Oligarchy, page 5
The sharing goes on. If Bianca were here … But she’s not. But if she were, she would have real stories, not that she would ever tell anyone about them. This stuff is just a combination of dull, non-eating-disorder anecdotes and urban myths and the usual teenage crap. When it’s Natasha’s turn she doesn’t know where to start. There are so many things, but do any of them make her feel anything? Like, does she actually care? It’s her mother who has a problem with food, anyway, not her.
‘I threw away a box of chocolates,’ she says in the end, with a shrug. She doesn’t say that these were her parting gift from Nico. That she loved him so much less because of it. That she hasn’t replied to his last letter. That he bought her vegan chocolates even though she is not a vegan and he is not a vegan but probably because he’s a guy and didn’t read the label properly. That he does not know about her father, and everything that has happened. ‘Just before I flew here from Moscow.’
‘And how did that make you feel?’ says Tony.
Tash shrugs again. ‘I don’t know,’ she says.
‘Bad?’ prompts Tony.
‘Sure,’ says Tash. ‘Yeah. I wished I hadn’t done it.’
‘On a scale of one to ten?’
‘Like a four?’
‘A four. A four.’ He starts pacing. ‘Are you sure?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How many of the chocolates did you eat?’
‘One.’
‘Really? Are you sure it wasn’t the whole box?’
‘Um …’
‘You ate the whole box because you’re a disgusting fat bitch.’
Tash looks at Tiffanie, who has arranged her finger and thumb in an L on her forehead, which is pointing towards Tony. Tash wants to laugh but she can’t.
‘Right?’ says Tony.
‘No,’ says Tiffanie. ‘Because she is not anorexique.’
‘I ate one,’ says Tash. ‘Then I threw the box away because I was about to get on a plane and I didn’t want to be tempted.’
‘Aha! Tempted. Why would you say that?’
‘Because I’m normal. I would have been bored on the plane and eaten something I didn’t want to eat, so I threw them away so I couldn’t.’
Tony sighs. ‘Right, well, you can sit out of the next part, then, if you’re so “normal”.’
For the next fifteen minutes Tony gets everyone to relive their nine or ten experience, first the way it actually happens in their memory, then in black and white, then in third person. He makes them do it again and again and again.
Later on, in the dorm, the game is to make Tiffanie say neuro-linguistic programming, which is hilarious, especially as Tiffanie, who is topless as usual, insists on saying langoustine instead of linguistic, which takes the girls’ minds off what happened with Tony and Dominic at the end, and the fact that it was their fault. The static had built up and up, and Elle was crying while reliving an experience when a boy saw her with something caught between her teeth, and Sin-Jin was whispering something to Madame Vincent, and Tash leant down to discharge the static on the leg of her chair but this time it made a cracking noise and made a spark and it actually hurt, so she said Ow, and then Tiffanie giggled and then—
‘You think this is funny, do you?’ said Dominic, glaring at them. ‘You think this is a big fucking laugh, do you? You think anorexia is funny? Your friend has just died, and we are here trying to save your lives. Your actual lives.’
Silence.
‘Even if you don’t die of anorexia itself,’ said Dominic, ‘from your body actually eating itself and then stopping, because you have killed it, there are plenty of other ways to die along the way. Plenty. Have you ever seen a sex slave being fed to a tiger? It’s not fucking pretty, I can tell you. Fat girls don’t get fed to tigers, they—’
It was at this point that Tiffanie and Tash and Lissa and Rachel and Danielle and even Donya pretty much lost it. Fat girls don’t get fed to tigers??? WTF? They laughed until they cried, until they literally fell off their orange chairs in an explosion of static and grief and absurdity.
And then they got sent to the headmaster.
*
Tiffanie’s Frenchness is like a massive planet with its own gravitational pull. If you want to have a good conversation with her, you have to speak French almost fluently. Everyone is therefore on course for an A* in French, except for Tiffanie herself, who does not understand the English instructions on the exam papers. You’d think Madame Vincent would be pleased with this but she is not. She despises these girls with their hipbones and collarbones and rolled-up skirts. She hates it when they laugh. She hates their teeth.
