‘It’ll be all right. I’ll order some fish.’
‘But I really think it might be better if we allowed dietary decisions to be led by a qualified dietician, rather than yourself?’
The RMN smiled, as if he’d heard all this before. ‘You have to be calmer about things, Mr Edwards. It doesn’t do to get emotional in front of the patient. It’s OK. I’ll just order something nice.’
He ordered me a plate of salmon at lunchtime. When the salmon came, I lost control, terrified at the smell of the food and the thought of the thick, cloying taste of it, blind with panic at the thought of any energy going into my body, poisoning me. I forced my way out of the bed and into the hallway, then collapsed sobbing on the floor because my legs wouldn’t carry me any further. Dad screamed at the RMN and picked me up like an infant in his arms, then carried me into the day room, away from the food. We buried our faces in each other’s shoulders and cried then, for a long time.
Mum wanted to come but I told Dad I couldn’t see her, and he called her and asked her not to come, because he knew I was serious, and knew I had grown very weak, and the distress of what was happening was dangerous to me. For the next two days, every time food came on to the ward I believed it would be forced on me. I would hear the trolley approaching, its death rattle growing louder on the other side of my frail blue booth curtain, and I would start to scream. I would try to escape, and become violent, biting Dad as hard as I could, scratching at him, kicking. On the third day, after he had stopped me trying to jump out of the window, we made a deal together.
‘You have to be calm, Kate,’ he told me, while I collapsed in his arms, too weak to stand, almost too weak to stay conscious. Another RMN watched on, an older woman who told us she had grown up in Nigeria.
‘But they’re trying to get food in me.’
‘No one’s going to do anything secretly. No one’s going to do anything you don’t know about.’
‘They can’t do it, they’re not allowed.’
Dad held me up then by my shoulders, and looked me in the eyes. ‘Why don’t we make a deal, darling? We can’t keep doing this every time the food comes. Because the other patients have to eat. It’s not fair on the other patients to have you screaming, is it?’
I shook my head. ‘No.’
‘So why don’t we make a deal that if I promise no one’s going to try and get the food into you through the cannula, you promise to stay calm when it comes?’
It’s strange to think of the way he reasoned me back into life, weaving the world into a different order for me, so I could accept things that had terrified me till then. He made it all right when the problem wasn’t about food any more, when the problem was about helping other people. He took me out of the minefield where I was trapped, and into a place where I could make decisions.
‘OK.’
‘Do you think you can do that?’
I was so afraid, so very afraid of letting food near me. I thought if I could only go on a little further, and last for a little while longer, people would see I was right, I could be OK, I would love Joe enough and the guilt might be over.
‘I’ll try.’
‘Because it’ll be fairer on the other patients, won’t it? And you can’t keep being this afraid, my love, it’s going to wear you out.’
I still refused to take in anything but water. Nothing else, nothing to pollute my body with calories. And that meant I continued to die. When I went into hospital my blood results were those of a coma patient and I heard the doctor who first examined me compare my physical state to that of an Auschwitz survivor when talking things through with Dad. I would only allow water and vitamins through the cannula. Vitamins wouldn’t make me fat. And I didn’t want to die, I wanted whatever the doctors thought the vitamins could give me. This wasn’t all happening because I wanted my life to be over. I just wanted to get all the fat out of my body. On the third day after I went into hospital I was pushed on a wheelchair through to a side room at the end of the ward, where I started to shake with the cold, although everyone else had taken off their jackets. Without the additional heating of the main ward the temperature was almost unbearable to me. There were three people waiting there – patient and calm and expensively dressed, their smiles so full of understanding, with the light of the day in the window behind them. They had put out a plastic bucket chair for me, but when I tried to sit down it hurt too much, the bones of my legs cut too sharply into me, so Dad helped me down on to a sofa at the corner of the room instead, and the psychiatrists all moved their chairs.
‘Sorry about this,’ he said, lifting me across to the new seat like a dog being carried into the vet’s.
‘That’s quite all right.’ None of them moved to help him. Later, when Dad wasn’t allowed to be there all the time any more, one of those psychiatrists told me that all of them had thought he got too involved in looking after me; he shouldn’t have been moving me around without the proper training. It was all a bit Bruce Willis, he said, carrying people round. Perhaps that was why they hadn’t helped: they disapproved; and maybe they didn’t have the proper training either.
Once I was on the sofa I found I couldn’t quite breathe without my oxygen mask on, so Dad disappeared for a moment, and went to get the oxygen cylinder, returning with it under one arm.
‘Here we go.’ He tried to smile, to make it seem like things were going to be all right, then put it on over my head, tucking the elastic of the mask behind my ears, and sat down next to me. He held my hand very tightly, and I turned my attention to the strangers sitting in front of us.
‘So you’re not eating at the moment, Kate, is that right?’
I hardly knew which of them was speaking. They all smiled at me with the same dispassionate face. It was only a day at work for them. No matter how kind they might have been, they were all thinking of their inboxes, their to-do lists.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you intend to eat again?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t need to.’
‘Why do you think you don’t need to eat any more? How will you live without food?’
