Something Only We Know (26 page)

I wanted to ask her why she’d sometimes stolen chocolate from me, but I didn’t want it to come out like an accusation. ‘I’ve read somewhere that however thin you get, you
look in the mirror and see a fat person staring back?’

‘For some, I think. Not with me. I understood that I was thin. I was just never thin
enough
. I knew I was making myself ugly, I knew what a state I’d got my body into, but
looking dog-rough actually becomes an excuse to despise yourself even more. The whole thing about anorexia is it’s carefully tuned, designed to fuel itself. And by then it had become about
much more than the way I looked, anyway. It was about denying myself and excluding myself. I decided I didn’t
deserve
nice food and treats. I wasn’t worthy.’

‘Why, though? Was it because of the bullies? Or was it seeing Saskia and Joe together? Did that make you feel second best?’

Hel seemed surprised. ‘Joe never went out with Saskia.’

‘Oh! Didn’t he?’

‘No.’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘Where have I got that from, then?’

‘I have no idea, Jen.’

I tried to think back to the snatches of Hel’s history I’d managed to glean from Mum. The trouble was, all I’d ever got were dark hints and disconnected warnings. ‘Saskia
was involved, though? She was around at the time you got ill?’

Helen’s expression became guarded. ‘I thought then she was the best friend I had. The only friend.’

‘So what happened?’

‘She moved away.’

‘I see. That was upsetting as well, then?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘OK.’

For a minute or so I wondered whether I’d blown the mood, whether the shutters would come down. But no, her body language relaxed again and she laid her head against the sofa, wriggling to
get more comfortable. Then she closed her eyes.

I said, ‘Why
did
you ask me to check up on Joe? I mean, if it was such a miserable time for you, I can’t see why you’d want the reminder. Wouldn’t you just try
to forget him, block him out?’

‘What I wanted to know was how life had treated him,’ she said, still with her eyelids shut. ‘I wanted to know if he’d got what he deserved.’

‘But fate doesn’t work like that. Otherwise Rosa would wake up covered in boils.’

‘I know. Events are mostly random, we’re all careering around like atoms in a cloud. I get that. Except, the trouble with the anorexia mind-set is, you turn everything in on
yourself. Therefore if I fail, it’s always my fault. Always. Whereas if you make a mistake at work, say, you might blame Rosa or a computer virus or put it down to plain bad luck. Well, you
might say it’s your own fault, but the point is it’s not an automatic impulse, the way it is with me. And last summer I couldn’t stop thinking about what happened with Joe and how
utterly shit it had been – yeah, even though it was so long ago. I don’t know what stirred it up again so vividly. Perhaps it was making myself think about the future. But I found
myself reasoning that if karma
had
caught up with him, then in a way that let me off the hook. It would mean I wasn’t as crap as I thought I was. The voice of the anorexia had been
wrong. The blame lay on him and he’d been punished. Do you see?’

‘Karma has caught up with him, Hel. Now Ellie knows he’s cheating.’

‘Yeah. A mess. What do you think she’ll do?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Do you think she’ll get a divorce?’

‘I don’t care. And nor should you.’

‘I don’t.’

She opened her eyes and lifted her head to look at me. ‘Let me ask you something, Jen. Since I’ve bared my soul so much tonight.’

‘God, yeah, go on. Anything you like.’

‘Have I been a terrible big sister to you?’

The question caught me completely off-guard. ‘Eh?’

‘Because I know over the years I spoilt a lot of things for you. Meals out and parties. There was that night at The Riverside. Do you remember that?’

Ah, yes, The Riverside restaurant, with its velvet chairs and stunning views of the Dee. The meal had limped to its conclusion and then Dad had wanted Hel to have a dessert, but she
wouldn’t. He’d gone ahead and ordered her one anyway, and put it down in front of her: a huge plate of chocolate fudge cake with vanilla ice cream melting against the sticky dark icing.
I suppose, looking back, the situation couldn’t have been any more intimidating. We’d all gone on and eaten our puddings while she sat with her eyes screwed tight shut. She refused to
even pick up her spoon. Then the waiter came with the bill and Dad said, ‘We’re not finished, are we? Are we?’ Mum was going, ‘Leave it, Don,’ but then Dad started
ranting about how much the cake had cost, and Helen said she’d told him she didn’t want it, and Mum said yes, she had, and Dad picked up the plate and slammed it down on the table top
so a load spilled onto the cloth. ‘Eat it!’ he’d shouted in her face, and everyone around went quiet and watched. And still she wouldn’t touch it. In the years since,
I’ve heard some people claim eating disorders are about attention-seeking, but believe me, the last thing my sister wanted then was attention. It was no wonder she still hated meals out with
the family. We’d left the restaurant with her and Mum crying. That had been my ninth birthday.

