by Emilie Pine
I think it would sound strong. I think it would sound loud. I think it would sound proud.
And I am listening.
And this, this is what it looks like when a woman bleeds onto the page.
SOMETHING ABOUT ME
I’M NOT HERE. This is what I’m thinking as his hands are on me, his hands and his mouth and the rest of him, all telling me that he wants to be inside me. I’m not here. Because I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be here at all. I’m only sixteen, my mum doesn’t know where I am, it’s a school night, I should be tucked up in my own bed, not being fucked on someone else’s. So I’m not here.
Except, of course, that I am here, or rather I was there, where I shouldn’t have been. Ask me now, now that I’m over forty and I’m safe and I have a job and a home and a partner, and I’ll tell you that I had a crazy few years as a teenager. Ask me and I’ll laugh and say I was maybe a bit out of control. When other people reminisce about being on sports teams or misbehaving on school trips, I might mention the fact that I passed through five secondary schools in the space of three years. It sounds exotic, and people who have only known me in the good years will look slightly surprised, then laugh at the idea that I used to be a wild child. My boyfriend, who knows some of the funnier anecdotes, suggests I write an essay about my younger zany self. But he only knows the quirky version and it’s not the whole story. So for a long time, I circle the idea. Why, after all, would I ever tell the story, when to tell it would be to risk the life that I have made in the years since?
I worry away at this question for hours, sitting chin in hand, blank notebook page before me, in the attempt to decide if this is a disaster or a story worth telling. And even if it’s worth telling, how could I shape it into something meaningful? I try to start at what I feel is the beginning – I’m not here – but that’s too late, it wouldn’t make sense. Why don’t I start at fourteen, when I moved to London? But that’s too late too. Maybe I should start with Ireland and my first drink, and my first cigarette, at thirteen? And if I start there, where do I finish? Perhaps at nineteen, with my last cigarette?
And then I realise that this story doesn’t start, or end, where I thought it did. There’s no one moment of origin I can easily point to. The chronology is too fraught, and doesn’t form year by year, following simple landmarks.
So this may not make sense all the time. But it’s what I’ve got.
AFTER MY PARENTS SEPARATED, we had very little money, a fact I was constantly, achingly aware of. I hated the sense that we were only ever scraping by, I hated that there were no treats, that our car was so old the locks froze shut in winter, that we had no TV, and then later only a tiny black and white one. I hated that I never had more than one pair of shoes, and that those shoes were never the branded ones the other kids in my class had. I hated that I wore cast-offs from older or bigger children. Most of all, I hated that we ate the same cheap food repeatedly, an endless litany of grey-brown mince and watery potatoes that, each mealtime, filled me with revulsion. And then, at ten years old, I discovered the power of not eating.
Most weekdays my mum sent me to school with my lunch, usually a sandwich and an apple. But some mornings, short on time, or bread, or something to put between the slices, she told me I could eat one of the sandwiches that came in the bag. Every child received a free daily carton of milk. The carton came in a slab and slung on top, like some sort of afterthought, was a clear plastic bag of sandwiches. They were mostly ham, and some were cheese, the ham slimy and the cheese plasticky, both heavily smeared with butter. I hated butter in sandwiches (I still do). Though I think now that they were probably put in the bags in neat stacks, by the time they got to my classroom they were always a mismatched pile. To get a sandwich involved reaching into the greasy bag and picking out each component. They managed to feel both stale and soggy and, in winter, warm from the radiator.
The boys drank the milk, and some, after playing football all lunch break, would eat the sandwiches too. But girls didn’t eat them, or not as far as I could see, and certainly not the girls that mattered. It was bad enough that I was already the kid in hand-me-downs, including those from a not-very-nice taller girl in my class (our mums were friends). ‘Oh,’ she would say, ‘I used to have a jumper just like that.’ ‘Oh,’ she would say, ‘I think that was my jumper.’ Under her gaze, I could never have picked up a free sandwich, no matter how hungry I was. So on those days that my mum didn’t have time to make me a lunch, I simply didn’t eat. And then – is this where the story starts? – I stopped eating those sandwiches she did make. I squashed them down to the bottom of my bag, where they mouldered and smelled. I satisfied myself by eating the daily apple. Then I stopped eating the apple too. I found I had a talent for hunger.
