Thin (22 page)

[She moves around the stage, gesturing and speaking in exaggerated voices.]

‘This is the best thing that has ever happened to me.’

‘This is all I have ever wanted to do, to be.’

‘This will make things all right’

‘This will change things. It will. A new me.’

I have decided it will be better if I am thinner, because it gives me that edge of confidence. A little push. I have to wear tight black leggings and leg warmers
[she looks down at her outfit]
and a leotard on the stage in front of a big audience. So I don’t eat my lunch, I just have muesli for breakfast and then bananas and Lucozade in the evenings. This makes things a bit tiring, but it means that I can try and concentrate on my acting, and not the size of my hips. I don’t have my periods any more (not for the last few months anyway) but it doesn’t bother me, things are a bit easier that way. It’s just because I have lost some weight (I think I must have) and they switch off at a certain level.

[Grace sits on the floor.]
When I make a mistake in the play, do you know how that feels to me? I have to go home and pull things apart, and then I don’t want to go outside any more, or see anyone’s face. They will have noticed my mistakes. I know they will. I won’t have any muesli the next day because I need to make up for the mistakes by looking the thinnest I can on the stage. It’s OK because it is only for a time, and I’m not starving myself (no way!). I don’t want to lose too much weight because things go off course when that happens, and I could get into real trouble, although a couple of pounds wouldn’t be a bad idea.

[She stands up and walks to the side of the stage where a group of people are chatting.]
The other members of the cast get together. They are friends and they get drunk and laugh and swap numbers. I prefer to stay in my own space. I sit in my room and in my costume and in my act. I don’t let them in or reveal myself because they might start to figure me out and ask too many questions. One of the girls asked me to audition for her play at the Edinburgh Festival. I performed well in my American accent at the audition. She called me up and said:

GIRL 1
:
[holding a phone]
Grace, would you like the part?

GRACE
(
OUTSIDE VOICE
): Yes, definitely, certainly, absolutely, I would love it.
[Grace puts down the phone and then picks it back up.]
No, no, I can’t. I’m sorry. It’s just not possible. Sorry to let you down. I don’t have much money to spend a summer doing acting and er, I need to do some more studying and er, I well … I can’t do it. Thanks for asking, though. Sorry to let you down like this, I’m just … not ready for that. Thanks, anyway. Please still be my friend.
[Puts phone back down.]

[Curtain closes.]

Grace sits with her friend on the steps to the entrance of Cambridge University library. Grace is smoking her Marlboro Light. The two girls stand up and turn around to the library door, helping each other to their feet, then they collapse back on the concrete steps laughing hysterically in tandem. There are piles of books in plastic bags by their feet. They sit so tightly together that from a distance it is hard to tell them apart. It is only when somebody else enters the frame that their bodies appear to dissolve and Grace is shown to be hiding behind her friend, under the shape of her shadow, in the strong sunshine.

A boy approaches, and Grace’s friend stands up and kisses him hello. Grace sits back, leans on her hands and bites the skin around her inner lip. Her friend continues to talk to the boy, Grace looks up and smiles. The boy nods his head towards Grace and then turns back to her friend. Grace sits silently and checks her watch. The minutes are tick-tocking by and she hasn’t done any work today.

It is hard having a best friend, because it means that you can’t do everything at the exact times you want to, Grace thinks to herself. Grace goes everywhere with her best friend. It is like living a whole different life, away from the one she grew up in. It feels easier that way, to do the things that someone else does. It is good to be able to grasp on to the centre of someone else, to move her forward. But if her friend wasn’t there she would have been in the library hours ago, instead of driving around Cambridge, getting a Starbucks coffee and watching her friend eat breakfast.

Grace eats breakfast in the house before she goes out every morning so that she won’t be tempted by the food in the library café, which is not what she should be eating, and which wastes valuable revision time. But her friend doesn’t feel that way, she isn’t as controlled as Grace; it appears that not many people are. Grace knows that people sometimes find her behaviour annoying, with her difficult eating habits and her topsy-turvy behaviour. But her best friend doesn’t mind too much, she even finds it intriguing; the way Grace is different from everyone else.

