The Flavours of Love (39 page)

These are the things she doesn’t know about me: I have done some unthinkable things to protect my daughter; I’d do virtually anything to protect my daughter and my son; if it came to a choice between hurting Imogen and allowing my children to be damaged, there’d be no choice at all.

*

‘I was about to come out and look for you. I was worried.’ He doesn’t want to be around me any longer, he doesn’t want to speak to me, but Fynn has waited here for hours for me to come home. My heart aches at the thought of that, at the thought of him.

‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘For the lift to get Phoebe, for bringing her home, and for staying here to wait for me. And for being worried.’

He won’t look at me, he stares straight ahead as I speak.

The walk home hasn’t cleared my head, it has simply made it swim, made me feel as if I am on a piece of driftwood in the ocean, bumped around, taken here and there on the will of the tide, the whim of someone else. I need to cook something. Or eat something. I need something that is going to make all of this
everythingness
go away. A talk to my best friend might do it.

‘Fynn—’

His navy blue eyes look sharply at me, then. Cold, unflinching; warning me not to do it, not to go
there
. It was done with and we all had to get on with it.

‘Nothing. I’ll see you.’

‘Take care of yourself,’ he replies, his line of sight back on the windscreen. He pulls away from the kerb without looking in my direction again.

Entering my house seems too much effort right now. I sit on the fourth stone step, my bag on my lap, the cold of the night air seeping into my skin. I know she’s probably out here, watching me from wherever she is. But if I go inside I will not be able to stop myself from bingeing. I will need to stuff away all these feelings, all this hurt, and I don’t want to. I need to, but I don’t want to. I can’t fight it for much longer, but being out here will delay it a while.

I hear the car before I see it. It has a familiar growl, it is a striking British racing green colour, it has a driver with navy blue eyes who looks in my direction and meets my gaze. He throws a regretful but affectionate half-smile at me before accelerating away.

Come back
, I think at him.
I want to do it again
.

Monday, 13 May
(For Tuesday, 14th)

Saffron
.

I think it might be a good thing that Joel didn’t get to live to see this happen. His precious, adored daughter is as big a slut as her mother? It would break his heart.

I didn’t even know she was pregnant. I wanted you to see how badly you were letting her down, how you weren’t protecting her from all the bad people out there. Do you know how easy it is to befriend her friends online? Too easy. They don’t even bother to check who a person is before they become ‘friends’. I know Phoebe kept rejecting my requests, but her friends accepted me. And I just made up the rumour and put it out there. And suddenly it’s true. She’s a slut, just like her mother.

She doesn’t know when to keep her legs shut.

As I said, maybe it’s a good thing he isn’t here to see this. It would break his heart.

Some lessons need to be taught the hard way. I’m sorry, Saffron, but you’ve just learnt one. I think you may have to learn a few more.

A

In my fantasy I am not here. I am at the beach.

In my fantasy, the beach isn’t the place where I go to explore thoughts of ending the pain. In my fantasy I am sitting at the beach hut, with the doors propped inwards. We have put up the rickety camping table, its Formica top cracked and peeling away from its metal surround. We have canvas deckchairs – four in total, but we have room for five people because one of the deckchairs is a doubler. In my perfect life, I am curled up on my husband’s lap as he reclines in the double deckchair, his long legs support my body and I am substantial and real, but not grotesque and huge as I often feel. He has his arm slung around me, the other playing with my hair. My eldest child, a girl, has her legs curled underneath herself and she is alternating between texting and reading a book. My youngest child, a boy, is sitting on the hot, uneven tarmac in front of his deckchair, sorting through his heaped pile of stones and shells, industriously categorising them.

In my mind, I am landed here, on my beach, with the sea rushing in and out to say hello like an excited, noisy child who can’t quite believe how many people have turned up for a visit. There are people wandering past on their way to somewhere else, but we are cocooned inside our little world, the pieces of our lives slotted together, so from up close, from far away we are the same: a complete picture. We are a family.

