The sound of fifty people rushing to get drunk. I hear the lilting music of their voices dancing, beating at my eardrums. For a while, Grandma used to put up the framed family tree she had put together by the front door to welcome the guests on these days, so people could see what they were part of – and perhaps what they were letting themselves in for – when they arrived. But my second cousin Neil, who rather regrets the three divorces inked by his name near the bottom of the tree, objected to its presence, so it’s no longer brought out and displayed. I learned enough from it before it disappeared back into one of the upstairs rooms, though, about how my family fitted together, to be able to make a fair amount of sense of the Brueghel-like throng chattering around me.
‘Of course, you know why the trains run so well in India, don’t you?’ I make out the voice of Cousin Neil himself, holding forth, puffed up with certainty of his own brilliance.
‘This isn’t going to be a joke about Hitler, is it?’
‘Certainly not. The trains run on time in India because our great-grandfather used to run them.’
‘Of course, I’d forgotten that! He worked on the railways, didn’t he?’
Neil scoffs. I don’t think I’ve ever actually heard anyone scoff before, but Neil’s intention is clear and unarguable. ‘I wouldn’t quite call it working on the railways. He had a staff of about two hundred, June, that’s not what’s commonly understood as working on the railways, is it?’
‘Of course,’ says a chastened June, a small woman I can’t remember anything about except that Aunt Laura thinks she’s a wet fish, ‘he was a high-up, wasn’t he?’
‘I have in my possession, back at the house, a photograph of him on the day before he came back to England to join the Engineers at the start of the first war. He looks like a great fat walrus.’ Neil says this with a tone of fervent approval, possibly because it isn’t a bad description of himself. ‘He’s absolutely surrounded by Indian faces, all his boys saying goodbye.’
‘You can’t say that any more, Neil,’ says Megan, Neil’s harassed-looking fourth wife.
‘Why not? What’s racist about that? They’re Indian. They have Indian faces.’
‘Yes, but you can’t call them boys, it’s derogatory.’
Not so long before today, I would have found it unbearable to stand here listening like this. I lost the trick of being able to cope with the rough and tumble of human boringness, insensitivity, boisterous enthusiasm. Now, I’m learning to bear it all little by little, I’m trying to come home to myself.
I’ve built up the walls of my life so the world around me is – usually – a lot quieter than this party, this scene I’m in. I live most of the time in the company of Sam and a few friends who are gentle with me without making a big deal of it, and the flat I like being in, and the pages of books. I only venture out into the bustle of the city where I live, or any of the world’s loud places, when I feel able to, and hide myself from the sharp elbows and callousness of strangers the rest of the time. But I feel I’m able to do it more often, these days. I’m learning to carry the quiet I’ve woven into my life at home around like an escape route, a trapdoor, and dive back into the memory of it when things get too much.
From the vantage I’ve fashioned for myself, the quiet isolation, Neil doesn’t really depress or upset me, as he might have done not so long ago. Part of me finds him funny, in the way that anything ridiculous is always funny; part of me feels sorry for him, because he’ll never realise how silly he looks, with his belly and his opinions sticking out a foot in front of him, preceding him everywhere he goes; and part of me loves him, for being just as unusual, in his own way, as I am – as anyone is, for that matter.
I look across the busy lawn at the people talking, the nibbles being nibbled, the glasses emptied and refilled, and for a moment the image comes of jigsaw pieces thrown into the air. Every personality bristling across the waking garden, like hedgehogs snuffling through flower beds, pigs hunting apples out of the mud, each of them sticks out in their own way at odd little angles, elbowing each other, finding new and ingenious ways to not quite fit, because that’s what people do. Today we’re doing our best to piece ourselves together. Perhaps if we ever pull off the trick, the image revealed might really become something beautiful. The picture that has been cut up and hidden in little parts carried by every disparate one of us might be a wonderful thing to make out, just once, even if only for the duration of an afternoon.
‘Would you like a vol-au-vent, darling?’ One of Grandad’s neighbours thrusts a plate under my nose. ‘Cheese and tomato. I think they’re called vol-au-vents, aren’t they? Or is that just what you call pastry parcels? Anyway, never mind, have a thing.’
I smile, weakly, and pick up a mouthful of feta on a cracker. ‘Thanks.’
The woman sweeps on, radiant and ludicrous in her conviction that she’s being helpful to everyone. I examine the thing, put it in my mouth, bite down, start to chew.
I was funny about food when I was barely out of primary school. It used to be my mum’s habit to make all my sandwiches for the term ahead in a big batch at the end of the holidays, setting aside an hour and a tub of Flora and several brown loaves and a stack of cheese and pickle and tomato and tuna and ham and boiled eggs and mayonnaise, then sitting with me and the radio playing around us while the two of us made enough sandwiches to get me through all the weeks ahead till the next school break. The idea was that it took less time, doing it all at once; and of course, there was the question of money, how much she saved by buying things in bulk and how she saved even more by making sure I never needed to buy things from the school canteen.
