My Madder Fatter Diary
Read My Madder Fatter Diary Online
Authors: Rae Earl
Rae Earl was born in Lincolnshire in 1971. She went to Hull University where she won the Philip Larkin prize and following a brief stint at Parcelforce moved into broadcasting. She now writes full time from her shed in Hobart, Tasmania.
Also By Rae Earl
My Mad Fat Diary
OMG! Is this my actual life?
OMG! I’m in love with a geek!
My Madder Fatter Diary
Rae Earl
First published in Great Britain in 2014
Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Rae Earl 2014
The right of Rae Earl to be identified as the Author of the
Work has been asserted by her in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be
otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that
in which it is published and without a similar condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance
to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 444 75429 2
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
For
Emma ‘Mort’ Drury – for ALWAYS being right (bar that train) and for Feint and Margin
And
Sharon Rooney – for your utter brilliance and total talent
Contents
Introduction
This is My Madder Fatter Diary.
It’s 1990 and I’m a morbidly obese teenager living in Stamford, Lincolnshire. I live with my mum who, in her late forties, has just divorced her homosexual second husband and is having a sexual renaissance with a Moroccan bodybuilder 20 years her junior. I know. It’s a bit Jeremy Kyle but you’re going to have to go with it.
I have two older brothers – who are lovely but have their own lives – and a dad who is quite sweet but who I don’t see much.
I go to an expensive private single-sex school in a felt navy hat because I passed a scholarship exam at age 11. This fact, combined with my size, doesn’t make me particularly popular on the fairly crappy council estate where our house is. All the streets are named after members of the royal family – Edinburgh Road where I live is not palatial and I get teased a lot in Mountbatten Avenue. It’s Anne Road though that’s the real killer. ‘The Anne’ and Green Lane are a hotbed of ‘Jabba’ baiting – where teams of total twats call me every fat name under the sun. I could list them here but it would take up half a page and they were not particularly creative. That said, the day 5 teenage boys started singing ‘Hey Fattie Bum Bum’ at me at least showed a good knowledge of 1970s lovers rock reggae.
In the absence of getting the REAL thing, food is sex. Most days I down custard creams almost intravenously. Kit Kat multipacks are hoovered away in an instant. I have a full meal at school and then come home to more. I graze like a cow but eat like someone half-starved when big plates of anything are presented to me. Food is a pleasure, food is an anaesthetic, food is dependable. It would be a perfect partner if it didn’t push up my waist size to something that relegated me to middle-aged women’s clothes shops and the romantic dugout.
This doesn’t sound very joyful does it? Thankfully the best humour often grows in the darkest places. Plus my life then is littered with lovely people, good music and great things.
I have a social life to die for. I have a record collection that’s been in alphabetical order since I can remember. I’m madly in love with a sculpted piece of testosterone wonder called Haddock. That’s his codename because my mum refuses to enter the 20th century and get a home phone so I have to use phone boxes to ring people and I’m concerned this most secret and beautiful of true loves will be exposed to the world. I’m not ready to do that yet – despite the fact that on New Year’s Eve 1989 he seemed to be saying some odd and frankly very encouraging things that may mean that he secretly loves me and wishes to ‘do’ me senseless. I have a fantastic best friend called Mort, school is a safe haven and largely a total laugh and music saves me everyday. It says what I can’t say and heals things I can’t even express. I live for it.
What else?
Oh I’m crackers.
I’m stark raving loony mad. I know it. My mum knows it. A few other people suspect it and the professionals have diagnosed it. I was in a psychiatric ward at 16 but I’d been crazy long before that. Who knows where being ‘nuts’ starts? I was always scared of something. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t think I controlled everything with the power of my thoughts. Thinking you are in charge of world peace is quite a big burden. Thinking that you can stop your mum dying in a horrible train accident by touching things many times or counting or praying takes up a lot of time. It also demands a lot of energy and a need for distraction. For most of the time there were no tablets to calm me down so I took HobNobs. It made sense. My Prozac was oaty and sublime when dunked in half a mug of Tetley. Whatever the worry, a packet of something fatty sugar-coated the mental pain.
