Thin by Grace Bowman Read Free Book Online Page B

might be telling them, or not telling them. But this specific something they did not know how to look for. And when it did arrive, it took a while to be able to interpret it, and decipher what it was all about, and where it was heading. It came suddenly, over the course of a short few months. It came without warning and it came silently. So silently. She was there; a vibrant, full, loving daughter, maintaining a balanced control. She was not excessive or extreme, she was not overly rebellious, nor acutely shy and quiet, she was strong and she was fun, or so they thought. Then she disappeared behind an invisible layer – a see-through layer – and all of a sudden she was gone.
    Dad and Grace go to the botanical gardens. They walk round and round. Grace feels a sort of excitement, tinged with a strange sense that she is outside of her body and that this can’t be happening to her. The cases are packed, her bedroom is cleared out, she surely couldn’t
not
go to university. How would that happen? How would that sort of thing work out? She has a room paid for, a place taken. What will they do when they call out the register and there is no answer to her name? What will the other students think about her? Will someone tell them the story, or will they just bypass it/her? Dad tells her that it is OK, those things will just be handled for her, because when you have anorexia people do things for you. Other people take care of the hard things, like ringing up a university and speaking to people over the phone, making cancellations, getting refunds, checking you out, without you having to do anything but listen through the door to phone conversations, where parents notify strangers of your illness on your eighteen-year-old behalf.
    Grace lies on the beige carpet and finishes her sit-ups. She wonders what her friends are doing, the people who left her behind and went to university. It would have been her first week at university too, had this thing not got in the way. It would be Freshers’ week: a new, crazy, drunken start; a new room; new people. But instead, she has a sinking sense of reversion; like walking backwards, like a video on slow rewind. Things are all out of time. And so she slinks quietly into the background of her growing-up house.
    ‘I’m still here,’ she feels like saying. ‘Just a little less. A little less of me.’
    But they look blankly straight through her: the pain is too much.
    She wakes up to the sound of the six-thirty milkman. Her sleep is now light and fragile, like her body. It is difficult to shut down the mind at night as a headful of words cascades towards her, thoughts thumping intensely. She re-counts the day of food and drink meticulously through tables, numbers and equations. Everything has to be weighed out, measured exactly, or she feels unable to breathe, seized by an embracing panic around her throat. She feels her chest tighten with each reminder of the day’s food failures, she turns over with the stabbing thought of each ingested item, aching inside with regret. Today, as always, there is no sense of quiet as she rolls over for the fiftieth time, attempting to find a position where her bones don’t rub against the springs of her old mattress, and where she cannot feel every ounce of skin as it moves and slides below her.
    She always wakes up this same way, startled by the light; gripped by the fear that life can possibly exist without her; her own internal and petrifying alarm rising from her stomach through her ribcage and into the base of her throat. It jolts her with its force, pushing up from within, and sheis faced with an instant and horrifying reminder of her constant addiction. She simply can’t lie still for long. She tries to force her eyelids shut by pressing them together with her fingers, she tries to fall back into the dream world without physicality and without contact, but she seems to physically ingest each second and choke. Stifled by her own bed she can feel only