Countless

by Karen Gregory

  I’m flat on my back. I realise I’m scanning my body, trying to locate pain from the fall amidst the usual aches and wondering whether I fell on to my stomach.

  I lie for a long time on the ripped lino, thinking it all over, and realise I’ve decided. I’m going to have this baby. It’s only a few months. I can eat for that long, until they get it out of me. Career anorexic I may be – write-off, screw-up, whatever – but for a few weeks, maybe I can be something else too.

  I count out the weeks in my head, then the days, then the meals. Seventeen weeks, 119 days, 357 meals. I can do it, if I take them one at a time.

  I twist the idea over and around and Molly’s face comes to me – the way she looked the night in the garden, when she told me she loved the world, even if no one in it but me loved her back. If I can’t do it for anything else, maybe I can do it for her.

  So this is the deal I’m making: Nia and I call a truce. When the baby is safely here and I’ve found it some proper parents, then Nia can have me back. All I have to do is eat for seventeen weeks and then everything will be like it was before.

  I feel Nia standing at my shoulder. She seems to consider it, and then I feel a tiny internal click, like a pact has been sealed.

  Done, Nia whispers. And then she melts away like smoke, floating towards the ceiling, watching.

  Inside, I feel the baby kick.

  PART TWO

  COUNTDOWN

  Crap Things about the Unit, Number Three:

  the ‘Food’

  I’ve often wondered why all the words we have for eating are so disgusting: gulp, slurp, gobble, suck, chomp, chew, gorge, trough, masticate (that has got to be the nastiest one), belch, burp. All guttural, onomatopoeic (I had an awesome English teacher in Year Seven. Me and Natalie used to sit right near the front and I’d be whispering o-e-i-a in my head so I got the spelling right. Can’t remember any of the poems we studied though, or any of the ones I wrote. Which is probably a good thing).

  Obviously, being made to eat was always going to suck. But meals on the unit sucked in more ways than I could have imagined. All those calories, the fat, the sugar, the whole grossness of having it shovelled down my throat meal after snack after meal. Tube feeding at night. Sitting at the table forever. Yeah, all food would have sucked. But hospital food sucks in a different way. It’s worse than the stuff they make you eat at primary school. All soggy chips, scoops of mash, soups which are completely unidentifiable. Butter oozing out of greasy foil on to toast you could roll up. Everything delivered lukewarm on trays with lids that sweated. I mean, if you were actually trying to put someone off eating you couldn’t do much worse than forcing them to eat that crap day after day.

  Chapter 6

  17 WEEKS TO GO

  I’ve been thinking about a book Molly showed me before she died, this weird hippie thing about past lives. I never knew if Molly really believed in all that stuff or if she just liked winding the staff up, especially any she’d pegged down as the bleeding-heart type, with their wispy scarves and positive affirmations. I wish I’d found out.

  I remember the book said babies choose their parents. Like, all of us choose them, and the circumstances we’re born in, for some reason. Because we have something to learn or whatever. Christ only knows why I would’ve chosen my parents, although they’re not that bad really. They definitely didn’t deserve a daughter like me.

  Mostly, I don’t believe in anything much apart from Nia, and I think if you decide people choose their parents you have to start going into reincarnation and all that sort of stuff. Plus, why would you choose to be born in a war zone, or to parents who don’t want you?

  More to the point, what could possibly make a baby choose me?

  Mary’s coming back again next week. In the meantime I’m supposed to be seeing a nutritionist, but I swear I already know more about food than a roomful of them. I get on the internet and read everything I can about maternal nutrition, and make notes in a book. I look up diet plans and meal plans and carry on scribbling and by the end of the day I’ve devised my own timetable, based carefully on everything I need to eat to gain the right amount of weight; no more, no less. Then I make a shopping list and price it all up. Make some adjustments and add it up again. Steak is a bit pricier than noodles.

  Finally, by the evening, I have my plan. I’ll go shopping tomorrow.