‘I’ll have coffee.’
‘But why do you think coffee will give you all the nutrition you need?’
With a triumphant gesture, I pointed to myself. ‘Well, it’s working all right so far, isn’t it?’
There was silence in the room. I felt sure I had won the conversation with this convincing argument. I noticed that Dad had visibly relaxed next to me, and thought I must be doing well. Of course I was doing well, in a back-to-front way. He knew once I’d said that, once I’d insisted with a smile on my face that I would live on coffee for ever and that would be all right, then the judgement was made. I wasn’t in charge any more. They wouldn’t allow me to die; they would place me under a further section that allowed them to save my life. If I had persuaded them I was sane and deciding to starve myself on a rational basis, perhaps if I had explained my reasons, the trouble I had come through, things might have turned out otherwise.
In a quiet corridor aslant from the bustle of Grandad’s house, waiting to use the loo and taking a break from greeting people, I’m stirred from the memory of what I’ve come through to stand here today by the smiling face of a cousin.
‘Hiya, Kate!’
Fiona and her parents come to the party every year, even though they have to travel the farthest, getting up at God knows what hour to come all the way down here from their home on the Wirral. Perhaps being so far from the rest of the tribe means they’re more committed to it, and that’s why they always make the journey every May.
‘Hi, Fiona, how are you?’
‘I’m OK. It’s been such a long time.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. I’ve been a bit ill.’
‘I know, love. I heard. I’m so sorry. Are you all right now?’
I shrug. I didn’t want to have this conversation. I don’t want to lay myself open in front of this person I bare
ly know. But I knew what would happen if I came to the party. And I know I have to start sometime. That’s why I came here, after all: to start being brave again, carry on reminding myself how I’m supposed to live. ‘I don’t know really. It’s like being an alcoholic. It’s there, always, for ever. You just get control.’ This is further than I meant to go, really. Fiona probably didn’t bargain for this much truth. I could go even further now I’ve started, try to really show her the way I feel, wake her up to what I’ve been through, and tell her my favourite image of what anorexia is like, the final image of Primo Levi’s book The Truce, which I read while I was still in the hospital, ghoulishly devouring tales of Auschwitz because they reminded me a little of myself and hoping none of the nurses would work out what I was reading. At the end of The Truce, Levi spoke of the morning call at Auschwitz that woke him every day, the cry of ‘Wstawàch’, ‘Get up.’ And he finished by saying he didn’t believe he’d heard it for the last time. He believed that a truce had been called, but it wouldn’t last for ever. And a day would come when he would be lying in bed, and the sound would reach his ears again. The sound of a German voice outside his window calling ‘Get up,’ and the nightmare starting again. That’s what anorexia is like sometimes. I can understand why Levi ended up throwing himself down a stairwell to his death. I can imagine he must have heard the call again. I know what that’s like, to wait for the voice that will summon you home into suffering. I think, on reflection, I might not say this to Fiona. She probably hasn’t heard of Primo Levi, anyway.
‘A friend of mine had a sister who died from it.’
‘Yeah? I’m sorry.’
Fiona becomes suddenly tearful. ‘It’s so good to see you. I’m so glad that didn’t happen to you.’
‘Yeah.’
‘More people die from anorexia than anything else, you know.’
I try not to smile. ‘I don’t think that’s quite true. I think you mean it has a higher death rate than any other mental illness. I don’t think more people die of it than anything else.’
Fiona laughs. ‘God, sorry, yeah, said the wrong thing. AIDS, obviously, loads of people die of AIDS.’
I’m glad I didn’t tell Fiona about Primo Levi. ‘I think even AIDS is still a bit of a minority pursuit compared to, like, heart attacks and cancer.’
‘Of course. I didn’t think of them. Of course.’
The loo door opens, and Fiona disappears through it. I wait on my own for my turn.
I began fainting regularly the afternoon after my sectioning meeting, my energy reserves completely exhausted. My body was eating my heart and all my bones were aching. A tube was inserted through my nose after my fourth faint, despite my screams, despite my protestations, and Dad was sent home so the doctors trying to save me could get on with their work.
I stayed in bed in the hospital for four weeks. Dad moved into my room in Bristol, so he could come and see me every day. I still can’t bear to think of the tension there must have been between him and Mum in those weeks, when I was still adamant that I wouldn’t see her. It must have been hell for him to mediate between the two islands of pain and isolation he lived between, his home and the hospital; to hold them together, and keep them apart. I was unfair on him, giving him all that to cope with, when perhaps what he wanted to be was weak and distraught, to collapse and give way to the grief of what had happened to his daughter. And it must have been hell as well, of course, for Mum. But I made myself ignore that. I told the nurses Mum’s name for them to put on a list. They promised they wouldn’t let her on to the ward, and because I was over eighteen that was the end of it, of course. I thought if I saw her the walls might cave in. She would sit by my bed and pretend we were close, pretend we were all in this together and she knew what was best for me, she could look after me, and the thought made me sick, I couldn’t stand it.
I kept remembering Mum sitting me down on the closed lid of the toilet seat, and running the hot tap.