Once, being driven home after school, I told the car-pool mum that I hadn’t eaten anything at all that day. And – this was the punchline – I wasn’t even hungry. She told me not to be stupid. I elatedly insisted that no, really, I didn’t eat anything, all day. And then, believing me, she made me eat the leftover crusts from her daughter’s lunch. This was not the reaction I wanted. She was not filled with admiration at my achievement of will over appetite. I choked back my tears, chewing resentfully, and decided that I would not expose myself again. I would not tell anyone about my victory over weakness. I would just do it. And this actually made not eating even better. Because now I had something, a secret weapon, that was mine only. Not eating, I felt clean and light. And powerful.
I had no friends in school, but then that’s probably already apparent from the kind of story I’m telling here. I misunderstood how to make friends: I talked too loudly, or I cared too much what they thought about me. I didn’t know the right rules.
I had always been a thin child, and no one really noticed that I started to get a bit thinner. I ate a few mouthfuls of breakfast cereal on days when my mum demanded it. If she forced me to eat more, I would make myself throw up. One day, when I had to finish a whole bowl of cereal, I threw up on the hall carpet, just to make a point. It was too much hassle for my mum, one thing too many, on a morning when she was already running late. ‘God, isn’t it enough?’ she said. ‘Get in the car.’ I wasn’t quite sure what she meant by ‘isn’t it enough?’ and I feared I’d gone too far. But after that the pressure to eat breakfast lessened.
I always ate one full meal each day at dinner time and so I never got dangerously ill or thin. I did get sick all the time and I fell quite a lot, a combination of clumsiness and faintness. In fact, I was in and out of the emergency department in the Children’s Hospital, often with sprained wrists or ankles, getting to know the faces and names of the nurses and admission clerks. I remember one injury that was so bad that my mum had to take a week off work to look after me. We spent the days making a cardboard doll’s house together, and she cooked me my favourite foods. It was a rare period of calm and closeness. I ate. I began to feel better. When I went back to school at the end of the week I was briefly popular for allowing the other kids to race with my crutches. But soon enough I went back to not eating. I stayed at my desk during lunch break, with a book.
I was increasingly anxious. I started not sleeping. I would lie in bed, dissecting and rephrasing everything I had said during the day, reflecting on everything I had got wrong. At this stage I was probably eleven. My mum took me to the doctor, concerned at the dark circles under my eyes and my constant tiredness. In the consultation room, the GP asked my mum to leave us alone, and then he asked me if there was anything I was particularly worried about. I said no. I don’t remember the other questions, but I do remember feeling that if I said nothing, they wouldn’t find me out. When my mum came back in, the doctor commented on my thinness, and asked if I had an appetite. He weighed me on one of those old-fashioned scales with weights and balances. I watched his thick fingers move the slider. ‘She’s underweight,’ he said, to the room. And I thought to myself, ‘This is it, this is the moment I get noticed.’ My mum then recounted how gre
edily I ate when I was given my favourite foods, like a chicken sandwich slathered with mayo. They laughed.
In the car, Mum asked me if I had told the doctor what I was worrying about. I stared at my lap, and shook my head. She got annoyed and told me that she had had to take the afternoon off work, and that doctors were expensive. Her voice was sharp with money worries. I resolved that in future I would not tell her if I hadn’t slept. And that I would not tell her that I just wouldn’t let myself sleep. That it was another rule, another form of control, another punishment.
