Isolated Moments of Wonder

It been a month or so of change and I can hardly keep up with it.

It’s making you shift and reassess and battle new demons and it’s making me let go a little – relax my grip on your life. What has taken the place of my mothering madness is a floating directionless vacuity. I feel rudderless and unsure. At least the relentless days and nights of food and fear and obsessive control and habit after pattern after routine were familiar – known to me in all their rancid glory and hated for all their restrictive power.

You have, they tell us at the clinic, made faster, better, more remarkable progress than any anorexic they have known. I hear the astonishment every week when I tell them that you haven’t cheated, have stuck to your directed food intake, haven’t exercised, have cried and talked and healed in appropriate measure.

They expect the worst from you and every week nowadays, you continue to elicit murmured – almost disbelieving – congratulations.

Where has the hysteria gone? We have learned to live alongside anorexia – we have grown accustomed to its face. We talk together through its tricks and wrestle with its confounded menaces like old hands now. How vile that we should be almost at ease with it. No smugness! No settling for this as if it were the best we can hope for! I want more for you. A rich, full, busy life - thrilling and safe in equal measure. You deserve all the Universe has to offer. My sweet little love, my precious, most adored child. All that there is should be yours as reward for and recognition of your existence. My heart pulls with love and admiration: the sheer force of your will and the effort you have put into this. We are on the cusp of something new. We are doing this. I want to grin with relief but am too mindful of complacency. Not just yet...

Here is a list of changes for me to revel in:

1. You ate a Skittle. On the bus, on a school trip. I wonder if you factored in the calories and the sugar. I think it was one of Robbie's. I picture you reaching for it and shaking inside. One tiny bright sweet popped into your mouth. Oh, the casualness of that word. I bet there was no such thing as 'popping'. I bet there was trepidation and screwing up your courage and that desperate longing to be normal - to take a sweet and eat it as easily as anything. And it will have looked like a big nothing to anyone watching but we both cried when you told me. The miraculousness of it. You incredible girl. This is the slippery slope now. The spinning into wellness. It's got you and it's carrying you along and me with it and we're on our way.

2. You peeped round my door one day and said you'd like to try having Christmas lunch with me and Dad and Robyn. Not your food, simply eaten at the same time as us. But actual different-to-your rigidly-usual food. I tried so hard to not punch the air. I wanted you to see my delight but not my overwhelming relief. Or my tears. I actually wanted to yell with surprise and happiness. I think I managed to convey my pleasure without completely alienating you...

On the day, you supervised the preparation of the roast potatoes - making sure no magic extra oil or poisonous calories were slipped in secretly. And you served yourself alongside the rest of us and you ate it. With us all there. And you didn't take ages or do anything outwardly anorexic. You just ATE YOUR FOOD. The significance of this is really quite enormous. I'm not conveying it well here but it was everything I'd ever hoped for. Your tiny portion - carefully quantified - of Christmas lunch. Eaten. Deliberately consuming different food at your own instigation! Halleluia.

3. You announced you'd like to try having your lunchtime sandwich at college instead of me collecting you, bringing you home to eat it and then delivering you back. This means you feel brave enough to eat in front of your friends. I am so proud. I wondered if this day would come. A part of me was content with the prospect of it not. When the first day is done, I will want to pry your mind with questions and have my worries soothed by your nonchalance. I must not badger you. Must not hold you to me and weep into your hair when you tell me it was fine.

4. You offered me a cup of tea tonight which is not that unusual but it was as we were going up to bed to watch DVDs and you don't generally offer me one at that time. The minutiae of our times together are unvarying and any slight alteration makes my Mother Of An Anorexic radar go blip. I am very glad I said yes. You carried up your day's flotsam and then went back down for the tea. When I turned to take the mug from you, I saw another in your other hand. I thought "Oh. Grace is having... " and then stopped. A what? A mug of air? Grace doesn't drink unbidden anymore. She sticks to her scheduled fluid intake and never deviates. I pester her to drink. I mention how she doesn't. I slip it in alongside my other vexed whinings. And you smiled at me and said "Guess what I'm having?" and I looked and I crowed! A cup of tea. Not black tea either but with a dash of milk. My GOD. What is happening here? What has become of my unyielding, inflexible poorly girl? I couldn't stop the "Yes!" Nor the cheek-aching grin. We had a lovely cup of tea together, as normal as you like. I wanted to ask you what made you decide, how did it taste, were you scared, had you been thinking about it and planning it for ages, was it horrible, did you like it, are you amazed at your brilliance? I didn't, though. I drank my tea and kept my eyes off yours and my speculations to myself.

5. Your period started. For the first time in nine months. You were jubillant and so was I. That we could discuss the finer details of something so personal and ordinarily taboo is testament to how this has robbed us of our boundaries and modesty. Illness is no respector of privacy. Your body is creaking back into life and your innards are churning with hesitant vigour. Hooray for that damnable thing revisiting.

You were swept along by fantasies of release and freedom - as if this signified the end of your illness and a return to eating what you want, when you want. But this is just the first step and the realisation hit you cruelly. You must stick to the regime a while longer, must continue to gain weight and then stabilise and stay at a healthy weight for a considerable, unspecified length of time before you are unburdened. The agonising slowness of recovery is infuriating to you and it made you cry when they told you you'd still need your ovaries scanning to make sure you really were getting better. You had blindly expected liberty. It's so hard for you to see how far you've come. Each forward step is reached only after weeks and months of horrendous effort. When you reach the milestones, there's only ever more ahead.

We are living a life of semi-absolution. It is frightening to have it all swimming untethered and unfamiliar in front of us. I want to surrender to it.

Crying

I have cried so hard this morning. With something I can't name. I think it's a mixture of fear and relief. My eyes ache now like they used to in May and June and July.

You weigh 42.8 kilos - the most since the getting better began. I looked at the readout on the scales at the clinic yesterday and felt a small jolt of happiness. But I've seen the changes in you over the last couple of weeks and I know you're getting better - I don't cling so desperately to the numbers on the scales any more - don't look to them for reassurance and hope or for confirmation of my hateful fears. So I didn't feel my stomach flipping or that swaying feeling of deliverance.

It was almost as if I expected it. Your eating is stable. Your rage is contained. Your madness is managed. So you follow the expected course of recovery as you have done every step of the way. But now I feel limp with - I don't know what. I want to call it relief but it feels too empty and dark for that. It's as if all these months, a huge part of me has been on hold.

And now I am disintegrating - because I can. It won't kill you. It won't take something essential from you: you are healing yourself slowly and don't need my hawkeyed love and support now. I can fall apart. I can sink into my disintegration and the fallout won't be catastrophic. My hands are off the wheel now and we're not going to crash. I worry I might though - all on my own. I look in the mirror and realise I have stopped caring about what I look like - the lines and dark circles and the grey hairs that have grown with such alacrity this half a year are just there now - forever. They are unremarkable to me and that in itself is indicative of how deep I am in the this hollow place. I'm all a bit fragmented and loose in my soul and don't know how to put myself back together. Sighing and crying won't do it.

