Oligarchy, page 6
If this is the face of anorexia, pretty much everyone wants in.
To end her talk, Anastasia brings up Instagram on the big screen and shows the girls how to search for anorexia hashtags like #thinspo and #thinspiration and #bonespo and #anathinspo and #thin and #skinny and #ana and #thighgap. When she puts #thighgap into the search box, Instagram comes up with a message: Posts with words or tags you’re searching for often encourage behavior that can cause harm and even lead to death. If you’re going through something difficult, we’d like to help.
‘Yeah, so all the anorexic girls obviously just ignore that warning,’ says Anastasia. ‘And of course it’s not like anyone really cares, right? I mean, they let the hashtags exist. Anyway, I apologise if what follows is a bit shocking, but you need to know what’s out there, and what the risks are of going down this path.’
The next five minutes is a blur of extremely thin and beautiful girls posing in mirrors in tiny pairs of knickers, or lying next to white cats on white sheets looking angular and emaciated and tragic. Some of the pictures are a bit weird: there’s one where a girl has her thigh in both hands and her thumbs crossed over on top of it. There are a lot of ribs, and navels, and denim shorts, and crop tops. But mainly these girls just look like standard celebrities or dancers. They are not really that much thinner than the models and actresses that everyone aspires to be: the ones who play normal people in all the films and adverts that everybody watches. The only difference is that their posts say things like ‘I binged so much today I really hate myself rn’ or ‘I am so fat and stupid and I ate too much today. Tomorrow I have to restrict more’ or ‘I’m working out right now because I binged so much this morning’. It is obvious that ‘binging’ in this context means eating anything at all. Some of the comments are encouraging – ‘You can do it you’re so beautiful’ – and some are offers of help. Anastasia expertly navigates various feeds until she finds one that features an especially beautiful girl and is all in black and white, with captions like ‘I want to disappear’ and ‘I want smaller breasts’ and ‘I just looked at donuts and I got so anxious I wanted to die’. In one of the pictures the girl is wearing what looks like a child’s bra-and-knickers set with the words Daddy’s Girl embroidered on both pieces. It is actually quite creepy. The caption on the most recent picture says ‘I’m going to starve until I am thin enough’. It was posted three years ago.
The question and answer session goes on for almost half an hour.
‘What do you think of treacle tart?’ someone asks. ‘Is it really unhealthy?’
‘Well, everyone’s different,’ begins Anastasia. ‘But personally? It’s still a no for me. I don’t eat gluten and so that rules out most tarts. And I mean treacle does have a lot of vitamins, but the sugar content means it’s still not a viable option. But that’s just me – everyone has their own choices to make. Everyone has their own food boundaries, which I totally respect.’
‘Do you eat dib-dobs?’
The sound of suppressed giggles.
‘I honestly don’t know what they are?’
‘If you had to choose between being ugly and happy, or beautiful and miserable, which would you pick?’
And then the bell rings for the second period and everyone scatters.
*
Madame Vincent is directing the French nativity play that is going to be performed for the parents on the last day of term, after which the girls will be driven away for two weeks of friendless overeating and unsupervised YouTube binges. Their parents don’t even know what YouTube is. They think it’s all harmless pop videos and instructions for making gnocchi and putting up shelves. They have no idea that you can spend literally the whole day watching someone’s butt workouts, or their abs-and-arms days. They have no idea how something like that makes you feel: both empty and full, like a dirty room with the door left open. Anastasia has uploaded approximately thirty hours’ worth of footage of her eating raw food as part of her ‘recovery’. These new salads, she explains in her intros, are better than her anorexic ones because they have a few macadamia nuts in them, and a teaspoon of chia seeds. You can also watch haul videos for hours and hours. Girls who order a couple of hundred quid’s worth of clothes from Topshop or Pretty Little Thing and then film themselves trying on the whole lot.
But there’s a lot of term still to go, somehow, before that. And the French play.
