Fragile

by Nikki Grahame

  Then, by the February of that year, I’d reduced what I would allow myself to water – which I’d only agree to drink out of one particular sherry glass from the kitchen cabinet – vitamin C pills and the occasional slice of toast or shortbread biscuit.

  I was painfully skinny but not only had all my body fat gone, so had my spirit, my energy and my childishness.

  Lying on our battered brown corduroy sofa watching television, I was locked in a world far away from everything going on around me. I was unable to concentrate on anything, play with toys, think or even move very much.

  For a fortnight I ate virtually nothing at all. I chewed gobstoppers to keep away hunger pangs. And I screamed and lashed out if Mum or Dad tried to make me eat. I was so weak that at night I had to crawl up the stairs to bed as Mum tried to help, tears rolling down her face on to the carpet.

  You might wonder why she wasn’t dialling 999 or camping outside the doctor’s front door, but she had been told so many times I’d just ‘snap out of it’ that she had lost all confidence in the system – and in herself. Her self-esteem was shot to pieces after everything she had been through and she had no strength left to fight. But one morning at the beginning of March she knew she couldn’t leave it another day. She helped me into the car and drove me to the GP’s surgery.

  When we arrived she helped me out of the car and we found ourselves a seat in the stuffy waiting room. Mum went up to the receptionist and quietly but determinedly stated her case. ‘My daughter is very ill,’ she said. ‘I can’t cope any more. We are going to sit here and we’re not leaving until someone does something to help her.’

  This time it took the doctor just one look at me to tell I was dangerously ill. I was malnourished and extremely weak. But most urgent was the fact that I had become severely dehydrated.

  I was so tired I hadn’t got the strength to lie when the doctor asked what I’d eaten that day. And Mum was doing all the talking this time anyway. The previous day I’d had a quarter of a slice of toast for breakfast, no lunch and two slices of bread and a fish finger for my dinner. That was all.

  The doctors weighed me and I was just 20 kilos (3 stone 2 lb). I had a BMI of 12.4, which meant I was severely underweight. A normal eight-year-old would be around 27 kilos (4 stone 4 lb) – that’s 7 kilos, or more than a stone, heavier than I was.

  The doctor promised Mum that by the following day they would have found me a specialist unit where I could be assessed and helped. He turned to me and said, ‘Now go home and eat something – it’ll be your only hope of staying out of hospital.’

  When we got home Mum heated up a Cornish pasty for me in the microwave and I ate the lot. It was delicious. After so many weeks of eating almost nothing, it felt amazing.

  But within an hour of finishing it, a huge wave of guilt surged over me. I hated myself for being so weak and giving in. You must not do that again, I reprimanded myself.

  I went to bed feeling angry at myself and guilt-stricken about how much I’d eaten. And I was terrified of what the morning would bring.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE MAUDSLEY

  I was lying on the sofa wearing a billowing white dress dotted with huge purple lavender flowers when the call came saying they had found a specialist unit for me.

  That morning I’d crawled up to the attic and dug the dress out of our big red dressing-up box. I had a porcelain doll that had an almost identical dress and I decided I wanted to look like her. It must be easy being a doll, I thought.

  I put the dress over my head, then, exhausted by the effort, returned to the sofa, where I lay and watched Mum vacuuming around me. By this point I was so sick I could barely move.

  ‘We’ve got a place for your daughter at the Maudsley Hospital in south-east London,’ the official-sounding woman on the phone told Mum. ‘Can you come straight away?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Mum replied. ‘I’d go to hell and back to save my daughter.’ She didn’t know then that hell and back was precisely the journey she would be making over the next nine years.

  The following few hours were a flurry of activity. Mum rang Dad, who came straight home from work, picking up Natalie from school on his way. We drove to the station, then set off on the tube journey to the Maudsley.

  The Maudsley Hospital is the biggest mental health hospital in Britain. It treats people with all sorts of horrific mental problems, including kids with emotional and behavioural problems, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), post-traumatic stress, depression and other serious psychiatric conditions. When we turned up there that day, 5 March 1991, I had no idea I was being bracketed with kids so seriously ill.

