by Julia Bell
I’m starving but I don’t want to tell her. I reckon the sooner I get thin, the sooner she’ll get more food in, and when she goes upstairs to have a bath I get on the exercise bike. It’s hot and I have to take my sweater off. I close my eyes and imagine that I’m in Wipeout. I’m zooming around the racetrack as I peddle, faster and faster, zipping around all the sharp corners until the wheels starts to squeak and my heart pounds.
I’m dizzy when I stop, and have to lie on the sofa, my lungs hurting. I can hear the thud of blood in my ears, the grind of the central heating, the hum of the fridge in the kitchen. It’s like I’m waiting for everything to explode.
I dream about her. She’s dancing, she’s happy, the same as the photograph that Lisa keeps in the salon, turning around and around, her arms outstretched. She’s got her eyes closed, she’s concentrating, she’s humming to herself. She gets faster and faster until I can’t see her feet moving and she’s spinning, a tornado of air gathering around her. The humming is echoing, deafening.
Thinnnnnnnnnn, she hums, thinnnnnnnnn.
I wake up suddenly and I can’t breathe. I don’t know how long I’ve been asleep. The heating’s still on, recycling the air, turning it stale. I go to open my window but it’s locked. I push against the handle uselessly and try to control the panic that makes my heart beat faster. Outside the building site is closed up for Christmas, tarpaulins over the bricks, the roof joists. The house opposite is nearly finished and sold already. Mum said it was a young couple. ‘In management. Our kind of people.’
We sit on the sofa together. I put my arms around her. She’s freezing cold. She babbles on and on about food. She says that it’s a curse, that women must endure it. ‘It’s sent to test us,’ she says. ‘But we’re strong. We’ll win.’ She says we should imagine the house like a cocoon, that when we emerge we’ll be thin, beautiful, powerful butterflies.
She dozes off about midday and I switch the central heating off, pushing all the buttons until the boiler stops humming. I try to open the front door but it’s locked. I wonder if I should ring someone.
I look in all the cupboards. There has to be something to eat. But there’s nothing apart from tea and coffee and Candarel. I dip my finger in the jar, lick off the sweet, chemical flakes. My hand shakes when I try to fill the kettle. I drink two glasses of water just to put something in my stomach. I feel crazy, hyperactive, high.
I wake her up with tea. She looks around her, dazed.
‘Where are we?’
‘I want to go out,’ I say. I hold her hand, rub it between my palms, trying to warm it up.
‘You’ll run away from me.’
I tell her that I think we should eat something. Just a little something. ‘I’m starving, Mum.’
‘I told you. We’re detoxing.’ Her eyelids flutter. ‘This is just a hard bit. We’ll get through this, we will.’ She grits her teeth when she says this, her face scrunched up, veins sticking out on her temples. ‘We will.’
She goes to bed at six. She says we can eat something tomorrow. ‘Five more days, honey, only five more days.’
When she’s upstairs I look for the keys. I can’t find them in her handbag or her coat pockets. She must have taken them upstairs.
She’s padding around her bedroom, talking to herself. I plug the phone in and try to dial Lisa’s number but the keypad’s not working. It makes a funny beeping noise when I punch in the numbers. I try Nana. Same thing.
I bang on her door. ‘Let me in!’ I scream, desperate. ‘Let me in!’ There’s rustling inside. ‘I’ll break it down.’ I press against the door with my shoulder. ‘Mu-um. Let me in.’
When she opens the door, she’s holding a key in her hand. ‘Go on then,’ she says, her lips a half-smile, mocking. ‘You can go if you like. Miss Piggy off to trough.’
I snatch the key out of her hand. ‘I’m sick of it,’ I hear myself shout. ‘You’re not fat. You’re not.’
‘Sweetheart,’ she says, ‘you don’t understand, I don’t deserve to eat.’
Something in my head erupts. Mad kaleidoscope colours swim in front of my eyes. I breathe lungfuls of the sharp night air. I try to focus. All around our house are building materials: huge sewer pipes, piles of bricks and timber, A-frames for the roofs, bags of concrete. A piece of loose tarpaulin flaps in the breeze, making me start. I hug my arms to my chest, start running out on to the main road. I let my feet carry me, racing along the pavements, my body light and brittle as a bird.
