Small Acts of Disappearance (2 page)

It's awful and it's dubious, of course, to use an entire country as a test ground, in a kind of personal experiment. It's the same unthinking privilege that any kind of travel is predicated on for we children of the West. But I also wanted to try to be someone else for a time – to be forcibly removed from the people who knew me, from my habits, from my patterns of behaviour, my routines and rules. I thought, perhaps, that distance could defeat disease, that I could leave my home and somehow leave my self behind as well.

Most of the journalists bought rice-and-curry lunch packets from a tiny kitchen down the road; wrapped into a neat newspaper mound, there'd be a tightly packed, square prism of white rice, a daub of different curries in each corner, coconut and chilli sambal in the middle. We mixed it all together with our fingers, the turmeric staining mine nicotine-yellow. The varieties of curry changed each day, dependent on what had been harvested: to not be able to choose was as terrifying as it was liberating.

The problem for me, in Sri Lanka, was that the country's cuisine is based on two ingredients that almost always triggered my vomiting – rice and the coconut milk that binds the sauce in any curry. The first time I ate one of these lunch packets with my colleagues, I had to sprint from the tea room to the small garden at the side of the office building. I threw up onto a bed of brightly-coloured tropical flowers and tried to shake off my workmates' well-meaning concern and questions. But I know too that I told the mother of my billeted family that I was a vegetarian, my new café-set friends that I couldn't eat gluten (and we all laughed that this was a Westerner's disease) – that I was limiting my options, even then, far beyond just what I knew my stomach couldn't handle.

I'd often wander further down beyond the kitchen instead, and buy a fist-sized egg roll, a soft bun slit down the middle and filled with slices of boiled egg and bright red sauce, as well as a tomato from a street stall. It cost me the equivalent of twenty cents. I started buying two each day, and handing one to the first beggar I encountered at the bus stop near the office. One of the beggars had some kind of fluid swelling in his feet, his ankles as round and wide as tree trunks. Another had a goitre that forced her head to crick permanently sideways on her neck, like a perpetually shrugged shoulder. At first, I'd eat the other roll, painfully slowly; I remember one colleague asking me, perplexed, if that was all a typical Westerner would eat for lunch. Eventually, I started working through the lunch break, a
habit that I stuck to in the worst years of my illness for the way that this working pattern looks diligent and industrious, rather than insane.

There was a pharmacy too on the other side of the street, in the most modern and starkly tidy building in the area. It was the place my colleagues trooped to for the ‘Nescafé machine', a contraption that squeezed wet and weak instant coffee out of little plastic sachets, or for packets of prawn crackers or tiny, salt-dried fish. It was here one afternoon that I was grabbed at by a woman in a sky-blue linen suit, her fingers pressing into the thin flesh of my upper arms. ‘I can see you, sad little lady,' she whispered in my ear. She stared at me, unashamedly, she asked me immediately about my faith, about my marriage, both of which are non-existent. The woman grasped my arm and held my hand against her chest. ‘I think that God has put me in your life today for a reason. To bless you. To make you well.' I tried to move away; but she followed me, unable as I was to blend into the background, the whole way back into the office, where the tea-wallah hustled her away.

Each day I caught two buses into work, juddering and lumbering things, occasionally riddled with holes in the floor that were plastered over with gaffer tape or cardboard. They were crowded of a morning, fuggy and sticky in the afternoon, and always full, and the crush was perfect for hiding the wandering hands of commuting men. At first, I thought the
frequent brushes against my body were accidental, and very often, they were carefully construed to leave plenty of room for doubt. One man might look like he was nodding off, his hand relaxed and floppy against the backrest of the seat, until it slowly started rubbing at my breasts. Another might hold a satchel at waist-height and then repeatedly bump against my thighs. My knees grew bruises.

Each day, I changed buses at Nugegoda Junction, where a white plaster Buddha sat smiling at the smog beneath the heart-shaped leaves of a spindly Bodhi tree. The ground was clayey and red there. Three weeks after I returned to Australia, a bomb was detonated in the dress shop on the corner.