I feel so sorry for us. So sad and wretched that we had to go through this. It breaks my heart for us. I want my mother to hold me and comfort me and help me and tell me it's ok. But she has never done that for me - has never seemed able to reach out to me like that and nurture me. I've always managed without her. But right now I could so do with her telling me how wonderful and strong and brave I have been - that I have helped Grace and that I have been a good mother. She doesn't seem to have the wherewithal for that. But I am all Mothered out and need one for myself. I feel sad for me. I am so weary. Tired to my bones and as if my heart has been shattered. I want to leave this all behind now.

But I'm too scared to succumb. You might need me again. So today's self-indulgence will have to be just that - for today. A small peeping out of the real, broken me.

Is this my life now?

Anger

Anger has always been such a powerful emotion in my life.
My own anger but more so, the anger of people I love.
It's always meant devastation, fear and being out of control.

My father's anger terrified me. It was fury. It was rage. It was catastrophic. It was drunken spittle flying and massive, calloused square hands hurting a little girl. It meant pain and humiliation and violence and a feeling of complete worthlessness and terror. He frightened and enraged me so completely and the forever thing of all this is that now, as a grown woman, I see anger brewing and I am reduced: 5, 9, 14 years old again. I am unable to cope and am lost to the fear. It is cataclysmic in its power.

My own anger was medicated into a tight, black hole for years - squashed down by the strong, flat palm of alcohol and released in short crazy unbelievable bursts, leaving me weak with remorse. Now, I have a better grasp on it - can let it fly a little bit and not dread the repercussions. Those few words encompass years - decades - of therapy and effort and soul searching. It's too much for me to go into more detail. And anyway, this is about you, my little love.

Your anger is another thing altogether.

It is unknown to me. A brand-new thing, amongst all the bloody awful brand-new things this year of hell has brought us.

When you were a baby, you had plenty of anger. Crying almost solidly until you could speak. Trying days. Years ago. As a toddler, you had not one single tantrum. I would do anything to avoid you having to feel angry, frustrated, that vile churning inside. I would stop and attend to you if I saw it coming - divert you and distract you - take your feelings for myself - swallow them down and forbid you them. I shielded you from what existed inside you and forced you to suppress it or ignore it. But I never let you learn how to manage your own natural, real, normal anger. I thought I was doing it for you, protecting you and being a good mother when in fact I was neglecting your emotional development. In my desperation to save you from the horror of anger, I stole something too.

But was it just for you? Maybe I was protecting myself too. Bad enough having to witness my father. I couldn't bear to see that emotion on your face and in your body. It frightened me. But it means that now I have no frame of reference - can't reassure me/us with remembering past rages and recoveries.

When (in your recovery from anorexia) you felt safe enough with me (as the mother of an anorexic) - safe in the knowledge that I wasn't going to shout or cry or fall apart or die from it - you began to show some of your rage and fear. The first time, it drew me up so sharply I almost fell over, never to get up again. You shook and yelled and panicked - raspy, catchy breaths and bobbing shoulders, red face wild eyes garbled voice. I thought you were going to die of it. Literally fall over dead. I felt hysterical inside. I expect you did too. If it wasn't so tragic, I'd be smiling as I type that. Oh darling, what a pair.

I have variously responded to your anger with crossness, shouting, fear, wild eyes, pounding heart, walking-away legs, blank eyes - struggling to stay alive in the face of such a terrible thing. We have talked ourselves blue over this and I know you know me almost as well as I know myself and you are certain in the knowledge that my response is not about you. It is about me. It is my legacy. But it is lousy mothering. It is a part of the sickness he infected me with and that it has carried down the generations into you is something that incenses me.

I have always tried to fix you, to protect you.
I was raised to know the world as a terrifying place - filled with unpredictably awful things happening to the people I loved and being utterly powerless. How pointless all my effort has been. The bad thing happened anyway.

How ridiculous that I'd think I could alleviate your suffering. I can barely manage my own.
You will fix you. I am just along for the ride.

Thin Girls

I see thin girls everywhere. It's like when you get a new car and suddenly, that sort of car is everywhere. I didn't realise how many people owned a blue Peugeot and I didn't realise how many terribly thin, sick girls there are out there.

I would have stared and mocked before - thought mean things about stupid girls and diets and willpower and how unattractive, weird, sheep-like, selfish, blind. Now I pass a thin girl and I want to hold her in my arms and rock her. (I want to find her mother and hold her.)

A part of me wants to get angry at her, though - yell how cruel she's being and just bloody well stop it. Maybe it'd work with a stranger. I know it would have been futile with you. It would have shamed you and there is already sufficient shame in your mind to last you forever.

Now, instead of seeing something unknown and alien and strange, I see something that lives my life alongside me every day and inhabits my every thought.

I know you, anorexic girls. I know you. I know your fear and your anger and your complete bewilderment. I see my daughter in you all and it's like a kick in the stomach.

Prozac

My darling, you've taken up your legacy and been forced to succumb to antidepressants. You, your mother, your grandmother, aunt and uncle. A month down the road of sorting out your serotonin. Oh, for different genes.

In a way, I've wanted them for you since the beginning - I know their power and how they can return a life. The light went out and no matter how much I loved you and looked after you, there was no igniting it. It was tearing at my heart, seeing the depression in your bearing and your being and yet not being able to persuade anyone that you needed medicating out of it - that your own resources and mine were never going to be enough.

When you've lived alongside a thing all your life, you recognise it quickly. Eventually, the sleeplessness was showing in your serious, sad eyes and in your monotone voice and your exhausted little body. Such weariness. It made me ache to see. And to hear you tell me over and again, every morning as you peered round my door, that you'd woken twice, three times and stayed awake, staring up and alone and frightened and with your mind whirring and playing with you. There were only so many times I could say "My darling, my poor darling child - I feel for you" and then send you off to college, dragging your exhaustion behind you.

So you take 20mgs a day and it has returned you to me. I have my girl back. I told Monica that when we saw her last and it made you cry. I could see you crying invisibly, tearlessley, silently as we sat and made polite conversation with her about trivial things. I knew something had upset you but wasn't sure what. You were terse and perfunctory with her rambling, idiotic, forgetful questions and I wanted to hold my hand up to her face and say "Shut up a minute - I need to speak to Grace - there's something wrong with her - can't you see!". It wasn't until we got out of the door after the hour and you fell against me and wrapped your arms round my neck and sort of moaned "Oh Mum - I feel overwhelmed". It's been a struggle, getting you to realise quite how ill you've been, all these months. You seemed to come to an understanding right there and then. The difference in the Prozac-free you and the now-you is plain for you to see. You're desperate to never have that version of yourself back. It's only with hindsight that it all becomes clear. I think that clarity is a bit horrifying for you.

We have both endured such darkness. Losing such a huge part of you to this sickness and watching you disappear right in front of my eyes - bodily and mentally, thin and characterless and devoid of substance, your head self merging with your physical self (the one mimicing the other) - has felt like a slow death.

I know you see the changes in yourself. To me, they are a joyous miracle. I celebrate you with all my heart - my talkative, silly, light, friendly, sarcastic, arsey, funny, loving child is here again. She had been smothered and now she is breaking free.

