Fragile

by Nikki Grahame

  ‘Well, let’s just keep an eye on her and see what happens,’ said the doctor, his decision clearly made.

  We drove home in silence, Mum feeling defeated again and me victorious once more. No way was anyone going to be ‘keeping an eye’ on me!

  And when I wasn’t doing the screaming and shouting it was Mum or Dad’s turn. After their initial decision to split they had decided to give their marriage another go. Then the rows just became even more vicious and after a torturous couple of months they returned to the idea of divorce. But because they couldn’t agree on what to do about selling the house and splitting the money, we all carried on living under the same roof.

  In my eyes Dad was still acting like a monster. He’d gone from someone I would chase down the road every time he left the house to someone so bitter and angry that I didn’t want to be around him. I transferred all the intensity of my feelings for Dad straight over to Mum. And now I’d lost Grandad and Dad, I clung to her, both emotionally and physically. I reverted to acting like a toddler. If we were watching television I’d insist on sitting on her lap and if she went out I’d stand by the window waiting for her to return. If it was evening time I’d lie on her bed until she got home.

  Mum became the focus of everything for me – both my intense love on the good days and my anger and frustration on the bad.

  By worshipping Dad rather than Mum I’d probably backed the wrong horse, but I wasn’t going to lose out now. No, that would have to be Nat. That caused big rows between me and her then – and it still does even today.

  But even though Natalie and I both desperately needed Mum, she didn’t really have much left to give us. She was weak, crying all the time, and I was just so needy that she felt exhausted, which in turn made me feel abandoned.

  My world was falling apart.

  When Mum couldn’t stand sharing her bed with Dad any more she decided that she, Natalie and I would all move up into the attic and live there. From now on I slept on a double bed with Mum as I couldn’t bear to be physically apart from her. Natalie slept on an old brown sofa. All our toys were still scattered around the room, so it seemed like a bit of adventure having Mum up there with us, but it was kind of weird too.

  By now I was struggling at school. The less I ate, the harder I found it to concentrate. And so much of my energy was being spent thinking about how I was going to dodge the next meal, how much I’d eaten so far that day and what Mum might be thinking about making for dinner that night, that I just couldn’t focus on lessons at all.

  Then at break times I started going to the girls’ toilets and doing sit-ups. I would do dozens in a session before the bell, then dash back to my desk all hot and sweaty. One of the girls in my class must have told on me because one day a teacher came in and found me and said I wasn’t allowed to do it any more.

  That must have been when school started getting really worried about me and called Mum in for a meeting. They said they were concerned about my rapidly falling weight and that I didn’t seem able to concentrate in class any more.

  Mum hauled me back to the doctor again. It was a different locum, so we went through the same charade of my pretending to be eating a healthy if meagre diet and the doctor believing me. Again we were sent home, Mum even more dejected and me even more triumphant.

  Dad was seldom around at mealtimes despite still living in the house, so he rarely saw the battles. When Mum tried to talk to him about me, it just ended up in another row as they tried to blame each other for my getting into such a state. Although what kind of state it was exactly, they still weren’t sure themselves.

  One night Dad was in the pub when my friend Sian’s mum walked up to him.

  ‘Are you Nikki’s dad?’ she asked. Dad nodded and this woman he’d never met before grabbed his arm with a terrible sense of urgency.

  ‘My daughter is really worried about Nikki,’ she said. ‘She’s hiding in the toilets at school doing exercises and refusing to eat. Are you aware of what’s going on?’ she said.

  Dad looked blank and was forced to admit he didn’t really know the extent of what was happening at all.

  ‘Well, you need to be worried,’ my friend’s mum told him. ‘If you don’t do something, your daughter is going to die.’

  CHAPTER 4

  NEVER GIVE IN

  So why was I doing it? I can imagine that a lot of people reading this will find it totally weird that someone should want to put themselves through the pain and misery of starving themselves. Not to mention all the upset and stress it causes for their family.