  The journey from Northwood Hills tube station to the other side of London was exhausting. When Mum helped me off the train at Elephant & Castle, people were staring at me. I must have looked like a kid dying of cancer. And when I saw the stairs leading up out of the station, I thought I couldn’t do it – I just didn’t have the energy to get up there. But somehow Mum and Dad helped me and we clambered up into the daylight and through the dirty doors of a red London bus. After about ten minutes the bus lurched to a stop and the doors flew open again. In front of us was the Maudsley.

  It was certainly a serious-looking building, with two grand pillars flanking a flight of stone steps that led up to the main entrance. I felt tiny as I crept up the steps and entered the monstrous great building.

  Inside we were greeted by a smiley nurse who showed Mum and Dad into a side room for a meeting with Dr Stephen Wolkind, the hospital’s expert in child psychiatry. Natalie and I were taken into another room by a nurse – let’s call her Mary – who gave us crayons and paper to keep us occupied. It felt like Mum and Dad were gone for hours. After Natalie and I had coloured and drawn everything we could think of we wandered outside and sat on the low bars of a climbing frame in the fading spring sunshine.

  ‘I wish Mum and Dad would hurry up so we can just clear out of this place and go home,’ I said to Natalie. It had never occurred to me I wouldn’t be back in time for Neighbours.

  Then Natalie pushed me on the swings for a bit. I was too weak to push her. But still Mum and Dad didn’t emerge from their meeting. What could they be talking about?

  Finally Mary, the nurse, came out to the swings and told me it was time to go in. She led me down a corridor and into a small cubicle. Inside there was a narrow single bed, a table and a chair. She sat me down at the table and told me to wait a moment. A couple of minutes later she returned carrying a glass of milk, a couple of cream crackers and some cheese.

  ‘Here’s a snack,’ she said, placing it in front of me, then sitting down herself on the edge of the bed.

  I looked at the plate, barely able to hide my disgust at the big chunk of cheese plonked in the middle. Didn’t these people know cheese was about the most ‘bad’ food around?

  ‘Oh no, I don’t fancy that at the moment, thank you,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Nikki, you have to eat your snack,’ replied Mary. ‘I’ll talk to you when you have finished it.’

  For more than an hour we sat in silence. A few times I tried to engage Mary’s eyes, buried deep in her pudgy face, but each time she looked away. It was only later I discovered that it was the Maudsley’s policy to avoid any interaction with eating-disorders patients during mealtimes. So instead I silently gazed out of the window watching aeroplanes etching white lines across the sky of south London.

  Finally, another nurse came into the room.

  ‘Right, Nikki,’ she said brusquely. ‘Your mum and dad are going home now, so you’d better say goodbye to them.’

  Mum was standing in the doorway behind the nurse, her gaze flickering between me and the floor. I could tell by the red puffiness around her eyes that she had been crying. Even Dad looked shell-shocked.

  At first I couldn’t quite understand what was happening. I’d always thought we were just here for a meeting with specialists. It hadn’t occurred to me for a moment that they might want to keep me here. But the lo
ok on Mum and Dad’s faces told me in a second that this was exactly what was happening.

  ‘No, no. Don’t take my mum away,’ I pleaded, my voice high-pitched but starting to choke with the realisation of what was happening.

  ‘I need my mum. Please don’t make her go. I need her.’

  As Mum and Dad moved towards me to kiss me goodbye, I started to wail. This just could not be happening. Mum couldn’t be abandoning me. Not her, surely? OK, Grandad and Dad had left me, but Mum wouldn’t do that. Would she?

  My screams grew louder and louder, like the howling of a wounded animal. I watched the nurse gently take hold of Mum’s elbow and lead her back out into the corridor. ‘No, no, noooooo,’ I screamed.

  I lunged forward and flung my bony arms around Mum’s thighs, my screams now subsiding into loud sobs as I begged her not to leave me in this strange place surrounded by strange people.