I never thought these feelings, these times, these days of boredom and habit and everything being ok - never thought they'd be given back. I'd accustomed myself to a new reality and with all the effort I could muster, I'd made myself grateful and accepting of the sadness and the change and the worry and the fear. As long as I had you, I could cope. And now here I am - (those horrible miseries tucked away and murmuring quietly, just so I never forget or take anything for granted) - with my most beloved daughter sitting next to me and I am not wracked with terrifying, persisitent premonitions and stomach-clawing apprehension.

We're getting there.

The Maths

Sometimes - for little minutes - I get this soaring feeling of hope. An imprecise knowledge that your life will be returned to you (and in turn, mine to me) in all it's simple glory and all will be well. And then I remember that it took you three quarters of an hour to choose how to incorporate into your day the requisite - instructed - extra 200 calories issued in today's clinic appointment. Dillying and hesitating, delaying and vacillating - the cake and biscuit counter in Sainsbury's a sea of foulness before your poor eyes.

Such worry and fear in your bearing as you move from cakes to breads to biscuits to cakes and over and over again - picking up packet after packet and then back to the first, seemingly willing the fat content to have each time miraculously gone down and the calorie content to be the exact right number - trying to do the right thing, do as you've been told, battling against the voice and trying to get well. I know you don't want to eat at all but you told me today how frightened you are of becoming so ill again, reverting to that terrified girl who battled to starve herself successfully. So you try and you fight it and you do as you're told. But it very nearly breaks you. To pick up the slack and to give you what paltry reserves of courage I can spare for you to take, leaves me barely able to see.

We get home and I fall into my bed while the sun shines outside and children laugh in the gardens over the way. The nothingness of my room is like heaven. All I have to do is be. And yet all I can do is think of you downstairs - actually being the one doing the living through every second of all the terrible things I imagine. I think of your next meal and your pain and your struggle and your worry and your sadness. And I could punch myself with the guilt and disgust.

Point four of a kilo lost this week. All those stairs at college - corridors strode down and classrooms crossed at speed to keep up with timetables and friends. But with each step, the burning of energy and the maths of it all makes you thinner. So, the numbers do bad things and the balance must be addressed. With more food. You eat so much but of so few calories and such little fat. I despair. How to smile and gather hope and be your calm, equable Mother when according to the calculations, IT'S NOT WORKING. I just don't know. I try to sort it in my head - battle plans and strategies - but I am frozen with indecision and woe. I just want to go to bed and bury my head and melt away into oblivion. I do not know how to keep on doing this. If all this fails, it will be my fault for not being able to hide my rage and my crying and my fear. I let little bits escape, against my will: tears squeezed through swollen and stinging lids; sharp words through tight, bitten lips - lumpy and ragged inside from my restless teeth.

I am so tired, I feel I could vomit. I feel sick with the worry and the exhaustion and the middle-of-the-night wakefulness. The fear is a part of me now - grafted like a new skin over the old me. There seems to be little of me left now. I don't recognise myself anymore - not the vision in the mirror nor the voice in my head. I am on a mysterious autopilot - assigned to me by someone who has never met me before and doesn't quite know how to create the facsimile. I have no idea who I am.

Potatoes

I fell asleep just now and had a dream that you asked for potatoes.

I want to say more on this - about the astonishment and happiness I felt at your spontaneity.
And I want to describe how you held up the bag of charlottes to me in Sainsbury's and said "Can we have these?"

But I think I'll leave it at that: you asked for potatoes.

Smell

You said my salad smelled nice yesterday.
Food smelled nice to you. Oh god - you not only experienced it, you allowed it and you mentioned it and didn't retract it or explain it away or ask me never to mention it again or tell anyone. It was a spontaneous moment! I can feel a smile on my face just from thinking about it.

For a moment there, you forgot that food is medicine - only ever foul disgusting medicine.
Some latent, sleepy part of your brain - the part that has been put on hold all these months and is forbidden to voice an opinion - snuck past the defenses erected by that bitch inhabiting your mind. It remembered food as pleasure - as a delight to the senses - not a shameful, excessive indulgence. Fuck YOU, anorexia.

Whether you want to or not, you seem to be improving, slowly slowly slowly - evidenced by such incidents. Small things no-one would notice - except me and you.

I won't forget this. Moments like that give me a fleeting glimpse into a future filled with ordinariness.

You are wonderful.

No More Brambling

We haven't gone blackberry picking this year. I'm pretty sure we won't. Not never - just not this year. Makes me sad and wistful - it's been a part of our Autumns since you were a baby: purple, prickled fingers and lumpy, sugary crumble. And Mabel plucking them with her front teeth to keep herself amused while we wander slowly round all the bushes on the Common, filling up Tupperware containers.

It'd just be pointless. And yet another mean reminder that you're not your usual self - that simple pleasures are now on hold - boxed away until we can revisit them. I don't know how I'll remember everything you and I will need or want to reacquaint ourselves with. Maybe a list:

• Brambling.
• Going to the cafe on the Common.
• Me making you a bite to eat.
• Me making you a cuppa. You making you a cuppa.
• Going to fast food places with your friends on the way home from school.
• Spotting things you might fancy in shops and buying them for you without mentally slapping myself.
• You having a monster peckish evening and enjoying eating every single thing you make for yourself - crackers and cereal and crisps and carrots and hummous.
• You saying - "Mmm, that smells nice".
  
• You saying "I'm starving" and me not wanting to cry for the time when you really were. Just typing that makes me want to cry.
  
• You saying "I'm not hungry" and meaning "I'm not hungry" instead of "I'm going to punish myself by withholding nourishment".

That fast became a general eating-related wish list. Not what I intended.

_______________________________________________________________________

A different list:

• College.
• Rachel and Lily and Alison here. Mixed feelings of pleasure in Lily's sweet company and irritation at the noise of that dog and the crowding and the slight disintegration of your carefully practiced and well worn routine - your safety and familiarity has taken on a tinge of chaos and you're striving valiantly to not mind, to not show that you mind, to not shout and scream and throw your blender at them for doing normal things in the kitchen and not being able to read your mind.
  
• Diane gone. Strange but true. And how quickly we pushed her into the box marked "Forgotten". The lid keeps slipping off a bit.
  
• You feeling like you're getting fatter when actually you still feel like a bony, tiny waif in my arms and your Size 4 clothes show no signs of getting snugger.
• Scared to be different in front of your friends at College. Different is weird and weird means losing the few friends you have left and that means being alone and lonely and pretending that's what you actually wanted all along.
• Wanting to be invisible and glide soundlessly and ephemerally through your existence outside of this house.
• Seeing girls you used to think were slim and lovely and envied slightly and realising you're now so much thinner than they are: pride fighting shame. Always the dichotomy.
• Crying with the fear and dread of College and coping with such a huge shift and so much that is hurtingly unfamiliar - it makes my stomach twist with worry about how you'll cope - not knowing and having to wait and see and force yourself and try try try to be normal and to be just like all those others who used to be your close-knit band of comrades. Now, you speak of them as though they were dangerous strangers who will invade the new, rigid, safe existence you have carved for yourself. As if their teenage exuberance and carelessness and recklessness might ruin you. It won't, my darling. It makes me so sad.
• Knowing you've given thought to chucking it all in and getting a job instead.
• Antidepressants. I thought this was what I wanted for you - that they'd give you a boost and the room to heal. Now the time has come and the Doctor feels you need them, I absolutely do not want you to have to take them.
• Your obsessions and compulsions getting worse and more complicated and time-consuming and annoying and making you weirder and more different - as if there was any need for more.
• Hearing you say "suicide" and wrapping it in a sentence of reassuring words and "I never have/never will/don't want". But the damn word was said and I keep hearing it echo in my head. Goddammit.
• Sleeplessness night after night. Yours as well as mine.
  