Mum and I would fill several carrier bags with these sandwiches, and put them in the freezer. Each morning through the term, I would take pot luck, and draw a sandwich bag from among the others. It was a lottery. Tuna and tomatoes never defrosted by lunch, so quite often I had to eat frozen food. It wasn’t long before I decided I’d rather not eat those. I wasn’t even sure it was safe to eat frozen tuna. So I started skipping lunch on the days when I picked the wrong sandwich, and hiding the sandwiches in the clothes cupboard in my bedroom. I knew it was stupid, and wouldn’t solve anything in the long run, and that the food I hid would only rot and start to smell, it wouldn’t go away. But it wasn’t a decision I took with the whole of my mind, I don’t think. What I was really doing was trying to block out the thought of the lunches I hated. I used the cupboard as a place where I could put things so they didn’t exist any more, and I didn’t have to think about them. A way to keep out the light.
This policy worked for a couple of months, until one day I came home to find Dad waiting for me in the kitchen.
‘I need to talk to you about something I found in your room.’
‘OK.’ I knew at once what it was, of course. Perhaps I had been waiting for the day when someone would discover what I was doing, and the loop I was trapped in could be brought to an end. All of us like to be saved, after all. When we were children, all of us liked to be picked up and held. But still, I walked over to the kitchen table with a feeling of dread for the shame I knew I would have to face in a few seconds. I thought Dad had seen something weird about me, a secret thing; he knew something was wrong with me; he knew I wasn’t normal like everyone else.
‘I wouldn’t ever go searching round your room, of course, but I’ve been noticing a smell in there recently when I’ve been hoovering. So I tried to find out today where it was coming from.’
I realised then that he wasn’t going to say it outright. It was too embarrassing a picture for both of us to confront. But those festering sandwiches sat smugly between us, just the same.
‘I’m really sorry.’
‘What have you been doing, darling?’
I felt a strange light-headed sense of unreality about actually saying this out loud to Dad, as if this was happening to someone else, or that I was watching myself from across the room. ‘I just hate my lunches.’
‘But didn�
�t you think you could tell us about it?’
‘I didn’t know how.’ Stupid. I had been so stupid. I hadn’t thought things through.
‘You just needed to come and talk to us.’
‘I just didn’t know how to.’ Now I was whining, I could hear it in my voice, and the tears came in earnest. I knew he would be gentle with me, but I wished more than anything that he would just stop talking and we could pretend this had never happened, and I could bin all of the mess, and go on.
‘OK.’ Dad got up from his chair then, and crossed the room to hold me in his arms. ‘You can’t have been eating enough for a long time.’
‘No. I get hungry at lunchtimes.’
‘Will you promise not to do that any more? No more hiding?’
‘Yes.’ I would have promised anything just to end the conversation and get upstairs to the solitude of my room.
‘I don’t understand what you thought you were doing. You must have known it wouldn’t go away like that, just leaving them all there?’
That was the worst of it, being asked why. I didn’t know what I had been doing. It had simply been instinct. Something beyond me that made me try and hide away the things that made me unhappy, the lunches in their little plastic bags.
‘I don’t know what I was doing. I just didn’t like my lunches and I tried not to think about them.’
Dad looked nonplussed, exasperated. ‘All right … well, I suppose we’ll have to make you better lunches now.’
In return for putting a stop to the hiding away of things, I screwed a promise out of my parents that I wouldn’t have to eat tuna ever again. Mum wouldn’t back down on making all my lunches at the start of term, she said she didn’t have time to do it every morning, but that was victory enough to me, an end to chewing on frozen fish. After that, I still didn’t always feel able to eat the sandwiches every lunchtime – bread that has been frozen, and was cheap in the first place, is a very sad meal to try to eat – but I used to throw the food I didn’t want into the hedges between the house and school, rather than hiding it in the bedroom, and there was never any trouble about it ever again. With hindsight, it might have been better if I had talked more about the strange difficulties that seemed to assail me at lunchtime when Dad sat me down. But I was only a child, and couldn’t see the dangers I was playing with then. I thought things that had been thrown away simply didn’t exist any more. I wish all the instincts of our childhood were right. I wish I had got that right, at least. Life would have been much easier if that were true.
The episode with the sandwiches came back to haunt me later, in the months while I was settling into Bristol. Remembering it all now, standing on Grandad’s lawn in the midst of a mild May day, I can hardly believe it could all really have happened.
It started with restricting in the months after what happened to Joe, and with exercising too often. I would walk for hours, go out and run, do workouts following the instructions of smiling American women on videos I watched on YouTube. Anything to stay busy, anything not to be still. I wanted to pay attention to every small and seemingly unimportant element that made up who I was, and decipher the sum of myself, piece my real life together out of the senseless algebra of experience. I didn’t want to just eat any more, but instead to always know what it was I was eating.
It was a year after Joe’s accident before I went to a doctor. The GP didn’t look up from his screen while he spoke to me, typing up the previous patient’s notes. I told him that my periods had stopped, and he asked me a few cursory questions. Then he asked me about my eating.
