Fragile

by Nikki Grahame

  It was just awful. I immediately started to cry. Stanley Road had been about the only stable thing in my life over the past three years and now that was being taken away from me too. It felt like the unfairness of it all was never going to end.

  There were so many memories of that house and its amazing garden. There were the good memories: water fights with Natalie in the back garden and playing hide and seek in the attic. And, more recently, there were the bad memories: the screaming matches between Mum and Dad and the tears rolling down Mum’s face as she stood at the kitchen sink staring out past those dreadful orange curtains she loved so much.

  If I ever become ridiculously rich I’ll buy that house in Stanley Road again and move back there. Maybe one day I’ll get the life back that I lost.

  But that lunchtime, sitting in front of a tired-looking ham sandwich, I just couldn’t take in what Mum was saying. ‘But leave here, Mum? We can’t. No way. No way.’

  But whether I liked it or not, soon afterwards there was a For Sale board up in the front garden and Mum was packing up our clothes and toys into old banana boxes. Dad leaving and the house going up for sale hit me hard. Life seemed so unsettled again, so I went back to focusing on the one thing I could control – eating. I cut the amount I would allow myself more and more until I was on tiny portions.

  Mum tried to keep a close eye on me during mealtimes but I was hiding food again. Chips would go up my sleeve, pasta and meatballs inside my knickers. I was an expert at it by then and it only took Mum to lose concentration for a moment and food would disappear from my plate.

  I was also negotiating with her again about what I would and wouldn’t eat and as I gradually wore her down I was getting away with smaller and smaller portions. She still feared that to fight me might mean I ate nothing at all. I think the state I was in when I was admitted to the Maudsley had so terrified Mum that she would agree to anything if she thought she could prevent that happening again.

  She couldn’t, though. I liked to give her the illusion she had some control over what I was doing but in reality she had none. It was me and me alone who would decide how much I would eat.

  Mealtimes became horribly bitter and fraught. I would scream and throw tantrums if Mum served up something I wouldn’t eat. The first time I threw an untouched plate of food at the wall, she gasped in shock before going mad at me.

  ‘How dare you?’ Mum finally yelled, visibly taken aback at what her little daughter had turned into.

  I didn’t even reply, I just pushed my chair away from the table and stamped upstairs to my bedroom.

  But within a couple of weeks that behaviour had become the norm. Anything I didn’t like went straight up the wall until you could tell what we’d had for dinner recently by checking out the stains Mum couldn’t scrub off the walls of her once cream-coloured dining room.

  Christmas 1991 has entered family folklore because of one of my terrible outbursts. Tony had assured Mum there was no point in rushing out early to get a turkey, even though we had my auntie, uncle and three cousins coming over for lunch on Christmas Day. ‘Everyone just makes a big fuss before Christmas,’ he laughed. ‘There’ll be plenty of turkeys left if we wait until Christmas Eve and they’ll be half-price. You’ll see.’

  Well, what we didn’t see when we turned up at the shops on Christmas Eve was a single turkey – not one. All we could find was one very sad and scrawny-looking duck. Not that it bothered me – I wouldn’t be eating much of it.

  Mum spent hours cooking for everyone, trying to make it an extra-special Christmas after the grim year we’d all had.

  But as soon as I saw the duck lying on my plate I knew I was in trouble. I couldn’t bring myself to eat it. I just couldn’t eat all that fat. Mum could sense the danger too as my face took on that haunted, troubled look that I would get so often at mealtimes.

  Everyone was chatting and joking around the table when suddenly there was a loud smash. I’d picked up my plate and thrown it across the festively decorated table straight at the wall.

  ‘I’m not fucking eating it!’ I screamed, watching the gravy sliding down the wall like a slow-moving oil slick.

  ‘For God’s sake, Nikki,’ Mum screamed. There was silence as my auntie and cousins stared intently at their Brussels sprouts, not daring to look up. But suddenly Mum, Natalie and I broke the silence by all starting to giggle hysterically at the same moment. Then everyone joined in and we were all laughing uncontrollably. I think we were probably laughing at the sheer awfulness of everything – it was a real laugh-or-cry situation. Now we always call it the Flying Duck Christmas.