• I love you.
• Please get better.
• I love you so much.

Size 4

Your new Size 4 clothes arrived today.

I wanted to scream when I saw them. They're Lilliputian clothes. They are ugly (except they're not really - they're nice clothes - fashionable and cute and sexy. Just tiny.) I hate you being a Size 4. It's wrong. I can feel my face creasing with nearly-crying when I think of that number. It had better go no bloody lower, is all I have to say. Don't you dare let it go lower. Please, precious girl. The thought frightens me so much and strips my life of ease and peace. Where has my life gone?

New clothes for when you have to face everyone when term starts in a couple of weeks. I know how worried you are about going to college. It's all so new and unknown. So much of your life has been a learning curve lately and I want this upcoming one to be a good one, a positive, exciting step. How awful for you to have to take on all that PLUS looking all newly-emaciated. ("Newly" to the crowd at school, anyway. I can barely remember your Size 10 body.) All your clothes look silly on you - even the Size 8 ones. They waft around your thighs and sag at your fleshless bottom. I hate to see it. And yet I am bombarded with the vision so much. We are together all day - you'd think it would have stopped hitting me afresh so often. And yet every time I look at you, my guts lurch and my head swims a little. Ten times a day, I bite back the words: "For god's sake - look how bloody THIN you are! Please STOP THIS!" It's tiring. My eyes are creased with new lines and circled with soft darkness. I can't find it in myself to care too much about this, though.

So, miniature shorts that accentuate your elfin legs. But they fit. At last. Oh, if only it wasn't a 4 I had to face. I'm scared. Always so scared.

Worn Down & Out

I am fucking fed up with this.

I said precisely that. I even decorated it with a swift exit and wide flung door. Leaving you behind - frightened guilty angry - facing those two witches without my protection and the umbrella of my mothering. I'm sure they were kind to you. I'm pretty sure one of them will have looked on with careful, studied, practised sympathy, a tilt of her messy head and a murmured "Mmmmm". The other will have smiled uncomfortably and tried to jolly you along. The better of the two. The least hated. The warmer, more human nightmare - faced every week with resignation and fear and false stoicism.

I abandoned you for a moment - when you needed me most. All my protestations over these last few months to you - said to encourage you and embolden you: it's ok to feel, it's ok to express yourself angrilly, it's ok to be whatever you need to be - you're safe, you're ok, you've been good and polite and needing approval for far too long. It's destroying you. Let your emotions out. All that I have said. To help and heal you. All that encouragement to just be. So you did it. You were petulant and snippy to the doctor. And me? In my fury and frustration and desperation and fear, I shouted and told you you were being rude and I walked out. I despise myself for that. For many things besides that, obviously, but right now, I have the crashing realisation hit me every few minutes that I let you down. I am the most dreadful, thoughtless, lying, duplicitous, vile excuse for a mother.

So. Things are no better then. At least, that's what the scales say. How can this have happened? When you'd been weighed and you walked into the room where I waited, I couldn't tell whether it was a gain or a loss. I know by now that either of those will frighten you and make you feel despair. You GAIN weight and the anorexia berates you and kicks your fragile confidence with big boots - mean snippets of wordy punishment piercing your thoughts and blocking out rationality, sense, normality, knowledge and truth. You LOSE weight and your mind must imagine hospitals, force-feeding, loss of control, power, autonomy, freedom, meaning and sense, home and me. A backwards step means having to claw your way back with oh-so-casually added food (that dreaded "negotiation" between them and you, between them and us, between me and you - trying to be patient while you reject suggestion after suggestion only to be worn down and beaten into acceptance) and days stretching out miserably with every moment a battle until you acclimatise. Swelling belly (only in your mind; it's concave really, my tiny darling), stuffed gullet, gorged body, sickening greed and powerlessness. I know. I see it in your eyes and those ever-shrinking shoulders - tensing and turning from me.

You lost. A kilo. The most ever. I was dumbstruck. Furious. Terrified. Oh, the bleakness of all this.

I wish I could drug you. Put you into a deep sleep and pour food into you while you slumbered. However long it takes. I'd make wonderful food, pour over cook books and nutrition books and I'd create perfect food to heal you. Blend it into liquid and tube-feed you. So then I could be a proper mother. I'd be making you better. It'd all be down to me and you wouldn't have to deal with the agony that is getting over this. This horrible ugly struggle. Your little body would grow and your bones would melt back into your flesh and your corners would round out and your figure would come back and you'd be soft and healthy and normal and you wouldn't have had to battle and sacrifice. I'd awaken you when the time was right and you'd say "Have I been asleep? What time is it? I'm hungry". And I'd have to run to the loo to cry with joy and relief. And I'd tell you rehearsed lies - "Everything's fine. You're fine. Here's a lovely supper for you, darling - your favourite." And you'd wolf it down and smile and we'd go out somewhere lovely and you'd be all bouncy and silly and lighthearted and I'd have to keep swallowing hard to stop from howling. And I'd magically hand you your life back. All mended and wonderful and a little bit boring.

Where is your freedom? Where are your choices? Where is your blossoming adulthood and the exciting trepidation it should be greeted with? I HATE this. You're my baby again and I would rather you emigrated to Australia and lived a happy life away from me and I only ever saw you over a webcam than this. Can you believe that? That I can say that and mean it with my whole anguished heart? I do. I would sacrifice anything to rid us of this. I would kill him. I want to kill him so much. I dream of stabbing him or kidnapping him and putting him in a cage and torturing him for years. I fantasise wildly of ways to ruin him. Destroy him and all who love him. I dream of castrating him and stuffing it down his throat and taping his mouth shut and laughing while he dies in front of me. Of impaling him on a spike and watching the blood run out of him. I'm impotently enraged that I can't do this for you and for me and for every other girl who ever encounters him. Wicked, wicked man. I bet his life is ok. I wish ours was.

I am so sad. My eyes ache with crying every day. My heart breaks and mends and breaks and mends. I'm so tired. I wish I had a god. Such terrible loneliness.

A YEAR TODAY. My whole self is hurting. You didn't tell me until this afternoon. I wonder if you expected me to just know. I'm so miserably sorry I didn't. I feel utterly wretched for you. Such a bleak anniversary - one that will cloud your days, your eyes, your heart for ever more.

I wish my love was enough. I am trying so hard to love you better. I'll never give up.

