Читать книгу MY BODY, MY ENEMY: My 13 year battle with anorexia nervosa - Claire Beeken - Страница 10

I am working in the children’s department when Kim Speight comes in for her interview. She’s wearing an electric-blue skirt, a leather jacket and carrying a fold-up umbrella under her arm. Her long brown hair has been tonged at the back into two fat sausages which bounce up and down as she walks upstairs to the office. ‘Snooty cow,’ I say to myself, peering at her from behind a rack.

‘I dunno,’ I think when Kim starts a week later. ‘Maybe she isn’t so snooty, and at least she’s someone my own age.’ So when I bump into her in the stock room, I say hello and we get chatting. The following week, BHS holds a shopping evening for staff and their families. Mum can’t make it, so Kim asks me to go with her and her mum. I go back to Kim’s house after work and her mum is really nice: she cooks sausages and jacket potatoes for tea, which are lovely. We have a real giggle at the shopping evening and go on to become inseparable: Sheila calls us the terrible twins.

I still see Lisa Duxbury, but not as often because she’s given up her Saturday job and is studying at college to be a hotel receptionist. Kim and I start going clubbing together and spend hours in her bedroom trying on clothes. Her parents live apart, and sometimes we go round to her dad’s for tea. Often he gets us a Chinese takeaway and he always has bowls of sweets and fun-size chocolate bars dotted around the house. Kim stuffs herself – Kim is skinny; and somehow it seems okay if I do the same. I rush at the sweets, excited by the forbidden. ‘This is bad; you’re bad,’ says the little voice as I chew and swallow and, afterwards, I hate myself.

‘What does your waist measure, Kim?’ I ask, eyeing her with envy. She’s bought the most beautiful royal-blue pleated skirt from Dorothy Perkins and her waist looks tiny. I’ve got the same skirt, but it isn’t as nice on me because my waist is bigger than Kim’s. ‘Twenty-two inches,’ she says. And with those three little words, the game cranks back to life. ‘Right,’ I say to myself, ‘I’m going on a diet.’ The delicate balance that has kept me at a steady 7½ stone tips, and sends me helter-skelter into the land of fun-house mirrors where thin is fat and food is greed, and the calorie book rules okay.

‘Do you girls want a Chinese?’ asks Kim’s dad, one night after work. ‘Yes please,’ says Kim. ‘No thanks,’ I say. ‘Are you sure?’ Kim asks. ‘You haven’t eaten much today.’ ‘I’m alright, I’m just not hungry,’ I lie. Kim chooses what I usually have – chicken fried rice, curry sauce and chips – and I want it so much. I watch her eat and, smelling it, I can almost taste it. I am hungry and cold and my body is growling in protest. I touch my tummy, but it isn’t there and I am temporarily sated by a sense of superiority. Later Kim and I go upstairs to change to go out. ‘Bloody hell,’ says Kim as I undress. ‘Look at your stomach – it’s gone right in!’

At work my uniform flops off me. ‘Wow! My legs have got longer and my bum’s disappeared!’ I think to myself as I run my hand down my skirt. ‘What an achievement!’ If someone offers me a sweet I say, ‘No thank you.’

There are rows at home and people notice at work. I am summoned to Mrs Sansom’s office where she and Mr Warner tell me that if I don’t eat properly, my parents will be informed and I’ll be suspended. My job entails running up and down ladders and lifting things, and it seems I am a danger in the workplace. I run crying to Kim. ‘But Claire,’ she says, ‘you know you’re not eating.’ The voice in my head is insistent: ‘They’re trying to make you fa-at!’

With all eyes upon me I have to go to the canteen every day and struggle with a salad. With Mum and Dad bullying me at home it is impossible not to eat, so once again the merry-go-round slows and I stop starving myself and put on a little weight.

A few months later Mum and I are watching telly together. A programme about a girl called Catherine Dunbar starts. I am riveted because the actress playing Catherine has the most beautiful long hair, and I want to grow my hair as long as that. It’s a true story about a stupid girl who worries about her weight one minute and stuffs her face the next. ‘What’s she doing, Mum?’ I ask when Catherine starts shovelling handfuls of pills into her mouth. ‘She’s taking laxatives,’ says Mum, and I can tell from her voice that it’s an awful thing to do.