  As an eight-year-old I had no idea about the big ‘why’ behind it all – it was just something I had to do. A bit like other girls had to get every single badge at Brownies or had to get 100 per cent in a spelling test. But this was obviously more compulsive. And potentially fatal too.

  Some of the anorexia counsellors I’ve had have said that maybe my eating disorder started as a bid to make myself literally disappear in the warring situation at home, as if by physically getting smaller I would just fade from view. And another expert said he thought I simply went on a hunger strike that got out of control. He thought I was so angry and devastated at how my perfect life had been shattered that I was refusing to eat until someone picked up all the pieces and put them back together again.

  Counsellors have also quizzed me endlessly about my mum and whether she was to blame in some way but I really don’t think so. Mum has always been slim but not skinny and I never remember her dieting. But I do once recall her taking me and Nat to Folkestone for a weekend just when things were starting to go badly wrong with Dad. She was really stressed and hadn’t been eating properly. She stood in the hotel bedroom admiring her flat tummy in the mirror and said, ‘Ooh, I’ve really lost weight.’ But I honestly don’t think that alone could have caused it – there can’t be a woman in the country who hasn’t said something similar at some stage and not all their daughters have become anorexic.

  Another counsellor – trust me, I’ve seen dozens – thought that on some subconscious level I was trying to copy the way Grandad had just faded away from life. He reckoned it was a ‘mourning reaction’ and I was trying to identify with Grandad by losing weight myself. And while I guess there might be some truth in that, part of me still thinks I would have become anorexic whatever happened. It was in my nature from before I was born, and the events of that year only brought it on at that particular time.

  I also believe that anorexia just gave me something for myself that year as my life fell apart. I felt unhappy about everything that had happened, useless at gymnastics and inadequate at keeping my family together. But not eating was something I was good at. Not eating became my hobby, something that was all mine and that I could be in control of while my family and my perfect life fell apart around me.

  In fact how much I ate was about the only thing I could control in the deepening chaos. And maybe I began to realise that not eating actually brought me quite a lot of control. Very soon I was pulling all the strings in my family. Mum’s every waking moment became filled with begging me to eat, pacifying my moods, sorting out my medical support and worrying about me. And while I remained anorexic, all her attention remained focused on me.

  And as I’d always wanted to be the best at everything I did, long before I’d even heard the word ‘anorexic’ I’d set about becoming the very best anorexic ever.

  I didn’t tell Natalie what I was doing and she never asked. I didn’t tell my friends and certainly not Dad. And when Mum asked, begged or pleaded with me to tell her what the problem was, I simply denied there was a problem.

  Even though I’d started depriving myself of food to get skinnier for gymnastics, that soon went out of the window and before long losing weight became an end in itself. In fact my gymnastics was only getting worse as by losing weight I was also losing muscle. I couldn’t do the flips, I couldn’t jump, I couldn’t do rolls any more – and that made me feel even more useless.

  Then, just as
you might have imagined things couldn’t have got much worse at home, they did – with bells on! Dad found out that Mum had started seeing another man. Even though they were supposed to be separated despite living under the same roof, he went mad.

  It wasn’t even as though Mum was having some mad, passionate affair. She’d just struck up a friendship with a bloke called Tony who used to pop round to fix her old Morris Minor whenever it broken down – which was pretty often!

  Natalie and I had always quite liked Tony. We’d usually be playing out in the street on our bikes while he messed around under the bonnet. He’d talk to us and ask about school and he seemed harmless and friendly. After he had finished on the car he would go inside to wash the grease off his hands and have a cuppa and a chat with Mum. And that is how it all started. Tony’s marriage had been a bit rocky and I think he and Mum were two lost souls clinging to each other for a bit of comfort.

  Natalie and I worked out what had been going on when the rows in our house reached volcanic proportions.

  But, despite Dad’s jealousy, there was no way Mum was ditching Tony and having Dad back. Because what I didn’t know then was that, all through what I’d thought of as my perfect early years, my dad had been having a string of affairs.

