[warning- potentially triggering material]
Thankyou to all the lovely messages and reviews I've received over the past two chapters. You are all beautiful souls, and I wish with every fibre of my being that I could each give you a hug personally. Sorry for not updating, certain events have transpired and I've ended up on medication due to being deemed dangerous, and so I'm finding it really quite hard to hold onto reality.
If anyone is interested I keep a blog on where I stand with my treatment and recovery here: (do add the . com) I try my best to convey my thoughts as poetically as possibly.
I believed it was integral to the plot to introduce another point of view, so this chapter is constructed from Jade's perception.
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The content is mine, but the characters are the property of others.
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CHAPTER 3
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'What will we do?'
'Nothing. We'll do nothing.'
'I think that would be for the best.'
Her veins are filled with ice. Her skin as white as chalk.
The words blossom from Cat's mouth like bubbles of blood, and Jade relished in the taste of it.
She likes that taste, but very little else.
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She stands alone, bare feet throbbing upon the pavement. She's just ran for what feels like miles, yet in reality is only a few blocks. His car is long gone, speeding off round a corner a little over twenty minutes ago. Like a statue she holds fast, unwavering in her solid stance. She refuses to move, that would break the spell.
For now, in the eyes of the new dawn, she is alone in the street. For now she is just Jade, eight-years-old, scabby knees and bitten nails, her hair in some crazy construct of her pillows doing. She is just Jade, young and part of a complete parentage. For now, she is Jade, and she still has a father.
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Cat looked perfect in the hazy light. Her eyelids fluttered shut, as the butterfly wings of her lashes draped themselves upon the dark hollows of her bruised under-eyes.
Her admission, and Jade's agreement had shifted something between them. Jade felt the pooling of unease as she lay there, watching the slow rise of Cat's concave chest.
The words that poured from the girl's chapped lips could have come from her own. The tales of desperation, of deliberate punishment that shaped their dependencies.
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She could pinpoint the moment she began to hate herself. Despising the very flesh that hung on her big bones. Craving carving out a hollow in her chest to prove to everyone she was as heartless and inhuman as all the wind light tittering had wailed.
They feared her too much to touch her, she knew their thoughts towards her were unkind. A cruel temper brewed up inside her young body, yet all that witnessed it merely whispered behind manicured hands and blamed the missing Mr. West.
Her mother had screamed and shouted and finally after night long phone calls and racked up phone bills been able to see her father, her newly lost husband. Jade had not.
It made perfect sense for the still little girl to follow suit; to scream and shout, just as her mother had done; for in her minds eye that should finally allow her to see her father.
'He doesn't want to see you,' was the short message spat out by her mother, through booze bent teeth.
The alcohol was something new. The continuing motions of divorce had rattled her bones and a swift change had taken place within Marie West. She had transformed before her daughter almost over night, the first appearance of 'M' being the morning she had woken to find the space next to her empty; only a note to explain the absence. She had torn up the house looking for him, as though he might be hiding beneath the sofa or in the cabinet above the sink. After that she had receded into her room, locked the door, and for the next month only left to receive more wine and more pop tarts.
The house her father left them in was like a castle; large and cavernous, marble flooring that meant only hours of aimless sliding to a child. It was easy to forget her mother even lived in the house, their lack of proximity meaning that Jade could walk freely through the lined walls, and never encounter her mother in her prowling. The maids, two women Jade was used to catching occasional sight of, were nowhere to be found. The lack of employment explained the bowls of rotting fruit and the smell of decaying flowers that hung in the air like a decomposing convict. Her father had condemned her mother to an imprisonment of dependence upon his wealth. And as she slowly shrunk away, fueled on reds and whites, as her surroundings slowly rotted away, it became an unkempt punishment that Jade was now shackled to as well.
The short delivery of her father's message was passed on in the ill light of the evening, four weeks since his disappearance, since his escape. They passed each other in the hallway, Jade carrying her own hands, her mother, another bottle to add to her growing collection. Her father's wealth had bought a wine cellar to large to be appropriate. Her mother had found solace in that dark room, and sometimes Jade wished she could lock her down there, as though she were a wicked witch, so Jade for once could be to one leaving, not the eternally abandoned.
