Becky Read online

  ‘What are you doing, Bex?’ I asked. ‘Those meals cost money.’

  ‘I’m just full, Dad,’ she said quickly, before pushing past me and running up the stairs to her bedroom.

  Anjie told me later that Becky had confided that she wasn’t losing weight as fast as she wanted to. Obviously, she thought that by eating a few spoonfuls less, it would speed up the progress.

  ‘Hopefully it’s just a silly phase,’ I said to Anjie, but deep down I was getting very worried. She was still only eleven. Wasn’t that a little young to be spending so much time stressing out about her weight?

  Soon, it became obvious that Becky was getting obsessed about it, staring at herself in the mirror, weighing herself and eating less and less every day.

  ‘I’m not losing enough weight,’ she moaned to us one evening after she had spent the past half hour glumly pushing food around her plate.

  ‘You look fine, love,’ Anjie said, reassuring her, but Becky just shook her head.

  ‘I need to do some exercise too,’ she announced. ‘Dad, will you help me?’

  ‘That’s not a bad idea, Darren,’ Anjie said brightly.

  I had a multi-gym and punchbag in my workshop, which I used regularly, and I thought getting some muscle tone might make Becky feel better about herself and give her a healthier approach to weight loss.

  ‘We’ll get you some boxing gloves, Bex,’ I said. ‘But the golden rule is that you need to actually eat in order to be able to exercise. Food is fuel, OK?’

  ‘Got it,’ Becky said, beaming at me. ‘Food is fuel.’

  For a few months, Becky’s attitude to her weight improved. She spent a few hours a week practising her boxing with me, and at mealtimes she ate every last mouthful. She started toning up, and I could see that getting stronger was making her more confident. I was pleased with this progress – I wanted her to understand that it was better to be fit and strong than a skinny size zero – but obviously the girls at school had their own ideas, as they carried on tormenting her just as much as ever.

  A few months after Becky turned twelve, I came home to find Anjie waiting for me in the kitchen. She looked angry.

  ‘I had a call from the school,’ she said. ‘They wanted to know why we are pulling Becky out of school in order to home-school her. They asked if there was anything they could do to change our minds.’

  I was flabbergasted. We had made no such decision – we’d never even considered it. Becky had obviously lied to her teachers to try to get out of going to school.

  When we confronted her, Becky burst into tears again.

  ‘I’m sorry I lied, but I have no friends there. Nobody likes me,’ she sobbed. ‘Please can I be home-schooled? I don’t ever want to go back there.’

  ‘Come on, Bex,’ I said gently. ‘You have to go to school. We can’t afford to home-school you. You’ll get past this, I promise. The bullies will soon get bored, and then they’ll turn their attention to someone else.’

  But that wasn’t the answer Becky wanted to hear. She turned and fled to her room, slamming the door behind her. Anjie and I looked at each other in despair. We were at our wits’ end as parents. What more could we try? We talked long into the evening, trying to come up with solutions. Move her to another school? Wasn’t that giving up? And what if the same thing simply happened again?

  From then on, we started getting letter after letter from the school, saying that Becky hadn’t been turning up for lessons. They even threatened legal action against me for failing to make her attend.

  ‘I could go to prison for this,’ I shouted, waving one of the letters at Becky when she came in one night. She just shrugged at me. I was at a complete loss as to what to do. I had a job to go to, so I couldn’t march her into school and physically make her stay there all day.

  After a while, the school agreed to separate Becky from the other pupils and teach her on a one-to-one basis, in what they called ‘The Pod’, which was a teaching hut where they gave classes to pupils who were struggling to fit in. She seemed to adapt far better to this method of teaching, although her attendance was still an issue.

  In the meantime, her obsession with weight loss began spiralling out of control. She started slipping back into her old ways, and soon she was making excuses to skip meals altogether. She kept hounding me for a boxing session as soon as I got in from work, but it didn’t take much for her to get dizzy suddenly or even faint, because there was no food inside her. She had to give up exercise, and before long even getting up from a chair seemed like too much hard work for her. She looked ill and painfully thin, and I grew more and more desperate.

