The Flavours of Love

(For Tuesday, 14th)

  Saffron.

  I think it might be a good thing that Joel didn’t get to live to see this happen. His precious, adored daughter is as big a slut as her mother? It would break his heart.

  I didn’t even know she was pregnant. I wanted you to see how badly you were letting her down, how you weren’t protecting her from all the bad people out there. Do you know how easy it is to befriend her friends online? Too easy. They don’t even bother to check who a person is before they become ‘friends’. I know Phoebe kept rejecting my requests, but her friends accepted me. And I just made up the rumour and put it out there. And suddenly it’s true. She’s a slut, just like her mother.

  She doesn’t know when to keep her legs shut.

  As I said, maybe it’s a good thing he isn’t here to see this. It would break his heart.

  Some lessons need to be taught the hard way. I’m sorry, Saffron, but you’ve just learnt one. I think you may have to learn a few more.

  A

  XLVI

  In my fantasy I am not here. I am at the beach.

  In my fantasy, the beach isn’t the place where I go to explore thoughts of ending the pain. In my fantasy I am sitting at the beach hut, with the doors propped inwards. We have put up the rickety camping table, its Formica top cracked and peeling away from its metal surround. We have canvas deckchairs – four in total, but we have room for five people because one of the deckchairs is a doubler. In my perfect life, I am curled up on my husband’s lap as he reclines in the double deckchair, his long legs support my body and I am substantial and real, but not grotesque and huge as I often feel. He has his arm slung around me, the other playing with my hair. My eldest child, a girl, has her legs curled underneath herself and she is alternating between texting and reading a book. My youngest child, a boy, is sitting on the hot, uneven tarmac in front of his deckchair, sorting through his heaped pile of stones and shells, industriously categorising them.

  In my mind, I am landed here, on my beach, with the sea rushing in and out to say hello like an excited, noisy child who can’t quite believe how many people have turned up for a visit. There are people wandering past on their way to somewhere else, but we are cocooned inside our little world, the pieces of our lives slotted together, so from up close, from far away we are the same: a complete picture. We are a family.

  In my real life I am here. My grey-white dressing gown puddles at my feet when I discard it to step into the shower. Instead of my usual rush to move straight into the shower, avoiding the faint reflection of my shape in the limescale-splattered glass of the shower cubicle and the full-length mirror behind the door, I stop. Air goes in and out of my lungs, forced to expand and contract my chest, giving me courage. I have not done this for a long time. I have weighed myself every day but this I avoid. I have repeatedly binged and purged but I have side-stepped this. I constantly take handfuls of the excess parts of me, feeling their disgusting mass ooze between my fingers, but I have shunned this.

  I am naked, and I turn first to the ghostly reflection in the shower cubicle’s glass. It has a build up of white flecks of limescale because it was Joel who used to do the bathrooms. I haven’t kept up with that job as regularly as he did.

  A very faint version of me is there in the glass, and the outline is not what I expect. From the numbers on the scales, from the amount that goes in and comes out, from the touch of myself sometimes, this should not be my outline. My outline should be bigger, much, much bigger.

  ‘I thought you’d stopped doing this, Ffrony. You said you didn’t need any help and you promised me you would stop.’

  ‘You are thin.’

  I hear those words all the time, they are with me constantly, in there in the never-ending swirl of thoughts, feelings and memories I constantly hear in my head.

  My body revolves until, slowly, bit by bit, who I am when everything is stripped away is revealed to me in the mirror.

  In my fantasy life this is not who I am. I am perfect, and whole, and relaxed. It doesn’t matter what my body looks like, it doesn’t matter what the number on the scale says, I am complete. This outer part of me doesn’t matter, all that matters is what’s inside me. I will be loved no matter what, I will be held and cherished and wanted. In my perfect life I can let go of the digital numbers that go up and down, I can release the need to stuff things down and away, only to do whatever it takes to feel empty again. In my mind, my clear mind, I know that food is not love, it is not reward, it is not punishment, it is not perfection, it is not control, it is not unmanageable, it is not hate, it is not a sin, it is not one of the many things I use to torture myself with every day. Food is fuel.

  In my dream existence I know that thinness is not perfection. Thinness is not happiness. It is not the answer to all my problems, it is not the place I need to be so my life can begin. Wanting to be thin is another way of being elsewhere while life goes on around me. It is no different from being fat. Large. Big. Obese. Thinness is not going to change my life because I am thin and I am not happy. I am in control of my food and my body and I am not happy.

  In my ideal life I do not look in the mirror and see what I do now. I don’t see that I am thin and know that I am not happy. I don’t see that I am in control of my body, I control every element of it, and I am not happy. In my ideal existence, I don’t look at myself in the mirror and I don’t see the only thing Joel and I ever really argued about, I don’t see that Fynn was right.

  In my blissful world, I don’t remember the voice inside I chose to ignore when I was nineteen so I could restart on this journey to thinness and I don’t see clearly and painfully why I split myself in two so I can make it through the day.

