Staying in school for five nights a week was proving too difficult. I couldn’t cope with the homesickness, and became moody and binged on junk food constantly. It was just typical teenage behaviour, but weirdly I’d stop acting up every time I went home to my grandparents.
Eventually, and much to my housemistress’s disapproval, I started going home every Wednesday night, too, to help break up the weeks. My heart would race with excitement when I saw my grandparents’ car pull up into the driveway.
I began counting the days down to weekends obsessively, crossing off the days on my calendar like I would in anticipation of a holiday. A lot of this excitement boiled down to the fact I was absolutely spoiled rotten. In an attempt to make my room at their house feel more homely, my nan and grandad went out and bought furnishings for it – a crystal lamp shade, pink curtains and bubblegum-pink paint.
A major way in which my nan expressed her love was through food and feeding people. This was understandable: she grew up during the Second World War, at a time when food was rationed, and so feeding me was a way of taking care of me and showing me I was loved. Considering my mum is very much into healthy eating and force-fed me salads every night (child abuse), this was amazing.
Each Saturday, my nan and I would have our lunch out in town, laughing over cups of tea and gossiping about celebrities. After a day of shopping, she’d then order us a takeaway in the evening and we’d sit down to watch The X Factor.
Food, food, food.
It became a friend. I began living for the rich, sugary, salty, buttery deliciousness of it. Food didn’t judge you in any way. If anything, it made you feel better, gave you a lift. Food made my school days slightly more bearable, even if all I was eating was carbs, sugar and junk.
I was eating my feelings and didn’t regret a second of it. Homesick? Eat. Sad? Eat. Lonely? Nothing a packet of McCoy’s ridged beef-flavoured crisps couldn’t solve! Every slice of pizza, piece of chocolate or can of fizzy drink comforted me, leaving me feeling warm and fuzzy on the inside, even if it was just until my next meal. I’d have two, three rounds of school dinners, loading up on bread and none of the healthy stuff (I mean, you can’t get high off lettuce, can you?).
I couldn’t eat until I felt satisfied, though. Oh no. I had to eat and eat until the button on my jeans wouldn’t do up, or until I couldn’t move. Then, even if I was still full by that stage, I’d eat some more.
Before my grandad drove me back to school, my nan would hand me a plastic bag full of chocolate bars, crisps and cans of Diet Coke, which she told me was to be spread out until I next came home. She didn’t know it, but this bag would usually be empty within a day. I’d then go to the school’s tuck shop and buy even more junk food, eating and eating until I felt physically sick. Nobody stopped me from this obsessive eating, and not many twelve-year-olds are known for their self-restraint.
I avoided looking at myself in the mirror. I absolutely detested my appearance. I hated how my eyebrows were too big. I hated how I towered above everybody else. Yet I still had the mentality that I could eat anything I wanted and wouldn’t gain a single pound.
I ranked pretty high on the Freak-O-Meter. Not only was I the unfashionable, chubby and tall new girl, but I was also the unfashionable, chubby and tall new girl who had (shock horror!) periods.
To my fellow twelve-year-old classmates who hadn’t started theirs yet the idea of blood coming out of a vagina was hilarious, terrifying and very weird. A few girls would ask me about periods out of curiosity, as though I was some kind of agony aunt from Mizz, when I didn’t really know what was going on with my body myself. Although I’d been told periods were a natural sign of being a woman, I still felt like some kind of oddity, and I didn’t like the way puberty made me stand out.
Despite my best attempts at female bonding, the other two girls in my class who had started didn’t want to discuss their periods with me out of embarrassment, which made me feel even more like periods were something to be ashamed of. With no one to talk to, I felt totally on my own. And so I decided to hide my periods as much as I possibly could.
