her up, I say that I’ll eat the sweet next Sunday. Lesley carefully sets the fudge diamond aside; and I spend the entire week fretting about it.
‘God, you look awful!’ exclaims Lesley, the following Sunday. We go straight up to her room and I take up my post against the radiator. Lesley hands me the fudge diamond and picks a sweet out for herself. ‘Okay,’ she says, ‘I’m going to have this one – you have the fudge diamond.’ The radiator burns into my back, but I am so cold I don’t feel it. ‘I can’t,’ I cry, tears streaming down my face. ‘Okay,’ she says, taking the sweet from my hand and opening it up, ‘I’ll get a knife and cut it in half.’ She gives me half, but I am too frightened to put it in my mouth – once I start eating I mightn’t be able to stop. Lesley cuts the half in quarters, but I sob and shake my head. Eventually, Lesley coaxes me into eating a bit smaller than the top of my fingernail. I feel so bad that when I get home, I have to take more laxatives.
‘She’s too thin. She’s ever so thin,’ they’re saying, their faces swimming above me like huge moons. I’m lying on a bed of glass and broken light-fittings while staff and a few ‘let me through, I’m a nurse’ customers muse over my condition. I’d been heading for the stairs up to the stock room, but they kept careering off into the distance. Patches of blackness kept invading my vision, and I couldn’t breathe. ‘I can’t get there, I can’t make it,’ I thought, trying to catch sight of another member of staff. ‘Dawn!’ I cried, seeing the supervisor of lighting through the fog. But as she turned, my legs buckled and sent me crashing into a set of glass display shelves laden with lights. It seems I’ve been unconscious for 10 minutes. I am helped to the medical room, and Mrs Sansom tells me to take the rest of the week off.
‘You’re too ill to work,’ says Dr O’Donnell when I next see him. ‘Your appointment with the hospital should come through soon, but I’m signing you off work till then.’ In his letter to Mrs Sansom he tactfully writes that I have digestive problems. I’m relieved not to be going back to work: even lifting a pair of slippers back onto a shelf has become an effort.
‘It’s thicker,’ I cry, my voice rising. ‘What have you done to this soup? It’s thicker!’ ‘I haven’t done anything to it, Claire,’ says Mum. ‘I can’t eat it! I can’t!’ I yell, ‘you’re trying to poison me.’ ‘For Christ’s sake, girl, look at you, look at you!’ screams Mum, losing her patience. ‘You’re nothing but a bag of bones! And you are not leaving that table until you’ve eaten that soup.’ So I suck each spoonful before I swallow, and spit anything slightly lumpy back into the bowl.
After that I decide I’m not going to have soup for dinner any more. Instead, I cut myself a thin slice of cheese and have a hot chocolate made with skimmed milk. I eat the cheese in a particular way. I feed half to Sheba, then nibble all the way round the rest of the cheese, and stick the little pieces to the roof of my mouth with my tongue, the better to savour the flavour. I take sips of the hot chocolate and try not to swallow the cheese until the drink is finished. It is a disgusting little ritual, but somehow it makes eating more bearable.
Off work, I establish a rigid daily routine for myself. After Mum, Dad and Michael leave for work and Lisa has gone to school, I start my stomach exercises. I lie flat on the floor, put my arms over my head and slowly raise my legs up to the count of 10, then lower them to 10. Up and down, on and on, until I ache. I shower and inspect my body and then hide it in my baggy white jogging suit. I brush my hair and great clumps fall out; I notice long strands criss-crossing my pillow.
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