Tony leapt across the kitchen, snatched the bottle from her hand and slapped her on the back in an effort to bring the pills back up.
Obviously if she had really wanted to kill herself she wouldn’t have done it in front of her boyfriend. So I think it was really Mum’s way of showing how desperate she felt. She couldn’t cope any more.
The GP put her on anti-depressants and she had group therapy with other anorexics’ parents at Great Ormond Street. It all helped but nothing was able to help her shake off that constant feeling of sadness.
So all that meant that going home just wasn’t an option. Which was why I was speeding down the motorway to Taunton.
Sedgemoor was then one of Britain’s biggest residential care businesses, which placed kids in a number of children’s foster homes around Taunton. Then the kids all attended a special school nearby.
Some of the kids had been kicked out of school, others had run away from home because they didn’t get on with their parents, some had family problems and some were total delinquents – really rough, tearaway kids.
There were two other girls living in my house. Vicky was a big fat girl who had ended up there because she didn’t get on with her mum and had been thrown out of school for behavioural problems. She couldn’t stop nicking stuff. It was obvious she came from a really rough home, and she stank. She’d go into my room when I wasn’t around and steal my CDs and shower gel. They even had to lock up the food in the kitchen otherwise she’d have had the lot.
My other housemate, Karen, was lovely but very, very disturbed and into self-harming. She spent most of her time in her room listening to really depressing music with candles burning all around her bed. When they called her down to dinner she would often have candle burns all up her arm and hot wax over her clothes.
We had three women carers: Margaret, who was a bit unfriendly, Wendy, who was a real soft touch and didn’t know the first thing about calories or food (result!), and Kath, who was OK. Each morning one of them would drive us to school, where we did proper coursework, aiming towards our GCSEs. I felt more normal than I had in years.
The first day you arrived at Sedgemoor, the staff would hand you £1,500 to buy a stereo and television for your room and anything else you wanted to decorate it with. And there was still loads of cash left over for new clothes and make-up. I think the idea was to kit yourself out for a new life. If you stayed six months you got to keep all the stuff you had bought. But if you didn’t stay, you lost it all.
Each week we got an additional allowance of £5 to spend on magazines or to go bowling or to the cinema.
After having to obey the rules and regulations at Great Ormond Street for so long, foster care was like arriving in heaven. I had so much freedom, I didn’t know what to do with it. First off, I dyed my hair pink. I was still into that hippie look that Nina and Natalie were into.
Then one Saturday afternoon I went into Taunton and got my nose pierced. It was so cool. Then I had five holes pierced in one ear and four in the other.
We were living quite near Glastonbury, so on Saturdays we would get the bus there and go shopping, returning with bagfuls of multi-coloured flowing skirts and lacy white tops.
And one day we went to Stonehenge because it seemed a cool thing to do. I didn’t drink because of the calories but I smoked a couple of spliffs with some of the other girls. I didn’t like it much, though, because it made me feel lethargic, which I hate.
Nina, my friend from Great Ormond Street, visited me for a day at Sedgemoor. It was brilliant to see her, but secretly it was even more brilliant to see her looking fatter than me. However much we loved each other, we were still hugely competitive.
Most girl friends would have spent the day together agonising over which nail polish to buy or slobbing out at the cinema, but not me and Nina. We filled our day running around the streets of Taunton, trying to burn off calories.
It had been arranged that once a month Larry, my key social worker, would take me back to Great Ormond Street to be weighed. When I left there, Dr Lask had threatened me that if my weight fell dramatically I would be straight back in for emergency feeding. But even that thought wasn’t enough to make me eat enough. The house I was staying in wasn’t an anorexic unit, so the staff there had little idea about dealing with me and I got away with loads of dodges.
Also, because it was foster care, we could make our own breakfasts and lunches if we wished, which for me was perfect. At first I had one Weetabix for breakfast with water and black coffee. For lunch I had a Weight Watchers’ soup and a packet of Ritz crackers. Then for dinner it would be steamed vegetables and some fruit or a low-fat yoghurt. Before bed I would have an Options drink which the carers thought was hot chocolate – they didn’t realise it was only 40 calories.
