My mother said, ‘I just don’t know why it always has to be my children.’
I was standing outside the supermarket and we were talking on the phone. It was cold and I’d been there for a while. I said, ‘I should probably go in and buy some dinner now,’ and she told me that she really loved me in a voice that was heavy, like something bad was going to happen. I nodded as if she could see me and then said, ‘I love you too.’
After I’d hung up and put the phone back in my pocket, I felt empty, as though I’d forgotten to tell her something important.
There weren’t many people inside, and I walked down the aisles very slowly, letting my shoes scuff on the floor. Aside from the tinny music playing somewhere above the shelves, it was quiet, and there was something about walking around an empty supermarket that made me feel as though I was in a film. Each movement became exaggerated or suggestive, as though the way I held the basket was a significant detail. At university I’d never used a basket when I went to the supermarket, I’d carried everything instead. For some reason it’d never occurred to me to use one, even when my arms were full. I thought about this as I stopped at a shelf of jarred sauces and rice and began to compare the calorie content between two packets of noodles. The one with the least amount of calories had more grams of fat and I didn’t know which one to choose. Sometimes decisions like this filled me with so much dread that I would abandon the idea altogether and get something else, but it was late and I’d been on the phone with my mother for a while, so I chose the packet with the least calories and decided not to think about it anymore.
Recently, I’d told my boyfriend Ryan about the basket thing, that my reason for not using one was because, subconsciously, maybe, I’d felt as though I couldn’t. He’d laughed at this, but not unkindly. We were talking in his living room, sitting at opposite ends of the sofa so our feet were touching. The television had flicked to standby and when I paused to take my cup from the coffee table, I’d felt a shift in the way my presence felt in his house, as though talking about these things now made it okay for me to be there, like I wasn’t a guest anymore. I’d tried to explain exactly what I’d meant about the basket, but it sounded clumsy and not how I’d imagined it sounding in my head. I said something about it being a personal challenge, some kind of ritual, or a luck thing. What I’d actually meant was that somehow I’d felt as though I wasn’t allowed to use one, but I didn’t know how to draw this feeling out of myself and put it into words.
I’d had a lot of rituals when I was young. I’d count all the syllables in a single sentence and add up the total in my head. I’d mash up all the food on my plate so there were no lumps or edges. I couldn’t sleep until I’d prayed to God at night. When I was a teenager, I counted all the calories in the food I ate and did two-hundred sit-ups in the morning and 200 in the evening. I exercised for an hour every day and ate cereal for breakfast and dinner (no lunch). After the shopping basket conversation, Ryan told me that I punished myself, and I’d said, ‘Probably yeah,’ because I’d always agreed with whatever anyone had to tell me about myself, even if it was something I didn’t like.
I picked up a carton of soya cream in the refrigerated aisle. My mother and brother are both dairy intolerant, and at some point I’d convinced myself that I was dairy intolerant too. I didn’t exhibit any of the symptoms of dairy intolerance, of course, but I felt better when I could diagnose myself with a genuine problem, as if giving my anxieties a name made them real. My mother had called me just as I was getting off the train. She’d told me that my younger brother Jacob had not been himself recently. He’d broken up with his girlfriend and hadn’t eaten in days, which I’d laughed at because it seemed like I should, even though my brother and I got on quite well.
He was devastated, she’d told me, because his girlfriend had slept with somebody else and he’d found out through a friend, and not her.
‘Wait,’ I’d said, ‘I thought he’d already dumped her?’ and my mother had said, ‘Yes, yes. I said that, didn’t I?’
I could hear her rattling around the kitchen, tugging at the cutlery drawer that was always stuck. I never liked talking to her over the phone when she was busy. She told me about parties and drunk texts and Instagram stories, despite not knowing what Instagram was. I was impressed by how she always seemed able to tell a story as if she’d been there herself, listing the names of friends that neither of us knew. ‘And that other boy,’ she’d said, ‘the one from Jacob’s Economics class, I forget his name… ’ The line went quiet and I knew she was thinking intensely. ‘Oliver, that’s the one. Yes, he might’ve been there too, but I’m not sure. Anyway… ’
My mother had a habit of tucking and untucking her hair behind her ears when she got flustered like this, and I’d started to notice myself doing the same thing. Her dairy intolerance was apparently the result of extreme stress, which was why I believed myself to have it as well. I knew that, really, there wasn’t anything wrong with me, that it was easier to tell myself that I wasn’t allowed certain foods than entertain the idea of eating them. I picked up a bottle of almond milk and read the back, even though I already knew there were 57 calories per every 250ml glass. There are some things you just don’t forget.
