Leaving Jetty Road (17 page)

chapter thirty-three

Song

L
ater, in the school hall, I shift uncomfortably in my chair. Up on stage, the speeches and endless prize-giving ceremonies drag on. (When I say endless, I mean
endless.
There’s even a prize for Christian Student Leader of the Year.) Every now and then, the monotony is broken by the headmistress requesting a prayer, and the whole hall rustles as we all kneel down and say the prayer before scrambling back up to our seats again.

On my left, in between prayers, Sofe doodles with a chewed-up pen in the margins of her hymnbook. Lise sits to my right, pale and serious in a uniform that seems to engulf her, swallow her whole. Every time she bends her head, the little vertebra at the top of her spine pops out like a sharp pebble. She looks ready
—so
ready—for the hospital. It’s not that she’s skeletal, exactly. But you can’t help seeing that she’s on the way.
Well
on the way.

I sigh and move restlessly again on my seat. On the piano at the front of the hall, Lucy Nguyen, the school’s Year 11 musical genius, starts playing the introduction to the school hymn. As we stand up obediently, I think suddenly of Josh. He would have laughed at Speech Day: at the hymns and the prayers; at all these little school rituals we go through. He’d have been right, too: they
are
stupid. But the thing is, he never
did
see this part—the school part—of my life.

Now, of course, it’s the whole
rest of my life
that he’ll never know.

It’s not the first time I’ve thought of Josh today: every day, he darts in and out of my thoughts like this, pricking me with memories, making me ache. Sometimes, when I’m with Sofe, she picks up on it. She digs me in the waist, says, “You’ve got the thinking-of-the-asshole look on your face again.”

That’s what I like about Sofe. She brings you back to earth.

Now I glance at Lise to distract myself. She’s standing rock-still, her small wrist frail under the weight of the hymnbook. Nothing about her
—nothing—
is relaxed. Her body strains forward, yearning toward the piano at the front of the hall, and her mouth is a thin, tense line, jaw muscles taut, clenching. It’s like she’s afraid to sing, afraid to open her mouth in case nothing comes out. Like she’s afraid she’s lost her
voice.

I feel a sudden hard lump in my throat. I know how she feels, I think. I feel like I’ve lost my voice, too, you know? Had it stolen away from me, just when I was at my strongest and happiest. It’s like I lost all my songs when Josh left, and now I can’t imagine ever finding any new ones.

But then the introduction to the hymn finishes, and it’s time for us to start singing. As always—unlike the rest of us, who are all way too cool to open our mouths during hymns—Lise sings. Now that she’s singing, the tension in her body has gone: she sings with a wide-open, honest mouth; she sings strong and true. Standing next to her, listening to her sing someone else’s words, I find myself wondering if I’ll ever get the chance to hear her real voice, the real Lise;
her
song,
her
words. Somehow, I always missed it before; somehow, I never heard it.

The hymn ends. As we sit down, Lise turns to me. She catches my glance, holds it. Then, slowly, tremulously, she smiles. It’s a sweet, wide smile in that achingly hungry face—a smile that’s full of promise.

Life is good.
That’s what that smile whispers.

epilogue

Nat

L
ise’s room in the Psych Ward is gray. The view through the venetian blinds over the window is gray: cloudy late-summer skies above, gray concrete car park below. Inside the room, the colors are no different—gray-painted walls, plastic gray visitors’ chairs, spotted gray linoleum floors that smell of nurses’ rubber soles and bleach. Practically the only oasis of color in the whole place is the quilt that Lise brought with her: it’s yellow, with seashells and starfish and sea horses.

“To remind me of the beach,” she told me the first day I visited. “And of the
good
times.”

It reminds me of the beach, too: of walking up and down Jetty Road under the sea-blue sky; of the smell of salt in the air, and the taste of ice cream, and the promise of good things to come.

It reminds me, too, of that conversation Lise and I had at the start of the year in the Italian coffee shop, after we’d applied for the job at the Wild Carrot.
I’d like to change everything about myself,
she told me.
I’d like to be someone else completely.

Seeing Lise here in the hospital, week after week, I’ve started to think: Is that what it’s all about, this anorexia nervosa? About hating yourself so much you despise the way you look, the way you feel? The way you
are
?

If so—if that’s how it really feels, I mean—I can imagine how you might want to escape yourself. I can imagine how you might try to just whittle yourself away. You might even just want to keep on whittling, until there was nothing of you left at all.