She volunteers to oversee their early morning punishments. She turns up at their dorms at 5.15 a.m., she’s glad to, and she marches them out to the swimming pool for fifty laps before breakfast. They are not allowed towels. They look at each other’s fat through scratched goggles in the milky waterlight. They have cold showers. Before prep in the evening they have to complete the three-mile cross-country route into the village and back. It’s dark and they trip over tree roots and get old cobwebs in their hair and no one cares. Princess Augusta presumably never had to go on long runs, but no one talks about Princess Augusta any more.
While the girls swim, Madame Vincent does little squats, just little ones because of her knees, and when they run she does feeble press-ups, with her palms on the cold concrete by the swimming pool. Even though she is now fifty-six and a housemistress in the middle of nowhere, she is still French, and she still dreams of young, virile lovers. Lovers unlike Dr Morgan, who occasionally stumbles into her room after a long, lonely Sunday. She despises Tiffanie so much more than the other girls, because Tiffanie is French but will never become like her. Tiffanie will always have golden skin and rose-coloured nipples. Always.
*
Half-term. Natasha packs an overnight bag, puts on her Halpern skirt and takes the train to Kings Cross, where she is picked up by a pre-booked black cab.
It’s Friday night and London is a massive jewel sparkling in the rain. So much money and beauty and light all concentrated in one place. Every street with billions of pounds’ worth of clothes and perfumes and flesh, and ideas that exist, and ideas that almost exist, and ideas that do not exist yet. Miles and miles of blockchains. Blockchains all the way to the moon. Money, codes, hungry tigers. Steam on the windows. Small creatures hiding in dark spaces in basement car parks. The distinct species of mosquito that only exists on the London Underground hibernating, or whatever they do at this time of year. The deliquescence of early winter coats. Sneakbills and scrags in their puffa jackets and high-heeled ankle boots.
Aunt Sonja has a flat that looks over the Thames, with old river barges and party boats and ferries going past. The Thames reflects the jewel. Gives it fluorescence, and dignity. They need each other, the Thames and its jewel. They yearn for each other in the dark light, always.
Planes circle Essex and then queue up to land at Heathrow. They are also full of money. Money and biology and love. Is there anything else? One of the planes contains, apart from the pilot and co-pilot, only a single white Persian cat. Another contains a butler and some sushi. The jet trails of the planes break up and fall from the sky like scattering pearls, like the petals of white roses, like dustings of icing sugar, froth in the vapour.
In the kitchen, Aunt Sonja is explaining to Tash an algorithm her young colleague has developed which tells you what communication method someone is likely to use to do something secret like buy drugs or have an affair or groom an unwitting teenager. You take the person’s birthdate, birthplace and gender and then put in a few facts, mainly about their clothes. Do they wear jeans? High heels? Men over fifty who don’t wear jeans will use email. If they are over seventy they will write a note. But men between forty-two and forty-five who do wear jeans will use Snapchat. Tash imagines Tony and Dominic on Snapchat. The image is creepy but real. Normcore.
This is only if someone doesn’t use social media, of course, Aunt Sonja says. If they use social media, then you can find out everything about them anyway. Literally anyone can find out literally anything from a social media account. Habits, movements, passwords: the lot. She is drinking champagne in a thin elegant glass and making dinner. It’s brown rice and poached fish, with papaya and pineapple fruit salad to follow.
But this is old, she says. Blockchains are new. Well, they are old too, really.
There is a catalogue on the glass coffee table. Its text is in Russian, but it has images of London on the front: the Shard, the Gherkin, the Tower of London. Inside, there are images of bulletproof security cameras, and fingerprint entry-systems for apartments and offices. Gate systems for mansions and castles. Interiors of a country estate in Surrey. Prices.
Later, when Aunt Sonja has had several more glasses of champagne, she sits on the white sofa next to Tash and starts talking in Russian.
‘Keep your beauty,’ she says. ‘Do everything you can to keep your beauty. But also care for your fragile soul.’
Natasha has noticed on this visit that Aunt Sonja is not, herself, beautiful. She is thin, but in a sad way. Her collarbones look sharp, not attractive. They jut. She is well-groomed and well-maintained, but she looks like money rather than sex or love. It’s not that Natasha could put this into words, but she suddenly sees it, just as Aunt Sonja starts talking incoherently about nightclubs and dark-haired men and male prostitutes and something that happened last Friday night that Tash can’t quite get a handle on. Someone called Reuben.
