Fragile

by Nikki Grahame

  There was me in my tie-dye trousers and pink hair with a ring through my nose, looking like a skeleton being propped upright by a pair of Doc Martens.

  We were both 14, but I knew then that we were worlds apart. I thought, You’re not the little girl I used to run up and down the street with in a shower cap and a swimming costume, knocking on people’s doors and running away. You’re not the little girl who came for sleepovers in a tent in the garden on Halloween. You’re doing your thing now and I’m doing mine. So I just ignored her for her entire visit.

  I wasn’t jealous of Lena and what she looked like. I couldn’t even think that far – all I could think about was what was happening to me right there, right then.

  ‘Mum, please get me out of here,’ I pleaded as Lena stared at me with a mixture of shock and revulsion. ‘Take me back to Sedgemoor. I can’t stay here. They’re going to make me fat. They’re going to make me eat.’

  Then I’d repeat the same thing over and over again.

  Mum and Lena left after a couple of hours. They were barely outside the building when Lena burst into tears. ‘She’s dying, isn’t she?’ she said to Mum.

  Mum couldn’t say ‘no’, but she couldn’t bring herself to admit the answer might be ‘yes’ either. Lena was just a kid herself and had never seen anything as shocking before.

  ‘Nikki didn’t even notice I was there,’ she said. ‘She’s so caught up in her illness. That’s all that she can see.’ Mum nodded. Lena was absolutely right.

  I didn’t care about any of them then – Mum, Dad, Natalie, Lena. All I cared about was not eating.

  After a fortnight I was moved into a bed on the adolescent unit and then my battle really began.

  There were two kitchens in the unit: a downstairs one for residents on the road to recovery, who were allowed to prepare their own food, and an upstairs one where nurses supervised everything. That’s where I, Carly and the other four really sick kids – Debbie, Hannah, Paula and Simon – all ate. Simon was the first boy I’d ever met with an eating disorder. He was from North America but had to come to England because it was the only place he could get treatment.

  Simon and I were the sickest. Hannah was pretty ill too but she hated me as she knew I was her main competition and much skinnier than her. Paula and Debbie were just weird. Paula used to regurgitate all her food and Debbie wasn’t really a proper anorexic – she just pretended to be by not eating, because she wanted attention.

  Every week the Huntercombe dietician, Yvonne, would plan out our individual diet sheets.

  When I arrived, my breakfast was one box of cereal from a selection pack with one cup of milk and a cup of fruit juice. Snack time was one digestive biscuit and another cup of juice and lunch was a hot dinner off the menu – either fish, chicken or vegetarian.

  They allowed us to be vegetarian at Huntercombe – and so of course all the girls were and I joined in too. It gave us something else to be in control of.

  My first lunch there was fried veggie sausages with fried parmentier potatoes and spinach creamed in butter with nutmeg. It was horrific for me – so many calories and so much fat. When I picked the spinach off my plate there was a disgusting yellow puddle of melted butter where it had been sitting.

  At the first opportunity I shoved one of the sausages up my sleeve. There were eight of us at the table, all trying to get away with similar tricks and the nurses couldn’t look at all of us all the time. So next a few potatoes went down my knickers. They were scalding hot, but I was desperate to get rid of them.

  I managed to hide one and a half sausages and quite a bit of potato but what I hadn’t reckoned on was the 45-minute time limit at Huntercombe for every meal. That meant you had to finish your main course, fruit, yoghurt and juice in the time otherwise you’d have to eat the whole lot again.

  Disaster.

  My time was up and I still hadn’t drunk the juice.

  ‘You were told the rules, Nikki,’ said Adam, my key nurse, plonking another plate of veggie sausages and potatoes in front of me. ‘You’re going to have to do it all again.’

  ‘No way!’ I yelled. ‘I’m not eating all that again.’

  I sat there furious, glaring at the full plate and refusing to even pick up my knife and fork. And I was still there at afternoon snack time at 3.30, when a piece of fruit and a juice were added to the pile of food in front of me.