It was the morning she found her mother collapsed on the floor, blood pooling out between her legs, that the confusion of self doubt and ill formed thoughts of distortion finally swirled together and cemented the self loathing in her stomach, to sit there like a rock.
Like a ghost, she passed through the house, looped the phone from its cradle, and calmly dialed those three universal digits. She sat by the front door, goose bumps prickling across her thighs, as they pressed to the cool marble floor. She watched as the paramedics loaded her mother up into the ambulance, as the neighbors crowded around her lawn, treading their stiletto heels into the thinning grass, crocodile tears pouring from perfected eyes. She stood there in the doorway, blank. For the love of all things hold she could not draw herself up to cry. Everyone else was, yet she couldn't even conjure up the vapor of a tear.
It turns out her mother was miscarrying that last remnants of her father. Their marriage, ended, splattered across the white tiles, sealed in a tiny lacquered coffin.
She hates herself for not caring, for neglecting to worry for the woman who calls herself her mother.
She soon begins to scratch.
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And there it lay. The foundations of her disorder, brewing beneath the immaculate black varnish that was the organic structure many called her 'defense mechanisms'. It cumulated there; lying on Cat's plush bed, her fingers buzzing with a cold electricity as she slowly traced the lines of Cat's flush of hair, fanned across the her sheets, as the still smaller girl slumbered.
The two had signed themselves away to a Faustian plot, a deal with the devils between them.
She wants to hoist up her top and peal down the waistband of her panties to reveal to the sleeping girl the red jail bars that lined the curving flesh where thigh met stomach. She wants to bare all to her, but instead, she lies there, not knowing whether to stay or to leave.
Rising from the smog of Cat's decadent mind she turns to gaze down at the shrinking indent of the bed. Soon Cat's weight would be lithe enough that the girl would float above the bed, resting upon a cloud of fallen hair and wasted sanity.
And so she leaves.
She's gone.
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The scratches turn to scars.
Eleven ragged lines; to count each year she'd been upon the earth.
They lose the house in the divorce, but the settlement her mother receives is enough to pay for a single storied lifestyle in a quiet pastel coloured bungalow.
She finds relief in peeling back her skin and soon her stomach is red raw with claw marks. In a vicious cycle her body heals, patterning her body with the crusts of scabs, and in moments of desperation she pulls them off, their combat a constant give and take.
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She cuts because she can. Because she can't do anything else that comes close to feeling.
She hides them away behind her cotton briefs as her own little swallowed secret.
7 pounds of flesh her malady demands, for her weight hasn't shifted since yesterday.
Panic begins to settle in her stomach as the number 88 punches up again on the scale.
Her stomach screams at her for such a silly sight.
A single pound would have been a delight, yet her body tortures her for staying so static.
Instantly a plan formulates within her mind, and food is completely absent.
As much as she wishes to deny it, Cat's descent triggers ugly feelings within her. A silent storm brews in her mind, a sick feeling of injustice that compels her to run faster and further than before.
She finds her slipping into instances of doubt. Flashing moments populated by spectres racing past her streaming heart, obscured by weeping eyes. Her face is bathed in cool sweat as her mind leaves her body and the only anchor to the physical world is the rhythmic pace of her pounding feet.
Her eyes blur and then focus.
She finds herself gazing out across the freeway, her view elevated by a crossing bridge; it's rusting railings tightly in her grasp. Sweat drips from her face, and like a dream; her mind is blank as to how she made it onto this lonely bridge. Her legs feel like rocks, refusing to budge from her cemented position, stuck surveying the throbbing stream of steel bodies, all lobbying for a precious place in the slipstream.
Cat's compressed chest flashes within her mind and an urge coolly slips down her spine to slumber in her mind.
How quick it would be to end it all. To slip over the railing and for a few precious seconds to tumble in the air, a light suspense before shattering across the hot tarmac floor and remain weightless forever. For the blood to pour from her body by the pint and watch the pounds slip, slip, slip away.
She takes one last glance at the dizzying speed of the cars below, and with great reverence, slowly drags her heavy body home.
