Fragile

by Nikki Grahame

  The Queen singer Freddie Mercury had died six months earlier and I’d been given the band’s recently released Greatest Hits Volumes I and II. I was a massive fan of Queen – I always had been since Mum and Dad used to listen to their records at home when I was little. While I was at Collingham, Mum even took me on a day trip to lay flowers outside the house where Freddie had lived.

  Every day at Collingham, to pass the time, I’d sit at the dinner table and go through in my head the lyrics of each Queen song in the exact order they appeared on the albums. I knew every single lyric to every single song. Lunchtime would start with ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ running through my mind, then ‘Another One Bites The Dust’. Often I’d still be sitting there three hours later in front of a cold plate of sausage and chips when ‘One Vision’ finally came to a crashing finale in my head.

  But we did have good times at Collingham too. The manager there was called Paul Byrne and he was lovely. He took me under his wing and looked after me. He was good to me and for the first time in years I could laugh again. Paul played all those ‘Dad’ tricks that other kids got at home. Once I was in the bath and he dangled a broom down from the floor above and banged on the window. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Another time he put custard in my bed – it was disgusting but very funny. And he was always jumping out on me from behind curtains and doors.

  Paul made Collingham fun. When he was around I could even forget about food for a while. But he was strict with me too and if I didn’t eat he would really shout at me. ‘Come on, Nikki, stop staring at your plate and eat.’ But if I did eat it I got loads of extra treats. He’d get one of the nurses to take me to the pottery room or let me go with the other kids when they walked down to the local shop for a magazine.

  One day, he said if I ate everything they gave me until Wednesday lunchtime he’d take me to the zoo. I did it and he took me. It was brilliant.

  There was a really cosy day room at Collingham with amazing board games and a Nintendo and there was also a classroom where kids who were well enough had lessons. To help us with our French lessons Paul fixed up for us all to go on a day trip to Boulogne. It was so exciting going over on the ferry and trying out our ‘Bonjours’ on every shop owner we met.

  The only downside for me that day was the food. All eight of us piled into a restaurant and of course everyone except me instantly ordered burger and chips. I couldn’t face the burger and thought omelette at least sounded a bit healthier. But when it arrived it was the size of a dustbin lid and oozing bright-yellow grease.

  Paul took one look at my plate, then at my face and laughed out loud. ‘Serves you right for trying to be smart and not having burger like the rest of us,’ he chuckled. ‘You can eat the lot now!’ But he didn’t make me eat it all – so long as he knew I was trying to eat he never pushed me too far.

  Another time we went on a camping holiday in the New Forest, like I’d done at the Maudsley. We had a camp fire, made dens and bridges and one of the nurses dressed up as a ghost. It was so much fun. Best of all, I got away with eating hardly anything.

  After I had been in Collingham for a few months I had to move rooms and share with a girl called Lucy. I’m still not sure why exactly she was there but she was pretty strange. She was a real goody two-shoes and would grass me up to the nurses at any opportunity.

  For months I’d been getting away with offloading loads of food on to the boys’ plate at mealtimes. Whenever it was lamb chops, say, I’d slice off all the fat and lob it on to my mate Lee’s plate and he’d swallow the lot. It was a perfect system. But once Lucy saw what I was up to she wasted no time telling the nurses. Paul came in and screamed at me, ‘What do you think you are doing, Nikki? Well, you won’t be getting away with any more of your little tricks.’

  I was so angry at Lucy for dropping me in it and we didn’t speak for days. But after a while we made up and sometimes we even got on OK. Once I persuaded her to get up with me really early in the morning to jump out on the nurses turning up for their morning shift. We hid at the bottom of the stairs at the crack of dawn to play our trick and when we leapt out on the nurses as they came in, they all screamed. Once they’d recovered from the shock they saw the funny side. They were cool. And I think they must have realised there weren’t a lot of other laughs for us kids in that unit.