  Adam tried desperately to persuade me to eat but I wasn’t having any of it.

  Normally, when dinner came I would then have been expected to eat my lunch, snack and dinner all in one go. I begged Adam, ‘Please, can we just forget about lunch and snack and start afresh at dinner. Please?’ Finally he agreed, but the other girls in Huntercombe were furious that I had been let off.

  It was the same rule of getting your entire meal replaced if you left anything on the plate or if you hid food or ignored three warnings from a nurse about playing with food or separating items of food on the plate. Separating food, moving it around the plate and cutting it up into tiny pieces are all anorexic traits. Lots of anorexics don’t like the idea of one type of food touching another. For instance, chicken must never touch vegetables, so they’ll separate them. Then they’ll eat the items in strict order, starting with the one lowest in calories. I was always getting into trouble for separating food and for pressing food down on my plate with a fork to squeeze all the oil out of it.

  For my first couple of weeks at Huntercombe I was allowed to start off on fairly low-fat foods – I think it was probably just to get me used to being there. But after that I was put straight on to 2,500 calories a day. I’d got used to eating just 300, so that was a terrible shock.

  Meals suddenly became things like pizza and chips. But chips were horrific for me. I hadn’t eaten them in literally years and I couldn’t handle it at all.

  There were other nightmare dinners too. Bubble and squeak was horrendous because it was fried, and spaghetti soya (like spag Bol but veggie) always came in huge portions and was really filling. Macaroni cheese and the risotto were killers too, as they came drenched in cheese and butter. They were delicious but you could feel the calories melting into your body.

  I’d always hide anything I could get away with but if I was spotted and had my meal replaced I’d go mad. I could feel anger building up inside me like the engines of a space rocket about to blast off. The anger would build and build in my chest and then I’d explode, shouting and lashing out at anyone who came near me.

  I’d cry hysterically, screaming for my mum and to be allowed home. I’d fling myself around the room, hurl my chair and writhe around the floor, clawing at my skin and pulling clumps of hair out of my scalp.

  It must have been horrible for people to watch. The anger would come pouring out of my body, leaving me shattered. At the same time I was fully aware that my fits were pretty good for burning up calories too!

  I really think my mental torment did help me avoid putting on weight. I was always so anxious and stressed thinking about how to avoid the next meal, and how to get out of there, that it must have had an effect.

  My fits were happening more and more frequently – most days and sometimes every mealtime. The other girls hated me for them.

  ‘Just fucking get on and eat it, Nikki,’ they would shout if I was refusing food and building up to an hysterical fit.

  A characteristic of this eating disorder is the competitive urge to be the thinnest and most celebrated anorexic in a particular place. So the other girls were already jealous because I was the thinnest and the illest. I was top-dog anorexic.

  Hannah was particularly jealous. She was an incredibly clued-up anorexic, just like me, and between us we must have known the calorie content of every food in the world.

  I’d say to her things like, ‘Hannah, how many calories do you think were in that lentil cutlet?’ She’d sigh deeply and say, ‘Ohhh, what do you care, Nikki? You’re sooo skinny already. I don’t want to talk about it.’

  Hannah could be
really mean. She would always copy what I chose on the menu just to make sure I wasn’t getting away with fewer calories than her. And if she ever saw me hiding food at mealtimes she wouldn’t hesitate to tell a nurse. But I’d land her in it if I saw her hiding food too. It was every anorexic for herself.

  I’m sure a lot of the nurses hated me. They were always having to tell me off and I was probably just too much trouble for them. Every mealtime I would be refusing to eat, yelling and getting hysterical and violent, so it must have been really hard work looking after me. In the end I think some of the nurses just stopped challenging me every time I hid food or refused to eat and they just let me get on with what I wanted – which was not eating.