‘Make men want you for you,’ she says. ‘Not your money.’
‘I don’t have any money,’ says Tash, laughing a little nervously.
‘Oh, you do. You will. It’s a fucking disaster, by the way, having money, but you won’t be able to escape it, not now your father’s found you.’
‘Found me? I—’
‘He’s going to try to marry you off to the son of one of his associates. Beauty will make sure you get a choice. Do you understand? If more than one person wants you, it means you have a choice.’
‘What if I don’t want to get married?’
‘Then we’ll need another plan.’
For the rest of half-term Aunt Sonja works long hours and Tash spends her days on the Underground. She doesn’t know where to get off, or what to do. She goes up and down on the Piccadilly Line because she likes the colour. She goes all the way to Heathrow Terminal 5 and gets off there and buys a coffee in the Departures terminal as if she were about to go somewhere else, maybe even home. She’s been to Terminal 5 before, and it feels like a safe place. More than home, which she finds she can’t remember. Is it sort of brown? Maybe it’s actually black and white like in neuro-linguistic programming. Maybe it’s third-person. Maybe it’s simply gone. Two sagging sofas with covers that fall off and a cat with black hairs that stick to you.
She likes the fountain at Terminal 5. Tash imagines terrorists everywhere, imagines the hot flames of a sudden bomb, the cold steel of a machete, the silence between the bullets in a machine-gun attack in a crowded place, but she doesn’t care. She likes jumping onto a Tube just before the doors close, pushing her body into the warm mass of commuters, tourists, real Londoners. Between Leicester Square and Covent Garden one afternoon she watches as a drop of another girl’s sweat falls onto her arm. She feels, just once, a stranger’s hand start to rub between her legs and she doesn’t know what is happening at first because her jeans are quite thick and then he gets off and she wonders if she should have stopped him.
*
The next guest on the programme, which is now called ‘Speak Out Against Eating Disorders’, is called Anastasia. She is a recovering anorexic with her own YouTube channel and a respectable, but not jaw-dropping, 50k followers on Instagram. She is launching a gluten-free cookbook, and arrives by taxi with a skinny guy carrying boxes of these books that the school has pre-ordered and paid for. One for each girl.
The talk is in the freshly painted common room. There are to be no orange bucket chairs this time. Everyone squeezes onto sofas and beanbags and floor cushions and it’s a bit like morning registration, except that instead of Sin-Jin recording their presence on her tablet, there is this entity, this tattooed outsider wearing leopard-skin platforms and swaying like a baby giraffe by the computers in the corner. She has a takeaway coffee cup even though there is literally nowhere to buy takeaway coffee between here and Stevenage. Where on earth has it come from? She clings to it as if it is a drip or an oxygen canister that she must have with her at all times. She sips from it. What’s inside? It’s unfathomable.
The skinny guy has gone somewhere, which is a shame because everyone wanted a good look at him. Why don’t they have a car? Is Anastasia a pleb? The school can’t have booked an actual pleb to come and talk to them, could it? Tash is fascinated. She has not yet quite learned how to spot what the others call a pleb in this country. But she knows that they are people like Nico. Like his mother. Like Tash, before her father found her and gave her a plastic bag full of money and a copy of Russian Vogue. Plebs’ voices all the time through the walls of her mother’s apartment, screaming at each other. The dull thumps of marriage and babies and the middle of the month.
‘So hi, I guess,’ is how Anastasia starts, and her voice is reassuringly that of an ex-private schoolgirl, albeit one who has embraced a different aesthetic entirely. She looks like a rock star, with her tattoos and multiple necklaces. One of the necklaces has her name on it in gold letters. Well, a shortened version of her name. In fact, it says Ana, which is troubling. Another is simply a triangle. Another is a series of gold hippos interspersed with gold hearts. The necklaces are perfectly layered.
It’s like watching a YouTube video, like they used to do at Danielle’s house on a Saturday morning before Dani’s parents split up. Tash still watches YouTube videos sometimes on her silver phone, although they usually bore her. Girls with long hair and too much mascara going on and on about their ‘goals’ and their challenges and their breakups and their issues and exactly what they eat in a day. But the videos are useful for picking up English expressions. At the moment Tash’s French is improving faster than her English, which wasn’t the point at all. But her English is pretty good: it always was. Professor Dimitrov always said she had a special talent for languages. And her mother’s boyfriends always spoke English.