The other colorful thing in Lise’s room is the postcard pinned up on the wall above her bed. It’s a picture of somewhere on the Great Ocean Road: sparkling seas, steep cliffs, crumbling rocks. Lise waved it in front of me one day a couple of weeks into her stay in the hospital, and then showed me the message on the back:

I’ve thought about the message on that card a lot since then, about what it means. I was wrong about Sofe and Lise, you know: they
do
care about each other, underneath. I shouldn’t have been so scared of their arguments: of the things they might say to each other one day, of the things that could never get taken back. I should have known they’d work things out, in their own way. Not that they’ll ever be close or anything, but—they understand where they are with each other these days, and it’s okay. Maybe it always was.

I was wrong about something else, too—the Year 12 results. Not about Sofe, of course, who got into nursing as planned: she sent in her notice of deferment from somewhere on the Central Coast, hopped back into the VW and probably hasn’t thought about it since. Me, though—I got into uni. Can you believe that? The wonders of cramming, hey. Now all I have to do is figure out what I’m going to
study
there.

But it was Lise’s results that I was most wrong about: she failed. I mean, I know she only took half an exam in the end—but I guess I kind of assumed that her marks during the year would make up for that, or that she’d be given some kind of medical exemption.

“My marks during the year were crap,” she tells me one day in the hospital, when I finally get up the courage to ask her what happened. “I kept having panic attacks during tests and assignments and stuff.” She takes a deep breath and then adds, “And I don’t want to apply for an exemption.”

I stare at her incredulously. “Why not?”

She shrugs. “It was a bad year, Nat. I want to put it behind me.”

For a moment, neither of us says anything. I look at her now, as she stares out the window. She’s put on weight: she’s up to 105 pounds now, and only has 15 more to go to reach her “target weight.” She’s still pretty slender, though—and despite all the ready-made optimism and antidepressants the hospital has pumped into her, there’s this kind of fragile, wounded look in her eyes. Like she’s afraid to offer herself up to the world, in case she gets hurt again.

Not for the first time, I find myself wondering how she’ll cope when she leaves the hospital. I mean, I know she’ll still be having appointments with the dietitian, going to see her psychiatrist, coming up to the hospital a couple of times a week for a meal. But she’s the one who has to put the food in her mouth; she’s the one who’s got to give herself a chance. I don’t know whether she can do it, to be honest; it scares me even thinking about it.

“So what’re you going to do this year?” I ask cautiously. “Repeat Year 12?”

She shakes her head. “I’m having a year off.”

“Really?” I say, surprised. “To do—what?”

She hesitates. “Get a job?”

“What about your parents? What do
they
say?”

She doesn’t answer straightaway. I look at her carefully. Sometimes, coming in here to visit her, I’ve run into one or another member of her family. Terri always stops to chat with me, ask me how things are going: she seems sad about what’s happened with Lise but still cheerful in herself, if that makes any sense. (“She plays lots of card games with me,” Lise told me once. “And she brings in lots of soppy girly videos for us to watch.” She gave me a surprised grin then. “It’s been really
good,
actually.”)

Lise’s father, too, always maintains a cheery smile when he sees me: “Not much longer now, Nat. She’ll be out of here soon.” But Mrs. Mawson never looks anything but distressed. Sometimes she looks sad-distressed; sometimes she looks confused-distressed; sometimes she just looks plain
furious-
distressed. I can only imagine what family therapy sessions must be like with her. (Family therapy is one of the parts of Lise’s treatment.)

Now Lise says to me, “It doesn’t matter what my parents say about what I want to do this year.” A determined look has come across her face. “I’ve
got
to give myself some time, Nat. Studying can wait. I have to get my
life
together first.”

Her voice is firm, her eyes steady on mine. There’s not even a hint of the old staring-down-at-the-floor routine that used to be such a part of her. Maybe she
will
make it when she gets out of the hospital, I think, with sudden renewed respect. Maybe she’ll make it with flying colors.

In fact, with that look of steely determination, maybe she’s not so fragile after all. Maybe she’s the strongest of the lot of us—

The day before Lise is discharged from the hospital, I tell her about my swimmer/drifter theory. I’ve never mentioned it to anyone else before.

She understands immediately what I mean, as I knew she would. “Sofe’s a swimmer, right?”

I nod. “She’s always heading off where she wants to, you know? Even if she doesn’t know exactly where she’s heading
to.
”

We laugh.