The thing is, anxiety is a total bastard. It shape-shifts. It finds a face and things to latch on to then it multiplies the threat. Needles, floods, poisonous plants, rabies, terrorists, nuclear war, Sinitta ruining the charts – from the deadly serious to the really stupid, I’ve thought my brain could control it all. Then it just all got too much and I totally lost it. I found myself in an adult psychiatric ward with a schizophrenic biker and a woman who kept yelling about her skirt. We did group exercises with beanbags. The walls were brown. It was noisy at night. People who are ill and distressed don’t do 9 to 5. They shout and scream at 2 in the morning. I had to get out. I told them I was better. I wasn’t but I wasn’t going to improve there and mad people still want the same things as sane people do – success, happiness, a man. None of those were going to come to me in ward 4 of the Edith Cavell Hospital, Peterborough.
So in 1990 my head was often on fire. I knew I didn’t want to go back to the ward. I knew I had to keep it together as best I could. I had to finish my A levels and get to university. My diary gave me a place to explode. It was a place where all my mental debris could splatter all over the pages privately. That said, I couldn’t always fully let go. That would have been too scary, a loss of control. So you’ll get phrases like ‘trying to appease’, ’trying to keep it together’, ‘maintain spiritual stability’ – what I’m really saying is that I don’t want to talk to anyone because I’m frightened I’ll end up in a psychiatric ward again. But as I get older you’ll see I get more honest . . .
I’ve had to edit this diary a lot. There are pages and entries where I just write ‘God Help Me – PLEASE’. You don’t want to read that but that IS one of the problems with mental illness. On top of the pain there’s the tedium of it. The repetition. That horrible realisation that today is going to be ANOTHER day when you eat a loaf of bread to forget, when you burn yourself with matches to punish your thoughts and find the only relief is in a mangled cassette of Motown chartbusters, a water fight at school and Haddock’s arse in a tight pair of jeans.
I’ve had to rewrite a few things too. They made no sense at all. At times I was very poorly and one of the really evil things that does is strip you of the ability to express yourself with any coherence. No-one gets it. Not even you. Word for word just would not have worked. I’ve messed around with timings and changed people’s names but this is how it happened. This was me in 1990 & 1991.
In 1990 the world is crawling out of communism and repression and new countries are being born, but bloody Jive Bunny are still shitting out compilation singles and I’m still hoping to crawl out of the fat body I’m stuck in and the mad brain I’m chained to. I’m sharing my diary for the reasons I shared the last one – because it makes me laugh and because I want to tell people you can be out of your tree crazy in your teens and things can work out OK. However, there are now new reasons too. Since having my first teenage diary published I know there are young people who still feel mad. There are young people who cut themselves and look in the mirror and despair. I want you to see the terrible things I thought about myself and how I longed to be a ‘real woman’ like so many of my friends. Then I want you to know that those women I thought had it all sorted wrote to me and told me they had felt EXACTLY the same way as me! Adolescence sucks. Being a teenager is utter shit FOR EVERYONE but life gets better.
Anyway. 1990. The Berlin Wall is down, The Happy Mondays are off their magnificent trolleys, A levels are approaching and Haddock’s backside is a national treasure.
I’ll handle your questions at the end because you’ll have some . . .
Monday 1.1.90
10.12 a.m.
NEW DECADE! NEW YEAR! NEW RAE! It even starts on a Monday. It’s like the year already knows what it is doing. Perhaps just the 80s were TOTAL shit.
I CANNOT get over Haddock last night. Seriously though, it did sound like he would proper like me as a girl if I ‘just toned up a bit’. That won’t take that long. A bit of tone. That’s just a bit of walking isn’t it? FUCK! If I think about being that man’s girlfriend I could orgasmsexplode. That’s not even a word. I don’t care. It sums it all up.
11.22 a.m.
Just tied a scarf round my head and pulled all my chins off my face. I look a bit Chinese in a good way but there IS something there. There is something not totally rotten and ugly and bollocks.
1.12 p.m.
Just thought, I don’t know where everyone disappeared off to last night. I walked from Vine Street to Fraggle’s house at 4 a.m. I saw that everyone had gone to bed and came back to Vine Street to sleep. I love Dobber’s mum but I wish she had bought a thicker carpet. My cheek looked like a potato waffle this morning. Battered Sausage took the piss then started talking about women and how they were a pain in the arse and how they couldn’t decide what they wanted. I said ‘Your ex could decide last night – she didn’t want you.’ It was a bit harsh but he can take it.
Oh I can’t stop thinking about Haddock. In my head I’ve already had sex with him about 15 times this morning. Can men do it 15 times or do they just run out of stiffy? I WOULD LIKE TO TRY.
Dobber says she’s heard maximum 7 times in one night and by time 5 they are getting tired.