The Sri Lankan wolf-whistle is a kind of sucking noise, fish-like through pursed lips. It took me some time to understand this, the strange sound that pursued me through the street. I'd not known before what it means to be so conspicuous, to be recognised and remembered. At a time when I was slowly being pared back to my bones, when I was every day becoming insubstantial, I've never felt so looked-at, so fully bodied.

What disturbed me most about this was how quickly I became accustomed to being looked at, even touched. My body, in public, was public. I lowered my gaze to the ground.

The women in my office nodded along when I complained. It happened to them too – most of them
found other ways to come to work, or always travelled with their families. Shezny, a wide-smiled Tamil woman, said that when she had to catch a bus alone, she'd wear an extra pin inside her sari, to jab at anyone who touched her up. ‘That's great,' I laughed, ‘you take a little prick all of your own!'

‘No, no,' she said, bewildered. ‘A sari pin is very large.'

I never saw other women walking on the streets, save for an occasional pair of white-robed nuns, holding hands and turning inward. I rarely saw other women in public at all; there was no space for their bodies in the civil life of this city. My female colleagues were unusual because they were employed, all the more so because they worked in offices instead of hospitals or schools – but even they all spoke to me about how much they wanted to get married, to find a husband, to find love. Weeks in, I realised that they were daughters until the day they became wives; they were women before they were people. They could never move beyond their bodies, never forget that their bodies were there. But here was I, living beside them in a body that was slowly disappearing, despite its new conspicuousness. They took me into their houses, taught me to cook traditional meals that take hours to prepare, and I pushed the food around on my plate, unsure whether it was more polite to not eat the meal they had served me at all, or to eat it and then throw up immediately afterwards.

My collarbones grew angular enough to become individually sunburnt.

When I left Sri Lanka, at the end of my internship and far too sick to stay, I was light-headed and felt almost absent as I walked the streets, as if everything inside my skull had been untethered. I felt that time itself had swollen in the pre-monsoon humidity and was moving in thick and syrupy globs. I was wearing a child's salwar kameez, the long shirt and baggy pants worn by the country's Muslim women, the fabric barely stretched across my shrunken breasts. I'd chosen the salwar because it was a chaste woman's clothing, the throat, the knees, the shoulders covered by brightly-coloured cloth; I had found that it deterred, at least a little, the groping hands on buses. In my first days back in Sydney, I was shocked when I saw a young woman in hotpants. The speed at which my body had taken Colombo underneath its skin surprised me. Smaller, slower-paced, and thicker-tongued, I no longer fitted neatly in the space I'd left behind.

I became obsessed with automation, with the small mechanised tasks that in Colombo had all been performed by quiet men in meticulous uniforms, that had been physical and bodied, but now were strangely abstract. Within a week I was back in my old job, driving in along the M5 through toll-gates that opened automatically in response to the infra-red tag on my front windscreen,
swiping a card to open the office building's doors, swiping again to activate a lift. My computer automatically opened the schedule of radio programs I was to monitor each day.

There was a modicum of safety, somehow, in the constant small human interactions that were still in place in Colombo's public spaces. Here, I thought, it would be easy just to disappear.

For a long time, I couldn't place exactly what it was, the thing that took so long for me to reconcile. I came home feeling different, looking diminished, and unable to tie together the two cities I now loved, and the very different ways of being that each engendered. I think now that what I struggled with was my own dreadful inconsistency, what it means to love a place and a people in the way I did Colombo, and yet to have held it at such distance, however unwittingly. In many ways, my hunger kept me separate, unable to participate fully in those myriad rituals of society and sociability that circle around food, unable to accept nourishment from the same places as the people I was living with, or from the very people I was moving amongst. Hunger forces a kind of refusal, a brutal, impenetrable independence, leaves us quite literally unable to break bread and connect with the people in our orbit; I realise now that this is how I've lived most of my adult life.

