Hungry

by Grace Dent

  Weight gain was a badge of honour. You could pile on ten extra pounds in a week. Dad packed different-sized trousers, some with elasticated waistbands, for the inevitable spread.

  Dad’s health had started to worry us all, in lots of little ways.

  Since he’d retired he had grown plumper and certainly sleepier. Sometimes he even seemed a little confused. He’d given up driving. He wouldn’t tell us exactly why. But I knew he’d had some sort of scare. Lately he was experiencing weird tingling sensations in his feet, as well as a constant thirst.

  ‘This ’ouse is like a bloody sauna!’ he’d roar. ‘And she’s always whackin’ that immersion right up, making me parched.’

  In the Seventies my dad was wiry in his army uniform. Now he had a definite belly. Pictures showed it protruding under the cummerbund he wore to shake hands with the Captain on formal dining evenings.

  If you tackled Dad on his health, he became grumpy. So what if he slept in his chair all day and half of the evening?

  ‘I’ve worked all my life,’ he’d snap, eating a family-size bar of Fruit & Nut and slices of custard tart. ‘Can you not just bloody let me be?’

  This quickfire grumpiness worked well for him his entire life. He set the boundaries of what could be discussed. You’d try once or twice but then finally give up.

  ‘So what happened then?’ I say to Mam.

  ‘The blue suitcase on the conveyer belt, George,’ shouts Mam, with one hand muffling the phone. ‘No, George! The blue one with the yellow ribbon on. That’s ours. I’ve told you five times … Well, we got him a seat and he righted himself eventually, but it was scary.’

  ‘Can you go back to the doctor?’ I say.

  ‘Yes, we’re gonna have to,’ she agrees.

  I should have stepped in here. Put a stop to the snacks. I should have nagged him to take up jogging too. Or at least walking. Dad’s health was never quite right from around the mid-Nineties onwards. There was always something: his stomach, his joints, his balance. We needed to get him tested.

  March 1996

  ‘The problem would be with ulcers,’ begins the posh man in the white coat. ‘Raised glucose damages the nerves in the feet and this messes with the body’s circulation.’

  The specialist at the Cumberland Infirmary, just 1.8 miles across the city from ASDA, is lecturing us about too much sugar. He’s drawn a rudimentary pair of legs on a piece of paper and is circling swirls and arrows around the shins. I try to listen and scribble things down, but there are a lot of long words and they’re passing very quickly. If I get some down at least I could go to the uni library back in Scotland and look them up.

  ‘This means,’ he continues, ‘that you can get cramps and weird pains in your toes and legs. Which is bothersome.’ More doodling. We all lean forward to see.

  ‘But the worst part,’ he says, ‘is that when the blood supply is poor it means cuts and sores do not heal. So these can turn to ulcers or gangrene.’

  Dad nods. The specialist continues. We have seven and a half minutes of specialist appointment left and the waiting room is full.

  ‘Obviously if that occurs this wouldn’t be the end of the story,’ the medic continues. ‘We could try addressing some of the basic issues. We can remove all of the necrotic tissue, the peri-wound callus and foreign bodies right down to the viable tissue. That’s simple enough, in theory. Then we can irrigate the wound with saline, dress it, blah-dee-blah. I mean, if it’s an abscess, we’d need to drain it, whip away all the bad stuff … and that’s how we have the most success saving the limb. I have one patient, for example, who …’

  ‘I’m sorry, what?’ I say.

  The doctor carries on talking. My parents do not seem to notice the part where he’s mentioned the possibility of chopping off my dad’s leg.

  ‘So the dilemma is making a choice and acting quickly,’ the medic says. ‘If we treat infection long-term with antibiotics, we merely increase the risk of amputation.’

  ‘Hang on!’ I jump in.

  My parents bristle. They do not like it when I interrupt doctors. Medical people are very important and we should simply nod gratefully when they talk.

  ‘Amputation?’ I say. ‘We’re not there now. He’s just dizzy now. He doesn’t have ulcers.’

