My Secret Life (12 page)

I usually hovered over the toilet a little longer after finishing my purge, afraid of standing upright too quickly and falling backwards from the rush. My weak hand still clutching a drowned ball of tissue, dabbed around my mouth. Head spinning and my shoulders shaking, I would lean over the sink and attempt to regain some of the lost consciousness.

Silence.

She was gone and in her place a cut-throat hush that lingered in the air. She had disappeared for now and I was the only thing that was left behind. In those moments, an iron curtain descended. There was no sky above me nor ground below me. For all I knew, all oxygen had been sucked from the planet into a vacuum elsewhere. Despite all the trust I’d placed in her, she never failed in the extent of her cruelty after purging. In the aftermath of my self-induced oblivion, I was truly alone and I hated it. She was not there to seduce me with words or intoxicate me with her thoughts. She left me alone in that hole and in that darkness to suffer. I knew this moment would come and yet had done what I was told anyway because I wanted to believe she would still be there afterwards. Instead, the naively anticipated hope of her reassurance was replaced with wounding guilt. I could not hide from the feeling because she burnt the bridges of comfort I walked upon. I had done this to myself. In those moments I knew she had never really been there and only I had caused this grotesque scene. It was my guilt to bear; not hers or anyone else’s. I owned that guilt like a crucifix strapped to my shoulders.

Slumping my way into the running shower, I turned the heat down. Propelled from the adrenaline, my skin usually scorched at an alarming temperature and I welcomed the cold water on my back. I was still weak and unable to stand. Consequently, I squatted down into the bathtub, icy water running from my head and down my spine. Too ashamed to so much as lift my head towards a world I was not worthy of, I pulled my knees up to my chest, held them tight and buried my face downwards. My head was too sore to cry but I could never hold back the tears. I wept helplessly beneath the heavy droplets from above. My back hurt the most now. It was like someone had wrapped the mouth of a wrench around my deteriorating spine; if I moved too suddenly, that mouth would shut instantly and surely fracture my bone like a twig.

I moved slowly, still shaking. When the time came to abandon my spot beneath the icy shower, I resumed my position above the toilet, beholding the masterpiece in all its horror. Before me I saw everything I hated about myself. All my darkness sat in front of me; my body and mind now cleansed of it. I had exorcised all the demons that corrupted my mind. And in the ever encroaching silence, hell no longer existed only in my head. It now surrounded me, staring me in the eye from the well of a toilet. But with one flush, I composed myself, knowing that the world outside the door was waiting for me again. Show time was drawing near once more.

Easy
, she soothed, finally returning to her place in some mental crevice.
Don’t let them know. It’s our little secret
.

There was no escape. I knew that the door between this place and that of the world beyond it would, in some way, be shut forever. Freedom was a lost dream and escape seemed to have never even existed.

***

I am ten years old. I don’t like doing knick-knacks because I know it’s bold and see how angry Mum and Dad get when it’s done to them. We will all be sitting together watching television, when the doorbell rings. Dad will answer it but the children who rang the bell have run off. When Dad comes back into the sitting room, he’s really angry and curses about the bold kids who did it.

I don’t want to be one of those naughty children, but here I am, playing knick-knacks on my neighbours. If Mum knew she would be so angry with me. We have targeted my next-door neighbour’s house and after three knick-knacks, the man who lives next door is fuming. We can hear him shouting in his sitting room about the children who keep doing it. While the girls laugh hysterically, all I can think about is how my Dad does the same thing when it happens to us. I wonder if my Dad or my neighbour, Mick, ever feel embarrassment that they are being picked on. When I think about this, suddenly I feel sick and guilty. I want to stop playing the game; not because I could get into trouble but because I feel as horrible as the children who do this to my Dad and wonder if it would upset him knowing that his daughter is just as bold.

The only reason we’ve played a knick-knack on Mick’s house so much is because we won’t get caught. When someone rings the doorbell, we all run to the lane at the side of my house. Though I’m too short, the girls are tall enough to reach over the gate and unhook the latch, releasing us into the back garden and keeping us safe when Mick comes into his driveway, his face red with anger and his hands on his hips. We hide behind the big gate, watching him through the cracks. The girls are battling with their silent chuckling and I’m simply trying to steady my breathing, while my heart races with fear and remorse.