‘You’re not going out of this house looking like a tart!’ yells Dad. ‘I don’t look like a tart,’ I protest. ‘Tell him, Mum.’ ‘Your Dad’s right, Claire,’ she says. I am into Madonna, big-time, and even dress like her. I wear big crosses and chains, gloves and masses of blue eyeliner. My hair is dyed blonde and permed, and I dry it upside down for maximum effect. My cropped top shows my black bra underneath, and a tiny black skirt falls around my hip bones. ‘It’s barely a belt!’ splutters my outraged father.

‘You can’t stop me,’ I say, stomping back upstairs to my room where Kim and my brother’s friend Kevin are waiting for me to finish getting ready. Seconds later Dad is at my bedroom door, ‘Out!’ he says to Kim and Kevin – you’ve never seen two people scarper so fast. ‘If you don’t take those clothes off, I’m going to rip them off you, throw petrol over them and burn them,’ he says, and leaves the room. I know he means business. Crying with frustration I take off the skirt and stick on some trousers. Then I go to The Saracen’s Head in Dunstable and get drunk.

Kim and I virtually live at The Saracen’s Head – we’re there Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. I am going through a ‘what the hell’ stage and get drunk on cider and snog anybody. I am still paranoid about my weight and food is a problem, but not as big a problem as getting out of the house with my Madonna outfit intact! I am having one almighty crack, and later I will look back on the year that I was 17 as being one of the happiest of my life.

I love my job. I am made a senior sales assistant and, soon after, supervisor of menswear – it has been my dream to be a supervisor and I love it. My sales team consists of Claire McCann, a full-time assistant, and a college student called Veronica who comes in on Saturdays and in the holidays. Veronica is a big girl with albino colouring and a nervous tic. She is sweet but painfully shy, and whenever anybody speaks to her she goes bright red. Claire is the complete opposite. A chatty, laughing Irish girl, she is a year older than me and has worked as a butcher in her dad’s shop. She is stocky with short hair and huge owly glasses, and we get on like a house on fire.

‘Once, for a laugh, my friend and I stuck our fingers down our throat to see if it worked,’ says Claire one night when we are out drinking. ‘What do you mean?’ I ask. ‘You know,’ she says. ‘You stick your fingers down your throat to make yourself sick.’ ‘Oh,’ I say.

I get home, eat two Jaffa cakes, go into the bathroom, put my hair in a ponytail, turn on the cold tap, lift the loo seat and stick my index finger down my throat. Nothing happens. I try again, and graze the inside of my throat with my nail by mistake. I cough. Another jab with the finger and I cough again. My eyes start watering and the glands in my neck begin to swell. Poke, poke; cough, cough. My stomach jumps upwards towards my throat and bleaugh the contents hurtle through my fingers into the toilet bowl. The smell is awful, but I have to stay bent over the bowl spitting out great gobs of saliva and fumbling for the toilet paper to wipe my slippery fingers. It works alright.

Afterwards, I put down the lid of the toilet and flush. I lay my head on the grey furry loo-seat cover and listen to the deadly thoughts trickling back into my brain: ‘I’ve got to lose some weight, I’m so fat.’

‘I’ve always been a bit paranoid about my weight,’ I say, joining in on a conversation that Claire is having about dieting with Janet Chin, who works in the shoe department. Claire and Janet look at me in astonishment. ‘How can you be?’ exclaims Claire. ‘But you’re so thin!’ echoes Janet. ‘I think I’m fat,’ I say quietly, ‘and I’m trying to lose a bit of weight.’ In fact I am dieting like crazy and things are getting out of hand.

Other people’s lives revolve around going to work, getting home from work, feeding the kids, having dinner, going out, having a crack. My world revolves around how much I weigh, how big I look, what I can eat, what I can’t eat; and how much I have to eat to satisfy my parents, so they don’t nag, and Mrs Sansom, so she doesn’t suspend me. Food is my specialist subject and, most of all, I want rid of it.

