about her latest kissing story. Her head floats away.

  Her growth halts – she is shaped. Her fat cells are ready to shift and move into this new body. She is small and has small curves. The excitement fades. She doesn’t think about whether she likes her body. She dresses it to fit in, and allows boys to explore what she hasn’t even begun to discover herself. One by one they encroach upon her space and she smiles, laughing at her rebelliousness, without considering if she likes it.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she stutters.

  Sixteen: Grace is nice and controlled. Things are organized and ordered and she keeps everything to time. She always does her homework and she doesn’t get distracted. When she says she is getting up to do something, then she is getting up to do it. Nothing gets in her way. Success is everything. She likes to arrange things, and people. Some of her friends come round and play with her little brother and sisters. They do headstands on the carpet in the living room and play Guess Who? Grace thinks that they are terribly immature. They make her angry. Can’t they be serious, just for a few minutes? Grace does well in her GCSEs. All As and A*s. She is acknowledged. She has achieved. It must continue.

  Grace goes out with one of the most popular boys in the year. She stands in the playground and imagines the teachers looking at her and thinking, ‘What is a nice girl like that doing with a boy like him?’

  She is pleased by the show they have put on. They must be talking about her now.

  Seventeen: An older boy who actually has a car drives Grace home from school. She hopes that someone will spot her and think that she is cool, or better than they perceived. He asks her, ‘What kind of music do you like?’

  And she thinks to herself, What answer does he want me to give him? What kind of music does he like? She scrambles through her head to think of something correct and impressive to say, and instead she replies, ‘Oh, you know, everything really. What do you like?’

  And then she feels useless, and can’t even listen to his response, because she is thinking, INXS, INXS, that’s who I like.

  Eighteen: Grace’s eighteenth birthday is the best birthday ever. She drinks champagne with Mum and Dad in the morning and when she gets to school her friends have set up a birthday banner and a table of presents in the sixth-form area. After school Grace has a special takeaway pizza for tea, then she goes to the pub in the evening and orders her first officially allowed alcoholic drink. She is pleased that she is one of the first in the year to turn eighteen, she prefers it that way – being older, being first.

  There is change. All of a sudden people are talking about university applications, the end of school and moving away. The stability of family and surroundings are about to become a part of the past. She is going to have to move on – go it alone. She struggles to imagine this new position; she curls up, digging her nails into her forehead and searching for a reply to t
ell herself it will be all right. She finds none; it is too intangible. She tries to imagine a place, a room, a lecture, something to make this space of university into something she can hold on to. She lies in bed, alone and crying. It is dark, and the world is asleep. She feels the fuzz of tiredness, and can no longer tell if she has already fallen asleep or has been conscious the whole time. She feels the grip of illness, a thumping headache, a sore throat; she holds her breath.

  The doctors take a while to find out what is wrong. But when they tell her, she feels relieved because there is something real – something she can feel and explain – she has got glandular fever. Everyone is very sympathetic. She has a lot of time alone, lying down, watching endless daytime TV, and starts to feel differently about herself. She is not hungry and her throat is too sore to swallow so she can only eat half a piece of toast a day. The days are long and empty. Her head spins with thoughts.

  I can’t do my work. I’m going to get behind. This is my final year of school. I need to get the best marks. I can maybe even get all As. I can, if I try. But not if I’m ill, lying here. I might fail.

  She lies on the sofa. Mum strokes her head and soothes her and everything feels a bit better. She senses an isolation she has never experienced before, and she quite likes the peace. A friend comes round and puts some music on – loud on the hi-fi. Grace wants her to leave, she needs her own space and the friend is getting in the way of her carefully organized routine.

  It is strange when she goes back into school six weeks later. She decides to pick up some notes, so she can catch up with the lessons she has missed. It feels like her first day all over again. Her head of year meets her in the corridor. She tells him that she is feeling better, but she is shaking, her legs are shaking after the three-minute walk up the hill from her house. He tells her to go home and get better before coming back. The corridors are empty; everyone is in lessons. She thought it would be better that way, so that she wouldn’t have to see anyone. Then, all of a sudden, it is break time and people stream towards her; it is noisy and bustling. She feels the tremor of panic. They all carried on as normal without her, but things don’t feel normal now. She goes home and cries. Home feels small and claustrophobic, after six weeks on the sofa in the silence of the chatter of daytime TV.

  Grace goes to a party and feels a bit left out. She has changed.

  ‘You’ve lost weight, Grace,’ one girl remarks.

  Grace has never really been told that before, it hasn’t been a point of interest. But she sees the light in the girl’s eye and it feels like a real compliment.

  Back at school a second time and it is mock A-level exams. Grace is quite often the best girl in the class. She smiles as the teachers hand back her marked exam papers, and they smile at her. The top girl. Top marks. Best. They say to her, ‘You can do it, easy.’ ‘We know that you’ll succeed.’

  It is a bit embarrassing always being at the top. Grace sometimes thinks that she would rather be a bit more like the other girls, so as not to be envied or marked out for her difference. She covers her success as much as she can, and bows her head so that no one thinks she is being arrogant. No one likes a clever girl, not really, and especially not one who people describe as pretty, too. The labels feel wrong. It means that she is constantly judged.

  ‘It’s only her make-up.’

  ‘Her figure isn’t that nice.’

  She pretends that it is paranoia, that they aren’t staring and commenting, but she feels the heat on her forehead and a sudden consciousness of the movement of her feet, trailing behind her, as she head-down-walks across the sixth-form room carpet.

  Succeed. Success. Succeed. Get away from the judges. Leave it behind.

