Because of the glorious mural, the bathroom became more of a family hangout than the living room, and it was in the sacred family meeting place that I one day turned the brass key in the door and climbed up on a chair to reach the shelf in the wooden cabinet that held Mum's Valium.
Our London home had a large bathroom with a wall-to-wall mural of peacocks and birds of paradise, jungle birds and tall grass, inspired by Gauguin.
It was a miserable existence, but I felt powerless to stop it. I moved to the greatest city in the world and stayed home and ate cakes. "You suddenly thought it would be a good idea?" "It started the day I moved to New York." "And when did the bulimia start?" asked Dr R. There was nothing I could tell him that he'd tell me was as bad as I'd decided it was. Like the medieval use of leeches."įrom the first session, there wasn't a reference point he didn't get. "Your mother thinks," he said in that first meeting, "that New York brought this out in you?" Slim, balding, with a turtleneck sweater tucked into corduroy trousers, belted high. He opened the door, like a debutante appearing at the top of a staircase. The next day, I found myself on the doorstep of a therapist I'll call Dr R, finally acting on a recommendation I'd been given months earlier.
I say dreadful, which it was for those who loved me, but for me there was no dread it was as I had expected. "You will not be pretty for husband!" scolded an Indian nurse that dreadful March day, surveying my cuts as he inserted an IV drip into my inner elbow. Listening to The River by Bruce Springsteen over and over.Įventually, in early 2000, I tried to kill myself. As much as I cut myself – and it had been escalating since I was 16, creeping from my arms, to my neck, to my face – there was also pain and achievement, elation, in pounding the pavement. I think the fact that the streets were a numerical grid helped me to stay alive. The night shift cook and the waitress let me join their game of Boggle while I devoured a plate of pecan pancakes. At night, I went to a soul food restaurant called The Pink Tea Cup to fill the hours awake. They didn't know I was cutting myself and they didn't know I was bingeing and purging six, seven, eight times a day. At 22, I was living in Manhattan, on contract to this paper and about to have my first novel published. I t took a little while to realise that my quirks had gone beyond eccentricity, past the warm waters of weird to those cold, deep patches of sea where people lose their lives.
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