Our Day

I wake unsettled at 7ish and have a brief moment, every morning, of forgetting. Blankness. An almost out-of-the-womb like state. As if anything might happen and nothing has ever happened. And then like a sick swirling in my mind, this pleasant fog lifts - or more honestly, it is yanked away from me - and I am back to the truth. She has anorexia. She struggles, I struggle. Like some sort of sick symbiosis.

I lay a moment, catching my breath - taken from me by the realisation all over again that nothing is normal or easy or careless - and as I lay there, I wonder. How is she? Is she awake? Is she ok? Is she dreading her day? Should I go to her? Will she have killed herself in the night? Will her body have failed? I know in my sane mind that this last is not a realistic fear any more - she eats, she survives. Pathetic, bird-like portions - eaten with hatred and fear - each mouthful like toxic cardboard, ruining her life and her control and corrupting her soul. But she eats. Food as medicine, food as medicine.

I get up. I stumble to the bathroom and half-blindly begin my day. Dogs fed and watered, tea made (for me only these days - a fact that hurts EVERY SINGLE TIME I put the kettle on - she used to love her tea so much. I want to make her cups of tea. My eyes prickle with wanting that simple loving gesture back.) I return to my room and wait. The creak of her door comes like music and there she is - sleepy and tousled and all beautiful and a bit haggard and so achingly familiar and precious. I fight the urge - as I do every day - to leap across to her and squash her tight against me and thank her for still existing. I greet her with small words of welcome and love so as not to intimidate or alarm her. She either gets into bed with me to watch a DVD and come awake properly or she goes back to her own bed and the comfort of cartoons - so undemanding and familiar and a ghost of her previous little-girl life. I know she longs for her childhood - misses the demands she faced within it - such easy, silly, trivial demands - surmountable and innocent by comparison.

At 8.45 every day - not a moment later (the OCD-ness of anorexia strikes me time and again) - she makes her breakfast: that dreaded meal. And so begins another day of feeding her - food as medicine. I wonder will she cheat and put less milk on her Weetabix, when she already permits herself such a meagre quantity? Will I be able to stop myself peering covertly into her bowl? The same worries every day. Less calories equals trauma on the scales and me checking for signs of tiredness and for bones jutting almost-imperceptibly more. She sits beside me in bed as we watch something banal and we pretend everything is normal and this is what everybody does - eats breakfast with the safety of their mother shoulder-t0-shoulder in bed with them. I'm not sure if it's me that needs that safe feeling or her. Both, I think. We're both afraid and only just daring to raise our heads above the parapet.

She spoons and chews and chews (on Weetabix...) and swallows and repeats til it's almost gone. But she always leaves some and I haven't the heart to say "You've left 2 teaspoonfuls in there!" It would be pathetic. It would cause a frown and a fight and the day would be off to a horrid start. So I let it go and I mourn the grams those last spoonfuls would have added to her body. I want to say impatient, mean things - slap her hard and ask her what the hell she thinks she's doing leaving behind those precious drops of energy. But I don't. Not ever. And I despise myself for that. I yearn for the black courage to do that. Not the slap but the words.

She used to cry during and after eating her breakfast - talk in circles to me and with me about how it made her feel and how she hated herself and how weak she was. Now she sits there in silent, grim determination - waging war against the anorexia. And I want in some strange way to have that communication back - that desperate openness - panicky in her desire to verbally vomit out the terrible emotions and rid herself of them. But silence and monosyllabic responses are better than such pain, surely?

So - we now have an hour before the next food. Shower. Dress. make up and hair straighteners if there is anyone visiting or we plan to go somewhere. Empty, pale face and unpampered hair if not. I walk the dogs and do the housework and bob about on pins slightly, waiting for her to come downstairs and begin her day proper.

We watch telly and talk a bit and then before she has had time to even begin to relax or give her mind time to think like a normal person, it's time for her mid morning snack - a hateful, coy, dishonest, ugly word that has come to represent greed and fullness and indulgence. Meals she can understand and tolerate but snacks is a step too far. She knows all about regulating her blood sugar and habituating to regular eating, but still.

We have about an hour or so to live like wild things before lunch. This might mean going to sit in the gardens of the Rookery and throwing nuts to the squirrels or popping to the shops in the car or going for a drive to escape the four walls. Wild indeed. But it feels enough and it affords us a glimpse of humanity and a brief spell of being a part of things that are not us and illness and worry and that feeling of living each small moment under a microscope. But we can't stay out too long because the misery that is lunch beckons. The same meal every day - no deviation from time or quantity or method of cooking or seat to sit and eat it in or programme on the telly to distract her mind and drown out the chomping of her jaws and the swallowing of her throat and the hand to mouth over and over again. It takes her at the very least an hour to eat this meal. And I sit with her and type or read or watch the TV or potter in the kitchen, tidying up and willing her to eat without sadness or fear.

Round and round in her mouth the mulch goes and I can practically hear her counting the number of chews. She has to make it near liquid before she allows herself to gulp it down - otherwise it lands in her tender stomach like a clump of concrete. She is still so unused to having anything in there.

We may have someone over for a cup of tea or lunch - which always feels strained and weird nowadays - people actually enjoying their food and devouring it hungrily and with such gusto and pleasure. Delight at eating. It feels foreign in this house. I always want to say "See! See how people eat! You do that. Go on - YOU do it!" I keep this nugget of wisdom to myself. I have volumes of such witticisms and helpful remarks just taking up space in my head.

Afternoon snack brings a halt to puzzle books or computer games or DVD watching. I garden or pop out for 10 minutes to the bank or the supermarket or tend to the laundry or the kitchen floor - awash with cooking crumbs and glop and dog hairs and garden detritus. Always plenty to do. I stare out the window quite a lot too and shake a silent, sad, invisible fist at the Universe.

Feed the dogs and the cats and wash up and put away and give brief thought to feeding myself. Food is no longer quite the pleasure it once was for me - it's a necessity to be got out of the way so I can concentrate on her. (Except sweets and chocolate and sandwiches at night when I'm alone. Those I glory in. But that is for another entry.)

Sit and browse online and text and play computer games and chat and laugh and talk about how she feels if she needs to. Thank god for box sets of DVDs - they have saved us. And imprisoned us too. But there is safety in their confines.

Supper. Soup and half a pitta bread. Always has to be assaulted with Tabasco and reheated halfway through. Every day. She eats it so slowly. Chews her tinned soup by the teaspoon.

It all takes so long and every moment is magnified by the weirdness of it all and the strange rituals and the fear. But I am content with this. It is her getting better and it is safe in a strange way. I can keep her company and pick her up when she falls and intercept disasters and try to maintain her equilibrium. But it is a small world we inhabit.

We go upstairs after a long day down. Early and while it's light and people are still up and out living their busy, fun lives. We go to our separate rooms to re-group alone and have a small while to ourselves. I think she goes online to B-Eat.com and she watches cartoons or the banality of early-evening telly and I flop hotly on my bed, showered and half-asleep already. I don't ask what she does. She has no time of her own and I worry and hurt for her about that. But it seems that she can't bear to be too alone right now so I give her my all and have that hour to myself at the end of the day. I am only inches away - there if she needs me - and I think she likes the respite and privacy. So do I.

