MY BODY, MY ENEMY: My 13 year battle with anorexia nervosa. Claire Beeken
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‘For your height you should be anything from a minimum of 8 stone 11 to a maximum of 10 stone 12,’ he says, consulting the Body Mass Index. He points to a red bit on a chart. ‘Your weight is right down here in the danger zone.’ Then he takes my pulse. ‘You are emaciated and your pulse is too low,’ he says, making notes in my file.
‘Have you heard of anorexia nervosa, Claire?’ he asks, putting his pen down and eyeing me over his glasses. ‘Yeah,’ I reply sullenly. ‘That’s what you’ve got,’ he says. But I don’t believe him. ‘No I haven’t,’ I insist. ‘What makes you say that, Claire?’ he asks. ‘Those people are really thin,’ I say.
‘Right,’ says Dr O’Donnell finally, ‘I’d like to see you every week and I am also going to refer you to the hospital, to someone who is experienced in these matters.’ Hospital! ‘Will I have to go to hospital?’ I ask, mortified. ‘You might have to,’ he says gently.
‘You shouldn’t have told them,’ says the bullying voice in my head. ‘That was weak, and now they’re going to make you extremely fat.’ An army of people are joining forces against me and I have to do something.
I tell Mum that I’m not going to take laxatives any more; but I lie and bury them under my bedroom carpet. I start to eat more regularly. For breakfast, I have a slice of Nimble toasted with the lowest of low-fat spreads. Dinner is a bowl of Weight Watchers minestrone soup. In the evening I have a roll with a wafer of cheese melted in the middle. It is a starvation diet; but I get away with it, because Mum and Dad know nothing about calories. They are just relieved to see me eat.
I am scared. I want to stop taking the laxatives which make me feel so ill, and I don’t want to end up in hospital. In a rash moment I give all my laxatives to Claire McCann. She puts them in her locker, and the instant she shuts the door I regret it.
I spin a story to Shirley, a girl at work, and she promises to get me some laxatives when she goes out at lunch-time. On her way back Shirley bumps into Claire and hands her the tablets to give to me. Claire goes ballistic. ‘Keep ’em, keep ’em!’ she shouts, taking all the laxatives from her locker and throwing them at me. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry!’ I plead, scrabbling around the floor to gather up the packets and thinking, ‘I’ve pushed her too far.’ ‘I can’t deal with this any more!’ she yells at me. ‘Please don’t stop being my friend,’ I cry. ‘I won’t,’ she says, calming down, ‘but I can’t cope any more.’ ‘Listen,’ I say, ‘I’ll have a sandwich’ – anything to pacify her. So we go up to the canteen and I eat a sandwich. Afterwards I go to the toilet. I am so intent on getting rid of the food that I don’t notice that my friend has followed and can hear me throwing up.
In desperation, Claire McCann rings her GP. She gets talking to the doctor’s receptionist, who says that her daughter Lesley is anorexic and has been for years. She wonders if Claire and I would like to come to her house the following night to meet Lesley.
‘So you hide yourself in baggy clothes,’ says Lesley, eyeing me up and down. ‘I always dress like this,’ I protest weakly, feeling awkward. Lesley is quite a bit older than me, and has short brown hair and massive eyes. Her top half is very thin but her legs are quite muscular because she exercises so much. ‘You won’t have any friends – I don’t,’ she says. ‘They stick you in hospital where you won’t be allowed visitors; you’ll be made to stay in bed and they won’t let you wash your hair. But,’ she adds, ‘your hair will fall out anyway.’ It sounds barbaric. ‘You’ll lose everything,’ she continues, ‘so, stop! Stop it now while you still can.’ But I don’t know how.
I start going to Lesley’s house on Sunday afternoons: Mum would stop me if she knew Lesley was anorexic, but she just thinks Lesley’s a friend of Claire McCann’s. When Lesley picks me up in her Mini, she’s usually wearing a duffle coat to keep out the cold and her little nose is always red. Lesley is a hardened anorexic, but she does allow herself proper meals after she’s been to aerobics: I am subsisting on fewer than 250 calories a day.
‘Get in the car, skinny,’ says Lesley, eyeing my stick-like legs beneath my black skirt. I am feeling cold and ill. My eyes have started to sink in their sockets and Mum and Dad are in despair. Up in Lesley’s room I huddle against the radiator. She’s been given a box of Quality Street. ‘I like the fudge diamonds,’ I say. ‘Would you like one?’ she says, rooting for the distinctive pink wrapper. ‘I can’t,’ I say, as she fishes out the sweet and holds it out to me. I want it, but can’t bring myself to take it. I am fat, dirty and disgusting and don’t deserve anything nice. ‘Go on,’ says Lesley. ‘I can’t,’ I insist. Lesley keeps on at me so, to shut 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.