waiting for her to return. If it was evening time I’d lie on her bed until she got home.
Mum became the focus of everything for me – both my intense love on the good days and my anger and frustration on the bad.
By worshipping Dad rather than Mum I’d probably backed the wrong horse, but I wasn’t going to lose out now. No, that would have to be Nat. That caused big rows between me and her then – and it still does even today.
But even though Natalie and I both desperately needed Mum, she didn’t really have much left to give us. She was weak, crying all the time, and I was just so needy that she felt exhausted, which in turn made me feel abandoned.
My world was falling apart.
When Mum couldn’t stand sharing her bed with Dad any more she decided that she, Natalie and I would all move up into the attic and live there. From now on I slept on a double bed with Mum as I couldn’t bear to be physically apart from her. Natalie slept on an old brown sofa. All our toys were still scattered around the room, so it seemed like a bit of adventure having Mum up there with us, but it was kind of weird too.
By now I was struggling at school. The less I ate, the harder I found it to concentrate. And so much of my energy was being spent thinking about how I was going to dodge the next meal, how much I’d eaten so far that day and what Mum might be thinking about making for dinner that night, that I just couldn’t focus on lessons at all.
Then at break times I started going to the girls’ toilets and doing sit-ups. I would do dozens in a session before the bell, then dash back to my desk all hot and sweaty. One of the girls in my class must have told on me because one day a teacher came in and found me and said I wasn’t allowed to do it any more.
That must have been when school started getting really worried about me and called Mum in for a meeting. They said they were concerned about my rapidly falling weight and that I didn’t seem able to concentrate in class any more.
Mum hauled me back to the doctor again. It was a different locum, so we went through the same charade of my pretending to be eating a healthy if meagre diet and the doctor believing me. Again we were sent home, Mum even more dejected and me even more triumphant.
Dad was seldom around at mealtimes despite still living in the house, so he rarely saw the battles. When Mum tried to talk to him about me, it just ended up in another row as they tried to blame each other for my getting into such a state. Although what kind of state it was exactly, they still weren’t sure themselves.
One night Dad was in the pub when my friend Sian’s mum walked up to him.
‘Are you Nikki’s dad?’ she asked. Dad nodded and this woman he’d never met before grabbed his arm with a terrible sense of urgency.
‘My daughter is really worried about Nikki,’ she said. ‘She’s hiding in the toilets at school doing exercises and refusing to eat. Are you aware of what’s going on?’ she said.
Dad looked blank and was forced to admit he didn’t really know the extent of what was happening at all.
‘Well, you need to be worried,’ my friend’s mum told him. ‘If you don’t do something, your daughter is going to die.’
So why was I doing it? I can imagine that a lot of people reading this will find it totally weird that someone should want to put themselves through the pain and misery of starving themselves. Not to mention all the upset and stress it causes for their family.
As an eight-year-old I had no idea about the big ‘why’ behind it all – it was just something I had to do. A bit like other girls had to get every single badge at Brownies or had to get 100 per cent in a spelling test. But this was obviously more compulsive. And potentially fatal too.
Some of the anorexia counsellors I’ve had have said that maybe my eating disorder started as a bid to make myself literally disappear in the warring situation at home, as if by physically getting smaller I would just fade from view. And another expert said he thought I simply went on a hunger strike that got out of control. He thought I was so angry and devastated at how my perfect life had been shattered that I was refusing to eat until someone picked up all the pieces and put them back together again.
Counsellors have also quizzed me endlessly about my mum and whether she was to blame in some way but I really don’t think so. Mum has always been slim but not skinny and I never remember her dieting. But I do once recall her taking me and Nat to Folkestone for a weekend just when things were starting to go badly wrong with Dad. She was really stressed and hadn’t been eating properly. She stood in the hotel bedroom admiring her flat tummy in the mirror and said, ‘Ooh, I’ve really lost weight.’ But I honestly don’t think that alone could have caused it – there can’t be a woman in the country who hasn’t said something similar at some stage and not all their daughters have become anorexic.
Another counsellor – trust me, I’ve seen dozens – thought that on some subconscious level I was trying to copy the way Grandad had just faded away from life. He reckoned it was a ‘mourning reaction’ and I was trying to identify with Grandad by losing weight myself. And while I guess there might be some truth in that, part of me still thinks I would have become anorexic whatever happened. It was in my nature from before I was born, and the events of that year only brought it on at that particular time.
I also believe that anorexia just gave me something for myself that year as my life fell apart. I felt unhappy about everything that had happened, useless at gymnastics and inadequate at keeping my family together. But not eating was something I was good at. Not eating became my hobby, something that was all mine and that I could be in control of while my family and my perfect life fell apart around me.
In fact how much I ate was about the only thing I could control in the deepening chaos. And maybe I began to realise that not eating actually brought me quite a lot of control. Very soon I was pulling all the strings in my family. Mum’s every waking moment became filled with begging me to eat, pacifying my moods, sorting out my medical support and worrying about me. And while I remained anorexic, all her attention remained focused on me.
And as I’d always wanted to be the best at everything I did, long before I’d even heard the word ‘anorexic’ I’d set about becoming the very best anorexic ever.
I didn’t tell Natalie what I was doing and she never asked. I didn’t tell my friends and certainly not Dad. And when Mum asked, begged or pleaded with me to tell her what the problem was, I simply denied there was a problem.
Even though I’d started depriving myself of food to get skinnier for gymnastics, that soon went out of the window and before long losing weight became an end in itself. In fact my gymnastics was only getting worse as by losing weight I was also losing muscle. I couldn’t do the flips, I couldn’t jump, I couldn’t do rolls any more – and that made me feel even more useless.
Then, just as you might have imagined things couldn’t have got much worse at home, they did – with bells on! Dad found out that Mum had started seeing another man. Even though they were supposed to be separated despite living under the same roof, he went mad.
It wasn’t even as though Mum was having some mad, passionate affair. She’d just struck up a friendship with a bloke called Tony who used to pop round to fix her old Morris Minor whenever it broken down – which was pretty often!
Natalie and I had always quite liked Tony. We’d usually be playing out in the street on our bikes while he messed around under the bonnet. He’d talk to us and ask about school and he seemed harmless and friendly. After he had finished on the car he would go inside to wash the grease off his hands and have a cuppa and a chat with Mum. And that is how it all started. Tony’s marriage had been a bit rocky and I think he