  Natalie was just nine months old when Mum and Dad had decided to have another baby and Mum fell pregnant almost immediately. But around the same time Dad started going out most nights with his mates, leaving Mum looking after a small baby alone and expecting another.

  It was only one day when she found a long blonde hair wrapped around one of his socks as she filled the washing machine that everything became clear. Dad admitted it all. It was a woman who worked in one of our local shops. What a cliché! But it was easy, I guess – and so was she.

  I love it when Mum tells the story about how she threw her best coat on, strapped Natalie in the buggy and marched up to the counter of the shop, pushing in front of all the other customers.

  ‘I hear you’ve been screwing my husband,’ she said calmly to the woman, suddenly finding herself the centre of attention in the shop as all the other customers listened in.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ Mum said determinedly.

  ‘Are you threatening me?’ the woman sneered.

  ‘You’re bloody right I am,’ said Mum, spinning the buggy round and storming out.

  I’ve always liked to think that moment was Mum’s victory over a woman with the stunted imagination, let alone morals, to shag a man with kids. But it was a hollow victory. That weekend Mum miscarried the baby. She’d lost an unborn child and her belief in what her marriage had been.

  Mum said everyone was entitled to make a mistake and agreed to take Dad back so long as he promised never to do it again. He said he couldn’t promise but he’d try. Some commitment, eh? Anyway she took him back.

  Mum says a string of ‘other women’ followed over the years, which is why when she finally called time on the marriage, she really couldn’t go back.

  It wasn’t until I was older that Mum told me about Dad’s affairs, but I picked up enough information from ear-wigging their rows at the time to have a pretty good idea what was going on.

  I’d always been such a Daddy’s girl, I’d adored him, and finding out that my dad wasn’t who I thought he was hit me hard. I felt betrayed.

  Tony started coming round quite a bit in the evenings. He would hold Mum when she cried about Dad, and Grandad, and me. If he’d known at that time what he was taking on by getting involved with Mum and all of us, he would probably have run for the hills! But he was kind and caring and he stuck around. He would come round a lot when Dad wasn’t there, which was another huge jolt for me and Natalie. It just confirmed for us that we were never going to get our old life back. The only thing that softened the blow was that we both liked Tony. We called him Hog because his hair stuck up like a hedgehog’s bristles. He didn’t even seem to mind too much when we took the mickey out of him.

  Mum, Natalie and I were still living in the attic because Dad was refusing to move out of the house. There was a court battle pending over who would keep the house and it was becoming really nasty. Dad instructed one of his American cousins, a hotshot lawyer from New York, to act on his behalf. And then a few times this really scary heavy bloke came round saying, ‘We’re going to make you an offer – you should take it.’

  But Mum had nowhere to go to, so we stayed in the house, living like normal downstairs during the day when Dad was at work, then scuttling up to the attic each evening. We’d sit up there watching television and hear Dad walking around downstairs singing manically. It was like something out of a horror film.

  One night it kicked off really badly between Mum and Dad. There was screaming and shouting downstairs, a smashed teapot and so much anger. I lay in bed, the pillow over my head to dull the noise as I cried and cried.

  After that night Mum applied for a restraining order against Dad. In the end, though, she let him back into the house and the court case over what they should do with our home rumbled on.

  In January 1991 Mum filed for divorce and my perfect life was well and truly over. That same month Dad finally lost his job and it was obvious that sooner or later we’d have to move out of my beloved Stanley Road.

  Things at school were going rapidly downhill too. I started spending most of my days sitting in the medical room with the school nurse, Mrs Bullock. My teachers didn’t mind because they could tell I was very weak. I looked awful and hadn’t been concentrating on my lessons for months. Mum had told them about the problems at home and maybe they thought I was just going through a difficult patch and I’d pull through soon.

