Wishbones

by Virginia MacGregor

  September

  This morning, Willingdon is covered in leaves, as though a friendly giant has sighed his warm breath through the trees.

  I look out through the window of the lounge.

  Rev Cootes kneels on the ground. He’s been clearing the graves since dawn. Houdini stands next to him, nudging him every now and then and stamping through the pile of leaves so that Rev Cootes has to pick them up again. But Rev Cootes doesn’t mind. He smiles and pulls gently at Houdini’s collar. Mischief he calls him. My Little Mischief. Houdini is spending more and more time with Rev Cootes, which maybe makes up a bit for Clay not being around any more. And Mrs Zas, of course. She goes over to have tea with him at least once a day.

  I brush Mum’s hair, slow strokes from the crown of her head to the tips, which fall between her shoulder blades. We washed and dried it early this morning.

  I put down the brush and kiss her cheek.

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ I say.

  And it’s true, she is beautiful. Not skinny or fashionable or glossy-looking but properly, glow-from-the-inside beautiful. Mum still struggles to find clothes to fit her properly and she still has to take injections every day for her diabetes, but she’s healthier and happy and, most important of all, she’s stepping back out into the world.

  And just at that moment, I realise that I was right when I said that no one was as lucky as me. Not in that random way people think of as lucky like winning a Lottery ticket or finding a four-leaf clover. Luck’s not about good things happening to me or bad things happening to me. I’m lucky because, no matter what happens in my life, I’ve got a big family of people who love me and who I can love back. Not jut Mum and Dad but Jake and Steph, too, and Rev Cootes and Houdini and Mrs Zas and Mr Ding and the Slim Skills Gang and Clay, even if he’s hundreds of miles away. And all the other people I have yet to meet and love – a whole lot of luck is out there waiting for me.

  I sweep a red silk scarf, which Mrs Zas lent her for today, around Mum’s neck and shoulders.

  Everyone is going to wear something red, for Max.

  Red like a fire engine.

  Red like a heart.

  Red like Max’s superhero outfit on the front of Max’s Marvellous Adventures.

  I’m wearing the red Houdini jumper Steph made me for my last birthday. Dad’s wearing a red tie. Even Rev Cootes said he’d wear something red.

  When Mum’s ready, I leave her for a bit and walk across The Green to the cemetery and into Rev Cootes’s new greenhouse. Mrs Zas bought it for him so that he has somewhere to keep his more delicate plants. This year, Peter is going to keep his plants alive through the winter, she told me. And it’ll keep them out of Houdini’s reach, too.

  Mrs Zas is due to hear from the immigration office any day now. But she has faith that, no matter what the decision, she’ll find a way to stay. We’re her home now.

  I hold the bunch of red roses up to my nose and breathe in. They smell cool and soft. Then I wrap them in a damp newspaper for later.

  As I come out of the greenhouse, I see Mrs Zas pull up outside the church in the people carrier she borrowed from Steph. She goes to the back and takes out a wheelchair and then helps an old lady out of the passenger seat.

  Rosemary has long limbs and she holds her head straight and although her hair is grey, it’s soft and shiny. Mrs Zas has been taking Rev Cootes to visit her at the nursing home, and although Rosemary finds it hard to remember things, she’s been doing a little better since the visits. Mrs Zas makes her laugh. And there’s one thing Rosemary has never forgotten: the little boy with blond hair, who, thirteen years ago, played with her grandson, Clay. Rosemary said she wanted to be here today.

  The service is held outside. Mum said Max would have liked that. Always running around the village. So much life in that little body.

  The Willingdon Band comes and plays a few pieces as the guests arrive. Mr Ding crashes his cymbals together; they ring out across The Green.

  When Rev Cootes has given his talk and when Mum and Dad have said a few words about Max and how he loved swimming and the colour red and going on adventures – and how he loved playing with me, that he couldn’t wait to teach me to swim – I hand everyone a red rose.

  As they walk past, they place the rose on Max’s grave. Some of them take a moment to bow their heads and to whisper a few words.

  And then it’s our turn: Mum, Dad and me.

  I pull my hand out of theirs and kneel down next to the headstone I’ve looked at for so many years. I brush my fingers over Max’s name, over the dates of his small life. Then I take a photo Dad gave me of Max out of my pocket; I cut around Max’s face so that it’s a perfect oval. I slot it into the empty glass frame on the tombstone.

