Commune

Rose undressed before the mirror.  Naked she sucked in her stomach, turned sideways and pulled at the rolls of fat around her waist.  She imagined herself thin, how happy she’d be without her tummy, her arse, her dimpled thighs.  She didn’t mind her breasts, they were heavy but men adored them.  She’d keep those if she could get rid of the rest.  The mirror clouded with steam, she breathed out and turned off the bath.  Every diet she’d been on had been a lesson in failure.  Atkins, 2.1, Cabbage, Seaweed, Slimfast, Weightwatchers.  She’d tried pills and spinning, only eating on a Tuesday and the Dolls House Miracle with everything served on tiny plates.  None of them worked.  She’d got thin temporarily and then she’d got fatter.  Her mother went on at her to stop eating and her father ignored her.  At primary school her swimming teacher hung around the changing rooms and at secondary the history master pushed her up against a wall.  She was the first to get her period and the last to be kissed.  She’d left home and found Brighton, a social life of many shapes and although she’d become fun, everyone’s friend, the girl who made other girls feel better, she still couldn’t move without hate.  By the time she pulled on her nightie her boyfriend, his honey-blond hair messed on the pillow, was already asleep.  She crept in beside him and held him as he breathed.  They wanted to live together but didn’t have enough money for a flat.  He was a carpenter and she worked on reception at a health and wellbeing centre.  Her housemates didn’t want boyfriends moving in and his truck, parked up on the beach, wouldn’t fit her clothes. 

The next morning in a cafe on The Lanes he asked her again, “Why do you need so many?”  But she couldn’t throw out the ones she’d wear when she’d lost weight, they charted the flux of her changing waistband, nor could she discard those which fitted her now.  “I like them.”  She took a last stab at her burger.  It sprawled across her plate, the victim of shame over desire, the meat half managed, the bun regretted, the chips eaten quickly like a dirty secret hidden.  She crumpled her napkin and dropped it on her plate.  They’d been together a year and he’d only known her fat. He finished his falafel roll. “A guy in the workshop yesterday told me there’s a commune an hour from here.  We could live there.”  She smiled.  “Will we have to wear robes?” He smiled back.  “Let’s try it.”

The next day they drove through the cool October air and arrived at the commune as the evening sun glinted off the tepees and yurts which littered the land like poorly nurtured children.  The farmhouse, set back against the hill, was bound in wisteria and crowned in slipping tiles.  The door was open and they were invited in casually as if they were old friends.  Lain before a fire after a supper of aduki beans and rice the fifteen members told Rose and her boyfriend of a life lived communally.  They were committed to healing, all decisions were put to the vote, most of them were vegan.  Rose gave up her room, her boyfriend packed his truck with her belongings and they were given a plot. 

At her first meeting she sat in the circle between her boyfriend and a woman in a poncho.  A talking stick passed between them, Rose watched its journey toward her as if it were the question mark of God inexorably hunting her down.  Everyone seemed to know something about everything.  When not relaying dreams their conversation travelled from anarchy to the pitfalls of milk.  Smoke from roll up cigarettes hung like clouds amongst dreadlock mountains. When her turn came she said, “I’m just so happy to be here,” and let her hair fall over her face.  Books were stacked against the wall.  When the meeting broke up she picked out a volume entitled, Love Your Body, Love Yourself and took it back to the truck for ballast. 

Her boyfriend built a yurt from hazel, converted the truck into a wardrobe and together they settled down to winter in their slice of heaven nestled between a silver birch copse and a sprawling family of dirty children and their pierced, loving parents.  There were no mirrors in the commune.  While her boyfriend was off mending with a hammer and creating with a chisel Rose hung her powder compact open on a knot of wood and inspected her body three circular inches at a time.  When she closed it, it hung a shut-eyed witness so she threw it in her wash bag and went outside.  On an upturned crate, her back against her neighbour’s horsebox she opened a packet of biscuits.  Her neighbour took the kettle off the outdoor stove and poured boiling water into the pot.  Julie was lean and competent.  Rose followed the sinews in her arm as she handed her a cup.  She offered Julie a biscuit. Julie said, “I haven’t eaten wheat since the eighties,” and brought out a packet of rice cakes. Rose asked, "What's wrong with wheat?"  “I've got Candida," replied Julie. 

That evening Rose looked up Candida in her book and what she read was the story of her gut.  Bloating, thrush, stagnation, armies of spores stopping her happiness from thriving, an infection brought on by too much yeast.  There was a chart and a daily menu on which to hang her hunger and despair.  This time it would be different; this time she would succeed.  Smoke drifted from flues stuck up through tarpaulin, the commune came alive in the damp morning air and Rose kissed her boyfriend.  “Happy?” he said as he put on his jacket.  She nodded and kissed him back.  She’d already planned her meals for the week.  Rice cakes and tahini, quinoa for lunch and steamed veg for supper.  He went off to work on the fence line he was repairing and she stripped the bed and flapped the sheets.  With the support of the commune she’d conquer the miserable weight of a body she despised.  No one else in the commune was fat.

