it was 9.07 a.m. Maybe they’d already gone up the mountain.
Would they have done that? Left him all alone?
He felt unusually low. Last night had been one of those rare ones where too much emotion and too much alcohol had turned everything shadowy and toxic. That mood still lingered, this morning.
He needed liquid, but the kitchen was miles away. On the Casey Family WhatsApp, he stabbed out Bring me pint weak milky tea. 4 sugars. Begging here.
Minutes elapsed and no one showed.
Berocca: would that cure him? Usually he spurned tablets, but this was an emergency. If he could just get to the bathroom, to Cara’s washbag. She always had tablets, a pill for every ill. On rubbery legs, he crouched on the floor, hunting through her toiletries. What had he here? Dioralyte, that would do. And some Nurofen, that was also good. And … What was this? A flattened, crumpled piece of waxy cardboard.
Slowly he unfolded it. It was an empty ice-cream carton, a big one.
He went hot and cold. Underneath the carton – Cherry Garcia flavour – was the torn wrapper from a packet of Lindt biscuits.
Fuck. There was no more avoiding this.
Everyone seemed to think that he noticed nothing. With his optimism and gratitude for the small stuff, he was – affectionately – painted as a bit of a joke.
But Ed noticed plenty.
It was in Kerry at Easter that he’d first sensed something was wrong with Cara. On the Sunday night, when the two of them were settling down to sleep, he caught a faint whiff of something sour, a throwback to when the kids were babies. The smell of sick. The logical thing was to ask her, but instinct told him to say nothing. Not yet. From then on, he had been alert.
Immediately it was obvious that she was hiding something. From the very first night they’d met, she’d either been abstaining from sugar or fighting a drawn-out battle. This binary state had become a fixed part of their lives. But lately neither had been happening. No more cheery statements, like, ‘Fifteen days without chocolate! Am I skinny yet?’ Nor were there any sheepish orders for him to produce whatever emergency chocolate he had stashed about the house, her saying, with desperate hope, ‘Look, the weekend is ruined. I might as well eat what I want and get back on the horse on Monday.’
Then came the morning, maybe four weeks ago, when he’d been hunting in the bathroom for a fresh razor, unwilling to believe he’d actually run out. He’d opened the door of a high-up, rarely used cupboard and found himself face to face with a collection of about twenty bars of chocolate. The incongruity of those shiny, colourful wrappers, lurking in the dark space, made him feel as if his world was falling away.
Shortly after that, he’d once again caught a faint whiff of sick from her.
A long time ago, she’d told him about her eighteen months in Manchester, when she used to binge-eat, then make herself vomit. Seized by a tender sorrow for that lost girl, he’d elicited a promise that if she ever felt drawn back to it, she would tell him. But, as far as he knew, it had been consigned to her past.
Until now.
He was a scientist: he dealt in facts. The simplest explanation was the one most likely to be true: Cara was overeating, then making herself sick. Bulimia. He might as well call it by its correct title. She was bulimic? She had bulimia? Either way, he’d hoped it would go of its own accord, because he didn’t know what to do.
He’d come to accept that a thread of darkness ran through Cara, like an underground stream. Once upon a time he’d thought that their love might lift her permanently into the light. But although she frequently seemed content, there were times when she withdrew emotionally, leaving him going through the motions alone, waiting for her return. This was one of them.
In the last few weeks, he’d spent a lot of time online. Cara was right about one thing: overeating was an addiction. So, apparently, was bulimia. A study said that sufferers had similar dopamine abnormalities in their brain to people suffering from cocaine or alcohol addiction. But, as far as Ed could see, food was nothing like as dangerous as alcohol or drugs. Drugs and drink could kill, but food only became an issue at the extremes, if a person was morbidly obese or dangerously thin. Cara was