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If she keeps on running, perhaps one day she'll catch him
The flushed feeling reminds her all too well of that morning. That is what she's chasing, what she is trying to reconstruct; to resurface the memories of a suburban paradise, seconds before its collapse. The motions of physical exercise make her feel little again; she is eight once more, running after his car.
Just run a little faster. Just that little bit more and you'll get closer and closer.
To what she doesn't know.
In her mind, it's the image of his slowly disappearing car, the colour she cannot remember, the registration hazy. But that car contains her father, and for that she will forever chase him.
The further she runs the closer she gets to holding on to him, stopping him from leaving. Perhaps if she'd been a better child, a nicer person, perfect enough for both her and her mother; he might have stayed.
So just another mile, just keep on running down those streets, and perhaps one day, she might find him once more.
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Her head's beneath the tap, her gaping mouth greedily guzzling down the lukewarm water in an attempt to stave off her hunger. The water sits like a child beneath her ribs and as she turns to fit the plug into its hole she can feel it slosh with her shifting gravitation. She twists the bath's taps hastily and begins to undress.
The reflection above the sink faces the full-length mirror nailed to the back of the door and in recent months has become her most familiar place to be. Both a sanctuary and a frozen hell, for it's additional dimensions of perceptive.
Her skin is plagued by a greyish tinge and a light wafting of creamy hair, tuffs like those upon a baby's head coat the length of her spine and cheeks. As she shifts and twists to take in the full image of her diminishing body the muscles play about her legs, relaxing and contracting, as though if they made themselves noticed, her body might not continue to devour their meat. Her ribcage could play a tune, for the bars that house her lungs are predominant and gaping, taught ridges rippling across her skin. If she were to look close enough she would see the faint pulsating of her slowly beating heart.
The creamy water rises as she slowly lowers her naked body in, gasping at the heat.
Her sunken cheeks make an uncomfortable seat, and as she settles herself she can feels the sockets of her hip grating upon the floor of the bathtub.
She lies there for hours, days, full rotations of the earth until the water turns cold and she's left shivering.
Her hands chafe at her arms in a feeble attempt to generate heat.
She's been living on green tea and apple slices. Once upon a time she would've consumed three reduced meals, each a measure of 500 calories. The descent into her disorder saw the absence of lunch first, then breakfast, then the reduction of dinner to only vegetarian meals. The obsession with calories became crippling, why have all those extras, when one's diet could be reduced to so little? Why eat, when there's the choice not to? Months now had blended into one single blur, the only passage of time being the drop from 135 pounds down to 88, 1500 calories, down to a light 50. But still even that was too much. Why have 50 when you could have 40?
The water had pruned her tired skin, the ripples of her fingertips tracing the slicing path of her erupting hipbone. The water soothes the smattering of bruises that played across her hips from the pinching and punching and constant pursuit of perfection. Now that she had found them, she never wanted to let them go.
Her skin is sliced about the hips; scabs coat the brutal sawing of her scissors. Fumbling with her arms, she pulls back the flesh, examining their length at every angle, searching for the waves and troughs of her wavering bones.
The wet weight she feels between her rolling fingers, which rove painful across her body, flattening and constricting her thighs, her arms, her stomach, is enough to make her blanch. The calorie absent jello pots she had just gorged herself on make themselves noticed in the recesses of her stomach, their berry coloured fluids having slipped past her lips a mere hour ago. She is sure her mother's riding the tides of a chemically induced slumber but to ensure her secrecy she pulls the shower curtain about the bath tub and stands, twisting the nozzle and releasing a jet of ice cold water upon her head. Repeating the mantra 'shivering away the fat' seems to numb the shock, and soon her waxy fingers feel no more, like two wet slugs as they slides themselves down her throat.
88 pounds plagues her mind and she imagines it's those two numbers jammed in her mouth, it's those two numbers drawing the contents of her stomach up into the fresh air.
She empties herself across her feet, a red and white bile spraying from her mouth to swirl around her ankles. She can't be sure if it's blood or jello but the sick still remains in the tub, for in her haste she forgot to pull the plug. Her throat screams out as it dissolves in the acidic sting of her stomach's contents, her teeth too, howling out for relief from that unnatural nausea.