  I’m about to start getting ready for bed when there’s a tap on the door. I ignore it, figuring it’s probably someone for the next flat down. But whoever it is doesn’t go away and I have a look out of the spyhole, then let out a sigh. It’s Laurel.

  I open the door. ‘What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be on the unit.’

  ‘Can I come in?’ she says and then moves forward, and I find myself stepping back and letting her through.

  She curls up in a tiny ball on my sofa and starts biting at the corner of one nail.

  She’s wearing a long black skirt that should be tight but I can see her knees scything up through it, her feet tucked under her. Her cheeks are hollow and kind of grey, her collarbones standing out. I can’t help the comparisons coming. I feel like an elephant next to her, a hippo.

  ‘You want anything? Black coffee?’

  She nods and I make it weak, with a splash of cold water. Her fingers wrapped round the mug are skin over bone, the tendons standing out on the backs of her hands in sharp lines.

  I want to ask why she’s here, but I already know why.

  ‘They’ll be looking for you,’ I say.

  Laurel sips at her coffee and turns eyes that are out of some Disney cartoon on me. ‘Yeah. Sorry, Hed. I couldn’t take it any more, you know? They’re going to transfer me to Newlard.’

  Oh. Newland House, a private unit. I remember another girl getting sent there once. We didn’t hear from her for months, then when she was finally allowed to write letters, she sent these long, desperate ones that went on for pages filled with teeny writing – like the more weight she put on, the more she disappeared. They watch you all the time, even on the toilet. No one gets away with it, not there. Laurel started calling it Newlard, which we all laughed at, at the time, but it’s a place we’re scared of.

  ‘When?’

  ‘I’m supposed to be going next week.’ She gives me an anguished look, all eyes and skull, her forehead a huge tight dome under thin hair. ‘What am I going to do? I can’t –’ She starts taking gasping breaths.

  ‘It’s OK. It’ll be OK,’ I say. ‘Do you want a paper bag?’

  I’m mainly terrified she’s going to collapse, have a heart attack or something. She looks so bad. But she also looks … thin. Thinner than me. By far. I know she thinks it too. It’s an unspoken competition that permeates everything. And I hate losing. I try and pat her on the shoulder, awkwardly, and we both know I’m feeling only bone. That sharp bit at the top of your shoulder that ought to be padded but isn’t. Not for people like us. I put my hand up to my own shoulder, for comparative purposes, and drop it fast.

  Laurel swipes her hand across her face, smearing eyeliner to one temple, then looks at me. ‘Maybe they’ll change their minds. Or the bed will get taken by someone else. I could always …’ She pauses and pulls her legs up closer, rests her chin on them. ‘What about you?’

  ‘What about me? Nothing much to report.’

  Oh yeah, nothing other than a bloody baby. That just sort of slipped my mind. I think I feel that little twitching kick and I shift forward, pulling my jumper loose.

  Laurel is frowning. ‘You look … You don’t seem …’ She stops and there’s a tiny part of me that wants to laugh at the puzzled expression on her face. I imagine telling her, the look of horror, and know I can’t.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say.

  She cranes her head round, so I glimpse the sharp, clean bones at the nape of her neck. She’s only been here once before, not long after I first moved in. She’d run away from Dewhurst that time too. It had felt so weird showing her the place, part of me feeling
all grown up and oddly proud, another part feeling stupid, like I was pretending to be an adult. I realise now, the place still looks the same; I haven’t exactly been busy decorating.

  She gives a sigh. ‘I wish I could get a flat.’

  I know she means so that she can crack on with her version of Nia with no one to stop her. I want to tell her about the quiet, how empty it gets, but she wouldn’t understand. Her mum would never kick her out anyway.

  So we sit there in silence and looking at her folded up tight takes me back to the unit, to the circle of us all staring at the floor and each other, even though we weren’t supposed to be looking.