I SPENT YEARS following my hunger regime. But when I got to secondary school, I needed more to get through the day. One morning, at the school assembly, I started to feel weak. First my sight went, but I could still hear the announcements and I could stand in my place, swaying forward a little. Then a loud buzzing filled my ears and there was total blackness. I let go. The girl who stood next to me in the line told me afterwards that I made a loud bang as I hit the parquet. The school matron was dismissive when I confessed that I’d ‘forgotten’ to have breakfast. In fact, my constant refusal of breakfast had become such a battleground at home, that my mum had recently pursued me to the bus stop, still in her dressing-gown, waving a piece of toast.
For the rest of the assembly the whole school was made to sit on the dusty floor. Afterwards, older girls feigned concern, putting an arm around me, claiming me as a mascot, and for the remainder of the year I attained some slight celebrity, being pointed out as the girl who fainted. At least, at this point, I had friends. By thirteen I had begun to find people who seemed to like me – who did, in fact, like me. But it took me a long time to let myself believe that. Perhaps the most corrosive aspect of a lonely life is not the time spent alone, but the time spent in a crowd, feeling left out.
My new friends noticed my thinness. Everyone did. Other parents and teachers commented on it. When it was seen as a problem, I was called ‘skinny’, a label that thrilled me. Mostly I was described in coded ways that I knew proclaimed thinness a ‘good thing’, with words like ‘slim’ or ‘slender’. I was smart at school, could act confidently (for which, read ‘loud’), and tell funny stories. But being thin, with jutting elbows and a fretboard of ribs, was the only skill I valued.
I knew, at this stage, the effect of my body on others. And I found new ways to exploit my body to generate further kinds of emotional pay-off. I developed a social life and started to go to other kids’ houses after school and then weekend parties. I longed to be cool. I would stand on the edge of groups of kids who were talking and laughing and making out and yearn to be included. As I continued to hang around, I started smoking, copied the walks of the other girls, sashayed my hips in what I hoped was a seductive manner. Around boys I liked, I smiled coyly, even stared openly. It was one way of being seen myself. At one party, I followed a boy outside when he beckoned to me, then I cringed in shame as he laughed at me, shouting to all his friends that I was desperate. But desperation, in itself, can be attractive. I learnt that if boys wanted to use my body I could rediscover that early feeling of triumph and lightness that I’d previously only felt through not eating. That I found the encounters themselves fairly distasteful was neither here nor there.
I remember my hymen breaking, the blood in my underwear, after an over-eager boy put most of his hand up me. It hurt but I only silently grimaced, afraid of being heard and laughed at by the other girls. I assumed he’d done it before. I assumed it was what the cool girls did. In fact, it probably was what the cool girls did because none of us, not a one, was confident enough to say no to what seemed expected. To object would be to declare ourselves, to him and all his friends, frigid. Which was even worse than being ‘easy’. I know now that all I really wanted was affection – to be touched or held with love, with understanding, with kindness. And yet this was an impossible ask. I was so filled with the need and wanting of it, and so transparently so, that I think it must have been hard, sometimes, for people to look at me without flinching.
WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN my mum’s job took me and my sister to London. My father, an infrequent contributor to our lives anyway, stayed in Dublin. London meant a new school and a whole new level of opportunity. It also meant a whole new group of friends, girls at my school, who seemed daring and brave and cool. And who mistook me for cool too. They let me hang out with them, and together we started going to clubs. I told my mum I was staying at another girl’s house and in this new city, where she knew no one’s parents, she did not realise I was lying. And soon this new kind of lying became second nature, the only way to get what I wanted.
One Friday night at a club I was flirting with a late-twenty-something man and he asked my age. I told him nineteen. I told him I was an art student. This was what I always said, because it sounded impressive, though I would have been totally stuck had anyone ever asked me what kind of art I studied. After kissing me, he drew back, checked my face and asked my age again. I smiled and said seventeen. He blanched, backed away and fled. When I returned to the dance floor and told my friends we roared with laughter. The sap. We were bulletproof. We were fifteen.