  *

  I often cry in the shower. With my hair pushed under an elasticated clear shower cap, I stand facing the large metal head and I let the water drum onto my face, I let its rhythm resonate over my sensitised skin and I cry. I allow my body to shake, I wrap my arms around myself and I sob, I breathe in and out rapidly, like the short bursts of a machine gun. I can do that in here with the sound of running water as cover so no one can hear me. I am never alone enough to properly cry, to completely let go and wail. So I do it here, as alone as I can get.

  When I am exhausted, tired of crying, agreed that this is enough for today, I right myself. I force myself to stand upright, I release my body from my own tight grasp and I open my eyes ready to focus and face reality.

  It takes longer today, to right myself, to drag myself out of the fantasy life where I long to dwell and into this life. In this life I have devastated my body, I have constantly painful teeth that are so damaged they have often crumbled from eating cereal; I haven’t taken care of my family and they are fragmented, frightened, fragile; I have lost my best friend. I have messed up on every level. It takes longer but with determination, I prise my eyes apart, reaching to the side for the sliver of unperfumed soap that should be sufficient to wash my body. As my eyes, probably a vivid crimson and thick with the heaviness of attempting to weep my heart out, open they take their time to focus.

  Once the world around me is in view again, I see him. He has a perfect, cylindrical but tapered body; neat, evenly spaced black and yellow stripes; four clear, fragile wings; a long, protruding line at his bottom.

  9 years before That Day (May, 2002)

  ‘You do the spiders and slugs, Babes, I’ll do the wasps.’

  ‘We hardly ever get wasps.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean we don’t need a dedicated wasp ridder.’

  ‘How come I get two and you get one?’

  ‘Wasps are more dangerous, Ffrony.’

  *

  He would find this hilarious, he really would. The slugs have had their way with my plants, I see evidence of spiders and their webs all over the place and now this. I can’t remember the last time we had a wasp in the house.

  ‘You absolute bastard,’ I say to the grin Joel’s no doubt wearing wherever he is. ‘You’d do anything to get out of deali
ng with things like this, wouldn’t you?’

  I stare at the wasp, wobbling its way up the condensation-soaked shower pole, as if attempting to climb to the top of Mount Everest.

  This is Joel all over. He was expert at reminding me that you need to put your problems into perspective. Right now, my biggest problem isn’t all the things I’ve been crying about, it’s getting out of the shower without being stung.

  ‘Let’s see how you get out of this one then, eh, Ffrony.’

  XLVII

  With my notebook splayed open, a pen nestled like a blue, crystal-encased caterpillar in the valley in the middle of the pages, I sit at the kitchen table.

  In my notebook I have written:

  Food is not love

  and

  Love is love

  and

  Food is food

  and

  nothing can taste like love.

  and

  Everything tastes amazing when you love what you are eating.

  and

  Love what you eat.

  and

  Eat what loves your body.

  I mean it all. I know it all on an intellectual level, I know what I need to do, I know how I need to see myself move towards a cure for what I have, but it is living it that will make a difference.

  If I let go of what I have now, I will be back there in no time. I will be back to being the little girl told to stop eating bread and eat more fruit by her well-meaning mother, I’ll be the best friend who’s ever so nice and would suit my name if I lost weight, I’ll be the worker who needs special clothes because I am huge, I’ll be the woman at college no one notices because I am large. I’ll be fat and ugly and unsuccessful. I’ll also be the woman that Joel fell in love with. And I’ll be the woman who dropped the blackberries, the woman who hadn’t prepared for every eventuality so losing her husband nearly destroyed her.

  I know what I have to do intellectually; emotionally I’m too damn scared right now. But if I write things down, I can come back, I can see what I believe. And maybe it will click in my mind and my heart and I will be able to do it. If I write things down I’ll remind myself that I can’t think clearly when I binge and purge, and right now I need to think clearly.

  Now, I have little pieces of Joel in front of me. These scrawlings of his bring me closer to him, remind me he was more than his death, he was alive, too. He was so much, and he was this – a collection of recipes, each containing the foods he loved.

  I adore his funny, sloping writing, the way he crossed his ‘t’, the way he curled his ‘s’, the longer slope of ‘J’ because, I guess, it was the most important letter to him. He has notes on scraps of paper, a few filed away in a notebook, some on different-shaped and rainbow-coloured stickies. Some of the sheets are crumpled and creased, others are bisected in two directions from the way he folded them up.

  I’ve been looking for a blend of flavours that, when I slip them between my lips, will bring back everything good about my life with him. I’ll close my eyes and the taste will take over my senses, and I’ll be transported back to another place when I was with him. I’ll be that person who can look in the mirror and not worry about who I’ll see looking back at me. I’ll be the woman who can experience a bad feeling and not be terrified it’s going to consume me. I’ll be the person who can cope with things. I can deal with wasps in the shower. I can deal with the person who is going to try to kill me.

  If I find the perfect mix of flavours, I’ll be with him again. He’ll come back to me. I’ll find that love that made me feel normal and safe.

  Joel liked to follow traditional recipes as much as possible and would add one little Joel twist. Unlike me. I keep trying out different things, mixing ingredients up, replacing one or two elements to see what they taste like together. If they’ll be him. And us. And the life we had before that day.