  What if I am poorly and alone and hurting and there is no one to hold my hand and look after me? I want my mum and dad to tell me it’s all right. I am hurting and aching all over and I need my mum. I don’t want to go to university. I don’t want to go away.

  She eventually drifts into sleep. She is not as strong as you think. She is not the leader you thought she was. She has skipped childhood to win the race, and now she feels more like a child than ever.

  Two

  Grace looks at herself in the reflection of the glass-paned double doors between the kitchen and the playroom of her growing-up house. In the reflection she can see her new pinstripe trousers, which she bought on a shopping spree for her eighteenth birthday. The material is thick, rough and wintry and it itches at her skin. The trousers taper in at the bottom, and with them, she wears some silver shoes, which have a big chunky heel. She bought them for school, for the sixth form, because sixth form means fewer rules, and you are allowed to wear heels of some sort. Grace doesn’t like the rules because there is always the fear that she might break one, and that isn’t something she wants to do.

  ‘Get your blazer back on,’ the teachers shout at her. ‘Take that lipstick off.’ She shudders inside, but smiles on the outside, because it is not a good thing to show that you are affected or worried by being told off, but she is, deeply.

  After years of wishing for it, being eighteen is strange. Everyone around her makes it into a big deal, a defining moment. Grace is no longer growing up, but a ‘grown-up’ – able to do things and firmly in control.

  In the thick glass reflection, Grace can see her smart outfit. She is ready to go out to town. She is dressed up, make-up layered thick. She is wearing a gold-coloured polo-neck jumper with short sleeves, which is made of a stretchy sort of material. Grace plays with it; she stretches the sleeves about, pulling them down her arms. She lifts her foot off the floor and brings her knee up so that she is standing on one leg and looking at the other one in the glass. She stops. She tilts her head. She looks at the thick material at the top of her trousers, which is bunching up, and she observes the shape of small rolls of flesh at the top of her thigh, squashing beneath the fabric. She looks again into the thick glass of the double doors. Her image is criss-crossed by the wood framing and she says out loud, ‘Do you think I need to lose some weight?’

  She shows Mum the tight trousers. Mum gives a semi-smile. ‘Oh love, you don’t need to. Aren’t you funny!’

  Grace goes out for the evening and she has some drinks with her friends, laughing, joking; having fun. She eats some chips as she stands in the market place in the long queue and waits for a taxi home with all the drunken people, and she says goodbye to her friends and she comes home, just like normal.

  Wolf whistles from the builders in the car park. Mr Driving Examiner smirks. ‘Someone is popular, aren’t they?’

  Grace feigns a smile and pulls down her smart black skirt to cover more of her legs, which are semi-masked under her black tights. They drive. Grace completes the manoeuvres. Success. Succeed. Finish.

  Get it right, Grace. Get it right. Got to pass first time to make it. Got to be the best. Pass the driving test and get back to revision. A levels. Everything is dependent on these results. There is no chance of a failure. It is just not possible. Get it right, Grace. Come on. Get it right.

  ‘So, what are you going to do at university?’ Mr Driving Examiner turns his head.

  ‘Sorry?’ Grace isn’t prepared for him to actually speak to her.

  ‘At university, what are you going to study?’ Mr Driving Examiner repeats as he relaxes back into his seat.

  ‘Drama,’ Grace tells him. ‘I want to be an actress.’

  ‘Very nice.’ Mr Driving Examiner smiles. ‘So are you going to be like Sharon Stone in that film?’

  Grace giggles nervously. Unsure what to do with the wolf whistles and the flirtatious comments.

  She gets full marks on the over-prepared Highway Code, recited and recited to perfect precision.

  ‘I am pleased to say that you have passed your driving test.’

  Grace takes the piece of paper from Mr Driving Examiner and counts up the number of minor errors she made (she definitely does not like errors, mistakes, failures – however they want to phrase it). She will not
reveal that information to anyone, thank you very much.

  She goes home and runs down the drive waving the Pass piece of paper in her hands. Another thing achieved. Smiling faces at her first-time success and best of all, no failure – an impossible consideration.

  Grace sits in the driving seat, with her boyfriend beside her, in Dad’s car. It feels wrong.

  ‘I’m scared.’

  Boyfriend laughs.

  ‘I don’t think I can do it. I don’t remember what to do. I keep having these dreams about the car going out of control. The brakes won’t work. I can’t get into the parking spaces. I can’t make that kind of a judgement. What if I get it wrong? What if I make a mistake and I crash or I hit someone’s car? I couldn’t handle it. I can see it happening in my head. People are hooting their horns, shouting at me, and I’m just sitting there, not even remembering which pedal is which.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to drive. Do you want me to?’ Boyfriend asks.

  ‘I’ll be fine. I’ll be OK. I’ve just got to do it.’

  Grace starts the car. Her foot is vibrating, her whole leg is shaking, all the way up to the top. She starts to drive, hesitantly, tensed-up and terrified of making a mistake.

  Got to keep driving, Grace. Just forget the fears. Eating you up, aren’t they? Feel like a failure for the deep white scratch you made on the side of the red car. Misjudged the width, backing into the drive, didn’t you? Can’t do anything, can you? No good. Not even after all those months of lessons and practice. Hear that screech of the side of the car against the concrete wall. Ouch. Hear it over and over again.

  Things seem strange, don’t they? Not quite right. This is the one chance you have to shape the future. Everything is changeable, on the edge. Have a daydream. Go on. Sit and think of something. Something to help make things better, more bearable.

  Got to do well. Got to get top marks. Got to be pretty. Got to have best friends. Got to be popular. Got to go to the best university. Got to be the best in class. Got to keep the boyfriend.