  Collingham was only open on weekdays but at first I wasn’t trusted to go home at weekends, so Paul would drive me back to Hillingdon Hospital instead. On a Friday evening, as we sat in traffic jams in the Sunshine Variety Bus, I’d make him listen to my Queen tapes.

  The weekends back at Hillingdon were grim. I’d spend hours tidying up the playroom because it was good exercise and something to do, then I’d lie on my bed watching Queen videos and singing to myself, trying to kill the hours until it was time to return to Collingham on Monday morning.

  At Collingham I had my own bedroom. It was quite big and I decorated it with colour posters of Freddie Mercury I’d bought in the Virgin Megastore and my collection of helium balloons. Every time Mum visited I’d drag her out to a card shop for another balloon. I was also really into stickers and had them all round my room – the furry ones and scratch ’n’ sniff ones that I got out of Frosties packets (without eating the Frosties, of course).

  The only problem with my room was that it was right next to the nurses’ station, which had a massive observation window so that they could keep an eye on me at any time of day or night. I also had to sleep with the door open in case I was up to any exercise or being sick. That meant I had no privacy, even when I was sleeping. It was like living in a goldfish bowl.

  After I’d been at Collingham for two months, Mum was allowed to come in and sit with me during meals. They were trying to work out some kind of strategy to help her cope with me when I eventually went home. Everyone was just terrified that otherwise, as soon as I was discharged I’d just go straight back to my tricks and tantrums, Mum wouldn’t be able to cope and I’d get really sick again.

  First of all at mealtimes Karl, my clinical nurse, sat down with us. But once he was happy that Mum could be strict with me if she needed to be, he would leave us alone. Of course as soon as he was gone I started pushing my luck again. I’d still try to wrap Mum around my little finger.

  But I was making progress and my weight did start increasing. In my mind, though, I still firmly believed being skinny was perfect and that was still the way I wanted to be.

  What the doctors didn’t know was that I had been using my time wisely at Hillingdon and Collingham, devouring every women’s magazine and newspaper article I could find about losing weight. I’d become a child expert on food and nutrition and could recite the calorific values of hundreds of different products. And I’d worked out exactly how much exercise would burn off how many calories too. I had an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of slimming.

  So when I did start to go home at weekends I was already several steps ahead of Mum – even though I was only ten. The moment I arrived home on a Friday evening I’d have a set amount in my head that I would allow myself to eat that weekend. And no matter what instructions Mum had been given by Collingham, it wouldn’t make any difference.

  I was tricky too. One weekend at home I invited my old boyfriend Nicholas Richards round for tea. We’d been at Hillside School together and written to each other during my stays at the Maudsley, Hillingdon and Collingham. I was so looking forward to Nicholas coming round but I still couldn’t help obsessing about how to reduce the calorie count of our tea.

  ‘Oh, but Mum, can we have Quavers instead of the normal Salt ’n’ Shake crisps? I love Quavers,’ I said. Mum was just delighted to think I was eating crisps. What she didn’t know is that a packet of Quavers is 85 calories and Salt ’n’ Shake is 146. Mum could be such a soft touch.

  And I’d still argue with her about everything she prepared for dinner. If she tried fish fingers, for instance, it would be the same old argument.

  ‘Collingham say you have to eat three of them, N
ikki,’ she would say.

  ‘Fine,’ I’d reply like a right little cow. ‘But if you give me three I won’t eat anything. If you give me two I’ll eat them all.’

  What could she do? I had her over a barrel.

  Mum was still very brittle. She would cry a lot about what I was doing to myself and everything that had happened. I may only have been ten years old but I could sense she was weak and I used that to my advantage.

  Another thing Mum was always trying to feed me was waffles. I hated them and would squeeze them on to kitchen paper to blot all the oil off before I ate them. Mum would huff and puff about it but it was either that or they went straight in the bin. I’d hide food in my knickers too and on a bad day there would be plates thrown at the walls again as well.