  But it wasn’t normally like that. By then there was rarely much laughter at mealtimes in our house. It was far more likely to be screaming and shouting, particularly when I’d just hurled another dinner plate across the room.

  Soon I was eating virtually nothing again and my weight fell dangerously low. I was mentally and emotionally tormented too. I felt isolated and alone at home and school and I found it hard to concentrate or even think about anything other than food. I became totally focused on what I was trying to do – not eat. I was locked in a vicious circle because the less I ate the weaker I became and the more incapable I was of finding any pleasure in anything. Food and avoiding it occupied my mind every waking hour.

  At the beginning of 1992 I was pulled out of school again. In less than four months since I had been discharged from the Maudsley I had lost three kilos (nearly 7 lb) and was down to just 23.3 kilos (3 stone 9 lb) – 75 per cent of the weight I should have been.

  I was pale, sickly-looking and covered in a layer of lanugo hair, which anorexics get when they are seriously ill. It’s a fine hair, almost like fur, which grows all over your body in a bid to keep it warm when there isn’t enough body fat left to do that. I had loads on my back and all down my arms. It was horrible.

  The whole family was attending family-therapy sessions in the hope it might help me but when I was there I refused to get involved. These people still didn’t get it – I didn’t want to eat and get better. I couldn’t let myself do that.

  My medical notes show that I then went down to consuming just one glass of water and a biscuit each day. It was critical.

  Soon after that I stopped eating entirely. I just couldn’t do it any more. Eating was giving in and I refused to do it. I was going to be strong and deny myself everything. At mealtimes I stopped sitting down at the table. Instead I would stand in the corner of the room and watch as they all tucked in. I’d watch Natalie’s every move as she nudged the food on to her fork, lifted it to her mouth, chewed then swallowed. It looked so simple but I just couldn’t do it. The guilt would be too much for me. I’d feel like I had done something too awful and I couldn’t let that happen.

  By this time Mum, Dad and my GP were frantically worried about me again.

  Our family doctor, Sara, was back from her maternity leave and was brilliant at trying to find me specialist care. But that wasn’t so easy. Letters flew backwards and forwards in an attempt to secure the funding from my local health authority for a bed in an eating-disorders unit. But then there were no beds available and I was put on a waiting list. It dragged on like that for weeks and all the time I was getting thinner and weaker.

  Then one week I ate nothing except vitamin C pills. During all the times I had starved myself before I had never felt hungry, but this time even I felt the need to eat – yet still I couldn’t do it. Something inside me just wouldn’t let me give in to food. ‘You can’t do that, Nikki,’ I’d hear in my head. ‘You’ll be giving in. You have to stay strong.’ And I did. I stayed strong in my head and I didn’t eat. But physically I was weaker than I’d ever been.

  My GP’s notes show that when I visited her on Friday, 24 January I hadn’t eaten anything since the Wednesday. I was terrifyingly thin. On the Saturday and the Monday I was back at the surgery but still I wasn’t eating. I was so hungry I was unable to think straight. I told Mum I wanted to die and threatened Natalie with
a fork.

  Mum was buckling under the strain. One or other of us was in tears most of the time and the tension was unbearable. And still the battle to find a bed at a suitable unit continued.

  Then I stopped drinking too. I became more and more dehydrated and was desperate for a drink but I just couldn’t allow myself to give in to that either.

  I remember watching Tony and Mum sitting in the kitchen drinking tea and I was just desperate for it, desperate – but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t give in.

  One morning, truly desperate, Mum took me back to our GP again and pleaded with her for help. The doctor told my mum to drive me straight to the nearest hospital.

  I was nine years old and weighing just 19 kilos (just under 3 stone) and I hadn’t drunk any fluid for a week. I was now a critical emergency case because I was so severely dehydrated and was rushed to the local Hillingdon Hospital and placed on the Peter Pan Ward, a general children’s medical ward.

