by Cathy Kelly
Nineteen
Lovers’ hearts are linked and always beat as one. MANDARIN PROVERB
In the end, it was Andi who noticed.
Ruby and Andi were in the changing rooms and Ruby was trying to change without actually letting anyone see that she was getting thinner. But somehow, Andi clocked it.
She grabbed her friend’s arm and held it tightly.
‘What’s going on, Ruby?’ she demanded.
‘Keep your voice down,’ hissed Ruby.
‘OK, but what’s happening? You’re turning into one of the skinny cows and I want to know why.’
‘There’s no reason,’ whispered Ruby, but she couldn’t stop the tears. Someone had noticed, but not the right people. Not Dad, not Vonnie, not even Mum.
‘Oh, Rubes,’ said Andi. ‘Please tell me it’s not what I think it is.’
‘It’s not.’
‘It bloody is,’ said Andi. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here. We’re going to my place and we’re going to sort this out.’
‘I can’t!’ Ruby tried to wriggle out of Andi’s grasp, but her friend wasn’t letting go.
‘No, you’re going to come with me. Screw school. School will be no good to you if you’re dead.’
‘Don’t talk like that,’ said Ruby, horrified.
‘I will talk like that,’ said Andi, rage in her voice. ‘I love you. You’re my best friend and you have been for a long time and you’re doing this crap to yourself, this not eating – don’t deny it. I know. You have nothing for lunch. So we’re going to go to my house and I’m going to show you what happens to people who do this.’
She stopped dragging her friend by the arm and turned to face her. ‘You’re going to end up like Monica. Remember her? I’m going to show you what she’s like now – and it won’t be good. She was a nice girl, that’s what my sister says, and now she’s nothing. She’s just skin and bones, going from hospital to home and back to hospital again, because she can’t get well. I’m not going to stand by and let you get that bad.’
Ruby didn’t know what to say. Monica had been in their school until she’d been hospitalised for anorexia. She’d never come back after that and rumours had sprung up about where she was now. Recovered, not recovered – nobody knew.
That wasn’t what Ruby had wanted at all; she wanted to say so to Andi but she couldn’t. Instead, she stood silently by her locker as Andi pulled out their stuff and shoved Ruby’s coat and rucksack at her.
‘We’ll be killed,’ said Ruby.
‘No we won’t,’ said Andi. ‘We’ll go out the back way.’
The back way meant climbing over the fence near the basketball courts. Ruby had done it before, but not for a long time. She was very tired. She hadn’t eaten all day, and the gluttony in front of the fridge last night hadn’t provided any sustenance. Not enough protein, she knew. There’d been no cold chicken, no cheese; just cake, a yogurt, some cream – crap like that. Nothing that would give her any energy.
Seeing her struggling, Andi grabbed both rucksacks and threw them over the fence, then hauled her over too.
‘You see,’ said Andi between gritted teeth, ‘this is what not eating is doing to you.’
It was freezing cold and wet, and they both pulled their hoods up and trudged through the polar wind up the back lanes and out on to the main road. It didn’t take long to catch a bus. Andi’s house was only eight stops away, closer than Ruby’s.
They sat in silence together until Ruby said: ‘Will there be anyone home?’
‘No, nobody home today, just you and me.’
Ruby relaxed back into the seat. Perhaps Andi was the right person to tell. She couldn’t go on with this much longer.
Andi’s home was so very different from The Close and from Poppy Lane.
While Poppy Lane at least felt as if it was trying to be a home, however full of packing cases and old wallpaper it currently was, the house in The Close had lost all sense of that a long time ago and had turned into a mausoleum of slammed doors, with Ruby’s mum stamping around the place, rattling saucepans in the kitchen as she cooked. Sometimes Mum spent hours on the phone to Granny Lulu, ranting about Ryan and Vonnie at the top of her voice, totally forgetting that Ruby was sitting in the room with her.
Ruby had learned how to tune out, more or less. It was always nice to come to Andi’s place, though. It wasn’t a big house; not really enough room, as Andi always said, for parents, a nineteen-year-old brother, an eighteen-year-old sister and Andi. The plus was that Andi’s sister, Clare, never minded lending her clothes. Andi was much envied among the other girls in year five for having a sister who would lend.