Grace’s friend looks at her out of the corner of her eye.

‘That’s a brave thing to do for Cambridge.’ The boy on the steps looks towards Grace.

‘Sorry?’ Grace hasn’t really been listening.

‘Your dissertation. What is the exact title?’

Grace feels embarrassed. ‘Well, it’s something like,
Flirting with Food: Fasting and Feeding in the Brontës’ Novels
. Do you know much about the Brontës?’

He does, of course.

Grace continues, ‘Have you read Charlotte Brontë’s
Shirley
? It begins with a quote from there: “Men of England! look at your poor girls, many of them fading around you, dropping off in consumption or decline.”
²⁶
So, yes, that’s it, really. I didn’t think about it being brave.’

‘Oh my God. For Cambridge, yeh. You’re talking about eating disorders, right? That’s so not a traditional topic, is it?’ He flicks his hair.

Grace shrugs her shoulders and looks away from him. She wonders from his comment about her apparent ‘bravery’ if he thinks that she is bound to be a failure, or if he thinks that she is stupid (most likely, as he is a very clever postgraduate English Literature genius) or, worst of all, if he has guessed her secret. This bothers her for some time. Grace covers her eyes from the sun, from his smile and from his
tilted, peering head and hopes he will forget all about her and her fixation with all things to do with eating disorders. Grace wonders if she should never think about anorexia again, but it keeps lurking. She keeps reading about it or encountering it in various places even when she isn’t looking. She didn’t realize it was something that was present all those years ago, even if it didn’t have a name then. In fact, she hadn’t really thought about it in that kind of a universal way, only really in relation to herself, and now she has folded it away behind her, she tried not to do that either.

Grace wonders what it would be like if she hadn’t become anorexic, if things would have been different. Maybe she wouldn’t have had such a different-from-her kind of friend. Perhaps she would have been more confident, sociable or popular? But she struggles to remember what she was like before the anorexia took over, what she looked like, or sounded like, or how she laughed (did she really?).

Grace’s mum says to her, ‘Why don’t you bring your friend home to meet us? If she’s your best friend then we should definitely meet her.’

But Grace remembers that she can’t bring her friend home because she doesn’t want the two worlds to meet. Things are secret in one world, and not in the other.

The only downside to having one single-focused best friend is that now the people in college, who she tries to keep at a distance, think that she is being rude:

‘She doesn’t like us.’

‘She thinks she’s above us.’

‘She doesn’t make any effort.’

Grace prefers them to think that, because it is too hard to have to make an effort, to reveal herself to them completely or to join in with their unbalancing student life. Sometimes she has to go along to dinners and say things like, ‘I think I am allergic to that’ or, ‘I’m not feeling very
well. I think I have a bad stomach’ or, ‘I don’t have very much money so I won’t have the full meal like you.’

She sits at the table and drinks her glass of tap water, and smokes her cigarettes, and plays with her napkin and pretends she is having a good time. She would really rather be alone, sitting at her desk in her bedroom, or reading a book, or thinking about things. It is good to have a lot of time alone, to figure things out, Grace thinks, because nothing the other students say seems to make much sense. Cutting off is just easier. Grace is busy thinking about topics such as how many teaspoons of mayonnaise go into an ordinary shop-bought sandwich, which is not a topic for discussion. And when she has finished with that line of thought, she has to discard the facts she has just learned because she knows that it is ‘very wrong’ and ‘bad’ to think like that (like the old Grace, who only cared about fat and calorie contents).

Usually the other students laugh or shout and it makes her feel uncomfortable that she isn’t joining in, so she has to concede. They interrupt her plans – she has to eat everything, she has to drink cocktails and wine and eat pizza and puddings. Then it feels like she is scrambling for days trying to get her grip back on things. The whitecoats would be happy with the disruption, Grace thinks. They would be so pleased that things are being taken out of her control. It is not that she doesn’t ever want to have fun, but she is just trying to keep things balanced, don’t they get it? Can’t they try and understand? She doesn’t want to have to stand up at the head of the table and say, ‘Tonight I won’t be having any chocolate cake or any pitchers of creamy cocktail because I have old problems with food and I would rather not eat and drink too much. In case it makes me veer to extremes.’