I didn’t eat after my first boyfriend broke up with me when I was eighteen. He was a couple of years ahead of me in school, though I hadn’t really known him until the summer before I went to study English Literature in Edinburgh. By the time we were going out we were both studying at different universities, so we only saw each other at the weekends or in the holidays. He wasn’t conventionally good-looking; he was the kind of pale you imagined really sick people to be, and he was small and bony. But my attraction to him ran so deeply that sometimes when I looked at him it felt as though my body had no end or beginning. When we were both home, I would go around to the house where he lived with his mother and grandma. We’d stay up late watching YouTube videos whilst drinking old spirits we found at the back of his grandma’s drinks cabinet.
I never felt like I needed to dress up for these occasions, but I always did. I would buy outfits that I imagined he would like to see me wearing: flowery skirts and blouses, cardigans with elbow patches. I wanted to be a nicer version of myself, and I felt as though wearing something pretty and wholesome would mean that I would somehow become just that. If he told me that he liked a certain top I’d worn, I would wear it over and over. Sometimes I’d wear it even if I’d forgotten to wash it. If it smelt bad, I would pretend to need the bathroom so I could spray it with deodorant and wash under my arms with hand soap. I was always doing things like this when I was younger: sidling off to a toilet to reapply my make-up or pop a zit, or even change outfits if I’d caught my reflection in a window and thought that I looked fat. I never considered myself to be pretty, but when I turned eighteen I became acutely aware of my appearance, the way the backs of my legs might look to someone walking behind me, even the chubbiness of my fingers. My face was pocked with small patches of acne that never seemed to fade, and my hair was tough and straight and broken-ended in a way that reminded me of dried spaghetti, so I curled it every single day. When I stayed at my boyfriend’s house I would even get up earlier than him so I could curl it before he woke up. I’d creep out of the bed, plug in the straighteners and quietly sit in front of the tiny mirror on his desk, anxiously winding handfuls of hair around the iron whilst checking that he wasn’t suddenly awake and watching me. These moments were always so highly charged and frantic and not at all exciting. Even when it was done I would look at my desperate expression in the mirror and feel guilty or disgusting or both.
Despite this, when I moved to Edinburgh for university, I began to feel a strange, unfamiliar confidence in my situation. I carried myself differently, as though I mattered. Having an older boyfriend who played in a band filled me with the sense that I was different to my classmates. Wiser, cooler. I liked telling people that I was going to London for the weekend to watch his band play. Then I’d blow out smoke and change the subject as though I didn’t really care anyway. The friends I made would ask if the distance between us bothered me, if I worried about what he might be doing in his free time. I told them that it didn’t, but this was a lie. I clamoured for him during the weeks and sent him long text messages and stories and playlists I’d made for him online. If I knew he was out I would leave whatever I was doing and go home to sit in bed and wait for him to call. But in a way I enjoyed being apart from him too. It felt like I was being given extra time to make myself better. To get new clothes, to lose weight. If he told me that I looked thinner when we next saw each other, I would be happy all weekend. I would feel as though I’d achieved something and eat all the things I never let myself eat. It was always sad when we said goodbye, but on the train back I would fantasise about the days ahead of me, how much better I could be next time.
I thought about the conversation with my mother as I wondered about maybe buying porridge or cereals for breakfast again. This was another idea that I’d end up abandoning. This one has too many calories and this one has too much sugar. ‘What’s the point?’ I’d said to her. ‘Jacob broke up with her. She’s allowed to sleep with someone if she wants to.’
‘Of course she is,’ my mother said, and I’d imagined her bristling up like a cat, snapping a dishcloth at the flies in the kitchen. ‘It’s not that she did it, that’s not the problem. It’s that she did it and she didn’t tell him about it. Jacob hates dishonesty. I hate dishonesty.’
I’d wanted to say, ‘Well, no one likes dishonesty.’ But I didn’t.
I walked down the bread aisle and saw a guy in uniform snapping REDUCED stickers onto packets of hotdog rolls and burger buns. He looked bored and the overhead lights gave his skin an oily sheen. We avoided making eye contact as I passed. I’d seen him working before at the tobacco stand. In fact I was in the supermarket so much that I recognised most of the people that worked there, though I always hoped they didn’t recognise me. I only ever paid at the self-scanning checkouts as I didn’t want the person serving to analyse the contents of my basket. I’d eaten a lot when I was a kid. I would spend all my pocket money on junk food and eat whole packets of biscuits alone in my bedroom. I was a small child, and I remember adults commenting on this, picking up my wrists and shaking them around. ‘Just look,’ they’d say, and I wouldn’t get it because being slim isn’t an achievement for children in the that way it is for adults. I got called ‘pretty’ a lot, and people were always giving me things like 20p coins or Freddo bars. I started to gain weight as I got older, though it wasn’t something I particularly cared about. I remember sticking my belly out as I stood in front of the mirror in my sister’s bedroom to make it look like my pregnant mother’s, and I’d felt good then, like this was what becoming a woman was.