  ‘Oh,’ says the doctor, ‘yes. I was just explaining where poor diet and too much sugar leads. Sometimes. What we need to do in the meantime is lower Mr Dent’s blood pressure, glucose and cholesterol. That’s the key thing right now.’

  ‘So no injections?’ says Mam.

  ‘No, not now,’ the doctor says. ‘Two pills a day. But please keep a close eye on blood sugar. If we crack that, this can be relatively plain sailing. But … it’s curbing the sugar that patients do seem to have problems with.’

  ‘Thank you, doctor,’ says my dad, standing up, committing to nothing. I follow him out, deflated.

  The specialist bids us goodbye, back out into the corridor. It’s like he’s done this spiel three times already today and will do it fifteen more before home time.

  The mystery of Dad’s dizziness, sleepiness and thirst is explained. At the age of sixty, within a decade of the big ASDA opening and a few years cruising the high seas – which I’m sure is entirely coincidental – Dad has developed Type 2 diabetes.

  We mooch back to the car in silence.

  ‘There’s gonna have to be some changes,’ Mam says, her voice trailing off as she’s already fresh out of ideas.

  ‘Dad,’ I say seriously, ‘you’re gonna have to stop eating chocolate trifle every night. This is serious.’

  Dad looks away as if I’m addressing someone else.

  ‘I think the main problem I’ve got,’ he says solemnly, ‘is which poor bastard is gonna buy half of me socks?’

  ‘Dad, it’s not funny,’ I say, even if it was very funny. This is one of the ways he distracts you.

  ‘Oh, come on, precious,’ he says. ‘I’m gonna save a fortune on slippers.’

  On the way home, I thought hard about the future. Going to London and pushing to be part of the media scene seemed like a waste of effort. That woman’s bare feet up on the desk? The way she had no idea where my uni was? It spoke volumes. But if I were to come home for good after graduation, I could step in and care for Dad as he got old. That’s what good daughters do. Especially ones from Currock, I thought. Girls like me can have ridiculous dreams, but at the end of the day, they should do the right thing.

  May 1996

  At a computer in the far corner of a science lab two of my nerdiest uni friends, Alan and Dirk, are in fits of filthy laughter, typing long chains of mysterious code into a keyboard. I’m supposed to be in the university twenty-four-hour study room finishing my dissertation – a 25,000-word post-modern discussion on Virginia Woolf and Rose Tremain. It felt like a good idea when I proposed it. Now, I’d rather watch moss dry on a radiator than write the conclusion.

  Besides, I’m curious as to what’s going on in this lab.

  The monitor turns ominously black aside from some yellow spindly text. Then it requests another password. Then a page of a hundred or so lines of more code appears, underlined with neon. In years to come, I would know these as ‘links’.

  ‘Not the dog again,’ moans Dirk.

  ‘It’s gotta be done,’ says Alan, shaking his head.

  ‘Dinnae show Grace the dog,’ says Dirk.

  ‘Show me the dog,’ I say

  I’ve seen the heady world of home computers on Tomorrow’s World with Judith Hann. This is going to be some space-age computer-generated animation of a dog for me to smile at.

  Alan clicks on some links and types a bit more. He claims to be connecting to another computer on the other side of the world. And then the screen fills with a set of photos, revealing themselves slowly.

  A woman with long brown hair is having rather enthus
iastic sex with a rather large Great Dane.

  ‘What? No, noooooooo!’ I cry, covering my eyes but then going in for a proper look. ‘Who, what … how did you get that?’

  The boys – being horrible beastly boys – find this hilarious.

  In that moment, I knew that something had changed. My friends really were, as they’d claimed several times, talking to strangers all over the world. They were swapping messages, pictures and files via computer using only the phoneline. Some of them were ridiculous top-grade smut, but mostly they were trading essays on Judas Priest and Led Zeppelin sheet music and talking about conspiracy theories with fellow nerds in West Coast America. The world seemed to be shrinking. Talking to America was now as simple and relatively cheap as talking to your friend down the street.