  ‘It’ll only be for a night, won’t it, Mum?’ I asked as we climbed into the car to go there.

  ‘We’ll see, darling,’ Mum replied. ‘We’ll see.’

  CHAPTER 7

  HILLINGDON HOSPITAL

  As Tony drove us to the hospital I stared numbly out of the back window of the car. I was too tired to talk and too weak to pay much attention to the people going about their everyday lives, scurrying up and down the busy streets.

  Then something in a shop window caught my eye. It was a huge poster, the height of a man, advertising bottles of water. In the picture, water was splashing out of the bottle and falling into a glistening pool beneath it. I stared at the image, transfixed by the wetness. Oh, I so wish I could drink that, I thought. I’m so thirsty. Because I hadn’t drunk anything for three days I was seriously dehydrated, but still I hadn’t been able to permit myself even a drop of water.

  I knew from being in the Maudsley that once I was in hospital they would be making me drink and eat – and part of me was relieved. I would be able to hand over control to the nurses and it would be like having a holiday from myself.

  We pulled up outside Hillingdon Hospital and I looked up, half scared and half comforted by the solidity and plainness of the huge building.

  Inside, a lovely nurse introduced herself as Geraldine, the ward sister. She helped me with my overnight bag – stuffed full of comics, clothes and my teddy bear – as we walked along the ward and into the cubicle which was to become my virtual jail for the next three months.

  ‘Now, Nikki, we’re going to start off by getting you a nice drink,’ Geraldine said, smiling. I didn’t even bother to fight the suggestion. But I did lean down, unzip my bag and pull out my sherry glass. ‘Can I have it in this, please?’ I asked, holding up the tiny tumbler. ‘I only drink out of this glass.’

  ‘Really,’ replied Geraldine. ‘Well, I think you’re going to need a bit more than that, dear. You’ve got to drink a litre of lemon squash by midnight or we’ll have to put you on a glucose drip.’

  She was really lovely but clearly wasn’t going to take any nonsense from me, and her threat worked a treat. As she poured out the first large glass of lemon squash from a plastic jug, I held out my hand and grabbed it.

  The first mouthful tasted amazing. It felt like I could distinguish every single ingredient and I loved it. I was so thirsty that soon I was gulping down the squash. But however much I drank they just kept topping up my glass in a bid to rehydrate me.

  The next step was for staff to weigh and measure me, take my blood pressure and assess my mental state. The notes on my admission sheet make grim reading: ‘She shows feelings that life not worth living, sad, tearful and irritable, obsessed with weight and once thought of drinking her sister’s chemistry set in attempt to kill herself. Digs forks into herself.’

  Certainly I’d reached a point where there didn’t seem anything in my life worth living for.

  After all the tests, Geraldine sat on the edge of my bed and handed me a programme of what my life would be while I remained at Hillingdon. I still have the two pages of typed notes which were to provide the format for my every waking moment during my stay there. They are decorated with my childish felt-pen pictures of a rainbow, balloons and a flower, but not even my pretty doodlings can take away the harshness of the regime.

  During stage 0, which lasted until I had increased my weight from 19 kilos (3 stone) to 19.95 kilos (3 stone 2 lb), my day consisted of:

  Bedbath, not hairwash

  Bedpan

  Schoolwork for half an hour each day

  Mum to visit for half an hour each day

  Dad to visit for 20 minutes every other day

  Reading half an hour each day

  No other visitors.

  And that was it – my entire day’s activities. All of it was to take place in my hospital bed, which I was not permitted to leave even to use the toilet.

  There were hours and hours every day where there was just nothing at all for me to do except lie on my bed and stare into space.

  Stage 1 – until I reached 20.3 kilos (3 stone 3 lb) – introduced the ‘perks’ of a hairwash once a week and drawing and colouring for half an hour each day. Everything else remained the same.

  Stage 2 – until I reached 20.8 kilos (3 stone 4 lb) – increased schoolwork, reading and Mum’s visit to one hour each per day and Dad’s to 20 minutes daily. Natalie was also allowed to visit once a week with Mum.

