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

Later, bent with pain from the lumbar puncture and still getting headaches, I am dosed with painkillers and can’t face the hospital food. Over the next few days the nurses keep pestering me to eat, which I find irritating. ‘What’s the big deal?’ I say. ‘I’m not hungry.’ Then the threats start. ‘If you don’t start to eat, Claire, we’re going to have to feed you through a drip.’ They transfer me to the General Ward where, too weak to walk from lack of food, I lie watching the girl in the bed opposite. She has lots of aunts and is surrounded by boxes and boxes of chocolates they’ve brought in for her. I love sweets, and envy her as she absent-mindedly pops them into her mouth. She catches me staring and asks if I’d like a chocolate. ‘No, thank you,’ I say, rather surprised at the feeling of superiority it gives me.

I haven’t eaten for three or four days when the big bossy matron settles herself on my bed with a bowl of Weetabix. She’s smothered the cereal with sugar and poured on loads of milk – I loathe milk. ‘The doctor says you have to eat this, Claire,’ she says, thrusting the bowl under my nose. ‘I don’t want it,’ I protest. ‘I’m not hungry.’ ‘You’ve got to eat it, Claire,’ she repeats. ‘No, no, no,’ I insist. ‘I can’t!’ With that she holds my nose, my mouth springs open and in goes the spoon: it rattles against my teeth as matron tips the soggy mess down my throat. She repeats the process a couple of times and then lets me up for air. ‘If you don’t want me to do it, you’ve got to feed yourself,’ she says. Burning with humiliation, I eat the rest unaided.

I am scared of meal-times after that. Each morning I dread the rumble of the steel trolley bearing down on me with its unwanted load of Weetabix, cornflakes, puffed wheat and piles of white bread and butter. I hear the metal jugs of milk rattle and catch the nauseating smell of Ready Brek as it wafts across the ward. I’m not going to risk another force-feeding so I ask for Weetabix, and fling most of it into the cupboard by my bed.

Matron gets wise to my trick and makes me sit at the table in the centre of the ward with the other patients. ‘I’ve got to go to the toilet,’ I say to the chocolate girl one dinner-time and leg it down the ward to the toilets next to the painful room. I bolt the cubicle door and pray: ‘Dear Lord Jesus Christ, please don’t let them know I’m in here. Please don’t let them look for me. I can’t eat. Don’t let them find me. I promise I’ll eat tomorrow.’ There is an almighty bang on the door. Matron! ‘Claire, open this door. If you don’t, we’ll come in and get you!’ Sheepishly, I unlock the door and come out. Matron propels me to the table, but I howl and scream and will not eat.

‘I’m going to pull the wool over your eyes,’ I think to myself when the consultant is on his rounds next day. ‘Hello, Claire. How are you this morning?’ he asks. ‘Fine, really well,’ I say brightly. ‘I’m ready to go home.’ ‘You’re not eating much, Claire,’ he says, casting his eye over the chart at the bottom of my bed. ‘It’s the food in here,’ I say, with all the conviction I can muster. ‘Mum cooks lovely food; I’ll eat loads when I get home.’ ‘Okay,’ says the doctor. ‘You can go home.’ I can’t believe it. ‘Yes!’ I think. ‘I’m going to be Mary!’

Mum and Dad come to collect me the following morning. They’ve brought my brown polo-neck jumper and matching checked skirt for me to wear and, as Mum zips up the skirt, it spins round like a hoop on a stick. I can see by Mum’s face that she isn’t happy. Poor Mum and Dad; I’ve been in hospital for three weeks and meningitis has been ruled out; but I’m still having headaches and not eating properly. Worry puckers their faces as they exchange glances and go to speak to Matron, and I am convinced they aren’t going to take me home. ‘That’s it, I’m off!’ I think, starting for the exit, but I am so weak and full of painkillers that I collapse and throw up.

The consultant is called and I barely notice him slip the intravenous drip into the vein in the back of my hand. But half an hour afterwards I begin to feel much, much better. I spend a week rigged up to the drip and Granddad continues to visit me most afternoons. He sits on the bed, asks how I am and gives me a Mars Bar. ‘Thank you,’ I say politely, laying it to one side, safe in the knowledge that he won’t touch me because there are other people around.

One afternoon I actually feel like eating something, but I don’t want his Mars Bar. ‘I’m hungry,’ I say to Granddad. Looking pleased, he rushes off to tell a nurse. She comes over with the tea trolley. ‘I want that,’ I say, pointing to a little iced chocolate cake with a diamond jelly in the centre. As I bite into it the nurse says, ‘You know, if you eat we’ll take this drip down and you’ll be able to go home.’ ‘And then I can be Mary,’ I think to myself. So I eat, and 48 hours later I am home.

The whole family turns out to see me in the Christmas play. ‘Your daughter has the voice of an angel,’ says somebody else’s mother to my parents. Mum tells me afterwards that Granddad cried.

‘If someone hits you, you hit them back,’ Dad says when I come home from school in tears. I am the loner whom everybody picks on. A girl in my class keeps threatening to beat me up and, after Mum buys me a new coat, the bully dumps it in the bin. Other kids say I am ugly and that I smell, and because I’m so skinny they call me ‘Skeletal’, ‘Stick Insect’ and ‘Xylophone’.

I still feel funny about food and am not eating normally. I never eat breakfast. If I go home from school for dinner Mum gives me soup or a sandwich which I sometimes eat, sometimes not. When I take in a packed lunch, I throw the sandwiches away and stuff myself with sweets instead. Mum would have killed me if she’d known, but because I usually manage my tea she doesn’t realize I’m not eating properly.

After a while I stop telling Mum and Dad that I’m being picked on – they’ve enough to worry about with Lisa, and what is happening to me at school isn’t half as bad as what happens to me at Granddad’s.

At the age of 11, I start at Lealands High. Mum says, ‘Sit with people you don’t know, so you make more friends.’ But I don’t. I sit next to Yvonne whom I know from junior school. Yvonne is bullied too because she has no hair. She is having chemotherapy for leukaemia and has to wear a scarf, and people pull it off to make her cry.

‘When you are older and you’ve got a job, you’ll wish you were back at school,’ Dad says. ‘Bet you a million pounds I won’t,’ I reply. I hate everything about school with two exceptions – dance and music. Our dance and music teacher is a blonde lady called Mrs Patterson. She’s rather plump but she can dance, and is a real tra-la-laaaa singer. She knows how to put a show together and always gives me lead parts. ‘I’m the gypsy – the acid queen,’ I mime along to Tina Turner’s soundtrack. We are doing Orpheus and the Underworld using the music from the films Tommy and Grease. With my face painted silver, a glitter disco dress and my head swathed in snakes, I am the Acid Queen and Ian Carrington is the Devil. Mrs Patterson always pairs me off with Ian who is the best boy dancer. I do a back-flip over him and then we launch into ‘You’re The One That I Want’.

When I am singing and dancing I feel different – I let go of my problems and am light and free. I look forward to Tuesdays and Thursdays when we have dance and music, and always sneak off games and go to the dance room instead. ‘Patterson-lover’ the other kids call me, but I don’t care. I only once refuse Mrs Patterson. She wants me to play a bellydancer in a pair of see-through net trousers over red knickers and a little bra-top. It is like being in your underwear and there is no way I’m doing it because it shows my body, and I know Granddad will be coming to watch.