Anastasia sips again from her takeaway coffee cup. She has her long blonde hair up in a high scruffy ponytail. Her gold hoop earrings bob as she speaks. She has a helix piercing as well: a tiny silver sleeper with a diamond heart dangling from it. She’s wearing ripped jeans, which are not allowed in the school, and which give her appearance an extra thrill. And of course there’s the fact that she has a navel piercing, and a cropped t-shirt to show it off. And an oversize cropped hoodie. So many school rules broken all at the same time. It’s beautiful.
‘So I’m here to talk to you about food issues,’ she says, in her well-educated voice. ‘And tell you about my anorexia journey, and some of the mistakes I made that I hope you won’t make.’ When she smiles, her whole face sort of scrunches. She’s all softness and innocence, except for her collarbones, which reach out more sharply and more desperately even than Aunt Sonja’s do. Her arms are like beautiful slender branches from a silver birch tree. She has a lot of bangles, as well as a couple of festival bands. The word Always is tattooed on her left forearm in black courier. With a bit less mascara, this is how everyone would want to look, if an angel came and gave them a choice. Maybe even the mascara is not as bad as it first seemed. It makes Anastasia seem extra-terrestrial, and kind of meta.
‘I was weighing myself like five times a day,’ she’s saying. ‘I counted the calories of everything I ate, obsessively. I’d go down to like 500 calories a day and I’d hate myself if I even ate a banana. I mean, bananas are a bit gross anyway, because they contain like 27 grams of carbs just in a single one, but I’d even feel guilty if I ate an apple. I mean, again, it’s like 14 grams of carbs, which is a third of what I’d be trying to have. You know that you need to be having less than 50 grams of carbs a day for serious fat loss?’ She laughs. ‘God, I’m so full of those bullshit stats. It’s like they never leave you. And the mantras? Hunger is just weakness leaving the body, for example. Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. You’ll need to ditch those as soon as you can. And learn that 75 grams of carbs a day is the right amount, not 50.’
Anastasia sips once more from the takeaway coffee cup. Whatever is in there must be so cold. Maybe it’s even a frappé, but don’t those come in clear plastic?
‘Recently,’ she says, ‘I realised I still had some food issues. Like, even if you think you’ve beaten anorexia it’s actually still there? For example, I have not eaten ice cream since I was nine years old. It was when I was ten that I stopped eating and my parents had me diagnosed as anorexic. So I basically haven’t eaten ice cream since then. The other day I made a list of things I won’t eat that are like food fears I still have to overcome? Burgers with cheese. I mean, who doesn’t have cheese on their burger? Uh, me! Still! And milk in coffee. I always saw milk in coffee as just bad calories, like a disgusting white poop of fat and bacteria and cow pus? So that’s on my list too. I have never eaten a chip! Like, I got in the habit of always choosing the least calorific thing in the shop? So in most places it’s basically a salad, no dressing. Sometimes a fruit salad. Sometimes miso soup. I see you have a lot of Bovril here? That’s a good choice for weight loss. But obviously I should now be choosing hot chocolate instead. With whipped cream and marshmallows. Like, I have to be comfortable with these things, I know I do, but I’m just not? A pizza. A whole pizza with a stuffed crust. And salad dressing. Like we have all been conditioned to never even have salad dressing. But who wants dry salad? We have to learn to live a little, ladies.’
Year 11 is transfixed. The form’s three fat girls, Rachel, Zoe and Ayesha, shift uncomfortably. Rachel’s legs have stuck together as usual; the others’ probably have too. The fat girls are not on floor cushions or beanbags, because getting up in public from any kind of low furniture is so embarrassing. Anastasia’s forbidden foods are basically their go-to staples. Double chocolate cookies. Cakes made of traditional ingredients rather than the raw vegan gluten-free ones assembled with grated beetroot. Actual Coke rather than Coke Zero. Isn’t Anastasia afraid of turning out like the fat girls, with their lumps and rolls and hair and zits and bad posture caused by trying to hide from life? Obviously, which is why this is a list and not a reality. To be Anastasia you have to put these items on a list but never in your actual mouth. You have to talk about food all the time but never, ever eat it.
