After Mum hugged me and we had both calmed down a little, she pulled back to look at me, said, ‘Darling, where have you gone? You are so thin. Ian, she is so thin.’
And I’m not sure I had noticed until then. I had been avoiding mirrors. I could see I was changing, and it scared me. It didn’t feel like my face, my body, belonged to me anymore.
But, as Mum said it, I knew she was right: I was now thin. Very thin. Thin as a rake, thin as a pancake, thin as a willow and so far away from the girl I had once been. Here it was—my dream come true. I’d expected to feel happy. Instead, I felt insane. After all those years of longing to be thin, of planning, dieting, restricting, failing, starting again, of imagining how it would feel to finally ‘win’, how happy it would make me, here I was, thin, and … now what?
Now it was just me and the bad feeling with nothing in between to protect me.
This was not what the box had promised.
6
Storms and other weather patterns
Black dog
Thick the fog
Yellow fog that rubs its back against your window.
‘YOUR OTHER HAND’
(The Moon Looked On, 2007)
Perhaps this will come as no surprise now that you know me a little, but in the lead up to my return home to Melbourne, there was a part of me that had hoped that as soon as that plane landed, as soon I saw my parents’ faces, I would somehow magically become well again. Everything would make sense, and I could just pick up where I left off.
Apparently, it doesn’t quite work that way.
The morning my plane landed, when we headed out into the crisp Melbourne air, walking to my father’s Nissan Bluebird, everything still felt too bright, and not quite real, and I kept blinking and wondering what was going on. I knew I was alive, but it was as though every other shred of my identity was now gone. My ideas of myself as resilient, bubbly, unbreakable and strong were all gone. My lists—gone. The fantasy of how, when I got thin, I would feel better—gone. Finished. Dead.
In the back seat of Dad’s car, him smoking a cigarette out the window, me resting my head on my mother’s lap, still crying, I did feel an enormous sense of comfort and relief. But when Dad turned on the radio and I heard the opening theme song of the ABC news, the bad feelings began to stir once more. I could feel it coming, feel it building in me, and in my fear of what might happen next I began to shake, and could not seem to stop.
Mum said, ‘Ian, turn on the heater, please,’ and he did.
She was talking fast. I could hear how worried she was, and how she was trying to hide it. The voice in my head told me I was a terrible daughter for doing this to my family. It told me how weak I was to have needed to come home and worry everyone with all this fuss.
The noise was all too much for me. I needed silence. I was too tired to speak loudly, so I asked Mum to tell Dad to please turn off the radio.
Even though I spoke quietly, Dad must have been on full alert, he heard me, clicked off the news, and started talking. I noticed he wasn’t using his normal speaking voice, he was using his special voice, his barrister’s voice, the one he normally reserved for the art of convincing a jury.
‘Your mum is so happy to have you home,’ he said. ‘Look at her. Scared as a pussycat she was. But you’re a tough girl. I knew you’d be fine.’
Mum said, ‘Ian, shh. Not too much talking.’ Mum said she wanted me to settle, to rest.
Dad knew what to do, though. He just carried on talking, confident in what he had to say. I suspect Dad would have been every bit as scared as Mum, but I also suspect he would have worked out in advance that some part of me would be relying on some part of him to hold the fort, to mirror back to me an image of life that was still robust and not just a husk. So he just kept talking about this and about that, moved on to minor matters, the garden and so on, and with his deep reassuring voice murmuring in the background, I think I might even have dozed off for a minute.
Yet, once home again in Sandringham, once the reality of my situation hit me—that I still felt weird, that I was a stranger to myself—it was as though my despair tripled.
That first night home, and for dozens afterwards, I lay awake in my childhood bed, shaking and terrified by the thought that, any minute now, I was going to start hallucinating, start seeing things or, worse still, I was going to lose control of my mind all together, and do something terrible. I felt like I was walking through a nightmare, or trapped in a computer game, and all the while my mind kept