‘It’s great we can get in here’ one of the girls says, fighting back the laughter. ‘We can do this all day!’

But I don’t want to do this all day. Aside from the growing twitch of guilt festering in my tummy, it’s nearly teatime and Mum will come outside to call me very shortly. But I can’t tell the girls I want to stop because then they’ll tell me I’m a goody two-shoes and won’t play with me again. Instead, I say I can only do one more knick-knack because I have to go inside for dinner soon. This seems to satisfy them. Because it’s the last one, the girls tell me that they want to watch from across the road.

‘I’ll go unlatch the gate now for you,’ one of them says walking back down the lane.

‘And then we’ll run over and hide behind the bushes,’ says the other. ‘We’ll wave at you so you know when to ring the bell.’ I don’t want to do this. Even though I’ve been playing the game, I’ve never rung the doorbell myself and just know I’m going to do something to ruin everything. But before I know it, the girls are running across the road and positioning themselves behind the hedges to watch. I’m standing alone waiting for their signal when panic sets in. I tell myself that I should have gone into my house ages ago. I should be sitting with my parents now, waiting for my dinner and out of trouble’s way. I consider just running inside now and not saying goodbye to the girls. In fact, my feet start to move in the direction of my front door when at long last, I see a white hand waving frantically from the bushes.

Frozen to the ground on which I stand, I’m trapped and now cannot get out of what I’m about to do. Not wanting to prolong the agony of my own guilt, I make up mind and run to Mick’s porch. In my head, I whisper to myself, ‘Just do it. Get it over with and go home.’ My finger presses the button before I even tell it to do so and not waiting to hold the buzzing sound for every long, I dart away, nearly taking the doormat with me. I reach the big gate down the lane and am so relieved to know that escape waits just beyond it. I push forward against the brown wood, only to realise that the door isn’t swinging open.

‘No, no, no, no!’ I start to shake it violently. I can hear the latch clicking every time I try to push it open. The girls never opened the latch. Now here I am, trapped on the wrong side of it.

The world feels like it’s closing in on me, as I desperately try to reach above the gate. I can feel the latch but I’m too short to fully unhook it. I jump up and down, trying to get a hold over it but it comes to nothing; that door is shut and I can’t get it open no matter how hard I try. All I can think is how much I wish I could get it open. Beyond it waits escape and safety. As it stands, I’m being held hostage by my own body on this side of it. If only I was taller and I could reach it.

‘You little...’ I hear behind me. Mick has discovered me trying to hide in the lane, still cowering at the closed gate. I’m backed into a corner now. Knowing that Mum will find out in a matter of moments and that the girls have probably disappeared, I press my hand to the wooden door and feel defeat beneath my hand. My mother sent me to bed without supper that night and rightly so; the poor woman had to endure a long and angry tangent from her neighbour. She suspected the girls’ involvement in the mischief but as I expected even then, they had been quick to disappear when trouble struck. I never sought to implicate them in the consequences and bit my tongue on the matter.

***

With my purge finally finished and my mind was calm once more, I stood in the bathroom, still exhausted and with my hand placed upon the wooden door, caressing it similarly to how I had done all those years ago. The barriers we face in life are so often the ones we create in our minds. As a child I couldn’t open that wooden gate because my body prevented me from doing so. As a teenager, it seemed I couldn’t open that door because my mind now held me hostage. The world that waited beyond it now was no longer one of safety or escape. Instead, I knew every time that I opened that door, it would be to a life of psychological insecurity and emotional entrapment. She – that cerebral leech who clung to all my thoughts – convinced me of this fact. Only with her could I find and maintain an asylum of mental armour.

I was still that frightened ten-year-old, snared on the wrong side of the gate. Still in that world of guilt and disgrace, I hovered at the door for a few moments after every purge. I would never be able to reach that latch at the back of my mind and I would never leave this place alive. This, I was sure of at least.

