Claire Beeken - MY BODY, MY ENEMY - My 13 year battle with anorexia nervosa

I think I might have dreamed what Granddad did, but the pain between my legs tells me it’s real. He said he did it because he loves me, and I believe him. Granddad makes me feel special and, with all the attention on my sick little sister, I need to feel special. I know that Mum and Dad love me, but I am jealous of Lisa and her illness which takes up so much of their time. Granddad is showing me all this love and at first I want to hold on to it. ‘Don’t you love me today, Granddad?’ I say when he doesn’t touch me.

What he does to me hurts, but I switch my mind to other things: meadows, flowers, whole episodes of Coronation Street. I lie there re-enacting the antics of Jack and Vera Duckworth and Hilda Ogden in my head, while the white-faced alarm clock by my grandfather’s bed ticks away my childhood. Afterwards I feel like a zombie. I eat the Mars Bar he always gives me and walk home in a daze – alone if it is daylight, under grandfatherly escort if it is dark.

‘Why are you always kissing Claire, Granddad?’ asks my cousin. We are sitting watching television while the rest of the family are outside. Granddad keeps coming back indoors, leaning over the back of the settee and sticking soggy kisses on my forehead. Granddad doesn’t answer the question, but looks down at me and winks. I feel awkward in the spotlight of my grandfather’s attention, and wish I could fall between the settee cushions like a lost penny.

I love Granddad, but what he’s doing doesn’t feel right and I need to know if it is normal. ‘What does your Granddad do with you?’ I quiz a girl in my class at school. ‘Oh, he takes me to the park and buys me ice cream and we have fun,’ she breezes. ‘Does he cuddle you?’ I ask. ‘Yes, he cuddles me,’ says my classmate. ‘What else does he do?’ I probe. ‘Nothing, why?’ she says. ‘No reason,’ I reply, changing the subject quickly.

I start being frightened to go to my grandparents’ house on my own. Grandma goes away a lot – to her sister’s or her son’s, and once to see her brother in Canada for a six-week holiday. ‘Why don’t you go down and see Granddad?’ Mum would say. ‘You know you’re his favourite.’ I’d feel the familiar scream rise up inside me: ‘But I don’t want to be Granddad’s favourite. It doesn’t make me feel good. I don’t feel right being Granddad’s favourite.’ But my pain never slips out. Instead it moulders away in my head. I begin to develop searing migraines, and lie clutching my head while a rat seems to gnaw inside my skull. I cry a lot too, but never in front of anyone. I huddle up in my bed under the window, and through my tears I pray to God to take me away. I am always saying sorry to Him because I think I must be really bad. Why else does He let it keep happening to me? Why else am I being punished?

My 10th birthday is in April, and around this time my headaches become more frequent. I am also finding it difficult to eat – I can’t shake the feeling that a bad thing will happen to me if I put something in my mouth. Mum and Dad don’t notice at first, probably because I’ve been a difficult eater since the day I was born. During my first few months I had a bad chest and couldn’t eat and breathe at the same time; I had to be fed like a little chick, every hour, 24 hours a day. The cine-film of my christening shows me looking like a war baby in a television news report.

I grow to be a faddy eater and particularly loathe school dinners, which annoys the dinner lady, Mrs Bacon. Her real name is Mrs something else but for some reason I’ve got it into my head that she’s called Mrs ‘Bacon’. One day, when I am six, she insists I stay behind to eat the dinner which, as usual, I have barely touched. The other children scatter to the playground, and I am left in the dining hall listening to their distant shouts. Mrs Bacon sits over me in her sickly-patterned overall and makes me eat. ‘I’m going to be ill if you make me eat any more,’ I say, staring into my bowl of semolina. ‘You’ve got to eat it,’ she insists. I take another mouthful and my body gives a tremendous heave. Out fly the cabbage, the mash, the meat and the semolina with its little dollop of pink jam – all over the blue Formica tabletop and onto the floor. Mrs Bacon looks horrified, and shoos me off to the medical room as fast as she can. With a feeling of relief, I leave her to cover my dinner with the powdery disinfectant that always lies like a sand-dune after somebody has been sick.

As I get older, I refuse to eat anything resembling an animal or fish. I’ll happily tuck into sausages, beefburgers and fish-fingers but won’t touch sliced ham, roast beef or lamb. I eat chicken – but not the skin – and for some reason I never eat sandwiches unless they’ve been made by me or my mum.

Mum and Dad have always taken it for granted that I am a fussy, skinny kid, but when I get even fussier and skinnier during the autumn of 1980, they start to worry. After I’ve been off school for several days with a migraine and unable to manage any food at all, Mum takes me to the doctor. My plummeting weight and excruciating headaches point to meningitis, and I am whisked into the Children’s Annexe of Luton and Dunstable Hospital for tests.

At first they put me in a room on my own and I hate it: I pick at the awful food and am bored because I’m not allowed out of bed. Worst of all I am missing school. I hate school too, but I’ve been cast as the Virgin Mary in the school Christmas play. Grandma gave me a painted statue of the Virgin which I keep on the sill in my bedroom and carefully lift down onto my bed to dust. She is my pride and joy, and it has been my dream to play Mary since I was in the Infants. Rehearsals for the play have started, and I am worried that my understudy will get her hands on my part while I’m in hospital. Her name is Fleur: ‘It’s French for flower, you know,’ she says snottily.

After a couple of days, Dad brings in the small black-and-white TV we take on camping holidays. I am lying in bed watching the end of Tiswas when a nurse comes in. She sits down and says she’ll read me a story from Black Beauty – I love Black Beauty, and like to pretend that I am Jenny. I settle down to listen to the story, but the nurse says, ‘You’re going to have a lumbar puncture this afternoon.’ ‘Is it going to hurt?’ I ask. ‘A little bit,’ she says, looking away and launching into the story. I can tell by her face that she’s lying.

The painful room is through the double doors at the far end of the ward. Where blood tests are taken and injections given, it contains a bed and a screen and looks out over the hospital garden. A doctor and four nurses fill the room, and although I can’t see any needles, I can smell them. ‘Hop up on the bed, Claire, and turn over onto your front,’ the doctor says from behind his white mask. Rigid with fear I lie down on the bed. The nurses close ranks around me and arrange my body for the procedure. I am wearing a paper gown which ties up at the back, and no knickers, and my bottom lies cold and exposed. Wham! – in goes the injection. I shriek with shock and kick out at the nurses. They press down on my back and hold my legs and arms. ‘If you let us do it, it will be over very quickly,’ says one of the nurses. After an interval I hear him instruct the nurse ‘And again!’ Bam! – in goes another injection. I thrash like a harpooned seal, and scream and scream until the sedative takes effect and there’s no scream left. Then they turn me onto my side and insert the biggest needle of all into my spine to extract fluid from around my brain, and I don’t feel a thing.