by Nicci Cloke
It’s the middle of summer, the sun round and hot in the sky, all the windows open and the air inescapably thick, closing in. I have on a beautiful dress I bought from a market one day, on one of my wanders. Pale blue cotton, with a full, short skirt and a sailor collar, sleeveless with big white buttons down the front and white swallows printed over it. As I reach the door, feet bare, my mother springs.
‘Put this on,’ she says. She’s holding out a white cardigan, thick knit with pearl buttons down the front.
I stare at her, the white jumper waiting between us. ‘It’s thirty degrees outside.’
‘This is going to be on our wall for ever,’ she says. ‘You want to look nice, don’t you?’
Into the sitting room where the coffee-table sat at right angles to the sofa and two chairs, both facing straight ahead. I ran my fingers along the windowsills but there was no dust, nothing to leave a mark in.
Through the dining room and the kitchen, not stopping there.
I sit at the table, arms crossed, trying not to shake. My dad stands opposite me, leaning on a chair, looking down at the table. He hasn’t said anything in forever. There is just the plate between us. My mother stalks back and forth. ‘We can wait here all day, Saffy. We’ve got nowhere to be. I’m not giving up today. Two spoons. Just two spoons, and then we can all get on. I’m sure you’ve got things you’d rather be doing. Something on telly? The others are watching telly. Wouldn’t you like to? I know you can hear me, it’s no use ignoring me.’
Maybe it’s something I do. Maybe it’s a slight curl of my lip or a flinch of my face. Maybe she just runs out of space to pace. But in that second, I hear her snap. I hear it, and I turn to look, and even as she’s rushing towards me, even as she’s picking up the spoon and jamming it in my face, even as the food is running down my chin and tears are falling down my face, I’m just staring. Even as my dad is pulling her away, even as the shouting fades deeper into the house, shut behind doors, even as I’m left alone with lumps dripping into my lap, I’m just staring. I can’t feel anything any more.
Into the garden. The sun was sinking slowly, the air dense and heavy. I looked at the wishing well in the corner of the lawn and wondered if I could fit inside, if I could pull the lid closed and sit there until I died. I thought probably not. Huck, my mother’s basset hound, would smell me and give the game away. I went to the apple tree and walked the whole way around its trunk, tracing the ridges in the bark beneath my fingers. I climbed the six planks of wood, without needing to look where my feet should be put, grabbing at them and not caring if I missed.
The wooden porch of Lulu’s tree house had once been big enough for two to sit and swing legs; now even she could barely fit. Green apples hung all around me and the sky was a clear, bright blue between the branches so everything around was bursting with quiet colour. When I was younger I would creep out there in the dark and listen to the rain falling softly around me. I hugged my knees and stared down at the grass, which grew long around the trees, short and uniform everywhere else in the garden. Up here things were wild and beautiful, a secret magic world away from everything else.
Beauty is a funny thing. In a tree it can be a colour or a bud or the way light dapples the leaves. In a view it can be the blue of the sky or the purple of sunset clouds or the curves of huge hills. But in a person beauty is not so simple. A single thing can’t make someone beautiful. You can have nice hair or pretty eyes or a lovely dress and still be ugly. My mother told me once, when I was only small and I asked her to put make-up on me, that beauty was only skin deep. When Fitz would tell me I looked beautiful, that I was beautiful, I knew he was lying. Because beauty really is only skin deep but ugly goes all the way in. The more you peel away the more you find.
I wondered how long it would be before Lulu could no longer fit in the tree house and my mother got someone in to rip it out. I could picture her standing on the lawn, hands on hips as men with tools tore down the walls and took them away in pieces.
We’re walking down the high street. That’s what I do at weekends, because I don’t have any of my few friends left any more, apart from Quin, and he’s being tutored at weekends and in the holidays by the university student who lives next door to them and who eventually introduces him to Brideshead. So I just wander around, sitting in cafés and bars, right at the back with a coffee or a water, and just watching people and seeing what they eat; looking at overcooked fried eggs split open to spill their still wet core over the browned and frilly whites, or burgers cooked too long, until the meat curls up at the edges, and the buns are shiny with fat and the lettuce translucent and dripping away onto white plates. Or I walk through bookshops and look at recipes and photographs, always flicking past the glossy author pictures or the scene-setting ones, the rivers or the rolling fields or the château, straight to the doughy pizzas and the fat fish and the carnival colours of peppers and red onions and fresh rocket. Rows and rows of symmetrical candy-coloured cupcakes with tiny sugar snowflakes and sharp crystals of sugar sinking into inches of icing. And I walk away feeling full.
That day, walking along with my mother, I’m wishing I could run into one of the shops, slide into the aisles and bury my face in one of the books heavy with food and stay there. It’s a cool autumn day, the beginning of school, when people are growing up and moving on, and I am stuck. I just want her to be gone. Her voice is needling, poking at me.