31
Boxing Week Beanfeast it says on the banner outside. Mexican Madness. The car park is full, cars glistening in the evening frost. I’m steaming like a racehorse and swaying on my feet. When I close my eyes to catch my breath I open them again quickly, scared that I’m going to pass out.
The restaurant is packed and dingy. There are hosts at the door, women dressed in stripy, toothpaste-green uniforms, pillbox hats pinned at jaunty angles to their heads. People are queuing along the servery, filling their plates from the trays of food. The salad bar looks like the aftermath of a food fight, the vats of coleslaw and potato salad spilling into oily pats on the floor.
I can’t see Billy. Dickie’s behind the bar, pulling pints. When he sees me, he comes over and grabs my arm. ‘What happened to you?’
‘Billy,’ I gasp, ‘I want Billy.’
‘He’s in the kitchen.’ He points to the swing doors at the back of the room.
I can’t see him. The kitchen is dazzling, the light reflecting off the chrome surfaces almost blinding. The air is full of steam and grease and noise. There are baskets of chips boiling in the fryers, chickens turning on the rotisserie, griddles of burgers spitting, waiting to be flipped, pizzas crisping in the ovens, steaks hissing under giant salamander grills, flames licking over the meat-like tongues.
Two boys in stained overalls rush between the ovens and the counter, shovelling chips into big metal trays, dolloping ladles of gloopy cheese sauce on to steaks, emptying portions of stir fry into woks, fire leaping up as the fat spills over the edges.
‘What d’you want?’ one of them shouts over the roaring of the air conditioning. He wipes a smudge from a plate with a blackened cloth.
‘Billy.’
He points behind him with his thumb. ‘Out back.’
I squeeze past them to get to the door. The floor is slippery and I have to slide my feet to stop myself falling over. They both stand still for a second to let me pass and I see that they’re both soaking: their chefs’ whites stained and singed and wet with sweat. They smile, their faces red, broiling, overheated.
Billy’s in the store cupboard wiping his jacket with a bit of blue roll. He’s got a greasy stain down his jacket.
‘Some kid throwing food about,’ he says. ‘You come over with your mum?’
When I shake my head he stops wiping.
He tells me to keep an eye out for the cops because he’s over the limit. It’s miles back to the house. I’ve no idea how I found the way here. ‘Did you walk all the way?’ Billy asks.
‘No, I ran,’ I say simply.
He sucks his teeth. ‘Young people.’
The house is silent when we get in. She’s not in the lounge or the kitchen; all the lights are off.
‘Maria!’ Billy calls up the stairs. No answer.
He takes them two at a time, opens the door to her bedroom. He takes a deep breath when he switches on the light. ‘Oh God,’ he groans.
I look over his shoulder. She’s not there. On the bed her fake Louis Vuitton cases are flung open. Inside them and scattered all over the bed, the floor, are wrappers. Old pizza crusts, KitKat wrappers, foil from ginger cakes, boxes and boxes of Ferrero Rocher chocolates. She must have been stashing it for months.
She’s in the bathroom. The door’s locked and there is a hiss of a tap running. Billy bangs on the door.
‘Maria! Maria! Are you all right?’ No answer. He turns the handle, pushes against the door. ‘I’m going to have to break it down,’ he shouts.
Suddenly, the door flies open, but it’s not my mother who stands in front of us.
She stares, her eyes wild, sunken. She’s wearing her long nightdress, the pink one, and it’s come open over her chest, except there’s no chest there any more just bones pressing through the skin like weals. Behind her, the bath is spattered and blocked with brown sick.
She slips through the gap between us like a ghost, screaming that she wants to be left alone. She runs out into the street and off up the road. Billy dials 999 on his mobile.
When they catch up with her, she’s half a mile away, nearly in Northfield. The ambulance almost knocks her over, and for a second, before the ambulance men overpower her, wrap her in blankets and administer a sedative, she’s like a figure from the painting: spectral in the headlights.