  I’ve tried up until this point not to mention something very important about the Seventies, Eighties and most of the Nineties. It’s been difficult, and I think I’ve pulled it off. However, one specific, absolutely crucial fact has been fizzing behind my eyes, which colours every single memory. Just like it does for all Generation X people telling a story about the past. We want to scream this fact continuously because it’s the main reason why everything happened differently back then. We were living on a different planet.

  You see, until this point, there was no Internet.

  There. I said it. I’ll say it again.

  Back then, there was no Internet.

  There was no Internet.

  Did I tell you there was no Internet?

  No, come back! It’s important. Humour me.

  If Generation X kids seem like creaky relics repeating the same news about our low-fi, offline youth, it might sound like we’re saying it so younger people can count their blessings. But we’re not. We’re actually retelling ourselves, over and over again, because we can’t quite believe it. We look at life now, and life back then, and we feel like time travellers.

  We lived through an era when literally every single godforsaken moment of daily life, from opening our eyes, was just one million times more hassle; it was an administrative wilderness without search engines, GPS maps, group chats, YouTube, online dating, selfies, Amazon Prime and the other 175 things we didn’t have that today alone have made things easier so far.

  We remember long patches of nothingness between two issues of our favourite print magazine, with no more information available on pop culture. Or feelings of real, cut-off, no-contact separation when someone was out of sight. We remember rarely having a clue about the feelings of strangers, neighbours or celebrities. We remember people being mysterious, elusive, unavailable. And we remember not knowing things: how the definitive answer to the question we had in the shower that morning was probably on the top floor of a library in New York and we’d never know within our whole lifetime. We remember the large ringfences around important people and the intense sense of deference and hierarchy over who we could just approach and speak to. And how impossible it was to be seen or heard or noticed. This kept us all much more neatly in our lanes. We remember how it felt the very first time we were so bold as to send an electronic letter straight to the address of someone important – a journalist, a store manager, a popstar – and … PING! One came back.

  If we harp on and on and on about this time, it’s because we feel like living history. We lived through the second Big Bang. It’s like you’re speaking to someone who was there when the wheel was invented, who until that moment spent two decades pulling everything around on an anvil.

  As me, Alan and Dirk walked home from the laboratory, I realised why they were so smitten with computers. All the normal rules of getting stuff done seemed to fly out of the window. In the pigeonhole beside my door, there was a boring brown foolscap envelope addressed to me bearing a London postmark. It had taken ten days to reach Stirling. As a mode of communication, it already felt prehistoric. Inside, there was a letter with a bright-red masthead from National Magazines. I gasped, then grinned, then began to really panic.

  July 1996

  Up and down Wardour Street in Soho, in the West End of London, I walk in search of the capital’s most celebrated showbiz private members’ club.

  ‘Is this the Groucho Club?’ I shout to the glamorous receptionist, opening a large door with dark glass.

  London door numbers always seem to have been given out during a gale. I’m already ten minutes late for the most important tête-à-tête of my life. We’re having lunch, but I do not feel like eating. My toe is poking through my stocking foot, my stomach is churning, my ears are full of white noise. I’m in absolutely no state to meet Marcelle D’Argy Smith, the editor of Cosmopolitan.

  After graduation, in June 1996, with ‘Wannabe’ by the Spice Girls blaring from every radio station and ‘Girl Power’ the hot topic of the summer, I moved back to my parents’ place to sleep in the room where Mam kept her wallpaper table and spare cat litter. Despite my promises that I was just on the verge of finding employment, Mam encouraged me to try harder by intruding into the room at 7.05 a.m. each day to clatter the Venetian blinds and shout the names of nearby turnip-picking opportunities. She did not accept I was now an actual intellectual and would only consider employment that required a nuanced understanding of magic realism in Angela Carter’s post-feminist fiction.

  ‘You can be an intellectual at Southwaite!’ she yelled, waving me off to clear tables at the Granada service station on the M6. This job involved eight-hour shifts of being shouted at by the public over the price of English breakfasts and being sexually harassed by the chef with finger tattoos, which I should have complained about but it actually broke up the day.