  Every time Becky looked as if she was going to faint, Anjie and I jumped to our feet in panic. I was turning into a nervous wreck, but Nathan, who had been scornful of Becky’s obsession with weight loss from the start, laughed at our reaction.

  ‘She’s obviously just doing it for attention,’ he sneered. ‘Stop giving her the attention and she’ll soon stop all of this. Look at her – she’s enjoying it.’

  He made things worse on occasion by taunting Becky, saying she was fat, and, needless to say, his comments upset her even more. It really wound me up when he came out with that kind of thing, but I just put it down to sibling rivalry and jealousy over the fact that Anjie and I were concerned about Becky. Even though Nathan was twenty-three while Becky was just twelve, he could still be immature when his mother showed affection towards his little sister.

  I had to take him to one side a few times in order to have a quiet word.

  ‘Becky is seriously ill,’ I explained, ‘and you are not helping. Some support would be nice, Nathan.’ But he just shrugged and sloped off.

  Almost every day, Becky and I had a war at the dinner table as I tried to get her to eat. I pushed food towards her, only for her to shake her head and try to leave and head up to her room.

  ‘Listen, Bex,’ I said, ‘it’s time to stop this now. You’ve lost enough weight. I don’t care if I have to sit here for three days, you are eating this meal.’

  But Becky would just shake her head. Nothing I did got through to her. I’m ashamed to admit that I ended up losing my temper on many occasions, out of sheer frustration.

  ‘You’re making me fat!’ she screamed.

  ‘I’m not making you fat – I’m keeping you alive!’ I shouted back, upon which Becky burst into tears and ran off to her room.

  Anjie in particular found it very upsetting, and she would often start crying as soon as Becky was out of sight.

  ‘I think we need to accept that this isn’t a phase any more,’ she sobbed, and I nodded in agreement.

  The next day, I woke Becky and told her we were paying a visit to the doctor.

  ‘You don’t have a choice, I’m afraid,’ I said as she opened her mouth to argue. I pulled back her duvet cover and ordered her to get dressed.

  When we got there, the doctor tried to reason with her. ‘You are underweight for your height and age,’ he told her. ‘If you don’t start eating more, we’ll have to admit you to a specialist clinic.’

  ‘I’ll eat,’ Becky promised him, but I knew my daughter well enough to realise that she didn’t mean it. For the next few weeks, it was the same old story, again and again. I sat across the table from her, trying to make her eat a proper dinner. Now and again, she would humour me by swallowing a few spoonfuls of food, but never enough to make me believe we were making progress. Neither Anjie nor I could get through to her, and the situation was starting to push me to breaking point.

  ‘Can’t you see you’re killing yourself?’ I shouted at her as she stared at the food on her plate. But it didn’t do any good. She didn’t appear to care any more. She claimed that the sight of food made her feel sick. I grew increasingly desperate as I watched her wasting away, her cheeks hollowing and her limbs shrinking to nothing but skin and bone. She was too weak to go to school. She could have collapsed at any time.

  We called the doctor again, and he sent Becky’s notes
to specialists at the Riverside Adolescent Unit – an eating disorder and mental health facility for young people. Because Becky had previously spent time in care, social services had to be involved as well, which I hated.

  During Becky’s first assessment, they weighed and measured her, and when I saw the numbers on the scales my mouth dropped open in shock. She weighed just 5 stone 3 pounds. We learned that the average for girls of her height and age was 6 stone 8 pounds.

  Anjie and I stared at each other in dismay, but when I glanced over at Becky, I was angry to notice that she seemed almost happy about how little she weighed. That’s when I realised how much this obsession had messed with her mind.

  At that appointment, the doctors officially diagnosed Becky with anorexia. My heart sank. She was just twelve years old! Her body hadn’t even finished developing and she was starving herself.