  I have a whole month to indulge myself in this if I so wish. I can pretend that everything else is OK with the world and I can immerse myself in cooking and baking and making and creating. Or I can face up to what is going on and deal with it head-on.

  ‘What are you doing still in your dressing gown?’ my daughter says to me, causing my heart to lurch. Instinctively, I cover the papers with my hands to hide them. Then I remember that it’s Phoebe. It’s not someone who’s going to mock what I’m doing.

  ‘I’m off work for a month,’ I say. I release the papers and notebooks then start to gather them up, to put them in some sort of order.

  ‘Why?’ she asks.

  After the venom of last night, the way she spoke to me, the hatred behind her words, I’m surprised she hasn’t packed her bag and left.

  ‘It’s a long story,’ I say. I’m amazed, too, I can still speak to her after last night, to be honest. What she said, it cut at me in ways I’d forgotten I could hurt. My daughter stands in her grey and turquoise uniform, her bag over her shoulder, ready to go to back to school. Ready to face all the words that have been fired at her. I don’t talk to her enough. I don’t let her know what I’m thinking so why would she let me know what she’s thinking? ‘But the short version of why I’m not at work is that I’ve been really unhappy there so I decided to go see the big boss, the President. And boy did I get more than I bargained for there.’ I shudder. ‘Anyway, he told me to take a month off to consider my options so here I am, considering my options.’

  ‘After breakfast are you going to take me to school?’ she asks, uninterested in my story.

  ‘No. I don’t think you should go to school today. Or even for a while. I’m going to talk to Mr Newton about it on the phone, but I think you should stay home.’

  ‘I want to go to school.’

  ‘You’re being bullied, Phoebe, pretty hideously from what I saw.’

  ‘You can’t run away from bullies. You’ve got to stand up to them.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ I say to her. ‘But you know what? Sometimes it’s best to take a rest, to step out before you go back into the fight. And it’s even better to fight when someone has your back.’

  ‘Do you even know how you sound when you say things like that?’

  ‘Phoebe, I know it goes against everything you believe in, but I’d be really grateful if you could do me one favour.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t go to school for a few days. Give things a chance to simmer down, let the school deal with the main culprits if they can find them, then go back if you really, really want to.’ Before then, though, I will have found her a new school. Even if it means going back to work for Kevin to magic up money from somewhere to send her to a private school, she is not going to go back to St Allison.

  It won’t have occurred to Phoebe, but whatever she does from now on, how the people at school react to that, react to her, will shape how she feels about herself for so many years to come.

  Something like this follows you everywhere. It seems to go away, to be buried and forgotten, then when you have dared to forget, it comes for you. Sneaking out of the mouth of someone who didn’t even know you at the time, written in white on a black chalkboard for everyone to see, repeated by a headteacher for your parents to hear. You never get over this type of thing, you can only pretend it never happened, stuff it down as soon as it rears up in your head. You can only do the best you can to live with it as a smudge on your psyche.

  Part of who I am comes from this sort of thing. An element of who I am is from seeing the words on a blackboard about something I shouldn’t have let a boy do to me – something I never thought he’d tell anyone after he persuaded me to let him touch me. For only a second, but once it was done, it never went away.

  I never thought my daughter would be there, too. This is so public, so exposed, this is scored permanently onto the fabric of time that is the internet. It won’t only follow Phoebe around, it’ll be there in the histories of the people who said it. They’ll always be known – even the anonymous ones – as architects of someone else’s despair and anguish.
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  ‘Why were you unhappy at work?’ She drops her bag, lowers herself onto a chair and her gaze begins to wander inquisitively over the papers on the table in front of me as if she hasn’t seen them before.

  ‘It’s really been one person making my life a misery. Making snide little comments, questioning the time I get in, the time I leave, what I do, whether I go for lunch.’

  ‘What, kind of like what you do to me?’ She almost explodes with laughter. I wish she could see herself, the way her face has opened up and how she is radiating pure joy. This is what she was like before her father died.

  ‘Yes, I suppose if I was you that’s what I would think,’ I reply, desperate to hear her laugh again. ‘But it’s my job as a parent to do those things.’

  Her naturally slender body leans forwards as if she would love to pick up the pieces of paper and have a closer look. Only Joel and I have touched them. Whenever I get them out, I try to feel him in the pages, imagining where his fingers would have touched, where he would have planted his hand to begin writing. But if she did touch them, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

  J’s House Ratatouille catches my eye. I often look at it because it seems so complicated, that it would take courage, true fortitude to attempt it.

  ‘How would you like to be my sous chef while I make J’s House Ratatouille?’ I ask her.

  ‘Mum, we’re not in some teen show where you give me a cute little assignment and we bond and become besties.’

  ‘That’s me told then, isn’t it?’ Smarting, I examine the recipe again:

  aubergines

  Courgettes

  Peppers

  Tomatoes

  Onions

  Basil

  Herbs de Provence

  Olive oil

  It’s not that big a list, reading the instructions, it’s not that complicated, it has simply seemed that way. I’ve built it up to be something it’s not in my head. I’m not going to be scared by this. I can do this. I’ll be chopping till the end of time, but I can do this.