  Mrs Bullock became a surrogate mother for me in the hours when I had to be away from my real mum. I loved her and wanted her total attention all the time. If another pupil dared to come to the medical room with a cut knee or something wrong with them and needed Mrs Bullock, I couldn’t bear it. I would pace up and down, feeling angry and anxious. This is my room, I’d say to myself. I need Mrs Bullock – she’s for me and me only.

  By the beginning of 1991 I had reduced what I would allow myself to eat more and more until it was virtually nothing. For breakfast it would be one small glass full of hot orange squash and four cubes of fruit salad. Then Mrs Bullock would give me tea and two digestive biscuits in the medical room, which would be my lunch. Obviously she knew that wasn’t enough, but I think she too was grateful to think I was getting something inside me.

  I negotiated with Mum – or should I say bullied her? – into letting me eat my evening meals out of a peanut bowl. If she ever tried to serve something up on a normal dinner plate I’d just freak, push the whole lot away and refuse to eat anything at all.

  But even a peanut bowl-sized portion was no guarantee I would eat. For a normal dinner I would allow myself ten strands of spaghetti or two small potatoes with some vegetables. And when I had eaten the amount I’d decided was acceptable, that was it, I’d stop eating and however much Mum begged, cajoled or shouted at me, nothing would change my mind.

  And all the time she was growing more and more terrified and frustrated as the weight fell off me.

  We went to the doctor four or five times but each time it was a locum and he was insistent it was ‘just a phase’ or ‘girls being girls’ and ‘something I would grow out of’. How wrong could he be?

  My doctor’s notes at the end of 1990 recorded my weight as 21.4 kilograms (3 stone 5 lb). By February 1991 it had dropped to 21 kilos (3 stone 4 lb). The locum described me as: ‘Very quiet, introvert and controlled. Reluctant to open up. Kneading her hands and tearing up the Kleenex given to her when she started to cry.’ But he still sent me home again.

  I was also suffering from Raynaud’s Disease, which affects blood flow to the extremities and means you are incredibly sensitive to the cold. But by then I had so little body fat protecting me that it was hardly surprising.

  One evening things hit a new low at home. Mum had cooked dinner, so again I trailed
up to the table, sat down, looked at my peanut bowl and point-blank refused to eat. Normally Mum would try to persuade me at first, but this time she just lost it.

  ‘I can’t stand this any more,’ she screamed. ‘Are you trying to kill yourself?’

  She dragged me to the floor and with one hand held me down by my hair while with the other hand she scooped up fistfuls of pasta and tried to force them into my mouth. I was screaming, clawing at her and trying to push her off me. Then I clamped my lips shut. Whatever she did, she wasn’t going to make me eat.

  Another time Natalie and I had gone shopping with my auntie and Mum for bridesmaids’ dresses because my cousin was getting married. We were in the restaurant in Debenhams and Mum ordered us fish and chips. But when it arrived I picked at a few peas, then pushed it away.

  Mum went mad. She held me down on the chair with one hand and tried to force the chips in my mouth with a fork. I was shouting and crying at her to stop but she was raging. My auntie was shouting, ‘Sue, stop it! Calm down, Sue. Leave her.’ But Mum couldn’t. She was terrified at what was happening to me and overwhelmed with frustration that she couldn’t do anything about it. Nothing she had tried was working, the doctors still weren’t taking her seriously and I was fading away in front of her eyes.

  As the weeks went by I became weaker and weaker and was feeling so out of it at school that one day the headmistress called Mum in for a meeting. She said the school couldn’t deal with the responsibility of having me there any longer while I was so ill and I’d have to take some time off.

  So that was it, no more school. But by then I was so tired and weak I was beyond caring. I became so weak and helpless that I’d get Mum to carry me around the house. I loved that. I could still have walked if I’d had to, but being carried made me feel like a baby again – it felt safe.

  The state I was in gave Mum and Dad a whole new subject to row about. Dad blamed Mum, saying I’d got worse since she’d filed for divorce. Mum blamed Dad for, well, everything that had happened really.