My cramps were absolutely excruciating. Not only that, but they could come on at very inappropriate moments. There were a good few times when my period was so heavy I’d leak through my knickers and on to my school skirt, and I’d furiously wash the blood out in the bathroom basins before anyone could see. Another time, at breakfast, I suddenly felt a cramp and just knew it had come on. I could feel the dampness between my thighs and didn’t know how I was possibly going to change my school skirt without people noticing. Luckily, I managed to tie my grey school cardigan round my waist, ease my way backwards out of the canteen, then run across the grass and straight back to my room.
Instead of asking for help, I spent the first few terms in absolute agony. I was convinced nobody else knew what I was going through and that women just didn’t talk about these things.
But trying to be discreet about my period was very difficult indeed. Sanitary towels, as I soon found out, make THE LOUDEST NOISE KNOWN TO (WO)MAN when opening them in a cubicle, so I’d often wait for a toilet to flush before unwrapping the packet quickly. And don’t get me started on tampons. The idea of sticking those – no, screw that, anything – up my hoo-hah terrified me more than umbrellas (yes, I have a phobia of umbrellas. I don’t trust their spiky edges).
Just a few weeks into boarding school, somebody left a drop of blood on the toilet seat without wiping it away. Suddenly, our class became embroiled in the Period Drop Scandal, trying to discover who the culprit could be. No one wanted to wipe the blood away themselves or use the cubicle, as though it had been somehow cursed by the Devil, which meant some poor cleaner had to do it for us. For a good few days this drop of blood became a whodunnit mystery, and I became one of the prime suspects.
‘But my period isn’t even on,’ I said to the jury. Some of the less informed girls looked back at me, clueless, not realizing that your period only comes once every four to six weeks. One girl, for example, assumed that when your period started, it was going to happen every day for the rest of your life (God, can you imagine?). When it came to the female body, compared to other girls in my class, I was some kind of wise master. The Vaginal Dalai Lama.
I didn’t enjoy this unwanted attention. I wanted to hide my body more than ever. I began wearing baggier things, feeling too ugly to wear fashionable clothes like the other girls. I may not have looked cool, but at least I was hiding the new womanly body I wasn’t prepared for.
As the weeks went on, I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t settling in. No matter how hard I tried to distract myself from home, I just couldn’t. Five nights a week at school felt too much, and speaking to my mum and dad on the phone made things ten times worse. The Brain Deviant liked to tell me that they had sent me here because they didn’t love me, flashing up images of my mum, dad and sister snuggled up together on the couch, having fun as a family without me around to ruin it.
My great-grandmother, Nanny Beckett, also happened to live near my school on a council estate, and my nan would make me visit her every weekend without fail. It was an odd contrast, leaving a wealthy school surrounding to visit an estate where families were really struggling.
Visiting my great-grandmother wasn’t exactly a bundle of laughs. I’d sit in the living room watching TV while my nan put Nanny Beckett’s hair into rollers, narrowly avoiding the scratches of her feral (and slightly mental) cat.
Nanny Beckett had had a tough life. She’d left the bright lights of London after the war to move up north with my great-grandad, whose family all lived up there. She dreamt of performing in shows and travelling the world singing, but this was at a time when you did what your husband said, and after a few factory jobs she ended up working in a launderette for a while. I always knew that I didn’t want a life littered with regrets about not having followed my dreams – or one where I followed a man.
I can’t recall a time in my life when Nanny Beckett didn’t hav
e OCD. When I was little she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, after persuading herself she was dying of imaginary illnesses like brain tumours or cancer. A headache would convince her she was dying. Doctors offered her tablets and therapy to help with her OCD, but she refused any help given her. Eventually, she managed to convince doctors she was OK and was discharged.
Nanny Beckett’s living-room drawers were filled with notepads of handwritten, utterly useless information, which had been scribbled all over in blue and black ink. After becoming paranoid that she was losing her memory, she felt she needed to write down everything she’d read or seen so that she wouldn’t forget things.
For example, she couldn’t watch Coronation Street without writing down the entire episode and what had happened between all of the characters. If she met someone in the street, she had to write down all their news and gossip. If the news came on, she’d have to write down all the headlines. One time, she even went through a stage of writing down the licence plates belonging to people on her estate, until some man started yelling at her, thinking she was reporting him for parking illegally.