  I can’t blame them. A lot of them were in their late teens or 20s and probably just wanted an easy life. They got paid the same amount whether they chased me around trying to make me eat all day or just didn’t bother. And I’m sure it was much more enjoyable for them to spend their shift sitting with a compliant kid who was making progress than some shrieking nightmare like me.

  I was foul to some of the agency nurses. I was so rude, telling them to fuck off at mealtimes and pushing food away. One day I was having a screaming fit about being made to eat something when one of the agency staff, Sharon, really lost her rag with me. She shoved me under the desk where she was working, pulled her chair in tight so I had no chance of escaping, then left me there for over an hour. I was trying to scratch and bite her legs but she just carried on typing away on the desk above my head.

  Sometimes I think Carly was the only person at Huntercombe who liked me at all. She wasn’t like the others. In fact she wasn’t even properly anorexic. She was more obsessive-compulsive, although she had been dangerously thin when she was admitted. Her problem was that she couldn’t eat anything which she thought might have been contaminated by someone’s fingers. So she didn’t even mind foods that were higher in calories so long as they came out of a sealed wrapper. She wouldn’t eat a piece of fruit because anyone might have touched it but she would eat a chocolate bar if she opened it herself. And she would only eat a slice of bread if it came out a fresh bag that she had opened.

  In the kitchen at Huntercombe there would be 12 cartons of juice or ten bottles of milk open at any one time, because Carly could only drink something she had just opened herself. She and I had had similar upbringings and as soon as we met it felt like we had loads in common. She’d been at stage school and I wanted to be an actress, so we would put on shows in the day room, singing songs from Bugsy Malone and Starlight Express. Carly loved doing it and I enjoyed it too – but for me the chief motivation was always that it was a way of moving around and exercising. The rest of the time the nurses would make me sit down so as not to use up calories.

  Sometimes at night Carly and I would sneak into the grounds of the manor house and slip into the walled garden, looking for ghosts and trying to scare each other.

  In the adolescent unit I had my own room and Carly was sharing with Debbie but she still spent every evening in my room until the nurses threw her out. Sometimes the nurses would let her bring cushions up from her bedroom and put them on my floor and stay for a sleepover. We’d be awake chatting for hours and could talk about anything – although never about our illness.

  We terrorised the nurses and made up songs about them. ‘More ag, more ag,’ we’d shout at one called Morag every time she walked past.

  After dinner Carly and I would often go and sit in the phone booth downstairs and ring our mums. In the evenings there was a receptionist on the front desk called Barbara who would sit and knit. One night, Carly and I thought it was hilarious to keep ringing the front desk from the phone booth, pretending we were Chinese and trying to get through to a takeaway. ‘Harro,’ we shouted down the phone. ‘We want chicken noodles and egg flied lice, prease. You deriver?’

  After about the fifth call Barbara must have realised what was going on, and she stormed round to the phone booth and yanked us out. ‘I’m fed up with you two,’ she shouted. ‘I don’t wanna be working ’ere, do I?’

  We ran off laughing until our stomach muscles ached.

  We’d have a great laugh in classes too. There were lessons every day, although I was too sick to concentrate on English or maths for very long. For a while the only thing I could focus on was art.

  After my first fortnight at Huntercombe my weight had increased by about 1 kilo (2 lb), but from then on it hardly rose at all.

  I’d become determined I would never ever go above 33 kilos (5 stone 2 lb) and so the closer I got to that figure the more difficult I became to control.

  CHAPTER 16

  I’LL NEVER HAVE TO EAT AGAIN

  By the midsummer of 1997 – three months after arriving at Huntercombe – it was very clear I wasn’t getting any better.

  I remained adamant I would not go above 33 kilos and was exercising at every opportunity. Each night I would pace up and down my bedroom before doing a round of star-jumps and sit-ups. And if there were no nurses around I would run up and down the stairs over and over again. Once, I even managed to lock myself in a room with an exercise bike. I was in there for 15 minutes before a nurse found me and pulled me off it. I felt particularly victorious that day.