  I close my eyes and bow my head.

  Behind me, the autumn leaves fall over the village.

  Dad puts his arm around Mum and she rests her head on his shoulder.

  A little further on, Steph and Jake look up at the sky. I know Jake’s thinking of Clay, that he wishes he were here, with us.

  Further still, Rev Cootes wheels Rosemary out through the churchyard gate and onto The Green. Mrs Zas walks alongside them.

  Out on The Green, Mitch and Mr Ding and the Slim Skills group and the people from the village walk in a long, slow line to a big table laid out with tea and coffee and cakes and sandwiches.

  And tucked into the hedgerows, perched at the top of the church spire, gripping the branches of the chestnut tree in the middle of The Green, the birds, which have been silent through the whole of July and August, begin to sing again for the first time.

  A Word from the Author

  When I was seventeen years old, I developed an eating disorder. Within a few months, I’d all but given up food. My periods stopped, my hair thinned, my podgy teenage body became sharp and angular and my days were dictated by working out how few calories I could consume and still stay alive.

  There are lots of reasons that led to my anorexia. Some of them were to do with weight: I’d grown up with comments from well-meaning family members about how much better I’d look if I could only shed a few pounds; I was in a girls’ school where comparing every aspect of your physical appearance to the most beautiful (or the most fashionably beautiful) girl in the class was part of everyday existence; and like every teenager I was bombarded by unrealistic presentations of the female body in magazines and on TV. But weight loss and body image were only part of it, there were other factors at play, ones that I’ve only recognised with hindsight.

  I had very little control over my life. Few teenagers do. That’s why, in adolescence, we work so hard to grab at things that might give us an anchor, even if those things damage us and the people we love. My parents went through a sad and difficult divorce and, like Feather in my novel, I found myself looking after my mum, who was heartbroken. I also had those typical traits associated with people who develop anorexia: I was a perfectionist and a high-achiever, aiming for straight As and a place at Oxford. Making sure my mum was okay and guaranteeing good grades and a place at my dream university felt hopelessly out of my grasp. Counting calories, deciding exactly which bits of food passed my lips, calibrating my eating to ensure a specific outcome on the scales (which I stepped on several times a day), brought enormous comfort. Managing my eating became a hobby and an obsession – even a friend, which, as a lonely teenager, I needed. And of course, as I lost weight, I felt like I was achieving something: every day, I was meeting my goals. I felt successful, a feeling which is hugely addictive, as addictive as eating too much food.

  Although I still have a difficult relationship to food, I am back to a healthy weight. I have a lovely husband, a gorgeously bonkers little girl called Tennessee Skye and I get to do the best job in the world: as Tennessee says, Mummy writes stories.

  I’m one of the lucky ones. Some battle with anorexia their whole lives. Some get so ill that their bodies give up altogether.

  When I started my first teaching job in a boardi
ng school and taught, cared for and lived with teenagers, I came to understand the forces that are at play in making young people undertake harmful behaviour. For my teenage self and many of the girls and boys I taught, it was an eating disorder; for others it was smoking, drinking, taking drugs or having damaging sexual relationships. All these behaviours were driven by the same needs: to find a sense of self, to get some kind of grip on our lives.

  It was also in my first teaching post that I came across male anorexia. I observed a boy I taught growing thinner and thinner. I remember him mentioning to me, proudly, how he’d spent a whole week surviving on nothing but a box of cereal: he could recite exactly how many calories there were in that 500g box of cornflakes.

  We have a long way to go in understanding and supporting boys and men who suffer from anorexia: many people still associate eating disorders with girls and women, and men often find it hard to talk about their eating problems and harder still to ask for help. That is what inspired me to write the character of Clay. In my research I found a wonderful charity, which offers information and support, called Men Get Eating Disorders Too: http://mengetedstoo.co.uk. There’s also a great book by Jenny Langley called, Boys Get Anorexia Too with an associated website: www.boyanorexia.com.