By the fourth day her every hour was shaped by the food she couldn’t have, her meals a cobbled together mess of the chart handled badly.  Her boyfriend asked for bread.  At the weekly meeting she shared with the group.  Five of the seven women said they had Candida too. Ken, middle-aged in a skirt, suggested she tackle lactose.  Susan, in poncho, agreed there was no point in one without the other.  In bed that night her boyfriend cupped her flesh in his rough grip.  “Don’t disappear,” he said into her neck.  “I love you the way you are.” 

The woods were full of bluebells when Rose unpacked a box of clothes stored deep in the back of the truck.  Never had success lasted so long, never had the world looked so beautiful.  Julie, a child hanging from her breast, said, "you’re an inspiration.” Rose replied, “I’ve always wanted to do something in health.”  “In the darkest corner lies the greatest light.”  Julie shifted her child onto the other nipple. “I could run a workshop,” replied Rose.

For a month, she concentrated on pieces of card, making colourful headings and cutting out pictures of bloating.  She put an advert in a Brighton magazine and another in the window of a health food store.  Nerves made her bounce on her toes. The people who turned up looked at her as if she knew something.  She took deep breaths, grateful for her careful planning and led them on a meditation of their small intestines.  When it was over they gathered about her, hugging.  She was shocked by her achievement, she was full of power and stayed up long after the commune was silent.  As she felt her way to bed that night her boyfriend's quietly escaping breath smelled of soy sauce and tobacco.

Through summer and autumn her body caved yet her flesh hung folded without fat behind it.  In the compact mirror her bottom hung with a grimace at her thighs.  She pulled a handful back, imagined life without it and cut out food groups, chunks at a time.  After lactose, yeast and wheat fell caffeine, gluten and sugar.  Her boyfriend said, “What will we eat in winter?”  She said, “Vegetables,” and sniffed the honey jar when he wasn’t there. 

Crouched by the wood burner, the first frost on the ground, her gut was consumed by the liver cleanse she ingested each morning; garlic, ginger, olive oil, lemon; the vapours haunted her mouth.  Her boyfriend lay with his feet up by the fire.  His socks were drying on a line strung between post and flue.  She studied the hairs that sprang from his big toe.  He said, “I’ll have tea if you’re making.”  She’d lost three stone.  Old clothes had been thrown away.  Freshly picked nettles spilled from a bag at her feet and her fingers smarted with stings.  The kettle hissed.  She pulled the lid, steam rushed at her eyes, she raised her hand and dropped the scalding metal which knocked the kettle so that he had to leap to catch it.  “Jesus, Rose.”  He lowered it to the tiles. She shoved it away from her, “You make it.”  It left a smudge of black across the carpet.  He said, “I haven’t asked you to starve yourself.”  He poured hot water into the tin pot. From the depths of her pounding skull she said, “Nettles are for kidneys,” and lay on their crumpled bed. He moved beside her. “Do you need to cleanse?  You look fine to me.”  She said, “Don’t you want to support me?”  That night as she stared at the twisting branches of their home she thought he doesn’t love me and moved her arm away as he turned and snored.

Winter Solstice came and went.  She exhausted ways with beetroot.  She was cold all the time and the book, open on her lap, felt heavy.  She closed her eyes and directed her thoughts to the heavens.  Tell me what to do.  The pain hadn’t left; the gnawing sensation in her cells of something wrong sat as heavily in her blood, piping up its dislike whenever she was alone.  She flicked the pages and they fell open at the chapter on fasting.  Within days she was full of life again.  It had been too easy to stop completely.  She wasn’t hungry anymore.  Susan said, “You’re amazing,” and Julie added, “you look great.”  Unable to sleep she spent night after night wrapped in blankets, sitting at the mouth of the yurt, the sky deep above her.  She was made of air, she was lighter than breath, twice she felt herself disappear completely. On the eighth day she prepared a meal of live sprouts and steamed tofu.  Her body was a temple, it glistened with emptiness, she could see the untouched surface of her insides as she’d always wanted them to be; pure and clean, she was thinner than she’d ever thought possible.  She lifted the fork.  The metal felt hard to her lips.  She chewed and swallowed, it felt odd and wrong.  In the rapidly cooling air her gut twisted in pain.  She curled in a chair and watched for her carpenter to return. He’d gone for a pint.  His note said, “See you in bed”.

The next morning she didn’t want to get up.  She stared at the tarpaulin roof and marked the hours by the shadows passed across the floor.  Julie, Susan and Ken came to see her but hammer blows rained across her eyes and she turned away from them while weakness, like a plug pulled, engulfed her.  Her boyfriend put his arms around her waist.  He seemed enormous, a lumbering, heavy boned man taking up too much room, filling the bed with hair and flesh.  He used to seem so slight.  She turned onto her front so that he wouldn’t touch the place where her breasts used to be.  He reached for her hand. “Drink some water.”  She replied, “I’ve been drinking water all day.” 

In her last spring alive she didn’t notice the bluebells.  She was too weak to get up.  Slung across her boyfriend’s arms she was aware of grass passing upside down, a doorway and faces.  Someone spooned warm, sweet liquid into her mouth but she choked.  Bile rose through her throat and coated her tongue.  She swam into black sleep and woke in a white room.  A doctor leaned over her.  She heard him ask when she last ate and Julie reply, “She seemed so knowledgeable.  We thought she knew what she was doing.”  Her boyfriend sat beside her bed.  He held her hand and listened to her breathing ‘til it stopped.