Small Acts of Disappearance (11 page)

When Rose becomes ill, her hunger is a weapon, because it frightens those around her, as I was always aware that mine did, with a strange and spiteful satisfaction that I've never really understood. Rose's anger is mostly directed at her mother, an ageing, alcoholic small-town beauty, too narcissistic and too disappointed to find space in her heart for her young daughter. But it's her father's heart that Rose's hunger breaks: a gentle, generally taciturn man, all Sam Pickles knows to do is ‘joke around it'. When I re-read
Cloudstreet
in those waiting rooms it was this that hit me hardest, Sam's tableside interaction with his thin and distant daughter, a conversation that I barely remembered from my previous reading:

Jesus, Rose, you look like a corpse these days. It's a crime you know, he says quietly, a bloody crime.

I get fat.

You haven't been fat since you were hanging off a tit… You have to start eatin again. It's not a joke anymore, love.

I can't, Dad.

Christ, you must be starving hungry!

I am. But I can't any more. I just toss it up again.

Bullshit, you've just talked yourself off yer tucker. Siddown an eat some with me…You'll bloody die if you don't eat.

Dad, I can't…

Give yourself some.

Dad.

Put some on your plate. Go on…Eat, Rose…

She spears a snag and bites it in half, chews recklessly and feels it slip down greasy and fine tastin.

All of it.

She can't see him for the waterblur now, but she eats and lets her cheeks run…she's up and running for the door with it all ramming upwards in her before she can even think about it…She just wants to disappear.

I'll always remember the unconscious hiss of air through my father's teeth, the sad and frightened look he gave me as I walked outside in the sleeveless cocktail dress I wore at my brother's wedding, the armholes gaping under my scraggly shoulders, the veins raised and ridge-like down my arms, the professionally made-up eyes huge in my head. That same sound he'd made weeks earlier, at a family barbecue, after he'd told me about the varieties of meat he was going to cook. I wasn't angry about this, just sad: he didn't know how to speak to me at all when I was at my sickest, when I tried to make desperate, deluded jokes about my size. How terrible and inconceivable these things must be for fathers, whose bodies have never been political in the same way as their daughters', who can't understand why we can't just eat and save our lives.

But even as I remember the number of times I've cried at dining tables, I remember that overwhelming desire to simply disappear.

My mother too used to ask me if I thought it was her fault, if there was anything that she could have done differently; I can't imagine how often she must have wanted to intervene. But my hunger is, has always been, something that I can own, something that is mine alone, and it's just this that makes it so hard to let go of. Rose has nothing she can call her own within the over-crowded, noisy house at Cloud Street, within the family where she's become the nurturer, at age sixteen. Rose doesn't own her time, her space, her body; but her hunger is her own, and preciously so.

Yet Rose recovers. It happens in the background of in the book, as other characters move to the foreground, until she relapses, years later (I know now that this happens so often that it's almost considered a normal part of the process). Eventually, though, Rose pulls herself clear of her hunger, swimming in the Swan River and falling pregnant to her new husband, the sad-eyed Quick who grew up right next door. Even so, she still recognises that there is a ‘shadow in her, this dark eating thing inside' and ‘sense[s] that it'd always be with her.' I didn't remember this line from my earlier reading of
Cloudstreet,
but it resonates profoundly with me now. The body doesn't forget. Perhaps my hunger will be
carried with me always, together with the things that drive it – my tenacity, my determination, and my writing above all else. They're dark within me, still, and I don't know what to make of what persists.

My second admission was a split one, interrupted by the four weeks around Christmas and the New Year, that intense period of family, functions and food that can be difficult even for people who aren't ill or anxious. I was rudderless over those weeks, still raw; all of my specialists were on holidays, all of my routines disrupted by the season. I spent a few days with my parents on our annual family holiday, to the same coastal town we've been visiting each January for over twenty years. I walked along the waterfront each morning, with joggers and cyclists sweeping past, all wrapped in tight nylon. My mother smiled and squeezed my shoulder each time I ate a piece of toast mid-morning, or took a single chocolate from the box installed on the kitchen shelf. I swam in the surf and let it buffer me about; I read on the balcony in the afternoons, watching children walking back from the lolly shop on the corner with white paper bags clutched in their fists, beach towels wrapped around their waists. I was so afraid of slipping. On that balcony, feeling suspended, I read Carmel Bird's
The Bluebird Café.