Natasha is cast as Joseph. Tiffanie is the donkey. Becky with the bad hair is Mary, well, Marie. Natasha’s main lines involve her saying the Hail Mary in French. Something about the prayer is rhythmic, almost jazzy, with its 4/4 beat and its light swing. In the dark weeks of term Tash gets in the habit of saying it before she goes to sleep at night. She also says it during those terrible moments at 3 a.m. when she wakes with turbulence in her heart and fluorescent thoughts streaking through her brain: her father, and Bianca, and the man on the Tube, and Nico … She says it over and over again until it enters her dreams and she knows she is, finally, asleep. Although there is of course a difference between knowing you’re asleep and actually being asleep.
Je vous salue, Marie, plein de grâce, Le Seigneur est avec vous. There’s something in it about praying for poor fishermen, and it ends with the words Now, and at the hour of our death, amen. But it sounds better in French, of course: Maintenant, et à l’heure de notre mort, amen. It is beautiful. Tash has no religion, not really, and so this becomes her religion: this one prayer is all she needs. She says it, silently, on the weekly cloaked visit to the village church when everyone is invited to pray. Sometimes she also prays for peace, and joy, and to be thin. Sometimes she even prays for the villagers, that they might become thin too. She pleads with God to bless them, with their vast stomachs and fat faces. She asks that God bless them despite their ugliness and misery, and prays that He might bring light and lightness into their lives.
*
Miss Annabel is thinking about pink lilies and mauve gladioli. No one has bought her freesias for a very long time. Where do they sell freesias? Not the hideous retail park where Sin-Jin has gone for the girls’ Tampax and cotton wool. Winter is approaching, and the time for such things is gone. Miss Annabel removes all the doilies from her chest of drawers. She half-heartedly dusts it and then takes out her winter perfume and puts it where the summer one has been all these months. They go fast now, the months. She finds her fingerless gloves, which she will need in the studio, even though she heats it to a point where the girls feel uncomfortable and the ones on diets get a bit fainty. Miss Annabel likes it when they faint. It proves that they do not know everything: that they should listen. She wishes that Bianca had listened. She knew what Bianca was doing when she found her posing in the mirrors in the studio, arranged so that her pointe shoes were the largest thing in the image, her starveling limbs so tiny, and jointed like a puppet’s. She pinches the skin on the inside of her wrist again, and it turns a pleasing iris blue before fading to the colour of pink lilies and then mauve gladioli. She does it again and again, because she knows, and she has done nothing.
*
‘This is how you treat an outbreak of anorexia?’ asks an angry parent, having found out about the early morning swims and the afternoon runs. ‘Are you out of your fucking minds?’
So now there are new punishments. Every night after supper the girls – the bad ones, the rotting apples from the attic dorms – walk past the pictures of Princess Augusta in the lake and into the headmaster’s study where he reads to them from Great Expectations, a story of a boy called Pip who will do anything for a beautiful, thin, rich girl called Estella, who never eats and who lives in a house full of cobwebs. No one enjoys the story that much until Estella appears in it. But a girl who delights in making a boy cry? And makes him eat, but does not ever eat herself? Everyone can get behind a character like that. Pip loves the very hem of Estella’s dress. She makes him hate his hands.
Instead of calling everyone Océane, Tiffanie now calls everyone Estella.
‘Estella, where are you go-ange?’ she asks Rachel one afternoon. It’s that darkish, gossamery time between the end of the school day and the beginning of prep. Rachel is in her sports stuff. Her thighs heave in her green regulation shorts. Surely you can get the shorts in a size bigger than the one she has got? Maybe she’s just got fatter this term. Who knows?
‘For a run,’ says Rachel.
‘But we don’t have to do that any more,’ says Donya.
Rachel shrugs. ‘I enjoyed it,’ she says. ‘Thought I’d carry on.’
‘It is freeze-ange!’
‘I don’t care.’
Later, after dinner, Rachel leaves her pudding for the first time ever. Prior to this she had no idea, no fucking idea, that leaving something could be even more pleasurable than eating it. Why has she never tried this before? And the feeling of giving it to Donya instead, of watching Donya masticating like a little machine, a gross cement-mixer, her flabby, spotty jaw so far away from the 2D perfection that they all want, more, even, surely, than life itself …? It’s beautiful, and awful, and very, very simple. Rachel takes a deep breath and begins the next chapter of her life.