  Tears were sliding slowly down Mum’s face as she tried to untangle my arms from her legs and steady herself.

  ‘I’ve got to, Nikki,’ Mum kept saying. ‘I’ve got to – the doctors are going to make you better. You’ll be home soon, I promise.’

  But I didn’t hear any of that. My head was thumping and my ears were filled with a strange howling – I didn’t realise then that it was me making such a horrific noise.

  Mary and the other nurse peeled me away from Mum but I started screaming and lashing out at them. I was so angry, so furious that everyone would gang up and do this to me. Why me? After everything else, why me?

  I flung myself around the room, banging into the bed and table, flailing my arms and legs.

  Eventually, Mary pinned me to the floor to stop me smashing my head while the other nurse gently pushed Mum and Dad into the corridor.

  For a moment I stopped struggling and took a breath. Through the glass window of the door I could see Mum looking back at me over her shoulder as she walked away. She had walked away and left me sobbing on the floor. Mum, who’d been there me for every second of every day, who carried me like a baby from room to room, who cuddled me to sleep and kissed my tears. She had left me.

  I lay totally still and heard the lock on the door at the end of the corridor click shut. I was eight years old and totally alone. I cried until my head pounded and I was shaking with exhaustion.

  After five minutes Mary picked me up from the floor and eased me back into the chair by the table.

  The two cream crackers and lump of cheese were still sat there on the plate. My whole life had been upended once again but that chunk of cheese wasn’t going anywhere.

  ‘Now, Nikki,’ she said, ‘we’re going to work you out an eating programme which is going to make you better.’

  She was fat and spoke with a strict, headmistressy voice that I could tell meant she wouldn’t put up with any negotiation. I was so scared.

  ‘If you stick to the programme and eat your food you will see your Mum in a couple of weeks,’ she told me. ‘As for now, eat your snack up and then we’ll talk to you.’

  ‘When am I going to see my mum?’ I mumbled through my tears.

  ‘Eat your snack and then we will talk to you.’

  ‘But I need her. I need her.’

  ‘Eat your snack and then we will talk to you.’

  ‘Please let me see her. Please.’

  ‘Eat your snack and then we will talk to you.’

  And that is how it went on. Me, sobbing, begging and way beyond being able to think about eating. Them, refusing to talk to me, comfort me or even look at me unless I started eating.

  At six o’clock they took away the plate of crackers and cheese and replaced it with a meat casse role dish with mash and peas. Again I looked at it and refused to eat. Again they sat near me at the table, refusing to speak unless I ate.

  ‘Please, when can I go home?’

  ‘Eat your dinner.’

  At eight o’clock they took the cold, congealed food away and brought a glass of milk and a small KitKat.

  ‘When am I going to see my mum?’

  ‘Eat your snack.’

  At 8.30 the chocolate and milk were taken away and the nurse said it was bedtime. I looked over to the bed where the pyjamas Mum had sneaked into her handbag on the way here had been laid out for me.

  The only time I’d ever been away from home before was at a Brownie camp and then I was so miserable I’d wet the bed. How on earth was I going to manage in this place with absolutely no one I knew around me and no idea when I might be going home?

  I was shaking as I swung my legs in between the plain white sheets. I thought of my teddy-bear duvet cover. I thought of my sticker collection. I thought of Mum and Dad and Natalie all doing just what they had done last night, last month, last year – but without me.

  How could this be happening?

  One of the nurses sat on the bed as I lay there and closed my eyes. It can only have been exhaustion from that long day that made me able to sleep.

  Next morning it all began again. I was woken by a nurse and got up and dressed myself. At eight o’clock a tray was put on my table with a bowl of cornflakes, a slice of bread and butter and a glass of orange juice on it. I allowed myself the orange juice and left everything else.

  Then they set about weighing and measuring me. My weight had dropped to 18 kilos (2 stone 12 lb) – the average weight for a four-year-old. And I was a month off my ninth birthday.