  And so it went on with extra privileges at each stage. But it all came accompanied by the threat that if I lost weight at any point I would be fed through a tube.

  I’d been told enough times about ‘tube feeding’ and it sounded terrifying. The mere thought of having a tube shoved up my nose and all the way down into my stomach made me gag. Worse still, it meant I’d have no control at all over the number of calories they were pumping inside me.

  Mum and I had talked about tube feeding too. ‘If you ever have to be tube-fed I won’t be able to visit you,’ she’d said. ‘I couldn’t face seeing you like that.’

  The doctors at Hillingdon must have thought that the privileges they were offering plus the fear of tube feeding would be enough to make me eat. But they can’t have dealt with anyone with such ruthless self-control before.

  I decided in my head how much I would allow myself to eat, and then nothing more. And no amount of privileges or threats would make me change my mind. There was no way I was giving in just to have an extra half-hour’s colouring or an extra half-hour with Mum. Hugging my mum? By then I could take it or leave it. That’s what being locked up in hospitals had done to me.

  I didn’t even make it to Stage 4 and after my weight had crept out of the critical level to reach 21 kilos (3 stone 4 lb) it stayed pretty static until I left there.

  All my meals were brought to me in my cubicle and served up on one of those narrow tables that swing across the bed. I wasn’t even allowed to go for a shower or to the toilet, so my whole life was contained for three months within those cubicle walls.

  It was cripplingly boring and enough to send anyone mad, let alone someone who was obviously struggling to keep their senses together, as I was at the time.

  I guess they thought that if my life was so unstimulating I’d start to find food interesting and give in to it. But they hadn’t reckoned on my cast-iron will.

  For breakfast I would allow myself to eat a Weetabix with water and black tea. For lunch it would be half a jacket potato and dinner would be something like minced turkey. They made no effort to force me to eat and would just leave the food in front of me until the next meal if I hadn’t touched it. Meal after meal I would pick at few vegetables or anything else I felt I was ‘allowed’, then leave the rest for hours on end until eventually it was cleared away.

  I suppose they didn’t feel the need to encourage or force me to eat because they thought the combination of privileges and punishments was enough.

  So I sat there for hour after hour, day after day, my head aching with boredom, but st
ill refusing to eat up all the food in front of me.

  I’d sit and stare out of the window or peer through the gap in the curtains at the comings and goings of the nurses up and down the ward. But if one of them caught me looking she would just pull the curtains tight shut – looking out was far too much like entertainment.

  Bed-wash in the morning, when the nurse would come round with a bowl of warm water and some soap, became one of the high points of my day. At least it was some human contact.

  ‘Hello – do you like working in the hospital?’ I’d ask my bed-wash nurse, in a desperate child’s attempt to strike up a conversation. I’d do anything to make them stay for just 20 minutes and talk to me. Most of them were pretty on the ball, though, and knew I was just trying to relieve the boredom. And that was against the rules. So they’d just give me a friendly smile, finish the wash and walk away, leaving me in silence in my cubicle jail all over again.

  When I arrived at Hillingdon I was still young enough to be scared about being told off by nurses and doctors. But as the weeks rolled on and I became more and more bored, I became rebellious and cheeky. I started getting off my bed to do star-jumps when no one was around. But I was usually caught by the nurses and sent back to bed.

  One day, some charity workers came to our ward, handing out toys to all the kids. There were He Man and Action Man figures for the boys and Barbie dolls for the girls.

  I was sitting in my cubicle, trying to hear what all the excitement was about, when a lady from the charity poked her head through my partially opened curtain and said, ‘Hello, dear, would you like this?’ She handed me the most beautiful Barbie I’d ever seen. She was wearing a pink ball gown and came with her own hair brush.

  ‘Oh, thank you, she’s lovely,’ I murmured. And I’d never been so grateful for a present in my whole life.

  She really was beautiful. I sat on my bed and brushed her long, blonde hair with the tiny pink hair brush and unfastened her clothes, then put them back on her again, until she looked perfect.