She finishes her purge in the toilet, the spray from the shower tickling her naked back. Within the bowl the final contents of her stomach rests; the bile lacteous in its milky churn.
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She's rotting inside.
She's waiting for her release
She's searching for what's beneath her waxy skin. Who she is, and how she's made; layers of upon layer of pillowed fat, all stuffed and sewn into her splitting sides.
She wants to be the girl she has to potential to be, elegant and kind, delicate and refined.
She wants to be so full of dreams that it consumes her, that her aspirations suck the flesh from her bones.
Yet the scales still read 88. That dreadful number that makes her want to bleed out or be hit by a bus. She wants to wash the weight away, to finally step down from this plateau and continue to sink.
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She can't sleep for the third consecutive night, and she thinks she's going delirious.
Every time she tries to close her eyes the number 88 flashes up behind her lids and the voices screams out for her to jump and shiver, to make any kind of movement that might burn a few more precious calories.
She drags herself to Beck's in the hope that his presence might soothe her raging mind. She feels dangerous and she needs him to hold her down.
Like always his bed is welcome to her and together they count the dulcet drones of passing cars. His phone alights from across the floor with a vibration, strong enough to rouse him from his stoop. He rises to get it, but remains in silence, across the room.
He's staring at her with curious eyes. Usually in the hazy darkness there's pubescent lust swimming about in those irises, but now, from across the darkened room she senses something else.
'You've lost weight,' Beck murmurs.
'Stop being a shit.'
'I'm just being straight with you Jade.'
She appreciates that, it's how their relationship works, but a familiar titter in the corners of her minds whisper to her attack, attack, he's attacking you, attacking us.
'I'm on the pill, my weight fluctuates. You know that,' She states it like a fact, a barb stings about her words.
'I know that. But I thought it would never be a problem.'
'Then don't make it one,' Her voice is rising in pitch and volume, whilst his stays frustratingly level.
They fall back into silence, another car hurtles past.
'I can put my hands around your waist Jade.' He whispers out into the dark, his eye downcast, almost in shame.
'So?'
'I don't want to be able to do that!' His voice is suddenly loud; it fills the room and pushes into her face.
She stands, wide-eyed in shock. He doesn't ever shout, and yet she can still feel the hot angry breath across her check. Tears rattle down to extinguish the flaming aftermath of his words as she silently leaves his trailer.
She's accustomed to walking in the dark, the presence of the sun makes little difference to her. It's the same route she always takes home from his. Each location has a different route home, preplanned, already measured out with an old curly street map, so that she can ensure she is taking the longest possibly route. Large detours are made for a multitude of rules her silly minds conjure up. The amount of change in her pocket denotes that a loaf of bread can be bought, and so already she takes an extra ten minutes to walk to a shop she already knows is closed. She now retraces her steps to a 24-hour gas station, the lurid lights calling to her queasy eyes.
She pushes all thoughts of their argument from her mind and concentrates on how many steps she's taking; her count rapidly rising up through the triple digits.
She traipses about the aisles of the store like a ghost, the fluorescent lighting washing out her skin, the sickly pallor rising up from her pores like visible smog. A large loaf, the size and feel of a plush pillow is wrapped in her arms and promptly placed on the waxy counter. The boy behind the counter asks whether or now she's actually going to eat that. She just brushes the comment away with two jabbed fingers and a curt snort. She's a regular here so he's allowed to be cheeky.
Her feet now take her north, and with her brain absent she walks into the blue bruised night, the inclination of the street rising. She's at the memorial gardens, patches of neglected grass circling a large pool of water. The silent shadows of the mooring ducks trace across the lightly rippling water, their muffled whispers and night-time kisses calling out to each other upon the cool breeze.
The mirrored surface breaks with the missiled lump of bread thrown from her clawed hand. It bobs slowly upon the light waves, as the ducks mechanically circle it, consuming every sodden morsel within moments. The rest of the loaf shares the same fate.
She thinks good riddance, and settles down on the grass to watch the ripples from the gliding ducks.
She would fall asleep, but the allure of the further two miles that could be taken home is great enough to feign off exhaustion.
She picks herself up and storms off into the still quiet night.
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Burns and cuts litter her hips.