I don’t like making myself sick – I’m not very good at it, but I’m brilliant at taking laxatives. I got the idea from the ‘Catherine’ documentary I saw on TV last summer. Taking laxatives helped Catherine lose a lot of weight. Sure, they also helped kill her; but she was anorexic, wasn’t she? I just want to lose a few pounds.

The first time I take the recommended dose: I swallow two brown Senokot pills with water and wait. They work a treat. I reckon if I increase the dose I’ll get thinner, quicker.

‘For God’s sake,’ says Claire, ‘you don’t need to lose any more weight. You’re looking so ill. And where’s your personality gone?’ ‘But I just feel I’m too big,’ I tell her. I am quite open with my friend about my problems with food, and even tell her that I am taking laxatives. Like me, she doesn’t fully appreciate the long-lasting damage that laxative abuse does to the body; she’s more worried about me not eating. ‘If you were as big as me you’d have to worry,’ she says, ‘but there’s nothing of you: you don’t have to diet.’ She begs and pleads with me to eat, and sometimes she gets angry.

‘Carry on,’ says Claire crossly, as she drives me home one night in her Renault. ‘Just carry on not eating. It’s doing me good – I’m losing weight worrying about you!’ And she is, poor girl. She’s carrying all the worry and stress of seeing me not eat day after day after day. I hide it from everyone else, but let my friend glimpse what’s really going on. I’m filled with guilt at what I am doing to her, and scribble her a note. ‘I’m so sorry for causing you all this pain,’ I write, ‘I promise I’ll try to eat. I’m so scared of losing you. You’re the only one who understands me, and I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t my friend.’ I post it through the slats of her locker at work, the first of many insecure little notes.

Claire tells her father about me, and big gruff Matt McCann then spends hours talking to me too. He tries to coax me into eating and suggests several times that I come to live with their family. But I am trapped in a bubble of disbelief, and no one can make themselves heard above the roar in my head which says, ‘You’re bad, you’re fat: you don’t deserve to eat.’

By early 1989 I am taking 30 Senokot a day. It always has to be 30 – not 29 or 31: it’s a ritual. My body has hardened to the huge doses and it now takes 12 hours for my bowels to work, so I tend to take the tablets at night. I know that if I take laxatives at 6 p.m. they’ll work at 6 a.m. the following day, and my trots to the toilet will be complete before I have to go to work. I think I’ve got it down to a fine art.

A girl called Rosaleen, who works at British Home Stores, is getting married in Scotland. Claire and I are invited to the wedding and decide to go up the week before, stay with Rosaleen’s family in Hamilton and have a bit of a holiday.

The coach to Hamilton leaves at midnight and will arrive just after six the following morning. Claire and I spend the evening getting drunk in a pub with a gang from work. At ten o’clock I swallow my laxatives in the Ladies, thinking that by the time they work I’ll be safely installed at Rosaleen’s. We carry on drinking until it is time to catch the coach. Then Claire and I stagger aboard, whacking other passengers on the head with our holdalls as we stumble to our seats.

A couple of hours later, horribly familiar feelings of fatigue begin to overwhelm me and my vision begins to blur. ‘Oh, my God!’ I think to myself, ‘the laxatives are working too early!’ Mixing laxatives with alcohol has been a bad move. ‘Here, use my bum as a cushion,’ says Claire, curling up in her seat. She has no idea I’ve taken laxatives – just thinks the drink has made me tired.

Sleep is impossible. I close my eyes, but rows of dots keep realigning for my inspection and sharp little stabbing pains start in my chest. My grumbling stomach begins its agonizing grind to a crescendo – ‘Oh my God, here it comes!’ I think. An almighty spasm shoots through me and I have just seconds to scramble over Claire and rush to the loo. The pain is excruciating – my insides seem to be cascading into the toilet along with their contents. I cling to the toilet seat and boil with a terrible fever. A high-pitched buzzing fills my ears and everything goes black. When the pain subsides and my vision clears I clean myself up as best I can, and head back to my seat, barely able to walk. ‘Thank God that’s over,’ I say to myself. Only, with laxative abuse, it’s never over and, as the coach rumbles through the night, I am forced to scuttle backwards and forwards to the disgusting toilet.