  Even in the day room I stood up all the time, stamping from foot to foot. But all the girls in the unit would stand whenever they could to burn off calories. We must have looked so strange to people who came in.

  I also used a relentless succession of scams to avoid food.

  I hadn’t been at Huntercombe very long when one day I saw a member of staff returning to the kitchen, tapping her security code into a keypad and pushing open the door. The next time she went back to the kitchen I stood closely behind her and committed the security code to memory. What a brilliant bit of ammunition, I thought.

  That night I waited until all the nurses were busy elsewhere, then I went up to the kitchen, typed in the code and I was in. I didn’t really have any specific plan – it just felt that I was having one over on the system.

  Inside the big kitchen, lined with cupboards and worktops, I began rummaging through boxes of food and inside the fridge. I took a couple of large, half-full cartons of milk out of the fridge and filled them up with water. That’ll be a few less calories on our cereal in the morning, I thought. Another little victory.

  A few weeks later I sneaked back into the kitchen and went through all the paperwork until I found my personalised diet sheet. Then I picked up a pen and drew a neat line through my afternoon snack. No more two-finger KitKats!

  The next time the dietician checked my list she saw what I had done, so it was a very brief victory, but worthwhile all the same. From then on the dietician had to sign every single alteration made to anyone’s diet sheet.

  By now I was supposed to be on a 2,500-calorie diet but because of hiding food and exercising I still wasn’t putting on much weight.

  Every meal was a battle and the doctors wanted to take action before my condition deteriorated further. They decided there was only one solution – I’d have to go back to being tube-fed directly into my stomach.

  ‘We’re going to have to reopen your gastrostomy,’ a charge nurse called Kate told me one afternoon after I’d refused yet another lunch.

  Just the mention of gastrostomy made me feel ill. ‘I’ll eat,’ I said immediately. ‘Please, anything but that.

  ‘You can’t talk your way out of this one,’ Kate said firmly. ‘You’re having the op to put a tube back in whether you like it or not’ – she paused – ‘but we promise we’ll only actually use it at night if you refuse to eat during the day.’

  The night before the operation I was so nervous I couldn’t sleep. I was desperately tired but I couldn’t close my eyes, I was too scared of the coming morning.

  In the end I got Mum, who was there, to push me downstairs for a cigarette. I was still on about 20 a day at that point.

  Once again there were huge risks in my having a general
anaesthetic and such major surgery when my weight was so low. But if the alternative was death, the doctors believed it was a risk worth taking. As for me, I didn’t care about the op, only about how much food they could pump down the tube.

  In the morning I was transferred by ambulance to Great Ormond Street. It felt strange being back there again, almost like going home.

  A few hours after my second gastrostomy operation in 18 months, I was back in Huntercombe. There the doctors gave me a choice – 3,000 calories a day if they used the tube, or a couple of hundred less if I ate proper food. To me that 200-calorie difference was enough to make me, eat proper food and so for the first couple of days I complied and ate their enormous meals during the day to avoid being tube-fed at night. I could feel the tube sticking out of my stomach and it remained a constant threat of what would happen if I refused to eat.

  But the food was too much. One day, after a massive bubble and squeak, they served up profiteroles with cream. I can’t do this any more, I thought, looking sadly at the mountain of choux pastry and chocolate. How could they expect someone like me to eat all that? Even someone with a huge appetite would find it intimidating.

  I was also clashing with the nurses all the time and found it exhausting. They were trying to prevent me from walking anywhere to lose calories, so every time I stood up they’d say, ‘Sit down, Nikki. What it is you want, we’ll get it for you.’

  My mood was very low. I was having big meal after big meal and not even being allowed to move around in between times. Imagine how you feel slumped in the chair after Christmas dinner. Well, it was like that every single day.

  I knew I couldn’t take any more – of the food or of any of it. I was sick and tired of everything. I didn’t even get any joy from Mum and Dad’s visits any more.

  Once Dad came to see me and he said, ‘Sit down, will you?’ as I paced about the room.