He'll kiss them one by one in a silent saluting apology
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The lights are on inside, which to her fading observance, means little. She is drained. Her calves cry out in an exhilarated rush of adrenalin, whilst her stomach tries to coax her into consumption. It's been two weeks now. Two weeks fuelled on nothing but egg whites and water. Two weeks and no shift in weight. A single second more and she thinks she'll snap.
The key finally fits in the lock after a few ill aimed jabs, and after grappling with the twisting motion, the door is finally unhinged and she is able to enter.
She prefers not to draw her mother's attention, as that will only surface questions about dinner, so she remains silent as she begins to tread through the single levelled house. Her room is located at the back, so on ached foot; she pads her way through the single story of their bungalow
Passing through the kitchen to collect a glass of water, she notices the figure out of the corner of her eye. A man, still draped in a trench coat sits at the table.
When her milky pallor transforms enough to resemble her shock, his head turns to take in her face.
'Your smile, I always thought I'd caught a wolf.' His voice has been roughened by the trade of tobacco and gin; monosyllabic in its entrance into the room.
'I'm not smiling,' she retorts.
'No you're not.' he remarks sombrely.
'I think you should leave.' she says without meeting his eye. She hardly believes the words slipping out from her own mouth, for the man she has chased stands before her. But in some madness she desires nothing more than to banish that spectre from her home. For her, the kitchen houses many enemies and there is no room for another.
'I want us to go for dinner,' he wastes no time in building bridges, but her shores recede as soon as he stands.
'Perhaps.' The flicker of an idea flexes itself within her minds. Her father sitting at a table, alone, swimming in a crowd of coupled people, abandoned and discarded. She answers as such to entertain the thought, the brilliance of the plan enough to fill her up.
'I'm in town for a few days. Five. Until Saturday.'
'Cool,' she replies, instantly feeling foolish, once more immersed in the childhood this man stole.
He walks towards her, and clasping a full hand upon her shoulder, shakes her slightly, verbally motioning to exit with a hastened; 'See you round kiddo.'
He leaves the room and she does not breath until she hears the definite thud of the front door swinging shut.
The decay of a father, divine.
The death of a daughter entwined.
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He'd woken her that morning, to deliver to her cheek a kiss.
That, like in all the fairy tales he had once filled her head with, was enough to draw her out from her slumber.
Her hazy mind didn't comprehend and she'd weakly begged him to leave and let her sleep.
Waiting for the usual unclasping of a belt, she groggily awoke to find the room empty of the man, his presence absent for a now steadily lengthening eternity.
"Daddy?' she'd called out, but he'd never answer. She'd slipped from her bed and pulled on a pair of panties, the ones he'd said were cute, as well as her slippers, padding out into the hallway. A cool breeze had played about her knees as the empty corridors echoed out her cries. Following their reverberations she'd travelled down the main staircase to find the source of the chill.
He'd left the front door open, from which she heard the sound of the car's ignition.
The slippers were discarded as she'd raced from the house.
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She leaves the bungalow as soon as the morning breaks, fearful her father might resurface upon the porch, perhaps from a taxi or from her own nightmare. She thought she'd be elated at the reappearance of the man for so long she'd been chasing, but the only feeling that settles in her stomach is a queasy fear. School is naturally closed and so, she takes to the streets, feeling the cool morning air play about her sheer face as she glides through avenues and streets.
In the end she's late for school, and so seeing no reason to go to lessons, curls herself up on the closed lid in one of the girls' toilet cubicles. Her thoughts slip to her father again as she traces the length of her legs with feather light fingertips. Usually she would have already told Beck, slipped from the house as soon as her father had done so and run to his. But she and Beck are at odds. She feels too deflated to engage with him and all she wants to do is crumple, like those little balls of scrunched up toilet paper, those that methodically rotted in the cubicle's corners.
She didn't care if at this moment the only thing filling Beck's heart was hurt. Eventually she'd transform it into love and his adoration would become genuine. For she was sure all his kisses were just feeble attempts to suck the fat from under her tongue, his roving hands searching her flesh for the zipper that might let her padded guts spill out from their seems and made holding her a little less grotesque.
