can’t stop me,’ I say, stomping back upstairs to my room where Kim and my brother’s friend Kevin are waiting for me to finish getting ready. Seconds later Dad is at my bedroom door, ‘Out!’ he says to Kim and Kevin – you’ve never seen two people scarper so fast. ‘If you don’t take those clothes off, I’m going to rip them off you, throw petrol over them and burn them,’ he says, and leaves the room. I know he means business. Crying with frustration I take off the skirt and stick on some trousers. Then I go to The Saracen’s Head in Dunstable and get drunk.
Kim and I virtually live at The Saracen’s Head – we’re there Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. I am going through a ‘what the hell’ stage and get drunk on cider and snog anybody. I am still paranoid about my weight and food is a problem, but not as big a problem as getting out of the house with my Madonna outfit intact! I am having one almighty crack, and later I will look back on the year that I was 17 as being one of the happiest of my life.
I love my job. I am made a senior sales assistant and, soon after, supervisor of menswear – it has been my dream to be a supervisor and I love it. My sales team consists of Claire McCann, a full-time assistant, and a college student called Veronica who comes in on Saturdays and in the holidays. Veronica is a big girl with albino colouring and a nervous tic. She is sweet but painfully shy, and whenever anybody speaks to her she goes bright red. Claire is the complete opposite. A chatty, laughing Irish girl, she is a year older than me and has worked as a butcher in her dad’s shop. She is stocky with short hair and huge owly glasses, and we get on like a house on fire.
‘Once, for a laugh, my friend and I stuck our fingers down our throat to see if it worked,’ says Claire one night when we are out drinking. ‘What do you mean?’ I ask. ‘You know,’ she says. ‘You stick your fingers down your throat to make yourself sick.’ ‘Oh,’ I say.
I get home, eat two Jaffa cakes, go into the bathroom, put my hair in a ponytail, turn on the cold tap, lift the loo seat and stick my index finger down my throat. Nothing happens. I try again, and graze the inside of my throat with my nail by mistake. I cough. Another jab with the finger and I cough again. My eyes start watering and the glands in my neck begin to swell. Poke, poke; cough, cough. My stomach jumps upwards towards my throat and bleaugh the contents hurtle through my fingers into the toilet bowl. The smell is awful, but I have to stay bent over the bowl spitting out great gobs of saliva and fumbling for the toilet paper to wipe my slippery fingers. It works alright.
Afterwards, I put down the lid of the toilet and flush. I lay my head on the grey furry loo-seat cover and listen to the deadly thoughts trickling back into my brain: ‘I’ve got to lose some weight, I’m so fat.’
‘I’ve always been a bit paranoid about my weight,’ I say, joining in on a conversation that Claire is having about dieting with Janet Chin, who works in the shoe department. Claire and Janet look at me in astonishment. ‘How can you be?’ exclaims Claire. ‘But you’re so thin!’ echoes Janet. ‘I think I’m fat,’ I say quietly, ‘and I’m trying to lose a bit of weight.’ In fact I am dieting like crazy and things are getting out of hand.
Other people’s lives revolve around going to work, getting home from work, feeding the kids, having dinner, going out, having a crack. My world revolves around how much I weigh, how big I look, what I can eat, what I can’t eat; and how much I have to eat to satisfy my parents, so they don’t nag, and Mrs Sansom, so she doesn’t suspend me. Food is my specialist subject and, most of all, I want rid of it.
I don’t like making myself sick – I’m not very good at it, but I’m brilliant at taking laxatives. I got the idea from the ‘Catherine’ documentary I saw on TV last summer. Taking laxatives helped Catherine lose a lot of weight. Sure, they also helped kill her; but she was anorexic, wasn’t she? I just want to lose a few pounds.
The first time I take the recommended dose: I swallow two brown Senokot pills with water and wait. They work a treat. I reckon if I increase the dose I’ll get thinner, quicker.
‘For God’s sake,’ says Claire, ‘you don’t need to lose any more weight. You’re looking so ill. And where’s your personality gone?’ ‘But I just feel I’m too big,’ I tell her. I am quite open with my friend about my problems with food, and even tell her that I am taking laxatives. Like me, she doesn’t fully appreciate the long-lasting damage that laxative abuse does to the body; she’s more worried about me not eating. ‘If you were as big as me you’d have to worry,’ she says, ‘but there’s nothing of you: you don’t have to diet.’ She begs and pleads with me to eat, and sometimes she gets angry.
‘Carry on,’ says Claire crossly, as she drives me home one night in her Renault. ‘Just carry on not eating. It’s doing me good – I’m losing weight worrying about you!’ And she is, poor girl. She’s carrying all the worry and stress of seeing me not eat day after day after day. I hide it from everyone else, but let my friend glimpse what’s really going on. I’m filled with guilt at what I am doing to her, and scribble her a note. ‘I’m so sorry for causing you all this pain,’ I write, ‘I promise I’ll try to eat. I’m so scared of losing you. You’re the only one who understands me, and I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t my friend.’ I post it through the slats of her locker at work, the first of many insecure little notes.
Claire tells her father about me, and big gruff Matt McCann then spends hours talking to me too. He tries to coax me into eating and suggests several times that I come to live with their family. But I am trapped in a bubble of disbelief, and no one can make themselves heard above the roar in my head which says, ‘You’re bad, you’re fat: you don’t deserve to eat.’
By early 1989 I am taking 30 Senokot a day. It always has to be 30 – not 29 or 31: it’s a ritual. My body has hardened to the huge doses and it now takes 12 hours for my bowels to work, so I tend to take the tablets at night. I know that if I take laxatives at 6 p.m. they’ll work at 6 a.m. the following day, and my trots to the toilet will be complete before I have to go to work. I think I’ve got it down to a fine art.
A girl called Rosaleen, who works at British Home Stores, is getting married in Scotland. Claire and I are invited to the wedding and decide to go up the week before, stay with Rosaleen’s family in Hamilton and have a bit of a holiday.
The coach to Hamilton leaves at midnight and will arrive just after six the following morning. Claire and I spend the evening getting drunk in a pub with a gang from work. At ten o’clock I swallow my laxatives in the Ladies, thinking that by the time they work I’ll be safely installed at Rosaleen’s. We carry on drinking until it is time to catch the coach. Then Claire and I stagger aboard, whacking other passengers on the head with our holdalls as we stumble to our seats.
A couple of hours later, horribly familiar feelings of fatigue begin to overwhelm me and my vision begins to blur. ‘Oh, my God!’ I think to myself, ‘the laxatives are working too early!’ Mixing laxatives with alcohol has been a bad move. ‘Here, use my bum as a cushion,’ says Claire, curling up in her seat. She has no idea I’ve taken laxatives – just thinks the drink has made me tired.
Sleep