In my real life I am here. My grey-white dressing gown puddles at my feet when I discard it to step into the shower. Instead of my usual rush to move straight into the shower, avoiding the faint reflection of my shape in the limescale-splattered glass of the shower cubicle
and the full-length mirror behind the door, I stop. Air goes in and out of my lungs, forced to expand and contract my chest, giving me courage. I have not done this for a long time. I have weighed myself every day but this I avoid. I have repeatedly binged and purged but I have side-stepped this. I constantly take handfuls of the excess parts of me, feeling their disgusting mass ooze between my fingers, but I have shunned this.

I am naked, and I turn first to the ghostly reflection in the shower cubicle’s glass. It has a build up of white flecks of limescale because it was Joel who used to do the bathrooms. I haven’t kept up with that job as regularly as he did.

A very faint version of me is there in the glass, and the outline is not what I expect. From the numbers on the scales, from the amount that goes in and comes out, from the touch of myself sometimes, this should not be my outline. My outline should be bigger, much, much bigger.

‘
I thought you’d stopped doing this, Ffrony. You said you didn’t need any help and you promised me you would stop.
’

‘
You are thin.
’

I hear those words all the time, they are with me constantly, in there in the never-ending swirl of thoughts, feelings and memories I constantly hear in my head.

My body revolves until, slowly, bit by bit, who I am when everything is stripped away is revealed to me in the mirror.

In my fantasy life this is not who I am. I am perfect, and whole, and relaxed. It doesn’t matter what my body looks like, it doesn’t matter what the number on the scale says, I am complete. This outer part of me doesn’t matter, all that matters is what’s inside me. I will be loved no matter what, I will be held and cherished and wanted. In my perfect life I can let go of the digital numbers that go up and down, I can release the need to stuff things down and away, only to do
whatever it takes
to feel empty again. In my mind, my clear mind, I know that food is not love, it is not reward, it is not punishment, it is not perfection, it is not control, it is not unmanageable, it is not
hate, it is not a sin, it is not one of the many things I use to torture myself with every day. Food is fuel.

In my dream existence I know that thinness is not perfection. Thinness is not happiness. It is not the answer to all my problems, it is not the place I need to be so my life can begin. Wanting to be thin is another way of being elsewhere while life goes on around me. It is no different from being fat. Large. Big. Obese. Thinness is not going to change my life because I am thin and I am not happy. I am in control of my food and my body and I am not happy.

In my ideal life I do not look in the mirror and see what I do now. I don’t see that I am thin and know that I am not happy. I don’t see that I am in control of my body, I control every element of it, and I am not happy. In my ideal existence, I don’t look at myself in the mirror and I don’t see the only thing Joel and I ever really argued about, I don’t see that Fynn was right.

In my blissful world, I don’t remember the voice inside I chose to ignore when I was nineteen so I could restart on this journey to thinness and I don’t see clearly and painfully why I split myself in two so I can make it through the day.

*

I often cry in the shower. With my hair pushed under an elasticated clear shower cap, I stand facing the large metal head and I let the water drum onto my face, I let its rhythm resonate over my sensitised skin and I cry. I allow my body to shake, I wrap my arms around myself and I sob, I breathe in and out rapidly, like the short bursts of a machine gun. I can do that in here with the sound of running water as cover so no one can hear me. I am never alone enough to properly cry, to completely let go and wail. So I do it here, as alone as I can get.

When I am exhausted, tired of crying, agreed that this is enough for today, I right myself. I force myself to stand upright, I release my body from my own tight grasp and I open my eyes ready to focus and face reality.

