‘Do you need more painkillers?’
‘No. Yes. I don’t know.’
‘You can sleep soon.’
The best bit of the day for me and Dad was right at the end, when the other visitors had left, before the nurses had sent Dad away. Then we would share a bottle of fizzy water he brought every day from the hospital shop. It was the only thing other than still water I allowed myself to have; it was my treat, the most precious and exotic flavour in my world. I wasn’t allowed very much, because the hospital had me on a strict water diet and I couldn’t take on too much, but if Dad drank half the bottle with me then I was allowed my San Pellegrino. So we would sit together, watching the sun go down over Bristol, and say very little, or even nothing, and I would luxuriate in the tingle and thrill of sparkling water, the last luxury I allowed myself.
Fiona comes back out of the bathroom and smiles at me.
‘So good to see you, Kate.’
‘And you, Fiona. Lovely to chat. I’ll see you outside in a minute, yeah?’
‘All right.’
Fiona disappears back in the direction of the lawn. I duck into the bathroom and lock the door behind me, and allow myself to bask for a moment in the happy seclusion of a locked door and a drawn blind, the hubbub of the party sounding distant through the window. I have to admit, it’s going better than I expected, today. It seems I might be able to do it all. I can talk to people. And I’ve been looking around, but I haven’t seen Dad or Mum, they can’t have arrived yet. There’s still time before I have to face that.
It is all about time, that’s what I’ve learned, that’s what heals everything, clichéd as it sounds. That’s how I got out of the hospital. Slowly, agonisingly, things changed. For a long time the tube in my throat caused me a lot of pain and I avoided speaking at all, even to Dad, but after two weeks a doctor told me the tubes came in different sizes, and fitted a smaller one, and then I was able to talk again. As I left my starvation state behind the fog I’d been living in started to part; I was able to begin seeing more clearly that my life hadn’t been worth living when I was very ill, that I didn’t want to go back to how I had been then. Getting away from the hospital was more important than never eating again; if I had to eat my way out of there, then I would. The complete terror I’d started to feel about eating eased once my body had energy and my brain could work. After a while I was able to start taking in some of my calories without the tube. There was a coffee-flavoured drink that they gave me called Fortisip. It came in other flavours too, not just coffee, but that was the only one I accepted at first, because coffee had been the last thing I still allowed into my body before the sectioning; when I had got down to the very bottom and stripped all of life away, I’d still been drinking black coffee. The last taste in the world. When I was moved from the general hospital to the specialist unit I eased away from the tube completely, until I took all my energy from those coffee-flavoured drinks. The tube made it easier not to think about the treatment but it hurt, and there was something unhealthy about it too. To have your life piped into you, so you never really knew anything about it. It wasn’t how things were supposed to happen to a person. Things were supposed to pass through the net of the senses.
There are photos of my family all over the walls of Grandad’s downstairs bathroom: collages of snaps framed together to mark different years of all our lives. Looking around at them, I see once again the beaches of Salcombe where we all used to holiday together, the horses my grandparents kept that Mum and I would ride when we visited, the barbecues, the gin and tonics, the laughter of a family seeming united. I spot us in our raincoats, braving different winters, and down by the sea with buckets and spades. I recognise myself, stubby-legged and just beginning to learn to read, and Mum when she was young and uncertain and too long-limbed to be really beautiful. People caught in old photographs always look like early drafts of themselves to me, unfinished. I never think people look like they’ve fallen away from who they really are as they get older. All their lives, as they turn grey, as the lines grow deeper, people seem to me to be working their way towards their true faces, until the last face they present to the world is finally like the telling of the whole truth. We are always turning into ourselves, into the finished self people will remember us as having been when we have died, even though we were never really finished at all. Even though our stories might have had other chapters, if we’d just lived longer.
I come out of the bathroom and head back down to join the party. The bar, which I abandoned momentarily, is thronged with people waiting for the single bottle opener I’ve been using all morning, and I suppose I should go and rescue them all, but I’ve decided to take another five minutes to be peaceful, so I walk round the side of the stables, and look out at the field beyond the car park, enjoying the feeling of having escaped from my duties for a little while longer.
The specialist eating disorder ward was a calmer place than the general hospital. It was meant to be a community of people in recovery from the same kinds of trouble I had been in. I was in a medical bay at first, under constant supervision, but once I had passed three weeks without using the tube and my weight started to increase again – how I hated that feeling, dough swelling in an oven, the shame of a body distorted by fat again; or that was the image in my mind’s eye anyway, no matter how often people told me it was healthy – I was given a room of my own. All the patients had a room, with a big window in the door so the nursing teams could always check on us, but with a view from a window, and a desk and a cupboard and a bed: the nucleus of a life available to us, the very basics. It looked a little like a boarding school. The days were filled with workshops and community activities, a hundred different ways of supposedly nurturing me back into the world.