If she remembered things and wasn’t in reach of her notepad, she’d scribble all over her palms and the back of her hands. Her hands were once so blue with ink that I thought she’d got hypothermia, and had to do a double take. If I questioned her about the ink on her hands, she’d pull her sleeves down and cover it up. It was as though she knew what she was doing was crazy, but she just couldn’t stop herself.
When her TV broke one summer my nan offered to buy her a new one from Argos. She was worried about Nanny Beckett sitting at home doing nothing all day and not using her brain. At least the obsession with writing things down kept her active to an extent. My nan would visit her a few times a week, but now that the TV was broken Nanny Beckett let the world pass her by.
But not having a TV took a weight off Nanny Beckett’s shoulders; if the information was out of sight, her problems were out of mind. Huge world events would take place and Nanny Beckett would have no idea they’d happened because she refused to let my nan buy her a television.
When I got a new mobile phone at Christmas she refused to look at it, simply because she didn’t have the energy to write down what it all meant.
‘Don’t show me it,’ she begged. ‘I’ll only have to write it down.’
She became too scared to leave the house. She didn’t want to converse with people, because it would mean having to remember everything they said. Any information or news she received was then relayed through my nan. We’d be sitting at home and she’d ring five, ten, fifteen times, just to make sure she’d got the stories correct, writing them down thoroughly as though she’d been there herself. We’d sigh, telling her yes, that was what X said, and, yes, that was what happened when we saw X out shopping. Anything to put her OCD at ease.
Seeing Nanny Beckett struggling made me see how serious OCD was and how much I didn’t want to let my obsessions get the better of me. I feel thankful that I’m living in a time where more and more people are discussing mental health issues such as these, and where you’re not put into a psychiatric hospital for suffering with severe anxiety. But sometimes, when the Brain Deviant rears its ugly head, you forget you’re not the only one dealing with these issues. It’s like your brain forgets how neurotic you acted before, and it feels new again. You slump back into a dark state of loneliness, wondering how you’ll ever get out.
The problem was, Nanny Beckett could’ve got help, but she didn’t want it. That’s the thing with mental illness. You can’t help people who don’t want to help themselves.
One weekend, I was sitting in Nanny Beckett’s living room, watching some mundane TV show as I did every Sunday to block out the sound of the hairdryer, when I overheard her chatting to my nan.
‘Charlotte’s put on a lot of weight, hasn’t she?’
‘Shh, Mum!’
‘What? She has! She’s put on a lot.’
‘Be quiet,’ my nan hissed, scared I’d overhear.
Weight gain? Huh? What was she on about? I mean, I was wearing an extra-large man’s beige sweatshirt that covered every bit of my body – no wonder I looked bigger. I convinced myself I wasn’t actually wearing such a hideous oversized sweatshirt to hide the body I’d gradually begun to hate. It was easier to blame Nanny Beckett’s comments for how bad I felt, rather than admit to the self-loathing I’d been feeling for a while.
As we left, I couldn’t look Nanny Beckett in the eye. I was embarrassed, but didn’t want to bring it up with my nan, or let either of them think it had affected me.
When we got home, I went into the bathroom, locked the door, took my clothes off until they fell in a pile at my feet, and looked at myself in the mirror. Properly and intensely, this time – not through hurried and shy glances, as I would have usually.
It was true. My body was big. It was much bigger than any of the other girls’ bodies in my class. I pressed into the flesh on either side of my ribs and my finger disappeared into my skin by a good inch or two. My tummy wobbled when I hit it. How had I not noticed this before? Was I blind as well as fat?!
I hit it again, and again, and again. It was like jelly on a plate, wibbly-wobbling away. It was disgusting. I couldn’t believe I’d let myself get this way. I was a total mess.
I knew I had to change. And so that night I vowed to go on my very first diet.
I didn’t want to seem ungrateful when my nan handed me my usual treats bag in the morning.