  The doctor’s reports from that assessment say I was ‘finding reality of life too hard to bear and wished to be dead to be reunited with her idealised grandfather’. I was the worst anorexic case they had ever treated at the Maudsley and there was a real concern that unless the weight went back on immediately, I could die.

  ‘You are dangerously underweight,’ Mary, my key nurse, told me. ‘You will not be allowed to see your Mum until you eat. And you will not be allowed to speak to your Mum until you eat. And if you still refuse to eat we’re going to take you to a medical ward, put a tube into you and force-feed you.’

  No one ever asked me if I wanted to put the weight back on. No one ever considered I might not want to get better.

  But I realised then that this woman was totally serious and this wasn’t a battle I was going to win.

  And, young as I was, I was old enough to know that my only option was to play the system.

  OK, I’ll comply with their rules, I thought. But as soon as I get out of here I’ll eat whatever I want and get as skinny as I can as soon as I can. I’ll eat whatever they serve me up and pretend I’m better.

  The food’s just like medicine, I told myself. I’ll take it to get them off my back. So every mealtime I sat obediently at the small, square table, pushed up against a blank wall, and slowly yet surely cleared my plate.

  It was real old-fashioned school food, like liver with potatoes and green beans, steak and kidney pie and shepherd’s pie. All of it was disgusting but I got my head down and got on with it.

  During mealtimes there was no one to talk to, nothing to look at and nothing to do. In some ways eating the food relieved the boredom – and knowing this was just a game, something I’d do to shut everyone up, made me feel like I was still in control too.

  And when I ate my food everyone treated me so much more nicely. If I ate my meals I’d be allowed out of my cubicle to play with the other kids on the ward. There were about ten of them, but I was the only one with an eating disorder. The rest were just oddballs.

  A girl called Janey used to run up and down the ward shouting and swearing at the nurses. She’d been kicked out of school and seemed totally out of control.

  Then there was Anna, who was about the same age as me, and she had behavioural problems and Down’s Syndrome. At that stage I was really into Felt by Numbers, a cross between Fuzzy Felt and Painting by Numbers. I was mad about it and for a while Mum had been buying me a box of it every weekend. When I’d finished my felt works of art I Blu-Tacked them up all around my room and they looked amazing.

  One morning Anna
came into my room when I wasn’t there and pulled every single one of my Felt by Numbers off the wall and threw them on the floor. When I returned and saw hundreds of pieces of felt lying higgledy-piggledy all over the floor I was heartbroken. I squatted down, picked them up and stuck each tiny piece back in its correct place. It took hours.

  Next morning Anna came back and did exactly the same again.

  The boys on the unit were really naughty too – some had behavioural problems and others would shout and swear at any time of the day or night. And we had another couple of Down’s Syndrome kids too.

  I’d never come across kids with mental problems before and it was utterly terrifying. The screaming and shouting at night, the dramatic mood swings and violent outbursts were all alien to me and I felt so isolated. If one of the kids was having a temper tantrum at night, I’d pull the sheets and blanket over my head and try to block out the noise by thinking about home.

  But the other kids’ rages and fits taught me something too – it got them attention and for a short while it gave them control. I think that on some level this sunk into my brain because within the year I was ranting and raving like the rest of them.

  My first week at the Maudsley seemed to last for ever but within a month I understood the system and just got on with it. As a child you become institutionalised very quickly.

  I made friends with a couple of the other girls and even the really weird kids started to seem more normal with every day that passed. There was a girl called Emily who used to shout all the time and couldn’t stop lying. She probably had Tourette’s Syndrome or something similar, but at the time I thought she was just mental. Even so, we became friends and would hang around together. Well, it was either that or being on my own all the time.

  I’d been in the Maudsley for a fortnight before Mum and Dad were finally allowed to visit. When it was time for them to leave I cried hysterically again, grabbing hold of Mum’s leg. After that they came every week and I got more used to the partings, but it was never easy. Mum was relieved that I had a bit more meat on me and that for the moment I was safe, but they didn’t dare look any further forward than that.