I killed the girl in hand-me-downs. I became the audacious girl, in a uniform of lipstick and short skirts, the girl in the club, the girl who knew where the party was. I was so high and having so much fun that I never missed the book-girl I used to be. I had free gig tickets, backstage passes, my name on the guest-list to a different club every night of the week. It seems insane now but two of my best friends and I gave out ‘business’ cards with our names, phone numbers, and the slogan ‘Made in Heaven, Raised in Hell’. Free drinks at the bar. A spot in the DJ box. VIP areas. All it took was to be underage, in a tiny dress, and to play willing to please. And oh, did I do that act well. Because I was willing to please. I wore my mum’s old dresses, which she’d saved from the 1970s. I cut them down so that they barely covered my ass. I donned, in what I thought was a spectacular move, a nun’s habit, with the bottom sheared off and a zip that ran all the way down the front. When my mum challenged my outfits, I grudgingly covered up, but this only added to the game. Leaving the house I wore a long top and long skirt. But as soon as I got to the club, I disrobed in the foyer, often for an audience, handing my outer layers to one of the bouncers, revealing the tiny outfit below.
My new lifestyle did not end at nightclubs. I went to music festivals and revelled in their lack of rules. I went to one festival where it rained and rained and everything was drowned in mud. On the last day, when a dishevelled guy said he could take me backstage to meet Nirvana, I abandoned my borrowed tent, and my borrowed sleeping bag, and my clothes and everything I’d brought. I didn’t even say goodbye to the friends I’d arrived with. I didn’t care. I stood next to Kurt Cobain at the bar. He was drinking what looked like a gin and tonic and smoking light cigarettes. I dismissed him as a lightweight and turned away. After all, I drank neat vodka and smoked high-tar only. I followed the dishevelled guy on to a posh hotel, where we partied with a group of music promoters, broke furniture and ran up a sky-high bar bill. We slowed down only long enough to shave off the eyebrows of those who’d passed out. And then we got kicked out.
I chose this moment to ring my mum from the courtesy telephone. It was not yet 6am. She answered blearily. When I drunkenly slurred the name of the hotel, she said that she’d actually been there herself a few weeks earlier, at a work conference. Wasn’t that funny, she said. I agreed and hung up. Even now I have no idea what I wanted from that call.
I caught up with the others and walked with them towards the train station. Along the way we somehow managed to shoplift, of all things, a pair of waterproof river waders. We laughed and laughed. I ended up at one of the stranger’s houses, and stayed there for a few days. I didn’t go home for a week in total. I had left the festival with an entirely different group of people than I arrived with. The person who owned the tent that I’d abandoned, my sister who owned the sleeping bag, and my friends, who I’d left without warning, none of them were
speaking to me. I had a hangover that registered only a few levels above death. I thought my life was great.
By this point I was, literally, a poster wild child. I appeared on a national television talk show as a prime example, displayed to scare middle-class parents. I chose to wear a t-shirt, on which I wrote the name of a recent ex-boyfriend, followed by the words ‘is a tosser’. My dad still recounts this anecdote, proudly. But on that show, I sat next to another featured guest, a mum whose son had died from huffing aerosols. She was quiet, nice, heartbroken. She’d had no idea her son was so at risk, and she was on the show to warn other parents. Even through the ten-foot-deep insulation of the self-absorbed teenager, I felt compassion for her. And then I briefly wondered if my own mum wasn’t quite as blasé as I thought she was. I remembered one evening, soon after our move to London, when she had paused at the open door to my bedroom, and asked what I was doing. I was sitting on the floor, with my back to the radiator, just staring into space. I started to cry. ‘I’m lonely,’ I said. ‘I know,’ she said, then she shrugged and continued up the stairs to bed. I assumed she did not care. And yet if she had crossed that threshold, had comforted me, what would I have done? I would have shouted at her to get out. Had she tried to hug me, I would have stiffened my body and told her in my coldest voice to get away and stop touching me.