And I remembered another day, Mum taking us on a girls’ shopping trip to the Bullring, stocking up on new clothes and school equipment for when I started at St Thom’s. But when it
came to lunchtime Hel turned her nose up at every café in Birmingham, insisting she wouldn’t eat anywhere that didn’t serve baked potato with low-fat Philadelphia. That was what
she wanted. Mum had been so grateful Helen had named a food she
would
countenance that we’d then trailed round for an hour and a half, till my feet were blistered and I was nearly
faint from hunger. An early train home and a cold pasty from New Street Station was what we ended up with, while Hel sat nursing a diet Coke and glowering at passers-by. Not the fun excursion
I’d looked forward to.

‘Hmm. I won’t pretend you haven’t been a pain at times. But that’s siblings for you. God, there was a boy in my class tried to kill his brother by pushing a wardrobe on
top of him. I’d say, compared with that, we’ve rubbed along OK.’

‘Compared with wanting to kill each other?’

‘No, honestly.’ I nudged her knee with mine. ‘Honestly. You were plenty nice to me when I was growing up. What about the surprise fairy lights you clipped to my swing? And the
way you helped me build that papier-mâché volcano for geography? Those friendship bracelets you said were a present from the guinea pig? You didn’t need to do any of that
stuff.’

She nodded faintly, and for a while said nothing. I let the silence lengthen while we both blundered around in the mists of the past, trying to get our bearings. All the versions of Helen and
Mum and Dad and me that had sat here over the years, inside these beige and cream walls.

Then she said, ‘Do you want to know a secret? A huge, mad, stupid secret?’

‘What?’

‘They think it was deliberate.’

‘How do you mean? Who?’

‘Who do you think? In their heart of hearts, when you strip away the stuff fed to them by counsellors and advice leaflets, my parents believe I just didn’t eat in order to spite
them. They do, Jen, they truly do.’

‘No.’

‘Of course they do. They haven’t said it in front of me – they trot out the accepted line, “Ooh, it’s an illness” – but look at their reactions.
Underneath everything, Dad still thinks I was just being stubborn. You remember what he was like, the threats and yelling and the way he’d jab his finger at me. “Stop being selfish,
think of your mother.” Meanwhile, Mum’s convinced it was to do with rebelling and because I hated her, which means the eating disorder was really her fault and she can beat herself up
about it forever. And this is where we are now: for all the meetings with doctors and counsellors and CAMHS staff we ever had, at the root of it my parents still won’t accept anorexia’s
a mental illness.’

‘Don’t be daft. They do, Hel. They must do.’

‘Their heads accept it, but when you get down to it they think it was just me, hurting them on purpose.’

I wondered whether she could be right. Far off I could hear the siren of a police car or an ambulance as it passed a few streets away. The night was a dangerous place.

She went on, ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m not thrilled with the label either. But it is what it is. When you’re starving, the lack of food affects your brain. Your thought
processes and judgements become properly screwed with the nutrient deficiency on top of the mental condition. You just can’t think like someone healthy. That’s why, from the outside,
the illness makes no sense and why it drives everyone around you up the wall. Some people see you as basically rational but making bad decisions, whereas you’re not capable of making
decisions at all, the anorexia’s doing your thinking for you.
I
didn’t want to upset Mum and Dad. The part-of-me-that-was-still-me didn’t. I hated seeing Mum cry and Dad
shout. But the other part was stronger.’

‘I believe you. If you’d been yourself, you wouldn’t have deliberately hurt the people you loved. I know that.’

She shot me a look of intense gratitude.

‘Look, Hel, you need to explain this, get it cleared up. Sit them down and tell them what you’ve told me. Or ’fess up to Ned and get him to tell them. God, I’ll do it if
you want, although to be honest, I’d rather not.’