‘I struggle to eat as much as I suppose I should, sometimes,’ I said. ‘I obsess over what I’m going to eat. I’ll spend a whole day thinking about what I can have for dinner. Then sometimes by the time I get home, I’ve built it up too much, so I don’t have anything.’
‘So how much of the day would you say you spend thinking about food?’
I’d never asked myself this question before. I thought about it for a moment. ‘I think about food all the time.’
The GP nodded. ‘I think you have anxiety, and an eating disorder. I’ll need to refer you for specialist assessment.’
Hearing those words spoken about me shocked me out of coping. My eating collapsed away to nothingness. I was racked by a fear of eating all the time, and woke with a sore jaw from clenching my teeth, with nail marks red and livid in the palms of my hands.
I started stripping my meals away to nothingness. Cutting out carbohydrates, fatty foods. One by one, the staples of my old diet were rendered out of bounds, and there was no one around me who stepped in and said anything. I stripped away potatoes and pasta and curry and pizza and bread and cheese and milk and eggs and sweet potatoes and chickpeas and lentils and Ryvita from my diet. The foods I had once enjoyed became mountains I could no longer climb, triggers, fear foods, ideas to scare me, make me start to sweat and shake, make my heart beat out of my chest. I was reduced to porridge and soup and salad. I was reduced to bananas. I told myself I didn’t need food. I could get on better without it. I would eat once every four days, when I felt too faint to go on, and suffer agonies of guilt and blame for days afterwards because I’d put something into my body. When things came to their worst, I went whole weeks between eating anything. I could only walk very slowly. My heart stopped working as it should. When I became desperately faint, and thought I couldn’t stay on my feet any longer, I would have a carrot, a banana, force something down and then have to curl up for the rest of the day, the pain of having eaten, the anxiety attack that came from having put food in my body overwhelming me.
For a long time, as my referrals were lost or rejected and my weight dropped, I averted my eyes from the truth of what was happening. I kept going to my appointments with the GP, and told myself things might heal, the end might still be just around the corner. When the doctor suggested he might need to take more drastic action, I ignored him. I chose to evade treatment while I still could. I didn’t want to put my life on hold, and go into hospital. I didn’t want to be fed through a tube, or put on a drip, even though I couldn’t find the strength it would take to eat enough to keep living. So I blocked out those thoughts from my head, refused to entertain the possibility of a collapse. It wasn’t difficult. It was all too easy to pretend around other people, and after a while I got so tired I would sleep for twelve hours every night, so there were no lonely evenings to fill with thinking. Anorexics, I found, sleep very easily. They don’t have the energy for dark nights of the soul.
What I had for company instead of sleeplessness was an insistent screaming inside my head, like a face that was watching and shouting just the other side of a window, a face that was always there that I tried to ignore, not to look at directly. I knew all the time I was awake that it was there, it was happening. I didn’t let myself think about it until things had become very serious.
There were two selves living in my body, two people fighting for the right to claim my name and take possession of my life. I still struggled for breath in there, hidden behind my eyes, drowning, staring out from the wreckage of the person I had been, still able to make myself heard in some situations. But the other self sprang up within me and fought to speak and drown everything else out, a voice like my own voice but separated from that real self like the two sides of a blade. A malignant intelligence waiting exiled at the edge of my subconscious. It raged around the walls of my mind, a wolf that longed to drag me out of the shell of myself, tear at my windpipe, put an end to me. The wolf would speak for me in some things. It took me over. And it stopped me seeing what was happening to me till very near the end.
In the end, Dad came to visit me, and that was the start of the change; it was having someone step in and react to my situation with terror that began to prise open the trap closing round me. I had been keeping all the distance I could between myself and my parents, trying to keep myself away from them, safe in my isolation, but Dad kept calling to ask how I was and where I was, tried to keep up
with what I was doing. I would tell him I was all right, and that I wanted to be on my own, and for a long time he respected that. But he must have realised something was going wrong. He decided to get himself a Facebook account – perhaps he was looking for ways to be closer to me – and I suppose he must have seen the few photographs of me that people had taken, as I grew thinner and fell deeper into sickness. One day he turned up in Bristol, calling to tell me he was in the city and needed to see me straight away.
‘Is anything wrong?’ I remember asking.
‘Nothing’s wrong with me, I just need to see you.’
We met when I finished work, in a café near the call centre. I guessed he had already been there for hours when I stepped in off the street, stirring the quiet air of the nearly empty room so that he looked up and saw me, feeling the draught from the door, I suppose. There was an empty cup next to him, and I thought he’d probably found the café as soon as I gave him its name, and sat there waiting for me ever since. I could see the tension in him. He looked like someone who had been coiled up with their worries for a long time. He must have been able to see the same in me, the fear in me as I walked in to see him and knew that I’d been found out again, just like the time he found the sandwiches hidden in the cupboard.
‘Hello, darling.’
He looked tired, a darkness round the eyes, a tightness round the mouth, and I wondered whether he had lied to me on the phone, whether there was anything wrong with him. I still didn’t think how my condition might be affecting him. ‘Hi, Dad.’ We hugged, and he held me very tightly.
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