An Anorexic's morning

An anorexic describes her morning (A monologue).
　
Stage directions:
A bare wooden chair, the sort that could be described as rather uncomfortable sits, centre-stage. It is lit from above by a central stage spotlight.
An anorexic girl walks from the wings onto the stage and as she sits down gingerly on the chair the central spotlight is joined by other side stage lights in flooding the area where she sits, now bathed in bright, white, revealing light. There are no shadows, as the convergence of lights does not permit this. The figure of the girl is one of a kind of white silhouette.
She's wearing a calico brown smock over dark denim jeans but it's obvious that she's anorexic, though not quite at first glance, since her choice of clothing creates a semblance of the normal. The smock billows, and the jeans are turned up at the ankles, cuff-style. These are the tricks of the trade, the anorexic's trade. She's wearing a pair of desert boots which she plants squarely on the floor in a masculine sitting posture.
She rocks from one side to the other on the hard chair she usually sits on to read, or write, or watch television, or eat, or refrain from eating. One of the reasons she is rocking from side to side is that her 'seat bones' can feel the hardness of the chair, for she has so little 'padding'.
This feeling is one she finds reassuring.
She billows out the smock as she sits down, as she always does. It's another 'trick of the weight' as she likes to call it.
She tucks her hands, with their coarse, brittle fingernails under her thighs, subconsciously, consciously feeling the gauge of her limbs.
She pauses, collecting her thoughts, then speaks in a clear voice, a voice which has become
a little husky on account of the flood of male hormone triggered by her anorexia.
She begins to talk, uncomfortably at first.' So what's a typical morning like then, for me?
W-e-e-ll, the careful calibration begins more or less when I wake up. It's something I endure as well as relishing, bittersweet, like dark chocolate, dark thoughts.
One of the first things I think about when I wake up is that there are three hours to kill (give or take an extra period of abstinence) before the first allowance, before I can eat. It's marking time in bite-size chunks, to coin a phrase! It's, kind of, an unfortunate game. I tend to visualise the allowance as I'm lying there.. To make things easier, it's nearly always the same menu'.
She extends her arms in front of her as though in an act of supplication, cupping her hands to describe a small bowl shape.
' I take a dessert spoonful of cottage cheese and fluff it out on a bed of lettuce leaves, arranged in concentric circles that give the illusion of a full plate. It's a question of fooling the mind, this diet business.' (She refers here, and elsewhere to her anorexia as 'dieting').
' I normally scatter some flaked almonds or a few cherry tomatoes generously onto the lettuce bed. That way, I get the vitamins and a bit of protein. And a bit of colour. And shape. That's important. It's not as daft as it looks or sounds, and there's iron too, in the lettuce. Oh, and laudanum, apparently. So maybe it's something I should be having at night instead of morning to help me sleep!'
She laughs, then strokes her chin with the bony fingers of her right hand. Her cheeks are downy but here and there a hirsuteness has produced one or two bristly chin hairs.Her face is sculpted and she has once possesssed a rare beauty. Her head seems too big for the rest of her frame(something of a giveaway, she often thinks).
She shifts on her chair uncomfortably.
'There must be, I feel, some order to the kind of ideas that I seem to possess. The regularity of cottage cheese and lettuce bed IS that order.
The pleasure of tiny satisfactions, those that measuring the weight of things can give is definitely not lost on me, though, even though you must think I lead a miserable existence!'
(She laughs, and the laughter turns into a slight clearing of the throat, as if in embarassment).
'Then there is the dressing game, a thing which is also part of the daily calculus, that is part of the fabric of those three hours, the preparation for going out, for the walk.
The walk is one of the most important parts of the morning. Well, it's all important, actually.
I have to check the mirror first, admire the clean lines, the svelte body (I'm being sarcastic, obviously!), see how athletic it looks, how athletic it IS. I know, you've got to laugh, though! To keep myself in the manner to which I am accustomed' ( she laughs) 'I always have to do press-ups, star-jumps and various aerobic movements. These are to top up the output, the exercise. They're... like, the icing on the cake, so to speak.