My post-purge experiences had the ability to vary greatly from day to day. Sometimes, I would be so revved up with adrenaline that my energy would manage to persist through the ordeal itself and long thereafter if required. For the most part, however, I underwent a form of lethargic paralysis. After slipping into some comfortable and, of course, baggy clothes, all I could bring myself to do was light up a smoke at the kitchen table. There was nothing like puffing on a cigarette after a purge. Together, she and I had been the puppeteers of our body, pushing it to all extremities and limits, only to finish with a divine sense of accomplishment. We had truly earned the fag to take the edge off.

Watching the smoke dance in front of my face, I recalled some of the first times I ever put a cigarette to my lips. After a mere two years of smoking, already the nicotine rushes had disappeared. Wasn’t that why I started; because the nicotine rushes were so good? I couldn’t remember. Probably not, anyway; I’ve no doubt I began smoking simply to fulfil my own ideal of what made me acceptable to my peers. Either that, or it had been a good substitute for weed, which I smoked for a time but simply couldn’t afford to continue with.

Whatever the reason, I very rarely got any kind of kick from cigarettes anymore. My smoking habit reminds me greatly of my purging. In the beginning, both had offered some degree of relief and satisfaction. But as time travelled on, each became something I was plagued with rather than something I chose to do. They were both addictions in their own right and even long after the action stopped providing the desired effect, I continued to smoke and purge relentlessly.

Initially, self-induced vomiting provided the escape I needed from everyday stresses. It was proof that I could use my body to satisfy the wailing hunger that penetrated my thoughts. Yet the feeling wasn’t sustainable. The first time I purged wasn’t long after Ami’s 19th birthday and at the time, it had provided me with a sense of exaltation; it was liberation from the food I had become so deathly afraid of. But purging soon became a daily occurrence and my memories of the collective hours spent vomiting up meals and sleeping thereafter have manifested exclusively into the aforementioned description. Thus, sometimes it’s difficult to remember why I did it in the first place, much the same I struggle to remember why I picked up my first cigarette.

Losing weight in general had the same effect, as I recall. We all know that feeling of stepping onto the scales after a difficult diet. You’ve been working very hard and hesitantly put your first foot atop the board. Still a little scared that for some unknown reason you’ll have shed no pounds at all, you hold your breath slightly, waiting for the verdict to tally down below. For me, the first time I saw the tremendous drop in numbers on the scales, I rode on a cloud of ecstasy. It was never going to last though, that feeling of unrestricted happiness. Moreover, no matter what I did, I simply couldn’t keep my weight down. It fluctuated for months from one extremity to the next, which I think is what scared loved ones the most. I wonder sometimes if what terrified them was how apparently ‘skinny’ I had become or simply the rate at which I could both drop and gain weight. Either way, I never wanted to let that momentary feeling of happiness go.

At first, I think I believed that if I could simply avoid gaining weight that it would be enough to sustain my elation. It was, for a while. Soon, though, I stopped being complimented on how wonderful I looked and the novelty of fitting into a size ten faded away. I just wanted to get that feeling back. In this way, I suppose it really was such an innocent pursuit on one level.

‘I just want to be happy.’ I uttered the words to myself time and time again. Such a harmless hope; I never knew what it could turn into. Happiness was a mere superficiality by that stage though and indeed, it isn’t impossible that in fact I didn’t really want it either. It was as if by keeping me miserable, she could control everything I did in my pursuit of this allusive and now entirely alien concept. Furthermore, I came to understand the notion of “self-harm” under a much broader dictation. Now cast under the heading of an “eating disorder victim”, in recent years I’ve had to simply widen my once narrow-minded scope on the complexity of human beings, both as a collective society as well as the individuals that compose it. Self-harm has been one of these complexities.

Much like an eating disorder or any other form of mental illness, I make the assumption that self-harming is an issue widely misunderstood and even still, I make no claim to knowing much about it. But the term did enter my head several times in one form or another during this period of my life. This is largely due to the fact that I saw my purging so often as a form of necessary punishment for the crime of my own worthlessness. Never before had I understood how or why any individual could take a blade to their own skin and indulge in tearing open the flesh.