  I think I regressed whenever I went home because it was easier to bully Mum than the nurses. I knew Mum was desperate for me to eat – my life depended on it and by now she felt hers did too. But in hospital the nurses, even the nice ones, weren’t as emotionally connected. Whether I ate or not, at the end of their shift they would go home and put their feet up in front of Corrie.

  Because I liked Collingham, though, my mood was much better and I was far calmer there than at home or Hillingdon. The only tantrum I ever had was the day Mum and Natalie were turned away at the door. They never gave me sedatives or tube-fed me there, so I must have been far easier for the nurses to handle than I’d been at Hillingdon.

  Collingham was a very warm, caring place and I liked it for that. It didn’t necessarily help me sort out my anorexia but maybe that would only happen when I was ready. But my weight did gradually creep upwards.

  I was allowed home for Christmas and I knew I was only weeks away from getting out permanently. I still didn’t want to eat but I knew I had to go through the motions to get everyone off my back.

  They finally discharged me on 14 January 1993. I weighed 28.5 kilos (4 stone 7 lb) and was 132 centimetres (4 feet 4 inches) tall.

  As Mum helped me load my bags into the boot of her car outside the unit, I felt I had won another battle. I was being allowed home – free at last. But to me it was clear that even if victory in this battle was mine, there was still a long, painful war ahead.

  CHAPTER 9

  TOO UNCOOL FOR SCHOOL

  ‘Ninety-eight, 99, 100.’ I took a quick breath of air as I finished my second set of sit-ups, then jumped off the floor and started pacing up and down the room.

  It was three o’clock on a freezing February morning and it was still pitch-black outside my bedroom window. But, like the night before, and the night before that, I’d been awake for the past three hours exercising silently while Mum and Tony slept in the room next to mine.

  I’d start with sit-ups, then walk up and down the room until my head spun. Then I’d do lunges and star-jumps, although they were more tricky as sometimes the floor shook and Mum would wake up. My bed looked inviting and sometimes I felt so tired I could die but I had to keep going, had to keep burning off those calories.

  As soon as I returned home, away from the watchful eyes at Collingham, I had thrown myself back into an almost constant exercise regime. Again, I couldn’t even sit down in front of the telly in the evenings. Instead I’d stand in the corner of the room, stepping from one leg to the other.

  I’d gone back to Hillside School but was finding it really tough to settle back in. I didn’t feel I belonged there – or anywhere – any more. I’d only just got things back on an even keel after the Maudsley when I’d had to leave for Collingham. And this time it was even harder to fit back in.

  Before, I’d always been a leader in my group but all the friendships had changed since I’d been away. There was a girl called Amanda Turbeville, who had joined the school while I was away. Joanne and Emily and Erin were all hanging around with her now and I was totally left out. That’s what it’s like with girls at that age – you’re either in or you’re out and I was most definitely out.

  Maybe my old friends thought I was just a bit too weird or uncool to hang around with now. I don’t know what it was but I felt rejected all over again.

  Mum told me to stick at it and things would get better, so I kept turning up, hanging around the edge of my old group and waiting for acceptance. And waiting.

  It didn’t help that I was really behind in my schoolwork too. We’d had lessons at the Maudsley and Collingham but they were only really giving us a basic education as best they could in the situation. I was never destined to be a great academic. I’m more of a doer than a thinker and it didn’t really bother me that I was behind except it was just something else which marked me out as different.

  As the months rolled by Mum would encourage me to ask friends round for tea but there really weren’t many girls for me to invite. Then I made one new friend, a girl called Lena, who was Russian and had just moved to the country and couldn’t speak English very well. She was stunning, with long, dark-brown hair, but the other girls were mean to her because she was different. We were both outsiders and clung together. Lena would come round my house after school and we would play games and make circuses. We kept each other going for a long time.

