Chapter 31
Andrew has an eating disorder. A combination of anorexia and bulimia where he starves himself for three or four days, eating only a slice of bread (no butter) or an apple, and then bingeing out something shocking. Normally he'll make it through a pizza, a bag of chips, four sandwiches and half a litre of ice-cream. It takes about half and hour before his "control tower" kicks back in, and before you can say Karen Carpenter, he's in the loo hurling it all back up, silently flogging his back with a vicious whip that says "You're fat, you're ugly, you're stupid" every time it cracks down on his flesh. And when he comes out of the toilet, he looks at me (if I'm there), with his brown eyes tortured by the punishment, and whispers "Sorry" as he makes his way to the bathroom to clean his teeth, wiping the sticky saliva from his face and the stinging tears from his eyes.
Andrew was not always like this; or if he was, he was less consumed by the disease. When I first met him at the queer room on campus, his smile illuminated the area, shining out like some glorious halo cast above us all. He always had time - time to chat over coffees or beer; time to hug you right at the moment when you needed it most; and he even had time, that time we got it on and screwed gently all night as the rain battered down on the tin roof above us, to explain the next morning how beautiful it had been but how he was worried about our friendship which was far too valuable for him to lose over a fuck or two. I left that day with a satisfied soul and an image of him waving and smiling at me as my bus roared off, shuttling me back to my hovel of a house.
But now, that image is like a photo in a frame that's been hurled to the floor and stomped on, some angry lovers' revenge upon the magic of a beautiful memory. Now Andrew sits before me, his arm lacerated from the self-inflicted knife slashes, his wrist shaking violently as he raises his cigarette to his parched, peeling lips. His face is emaciated and hollow; where light once shone, there is now only a bleak darkness unable to provide solace to any of us, let alone him.
Andrew has an eating disorder. Day by day, it's killing him. And he knows it. Day by day, it's tearing me apart, watching him being swallowed by the blackness. And he knows it, and I know that it hurts him even more.
Why is living so fucking hard?