Because then they would never look at her the same way again. So instead, they talk about work and people she doesn’t
know and what they are going to do with their future. Grace has no idea about her own. Some of the people round the table have got interviews and jobs lined up. They are all thinking about the end of university, but Grace is only really starting to get into it. She doesn’t really have any job ambitions. Everything got drained away with the anorexia and it hasn’t come back.

Grace goes to see a career advisor.

‘So, what is it you are interested in? What would you like to do?’

Grace smiles, ‘I don’t know. I don’t really have any ideas about jobs, not office jobs where you sit all day in front of a computer and file things. I don’t know.’

Grace thinks about her perfect head-dream. In her head-dream she lives in a clean flat, which has white walls and bare floorboards. It is peaceful and no one gets in the way. She has a personal trainer who comes to train her every day, and a special chef who never lets her eat more than she should, and keeps her completely in shape. This, she is sure, is the answer to her problems. As long as she has a flat stomach and thin thighs then she can forgo everything else. It’s as simple as that.

‘So …’ the career advisor looks puzzled.

‘I don’t know, maybe I’ll be a writer.’

The career advisor is confused. There are no boxes to check and companies to apply to for that one.

‘What about management consultancy or maybe banking? I can give you a handbook so you can do some research.’

Grace snarls. ‘No, sorry, I don’t think so. I don’t think that is me at all. I don’t think those things fit with me.’

And she realizes that she doesn’t even know what those jobs actually are, or who the ‘me’ is that she is referring to.

Grace sits on the sofa in her university house. She has finished her final exams and despite a couple of crying fits about papers she thinks she has spoiled, she is feeling OK.

‘So … how did they go?’ a friend asks.

‘OK. I don’t know. I messed something up. I did OK,’ Grace replies.

‘You’ll be fine. You always do well.’

Grace wants to scream.

Grace picks up the payphone in the station and dials the number. She is taking a break from the coffee bar where she is serving out hot chocolate with cream, and skinny, semi-skimmed or regular caffè lattes to London commuters. She likes it when they order a croissant or cake: ‘Would you like something to eat with that?’ she asks them. It is amazing how it works, how they suddenly say yes and break their planned control.

She rings her tutor to find out her results. This is everything that she has been waiting for. ‘Hello. It’s Grace. I am ringing for my results.’ She puts the heavy black receiver in both of her shaking hands to try and steady it.

‘Well done. You should be really proud. You did fantastically.’

Grace goes home from the coffee-shop job and eats her dinner from the Co-op on her own – pasta and green pesto. Then she walks to the kitchen and places her plate in the sink. She sighs. She thinks of washing it up, but she decides not to. She walks to the fridge and opens the door. She takes out a chocolate bar that she has bought herself for passing her exams and for finishing with university. She bought it on her own, in the shop. Not to impress anyone or to demonstrate she is eating to a worried onlooker, but because she wanted a chocolate bar.

I just feel like eating one, OK?

Grace takes the regular-sized chocolate bar back into the living room with her cup of tea. She decides that she will eat two squares. Two squares become the whole bar. Grace smiles. She hasn’t eaten a whole, proper chocolate bar for years. The whole bar at once!

I got here on my own, she thinks, I worked hard. Things don’t come easy – I do have to work hard. But I did better than they know. More than they will ever know.

A year on from my diagnosis, at the very start of university, I was, from a physical perspective, back into the body that I had left behind. My body was a bit smaller, a bit more fragile, more scarred from the stretch and shrink of my skin, but essentially, to the untrained eye, I was back to normal. I had made a declaration to the world that I was better and that I was no longer in need of any help. In body terms I had made a truly ‘remarkable recovery’, one that people were mostly happy to believe. I had managed to get things back in order. I got a place at Cambridge University to read English. I was seven and a half stone, maybe eight, maybe even a bit more in my second and third years and I was determined not to slip and let anybody know.