  Listening to her assessment was difficult. We told the specialists that her periods – which she had only had for a year – had stopped completely. They explained that it was because her body was in ‘shut down’ mode. She always felt freezing cold because she didn’t have enough meat on her bones to keep her warm.

  Anjie and I were silent as we drove home, still reeling from the shock of how little Becky weighed.

  ‘I knew she had lost a lot, but I never thought it was that much,’ Anjie whispered to me. ‘How did we let her get like this? I’m scared stiff, Dar.’

  I must admit, I was too.

  As part of her treatment plan, Becky was required to attend two hours of counselling each week with a child psychologist. Anjie and I went with her to these sessions, where she was encouraged to talk about her feelings surrounding body image and food. She struggled at first to open up to a stranger, and it was hard not to jump in and speak for her, but eventually Becky started talking. She told the counsellor about the bullying she suffered at school, and how she wanted to be thin so she would fit in.

  When Becky was asked about her family, she immediately snuggled into my side and I put my arm around her.

  ‘I feel safe at home,’ Becky confided. ‘That’s where I feel most confident. I only feel safe when Anjie and Dad are there, though. I don’t feel safe on my own, or with my older brother Nathan.’

  I looked at her, not understanding what she meant. Nathan and Becky got on all right most of the time, although there was a huge rivalry between them. We knew Nathan was jealous of Becky’s relationship with his mother and often accused her of wanting to be the centre of attention, but we’d hoped that attitude was easing off as he was in his twenties.

  ‘You don’t need to be scared of Nathan, sweetheart,’ I said. ‘He’s your brother! He won’t ever hurt you. Besides, if he tried, I would protect you, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘How would you be able to, Dad?’ Becky asked, a strange little smile on her lips. ‘You’re getting older now.’

  ‘Cheeky bugger,’ I chuckled.

  To be honest, I thought Becky was just being silly when she spoke about Nathan like that. He could be arrogant and sometimes a bit nasty, but I knew that he would never hurt Becky or Danny. We were a family.

  After a few weeks in which Becky showed no improvement, a social worker and a specialist from the clinic came to visit her at home.

  ‘Becky, we’d like to show you around the unit tomorrow, to give you a proper tour of the facilities,’ the specialist said, smiling at her. ‘As you aren’t getting any better, we’ll need to admit you. You’ll stay with us until you’ve recovered.’

  Becky’s eyes opened wide and she looked at Anjie and me in horror.

  ‘I’m not going to stay in Riverside,’ she blurted out. ‘I don’t want to go there. You can’t take me away from home. My dad won’t let you.’

  ‘There’s nothing your parents can do about it. I’m sorry, but you have no choice. If you don’t eat, you’ll have to come and stay at the clinic for a while,’ the specialist explained. ‘You’ll get proper support there. We can help you.’

  Becky looked at me, waiting for me to say something.

  I sighed. ‘Bex, I can’t stop them taking you,’ I told her gently. ‘We’ve tried everything we can to make you better, but it’s just not working, sweetheart. If you’re not going to eat, then Riverside is the best place for you.’

  ‘I’ll eat! I promise!’ Becky’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I don’t want to be away from you and Anjie. Please don’t let them send me away. I’ll start eating properly, I swear.’

  Even though the social worker and specialist didn’t seem totally convinced, Becky’s extreme reaction at the thought of being separated from her family persuaded them to reconsider and leave her at home for a little while.

  ‘We’ll be back if there’s no improvement in the next couple of weeks,’ the specialist told us before she left. ‘This is all up to you now, Becky.’

  Becky nodded frantically. She looked terrified at the idea of being away from home. I could see she was shaking.

  That night, she wrote out another of her shopping lists for me to take to the supermarket the next day. As well as some microwave meals, she added pizzas and pasta, foods she hadn’t touched in months. When I got home with the shopping, she immediately grabbed a ready-made lasagne and stuck it in the microwave.