  Crap Things about the Unit, Number Four:

  Group Therapy

  Ahhh, Group Therapy. Group Silence, mainly. All of us scrunched sideways in our chairs, backsides aching, knees rubbing against the wooden arms while the therapist tried to get us to talk about – or, worse, paint – our feelings. An hour’s worth, three times a week.

  I got to know the carpet in that wide cold room so well. I can see the flecks in it, pale yellow, like vomit, on a dreary blue, when I close my eyes.

  Each day the same. The only things that changed were the residents and our relative sizes. The way we counted each other’s bones, trying to work out who was winning that particular week. All the admissions were like that, right up until the last one.

  Then Molly exploded on to the unit.

  The first time in Group, she sat for about five minutes in the stillness, before jumping up and saying in that loud, posh voice of hers, ‘Well, bugger this.’

  Ellen, who was facilitating at the time, said something completely wanky, like, ‘I’m hearing some anger from you, Molly.’

  I happened to meet Molly’s eyes at that moment, and we both burst out laughing, the sound of it so strange. It seemed to go on forever, that laugh, flinging itself from wall to wall until it infected everyone.

  Even Laurel smiled, and I remember that smile so clearly, the wrinkles creasing her cheeks like an old woman. It was the first time I’d ever seen her do it, and at that point I’d known her at least a couple of months. And something about it made the laughter die in my throat and then tears were in my eyes and Molly looked at me like she really knew everything that was in my head. That look went on a long time, while Ellen blustered and the others fell silent. It seemed like the only thing in the world was Molly’s eyes, green and shining.

  ‘You miss her,’ Laurel says.

  God, how I do.

  Chapter 7

  16 WEEKS TO GO

  I took Laurel back to the unit. They probably would’ve been knocking on my door before long anyway. We sat for a while and then she looked at me and said, ‘Suppose I’d better …’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ And off we went, in a taxi which I knew they’d pay for at the other end.

  I gave Laurel an awkward, arm’s-length hug and told her to write to me – she’s not allowed her laptop owing to a Pro-Ana website incident – and then kind of skulked in the back of the taxi while she slumped up to the door. It opened before she got there to reveal Felicity looking stern. Felicity said a few bits to Laurel then came over to pay the driver. She didn’t look at me while she gave him the money to take me back and I thought I’d got away with it, but then she opened the back door and leaned in.

  ‘You need to come to our sessions. Don’t make me send the crisis team round,’ she said.

  I nodded and she seemed to know better than to push it.

  Her eyes flicked to my stomach once, before she said, ‘Thanks for bringing her back,’ then shut the door quickly.

  I was thinking about it all the way home – if that’s the right word for the flat. Felicity looked worried, like always, but also a little bit triumphant, like she knew stuff about me.

  I was also thinking I should speak to Mum and Dad, but that was all too complicated, so then I started to think about Molly’s List.

  I haven’t looked at it for weeks, but I don’t need to. I know everything on there.

  Molly’s List – Things to Do Before You Die

  1.Lose virginity. It cannot be as big a deal as people make out and, seeing as I’m not going to be around to do it for myself, you’ll have to do it for me.

  2.Travel. Go somewhere. Go to the places no one wants to see. Anti-travel the world. You could start in Torquay – there’s lots of old people there and old people rock. They must be on to something. Get one of those vintage Victorian swimming costumes and go for a dip in the sea.

  3.Adopt an animal from one of those rescue places and get a certificate. I’m thinking a baby giraffe – they might look funny, but they can see far (she drew a wobbly picture of a giraffe here).

  4.Read more books – classics and all that. Read something you actually like and stop picking books at random. You do deserve to read stuff you want to, you know.

  5.Fall in love. It doesn’t matter if this is mutually exclusive to number one.

  6.Change the world, because I know you can.

  7.STAY OUT OF HOSPITAL.

  I think about the list and how I’ve only done numbers one and seven so far, and I don’t even remember the first one too well, considering I was pretty drunk at the time – and look how that worked out.