*
There is a permanent haze of civet and oak moss, or whatever they use now. No one makes perfumes with the scent glands of snakes or cats any more, but the attic dorms smell as if they do. Tash has a bullet-shaped bottle that smells a bit like home, like fictional large men from home, large men with taut muscles driving their horses over snowy hills with furs and leather.
The samples they brought back from Stevenage are almost gone. Good job, then, that they are going to Cambridge tomorrow. They are going to get more perfume samples, and stock up on cigarettes, and buy alcohol for the Christmas party: for Bianca’s wake. They are all onto the headier Stevenage perfumes now: the ones they didn’t like at first; the ones that smell, frankly, like sex slaves being fed to tigers.
‘I can’t bear Guerlain perfume,’ declares Lissa, and locks herself in one of the bathrooms and showers for much longer than a normal person would. Her shower gel smells like green things and clean boys. Over the sound of the water they can hear her sobbing.
All of this is the sign of a good story to come; everyone knows that. But good stories have to be coaxed out carefully, like breech kittens; dug up slowly like hexed treasure; eased into the world gently, like an outsize poo.
‘Estella,’ says Tiffanie, at the bathroom door. ‘ESTELLA. Don’t be so stu-peed.’
Eventually Lissa emerges and gets into Danielle’s bed. Her eyes are red. One of her arms is bleeding a little. It bleeds onto Dani’s pillow, which so recently was Bianca’s pillow. Has the pillowcase even been changed? Perhaps not. There must still be bits of Bianca’s hair and dead skin everywhere: pale fragments of a dead girl.
It was shopping with her mother, before the divorce, Lissa explains. In some small town with a spa hotel and a twee high street, perhaps somewhere in Somerset? An overheard comment in a boutique from the shop’s owner, who was swathing her mother in sexclothes for him, the hedge-fund manager from Boston who is now her step-father, and who touched her leg that time deliberately and wants to sell the ponies and actually hit Suze during that awful argument, but anyway, that is not in this story.
The dark bulbs in the shop that made customers look thinner and taller, like an Instagram filter, like a cursed jewel.
‘Make him remember you,’ whispered the shop owner, spraying Lissa’s mother with Guerlain. ‘Always wear enough perfume so that he remembers you, so that when you leave the room your scent lingers for hours and hours.’
As if Lissa’s mother had never worn perfume before; had never even worn clothes.
The hotel room smelled sweet and intense afterwards, dead flowers on a dark lake.
Make him remember you. Fill his office with your spray. Let him open you like a flower. That’s what the woman in the shop said. While her customer’s fifteen-year-old daughter was listening but pretending not to, touching the limp garments on the rails and wondering what it would be like to have to buy jeans that cost £300 rather than the ones from Topshop that her friends wear. Mom jeans. Fat, rich mom jeans. The owner of the shop draped over her counter like the remains of a dead animal, her hair thick with dry shampoo, her face caked in expensive make-up that did not conceal her triple chin and her greedy eyes.
*
It’s Miss Annabel and Dr Morgan on the coach with them for the Cambridge trip. Some of the teachers have a mysterious sort of chemistry between them. For example, everyone knows that Dr Morgan hates Madame Vincent. He never meets her eye, and whenever he asks her to do something – pass him a book, hold his coffee for a second while he finds his key – he does it in that mean, annoyed voice with a sigh at the end. It’s fascinating watching them. Their awkward movements are those of Guignols operated by people with stiff cold hands.
There is, disappointingly, no chemistry at all between Miss Annabel and Dr Morgan. There is, however, something going on between Becky with the bad hair and Dr Morgan. She insists on sitting next to him on the coach to ‘help’ count people in and count them out. This is the kind of thing a future Head Girl should be doing, but there’s more to it than that. He glances at her a few times too often, then looks pale, like someone about to throw up.
