the big chunk of cheese plonked in the middle. Didn’t these people know cheese was about the most ‘bad’ food around?
‘Oh no, I don’t fancy that at the moment, thank you,’ I said quietly.
‘Nikki, you have to eat your snack,’ replied Mary. ‘I’ll talk to you when you have finished it.’
For more than an hour we sat in silence. A few times I tried to engage Mary’s eyes, buried deep in her pudgy face, but each time she looked away. It was only later I discovered that it was the Maudsley’s policy to avoid any interaction with eating-disorders patients during mealtimes. So instead I silently gazed out of the window watching aeroplanes etching white lines across the sky of south London.
Finally, another nurse came into the room.
‘Right, Nikki,’ she said brusquely. ‘Your mum and dad are going home now, so you’d better say goodbye to them.’
Mum was standing in the doorway behind the nurse, her gaze flickering between me and the floor. I could tell by the red puffiness around her eyes that she had been crying. Even Dad looked shell-shocked.
At first I couldn’t quite understand what was happening. I’d always thought we were just here for a meeting with specialists. It hadn’t occurred to me for a moment that they might want to keep me here. But the look on Mum and Dad’s faces told me in a second that this was exactly what was happening.
‘No, no. Don’t take my mum away,’ I pleaded, my voice high-pitched but starting to choke with the realisation of what was happening.
‘I need my mum. Please don’t make her go. I need her.’
As Mum and Dad moved towards me to kiss me goodbye, I started to wail. This just could not be happening. Mum couldn’t be abandoning me. Not her, surely? OK, Grandad and Dad had left me, but Mum wouldn’t do that. Would she?
My screams grew louder and louder, like the howling of a wounded animal. I watched the nurse gently take hold of Mum’s elbow and lead her back out into the corridor. ‘No, no, noooooo,’ I screamed.
I lunged forward and flung my bony arms around Mum’s thighs, my screams now subsiding into loud sobs as I begged her not to leave me in this strange place surrounded by strange people.
Tears were sliding slowly down Mum’s face as she tried to untangle my arms from her legs and steady herself.
‘I’ve got to, Nikki,’ Mum kept saying. ‘I’ve got to – the doctors are going to make you better. You’ll be home soon, I promise.’
But I didn’t hear any of that. My head was thumping and my ears were filled with a strange howling – I didn’t realise then that it was me making such a horrific noise.
Mary and the other nurse peeled me away from Mum but I started screaming and lashing out at them. I was so angry, so furious that everyone would gang up and do this to me. Why me? After everything else, why me?
I flung myself around the room, banging into the bed and table, flailing my arms and legs.
Eventually, Mary pinned me to the floor to stop me smashing my head while the other nurse gently pushed Mum and Dad into the corridor.
For a moment I stopped struggling and took a breath. Through the glass window of the door I could see Mum looking back at me over her shoulder as she walked away. She had walked away and left me sobbing on the floor. Mum, who’d been there me for every second of every day, who carried me like a baby from room to room, who cuddled me to sleep and kissed my tears. She had left me.
I lay totally still and heard the lock on the door at the end of the corridor click shut. I was eight years old and totally alone. I cried until my head pounded and I was shaking with exhaustion.
After five minutes Mary picked me up from the floor and eased me back into the chair by the table.
The two cream crackers and lump of cheese were still sat there on the plate. My whole life had been upended once again but that chunk of cheese wasn’t going anywhere.
‘Now, Nikki,’ she said, ‘we’re going to work you out an eating programme which is going to make you better.’
She was fat and spoke with a strict, headmistressy voice that I could tell meant she wouldn’t put up with any negotiation. I was so scared.
‘If you stick to the programme and eat your food you will see your Mum in a couple of weeks,’ she told me. ‘As for now, eat your snack up and then we’ll talk to you.’
‘When am I going to see my mum?’ I mumbled through my tears.
‘Eat your snack and then we will talk to you.’
‘But I need her. I need her.’
‘Eat your snack and then we will talk to you.’
‘Please let me see her. Please.’
‘Eat your snack and then we will talk to you.’
And that is how it went on. Me, sobbing, begging and way beyond being able to think about eating. Them, refusing to talk to me, comfort me or even look at me unless I started eating.
At six o’clock they took away the plate of crackers and cheese and replaced it with a meat casse role dish with mash and peas. Again I looked at it and refused to eat. Again they sat near me at the table, refusing to speak unless I ate.
‘Please, when can I go home?’
‘Eat your dinner.’
At eight o’clock they took the cold, congealed food away and brought a glass of milk and a small KitKat.
‘When am I going to see my mum?’
‘Eat your snack.’
At 8.30 the chocolate and milk were taken away and the nurse said it was bedtime. I looked over to the bed where the pyjamas Mum had sneaked into her handbag on the way here had been laid out for me.
The only time I’d ever been away from home before was at a Brownie camp and then I was so miserable I’d wet the bed. How on earth was I going to manage in this place with absolutely no one I knew around me and no idea when I might be going home?
I was shaking as I swung my legs in between the plain white sheets. I thought of my teddy-bear duvet cover. I thought of my sticker collection. I thought of Mum and Dad and Natalie all doing just what they had done last night, last month, last year – but without me.
How could this be happening?
One of the nurses sat on the bed as I lay there and closed my eyes. It can only have been exhaustion from that long day that made me able to sleep.
Next morning it all began again. I was woken by a nurse and got up and dressed myself. At eight o’clock a tray was put on my table with a bowl of cornflakes, a slice of bread and butter and a glass of orange juice on it. I allowed myself the orange juice and left everything else.
Then they set about weighing and measuring me. My weight had dropped to 18 kilos (2 stone 12 lb) – the average weight for a four-year-old. And I was a month off my ninth birthday.
The doctor’s reports from that assessment say I was ‘finding reality of life too hard to bear and wished to be dead to be reunited with her idealised grandfather’. I was the worst anorexic case they had ever treated at the Maudsley and there was a real concern that unless the weight went back on immediately, I could die.
‘You are dangerously underweight,’ Mary, my key nurse, told me. ‘You will not be allowed to see your Mum until you eat. And you will not be allowed to speak to your Mum until you eat. And if you still refuse to eat we’re going to take you to a medical ward, put a tube into you and force-feed you.’
No one ever asked me if I wanted to put the weight back on. No one ever considered I might not want to get better.
But