‘I saw Kelly from next door earlier,’ she’s saying. I don’t reply, pulling at a flap of skin over my hip through a hole in the pocket of my jumper until my eyes water. ‘She graduates next year. Isn’t that lovely? She’s going to be a vet. She hopes she’ll end up with her own practice. And a farmer husband! Isn’t that charming? Now, will you look at that little dress? That would look so lovely on you. I’ve always said navy was your colour. Most things are, mind, you’ve got your nanna’s colouring, though God willing not her temperament. Shall we try it on? That’d be fun, wouldn’t it? You try on that and I’ll give that green number a whirl, although I’ll admit silk isn’t always flattering on my thighs, but what is, eh? Saffy?’
I flick a hand instinctively, trying to swat the annoying noise away. ‘No,’ I say, with the greatest of efforts. ‘I don’t want to try it on. I hate it.’
She tuts. ‘There’s no need to be rude, Saffia. If you didn’t want to come, you might have said. Bluebell needs new shoes, you know. I could’ve brought her.’
I stop watching my scuffed pump scratching the pavement and look at her. She’s got older at some point when I wasn’t looking – she looks pretty much the same, with the same round eyes as Ella and turned-under hair, which she sets with rollers every morning; but her eyes are creased deeper than before and lines run down the corners of her mouth. Her skin has a dry, velvety look to it when you’re that close; powdery and crumbling. I feel a sudden hatred for her, for the too small handbag that hangs from the crook of her arm, for the lip-lined smile that never falters.
‘You should have,’ I say, pulling up my hood and stuffing my unbrushed hair over one shoulder, away from my face. ‘I didn’t even want to come.’
She rolls her eyes. ‘For goodness’ sake, Saffia. How long are you going to carry this on? The rest of us have lives too. You’ll just have to snap out of it, soon enough.’
I look at her, at the tiny pearls in her ears, at the spirit-level straight of her fringe, at the pressed angora cardigan, and then I look at the road behind her, at the cars and the buses heaving past, and I think about shoving her aside, about hurling myself under the wheels of the bus lumbering up the road, about the screech of brakes and the thud and the blood and the screams, and then the silence. The long-awaited silence. I picture her with a faint spatter of blood across her dusty cheek, as my skull smashes against the asphalt and my hand falls flat against the road, fingers closed as hers reach out for me too late. I almost smile.
I don’t think she would have reached for me, looking back. I overheard her, a day or so later, telling m
y dad that she couldn’t take any more. Perhaps in that moment, hearing the bus shuddering up behind us, feeling me staring back at her, unfixable, she wanted to push me.
It wasn’t long after that day that I was told I would become an in-patient at Happy Blossoms. It was a place I would come to dread and hate and dream about, but that first time, when I didn’t know any better and was easily fooled, a tiny part of me was thankful for a way out, a new place to be. I’d left this house, and I’d hoped I’d never come back. And now there I was again, back up in the tree house hiding from a family who wanted me hidden. I felt like I’d slipped through a groove in time and ended up back in the past by mistake. I needed to get out, back to my life, back to my flat.
Leaning my head against the rough wood, I breathed in the green air. A bird fluttered through the leaves above my head, settling on the roof. I heard the squeak of pushchair wheels outside on the road and wondered if it was Una, walking back and forth along the road with nowhere else to go. A car pulled up outside the house. I opened my eyes. Heard the doors closing, one, two, three, and Lulu’s voice wheedling something about a bunny. The sound of the boot opening. I slid back down the tree, over the doorstep, up the stairs and into bed just as the front door opened.
The doctor looks at me wearily over fogged lenses, and then at his notes, and then at my mother. ‘Your daughter, Mrs Truelove, is suffering from anorexia nervosa. An eating disorder.’
He lets the words sink in for a moment or two. I look down at the carpet and wait to leave. I seem to spend most of my life staring at ceilings or at floors, waiting for something or nothing to happen. ‘There is a range of treatments available,’ he says, as my mother’s lips start slowly to form shapes, her eyes blinking slowly. ‘It will depend on a number of factors,’ he says, ‘as to which treatment will emerge as the most suitable. Often, residential care is seen as most effective. But, certainly, we can offer the therapy you will both need to reach this decision.’
A funny thing happens then. My mother reaches over and takes my hand in hers, and squeezes my fingers between her cool ones. I feel a sudden surge of hope, though I don’t know what I’m hoping for. And then she finds the voice to speak.
‘She doesn’t have an eating disorder. My daughter does not have an eating disorder.’
She drags me out of my chair and pushes me out of the door. ‘Thank you for your time,’ she says, pulling it to behind her.
‘You do not have an eating disorder,’ she says to me, marching out. As we pass the waiting room, she waves to a younger woman with two small children. ‘Hello, Jane!’ she calls out. ‘Nothing too serious, I hope?’ And then she pulls me out of the door.
I could hear them piling in, carrying things bought from the supermarket or the garden centre, plastic bags piled at the foot of the stairs, the beep of the car as it was remotely locked. Lulu’s cork sandals slapping on the tiles as she ran through the house as if she’d never seen each room, my mother calling after her to take her shoes off, to come and have something to eat. The TV switching on, the quiet sounds of the tennis, the squeaky springs in the worn-out spot on the sofa as Dad sank into his favourite hollow. I lay flat on my back and listened.