But when I started secondary school in a different town, I was overwhelmed by just how many other pupils there were, how easy it was for people not to like you. I got called names in the corridors by older boys who didn’t know me, and everyone looked at each other in the changing rooms as we put on our PE kits. One boy in my class called me a man whore, and even though I didn’t know what that was I thought that he was probably right. I started reading teen magazines a lot, where there were stories about girls who drank too much and push-up bras and what to wear on your first date. I wanted to look like the girls in the adverts, wanted short skirts and breasts that were high and round. I read an article about a girl who starved herself until her parents took her to a rehabilitation centre and I was envious of how emaciated she looked in the photographs.
Six months into our relationship, my boyfriend broke up with me and then slept with another girl, just like that. Like Jacob, his friend had told me about her, how he’d seen her messages on his phone, and I remember thinking, I’ll never eat again. That same week I’d gotten drunk every night with whatever friends were up for it just so I felt too sick and tired to eat, and then suddenly he appeared outside my dorm building. He’d come all the way from Bristol to tell me that he was sorry, and it’d seemed like the most romantic thing to just turn up like that and ask to get back together. I wondered now if Jacob’s girlfriend might do the same.
We were together for exactly three more weeks before he broke up with me again, and when he did I stayed in bed for two days. I told my mother about the whole thing, and she made my father drive her to Edinburgh to see me. They’d been divorced since I was three years old, but somehow they’d managed to stay reasonably friendly with each other. They took me out for lunch and told me all the things that should’ve made me feel better, that were meant to make me feel better, but instead made me feel even more pathetic. I’d picked the batter off the scampi on my plate as they said things like, ‘You’re so smart,’ and, ‘He just doesn’t know what he’s missing,’ and I felt as though I might randomly projectile vomit. After that, I developed an irrational fear of throwing up, so I began to carry a sick bag around with me, just in case.
In the supermarket, I went to the frozen aisle to look at the desserts, which was something that I did a lot, and told myself that I could buy something and it would be a nice thing to do, to come home and say ‘I got dessert!’ and Ryan and I could eat dinner and watch TV and share a tub of ice cream, even a low calorie one.
On the phone, my mother had said, ‘Do you remember how cut up you were, when that boy did the same thing to you all those years ago?’
At the time, a friend had told me that I would never forget what’d happened, but in actual fact I didn’t think about it at all. I hadn’t thought about it, really, until this evening. But sometimes in conversations I would listen to somebody talk about a cheating ex-partner and I would remember how quickly food can rush up from your stomach into your mouth. I could always recall the physical reactions, the dryness in your throat, the way your insides cramp when you haven’t eaten for a day, but I never thought about emotional hurt or pain or crying. I was proud of myself for not letting it affect me, like I’d overcome something traumatic and was better for it.
I opened the freezer door and nearly reached out for a small carton of something dairy free that had NO SUGAR! NO FAT! written on the front in bright letters. I could cycle on the exercise bike I’d brought along with me when I moved in with Ryan a few months ago. We’d been together for two years, and he was very accepting of my insecurities. I felt as though, on some level, I’d begun to accept them too, even if in accepting that I would never be thin again also made me feel as though I’d failed. The glass was steaming up, so I shut the door and moved on and thought that it was probably best to not have anything at all because I’d only feel bad about it later. Ryan tells me that I worry too much, but I guess we’re still learning to understand each other.
‘Maybe you should send your brother a text or something,’ my mother had said, ‘just to let him know you’re there for him,’ and I started composing a text in my head as I walked towards the checkouts. Hey Jacob, I heard about everything. So sorry, man. Sometimes these things happen and it sucks, but I really hope you’re taking care of yourself. I didn’t even look at the shelves as I passed, instead I stared ahead at a blank woman scanning items at the conveyer belt on the other side. I focused on her with such intent that she appeared to shrink and stretch further away from where I was, no matter how close I got. Then it became a race and I started walking faster. Hey Jake. Listen, she was a douche. Make sure you eat. You’ve got to eat. Then I tried not to blink and I held my eyes open so they teared up and prickled but I kept going and I didn’t blink at all and the shelves began to spin in the corners of my eyes but I looked straight ahead and I was holding my breath and soon the woman in her yellow T-shirt scanning dog treats and toilet rolls got bigger and bigger and I arrived at the other end lightheaded and new. Hey Jacob, I’m so sorry to hear about what happened and I hope you’re okay. This happened to me too when I was around your age and it feels really shitty, but it passes, I promise it does. You won’t even remember it in the years to come.
At the checkout there was a display of chocolate bars, and I thought about how good it would be to just be a person who buys one like it doesn’t matter.