But more than this, in Colombo, my hunger was obscene. It was not predicated on need, on poverty or
parentlessness or war, corruption or greed. It was something feeding on and off itself, something always leading back into itself – the starving brain turned inwards to survive. My hunger was not, and could not, be equated with the hunger that I saw around me. Amongst so much need, my own denial was something as incomprehensible to my local friends as the hunger they lived alongside was to me. Something irreconcilable here made my world grow bigger and more disparate, and all the while, I shrank. And I shrank away as well.

IN HOSPITAL

 

 

 

 

 

A
t my sickest, a lover once folded a blanket over my shoulderblade before curling against my back to sleep. People visibly recoiled when I passed, or looked back over their shoulders in a double take that I could never help but notice. From the outside, nobody understands the seemingly wilful hunger of those of us who waste away, nobody really understands the hold that it can have, its awful power.

I know now that the impulse I have to starve comes from exactly the same place as my impulse to write: hunger, like writing, is a mediator. It stands between me and the world, between my self and the things that might cause it harm. Hunger is addictive, and it is intensely sensual, pulling the body between extremes of hyper-alertness and a foggy trance-like dream state. And like writing, it lets me stand clear, separate and intact; it lets me stand on the outside.
I spent years determined to stay on the outside. Because I wasn't, I was sure, one of
those women.

The problem, I realise now, was that I'd never met one of those women. I never really did until my first admission to a hospital day program, five years after my travel to Sri Lanka.

When I agreed to the admission, I still didn't think that I belonged in an eating disorder program, that my hunger was malicious. I knew that I was noticeably underweight, and that I was still struggling to manage my physical condition, to eat enough to fuel my body without throwing up in the process. I'd scan every restaurant that I went to upon entering, to make sure that I was seated close to the bathroom or the door; I had become adept on picnics and at parties, ducking out, mid-conversation, and scampering for the nearest plant or wheelie bin. (‘Fucking junkie' a man once spat as he walked past me, when I was doubled over behind a tree after an early café breakfast with my best friend.)

By the time I was admitted, I'd spent two years visiting an outpatient clinic, at first fortnightly, then monthly, walking past the locked psychiatric ward and up three flights of stairs to its set of narrow corridors; at the height of my illness, even this exertion left me dizzy and unsteady on my feet. I still thought that my main problem was anxiety, that the stress and exhausting worry that were constantly coursing through me were exacerbating the vomiting that was the main symptom of my physical illness. I never once
thought that the way that I was eating might be exacerbating the stress with which my body and my mind were both racked. A psychologist had slowly encouraged me to attend the clinic, suggesting only, carefully, that the doctors there would be experts at putting broken, undernourished bodies like my own back together. I remember showing the clinic's dietician, during my first appointment, the food diaries I'd been asked to keep over the preceding fortnight, and stating straight up, ‘I'm not anorexic.' I didn't realise then that she must hear this all the time, and barely registered her response, ‘You certainly eat as if you are.'

In these two years, I hardly progressed at all. I realise now this was mostly because I could not recognise the complex nature of my hunger, and so I couldn't understand the help the doctors there were trying to extend to me. I went alone to these appointments, waiting on one of the plastic armchairs lined up in a row past the reception desk, always alongside other thin and anxious women with flaking skin and darting eyes and knees that were constantly jigging up and down, out of both nervousness and a desire to burn more energy. I didn't talk to them, tried to avoid their gaze.

I can't remember, now, what I talked about with the psychiatrist in my appointments, my memories of these visits are cloudy with a strange combination of malnutrition, boredom, exhaustion and fear. But I do remember the one day that my regular doctor was away; his substitute was forthright, crisp and far less gentle in her manner than he had ever been. She said, after closing my by now bulky file,
‘You know you're not getting anywhere here,' and I had to concede that she was right.

I called the hospital from a café up the road from the clinic, feeling somehow, and somewhat irrationally, that the decision to do so wasn't really mine to make, that my hand had finally been forced. I'm also not sure that I would ever have gone ahead with the admission if I hadn't thought that I would write about it later. But even as I walked, on the first day of my admission, through the building's bright blue door, after a round of meetings, measures, blood tests, heart checks and the reading of a rule book as thick as my spindly wrist, I still remember thinking, even then, that I'd have nothing in common at all with any of the other women I might meet there.