They make us wait in the corridor. Billy gets some teas from the machine. ‘I got you this as well,’ he says, giving me a Mars Bar. I put it in my pocket for later.
The doctors put her on a heart monitor, slide a glucose drip in her arm. They tell us that she’s starving. That her body has been eating away at itself for months, that now she’s started to digest her vital organs, the muscles around the heart, the lungs.
Billy looks upset when the doctor says these things. ‘We’ve never known,’ he says, ‘how to stop her.’
He grabs my hand and squeezes it. We sit there for a moment in the Family Room, hand in hand.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, quietly.
32
Nana’s out the front in her mac and a pair of wellies. She’s leaning on her stick with one hand and wielding the trimmers at the hedge with the other. Greenery falls down around her like rain.
It takes ages to cut through the dense growth to the trunk of each bush and then lop the top off.
‘Timber!’ she cries, as another one falls into the road.
We watch her for a few minutes, then Billy goes into the house and switches the trimmers off at the plug.
‘Ray,’ she squawks. ‘I told you I won’t be doing with it any more.’
When she turns round, she puts the trimmers down and hobbles towards us. ‘If it’s about your mother I don’t want to hear it.’
The kitchen is lighter already, bright shafts of winter sunlight flood in. ‘I knew that this would happen when you came back. I knew it.’
She won’t go to the hospital. She tells Billy to fetch Lisa first.
I finger the Mars Bar in my pocket. I still haven’t eaten anything and, for once, Nana hasn’t got any food out. She’s staring out of the window. She clears her throat a few times.
‘I’ve never been much good at talking about these things, pet.’
I unwrap the Mars Bar, push it between my lips. The sweet, sugary chocolate melts on my tongue. I savour it for a second, then eat it, nearly whole.
‘What could I do? Worried me sick when she came back. I could see what was going on but it’s always the same, she never listens. It’s like drugs. She can’t help herself.’ She turns from the window to look at me. ‘I won’t have you going the same way.’
‘I won’t,’ I say, swallowing a hiccup.
She turns back to the window. ‘You know, I’ve forgotten what it’s like to have a view.’
They put her on pills. They give her all kinds of trial combinations. Green ones for her mind, yellow ones for the side effects, blue ones to make her hungry. She keeps pulling the drip out of her arm. Worried doctors write notes about her weight. Six stone three. Same as prisoners in Belsen in the war. Every day the nurses put her on the scales and weigh her to make sure she’s gaining.
She shields her eyes from us when we come in. ‘Go away,’ she says. ‘I don’t want you to see me like this. They’re trying to make me fat.’
Afterwards Nana and Lisa talk to the doctors in a private room with glass mesh on the windows. They want to move her to the psychiatric hospital in Winson Green.
We’re waiting for a bus outside the hospital when I decide to leg it. I’m sure they’ve been talking about Social Services and foster homes behind my back.
I get lost trying to find town, end up by the canals in Brindley Place. There’s loads of posh cafés, people in business suits slipping discreetly in and out of bars. Some of them have even got seats outside. I sit in front of the windows of Café Rouge until I get so cold I have to move.
I know where I am when I find the Library and Paradise Forum. I buy a juice from Starbucks with the last of my money. I don’t know where I’m going to go.
Walking down New Street all the women look like dolls. Robots! I want to shout at them. You’re all robots!
I start to swing my arms, left, right, left, right, higher and more rigid each time. People are starting to stare. ‘You all walk like this!’ I shout at them. ‘Robots! You’re all robots!’
When I get to the bottom of New Street, everything’s a mess, the city is rubble for nearly half a mile. I stand against the mesh barriers, looking down to where the markets used to be, the Nail File. They’ve blown up nearly the whole Bull Ring, only St Martin’s church still stands forlornly in the middle.
Lisa taps me on the shoulder.
‘Thought I might find you here.’ She must have been following me.
I shrug away. ‘What do you want?’
‘Come on, Carmen, love, your nan is worried sick.’
‘Wants to put me in care more like.’
I light a fag, won’t look at her ‘No one ever said that,’ she says.
‘No, just thought it.’