‘I’m sure Shelby’d lend me her clothes,’ Ruby used to joke, ‘but they wouldn’t fit me.’
Thinking of Shelby now made her want to cry. How long had it been since she’d made a joke or laughed at anything?
The house was warm inside, the radiators on low. Andi frogmarched Ruby straight into the kitchen, threw the rucksacks down and steered her towards the big old couch covered in cushions and cat hair. The family’s two cats, Jasper and Georgie, looked up from their comfortable spaces, blinked sleepily and then put their heads back down again.
‘What do you want to eat?’ Andi demanded.
‘I … I don’t know,’ Ruby stammered, instinctively thinking of her regime and what she could not eat. Then she let her body relax. ‘Toasted cheese – a toasted cheese sandwich and a cup of tea. I think about toasted cheese all the time.’
‘And when was the last time you had it?’
‘Don’t know.’
Andi turned on the radio so there was music and made the food in silence, then put it in front of Ruby.
‘Gimme a sec,’ she said.
Ruby could hear her running upstairs, the thump of her feet, and then she was back with her sister Clare’s laptop.
‘Won’t she kill you?’ said Ruby. Clare might have been good about her clothes, but a laptop was a personal thing.
‘She won’t kill me,’ said Andi. ‘This is important – you’re important.’
Again Ruby felt that prickling of tears in her eyes.
Andi was brilliant on a laptop. She’d studied typing in transition year, and her fingers flew over the keys much faster than Ruby’s ever did. Suddenly they were there.
‘I didn’t know these things were still on the Internet,’ Ruby said. She’d often thought about looking up a pro-anorexia website but she’d been nervous – nervous someone might check her history and figure it out … and then what?
Not her mother, no, but it was the sort of thing Vonnie might do if she found Ruby’s laptop lying around and wondered why she wasn’t eating properly. Vonnie was the kind of person who’d notice that.
For some reason this thought made Ruby even sadder. She’d done this so someone would notice her, and the person most likely to notice was her stepmother. Not her mother. That made her want to cry and never stop. Her family didn’t have to be together – in fact, her parents were better separated – but she did want parents. A mother who cared.
‘OK,’ said Andi, scanning the home page of the first site. ‘Gallery, I think that’s where we’ll start.’
The gallery was shocking. They both stared at it open-mouthed. There were pictures of girls proudly sucking in non-existent stomachs to reveal the full extent of their ribcages. People bent over in the shower showing the bony nobbles of their spine, each etiolated rib visible.
There were blogs with titles like Can’t be loved until I’m skinny, or Too fat.
They both read silently. The music in the kitchen ceased to exist in their heads. There was Maria, who was racing off to buy cayenne pepper because she’d heard that cayenne pepper and lemon juice and vinegar was the most wonderful diet ever and suppressed the appetite.
A banana was the answer, somebody else said. It keeps the potassium levels up. I know it’s really fattening, but y’know.
There were girls berating themselves for not having had the e
nergy to exercise for three days, but determined that they would.
Another girl had eaten a thousand calories the day before, planned to eat six hundred the following day and then fast for the third day because there was a party. She’d seen a boy she liked and the girls he fancied were all skinny. It had to make sense, didn’t it?
Andi kept clicking up picture after picture, blog after blog relentlessly until Ruby couldn’t bear to look any more.
‘I want to talk to them all and tell them they’re crazy,’ she sobbed. So many of the girls had beautiful, innocent faces with hollow Bambi eyes looking out sadly, apparently incapable of loving themselves. ‘I feel so sorry for them.’
‘Is that what you want to be?’ Andi demanded. ‘Because that’s the path you’re going down. You choose that and you know what it will lead to: hospital, then death. You can’t do that to yourself – I won’t let you. Tell me, what’s going on?’
‘Turn it off, please, I can’t look at it any more,’ begged Ruby ‘There’s so much pain, it’s too dreadful.’
‘Fine.’
Andi exited the site and soon Clare’s screensaver came up: a dolphin leaping endlessly through blue waters.