  In 2008, I took a group of girls from my boarding house to work in primary schools along the Lamu Coast in Kenya. I’ll always remember the chat I had with the headmaster of one of these schools. He asked me to tell him about the problems that young people face in English schools and I told him about anorexia. He threw his arms up and shook his head: ‘In Kenya, if you are thin, it means you are either sick or poor.’ He could not see the appeal of being thin: being curvy and carrying some weight was a sign of attractiveness, wealth and success. It taught me about how differently cultures perceive beauty. We could learn a great deal from how Kenyans see and appreciate the female form.

  For the last twelve years, I have continued to observe and be fascinated by the psychology of eating: of how we starve ourselves and also overeat to get some kind of comfort and control. At the same time, through the news and simply by watching the world around me, I’ve noticed that obesity has become a huge health concern for children, teenagers and adults. Both extremes can have devastating consequences.

  In the UK, anorexia nervosa has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder in adolescence. At the other end of the spectrum, around one in every eleven deaths in the UK is now linked to carrying excess fat. Around half of British adults are overweight, and 17 per cent of men and 21 per cent of women are obese. The National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidelines on eating disorders showed that 1.6 million people in the UK were affected by eating disorders in 2004 and 180,000 (11 per cent) of them were men. In 2007, the NHS Information Centre carried out a snapshot survey of people in England over the age of sixteen. It found that an alarming 6.4 per cent of adults had a problem with food, a figure much higher than previously thought. A quarter of this figure was men, suggesting a possible increase in the number of males affected. Recent reports from the Royal College of Practitioners has indicated a 66 per cent rise in male hospital admissions. It’s clear that weight issues are a serious concern for the health of the men and women in our country and in the West as a whole.

  It’s my belief that only when we work to understand the psychological factors behind eating disorders will we be able to help people to lead healthier, happier lives and to develop a positive relationship to food.

  In my presentation of both Clay and Jo, I hope to give readers a rich and complex picture of individuals who struggle with their weight, their sense of themselves and their relationship to food – and that although one character refuses to eat and the other can’t stop eating, they are not so very different: they have suffered loss and rejection and feel that they have very little grip on their lives.

  I also wanted to show how challenging life can be for those who love and care for people with eating disorders, as is the case for Feather.

  But more than all this, I want my readers to see beyond Clay and Jo’s weight issues to the interesting, wonderful people they are. Through them, I hope to widen our understanding and appreciation of true beauty.

  I believe that novels have a special role to play in building compassion: for others and for ourselves. I hope that Wishbones will allow us to develop a deeper and richer appreciation for all the glorious differences there are between us as human beings.

  Acknowledgements

  With each novel I write I become increasingly aware of how many people are involved in getting my stories into readers’ hands.

  Thank you, Bryony, for believing in Wishbones from the very start and for helping me find the best home for it at HQ, HarperCollins. You are a dream agent.

  Thank you, Anna, for falling in love with my story: I am so excited to be sharing my YA adventure with you.

  Thank you to the whole team at HQ for making Wishbones sparkle and for getting it out into the world.

  Thank you to my faithful writing buddies: Helen Dahlke, Jane Cooper, Joanna Seldon and Patricia Lee-Lewis.

  Thank you to the friends who have encouraged me on my writing journey: Linda Gibson, Pam and John Owles, Laurence and Beryl Hobbs and Richard George.

  A big thank you to the lovely Emily Pittick who sat with me over many a hot chocolate, teaching me all about what it means to be a competitive swimmer, in particular the joys and challenges of swimming butterfly.

  Thank you to all the wonderful people who have looked after my beloved Tennessee Skye while I wrote this book: Dionne, Juliet and the most awesome godmother and nanny in the world, Charlie.

  Thank you to Mama, my first reader and the most courageous person I know.

  Thank you to my faithful, bonkers cats, Vi and Seb, who keep me company during long hours of writing and inspire me to include animals in my stories. Thank you especially to dear Vi, who passed away as I was editing Wishbones.

  Thank you to my darling Tennessee Skye: every day, you teach me a little more about the world. I love you so much.

  Thank you, Hugh, my soul mate and the love of my life, for never, ever, doubting that I can do this. And for putting up with my lack of housework!

  And thank you to you, dear readers. Thank you especially to my young readers, for taking the time to read my story when life offers you so many other tempting distractions. I love writing for you and I hope that we’ll share many stories.

  Copyright

  An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2017

  Copyright © Virginia Macgregor 2017

  Virginia Macgregor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780008217303

 

 

 
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