“You’re a swimmer, too,” I add.

“Me?”

I nod again. “I’ve admired your iron will ever since I met you, you know? You’re always going
somewhere—
even if it’s the wrong way, sometimes.” I grin at her ruefully. “You’ll plow back to shore one of these days.”

Because I believe this now. I really do.

Lise, meanwhile, is making other connections. “Josh was a swimmer, too, wasn’t he?” she says softly.

I swallow. It’s true, of course; I’ve always known that. That’s probably why I fell for him so hard in the first place. Josh was so full of color and vitality and direction, it was easy to get lost in him, to feel like my life had started to reflect those qualities, too. Now that he’s gone, I’m back to where I was before I met him—drifting, drifting. Floating aimlessly on a calm, calm sea.

“Nat?”

I come back to earth. “Mmm?”

“It’s okay to talk about it if you want to, you know,” Lise says gently. “I mean, maybe you talk to Sofe, or to your mum, or whatever—I don’t know. But if not, I’m here, okay? I’m
here.
”

There’s a sudden lump in my throat. “You’re a good friend, you know that, Lise Mawson?” I say gruffly.

“So’re you,” she says, regarding me gravely.

Then suddenly—I don’t know who reaches out first—we’re hugging. Me and Lise, my un-huggy friend: arms around each other, holding on for dear life. It’s weird, but at that moment, for the first time, I know things are going to be all right.
Really
all right, I mean. Like Sofe said on that postcard, in her typical, Sofia-like way: friendship is what matters. As long as you’ve got friends, you’ll be okay.

My chin rests on Lise’s shoulder as I hold her, and my eyes fall on the window. There are a million things you can see when you look out a window, I suppose—clouds, cars, bad weather, traffic lights, parking meters. But what I see is the sky.

That’s the thing about drifting, I realize with a sudden, warm rush of gladness. Lying on your back, floating, that’s exactly what you see: the whole inviting, wide-open sky.

Afterword

Anorexia nervosa affects up to one percent of adolescent girls and is the third-commonest ongoing health problem in females of this age. Eating disorders are much more common in females than males, about nine times more common in adolescence and three times more common in prepubertal children. Anorexia nervosa may occur from eight years of age, while bulimia nervosa commonly starts in late adolescence. Recovery often takes many years, the health complications affect every system in the body, and there is a risk of death.

Leaving Jetty Road
uses the imaginative ploy of interweaving three friends’ different paths through adolescence to highlight some common features in those who develop eating disorders and the insidious way in which these evolve. While the character and circumstances of girls who develop eating disorders are individual, some features are common, and Lise, in contrast to her friends, displays many of these. She is intense, determined, shows self-control, and has high body dissatisfaction. She has trouble establishing age-appropriate relationships, has high anxiety, and is a perfectionist about her studies. Her family values body image, and her mother is very food conscious. Of course, not everyone who has these characteristics develops an eating disorder and not everyone with an eating disorder displays all of these characteristics. There is a strong genetic factor that puts some at risk, and eating disorders commonly run in families. Typically, Lise elects to become vegetarian, stops using butter, and develops rigid rules relating to food, such as fasting before exams and an aversion to wheat. When she does relax her rules, she exercises to compensate for the calories taken. She indulges in isolated exercise for weight control rather than team sports for pleasure. Initially she is rewarded with compliments for weight loss, but it is never enough; she strives for lower and lower weights. She is unable to see her weight loss as a disease, but rather sees it as an achievement. Parents can perpetuate these behaviors by buying diet foods, allowing extreme exercise, and buying clothes in small sizes.

So how do you determine when someone you know is not eating healthily and could be developing an eating disorder? Concern should be raised if eating or exercise behaviors become habitual, chronic, and intrude on that person’s life. Healthy eaters eat because they are hungry or for enjoyment, at reasonable intervals; are flexible, not anxious about occasional sweet or fatty foods; can eat comfortably in company; and don’t set their lives around food rules. Sadly, some young people who set out to prove their self-discipline by controlling their eating and exercise patterns get taken over by the eating disorder and become unable to stop the behaviors that tend to develop. Early treatment is associated with better outcomes, so recognizing the problem and seeking help early are important. However, often the person is likely to deny there is a problem, is not willing to relinquish the eating disorder, and will make false promises to avoid treatment. Getting the person to accept help is usually not easy, but it is the first step on a long road to recovery.