We later watch DVDs til we can't keep our eyes open another moment - drawing out the day and the togetherness. We used to talk and she would cry at this time - battle her demons with me there to soak it up and try to mend her. But there is no way to mend her. All I can do is just be. She will heal herself when she can - with time and days stretching shimmering-hot ahead of us. Effort and routine and love and fight and tiny moments of success.

Then sleep.
Then all over again.

Wasted Years

Things I don't miss about you:

You mindless half-laugh at the end of every utterance: such a display of nerves and sad desperation to be approved of, included, getting it.

Your foul breath that I never felt able to mention, making me turn my head away from you.

Your poorly-hidden jealousy; mean spiritedness greeting each minor success that isn't your own.

Your chav accent - south london old school roots in your every sound. It's a relief to not have to mentally correct so much of your speech. You always sounded stupid. I never have to listen to how you "done it" etc ever again.

The continuous, day to day Ouches you spluttered with every minor bump or knock. As if saying it out loud would garner you some sympathy. Passive all the way. 'Oh, please notice poor little me'. No.

No enthusiasm, no "Oh I'd love that!", no joie de vivre, no courage in the face of adversity, no blitz spirit and gung ho and galvanising into action. Just listless, bored, disinterested, cold gloom. Hovering over us like sick fog. Sucking the joy out of every room you sit in. How miserable you made me and how exhausted I felt every day trying to include you, cheer you, jolly you along, share my heart with you. Only to be met by dim incomprehension.

I don't miss having to decide everything for us, having to chivvy you along to be a part of our family, to take an interest, to decide something, to say "This is what I want". I always had to guess. Always. It made me feel so anxious and worried, having to guess all the time. Because I was tired after years of asking. You never changed. Never grew. Never tried to be a better person. Just the same old vague, silent, self-absorbed gloom, day in and day out.

I don't miss the lack of kindness, the lack of reaching out to another human being in the same house as you, seeing their pain and trying to help. Your coldness was shocking in the extreme. You have an unkind, withered spirit and I don't miss being hurt by that. I never want again in my life that feeling of not being enough. Of seeing myself reflected in your eyes and knowing I'm not good enough for you, not what you expected, not something. I hated feeling so bleak all the time in your company, so not-good-enough. You were always on the lookout for something different, something more, something other. Never satisfied. Always grumbling. That grumbling made me feel sick. Tired and despairing and sick.

Never again will I allow anyone close to me in any way if they have not had some kind of therapy, tried to make themselves a more enlightened person. I am free of the darkness you infected my home and my heart with. I will never allow such a thing to happen again.

8 years, I wasted.

Slip

You cheated. First time since the getting better began. It hurt me and confused me and worried me. My truthful, conscientious daughter. I always hoped that particular anorexic trait would elude you. You seemed to be behaving deliberately stupidly and I just didn't get it - wanted to slap your tiny, angular face and yell into it.

It was such a small cheat - but one you clung to because "they" said you could alter your regime slightly. But 70 calories fewer is the difference between me crying with relief when you stand on the scales and me crying with despair when the numbers (those damn numbers that smother our lives like a rotten blanket) go down. How ever would I be able to look at you and muster up from my boots any ounce of optimism and positivity about the battle all over again? "They" hadn't taken into the equation this mathematical stumbling block. But you had and you ran with it, head down and saying nothing. A silent lottery win for you there, dearest one.

Such a small slip - when you've been so fastidious and exemplary - but it became magnified and giant between us. It made me cry with worry. And it made you cry with shame and guilt at my discovery. Probably with a fair dose of hatred too. I know you felt such fury towards me for picking it up and picking on you. You tried to bow your head and grit your teeth and speak in civil tones but you might as well have ranted like a loon at me for all the good your control did you. You can't hide. It's always writ LOUD on the planes of your face and in the hunch of your knobbly shoulders.

So you're sticking stubbornly to the new breakfast and the 'lessness' of it and you know it's not right and still you maintain it's what you're going to do. And I have to let you and pray it isn't the backward slide I've dreaded. It's crazy, anorexic thinking to believe - to say out loud - that it's ok to do this. It's pacifying the demon inside you. Different food but fewer calories. That's the trade off. You're brave to eat something not on your safe list but only because it's less frightening than persevering with a banana. This makes me sad and I feel sucked dry of the will to battle it with you. So I gave in. Just this once. I am pathetically weak to have acquiesced.

Anyway. Apropos of nothing, your legs may well be the same size as Lydia's (they're not - I looked today when she was here) and she may well be perceived as normal and I know you want to say that this means your legs must be normal too and I am making a fuss when I tell you they're like sticks. But she isn't anorexic and she doesn't feel terror when she eats. So yes - your legs are too thin, my love, my precious little girl. (Who should be nearly a woman by now.)

I despise that this has taken so much from you. Not just your freedom - and mine - but your spontaneity and the simple pleasures of a life lived carelessly.

Puzzle

You do your puzzle books to stave off the thoughts and I hide behind a screen of one sort or another. I know your mind is on food - how much you crave it and how "the other you" forbids you to eat it or if you do, to enjoy it. You mentioned to me yesterday how frightened you are to admit to craving food - that just saying the words drains you and fills you with a numb, impotent sort of terror - that if you cave in, you'll never stop. Not stop ever - that you'll go on bingeing and a new sickness will take the place of the anorexia. I suppose it might. Would I worry so much about that? I think it would be a different worry. More a mortification at the self-hatred I know you'd feel - more than you do already in these new days we are living.

The puzzles block you. Stop you crying, lashing out:

frown wail howl hate scream break panic worry fear.

But I seem to have lost the ability to hide so well. I can't hide from myself and a large part of me is terrified ALL. THE. TIME. I hate this. I have to squash myself, sacrifice myself, bottle and bury and dredge up from the pit of my heart the ability to be strong. I am not used to this. I am so filled with fear and my mind is screaming. Every minute of every day I long to fall apart - the draw is powerful and nags at me. Fall down; lie down; snap; cry; run away; shout; give up; say mean mean mean things;

frown wail howl hate scream break panic worry fear.

I want those reactions. Not this straight-backed, calm, gently smiling, articulate, reassuring Mother. I miss me. And I miss you. Mostly I miss you.

If I could have you back, I would gladly stay like this forever. But it's hard, darling. I am frightened of failing you. Of going blind with rage and fear, of falling over in despair and never being able to get up again. Not metaphorically, either. That my bones will buckle, my muscles wither, my body collapse with worry and this hideous, nauseating, pervading exhaustion. And I will have failed you.

I see you trying to master the fear. Watching your face is like having your feelings painted in the sky - gigantic, unmissable messages. You chew for interminable lengths of time, swilling that terrible stuff/beautiful nourishment/life-saving sustenance around your mouth and between your molars. You swallow the medicinefood and you try so hard to chat with me and watch the telly and be normal - I can see you trying so hard to be normal - to answer me civilly when you feel like murder, to maintain your dignity while you crave destruction, to contain your hysterical self within your skin. But it's all a bit of a charade for now, I think. It's fake-it-to-make-it. It's like AA for anoerxics. It's good. I'm proud of you.