‘Can I have a bit less in the bag today?’ I asked, looking at the brightly coloured packets that seemed to glare back at me, begging me to eat them.
‘Don’t be so silly,’ my nan said. ‘You love your treats bag.’
Once I got to school, I opened the treats bag in secret and began to study the labels. It looked like a foreign language. What did these numbers mean? There were 250 ‘calories’ in a packet of crisps; 220 in a chocolate bar. But there were none in a can of Diet Coke. Did that mean it was better for you? As I thought about it, my only reasoning was that worse foods had higher numbers. Diet Coke, for example, must be good, and chocolate must be bad.
‘Here you go,’ I said, giving my bag of food to the girls in my dorm. I watched as they fell over the treats like a pack of wild animals. My stomach may have been growling, but I liked the fact I’d managed to resist temptation. Finally, I felt in control.
Spring arrived, and so did swimming lessons. For someone who hated their body as much as I’d started to, these classes were complete hell.
For one, the swimming pool was outdoors, which meant you were constantly freezing, and it would frequently have a dead mouse/bird/rabbit (delete as applicable) floating on top of the water that would need fishing out. We had a strict gym teacher, Miss Miller, who’d yell at us from the sidelines if we complained about being cold, all while standing there in a warm tracksuit.
But the thing that put me off the most was having to wear a tight swimming costume next to a class of pretty, petite and skinny girls who I was much bigger than, both horizontally and vertically. While they looked like a bunch of delicate little swans paddling away in the pool, I looked like a blobby giant. I’d stand by the pool trying every which way to cover my tummy and thighs and other wobbly bits. I felt fat, and was utterly convinced the girls in my class viewed me that way, too.
The one way you could get out of swimming was if you were on your period. Being ‘on’ granted me the privilege of avoiding the cold water, and meant I could get out of showcasing my squishy body and erect nipples through my costume and having to shave my underarms and bikini line. So that’s when I thought I’d use the thing that made me different to my advantage.
I would make my way over to Miss Miller every Tuesday, put my hand on my tummy and ask if I could go to the nurses’ office for a hot-water bottle. She’d put a cross next to my name on the clipboard, then tell me to feel better soon.
Skiving off swimming was great. I’m convinced the nurses, who
we had to call ‘sisters’, knew my game plan, but they didn’t say anything. I became friendly with a few other girls in school, who I’m sure were often skiving off as well, and we’d hang out there chatting with hot-water bottles on our tummies. I’d sit in the sisters’ office with Ribena and biscuits, watching crappy old videos on the VHS, before ‘miraculously’ getting better for my next lesson. It was great.
That was, of course, until Miss Miller cottoned on to what I’d been doing.
‘You’ve been off swimming for four weeks in a row now,’ she said, glancing down at her clipboard one Tuesday morning. ‘Are you honestly trying to tell me you’ve had your period every single week this month?’
‘I’m … very irregular,’ I lied.
‘Get changed into a costume and get in the pool, Charlotte.’ Teachers only called me by my real name when I was in trouble, so I knew things were going to go slowly downhill from there.
‘I don’t have a costume,’ I replied, which actually meant: ‘It’s currently scrunched away at the back of my cupboard.’
‘Well, I suppose you’re just going to have to wear a leftover one from lost property then,’ Miss Miller said, smirking. ‘Hurry up, please.’
The class watched from the side of the pool as Miss Miller led me to the changing rooms. She was clearly quite pleased with herself, loving the fact I was squirming, in a way I’m sure a serial killer gets off on, too.
‘Here’s a spare one,’ she said, and flung me a navy-coloured costume that reeked of chlorine and possibly even body odour. (OK. I may have exaggerated that part.)
‘I really don’t want to wear somebody else’s swimming costume,’ I groaned, thinking of how the material would have clung to some other girl’s bits. God knows how long it had been left in the changing room. It hadn’t even been washed, for Christ’s sake. Brain Deviant went into overdrive, yelling, ‘PUBES! PUBES! PUBES!’ in my ear.
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