  Things at home were tough too. While I had been in Collingham, Mum had moved into a new house in Tolcarne Drive, five minutes’ walk from our old home. It was a nice house and Mum had bought me a lovely new bed and decorated the walls with Forever Friends teddy-bear wallpaper and curtains. But I still desperately missed my old bedroom and our old house.

  Tony was living with us permanently now, which also bothered me as it was just someone else battling for Mum’s attention.

  Everything felt wrong. Mum was upset too as she knew in her heart that I’d been happier at Collingham than I was at home. It was true. Collingham had given me a stability that I didn’t feel at home. And despite the bad times I’d had fun there too. There wasn’t much of that at home.

  I was continuing as an outpatient at Collingham, which meant once a fortnight Mum and I would get on the tube down to Earl’s Court for a weigh-in. Also, once or twice a month, I was having outpatient psychiatric treatment with Dr Matthew Hodes at St Mary’s Hospital’s Department of Child Psychiatry at Paddington Green. I hated those sessions – just another nosy parker asking me a load of questions I didn’t want to answer. Sometimes I wouldn’t even sit down in his room.

  We had family therapy sessions too. Natalie had to take afternoons off school for them, which she hated too – to her it was just another example of me causing more upset in her life.

  For about six months I trundled on at a fairly steady weight. I was still exercising and very fussy about what I would agree to eat, but at least I wasn’t losing a lot of weight.

  If it was a meal I ‘allowed’ myself, like two fish fingers and one potato, things were usually fine. But if Mum made something with more fat, like macaroni cheese, it was back to the same old tears, screaming and tantrums. She wasn’t allowed to fry anything and pastry was a definite no-no. It must have been a nightmare for her every single evening. Before Mum even turned the oven on I would demand to know what she was planning to make. Then there would be the lengthy period of negotiation until we found some way of cooking it that we could agree on.

  Collingham had left Mum with strict instructions about how much I should eat every day. But I knew she would bend the rules so long as I was getting some calories every mealtime. I was all too aware that her greatest fear was me throwing my plate at the wall or simply refusing to eat anything. I used that fear to blackmail her into giving me my own way. Once Mum started preparing the meal, I would stand behind her supervising, watching every single ingredient go in and calculating the calories in my head. But at least I wasn’t losing weight. And my mood was a bit brighter during that spring too. Things settled down at school a bit in the early summer and I even got invited to a few of the girls’ birthday parties.

  But shortly after that, things took a turn for the worse again. Everyone around me suddenly started growing up –
and I was being left behind.

  ‘Have you started yet?’ a girl in my class asked me as we sat in the playground one morning break time. It was the same conversation all the girls in my class had been having for the last couple of months – periods, time of the month, ‘coming on’. They couldn’t shut up about it – they were obsessed.

  ‘Er, no, not yet,’ I replied, looking intently at my scuffed school shoes.

  The doctors had told me that my puberty might be severely delayed by my anorexia. At first it hadn’t bothered me. Who’d want to go through that yukky business every month anyway? But as more girls in my class began to have this mysterious experience and turned into young women I felt more and more of an outsider.

  Then at PE I noticed how loads of them were starting to get pudgy bits around their chests – they were growing boobs. They’d arrive at school on Monday mornings wearing bras, the tell-tale straps showing through their white cotton school shirts.

  ‘Are you still wearing a vest, Nikki?’ Amanda asked one warm day, peering at my childish white vest through my summer blouse. I was mortified. My chest was still as flat as a pancake.

  That Saturday Mum took me to British Home Stores and bought me a little cami top which I wore just to make myself feel better. By now I was 11 and wanted boobs and periods. I wanted to be normal but the doctors were warning me that, because of the ramifications of anorexia, it might not happen for years, if ever. In the meantime I had to continue living in the body of a child.

  I started slipping back mentally and physically. I could feel it sweeping over me over a few weeks. I felt so isolated again. I became quieter and introverted and as hard as Mum tried to reach me by talking to me and trying to comfort me, there was nothing she could do. I dealt with my torment the only way I knew how – more exercise and less food.