Sure enough, when I went for my weigh-ins at Great Ormond Street my weight had dropped. I was allowed to return to Taunton but told I had to start eating and my weigh-ins were increased to once a fortnight. I didn’t want to go back into the Mildred Creak Unit permanently, but once I started losing weight again I liked it and I couldn’t bear the guilt of eating more than I felt was enough. Soon I was skipping breakfast entirely. Because it was like living in your own home I just went back to the crumbs-on-the-plate trick, claiming I’d already eaten if anyone challenged me.
I started buying low-calorie crisps and having them for my lunch – that was about 90 calories. And for dinner I’d have a tray of button mushrooms – they are only 13 calories per 100 grams (3½ oz). Then I found something even better – water chestnuts at just seven calories per 100 grams!
The carers would cook evening meals but I’d just say I didn’t fancy it and they let me off. They saw me eating my water chestnuts or Weight Watchers’ soups and thought that was OK. They had no idea about calories.
I cut back and back until for about a month I lived on nothing but Weight Watchers’ soups, black coffee and cigarettes. I’d started smoking every now and again out of our bedroom window at Great Ormond Street with Nina. We’d nick cigarettes from the nurses’ station and think we were really cool. In foster care, everyone smoked and I was soon on 20 a day. I’d read they suppressed appetite and made you skinnier, so what wasn’t there to like about smoking?
I’d been at Sedgemoor for two months when one morning in May I was due to return to London for my next weigh-in. As I’d barely eaten for a fortnight, I knew I was going to be in big trouble. I was painfully thin again and feeling incredibly weak. I couldn’t even run down the street because my legs would ache, and my clothes billowed around me because I was so scrawny.
I was lying on my bed thinking, How am I going to get through this one? when my eyes settled on the metal doorstop in the shape of an owl that held my door open. It must have weighed a few kilos but I picked it up and wedged it down the front of my navy-blue flared dungarees. (I’d chosen them as the best clothes I had for disguising how much weight I’d lost.) Perfect, I thought, slipping on a chunky wool jumper over the top.
All the way back up the M4 we went with the doorstop stuck inside my dungarees.
When I arrived at Great Ormond Street one of the nurses took me upstairs and put me on the scales. I’d slipped off my boots but was still fully clothed. But when I looked down at the numbers on the scales I saw instantly that my weight was dramatically low – I’d lost 6.5 kilos (1 stone) in just seven weeks. The nurse diligently wrote my weight down on her chart, then scurried off to find a doctor.
Mum had met me at Great Ormond Street and as I trudged out into the corridor she put her arm round my bony shoulders. We had a couple of hours left until the doctors decided what we should do next so we decided to wander down to Covent Garden for a bit of window shopping.
It was only a ten minute walk but by the time we got there I was exhausted. We were crossing the Piazza when my feet, too tired and clumsy to move properly, tripped up on the cobbles and I landed in a heap on the ground. I must have looked such a pathetic figure – a little bag of bones, pa
le, scraggy and sickly, too weak to even pull herself to her feet. A few people stared at me as I sat there and I didn’t even have the energy to look away.
Mum saw the horror on the faces of passers-by as they looked at me, and tears started rolling down her face. As another couple of shoppers turned to stare at me, Mum just lost it. ‘What are you looking at?’ she screamed. ‘Stop staring at my daughter – can’t you see she’s ill.’ It was just awful.
But of course people were going to look at me. Why wouldn’t they? I was a walking skeleton, except I could scarcely even walk.
Mum helped me up and we went back to the hospital. There the nurse told us to go straight to the Middlesex Hospital for a bone-density scan. Anorexics tend to have very low bone density, which means they are vulnerable to fractures and osteoporosis. The doctors wanted to assess my risks.