Her father too was the same. It all made sense, why he left, why she had never been able to catch him, why he too had grasped at her waist. Her fat feeble thighs, the flabby wings that hang from her arms, the rolls that spurge about her middle as she bend over the now uncovered toilet.
She purges to rid herself, not this time of food, but of the feelings, pent up and ready to burst. She purges the truths she had hidden in her heart for all the world to see. For everyone to pass by and see the fat swirling in that toilet bowl, the fat that had driven away her father, the fat that repulsed her boyfriend, the fat that made her contemplate so dearly plucking out her eyeballs. The butterflies are released to prattle out their woes in the toilet's basin, swirling around in the milky chime.
The bell rings to signal lunch and she sees this as a prompt to escape the cubicle's confines. She shakes as she washes her hands, their bloodless tips unfeeling under the hot dribble of water. She shoulders her bag and leaves on unsteady feet.
As she walks down the hallway people turn their head.
They turn their heads and blow at her.
Try and blow her away.
Don't they fucking understand?
She's the big bad wolf.
She does the blowing.
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She 15 when she decided she wants to die.
She realises the atrocities that have played out between her legs and wishes to leave this earth behind.
To be swallowed by the rotating tires of a truck and be crushed to a bloody pulp.
She begins to collect pills in a money jar, labelling it her 'escape fund'.
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Sleep evades her.
She hasn't slept for days, for creatures haunt her dreams.
They come in trench coats to swallow her whole and drench her in sick.
She runs though winding alleyways, her knees banging together as she desperately sprints from the spectres. The stretch of street becomes thinner and thinner, too narrow for her enlarging frame. Soon she cannot fit and from between her legs they rip away her hidden stars, that slowly burning spark.
They slip from her mind and beat about in the shadows. The dark projection throb like a ceaseless heart and she squeals and cries and begs for sleep, for a release from this now physical reality. She can feel the shadow's hand fingering their way up her legs, feeling about her middle where that two-digit dimension sits.
88 pounds of worthless slut. 88 pounds that could have been filled by something else, someone else. Go end yourself you repugnant turd.
She's in the bathroom, clawing through the cabinet. She'll put an end to this; drain her mind of consciousness by pulling the chemical plug.
She can't decide on how many she'll have, and panic rises in her stomach.
She needs to be deliberate and direct for this hazily formed plan to work, two qualities that at this moment have deserted her.
The cap finally pops off the bottle, and countless white teeth spill out onto the glistening floor.
Before the moisture of the shower dissolves her little white supposed saviours she scoops them up and one by one swallows them down without care or thought, her only intention is to save these lifeless pills from drowning.
46
46 calories counted so far
46 pills prescribed as such
She feels so empty, and yet so full.
Slumped upon the bathroom floor she waits for her sight to wane and for sleep to finally settle in.
The beat of the shower drowns out the notion of time and she is unsure now of where she is, what spectral plane does she now inhabit? Because surely not earth? The real world is far too painful and complicated, but she's cured that now with her pills. Washed away all need to think, all need to count, all need to eat.
For the final time, she claws her way up the bathroom wall and steps onto the scales. The number 88 flashes up in red once more and she feels her mind slowly collapsing from defeat. She's ready to dissolve when on shifted foot the scales still do not alter. In her dazed mind she rolls around on the balls of her feet, trying to change the number with an alternating gravity, when the tiny screen flickers, and the message low flashes up.
Low. Low battery.
Her eyes widen as the scale resets to 88.
Comprehension finally sinks in. The scales are broken. 88 being the default number; each of the tiny bars that construct the numerals flicker into life, so naturally 88 is the number displayed when the machine is faulty.
The weight of the pills pool in her stomach, dragging her down by the edges of her mind. The corners of her eye pull down and her sense of balance slowly collapses as her knees buckle beneath her and she crumble to the cool, hard floor with a smack.
She is going.
She is gone.
And finally, everything fades from sight.
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The sounds of motions permeate
A vehicle can be heard outside
She's finally found her father
But now, that's just not enough.
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The collarbone queen takes to her throne.
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Comments and critiques are welcomed. Of course if anyone has any questions or opinions on the subject matter, again, don't hesitate to message me.