I knew nothing about the book when I chose it from the second-hand bookshop near my house, but I instantly loved the staginess of its set-up:
The Bluebird Café
is a kind of
absurd mockumentary, complete with a cast list and glossary, about the establishment of the Historical Museum Village of Copperfield, a recreated town built beneath a huge glass dome, somewhere above the hills surrounding Launceston. To celebrate the opening of the Museum Village, a playwright with connections to the area has been sought out and commissioned to write about the old town; she is Virginia O'Day, who first came to live with her aunt and cousins in Copperfield as a seventeen-year-old, in her family's last-ditch effort to cure her anorexia.

What's remarkable about Virginia's illness in this book is the way the adult, healthy Virginia's perspective, given in a series of publicity interviews about the commission, interacts and intersects with her morbid teenage perspective, which in turn is mostly presented in diary entries. Virginia, in both incarnations, is always eloquent, articulate and self-aware. She is a writer, even as a seventeen-year-old, and her writing is a part of her pathology, as well as one of the things that pulls her clear.

As a teenager, Virginia's writing is her only means of asserting her selfhood, her way of imagining something more than what Launceston has to offer. Virginia wants to be different from her family, whom she sees as ‘fakes', and to escape the future of university, teaching, marriage, that they have planned for her. The teenage Virginia sees this ‘settling down' as nothing less than a kind of slow death; writing offers her a small rebellion:

I am supposed to get married and settle down in Tasmania forever. ‘Settle down' suggests to me that I am now an active volcano, but if I do the right things I will stop exploding and bubbling and seething and throwing up rocks and I will gradually become less and less active…and then go to sleep and then die altogether…[but] I will continue to lose weight and I will continue to write [my novel]
Savage Paradise,
and when the book is published I will be so thin, and there will be so many shocking scenes of violence and passion in the novel that I will be forced to leave home in disgrace.

The teenage Virginia throws thinness, violence, passion together as the transgressions that are her only power. The adult Virginia recognises her younger self's desire to escape, her desire for disgrace, but is conscious now too of the fear behind it, the fear that plagued that younger self and fed her hunger. She tells the interviewer:

When I left school I didn't want to go to university and become a teacher and get married and so on. I didn't even want to grow up; I didn't want any responsibility…I was terrified of being an adult, of getting old and dying. I was even prepared to die young in a perverse attempt to cheat death. So I began to starve myself…[these] are conclusions I have come to over the years.

There's so much story hinted at in the differences in these accounts, so much hard-won change that really
appealed to me, at a time when I was constantly revising and reshaping what I thought I knew about my self, my life and my disease.

Virginia's hunger is always explicitly tied to death, which seems to offer her the ultimate escape from her family and fate – perhaps the only escape that her adolescent self is able to envision – but it is also a sacrifice and a transcendence. Virginia's fast began, according to her sister, after a teacher suggested that her students give up eating meat as an offering or penance for a dead schoolmate's soul in Purgatory. Virginia, alone amongst her classmates, takes this advice so far as to stop eating altogether. She starts planning her funeral (‘she's made a will with a description of the flowers and the music and the prayers…What she has is an incurable condition,' her sister states). Her uncle describes her as having ‘a look of saintly self-denial and smugness'. Even her name, Virginia, is saintly, but also eternally childlike, untouchable, aloof.

The teenage Virginia constantly describes her own death, and writes too about things and people that have disappeared: the Indigenous inhabitants of Copperfield, her mother as a girl. My favourite of Virginia's imagined deaths occurs in the younger woman's diary, after she reads that adipose fat cells in corpses left in water become ‘suet-like' in consistency as they decompose. She writes:

I like to think that if I ever did drown and stay in the water for a long time I would have so little fat on my body I would not
turn to suet. Suet is one of the most horrible substances I have ever seen.