We climbed into a taxi with Larry, my social worker from Sedgemoor, and off we went. The doorstop was still in my dungarees as I quietly congratulated myself on getting away with it so brilliantly.
CHAPTER 15
HUNTERCOMBE
I lay on the padded bed as the scanner glided up and down my body, checking out exactly what damage I had done to my bones.
Then, all of a sudden, the nurse froze as she stared at the screen.
‘What on earth is that?’ she said, pointing at a dark object on the monitor.
She pulled up my T-shirt and as her eyes fixed on the 3-kilo (6½ lb) lump of iron that had been secreted inside my dungarees all day, everything became clear.
My fate was sealed – although naively I didn’t yet realise it.
Outside the Middlesex Hospital, Mum, Larry and I picked up another cab, which jerked its way through the afternoon traffic.
‘Which train for Taunton do you think we’ll make?’ I asked Mum as I gazed dreamily out of the window.
She looked at me, a mixture of fear and frustration in her eyes.
‘We’re not going back to Sedgemoor, Nik,’ she said. ‘The doctors have said you are too ill – you have to go straight to Huntercombe Manor.’
I didn’t need to ask what Huntercombe Manor was. It was well known on the ‘anorexic circuit’ as a specialist centre for teenagers and adults with severe eating disorders and in desperate need of refeeding and help. I’d been threatened with it loads of times when I was at Great Ormond Street.
There was only one place ‘worse’ than Huntercombe and that was Rhodes Farm. No one came out of Rhodes Farm without being fattened up. Huntercombe was supposed to be tough too, although I knew a few people had managed to beat the system there.
But I still didn’t want to go. I went mad in the cab, shouting and throwing myself around the back seat. God knows what the driver must have thought, but I didn’t care.
Mum held on to me, trying to calm me down. ‘Please, Nikki, we want you to live,’ she kept saying. ‘We want you to live.’
‘I hate you!’ I screamed, pushing her violently away from me. ‘All you want is to ruin everything.’
But as we pulled up on the gravel drive outside Huntercombe Manor, even I, through my angry tears, couldn’t fail to be awestruck by the place. It was like a scene out of Four Weddings and a Funeral. Set on the outskirts of Maidenhead, in Berkshire, Huntercombe was a beautiful old house surrounded by stunning grounds of neatly trimmed grass, mature shrubs, an orchard and even a secret walled garden.
We climbed up an imposing flight of steps into a main hall where the floor was laid with deep carpet and the walls lined with huge oil paintings. There were grand murals everywhere, even on the ceiling.
It was probably the most beautiful building I had ever been in. But I didn’t really care about any of that then. I’d been locked away inside so many hospitals and institutions that I couldn’t give a toss what they looked like inside or what the staff and other patients were like. The only thing that mattered was what they were going to do to me there.
As I walked through the hall I saw a girl that I knew from Great Ormond Street going through the door for an evening out with her parents. I didn’t even say hello but grabbed her arm and asked, ‘Gemma, how much are they going to make me eat?’
‘Probably about a thousand,’ she replied grimly.
‘No, I won’t eat more than three hundred. I won’t.’
Gemma gave me half a smile as she walked off with her mum. All us anorexics followed the same code. It wasn’t about being friendly and having a chat about old times and mutual friends. The only thing that mattered was calories – how many and how to avoid them.
Three hundred calories a day was the top limit of what I’d been allowing myself during the past few weeks at Sedgemoor. It is a pitiful amount and not enough to survive on. That’s why I was literally skin and bones the day I arrived at Huntercombe, my translucent skin drawn tightly across the jutting bones of my face.
I must have looked like the living dead because as my eyes met those of another girl of about my age standing in the hallway, she literally flinched in horror. I saw her take a small gasp, unable to take her eyes off my emaciated frame, and she stepped backwards slightly, as if repulsed by me.
It is strange that after such a violent reaction she should become my best friend at Huntercombe and probably the person who helped save my life.
‘Hi, I’m Carly,’ she said, in a girly little voice which seemed quite at odds with the troubled, world-weary look in her eyes.