Scotland is a nightmare. It is freezing and I am forced to eat more than usual to keep out the cold and stop people commenting. I shovel down tablets at all times of day and night to make up for it. We hire a car and do a lot of sightseeing, and I am forever having to rush to the toilet. After we get back from a visit to Edinburgh Castle, I am chattering away to Rosaleen’s dad when suddenly I freeze, and burst into tears. I’ve had a terrible accident! ‘Are you okay?’ says Rosaleen’s father. ‘Can I have a bath please?’ I sob. ‘It’ll take a while for the water to heat up,’ he says, looking bewildered. ‘I’ll have a cold one,’ I say. ‘Yes,’ I hear him say, as I race up the stairs, ‘Go ahead.’

Most nights we go out drinking – Claire, Rosaleen and I – and because I am so starved it only takes a couple of drinks before I’m away with the fairies. One night, after we’ve come in late, I go into the kitchen to get a glass of water. A tiny crumb lies on the counter, next to a sponge cake that Rosaleen was given on her hen-night five days before. The cake is stale now, and nobody has thought to throw it out. ‘I want this,’ I think, eyeing the weeny crumb with its titchy bit of icing. Guiltily, I pick it up and stick it on the tip of my tongue. ‘I need this,’ I say to myself, quickly picking a little corner off the cake and popping it into my mouth. I grab a bigger piece and shove it in; then another, and another. My iron rule over my starving body snaps and I turn into an eating machine. My mind hums with nothingness, as I sit on the floor with the cake and shovel it into my emptiness.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ says Claire, gazing in horror at the sight of me on the floor, ramming down the stale cake. She forces my mouth open and flicks out the cake, whacking the rest from my hands. ‘Get up!’ she orders. ‘I want it,’ I whimper helplessly, as she scoops up the cake and heads out of the back door with it to the dustbin. I stay on the floor and sob as if my heart will break. ‘It’s okay,’ says Claire, coming back in and rushing to hold me. ‘It’s okay.’ ‘Please don’t leave me,’ I sniff into her shoulder. ‘I won’t leave you,’ she says gently, rocking me in her arms, ‘But you’re going to die if you don’t sort this out. Promise me you’ll eat properly tomorrow.’ ‘I promise,’ I say through my tears.

Next day I have toast for breakfast – oh, and 30 laxatives – but I can’t manage any dinner.

‘I’m hungry,’ I tell the others, when we get back to the house after a night out with Rosaleen’s sister. Again I am horribly drunk. In front of everyone I walk through to the kitchen and fling open all the cupboards in search of crisps, bread, biscuits, anything. I find a packet of digestives and start stuffing them down one after the other. ‘Don’t!’ shouts Claire, but I am in a feeding frenzy and no one is getting in my way. ‘Stop it!’ she says, making a grab for the packet. My mouth bulging like a baby’s, I throw her a look of pure hate. ‘Leave me alone!’ I shriek, spluttering crumbs. ‘What the hell’s happening to you?’ says Rosaleen as she walks in, visibly shocked. ‘I want those biscuits!’ I yell as Claire snatches the packet. ‘You’re really ill,’ Rosaleen whispers incredulously. ‘I’m not ill!’ I scream. ‘Don’t you want me to eat? Am I too fat?’ ‘We’ve got to go to bed now,’ says Claire, trying to calm me down, but I’m not going anywhere without those biscuits. ‘I’ll bring them up in a minute,’ says Rosaleen, snapping into action, ‘Go upstairs.’ So I go and Claire helps me into my nightshirt and puts me to bed. Rosaleen brings the biscuits up, sits on the bed and lets me have three. I want more, but she won’t let me have any more and I bawl my eyes out.

Later, when Claire has gone to sleep, I lock myself in the bathroom and shove my fingers down my throat.

‘Did you eat while you were in Scotland?’ asks Mum, as she drives us home from the coach station. ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Did she, Claire?’ she quizzes my friend, who is sitting in the back of the car. In return for her silence I’ve promised Claire that I will eat when I get back home. ‘Yeah,’ she says in a flat voice, and changes the subject.