  I wonder again what Molly was thinking when she wrote it. Did she really believe everything would be solved with a few words on a scrap of paper? But it’s more than that. It’s like she was casting a spell for how my life should go. Because the thing is … I’m still here. I’m demonstrably not in hospital, for better or worse, even if I’m not sure I’ve had anything to do with it. Sometimes I think it’s only that sprinkling of words Molly left me, not even two hundred of them, keeping me here.

  I’m mulling this over, when something outside my window catches my eye. Some numpty decided to decorate the outsides of the flats with window boxes when they were built. To be fair, some people do plant stuff in them: marigolds, herbs – who knows what kind – and that sort of thing. But I’ve never bothered. Except now there’s a plant in a pot in one corner of mine. The breeze must have caught it, making bright red petals dance across the glass. I go over and almost have to shield my eyes from the mass of flowers in the window box next door, shaking crazily in the wind. I try to count how many there are, but the wind is too strong and the flowers blur into one blast of colour.

  Did whoever planted them there run out of room and decide they may as well use my box too? Or is it a present for me? But who the hell would do that? Someone who doesn’t mind stretching across a fairly decent-sized gap when they’re eight floors up, for a start.

  I lean forward a bit more, half my weight on the window handle, and then the window is caught by a gust and swings fully open. I swear, I nearly fall out. The ground seems to jump like a pogo stick and, for a second, I’m suspended, perilously close to tipping point. Then I manage to grab the window sill with my other hand and push myself back so hard I land in a heap on the floor. The window swings back and bangs shut, then out again, each thud in time with my heart, which has slowed right down. I’m used to it pausing for a bit, then speeding up, but it seems strange that in my fear it’s fainter, not stronger and faster.

  I realise I’ve got one hand doing little circles over the bump, which gives a tiny twitch, like the baby is saying, ‘It’s OK, I’m fine in here. But don’t do it again, all right?’

  ‘All right,’ I whisper back.

  And I realise: I was afraid. I didn’t want to fall.

  That has to mean something, doesn’t it?

  A little later, I’ve made a plateful of chicken, broccoli, carrots – which I’ve overcooked – and some slightly-too-hard-boiled potatoes. Lots of anorexics are amazing cooks, but then I’m not your average anorexic. And I hate cooking. If I had my way, I’d be a spirit floating about, all mind, and do away with food altogether. Not really an option right now.

  I’ve measured everything out and it contains the right balance of calories, protein, etc. I put it, with one of the awful bui
ld-up shakes, on the little fold-out table and sit in front of it, watching it go cold.

  This might be harder than I thought.

  The portion looks ridiculous. I’m used to big portions, from the unit, but not ones I’ve voluntarily shoved in front of myself. The chicken glistens greyly, and the broccoli is giving off a smell like stale farts. I never liked broccoli anyway. I cut everything up into little bits and decide I’ll tackle it like taking a pill. I manage to get down half of it that way, barely chewing.

  This shouldn’t be a problem. I’ve done this so many times before.

  I get some salt and add a tiny bit and put away another third. There’s now one potato, one mushy floret of broccoli and a chunk of chicken on my plate.

  I can do this.

  I pick up my fork. Get a piece of chicken to my mouth. Put the fork back down again. The smell of it is making me heave.

  I can’t do this.

  What now?

  I start thinking about abortions and birth defects and what Mary said. I could leave the rest, but I haven’t had enough, according to my numbers. I think about crying, but what good did that ever do anyone, to paraphrase Dad?

  Then there’s a tap at the door.

  Saved by the knock. Probably Laurel again. She’s going to be in so much trouble.

  I shove the plate away.

  I’m already saying, ‘Seriously?’ as I open the door.

  But it isn’t Laurel standing there. It’s a boy I’ve never seen before in my life.

  He looks a bit awkward and I realise that ‘seriously’ came out pretty loud.

  ‘Sorry to bother you. I’ve just moved in next door and I thought I’d introduce myself.’