‘Nah, you’re fine. It wouldn’t do any good, whoever did the talking. You know what they’re like. If I so much as hint at anything to do with eating disorders, Mum all but
sticks her fingers in her ears. Dad walks out of the room. It’s the great taboo. They’re terrified.’

‘Of what, exactly?’

‘They’d actually rather believe my motivation for not-eating was wanting to punish them than that I was at the mercy of a mental health condition.’

It took a few moments for me to accommodate what she was saying. But then I could see it, and I knew she was right. How could they have allowed their home to be invaded by some strange entity, a
shadowy evil that, in front of their eyes, took over their daughter? They were supposed to be the guardians at the gate. Her protectors. They should have been able to chase the bad ghost away. It
must have been easier to decide their daughter just didn’t love them enough, however painful that alternative might feel, because that version of events kept Helen as Helen, and not some
awful changeling. If the anorexia ever returned, they needed to believe they could reclaim her.

She watched me thinking it through, then pulled her sweatshirt cuffs over her hands as if she was cold, although it was plenty warm enough in the room. ‘Really, Jen. It’s best to
leave it. Say nothing. Trust me.’

I found myself trying to recall the worst period. Hel had gone into hospital for a month and I hadn’t been allowed to visit. That had been horrible. Mum took in board games and jigsaws
while I made Get Well cards and copied cartoons I thought she’d like. I wasn’t sure exactly what happened during the time she was away, but around that point the anorexia seemed to
plateau, and then over the following year she began a slow recovery. Ned started having meals with us, and chatting to Helen afterwards while we were still at the table, making her laugh and
distracting her. Sometimes he’d draw her into an argument about a story in the news or about the environment. She always enjoyed that. I suppose she’d been starved of intellectual
stimulation after dropping out of school. Then it got so Mum would sort of tiptoe out of the dining room and motion me and Dad to exit too, so they could be left alone. And I remembered how one day
there were just the three of us watching TV in the lounge – me, Ned and Helen – and I’d looked across and they were holding hands. I can’t imagine that was their first date,
crashed out on the sofa watching
Richard and Judy
while little sis goggled from the sidelines. There must have been some private moment between them, weeks or months earlier. Bless Ned for
all he’d done. Without him our family might have fallen apart.

I said, ‘However ill you were, though, you must’ve hung on to some idea of yourself to be able to find your way back.’

She nodded vigorously. ‘Oh, yeah, you don’t totally lose your identity. You stay
you.
It’s just that a lot of the time, the anorexic voice is louder than your own.
Until the day it’s not and you can start to recover.’

‘Well – the main thing is, you’re in a very different place.’

‘I am. I truly am. When I was fourteen, fifteen, a lot of stuff happened together at once. Like planets in alignment or something. It felt overwhelming and beyond my control . . . So
I’m not saying I couldn’t ever get ill again, but that part of my life feels a long way away. I guess I’ll never be able to sit down and just eat without thinking. My brain got
rewired while I was ill, and that’s stuck. But it’s not so
urgent
now because I’m on top of more stuff generally. When you’re a teen you’re surrounded by
people pushing you around and making your decisions for you, and the fact you have no say in most of it can be incredibly stressful.’

‘And now you have a brilliant boyfriend and a job you enjoy.’

Her face lit up. ‘Oh, the job’s fantastic, Jen.’

‘And you love Ned.’

‘Yeah.’

‘And Saskia’s gone, for better or worse, and the bullies have gone. And you’re not hung up in any way over toss-pot Joe Pascoe any more, are you? Are you?’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘That’s definitely all in the past, isn’t it?’

‘It is.’

Above our heads the Christmas star revolved slowly. Hel’s eyes as they looked into mine were clear and serious, her brow smooth and sincere. The face of an angel, my sister has. How could
anyone not believe her?

CHAPTER 8

Are you good enough to TAKE THE MIKE
? Chester Messenger
’s looking for talented young performers 5–16 to enter an exciting new talent competition! TAKE
THE MIKE is our chance to showcase the region’s up-and-coming school-age singers, dancers, comedians, acrobats and any other type of entertainer you can think of. Tired of singing to yourself
in the bathroom mirror? Fed up of performing magic tricks to your pets? Feel ready for a personal challenge? Then TAKE THE MIKE could be just the kind of break you’re looking for!