It takes longer today, to right myself, to drag myself out of the
fantasy life where I long to dwell and into this life. In this life I have devastated my body, I have constantly painful teeth that are so damaged they have often crumbled from eating cereal; I haven’t taken care of my family and they are fragmented, frightened, fragile; I have lost my best friend. I have messed up on every level. It takes longer but with determination, I prise my eyes apart, reaching to the side for the sliver of unperfumed soap that should be sufficient to wash my body. As my eyes, probably a vivid crimson and thick with the heaviness of attempting to weep my heart out, open they take their time to focus.

Once the world around me is in view again, I see him. He has a perfect, cylindrical but tapered body; neat, evenly spaced black and yellow stripes; four clear, fragile wings; a long, protruding line at his bottom.

‘You do the spiders and slugs, Babes, I’ll do the wasps.’

‘We hardly ever get wasps.’

‘That doesn’t mean we don’t need a dedicated wasp ridder.’

‘How come I get two and you get one?’

‘Wasps are more dangerous, Ffrony.’

*

He would find this hilarious, he really would. The slugs have had their way with my plants, I see evidence of spiders and their webs all over the place and now this. I can’t remember the last time we had a wasp in the house.

‘You absolute bastard,’ I say to the grin Joel’s no doubt wearing wherever he is. ‘You’d do anything to get out of dealing with things like this, wouldn’t you?’

I stare at the wasp, wobbling its way up the condensation-soaked shower pole, as if attempting to climb to the top of Mount Everest.

This is Joel all over. He was expert at reminding me that you need
to put your problems into perspective. Right now, my biggest problem isn’t all the things I’ve been crying about, it’s getting out of the shower without being stung.

‘
Let’s see how you get out of this one then, eh, Ffrony.
’

With my notebook splayed open, a pen nestled like a blue, crystal-encased caterpillar in the valley in the middle of the pages, I sit at the kitchen table.

In my notebook I have written:

Food is not love

and

Love is love

and

Food is food

and

nothing can taste like love.

and

Everything tastes amazing when you love what you are eating.

and

Love what you eat.

and

Eat what loves your body.

I mean it all. I know it all on an intellectual level, I know what I need to do, I know how I need to see myself move towards a cure for what I have, but it is living it that will make a difference.

If I let go of what I have now, I will be back there in no time. I will be back to being the little girl told to stop eating bread and eat more fruit by her well-meaning mother, I’ll be the best friend who’s ever so nice and would suit my name if I lost weight, I’ll be the worker who needs special clothes because I am huge, I’ll be the woman at college no one notices because I am large. I’ll be fat and ugly and unsuccessful. I’ll also be the woman that Joel fell in love with. And I’ll be the woman who dropped the blackberries, the woman who hadn’t prepared for every eventuality so losing her husband nearly destroyed her.

I know what I have to do intellectually; emotionally I’m too damn scared right now. But if I write things down, I can come back, I can see what I believe. And maybe it will click in my mind and my heart and I will be able to do it. If I write things down I’ll remind myself that I can’t think clearly when I binge and purge, and right now I need to think clearly.

Now, I have little pieces of Joel in front of me. These scrawlings of his bring me closer to him, remind me he was more than his death, he was alive, too. He was so much, and he was this – a collection of recipes, each containing the foods he loved.

I adore his funny, sloping writing, the way he crossed his ‘t’, the way he curled his ‘s’, the longer slope of ‘J’ because, I guess, it was the most important letter to him. He has notes on scraps of paper, a few filed away in a notebook, some on different-shaped and rainbow-coloured stickies. Some of the sheets are crumpled and creased, others are bisected in two directions from the way he folded them up.

I’ve been looking for a blend of flavours that, when I slip them between my lips, will bring back everything good about my life with him. I’ll close my eyes and the taste will take over my senses, and I’ll be transported back to another place when I was with him. I’ll be that person who can look in the mirror and not worry about who
I’ll see looking back at me. I’ll be the woman who can experience a bad feeling and not be terrified it’s going to consume me. I’ll be the person who can cope with things. I can deal with wasps in the shower. I can deal with the person who is going to try to kill me.