Whatever it looked like, it wasn’t like a school to those who were there. To me the place was like a gaol, and I hated every second. To be trapped; to be shut away from life; to be walled into that emptiness: it was the worst nightmare that had ever haunted me. All I did was eat, and wait for the next meal so I could eat again. It felt like a bitter irony, having avoided eating for so long. All I did was watch life running away from me, convinced the world had forgotten me, convinced that everything was passing me by. It was the same for everyone on the ward. I kept myself to myself most of the time, apart from other patients, determined to focus on getting out of that place, not making friends, but we did talk at mealtimes, and slowly I became closer to some of the young women I lived alongside. The ones who seemed determined, who could help me along. After visiting hours had ended I used to have a menthol with two other girls, Rachel and Ellie, on the balcony at the back of the ward. That was the only place we could smoke, because we were only allowed outside in the garden for thirty minutes each day. The rest of the time we were behind the locked door, in the prison. For the first month we didn’t even go outside at all. Then we were given fifteen minutes to sit in the garden. After a few more weeks we were allowed a daily walk as well, and then at last we were given community leave, the chance to go into town for a few hours, the chance to go home for the weekends. Such was our agonising reintegration back into the world. The rest of the time we lay on our beds and waited for the next meal. All the patients fantasised together about the lives we had once had and the lives we might have been having if we hadn’t been there. I used to talk about it with Ellie and Rachel. We dreamed of a hundred lives that wouldn’t come true. We would plan huge menus of food we wished we could eat without feeling afraid. All of us struggled to pick out goals to cling to. Without a reason to get out of the hospital, with nothing but despair and the constant act of eating to fill our time, it was hard to get better, and sometimes we felt it was too deep and steep-sided a well to climb out of.
I tried to commit to my recovery. I wanted to get out of the hospital, and so I thought of Joe, and what he would want for me, and tried to draw strength from imagining that. I worked with a psychologist to analyse where my fear had sprung up from, how it could be rei
magined into something safe. I was enchanted by this idea, that my whole life, the whole world even, could be reimagined. I could make it take a different shape and hold less threat for me, if only I managed to think things through.
A dietician worked with me to plot a route back into health through food. I started to work out the path I had taken to get away from eating, so I could retrace it in the opposite direction. The last things I had eaten were carrots, cucumbers, bananas. Single ingredients with very little in them at all. They were the first rung on the ladder back into life. The last food I had eaten with more than one ingredient had been a soup: pearl barley and tomato and root vegetables and lentils and onions. I made that my next step. After that, little by little, more seemed possible.
I didn’t have that much choice in the way I was treated. Still under section, I had to do what the dietician said. I was supposed to eat six times a day, three proper meals and three snacks. It was exhausting, and constant, and frayed my nerves so I used to catch myself grinding my teeth again, digging my nails back into my palms. But they told me it was what I had to do to get out, so I committed to it, clinging to the diet plan they gave me, the yoghurts and biscuits and chocolate milk, because it was a way to not be in the hospital, a way to go home, wherever that might be. I spent six months as an inpatient at the unit on this relentless cycle before the doctors let me become an outpatient. I moved out and rented a new room in a different part of Bristol, closer to the hospital, and Dad paid the rent for half a year. He wanted me back home still, but I wouldn’t go, insisted it wouldn’t help me. So we set out on the plan I had made for myself, the plan of standing on my own two feet again. Little by little I started to kick the ladder of my treatment away.
That took a long time, and of course the process hasn’t really ended, and perhaps it never really will. Once you have an eating disorder, you manage it for the rest of your life. It never goes away. The war is never quite over, even if it drifts right to the back of your mind over time, as it can with some people. I don’t know what will happen for me, not yet. I will have to live my life in order to see what becomes of it, and how the song ends. I can’t skip ahead and peek. Sometimes I feel like I’m winning, and sometimes I don’t, and then I tell myself I’m a bad anorexic for doing so well, and sob out my heart while the dark of another hollow evening spreads around me like blood pouring out of a body. Sometimes I’ll still pass a day without eating more than a few pieces of fruit, if I want to, or if I can’t manage it, if Sam isn’t around and I think I can get away with fasting without having to explain myself. I shouldn’t, but I like to exert that control over myself. The idea it all started with, the feeling that I wanted to take hold of the reins of my life, is still there somewhere near the heart of me. Sometimes I still feel overwhelmed by the world around me, paralysed when I’m sitting in a café looking at a menu, or shopping for food, or thinking of getting on public transport and facing the grubby and degrading noise of the world I’m being squeezed through, like sausagemeat into skin. The fear is always waiting for me, ready to claim me, if a day takes a wrong turn. I’ll always know that I could one day hear its voice again.
When I came to the end, when I had stripped myself away till only my skin and my bones were left to me, Lizzy had sat and held my hand and tried to bring me to my senses.
‘I think you think you’re doing this for Joe. But listen to me. The only thing any of us can do for him now is be alive, all right? And stick two fingers up to dying, and prove that life’s better than death. You have to see this isn’t showing loyalty to him. You have to live instead.’
It was a hard lesson, but I heard it; it reached through the fog of my illness and stuck like an arrow in the centre of me. And so I decided I was going to live, for Joe’s sake, for Lizzy’s sake, and try to stick two fingers up to death. I wouldn’t turn away from the world I had been plunged into. I would find a way to live. And the fall would be hard, and I might break something when I landed. But I would fashion a parachute and live.