  ‘That’s the attitude, Bex,’ I said, feeling a huge weight start to lift from my shoulders. Maybe this is the turning point; maybe she would get better now, I thought. Her eating problem had put a massive strain on both Anjie and me over the past few months. As parents, it’s your job to feed your children, and when you don’t manage it, for one reason or another, it feels as though you are failing. We had grown to dread meal times because of the stress of watching Becky push her food around her plate rather than raising it to her lips, but, to our delight, she ate every last bit of that lasagne. It was a struggle for her because her body had been starved for so long that I think her stomach must have shrunk, but she forced herself to finish her food. The threat of being taken away from her family had jolted our little girl into action, and from then on she went back to eating three proper meals a day, plus snacks.

  Becky was tasked with putting on a couple of pounds a week, and she was weighed regularly so the unit could monitor her progress. Within eight months – just before her thirteenth birthday – she got back to a healthy weight. Once she had enough energy to exercise, we started boxing again so she could get fit. Although it was a long, slow process, her whole attitude to her weight and her relationship with food became a lot better.

  Her thirteenth birthday came at the end of an agonising two years. To mark the occasion, we bought her a huge chocolate cake, and I had tears of pride in my eyes when she cut herself a massive slice. I cannot describe the massive relief Anjie and I felt knowing that our girl was going to be OK after all. We hoped that she could live like a normal teenager from now on.

  Becky’s confidence had always been low, and the counsellor told us that she appeared to have developed social anxiety around the time she was being bullied at school. She was too shy to get on a bus or go shopping by herself, but once her anorexia was firmly under control, her confidence slowly started to grow. When she got to the third year of secondary school – year nine – she started mentoring the younger kids in year seven. Usually, the older kids in the final year of school would take on mentoring duties, but Becky had been bullied so badly that she desperately wanted to look after the younger pupils.

  If she noticed a young kid looking upset or lost in the hallway, she would rush over to see if they needed help. She even hung out with a few of them during breaks and at lunchtime, so they didn’t have to be alone. The school gave her an award for her mentoring and for being the most kind-hearted pupil. She knew from experience how difficult it was to fit in, so she wanted to do all she could to help others in the same position she had been in. I was extremely proud when I heard about what she was doing, and I was pleased that she was using her own struggle in such a positive way.

  Unfortunately, Beck
y had missed so much schooling because of the bullying and the anorexia that she had slipped far behind the rest of her year. After discussion with her teachers, we decided we had no choice but to pull her out of mainstream education and place her in a special facility for pupils who had missed school due to serious health problems. She started at the Bristol Hospital Education Service when she was fourteen. I was on tenterhooks waiting to hear how her first day went because I knew how much she struggled with new surroundings and meeting new people. The last thing we wanted was for her to have problems fitting in at another school, at such a crucial point in her education.

  When I came home from work that night, Becky was watching television.

  ‘What was your first day like, Bex?’ I asked tentatively.

  ‘It was pretty good, actually,’ she said, smiling, and I sighed with relief.

  It soon went from ‘pretty good’ to ‘great’. Becky settled in nicely at her new school and even made two new friends – Adam and Courtney. The three of them seemed to gel instantly, and soon they were constantly hanging around at our house. For once, Becky had her very own friends, and they were good friends at that. The three of them looked out for one another, and I honestly couldn’t have wished for two nicer people for her to spend time with.

  Once she was better, I no longer had to treat Becky with kid gloves, and she and I sometimes had blazing rows. She was a typical teenager and, now and again, she wound me up to the point where I would lose my temper and yell at her over something as basic as tidying her room. She would yell back, and once we had locked horns, neither of us was willing to back down. Whereas Anjie always tackled Becky in a placid way, I regressed to teenage level, and we would yell at each other for ages. To everyone else this was funny because we were so alike, but neither of us would admit it. Anjie used to laugh her head off as she watched the pair of us yelling at each other.

  ‘You are like mirror images of each other,’ she said, chortling during the chaos one evening.

  ‘I’m not like her!’ I shouted, and at the same time Becky insisted, ‘I’m not like him!’