Carly had been at Huntercombe for nine months and was approaching a normal weight, although still skinny by most people’s standards.
Hello, I thought, instantly assessing her weight. Not as thin as me, I decided with satisfaction.
Then one of the staff came over and guided me up a flight of stairs to a kitchen where they sat me down at a table and brought me a banana and a glass of fruit juice. Carly followed me into the room and sat down opposite.
I wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone until I’d eaten my snack, so Carly just sat there watching me in silence. But she didn’t need to say anything. Just being there was enough to tell me that she would be a real friend.
The next step was to be weighed and measured. My weight was then just 27.7 kilos (4 stone 5 lb) and I was 152 centimetres (4 feet 10 inches) tall. I was 60 per cent of the weight I should have been at that age and height.
Huntercombe had an adolescent unit and an adult ward. I’d arrived as an emergency case and there were no beds free in the adolescent unit, so I was put in with the grown-ups. I’d never met an adult with an eating disorder before and it was really shocking. There was a woman called Jane, who was 20, who looked so thin and so old already that it was sad to watch her move around the ward. Then there was another woman, Fran, who was not just painfully skinny but sad-looking too.
But the good thing about being on the adult section was that there was more freedom. The first night I went into my bedroom, closed the door and started exercising immediately. I must have done 300 star-jumps that night and no one noticed.
Obviously it was good for shedding calories but it also kept me warm. My body weight had fallen so low that I was constantly freezing and the high ceilings and old-fashioned windows at Huntercombe meant draughts howled through the place at night.
When I finally lay down in bed, I rolled on to my side and put my hands between my thighs for warmth. But when my knees met there was a gap above them – I was that thin.
When I woke up, at 5am, I was still freezing cold, so I got up and inspected my new room properly. I opened the door of my new wardrobe and inside noticed a full-length mirror. I immediately pulled off my clothes and inspected my naked body for the first time in three years – there had been no full-length mirrors at Great Ormond Street or Sedgemoor.
I was so shocked at what I saw that I couldn’t quite believe it was me at first. I had to keep touching my legs and stomach to make sure it wasn’t an illusion or one of those magic mirrors that I remembered looking in with Dad when we went to Blackpool Pleasure Beach.
The f
igure looking back at me was little more than a skeleton with just a thin layer of tissue paper for skin, drawn over the stick-like bones. I stood staring for a good couple of minutes, considering what I’d become.
And my verdict?
Brilliant, I thought. It’s been worth every moment of all that hard work.
I pulled my clothes and Dr Martens boots on and thought, I’m going for a jog now.
Now I’d seen what I’d achieved through all those years of starving myself, I was more determined than ever that I couldn’t let anything destroy all my good work.
But I knew that meant I was going to have to fight even harder than I had ever done before.
I slipped quietly out of the door downstairs and started running around the garden, hoping no one would wake and notice me.
I managed a few days of dawn jogs before one morning one of the nurses came rushing across the grass towards me.
‘What do you think you’re doing, Nikki?’ she scolded. ‘Come inside right now. And if you do this again you will be put on total supervision.’
I later found out a girl called Paula, a total bitch, had seen me out of the window and snitched to the nurses.
I’d only been there a couple of days and I was already loathed by all the girls on the adolescent unit. I was the thinnest, most ill-looking girl they’d ever had there and they hated it. When it came to anorexia, I was the best. They could see it and they were jealous. At this time I was so immersed in my anorexia that I was unable to think or concentrate on anything else. I was desperately sick, but didn’t realise it.
I’d been at Huntercombe less than a week when Mum came to visit and brought with her my old schoolfriend Lena. We’d kept in touch by writing letters to each other but I hadn’t seen Lena for almost two years. When she walked into my room I was stunned. She had turned into a young woman – she had boobs! And hips! She was wearing a pair of trendy white patent wedges, an A-line skirt and a skimpy little top. I looked at her and thought, Wow, you look like a model in a magazine.
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