The coach parks near Cambridge train station, so it’s a longish walk into town. Lissa’s house isn’t too far away – a village about five miles out – and so she knows her way around. She comes here on the bus in the holidays. Sometimes Rachel stays with her and rides Suze’s pony, and they run errands for her, for Suze: Lissa’s glamorous older sister, who has no time for ponies any more. Suze has long blonde hair and her bra size is 28DD. She often gets marriage proposals in public, men going down on one knee in the middle of the street, or in the foyer of the cinema. Imagine being propositioned amidst the sour smell of cheap popcorn and factory-made butter. Imagine the crap that would stick to his knee. But everyone loves stories of Suze.
Quickly, the bad apples roll away from the heap. They tumble down a little street, past a college building. They are a bit more respectable today. Miss Annabel is stricter than Mr Hendrix. She understands about skirts. So Tiffanie is in something tweed, instead of the leather. It’s pink and, now she’s rolled it up a couple of times, quite short. Lissa is wearing a paper-bag skirt from Topshop that can’t be rolled up, but is quite short anyway. Tash is wearing her Halpern skirt because it has not occurred to her to buy another one. Her mother, after all, owns one of everything: one skirt, one dress, one pair of trousers and one pair of Levi’s jeans, once apparently so coveted. She has a fur coat, given to her by a man. Everything else is house-clothes, or the old Aeroflot cabin crew uniforms that she refuses to throw out. It’s a capsule wardrobe: the capsule wardrobe of a poor woman who used to be beautiful and who still speaks fluent English and whom no one truly understands.
But that world, Natasha’s ex-world, does not really exist now. It’s locked away in another dimension, like Nico’s aliens. There is only this world, the one with the fluorescence, the one ruled by Tash’s father. But where is he? Aunt Sonja said something about him being at ‘the castle’ for Christmas, but Tash has no idea what that means. What castle?
The girls have brought rucksacks for the alcohol and the cigarettes. Miss Annabel has already eyed the rucksacks suspiciously but been told firmly that this is for the environment, because doesn’t she understand that we don’t have a Planet B? Doesn’t she know how many turtles have to be killed to produce one plastic bag? At the mention of the turtles Dr Morgan started freezing them with his biologist’s death-stare, but then Becky with the bad hair asked him to help her reach her rucksack down from the overhead compartment and inadvertently normalised the carrying of rucksacks. Why has she brought one? No one cares.
The apples roll into John Lewis and ask for perfume samples, but they are not so impressive in this big university town. The over-highlighted, blusher-crazed ladies here aren’t as intimidated by their cheekbones as the ones in Stevenage were. To get people properly impressed with their cheekbones the girls will need to find men: desperate men without wives or scruples. Suze likes drinking in a pub called the Marionette (‘drinking in’ not ‘going to’), where many people have proposed to her of a late Friday night. Lissa puts into Maps this fabled place she has heard so much about, and the bad apples roll on and on doing what Siri tells them until they come to rest in a dingy back street that smells of death and putrefaction. No one said the pub would be this rundown. Can they go in? No one wants to, so Tash goes first. It can’t be worse than communism. Or what they say communism was.
The door is wooden and closed. Tash twists the handle and pushes it open, just slightly. There’s a fug inside, fingering its way towards them. The threshold smells of men: their heft and their erections and their cruel laughter because you stood in the wrong place and you asked for the wrong thing and you are a child and so guess what no erection for you in fact and no vodka and orange either because that is a child’s drink and you should have known that and where are your parents …?
Where are her parents?
The bad apples roll backwards and then in the direction of a tea shop for old people, with dusty cakes and greyish doilies. At least here they know the rules. Here are aged hens like Sin-Jin and Miss Annabel clucking over pictures of their grandchildren (not that Sin-Jin or Miss Annabel have such things because of the tragic and wasted lives they have spent at the school). Here are vast sandwich cakes with jam the colour of heavy periods, and hard, chewy croissants, and meringues that look like Tiffanie’s tits except for being pinker.