If I ever meet that man, I will kill him and go to prison dancing.

Feast & Famine

I eat myself into a stupor each night - alone in my bed, chewing and swallowing frantically.
Gorging on chocolate and biscuits until I feel as if I might vomit.
I don't like chocolate. I do like biscuits a fair bit. But not enough to shove a packet into my aching stomach every single night.

I imagine I'm over-compensating in some sickened, co-dependent way for the meagre scrapings you bitterly permit your precious body. I stuff, you starve. I over-indulge, you cling determinedly to ravenous denial. I feel disgusted and sad and heavy and soft on all my edges and you feel light and angular and washboard hard and lithe and pure and clean and stiff with ramrod effort. Hardened in your mind and breaking in your heart.

I eat so much. My fingers are foul with the sourness of wetted biscuit and greasy chocolate. There are flakings and leavings and crumblings and stinking, guilty drops of this secret feast all over me and my bed. I can feel - beneath my fingernails - revolting, tiny wedges of fat and oil and dry sugar. I can't bring myself to lick and suck it away. That vague gesture of hand to mouth and tongue probing. It's beyond me. I want harsh soap and scalding water. I wish I could do that to my stomach and my fattening body.

When I cry - harrowing and hard like I'm going to wring out my soul - I am left feeling so empty and listless. Perhaps I am filling myself up to mend the wounds. The fullness feels terrible and yet I am distanced momentarily from your anguish. MY anguish. When we cry and our hearts are breaking and I give you all the strength in my hollow soul, when I put myself on hold and breathe every breath for you and your sorrow and fear, when I spew my heart out of my body, through my mouth and into your gaping aching mind - to nourish and heal you - I leave myself bare and ravenous and depleted. Running on empty. So I gorge to fill the void for when you need me again.

Oh

I am overwhelmed by this suffocating fear.
It permeates everything and transcends everything.

I have caused this in you. I see that now.
I have loved you too much.
I never let you fully leave the womb.
I have trapped you and tainted you.

I am sick to my soul with despair.
Your bony bones are breaking my heart.

There is so much further to go and I feel like a frightened child.
I want to just run away and come back when
someone else has fixed you.

I see the tangle of hate and terror and guilt and rage
in your every glance, all mixed up like a sick potion.

This is somehow my punishment for my glee at having you.
So cherished and blindly adored.
All I live for and the burden got too much for you.
I see that now. I am sick with sorrow.

Forgive me.

Nick

Dear Nick,

Let me tell you what happened in more detail. This is what she told me on that first terrible day when this all began a few months ago and over the last few months as she's dealt with the feelings.

She met this man at the Reading Festival - and he is a man - in his 20's - called Joe. He flattered her and praised her looks, her body, and he showed an interest in her at a time when her relationship with Alex was failing. Alex fell asleep in his and Grace's tent and Grace was tempted to go and sit with Joe outside his tent next door. He gave her alcohol - Grace's first ever - and he got her drunk. Deliberately. He then took her for a walk to the area behind all the tents, She said she wanted to go back. He refused and tried to kiss her. She said no. He wouldn't listen. He got on top of her and pinned her down. She told me he was so heavy. My heart breaks to think of her struggling beneath him and being drugged into limpness and ineffectuality. She was too intoxicated to fight him off and anyway, he was a big man with something terrible on his mind and even if she'd been sober, there would have been nothing she could do. He ignored her. He didn't use a condom. He took her virginity. Seems he took a whole lot more than that.

She went back to her tent. The next morning he smiled at her. Laughed at her. Tried to get her to be mates again. Behaved as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. She took herself to the medical tent and got the morning after pill. Brave, sensible, thoughtful, frightened 15 year old girl. When she got back to London, she went to the Brook clinic in Brixton and got all the STI tests done. All by herself without me to lean on. She was too ashamed to tell me. She thought what happened was all her fault. That she should never have drunk the alcohol. That she should have fought harder. She blames herself entirely. Intellectually she knows NO MEANS NO but emotionally, she feels she is to blame. The guilt is overwhelming her.

I have bought her books on date rape. I have talked to her. I have taken her to counsellors. She would tell any other girl that rape is never the victim's fault. NEVER. But she can't apply that to herself. When her eating disorder was in its infancy, 3 months or so ago (such a short time for my baby's life to be so radically altered) she used to tell me she wanted to make herself small and unattractive so no man ever found her sexy again. (That man kept telling her how great her body was.) But the anorexia has grown two heads and a mind of its own now and it has little to do with rape or ugliness or sexual safety. It's just about control and fear of everything,

Please - PLEASE - don't try to discuss this with her. I know you won't but I have to say it again. It's of the utmost importance that you are strong and normal for her, Just normal, affable, loving, friendly, funny Dad. She needs normality and she needs to deal with this her own way. It would set her back terribly if she thought she had distressed you, if she learned that this knowledge had hurt you. I know she wouldn't be able to cope with that. I know it will be hard - that you'll want to crush her to your chest and never let her go when you see her tomorrow. Please be strong and don't let tears leak from your eyes or let a tremble into your voice or let your gaze rest on her sadly. She'll know. And it will devastate her. I cry every day in the shower with the radio blasting so she can't hear me. Months of crying now. Still she hears me and reaches out her hand to me and we hold each other and I feel her bones creaking beneath her skin and I wonder how I'll go on.

Tears are blurring my eyes now.
See you tomorrow.

Day Two

The hospital and the tests and the medicalisation of this scared you today. Made it real and big and frightening. We dealt with it though. We talked and got it out and didn't allow it to toxify you. You saw I can do this and you believe I am ok and that nothing you do or say or feel will ever change my love and that you are safe to be who you are - in this and always. Day by day, tear by tear, truth by truth and step by step together, you are realsising that we can do this and that you (and whatever ails you) are ok - I can deal.

You paid attention to the kitten today. You smiled and laughed at him and you stroked him and you let him on your lap and you didn't just stare blankly through him. My heart sang.

You talked to me about your fears and you allowed yourself to cry - big proper heartwrenching crying in my arms. I am so proud of your courage. When I held you, your shoulders felt like little baby shoulders - all bony and skin and no substance and I could feel the bones creaking when you sobbed. Your sadness and fear does not overly distress me, my darling girl. It feels right and real and there are no barriers between you and your true heart or between you and me when you cry and talk angrily through your tears. I am honoured to be shown that hidden side of you, the side you hate so much. Let me soak it up and love it better and ease your heart. Give it ALL to me and I will unburden you and keep you safe.

You allowed me to tell your Dad and when I told you it was done, you seemed relieved and you smiled and we spoke about him and his positive, loving reaction. There was openness and honesty and it was at your instigation. Brave girl. Mama's brave darling. Thank you for taking this seriously and for being responsible when I know all you want to do is curl up on your own and not deal with this for a single second more.

I am here. I will fight for you and with you. I will protect you and love you and guide you and help you to heal.

Dave

Happy 40th.