‘I didn’t know she liked dolphins,’ Ruby said.
‘Obsessed with them. She wants to swim with them, dance with them, kiss them – you name it. I read an article once about somebody who went on holiday and kissed a dolphin; she said its smell was very fishy – duh! What did she expect? Anyway, enough about dolphins.’ Andi looked her in the eye. ‘What’s going on, Ruby?’
Ruby sat in silence and Andi decided she wouldn’t press her for the moment. Instead she watched Ruby eat her sandwich, devouring it as if she hadn’t eaten in a month. Halfway through, she stopped.
‘Is it not nice?’ Andi asked.
‘I’m full,’ said Ruby, shamefaced.
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, really.’ Food made Ruby long to lie down, put her head on the pillow and sleep. ‘Andi, can we talk tomorrow? We will talk, I promise. We can meet early, before school. It’s just that I’m so tired.’
‘I’m not surprised, if you haven’t been eating.’
‘Please don’t be angry with me. Please. I get enough of that at home,’ Ruby said, her lip quivering. ‘I’m not anorexic, I promise. I started doing this—’
She stopped. She didn’t have the energy to explain.
‘Tomorrow,’ said Andi. ‘Early.’
‘OK.’
They met the next morning at eight o’clock outside a coffee shop near school. The café was far too busy for them to talk in private, so they got takeaways. Andi watched Ruby, who’d always taken two sugars, order a black coffee and add absolutely nothing to the cup.
‘Ruby,’ she said pointedly. ‘Sugar? Milk?’
Ruby flushed. ‘I’ve got out of the habit.’
‘I know sugar is the devil and all that, but put some milk in please, for me.’
‘Sure.’
Andi didn’t even bother offering to buy Ruby a bun: she knew they’d have to take this slowly. All night she’d been wondering what to do, who to tell – because she knew she couldn’t deal with this on her own, it was too serious. But who to talk to?
There was no point approaching Ruby’s mum, that was for sure. Andi had seen enough of Jennifer to know how self-absorbed she was. She’d been round their house when Jennifer went off on one of her rants, not even caring who saw her. If Andi told her about Ruby’s problem, she would wail and cry and make a big fuss. And that wouldn’t help Ruby.
If Andi told her own mother, it would send Ruby’s mother into orbit with rage. Same if she told Ruby’s dad. No, she needed somebody neutral, someone who would help.
Ms Lynott, their form teacher, came to mind. She’d be good. Ruby liked her. Everyone liked her. She was a kind, decent person who could actually talk to the girls and make it sound like she’d been a teenager once herself.
So that was the plan.
Andi was going to sit Ruby down and tell her they were going to skip maths and go to Ms Lynott. Finding a private place to talk in school even early in the morning was virtually impossible; Andi figured the best place was the bench beside the trees between the junior and senior schools. It wasn’t a hot spot for the smokers because it was in full view of Mrs Rhattigan’s office from the junior school.
‘Come on, let’s sit here,’ she said, making her way over to the trees.
‘It’s freezing,’ protested Ruby.
‘We’ve got our coffee, we can hold on to that. We’ll be fine. We’ll just be here ten minutes. It’s not that cold.’
‘It is,’ said Ruby.
‘That’s ’cos you’re not eating,’ Andi said grimly. ‘Severe dieting makes you cold all the time.’
‘Enough about the severe dieting,’ said Ruby, looking tearful.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t say it to be mean,’ Andi said quickly. ‘I just want to help. I feel like I’ve been a crap friend because I should have known. You’re definitely skinnier – how did I miss that?’
‘How could you know?’ Ruby said. ‘I hid it, that’s the whole point. You don’t let anyone know.’
‘Yeah, but I’m with you all the time. I mean, what were you eating for lunch? Oh wait, I know – you were eating apples and yogurts and almost nothing else. I thought it was some health kick. You kept going on about how your mother was cooking up a storm every night.’
‘She has been,’ said Ruby. ‘It’s her way of making a point in the great battle to prove that she’s a fabulous mother and Vonnie isn’t. Vonnie’s in work all day, therefore she cannot possibly be making fabulous nutritious meals for us when we’re with Dad.’
