It is a hot, slow September Saturday. Grace’s head is fuzzy and empty through hunger. She has only eaten an apple today. Mum is eating lunch with her friend in the cathedral café. Grace joins them. She stares at the food and orders a large Diet Coke. She eats some green salad too. Normal enough. There is numbness in the room. Everything is at a distance removed from her body. There are conversations flying off the walls and there is noisy cutlery and an intense smell of coffee. She feels her body pulse and her head throb. She walks to the car with mum and they start driving. They are going to buy some things for university – a suitcase, some pots and pans and plates. Grace has picked out the self-catering accommodation so that she doesn’t have to eat the university food. The thought of being fed, like school dinners, is too terrifying.

Grace tells mum that she is feeling tired. Mum implies that maybe it is because she isn’t eating enough and suggests that she makes her some food when they get home – some chicken and some potatoes. Grace chokes. There is a silence and a stiffening of her throat. The words get trapped. The throat won’t open to breathe or to speak for fear that it might ingest something impossible. Food is now an impossibility.

There are two words. Two small words, which open up a crevice of pain in the car.

‘I can’t.’

Perhaps if the second word had been different, the blackness/whiteness of the controlling and the not-eating would have stayed, and the game would have carried on. Perhaps if she had said, ‘I don’t’, ‘I refuse’, ‘I won’t’, then it might have sounded like there was someone in there fighting, someone with confidence and energy, someone on a determined drive, at least someone recognizable. But now, there was an admission. An admission so strange that the silence compressed the air to such a degree that everything went tight. In the ‘can’t’ there was so little fight, so little voice. Just non-oxygenated air.

The car stops and there are tears and a strange, unallowable conversation which suggests that somebody is angry with her. The conversation does not exist in real time, but in a blurred slow-motion where things just fall out of mouths and into space. The very presence of this conversation threatens everything. Grace decides to improve tomorrow – she must cut back on those apples.

Monday morning and things are grey. There is a doctor’s waiting room and two parents. Then they are inside the doctor’s office, and there are questions and speeches on her behalf. Everything is blank. Blank words and numbness. There is a heavy weight on her chest as she feels the walls of her breastbones stiffen. There is a prescription pad and a doctor confused by the entrance of three people who all look grey with worry, and one of whom looks very thin.

Suddenly a voice: ‘She can’t eat. She won’t eat. At first she cut out sweets and chocolates, then all she would eat was pasta, then only rice cakes and tuna, and now…we should have noticed before, but we just didn’t know what to look for. It seemed normal – just a diet, and then a bit more of a diet, and now we are blaming ourselves that we have watched it get to this stage. Now, she just seems sad. Not herself. She is secretive and quiet; she seems to be alone more. We don’t understand what is going on.’

The prescription pad is put down. Parents are ushered out.
There must be a conversation because it ends,

‘I think you have anorexia nervosa.’

Then there are parents again and decisions and agreements.

Then there are just tears. Endless, streaming tears. There is not even any energy to push them out; they just fall out of her eyes apathetically.

And secretly, there is a sense of pride and accomplishment. She now has a title: she is real and authentic. If she was an anorexic, then she was going to be the best anorexic there could be.

They drive back home in cold silence. The noise of the car heater drowns out the sound of their breathing. For the first time in ages she actually isn’t hungry. Her tears fill her mouth as she sits, rocking herself in front of the fire, dribbling over a bowl of Special K.