Dad’s girlfriend, spaghetti Bolognese, shopping. I had got myself another list. But it wasn’t complete.
I remember knowing the French word for town hall but in my exam I couldn’t reach it. Knowing something and not knowing something. It happens more than you think. Some people call it denial.
Mum came back in. She sat down on the side of my bed. She looked down at me serenely, rearranged my pillow gently. Like a proper mother.
‘We’ll sort it out,’ she said.
But I felt like I had stepped onto the bottom of a long escalator. I was being carried along whether I liked it or not. It was almost impossible to turn round and run back down again. Almost.
SOMEWHERE inside I knew the truth about what was wrong with Jo but I also knew it was impossible because it was what happened to other families. Families where the mother eats suppers consisting of a slimming drink and chips, families where the mother tries to push her acne-ridden, lanky daughter into modelling, families where the mother makes comments about the neighbour: ‘She’d look better in something loose’; ‘Oh, no, not the leggings’; ‘At least she’s got nice hair’.
I wasn’t as bad as that, surely. But had I made my daughter lick the platter clean? Had she seen me reminisce about how I looked when I could fit into my size ten wedding dress? Was I, in fact, only one Ryvita away from the Hollywood-diet, celebrity-worshipping mother? Perhaps, in fact, it was all my fault…
The guilt that was sucking the sense out of me was magnified by the commercials on television. Cleaning fluids, gravy, the right medicine administered with loving care all shine the light on what it is to be the perfect mother. I didn’t look like the advert mother and my house didn’t look like the advert house. I was struggling to get Jo to the doctor, let alone tuck her up in bed and caringly spoon some wonder medicine into her, as seen on TV.
It was about that time, just before I eventually persuaded Jo to see the doctor, that I picked up the newspaper and read about the teenager who had literally cleaned herself to death. The girl was called Lisa and it seemed such a pretty, happy name, yet she scrubbed her hands with every cleaning fluid she could find in her mother’s over-stocked cupboard. Still not satisfied, she would apparently bathe in bleach and wash her hair in a thick gluey substance normally used for unblocking sinks. She frequently ended up in Casualty on account of all the toxic fumes she was inhaling and the burnt areas on her skin. Her mother knew about it, but apparently did nothing.
Eventually Lisa swallowed some of the cleaning fluids, large quantities of the stuff, in fact, in an attempt to clean out her insides. Her mother, it transpired, was a stickler for cleanliness in the home and ‘a friend’ informed the paper that she would slap Lisa for coming home from school with the merest speck of school gravy on her blouse. ‘What sort of mother…?’ I found myself saying, but quickly suppressed the question in case I discovered that the answer was, ‘A mother like you.’
For some reason, I cut out the article so I could read it again and again. Perhaps it comforted me in some strange way to find a mother worse than I could ever be, one who would have guilt stamped on her soul for the rest of her life. But it unsettled me, too, for I knew deep down that Jo had a problem and I knew that if I ignored it I would be like Lisa’s mother, the one I was judging and condemning so easily. The story brought tears to my eyes and one day I sobbed over it as if I were reading an obituary of a loved one. I felt I knew Lisa and wished I could have done something to prevent her tragic story, and all the time Jo’s tragic story seemed to be unfolding before my eyes. I knew my daughter needed help, more help than I could give her, and yet I had a responsibility. I was the one who needed to take control but was failing to do so.
In the end, I managed to get Jo to the doctor. I didn’t know if it was the right thing to do but there seemed to be no other options. I had not yet taken Eliza’s advice and used my imagination. That would come later. That would come with Lily Finnegan’s strange approach.
‘I don’t need to go to the doctor’s, I’m not ill,’ Jo said when I suggested it.
‘But your stomach…’
‘I’m better. I’m OK.’
‘You haven’t been going to school, you’ve been—’
‘I know, I know. Please, Mum, don’t pressurise me. I’ll be all right, I promise.’
Her eyes pleaded with me, she looked so sad, even desperate, and I couldn’t reach her. I wanted to hug her, to tell her I loved her, that I missed the old Jo, that everything would be all right. But it was as if she had put a barbed-wire fence around herself to keep people out. To keep me out. Still, I tried to get through. I was not going to give up on my own daughter as, it seemed, Lisa’s mother had.
‘You are under pressure, I know,’ I said as gently as I could manage. Yet my voice was shaking, unsteady, as if I were at an important interview. A test to see if I was a fit mother. ‘School is full of pressure these days, I do understand. And the divorce, I realise you took it—’
‘I’m over it, OK?’
‘I know, but these things…Anyway, maybe a counsellor or a therapist or something…’
So Jo came to the doctor as the easier option, the more acceptable one, to both of us.
In my best hat and coat and clutching Jo’s medical card and inoculation record, I helped my poorly daughter out of the car and into the doctor’s surgery where I queued patiently to speak to the bright young receptionist who…
‘You’re late,’ said the not so bright young receptionist.
‘Sorry, couldn’t start the car and then I’ve been queuing here so I wasn’t as late as…Sorry, it’s for my daughter, Joanna Trounce. Jo…? Jo?’
I went back to the car to get Jo.
‘You didn’t say it was for an actual appointment.’
‘What did you think we were doing here? Having a pint and a game of darts?’
We sat among the coughs and heavy breathing of the waiting room, flicking through old magazines repetitively, rhythmically, as if searching for information.
‘There are a lot of bugs around at the moment,’ I told Jo and myself. ‘The problem is when you feel unwell, you worry about it and that worry makes you worry even more. It’s so easy to let these things get out of hand. I’m sure Dr Robinson will sort it all out.’
After my good-mother speech, I was carried along by a strong sense that everything would be all right in the morning, that a muddle would be unmuddled, that we would look back and laugh at it all. But the words ‘eating disorder’, ‘anorexia’, ‘bulimia’ repeated themselves over and over in my mind like a mantra wanting to push all other thoughts away.
It was with some relief that we were called into the surgery. I felt we had begun what we had come for and it would all be over soon, like taking your driving test. As we sat down, I decided not to take over but to allow Jo to describe her symptoms.
‘Joanna is having difficulty eating, not difficulty as such, I mean her mouth works well enough! Yes, well, I mean she eats and then feels sick.
