Stories - A Mirror

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WARNING: This story contains mild imagery of anorexia. Do not read this if you are likely to be upset or offended by this.

A MIRROR

Rated PG

Charlotte remembers the days when she was quite young, when she would heap cake and custard and sweets and chocolate, glistening and warm, onto her plate. ‘You’re greedy,’ her mother would say. ‘You’ll never eat all that.’ Of course, being a child, she’d ignore her, even when she was full by the second sickly mouthful.

They’ve stopped saying it now. No one calls Charlotte greedy now, not since the days of her grand decision. Not since she resolved, chubby hand over chubby heart, to stop being ‘greedy’.

She lost too much weight, too quickly, and her friends began to tell their parents. Their parents began to tell her parents and her teachers, and soon it was all over the school. ‘Charlotte’s anorexic, she’s starving herself … Mum, please talk to her parents, I’m really worried about her …’

Not even when Charlotte turned around and denied it, stuffing a Kit Kat into her mouth, did the rumours desist. They merely morphed. ‘Mum, I think Charlotte might be bulimic. You know who I mean - Charlotte, who was anorexic.’

Charlotte still gets stares, years later, when she nibbles at her food. Younger kids learn from their siblings, and she’s quickly pointed out, as a former size ten who went to a size six during her earlier adolescence, and hasn’t really recovered. Lately they’ve been revived, the rumours, and she’s taken to wearing baggy clothes, big jumpers and jeans, just to fuel them. It’s fun, being the centre of conversation.

‘She’s trying to hide how skinny she is …’

Well, she certainly isn’t greedy any more.

One day her teacher pulls her aside. ‘Are you all right, Charlotte? You look a bit … well …’

Charlotte raises an eyebrow. ‘Thin?’

The well-meaning teacher nods reluctantly.

At which Charlotte tips her head back, and laughs until her lungs are raw. ‘Oh no, I’m not thin,’ she states. ‘Thin is absolutely not what I am.’

Later she is on the bus, in the warm light, watching the cold, dark people on the pavement. Even now she attracts more than the usual proportion of stares, as people calculate how small her thighs must be under the denim. But Charlotte is quite incredulous. Only she knows that she can go home, jump on the scales and weigh the same eight stone ten that she weighed a year ago. There isn’t anything wrong with Charlotte’s weight.

As the rumours get more exaggerated and the stares become rather more disgusted than curious, as she transfers to sixth form college and is still unable to shake off the gossip, Charlotte’s eyes rest increasingly on Jonah. Jonah, the tall black-swathed English student. ‘Jonah the loner.’ Very aloof, but almost everyone agrees that he has these eyes …

Jonah’s eyes rest on Charlotte, briefly, in the corridor, and automatically widen as they travel over her bare, normal arms, down her front. She sees him wonder whether she has always been this size, and she shivers. Those eyes seem to scorn her the way she scorns everyone who worries about her.

And as she watches him, day after day, monthly, craning her neck between lessons to catch a glimpse, Jonah begins to get thinner.

Charlotte spends a few nights a week in her room now, crying over Jonah, convincing herself that he is anorexic, that he is starving himself. When she sees him her eyes fill with tears, and she know that she could help him recover, that she could lift the disdain from his eyes and let their velvet brown breathe out. She conveniently forgets that she has never spoken to him, that it is hopeless. She doesn’t understand the point of life without him.

Jonah’s ribs begin to poke mockingly through his skin, reducing the black coat and jeans from regal to something farcical. His cheeks are tight over his skull, and his voice, once deep and penetrating and full of life, becomes a quiet, suffocated whisper.

One would think that Charlotte’d just go off him. Not at all. The thinner he becomes, the more she worries, and the more she dreads his expression when she stares at him. She longs to pluck the fag from between his teeth, to replace it with chocolate, cake, custard, sweets, anything. She wants to make him greedy.

The climax comes when he strides into her. Really into her, not just against her, but crushes her, twists out the air from her lungs. She inhales his jumper and the cold weakness of his shoulders.

‘Watch it!’ she yells furiously, before finding she has no air to speak with, and choking.

Jonah watches her calmly until she has regained her breath. ‘You all right?’

Charlotte nods, slaps her breastbone and lets out a final cough. Her temples are throbbing, and her hot blood wants to surge from her throat into her waiting, grubby palms. ‘Yes, I’m fine.’ Then, obeying a malevolent whisper in her ear, she adds: ‘Better than you, anyway.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You should eat more, you know,’ Charlotte tells him. ‘You’re getting a bit scarce around the edges.’

Jonah laughs quietly, arrogantly. ‘No, no, I’m not. I’m fine. And this coming from you? I don’t know who you are, but if there was any less of you there wouldn’t be anything to know.’

‘Too garbled.’ She shakes her head in disappointment, not wanting to scorn him but finding that out of habit she has no choice. ‘The insults have to be sharper and shorter, otherwise one has to think about them and they have no impact. Obviously your brain’s as thin as the rest of you. Have this.’ She tosses him one of her famous, bulimic Kit Kats.

Jonah looks first at the chocolate bar, then at Charlotte, his expression a little lacking in comprehension, and very lacking in warmth. ‘And you expect me to do what exactly with this?’

‘Eat it, you idiot!’ she exclaims. ‘You need it, you know. And by the way, for the record, I’m not anorexic or anything. You must be getting me confused with yourself. Are you going to eat that, or what?’

For a moment Jonah doesn’t say anything, and then lashes his skinny arm back and slams the Kit Kat into the wall with such force that Charlotte totters a few steps backwards. ‘I don’t want chocolate,’ he says hotly. ‘I’m not greedy.’

Suddenly Charlotte is aware of how empty the corridor is. How echoey.

Realises how Jonah’s mouth is not moving, but that his words are bouncing around her, everywhere, in her ears and mouth and nose and eyes and ears and nose. Greedy. She turns and leaves Jonah, her head bobbing weakly on her neck, her legs feeble underneath her. She does not stop walking, vaguely gripping the strap of her bag, until she has passed the cars and the cold dark people and the traffic lights, and until she is home in her bathroom.

There she peels off her clothes and hops on the scales, murmuring tunelessly to herself. ‘Jonah the loner, thinks he’s fine, but he’s too skinny, too skinny by half, he’s just stupid, and he thinks I’m -’

Six stone ten.

‘Oh, there you are!’ her mother says cheerfully. ‘I bought a new set of scales, the others were completely broken. You didn’t notice? Telling me I was about three stone lighter than I was … ridiculous!’

Charlotte looks up, and her eyes travel up her own body in the bathroom mirror, up the whiteness, along the dented stomach, over her papery shoulders and up to her face, cold and terrified.

Sometimes it takes a mirror.

FIN