I find my way back to the bar to get another drink, fill my glass and look around me. Mum’s walking towards me, smiling, determined. Panic floods through me. I’m so scared to see her face after we’ve spent so long apart from each other.
‘Hello, darling.’
‘Hello, Mum.’ Mum gives me a hug, and I let her, lifting my hands to rest them for a moment on her shoulders.
‘I saw they had you out here running the bar again. Isn’t that terrible? You’d think they could run to some proper caterers and let you actually see everyone.’
‘I don’t mind helping them – they do enough for us today, don’t they?’ I speak as bluntly as I dare, hating Mum for finding it so easy to criticise others when I know she’s never in her life accepted any criticism of herself. I’m shocked at the hostility welling up in me.
‘Well, yes, I suppose they do. Now, how are you, darling? How are you feeling?’
I shrug. ‘I’m all right, I guess. It’s nice being here.’
‘Nice seeing everyone.’
‘Not particularly. I just like this house.’
‘Of course. Lots of happy memories for you here, aren’t there? Of course, it’s not so easy for me.’ She looks back at the house as if it holds some secret, and I don’t want to let her get away with that. She’s nervous, I suppose, she doesn’t know what to say and how to start talking to me. But that’s no reason to be cruel to other people, to Grandad and Aunt Laura. There’s no reason for Mum to play the victim today; she has no right, she shouldn’t be standing here trying to make herself important.
‘Why not?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. So many reasons. Much more than we could ever get into here. Wouldn’t expect you to understand. You’ve always romanticised this place, I know. But I just think of this as a sad place, really.’
‘It’s a shame you think that.’
‘There’s nothing I can do about it, and I don’t think I should have to apologise for feeling the way I do. It’s just a sad, sad home, and I know you can’t see it, but there are things you don’t see, you know.’
‘Well, I think Grandad would probably appreciate it if you kept that to yourself, as long as you’re here. I know I would. I’m here to be happy for him, not sorry for you.’
Mum forces herself to laugh. She doesn’t look at me. ‘You’ve still got a temper on you, haven’t you?’
Why is she sounding so aggressive? I suppose she’s hurt like I am. I suppose that always makes people want to lash out.
‘I’m just telling you what I think. I’m allowed to do that, particularly if I’m finding you offensive.’ Mum turns to look at me now, and I fight down the old fear, the child’s fear that I’ll be in trouble for speaking out of turn, that I’ll get told off.
‘Why on earth would you be finding me offensive?’
‘Because you’re so ungrateful. You’re so ungrateful for everything you have.’ How have we made our way so quickly into these deep waters? I wish Dad was nearby to mediate between us. I can hardly imagine a way we can ease back into civility from here.
‘Are you still working in that call centre then?’ Mum asks.
‘Yes.’
‘How long has that been?’
‘A while.’ Mum sighs, and I feel angry again. ‘What?’
‘No, it’s nothing, darling, sorry, I’m not trying to argue. I don’t want to have an argument.’
‘All right, but what are you sighing about?’
Mum’s searching for words. ‘It’s such a waste of your potential. You’re a talented girl, you shouldn’t be sitting in a call centre, it’s going to hold you back.’
‘Don’t call me a girl, Mum, I’m not a little girl. I don’t want you to talk to me like I’m an idiot.’
‘The best way of shaking yourself out of everything you’ve been feeling is to start taking life seriously again. Isn’t it? Don’t you have to decide that you’re going to be well, isn’t that how we do things? I know it all happens slower now
for your generation, but really, it’s not too soon to start building something for yourself, darling, that’s the way you’re going to start to feel better.’ I feel nothing but contempt. I’m not saying anything to that. Mum fills the silence by reaching out and taking my hand. ‘I’m sorry, darling. We’re fighting, and I so don’t want to fight. I’m just worried about you. I’m worried sick. When are you going to come and visit me, my love? When are we going to sit down and sort this out?’
I want to slap her, grab her by the ears, to scream. I want to turn and walk away. This is the woman who told me to move on from Joe, just weeks after the accident; this is the woman who told me I would waste my life if I kept on crying for him.
‘You’re not doing anything for him, being like this,’ she told me, sitting next to me on my bed at home, the childhood bed I never wanted to see again. ‘This is just you hurting yourself. There’s no point to that. Do you understand? You have to find ways to move on with your life.’ And then she wondered why I didn’t let her near the hospital; she raged at Dad and asked why she couldn’t be part of that illness. I didn’t dare let her near me then, for fear she’d tell me I was only hurting myself; I ought to move on with my life. There was no room in her world for grief, no understanding that some things take time, need time, leave scarring that has to heal. And nothing’s changed, has it? I can’t believe she thinks it’s OK to come here and tell me her complaints are important; that our falling-out matters, and needs to be dealt with. It’s as if all she can see is her own life and her own needs, all she wants is her own happiness, and she can’t imagine the needs or the life of anyone else. I want to scream at her. But that’s the kind of thing she expects me to do. That’s the way we used to communicate, and I don’t want to go back to that place any more. I keep breathing, out and in. I take my hand away from where Mum’s holding it.
‘I don’t know that there’s very much to sort out, really, Mum.’
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