  From Carlisle, I’d written a begging letter to a man called Toby Young who had started a high-brow, low-culture magazine called Modern Review. He politely rejected me as his assistant. I’d also tried for a BBC broadcast news intern position, which involved a group interview at the Jurys Pond hotel, Glasgow, which was a terrifying cross between Press Gang on CITV and Lord of the Flies. Now, as I turned up at the Groucho Club, I had one lifeline left. An invite to have lunch with Marcelle, Queen of Glam Fash Mags. In my final year, after my second attempt at the Cosmo competition, they’d called me up out of the blue and asked if, as a student, I fancied writing a very small 200-word segment on Prozac usage among female students. This was around the time of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s first book, Prozac Nation; being female and a massive headcase had suddenly become quite trendy. I’d sent them a little piece and they’d allotted me a non-paid role with the lofty title ‘student advisor’. I wasn’t sure what this meant at all, but it sounded grand. Then an official letter arrived asking me to lunch with Marcelle herself. As I lay the night before on a blow-up mattress on my brother’s floor in his squat in Hackney, I struggled to think how I’d fake it as a cool, connected media chick who just casually lunches on Dean Street with an editor. My outfit wouldn’t cut it for a start; a Morgan De Toi skirt made of ruched fake taffeta fabric and a Jane Norman fitted top. I’d look like an interloper. And not, say, an executive producer from Channel 4 here to meet Ben Volpeliere-Pierrot for langoustines.

  Photos of the Groucho’s inner sanctum were never available, but I imagined it to be a dark, smokey set of uncarpeted rooms chock full of the British cognoscenti. Damon from Blur would probably be on the piano clanking through ‘Park Life’, with Muriel Grey, clad in a leather mini skirt, discussing the Young British Artists with Tom Paulin. Midway through my first martini, Damien Hirst would waltz in to rapturous cheers, stinking of formaldehyde, then as one we’d unite for a rousing chorus of ‘First We Take Manhattan’ by Leonard Cohen. It would be totally bohemian and I’d fit in just marvellously and learn to be bohemian too. Some years would pass before I accepted that my type of working-class people are really not suited to being bohemian, as bohemian really means chaotic, self-destructive, whimsical and a bit whiffy. Most North London bohemians would be a lot happier if they stopped wife-swapping
and got a nice ‘To Do’ list on the go; then their homes might be full of neat rows of fabric-conditioned socks, rather than self-involved sobbing, cat piss and orchids.

  A gang of men checking in at the same time as me are dressed in dogtooth suits and thick bottle glasses. They are all various versions of Chris Evans from Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush. This gang disappear into a dark side door on the left on the ground floor where a loud lunchtime boozing session seems to be in full swing. Meanwhile, the receptionist points me skywards.

  ‘Cosmopolitan lunch?’ she says. ‘Top-floor suite. Follow the other girls.’

  What other girls?

  As I walked nervously up the three flights of stairs, there was a small nagging truth at the pit of my stomach that I needed to put a sock in. I didn’t really like Cosmopolitan magazine. In fact, all women’s mags had begun to lose their shine by now. My childlike faith in their mantras about ‘having it all’ was on the wane. As a teen, these magazines gave us girls a sneaky glimpse at what it’s like to be a real adult lady. It looked brilliant. By my mid-twenties I’d be wearing three shades of eyeshadow during the daytime, eating a lot of honeydew melon to replenish my water levels and dating men who fancied unconventionally pretty girls who made up for it with feistiness and brains. I’d have a lovely apartment with coordinated scatter cushions, my career would be on the rise and I’d spend weekends mini-breaking in European capitals or having second dates in country meadows, for which I’d chuck together a salad featuring three types of leaf: lollo rosso, rocket and watercress. Sexually, I’d be at it constantly, four times a week, in six positions that coordinated with my star sign. Despite being in the boardroom every other week asking for more money, I’d also know ‘when the time was right’ to have babies. They never mentioned women like me who loved being handed a cute baby but loved more the moment I could hand one back, swathed in relief that the feeling of anxiety and responsibility wasn’t permanent. The more I read glossy magazines the less I felt like a woman. More like a curious bystander. I needed to really keep this quiet.