I have in my mind, clear as day, snapshots of you, of memories that are repeated over and over again – pictures of the years turning into decades and passing by. My dear and only brother, my friend, my childhood nemesis at times (evidenced by the scratches and pinches, kicks and bite marks from me on your fair skin. We were often each other’s only target.)

Today, as I sit and think of you, I am dazzled by the number and variety of things I can recall about you – about me and you as The Big Kids and specifically for now, of you as Boy David – my blue eyed, fair-haired, scrawny, quiet, gentle brother. The memories came so quickly to my mind that I could hardly get them down on the pieces of paper I’d torn for notes.

I sat in the garden this morning and wondered what to do to celebrate your 40^th birthday. You are hard to buy for. I wanted you to know I love and cherish you, so socks just would not do. I have accumulated, over days, a selection of random memories – of you, dear Dave – from as far back as I can remember up until I left home. I’ve tried to put them into some chronological order but one or two may have slipped through my orderly net and appear where they choose.

I remember my small, wiry brother with the blond hair that I coveted and the blue eyes I longed for. Gran’s eyes, they were, according to everyone. The only one of us to have that from her. They made you notable and even extraordinary in Thailand – allowed you into the temples and the monks bestowed their interest upon you. Such a striking little boy.

There were snakes at the Nippa Lodge and I can picture us running in absolute terror, trying to find Mum and Dad (Dumb and Mad...) as one chased us. At least, it seemed to chase us. We were so scared. I wonder if in reality, it was just there on the ground? Dad was always warning us with horror stories to be wary of them. And there were pineapple chunks for you and sugar cane for me from the man selling them at the villa we lived in, with the guards and the palm trees and Ow, the maid . These memories are almost intangible – they pass in an instant as soon as I recall them – vivid but fleeting. There was a pool and you could dive and I don’t know if I just didn’t want to learn or plain couldn’t do it, but you were the one who could dive. And duck dive. I only learnt to do that as an adult. You were like a fish when you were a small boy – swimming and spear fishing with Dad. You and I used to lie on the beach in Thailand – white sands and Mum and Dad nearby – and we would pray to our own invented sun gods to make the sun come out again whenever it disappeared behind clouds. We thought it was us making it happen.

Remember the fridge falling on us – we’d been swinging on the door with only Ow in the house and we got hurt – I remember my lip bleeding. “Ow”. Most likely not spelled like that. “You like fried banana?” Except she said it “Flied”.

Peatmore Close. Me and you waiting for Mum to come home after having Tommy. Rushing to the back of the ambulance and asking the driver: “Hey Mr Man – where’s the baby?” And not understanding the silence. Mr Man. I can hear that so clearly. We were so excited.

You smashing my head with the potato masher and me yours with a pen. Me having stitches, you not. You trapping my finger in the bathroom door hinge and me again having stitches and a manky nail for ever more. I think of you and that day when I look at my left hand. I don’t mind the nail or the scar. They’re like wrinkles – badges of honour, marks of a life lived.

High Birches and our tree house and Tarzan & Jane. The roles pre-assigned but nowadays I’d as likely be Tarzan as you. I tried not to mind back then. I did the “cooking” of the grass and the berries and the twigs you “hunted” for.

Samantha! That plain plank of wood imbued with life by us and played with and given a soul. I loved that crocodile.

We called Melly “Puffa” – so mean of us. She was little and slower and couldn’t keep up with us as we charged up the garden away from her. And that song “Two Little Boys” we played over and over again to see her cry. Sadistic siblings. And playing Monopoly, which I mostly always hated but did it anyway to stave off boredom.

Watching you helping Dad in the garage with his tools, the bench at the back and the vice and the smell of oil and the dirt. Boys’ things and I wasn’t allowed and a part of me really minded that. Mixing araldite and holding things steady and being his right hand man/boy. “Hold this son” and “Do it like this, boy” and me minding The Babies while Mum slept or something. Dad and Boy David. Much as it is now, I imagine.

We used to spend endless hours looking for pretty stones in Gran’s front garden, crouched over on sunny days, scrunching the gravel where Bam’s car would often sit – that yellow BMW. And we would dash inside to Gran’s room – the ‘dining room’ - filled with excitement, wanting to show our finds to the adults sitting and talking and trying to disguise their resentment at out intrusion – all except Jilly, who seemed to actually care about meaningless scraps of stone. Bless her – always patient and keen.

Gran’s ‘Bogey Hole’. Scared me witless.

Going down “the bumps” in the car – exciting and frightening.

Being sent upstairs to Jump On Jilly when she overslept at weekends.

Being sent upstairs to watch The Persuaders on that old black and white telly that took ages to warm up and had a two-pronged aerial on top.

My quiet, self-contained brother. I wonder if you remember these things and if you do, if you remember them in the same way that I do.

I can picture you in your room at High Birches, on your ZX Spectrum – a thing that left me cold – or on your CB radio, (was it stored inside a double-doored white cupboard?) a thing that fascinated me but that I just didn’t get. My handle was “Thin Lizzie”. I can’t recall yours.

Stories with Dad. All those wonderful tales we begged for again and again and never grew tired of.

Libya. The hateful heat and the weirdness of it all. The walls round our house that you used to climb onto and walk round. You could go for a long way, travelling like that, to neighbours houses.

The shack of a ‘shop’ we had in the back yard on the pink pebbles and the cactus grass, with Jackie Burkermeyer

Nigel Crump. Who we privately christened “Nigel Crumplebiscuit”. That makes me laugh just writing it down. What a daft name. He was a large boy, if I recall.

Muddled-up, disjointed memories, flooding my mind now I sit down to write this to you. All so vivid. As if we were little again – me and you, Bec & Dave, The Big Kids. Sometimes, it felt like me and you against the world, Dave.

I remember watching Saturday telly with you; eating cereal and laying on our stomachs; scrumping Dad’s fruit; roly polys down the sloping grass; going up in the loft; being told to turn the immersion/lights/telly off; bumping down the stairs; you having beans and sausages on toast for tea and me having spaghetti hoops; having that old man, Mr. Martel, to babysit us and watching in horror as he picked his scalp; going next door to play with Nathan’s toy garage and really hating him...

I remember a time when I didn’t really know you at all anymore, when our lives diverged and you went your way and I went mine. Cars and girls and friends and always busy and out or on your computer – while I moved out and on and away.

I have so many memories and every single one of them is filled with love and makes me smile. You are my past and my present - a vibrant, vivid fixture in my mind. I recalled all this with such pleasure and I thank you for being my constant, lovable brother – from the day you were born and we became Bec’n’Dave to this day.

I will think of you as you read this, hoping it makes you smile and think fondly of me. You mean the world to me, Dave. Your gentle , weird, predictable, hilarious sense of humour; your towering, solid physical presence, your blue blue eyes and your familiar hands that haven’t changed since childhood.

I am proud and honoured to have you for my brother and I wish with all my heart that I could be there to hug you. I know you’ll understand – you always do. Your uncomplicated heart always lives and lets live. You are so generous of spirit. And hilarious of joke. But that would be another letter about another era.

I love you, Dave.
Happy 40^th Birthday.

Bec.