She gives me a don’t-be-silly look. ‘I’ve got a proposition for you.’ She twists her fingers through the mesh and smiles. ‘Come home with me.’
I’ve been here before. I recognize the kitchen. The bright yellow units, the blue-check curtains.
We stopped off at Sainsbury’s on the way home. Lisa’s got big bags of shopping. She says we’re going to do some cooking. ‘I’m going to show you how to make a proper shepherd’s pie.’
She lays everything out on the kitchen table, explaining how you have to sauté the onions first, and then add the veg and the mince. She tells me how to make the potato creamy by adding butter and milk to the mash. She gives me a peeler. ‘Here, you can start on the potatoes.’
We work together in silence for a while. I feel suddenly awkward, like I’m getting in the way.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
‘What for?’ Lisa looks at me sharply. ‘Don’t you start getting paranoid on me. You belong here, we’re you’re family. Don’t you forget that.’
When we’ve put the potatoes on a low heat to boil, Lisa unknots a bag of onions. ‘There’s one bastard thing about being me that I hate,’ she says, eventually.
‘What?’
‘I always have to be the one who says the things that no one else wants to say.’
‘Like what?’
She sighs. ‘It’s about time you knew,’ she begins, ‘about Billy.’
I know what’s coming next, like I’ve known since I met him, like I’ve known all my life, even though I’ve never even thought it until now.
‘He’s my dad,’ I say. ‘Isn’t he?’
Lisa wipes onion tears from her cheeks. ‘Who told you?’
I shrug.
‘You mum should have told you. I expect she was trying to. I think that’s why she brought you back here. Oh, Carmen, I’m sorry.’
My head is spinning, though outwardly I’m calm. I try to comfort Lisa, tell her it’s OK. But it’s like the ground under my feet is tilting, turning to sand.
‘I got the fright of my life when you cut your hair,’ she says. ‘You’re the spitting image.’
She sits down, cleaning her fingers on her apron.
‘After you were born your mother got very depressed. Not like I’d ever seen her before. She’d give you to Billy to look after and then lock herself in her room at Nana’s and not come out for days. Billy was a bit different then to how he is now, you know, he was still a bit – well, unr
eliable. He used to bring you round here to stay with me. I looked after you for nearly a whole year while your mother was sorting herself out.’
She pauses and looks at her hands, idly picking at a chipped nail.
‘And then when she got better and she met Brian she just whisked you off to Yorkshire. She went really funny on us, she said that me and Billy were trying to steal you away from her and that as far as she was concerned, you didn’t have a father. She got it into her head that I was having an affair with Billy. Ha! Me and Billy. Chance would have been a fine thing.’
The potatoes rise to a boil, spilling white foam over the sides of the pan. Lisa reaches out to turn the heat down. ‘I’ve, er, invited him round later. I hope you don’t mind.’
The kitchen is full of warm steam. Outside there are powder-puff clouds in the sky, curtains furling like flags in the breeze.
‘No,’ I say, eventually. ‘I don’t mind.’
Paisley’s redecorating. She’s taken all her posters down, the shiny faces of Westlife and Boyzone and 5ive are crumpled in the bin.
‘I’m not a kid any more,’ she announces, putting her Barbies in a big shoebox.
She got a new stereo for Christmas and we’re listening to Never Mind The Bollocks at top volume. ‘Mum and Dad hate this shit,’ she says proudly. ‘They’re hippies, godsake.’
I tell her about Billy, about Mum.
‘Man,’ she says, rolling her eyes, ‘that’s so, like, messed up.’
She’s bought a new set of make-up in dark reds and silver. She shows me her new lipstick, a thick black with glitter in it.
You like it?’ she asks. ‘Try it on.’
I wipe it across my lips, all the while watching myself in the mirror. It makes me look mean.
‘’S wicked,’ I say.
‘You can have it then,’ she says, grinning at me. ‘I wish I had my hair done like you.’
‘Got any scissors?’ I ask.
She looks at me doubtfully. ‘D’you think that’s a good idea?’
‘Oh, not for you,’ I say, picking one of her Barbies out of the box.