‘What do we think of bad language?’ she said in a shaky voice, taking the soap and rubbing it under the water with both her thumbs, so a lather started building. I watched it, burning in the brightness of my shame.
‘It’s bad.’
‘And I won’t have it in the house. You understand? I can’t let you behave like that.’ Mum turned to me, the soap in her right hand, her expression almost imploring. ‘Open your mouth.’
‘Please.’
‘Come on, Kate.’ She crossed the room and took my chin in her left hand, and I let my mouth fall open, because there was no point resisting Mum, no matter how hard I tried to make it stop: whatever Mum wanted would happen in the end. ‘If you would just listen to me sometimes, I wouldn’t have to do this. Why can’t you ever listen?’ I retched as my mum put the soap on my tongue and scrubbed, as if she was trying to bleach away darkness. The tears came springing onion-sharp into my eyes, and I let them.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I should think so too. I should think so, Kate, I—’ Then Mum stepped back, and I could see she was trembling. She seemed scared by what she’d done. ‘You see what I have to do when you use language like that? What you make me do? Never do that again, all right?’
‘I’m sorry.’
She turned away to the sink, and held her hand over her eyes for a moment. ‘Stop crying. I don’t want to see you till lunch.’ Then I was alone in the room, and I let the guilt wash over me, and sobbed my wild heart out, because my mum hated me, my mum thought I was disgusting, and I hadn’t even really done anything wrong but I knew I must be evil. I went to the mirror and looked at my eyes, and tried to clean up my face so it didn’t look like I’d been crying. I knew that I mustn’t show Dad all this, no matter how much I wanted to, or I’d only be in more trouble with Mum. I knew I had brought this sick soap taste on myself, and it mustn’t be shared with anyone else.
I still can’t quite tell what it was that she hated, unless it was the peaceful hours I took from her, unless it was the simple fact that I existed.
Time and again, my family said the wrong thing to me when they came to visit, all through my time in the hospital. That I was looking well, that I would soon be better, that the hospital was really very nice, wasn’t it? All I saw around me was a prison. All I could feel was the bloating of my body. Whenever anyone tried to make me feel better, the thoughts would flare up, and I wanted to tear at my skin. It was damaging enough to hear from friends, but I dreaded Mum arriving, telling me I had brought this on myself, or that I had always liked to milk my illnesses a little, or that my vegetarianism might need setting aside now all this had happened, as if that had started everything, as if it was my own fault and a madness hadn’t taken me.
Most of those were things I overheard Aunt Laura saying while she waited in the reception room to visit, over the subsequent months of my treatment. She used to come with Grandma and Grandad. Then after a while it was only her and Grandad who came, because Grandma was ill. That’s another thing that hurts now, knowing that I wasn’t there for her, that I missed so much of her sickness. And Laura and Grandad dealt with all that, the loss of a wife, a sister, and I’ve never asked them about it. We never talked about how they were, because I was too deep down in the well of my sadness. When Laura said things that upset me, I tried to tell myself it was just one person who thought like that, and Aunt Laura didn’t know what she was saying, she didn’t know how to react to what had happened. She expresses love like a woodpecker, battering away; she doesn’t understand the subtler tones people sometimes needed to hear. But all the same, it made me panic when I heard her talk like that. I didn’t know whether anyone would ever treat me normally again. What if everyone pursed their lips and shook their heads as they walked away from a visit with me, out of the hospital grounds, and thought I wasn’t trying hard enough to get better? Or thought I had been selfish to cause so much pain? Or thought I was stupid to throw my life away like this? What if everyone still thinks like that now, and everyone at this party is whispering an
d shaking their heads to each other when I pass by?
While he sat with me through visiting hours, Dad arranged for me to be released from the contract I had signed for my room in the flat, excused a few months on medical grounds. Dad and everyone else knew ages before I had accepted it that I would be a long time recovering. He arranged with the call centre that I wouldn’t come in for a while. I tried to shut out the humiliation of it all, of never being alone, of being watched all the time, even when I went to the toilet. And the shabbiness of using a commode, and having to be helped in the shower, and having to be helped to stand. I tried to smile at my visitors, and tried not to look too directly into the horror of the situation, the depth of my unhappiness, the depth of my fear.
‘It hurts so much even to lie here.’
Dad was opening cards for me, showing me the wishes of people who’d heard about what was happening. There was a card from Grandad and Grandma in among them. I had just heard Grandma was ill, and that was like a nightmare to me, another person I was going to lose and me not there for them. The card was comically inappropriate to the situation – a high heel or handbag or something, I think, with glitter. I saw that Grandad had written it. He’d never written a card to me before. Every birthday, every Christmas ever had been marked in Grandma’s handwriting; she had been the one who remembered all the dates and signed for both of them. Now I saw how ill she was in the neat and straitjacketed hand of my grandad. He must have stood mystified in front of the rack of cards and then seized on the one that seemed most feminine, pleased he was filling in for Grandma so well. He had tried to write her name differently, in curlier letters, so I wouldn’t guess she couldn’t sign it herself. I’ve never told him how easily I saw through it. I want him to think that it worked.
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