‘The body of a young woman which was washed up at Rocky Cape had undergone virtually no adipocene change owing to the almost total absence of fat in life. The coroner said “If this girl has been in the water for the length of time suggested by the weight of evidence, I am inclined to suggest she had been subjected to a rigorous program of starvation prior to death. I support this theory with further evidence that the stomach of the deceased woman was in fact in a remarkably shrunken state, and was completely empty of food.” Relatives of the deceased are being questioned concerning the young woman's diet and eating habits over the past year and a half.'

In those waiting rooms, I was always thinking, I'm not as sick as her, so I'm okay. I never thought, when I was hungry, about my death because I thought that my hunger, the way that I was eating, was what I needed to do in order to stay alive, in order to manage and live with my physical condition. A doctor told me, at twenty-five, I had a metabolic age of twelve, and I thought this proved that I was fit and strong and well. In the lead-up to my first admission, I was given a letter to take to my GP, outlining the care that I would need:

In the initial stages of treatment, it is recommended that the patient has the following fortnightly blood tests and assessments: Hormone levels (oestrogen, progesterone, luteinising hormone, follicle stimulating hormone); vitamin D;
bone mineral density; pulse and blood pressure; electrolytes, urea, creatinine, calcium, magnesium, phosphate, potassium, blood glucose level; white blood cell count; liver function, thyroid function; allergy diagnosis (self-reported allergies from eating disorder patients are often not reliable); body temperature. An ECG conducted monthly.

Heart, kidneys, liver, thyroid, hormones, bones: I hadn't realised that so much could be going wrong. The nurse who stuck the ECG stickers on my sternum, wrists and ankles, in a half-circle underneath my prune of a left breast, clicked her tongue whenever she touched me. ‘No good,' she said, ‘so skinny, no good at all.'

But what's interesting about Virginia's invented newspaper report is not so much her fascination with her own death – it's been a part of her illness from the very beginning – but the implicit punishment of her family in the last line. Like
Cloudstreet's
Rose, like Teresa in
For Love Alone,
Virginia wields her hunger like a weapon, against a father who doesn't recognise or credit her desire to be a writer, and her mother, who has accepted the same conventional future that Virginia's father sees for her (university, marriage, children) and has even come, in her imagination, to embody it.

Virginia writes, ‘My mother is so fat. She is fat and disgusting and she is so busy doing good works in the world and working for charity she wouldn't even know if I fell down dead.' Virginia's thinness visibly and violently
differentiates her from her mother, Margaret O'Day – Margaret is as fat as Virginia is thin, but they otherwise look very similar. Virginia's uncle describes Virginia as ‘a pale, faded milky impression of her mother' and their destinies too are designed to resemble one other. Virginia has seen photos of her mother, slim and beautiful, in her youth; Margaret's weight gain is said to have occurred in bursts after the birth of each of her seven children. But alongside child-bearing and child-rearing, Virginia aligns other duties of domesticity, especially cooking and entertaining, with fat – and from this is borne her fear. In another extract from her diary, she writes:

Were all the fat women with shopping bags and tribes of children once graceful brides with shining hair and shining eyes?…The dainty hands have mixed and moulded and manufactured jellies and puddings and chocolate cakes with fluffy cream and strawberries and hundreds and thousands and hundreds and hundreds of legs of roast two-tooth…They bake yellow sponge cakes called Lemon Snowdrift and cream the butter and sugar thoroughly…for the Nectarine Soufflé they beat and beat the whites of eggs…they make ice-cream in three flavours and they pluck fresh fruit from the fruit trees… Knives spread with butter things that are spread with butter such as bread and scones and also fruitcake…Then they start pushing and poking and popping, tossing and slipping and jamming these fruits of the earth, these works of human hands, into their open mouths…