I was going to live an amazing life, starting right now.
5
Thin skin
Born into this skin, that feels just a little too thin
Skin I’m never sure if I belong in.
‘THIN SKIN’
(The Winter I Chose Happiness, 2012)
For the plane trip to London, I brought a packed lunch—a large salad with a balsamic vinegar dressing. It felt like a good symbolic start to this new phase of my life. It was like I was saying: ‘From now on in, I’m going to take care of myself.’ By which I meant I was going to stick to my diet, no matter what.
Unfortunately, sometime between the departure gate and the announcement that You may now take off your seatbelts and move around the cabin freely, my packed lunch leaked all over my carry-on baggage and other people’s too.
I first became aware of the spillage when I felt something cold drip on my face from above. I put my finger to it, looked at my finger: rusty red!
Blood?
No—just balsamic vinegar.
Oh, bugger.
I had planned to eat only once on the flight: just that one salad, perhaps with a Diet Coke, or sparkling water with lemon, and some black coffee.
I had to keep telling myself I wasn’t hungry, even though I was.
Nerves, I thought. Just nerves. Hold steady, woman!
With steely determination, I declined the flight attendant’s kind offer of peanuts. That felt good. New. Powerful. I liked it. No, thank you. I practised saying it in my head, using my best British accent. No, but thank you. Oh, thank you, but not for me, I couldn’t possibly.
All around me, the rustle of wrappers, the crunch of peanut after peanut and my hunger so loud in my stomach that by the time we were flying over the Great Australian Bight, I was just about ready to eat my own fist.
I held tight for another hour, but somewhere over the Indian Ocean, when the flight attendant again offered snacks—not just peanuts this time but ice-cream too—I persuaded myself it would be rude to decline a second time.
I’d start my diet again, start properly, when I was in London.
It was soon night. The moon seemed to follow us the whole way. Mum had said to look out for angels (‘Mum! Please!’), but I didn’t see any. It took about forty hours to get to London, including stopovers, but eventually we landed at Gatwick Airport. I collected my luggage. A customs officer looked at my guitar and asked if I intended to work while I was in the UK. I did have a working visa, so I said yes, but not with the guitar. I didn’t know how to play it yet, I told him. Unsmiling, he stamped my passport, said, ‘Next.’
My friend Libby met me at the airport. We planned to stay together at her friend Phil’s house, in Golders Green. When we arrived, I had a shower, got changed, told myself I wasn’t going to sleep I was just resting my head for a moment, and woke up seven hours later. It was 3 am. I was very hungry, but a voice inside me said: Too bad. We’re in London now. You’re on a diet. So I had a coffee, and wrote in my diary.
The next day, Phil took us on the bus to Piccadilly Circus, and then to Harrods, where we bought tzatziki and tomato, cucumber, breadstick and oranges. I pulled out my penknife, sliced it all up, and as I ate I felt as though this might well be the most delicious meal I’d ever eaten in my life. On my portable cassette player, Libby and I interviewed each other to mark the start of our adventure. On the tape, our voices are full of confidence, and hope.
On the Tube back to Golders Green, I tried to learn the names of all the stations. I wanted to settle in as quickly as possible.
That night, Libby and I stayed up late drinking beers and watching the sun set over the rooftops of Golders Green. We made spaghetti, then drank some more—cheap red wine this time. Later, we pulled out the tape recorder again, took turns interviewing each other, and then spent the rest of the night singing and dancing to songs on the radio. I didn’t realise how much we’d drunk until Libby asked if I could pass her a cigarette.
‘But you don’t smoke!’ I said.
‘Oh yeah!’ she said.
I realised pretty quickly that I was going to need to get a job. I couldn’t believe how expensive everything was, especially things like fruit and vegetables.
I was now a couple of weeks into my stay in London, and my diet … it wasn’t going as well as planned. As far as I could tell, I still hadn’t lost any weight. In my diary, I wrote that a part of me had hoped that when I got to London I would somehow, magically, be able to stick to a fucking diet for once. But I just couldn’t seem to. It wasn’t even ‘being fat’ that was getting to me—it was that I cared as much as I did about being fat. Back and forth I went between caring and defiance, dieting and bingeing, a ping-pong affair that kept me busy and distracted and failing, failing, always failing. I wanted it to stop and, I told myself, the easiest way to make it stop was just to do what I did when I was ten and lose all the fucking weight.
I repeated to myself again and again that I was not going home until I was fit and healthy, by which I meant thin. I didn’t want to use the word ‘thin’, not even in my diary. I thought it made me sound shallow. I didn’t want to be shallow. I wanted to mean something.
But what, exactly?
One night, Libby and I went to a concert at St Martin-in-the-Fields that was just glorious. Candles and incense. Vivaldi’s Four