‘Oh God,’ said Andi. ‘I didn’t know it had got that bad.’
‘Yeah,’ Ruby said dully. ‘You’ve no idea; we get the whole cordon-bleu menu. The thing is, she doesn’t really notice whether we eat it or not; it’s just the fact that she’s made it. She’s so obsessed with proving how good she is at cooking, she never looks at Shelby’s homework. I have to look at it for her. And then there’s the constant interrogation. As soon as I get home on Monday night after a weekend with Dad and Vonnie, Mum wants to know everything. What we did, where we went, what films we watched. Was Shelby in bed on time? What did we eat? That’s her favourite one. Or what did Vonnie wear? There’s no good answer to that. It’s a nightmare, Andi. I can’t cope with it.’
‘Have you told your dad?’
‘I don’t want to. It’s hard enough for him already. I can see the stress every time Mum rings about something. She’s always so angry and he looks so upset. I know he and Vonnie are worried about money because of the mortgage, and I overheard them talking one night about how handy it would be if Mum got a job. And they’re right, it would be brilliant for her, but can you imagine saying it to her?’
Andi shook her head.
‘Me neither,’ said Ruby. ‘That’s when I thought of the food—’ She broke off. It sounded so stupid telling Andi about it now. ‘It was just something I could be in charge of. I thought that if I got thin, someone might notice, then they’d realise how hard this is for me …’ Her voice trailed off and she started to cry.
Andi put her arms around Ruby’s slender frame and hugged her tightly.
‘You utter, complete dork,’ she said tearfully. ‘I can’t believe you went through all this without telling me. There’s got to be a better way to let people know you’re hurting.’
‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,’ sobbed Ruby. ‘It’s stupid, I know, but—’
‘But you felt so miserable, and the self-destruct button is easier to push.’
‘I can see why you get As in your English essays,’ muttered Ruby, with a hint of her old grin.
‘Nah, it’s reading my mum’s self-help books,’ said Andi. ‘Listen, Ruby, we’re going to sort this out and there’s going to be no more food-controlling crap.’
Ruby said nothing; she just let the tears roll down her face, tu
rning cold in the wind as her dear friend held her tightly.
Jennifer was getting ready for her walk with Caroline that morning when she heard the front door opening.
Burglars was her first thought.
Swiftly she looked around her bedroom for a weapon, but there was nothing except a heavy crystal vase decorated with dust. Great, she’d be found flattened in her own house and the police would be able to tell everyone she was a crap housekeeper. She grabbed the vase anyway and crept carefully on to the landing.
‘I’m armed,’ she yelled, and began dialling the police on her mobile phone.
‘Yes, officer, I’ve got burglars,’ she said loudly, before the call was even answered. ‘Number four, The Close—’
And then she saw her burglars: Ruby and Andi. Something was definitely wrong, though. Quickly she ended the call.
‘Girls, what’s up? Ruby, what are you doing home at this time of day?’
By the time she got to the bottom of the stairs, she could feel the hairs standing up on the back of her neck at the sight of Ruby’s white, tear-stained face.
‘Mrs Morrison,’ said Andi coldly, ‘Ruby’s not well and I thought she should come home.’
Shocked as she was by the sight of her daughter looking so dreadful, Jennifer wasn’t disconcerted enough to have missed the note of reproach in Andi’s voice.
She grabbed Ruby, who looked as if she might faint, and together they helped her to the couch in the living room. Ruby lay down on it, as if she didn’t have the energy to sit up. Jennifer took one of her daughter’s wrists, and every instinct screamed at the frailty of it.
‘What’s wrong, Andi?’ she snapped. ‘What aren’t you telling me?’
‘Look at her, Mrs Morrison!’ yelled Andi. ‘She’s skin and bone. She’s not eating, and it’s all your bloody fault. Don’t you care about her at all? If not, she can come and live with me. I love her.’ And Andi hugged her friend and burst into tears.
Jennifer watched as if from a great distance, her only connection to the tableau her grasp on her daughter’s thin wrist.
All the voices she’d managed to block flooded into her head.