MY BODY, MY ENEMY: My 13 year battle with anorexia nervosa. Claire Beeken
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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 is impossible. I close my eyes, but rows of dots keep realigning for my inspection and sharp little stabbing pains start in my chest. My grumbling stomach begins its agonizing grind to a crescendo – ‘Oh my God, here it comes!’ I think. An almighty spasm shoots through me and I have just seconds to scramble over Claire and rush to the loo. The pain is excruciating – my insides seem to be cascading into the toilet along with their contents. I cling to the toilet seat and boil with a terrible fever. A high-pitched buzzing fills my ears and everything goes black. When the pain subsides and my vision clears I clean myself up as best I can, and head back to my seat, barely able to walk. ‘Thank God that’s over,’ I say to myself. Only, with laxative abuse, it’s never over and, as the coach rumbles through the night, I am forced to scuttle backwards and forwards to the disgusting toilet.
Scotland is a nightmare. It is freezing and I am forced to eat more than usual to keep out the cold and stop people commenting. I shovel down tablets at all times of day and night to make up for it. We hire a car and do a lot of sightseeing, and I am forever having to rush to the toilet. After we get back from a visit to Edinburgh Castle, I am chattering away to Rosaleen’s dad when suddenly I freeze, and burst into tears. I’ve had a terrible accident! ‘Are you okay?’ says Rosaleen’s father. ‘Can I have a bath please?’ I sob. ‘It’ll take a while for the water to heat up,’ he says, looking bewildered. ‘I’ll have a cold one,’ I say. ‘Yes,’ I hear him say, as I race up the stairs, ‘Go ahead.’
Most nights we go out drinking – Claire, Rosaleen and I – and because I am so starved it only takes a couple of drinks before I’m away with the fairies. One night, after we’ve come in late, I go into the kitchen to get a glass of water. A tiny crumb lies on the counter, next to a sponge cake that Rosaleen was given on her hen-night five days before. The cake is stale now, and nobody has thought to throw it out. ‘I want this,’ I think, eyeing the weeny crumb with its titchy bit of icing. Guiltily, I pick it up and stick it on the tip of my tongue. ‘I need this,’ I say to myself, quickly picking a little corner off the cake and popping it into my mouth. I grab a bigger piece and shove it in; then another, and another. My iron rule over my starving body snaps and I turn into an eating machine. My mind hums with nothingness, as I sit on the floor with the cake and shovel it into my emptiness.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ says Claire, gazing in horror at the sight of me on the floor, ramming down the stale cake. She forces my mouth open and flicks out the cake, whacking the rest from my hands. ‘Get up!’ she orders. ‘I want it,’ I whimper helplessly, as she scoops up the cake and heads out of the back door with it to the dustbin. I stay on the floor and sob as if my heart will break. ‘It’s okay,’ says Claire, coming back in and rushing to hold me. ‘It’s okay.’ ‘Please don’t leave me,’ I sniff