BEAT 2.6 Challenge

To raise money for BEAT during the COVID19 lockdown, I have decided to take part in their 2.6 challenge. Below are 26 lines from the book that I am writing. I selected these randomly. They reside in chapter 11 called ‘Marlborough House’.

Please donate to BEAT at: https://donate.beateatingdisorders.org.uk/page/56677/donate/1?ea.tracking.id=head and comment when you have done so that I can thank you with my deepest sincerity.

After a few moments of intensely awkward small talk, a different nurse came in to collect me. She embraced me into her kind, fleshy arms that cushioned my protruding ribs. Her body smelt like a mass of starry white clematis. This floral musk satisfied a wistful yearning to be back in Sutton Veny, walking down the dew-covered paths of Five Ash Lane. As she loosened her grip, she held my shoulders and smiled before taking me into the hallway. As we approached the dining room, she told me that it was lunch-time and the eight in-patients with different eating disorders would be half-way through their main course by now. She told me it was imperative not to stare, yet when I saw them it was impossible not to. One girl was sobbing to her key-carer who was muttering some kind of supportive jargon, whilst stroking her back. Another girl had her head down - her straw-coloured hair dangled over her face as if she was not to be seen by any onlooker who might think she was some kind of animal in a menagerie. The thinnest girl scared me. She sat on the far end of the table, with a nurse either side of her. One nurse was chatting to a different patient who had rosy-coloured cheeks and seemed to be having a little giggle, but the other was totally focused on this emaciated thing, who was no more than a shrunken scrap of a human being. Her hair was wispy and parched, her eyes were submerged in black holes that subsided down her lined cheekbones, and her lips indigo with fractured lines of scarlet peeping through. She did not even look sad, because behind that exterior she was empty. There was nothing there, nothing. 

I have often wondered what happened to that girl; whether she beat anorexia and has made a new life for herself; whether she, like me, battles with it every day but can live with what seems like a normal life; or whether she simply died. The brutal truth is that anorexia will not stop until you are dead. You can never be thin enough. Anorexia doesn’t want her victims thin, she wants them centipedal, elegantly ribbed, motionless. As I watched her pick up her fork and nibble at tiny morsels of blended food, I felt sorrowful. 

Upon leaving the dining room, a small brunette smiled at me, and I thought that she could be my friend. The next room we entered was the living room. Now, this was probably the saddest room of all. The worn sofas carried the weight of miserable humans - eroded over time from the constant influx of suffering adolescents. Thick blankets draped over the chairs, and tatty bean bags lined the walls. It was the complete antithesis of my lounge at home.