I pull on my heavy, floaty, linen black dress. It's a bit shapeless, but that's the point. I have thick, non-stretch jeans as well. They help your legs not to look too obvious, not to look like the licorice sticks they actually are! I like to make an impression when I go out so I have these suede desert-boots, the kind with the tab so I can pull them on. (I need a tab... they're so damn heavy!) They've got castellated soles, they make a mark, I can tell you. Boots like that carry authority. And, for all my complexities, I DO actually have authority.
You probably think I'm expending a lot of effort for what is, after all a bit of vanity. Yet somehow I've learned to expend the minimum effort for the maxinum result.
I have a kind of curtain coat, you know. They used to call them swagger coats, didn't they. Or was it duster? One of the two. Anyway, this coat adds another layer of... I suppose you could call it deception. Then I'm ready to float out into town. I say float because that's what it feels like. The term 'airhead' should really be applied to me, as most of the time I'm as light-headed a someone on top of Everest. And that's without the oxygen!' (She laughs loudly, recklessly).
There's a good joke about Everest...I can tell you the gist. I'll probably mess it up, I usually do. A guy labours all the way up Everest, passing all the usual debris you see on the streets. Crisp packets, juice bottles, Kendal Mint Cake, dead climbers,bla-di-blah.Actually, did you know there are about three hundred of them...and that's just the ones they've found. Not funny is it, though? He's nearly at the summit when a Scouser pops out from behind a rock and says 'Big Issue, mate?
Yeah, I know.'
She is sitting more comfortably now, getting into her stride.
'I always take a packet of these diet crackers with me. Don't worry, I DO put the wrappers in the bin! Anyway, I feel kind of voluptuous as I slowly take one out of the packet while I'm walking along. Each of these crackers is wrapped in its own envelope, and there are always eight to a packet, four in each compartment. So that's one for every quarter mile completed. I did have a pedometer but the trouble with them is that they clock up the distance with every movement of your hips, giving false readings, so they're not a true measurement, are they?
Anyway, I'm very aware of the boniness of my hand as I unwrap the crackers, and also the set of my pale, angular face. Actually, I rather admire it. I allow myself an extra cracker sometimes, just for the hell of it. I know I'll have to pay somewhere else.
Sometimes, I drift round M&S, to have a look at the tiny bras I'm hoping to fit. As if.They're for teenaged girls, actually. It seems wrong that children are being sexualised with these bloody things, and those awful chat magazines... there's no childhood, really, is there?
I deliberately go through the food department. I suppose I'm a bit of a masochist really.'
(She laughs).
' I stay out as long as possible. The highlight of all this dieting, this regime is going to Waterstone's to read the paper and have a huge Latte.'
She clears her throat.
'Yes, whooooh. You must be thinking 'what's the point? All that effort and she goes and has a Latte. Not even a skinny Latte!' Well, you've got to live dangerously sometimes!
I supose that's what this whole dieting thing is about...the danger of things.
'Anyway, that's once a week. I have a blackberry muffin too, but in actual fact I only have about a third of it. I wrap the rest in those lovely napkins you get in there with the crenellated edges, then I take it home to nibble at surreptitiously in weak moments. I ration the one-third muffin out into three pieces while I'm reading. Funny how I do things in threes and quarters. It seems to make sense. But I make it look random.
Anyway of course the grease of the muffin, those bloody transfats leave me feeling rather heavy and dull. The dullness is more to do with the failure, though than the calorific value of the muffin and Latte even though, as everyone knows, it's huge.
Finally, I'll go into Home and Bargain, buy bleach for my scrubbing sessions, for the bathroom.
Scrubbing takes a bit of effort and you're cleansing things at the same time, so that kind of makes sense.
A semblance of normality, I suppose'.
She looks whistfully at her audience.
Stage directions:
The overhead stage lights dim and narrow, revealing a stark figure, then close down gradually, leaving both her and the stage in complete darkness.