The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher(28)

When the weighing was over, Morna would come into their bedroom and start peeling off her layers, while Lola watched her, crouched on her bottom bunk. Morna would stand sideways to the mirror with her ribs arched. You can count them, she said. After the weighing she needed reassurance. Their mother bought them the long mirror because she thought Morna would be ashamed when she saw herself. The opposite was true.

* * *

OCTOBER: IN THE morning paper there was a picture of a skeleton. “Oh look,” Lola said, “a relative of yours.” She pushed it across the breakfast table to where Morna sat poking a Shredded Wheat with her spoon, urging it toward disintegration. “Look, Mum! They’ve dug up an original woman.”

“Where?” Morna said. Lola read aloud, her mouth full. “Ardi stands four feet high. She’s called Ardipithecus. Ardi for short. For short!” She spluttered at her own joke, and orange juice came down her nose. “They’ve newly discovered her. ‘Her brain was the size of a chimpanzee’s.’ That’s like you, Morna. ‘Ardi weighed about fifty kilograms.’ I expect that was when she was wearing all her animal skins, not when she was just in her bones.”

“Shut it, Lola,” their father said. But then he got up and walked out, breakfast abandoned, his mobile phone in his hand. His dirty knife, dropped askew on his plate, swung across the disk like the needle of a compass, and rattled to its rest. Always he was no more than a shadow in their lives. He worked all the hours, he said, to keep the small house going, worrying about the mortgage and the car while all she worried about was her bloody waistline.

Lola looked after him, then returned to the original woman. “Her teeth show her diet was figs. ‘She also ate leaves and small mammals.’ Yuck, can you believe that?”

“Lola, eat your toast,” their mother said.

“They found her in bits and pieces. First just a tooth. ‘Fossil hunters first glimpsed this species in 1992.’ That’s just before we first glimpsed Morna.”

“Who found her?” Morna said.

“Lots of people. I told you, they found her in bits. ‘Fifteen years’ work involving forty-seven researchers.’”

Looking at Morna, their mother said, “You were fifteen years’ work. Nearly. And there was only me to do it.”

“‘She was capable of walking upright,’” Lola read. “So are you, Morna. Till your bones crumble. You’ll look like an old lady.” She stuffed her toast into her mouth. “But not four million years old.”

* * *

NOVEMBER: ONE MORNING their mother caught Morna knocking back a jug of water before the weigh-in. She shouted, “It can swell your brain! It can kill you!” She knocked the jug out of her daughter’s hand and it shattered all over the bathroom floor.

She said, “Oh, seven years’ bad luck. No, wait. That’s mirrors.”

Morna wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. You could see the bones in it. She was like a piece of science course work, Lola said thoughtfully. Soon she’d have no personhood left. She’d be reduced to biology.

The whole household, for months now, a year, had been enmeshed in mutual deception. Their mother would make Morna a scrambled egg and slide a spoonful of double cream into it. The unit where Morna was an inpatient used to make her eat white-bread sandwiches thickly buttered and layered with rubber wedges of yellow cheese. She used to sit before them, hour after hour, compressing the bread under her hand to try to squeeze out the oily fat onto the plate. They would say, try a little, Morna. She would say, I’d rather die.

If her weight fell by a certain percentage she would have to go back to the unit. At the unit they stood over her until she ate. Meals were timed and had to be completed by the clock or there were penalties. The staff would watch her to make sure she was not slipping any food into the layers of her clothes, and layers in fact were monitored. There was a camera in every bathroom, or so Morna said. They would see her if she made herself sick. Then they would put her to bed. She lay so many days in bed that when she came home her legs were wasted and white.

The founder of the unit, a Scottish doctor with a burning ideal, had given the girls garden plots and required them to grow their own vegetables. Once she had seen a starving girl eat some young peas, pod and all. The sight had moved her, the sight of the girl stretching her cracked lips and superimposing the green, tender smile: biting down. If they only saw, she said, the good food come out of God’s good earth.

But sometimes the girls were too weak for weeding and pitched forward into their plots. And they were picked up, brushing crumbs of soil away; the rakes and hoes lay abandoned on the ground, like weapons left on a battlefield after the defeat of an army.

* * *

NOVEMBER: THEIR MOTHER was grumbling because the supermarket van had not come with the order. “They say delivery in a two-hour time slot to suit you.” She pulled open the freezer and rummaged. “I need parsley and yellow haddock for the fish pie.”

Lola said, “It will look as if Morna’s sicked it already.”

Their mother yelled, “You heartless little bitch.” Iced vapor billowed around her. “It’s you who brings the unhappiness into this house.”

Lola said, “Oh, is it?”

Last night Lola had seen Morna slide down from her bunk, a wavering column in the cold; the central heating was in its off phase, since no warm-blooded human being should be walking about at such an hour. She pushed back her quilt, stood up and followed Morna onto the dark landing. They were both barefoot. Morna wore a ruffled nightshirt, like a wraith in a story by Edgar Allan Poe. Lola wore her old Mr. Men pajamas, ages 8–9, to which she was attached beyond the power of reason. Mr. Lazy, almost washed away, was a faded smudge on the shrunken top, which rose and gaped over her round little belly; the pajama legs came halfway down her calves, and the elastic had gone at the waist, so she had to hitch herself together every few steps. There was a half moon and on the landing she saw her sister’s face, bleached out, shadowed like the moon, cratered like the moon, mysterious and far away. Morna was on her way downstairs to the computer to cancel the supermarket order.