“Plus, I’m sure Eva would appreciate the weekend off,” Saskia pointed out, and her sister nodded with a wry shrug.
“Now I feel like a shit sister,” Kivi said. “I never even considered how you felt about this, Ev. Am I burning you out? Be honest.”
“What? No!” Eva protested, but her eyes told a different story. And no wonder. With her marriage ending and getting used to being single again, Kivi was suddenly aware that she hadn’t been as mindful of her sister as she could have been.
“Let’s get coffee over the weekend,” she said, reaching out to take her sister’s hand. “Brunch on Sunday morning. Somewhere that’s not here. What do you say?”
“Yeah, that sounds good,” Eva said softly, squeezing Kivi’s hand, then switching back on her usual confident presentation. “So, have we convinced you, dear sister of mine? A chilled weekend with no guests?”
“I guess so,” Kivi said, and to her astonishment, Saskia leaned over to accept Eva’s high-five.
“Result!” Saskia commented, and Eva whirled away to grab her bag.
“Oh, look, and the sun’s coming out!” she chirped. “You can go and finish your walk. And then you could have a movie night, chill out for a bit…”
Her voice faded as she went into the kitchen, and Kivi turned to Saskia with a resigned smile.
“Guess I’ve got some making-up to do this weekend,” she said, and put her hand on Saskia’s arm. “But today, I find my day unexpectedly free. What do you say? Care to join me for lunch, in approximately half an hour, over at my place?”
“As long as you don’t expect me to cook it,” Saskia said. “I’m very good at washing up, but I can’t cook for shit.”
“Actually, I was thinking of ordering a pizza,” Kivi said. “Something I haven’t done since I moved here, I think.”
Saskia’s face blanched, and Kivi was immediately gripped by her own thoughtlessness.
“Unless – unless that’s triggering for you?” she garbled. “I mean, I’ve never really had to think about the…” She didn’t want to saycalories.“Do you… I can make something else? If that’s easier for you?”
“No,” Saskia said, although she still looked uneasy. “No, order a pizza. It’s not something I’ve done in many years either… since I was a kid, even. I need to keep challenging myself. To prove to myself that I control what I eat, not the other way around. It’s just… takeaway pizza is a step I didn’t even realise I needed to take.”
“A fear food, is that the term?” Kivi had been researching over the last week. Mostly on the nights that Saskia hadn’t spent with her. It turned out that there was a whole community online of people in various stages of eating disorders, and she had wondered whether Saskia was a part of it. She somehow doubted it.
“That sounds about right,” Saskia said vaguely, which didn’t give her much of an indication. “Let me just go and change into something more… comfortable.”
She was already wearing what Kivi would define as comfortable clothing – leggings, a T-shirt and the gilet from earlier – but she recognised that Saskia needed a few minutes’ space. Her eating disorder might not be at the all-encompassing stage about which they had spoken several nights ago, but it still had a loose grip on Saskia’s mind. And, from what she’d read, it was normal for it to flare up sometimes, particularly when things around the person were changing. A lot of the time, eating disorders were about control.
They ended up talking about it while they ate their pizza half an hour later, and Saskia agreed.
“To an extent,” she said. “For me it was about controlandimage, and the cross-section between them. Without my image – as in the stick-thin, disciplined gym-bunny that I was at that time – I felt that I wouldn’t have my career. And without my career, what would I be? Probably forced into a dead-end job that I hated and that allowed for me to have no control whatsoever, over anything or anybody. But in order to have that career, and therefore that control, I needed to maintain my image. Do you see the vicious circle?”
“And I suppose what with the whole world being geared towards thin people…”
“Exactly. Not just the fashion industry, but the rest of the world. Movie characters are almost always played by thin actors. You rarely see a plus-sized model, or singer, or TV presenter. The media is full of adverts for weight-loss diet plans, or slimming supplements, or fucking shapewear… and never for men, have you noticed? It’s always for women. And they wonder why we all have complexes about our weight.”
Kivi stared down at her half-eaten slice of pizza, debating the success of what she wanted to say next. Clearly noticing her silence, Saskia looked over at her. “Sorry, was that too passionate? I just… it means a lot to me.” She gave a self-deprecating shrug. “As you know.”
“No, no, that isn’t it. I was just… thinking about how differently I think about it,” Kivi said. Saskia gave her a look that invited her to continue, and so she bit her lip, and did. “I just think that food is the thing that keeps us alive, and obviously it works hand-in-hand with metabolism. It’s a natural thing for our metabolism to slow as we age, and we can’t do a whole lot about it. So why stress about it? We’re only here for a finite time, and we should do things that make us happy. And if that includes eating pizza or chips or cake, then so be it. There’s too much negativity in theworld as it is – why ward off something positive? I highly doubt anybody’s ever been laying on their deathbed, wishing they’d eaten more lettuce.”
“That’s… a logical way to think.” Saskia put her slice of pizza down. “But my brain just doesn’t work like that. It’s long and complicated, but… I mean, part of it for me boiled down to the fact that I felt I was undeserving of such nourishment. That I hadn’t worked enough for it, and that I was wantonly indulging in something that I didn’t appreciate. I think that’s a remnant of my grandmother speaking there. She lived… a very basic life. But the main part of itwasabout image. As vain as that sounds. When you work in fashion, unless you’re super high-up in the company, you have to be slim otherwise you get barbed comments from your colleagues or your superiors. When you’re relatively well-known, as I am in the industry, you have to be slim or else you’ll see comments online about you looking like a whale or suchlike. And when you have an eating disorder… that number on the scales, that woman in the pictures, is the be-all and end-all. And the only ways to control it are to eat less, or exercise more. Both of which I did. It helped that my parents owned a gym.” She smiled humourlessly, and picked up the pizza slice again, this time regarding it as if it were a house brick.
“Do you still think like that? I know you don’t purge any more, because you told me and I believe you, but is that still your train of thought?” Kivi asked. She had to know. Otherwise she risked upsetting Saskia accidentally with an off-the-cuff comment, and that was the last thing their fledgling relationship needed.
Saskia didn’t say anything at first, and Kivi tried not to stare at her. She was still looking down at the pizza slice, now as if it held the secrets to all humanity, and Kivi could practically see the cogs in her head turning.
“Yes,” she said eventually. “But I don’t want to. I told you, I don’t want to go back to how I was. Sometimes it takes the strongest will in the world to eat something andnotpurge it. When it’s something rich, or calorie-heavy, or decadent. But I know I shouldn’t.” She swallowed hard. “I can’t. I won’t.”
“Is that what’s going through your mind right now, while we’re eating this pizza?”
That did it. Saskia’s face crumpled, and she gave a sudden sob. “Yeah,” she managed, dropping the pizza again to wipe at her eyes with the sides of her hands.