The woman in the pink cardigan sits back in her chair and looks at me over her pearly glasses. The cardigan is the colour of the calamine lotion we’ve been blobbing on Lulu all week, little Lulu all scabby and sweet. I watch her playing on the carpet with an ugly doll’s house, all bright colours and plastic edges, square furniture and block shapes.
‘You can play if you want,’ the woman says. I stare at her in silence. I’m fifteen.
‘Tell me,’ she says, turning to my parents, ‘a bit about your day-to-day life. What kind of things do you do together, as a family?’
My father sits in silence, looking at his big hands clasped solemnly in his lap. He looks like she’s a vicar or his headteacher. I hate her.
My mother clears her throat, a weird little noise in the silent room. ‘Well, the girls all have their own interests, of course, but we like to go on visits at the weekend. Trips to see the family, that kind of thing. Sometimes we go out on a boat, sometimes to the library. You know, nice things.’
Jelli snorts. My mother looks at her sharply, and she goes back to fiddling with her lip ring. She’s still grounded for that. She can’t take it out yet, not until it’s healed, but it will be whipped out not long after. A year later will follow the nose ring, then the tattoo. You can’t whip off a tattoo, however hard you try.
‘And how about you, Ella?’ The woman turns to her. ‘What kinds of things do you like to do?’
Ella smiles at her sweetly, crossing her legs and folding her skirt around her, dainty and delicate. ‘I read a lot,’ she says. ‘Sometimes Daddy and me – Daddy and I – read a book at the same time and talk about it over dinner. Or I’m busy studying. I’m going to Oxford in the autumn.’
The woman smiles politely at her, and looks back to my parents. ‘I’d like to speak to you two alone now, if that’s all right. Why don’t you girls wait outside? There are mints on the desk at Reception if you’d like one.’
We wait. Jelli kicks me in the shin. ‘We’re missing Sweetheart High because of you, twatface.’ I ignore her. Lulu knocks the bowl of mints onto the floor, sending them flying in all directions, like tiny blown-up bones.
After a minute or two, the door swings open and my mother comes storming out, two spots of red high on her cheeks. My dad hurries after her, carrying her coat and stooping under the doorframe. ‘Pip,’ he says, as she marches through the automatic doors. ‘Come on.’
‘No!’ She shrugs him off. ‘I’m not listening to any more. As if it’s somehow our fault! As if we’ve done something wrong!’
We’ve reached the car, her in front, him clinging to her elbow, the four of us shuffling behind. He puts a hand on her arm as he unlocks the car. ‘That’s not what she was saying,’ he says quietly. It’s her turn to snort. I walk silently past them all and climb into my seat, buckle my seat belt, stare out of the window. Somehow, against all odds, they’ve managed to make it about somebody else again. It’s never just about me.
Clinking ice cubes below. Iced tea and tennis were Dad’s favourite things. There would be a piece of lemon in it, cut in a particular way, which made it into a spiral. ‘A helix,’ Ella used to say all smug. ‘That’s called a helix.’ The rustle as the plastic bags were ferried into the kitchen to be unpacked. I heard feet on the stairs and turned to the wall in a hurry. The door creaked open.
‘Saf-feee …’ A pause. ‘Is you sleeping?’
She was too old to say ‘is you’. Nobody thought to correct her.
She was creeping up to the bed now, sticky fingers on my shoulder. ‘Saf-feeee.’
I turned over. ‘What?’
She hopped onto the edge of the bed, all gangly long limbs she didn’t know what to do with. She still thought she was little, because that was how everybody treated her. ‘Are you tired?’
I nodded. ‘Yep.’
‘Oh.’ She swung her legs. She still had on the shoes. Cork soles with leather straps and plastic daisies glued on. She held out a packet of melting jelly babies. ‘You want a sweet?’
My grandparents always bring us jelly babies when we are little. I always wish they wouldn’t. It means hours of sitting in my room, looking at them. I don’t like the purple ones; the taste makes me feel sick. But if I leave them in the packet, I feel a horrible guilt right in my belly and I sit and apologise to their tiny sugary faces. It makes me cry to see them all alone in the yellow bag, unwanted. And so I eat them. I eat them and I say sorry.
‘No thanks,’ I said, and I tried to smile at her. ‘I’m just going to go back to sleep.’
‘Okay,’ she said, but she stayed where she was, swinging her daisies back and forth. ‘Is you coming to live at home again now?’
I kept my eyes closed. ‘No.’
‘Mummy said you is. She said you was coming home.’
‘Well
, I’m not. I live with my boyfriend, remember?’
She was chewing a jelly baby, a soft mushing noise coming out of her mouth, like a cow eating grass. ‘Mummy said you haven’t got a boyfriend any more.’
I didn’t remember throwing it, but the next thing there was water running down the wooden wardrobe doors, glass shards in my dad’s spade hand as he picked them out of the carpet, my mother’s hand on Lulu’s head as she led her out. And then I was alone again.
When you need the toilet, you have to wait until someone can take you. Someone with keys to unlock the two locks on the door. You can choose: you either let them in to watch, or you count very loudly as they wait outside the door, or you don’t flush and let them do it for you. You can’t say they don’t give you choices.