Feast

It’s 2 a.m. Cassie’s mournful dirge drifts up from the pantry. I lie in bed staring at the moonlight through the open window, exhausted from the absence of sleep, pondering whether tonight is the night I start to set boundaries, feign ignorance to my daughter’s call for attention or go downstairs to take care of her needs as I have done every night since she died.

    The illuminated hands of the clock read 2.30 a.m. by the time she falls silent. For a moment hope offers me its hand. Has the torment finally ended? Is peace now mine? A drumbeat pounds in my ears. Nerves fire off insurgent tension and 2.45 a.m. is the time I begin to believe she has quietened for the night. I close my eyes, breathe in, breathe out, unfamiliar calm trickles in. At the point sleep beckons, a sudden thunder crash of rage shakes my bed and I hear Cassie howl like a banshee. Hope withdrawn, I throw off the duvet, slide my feet into cold slippers and head downstairs on a silent prayer for Cassie to be gone by the time I open the pantry door.

    But she’s there, on top of the refrigerator like a mound of meringue, all folds and as white as freshly fallen snow, the silver heart charm that dangled from her wrist in life still in place. Her shadowy eyes are red and swollen, her pudgy hands reach out to grasp the air.

    “About time,” she wails, a repeat of what she says to me every night.

    I sigh, rub my sore eyes.

    “Sorry sweetie, I was trying to sleep. It’s almost 3 a.m. You do realise that?” A flash of times past when Cassie, a toddler, would creep into my room in the early hours to tell me she had been calling out for help in the bathroom and would I come with her right now because she really needed to go, me chastising her as I chastise her now. I shrug. “Then again. You’re a spirit. So maybe you don’t.”

    A moan bubbles, bursts up from her insides. The pitch is ear-splitting. I am forced to cover my ears.

    “Do you realise how long I’ve been waiting?” she says. “Are you trying to starve me all over again?”

    She drags out the word starve. It stokes my guilt and in my exhaustion I want to laugh hysterically. I open the fridge door, bury the sarcastic smile playing on my lips amidst the piles of food on the shelves. Cream-filled pastries, trifles, cooked sausages and bacon, chocolate muffins topped with swirly icing domes. A foodies paradise but the sight makes me balk. Food dominated Cassie’s nineteen year lifespan, mine too. I cannot believe it dominates her in death.

    “What would you like, Cassie? There’s lots to choose from. How about…”

    Before I can finish, her yelling bounces off the pantry walls.

    “Anything! Just give me anything. I need to feed and you’re frittering away precious time asking me what I’d like.”

    I take out the plate of sausages. In those first few weeks she showed up, I took the time to place them in a bread roll, slather on ketchup and mustard to make it look appealing. I don’t bother with the presentation now. Instead, I throw them into her open mouth as if I’m feeding a ravenous feral dog. She doesn’t chew, I’m not sure ghosts have the ability, but gulps them down in an instant. I see them slip through her transparent, organ-free form. It’s like watching a medical scan in real time. They leave her as they went in. Whole, unchewed, undigested, splatting to the floor. I follow with the cakes and trifles, watch my spirit daughter gorge only to cry for more. I take the dustpan and brush, sweep up the mess, pour it back into her and this is the cycle, pending her being satiated enough to cease her demands. Once the cycle stops and Cassie is soothed, I’ll clean up, throw it all in the bin. It’ll be far too mushy by then to save. Besides, it soon stinks the place out. Then I’ll sit a while, talk to her about anything and nothing until those shadowy eyes of hers close and she falls silent for the rest of the night.

*

    I share some blame for Cassie’s current state, and for how her life turned out. Weighing in at a hefty thirteen pounds after a pregnancy sustained purely by chocolate bars, the only food my constantly nauseous stomach wouldn’t eject, Cassie suckled the entire first night, such was her voracious demands, until I was too sore for her to touch me. A bout of mastitis sealed the deal to move her onto bottle feeds.

    “We’ll see if she’s meant to be this big,” the health visitor said. “You’re only a small build so maybe she’ll slow down.”

    Cassie did slow down, but I wasn’t worried. Children grow at different paces. She possessed a healthy appetite, cleaning every morsel from her plate and more. An active child, she remained slim but followed her centiles, a term used by health professionals. Listening to the mother’s at the school gates, fraught with their fussy eaters, I admit to feeling smug. Then one day karma bit me for my arrogance. Cassie stopped eating. Her personality changed. She was having trouble with her friends. Bullying, her teachers said. A phase, I thought. But after six months it dawned that this was no phase. Something far more serious was at play 

    “Cassie is ten years old and weighs what a child half her age should weigh. How long has she been experiencing problems with food?” The doctor gazed at me with sympathetic eyes as he spoke. I was grateful for it. It made a change from the critical glances I had become used to.     

    I took Cassie’s hand, gave it a reassuring squeeze. She pulled away, a fierce scowl that said you are a lying bitch came my way. She had gone through the surgery door under false pretense, that of holiday vaccines to go somewhere exotic. I had said it with my face set in stone so she didn’t suspect. I risked paying a heavy price for inventing such a whopper but by then I’d have done and said anything if it meant getting Cassie help

   “Since summer, so six or seven months maybe,” I replied. “She didn’t like the way she looked in her swimsuit, said her thighs were too wobbly to be on show. I thought it would pass only it hasn’t. It’s getting worse. I’ve been called to collect her from school several times because she’s fainted. She gets breathless at the slightest exertion. Her bones jut out. She’s pale and sleeps a lot. I’m really worried about her.” I wanted to say I feared she’d die, but to say it could make it happen. So I kept it to myself.

    “There’s a risk of lifelong health problems if she doesn’t start gaining weight.” The doctor looked to Cassie. “Do you understand what is happening here, Cassie? You are very thin and it’s not good for you.”

    Cassie stared at the floor, her arms crossed over her chest. The doctor sighed.

    “Let’s see what help we can get for you, shall we?”

    We left the surgery, a prescription for supplementary feeds, iron pills and vitamins stuffed in my pocket, a referral to child psychiatry on its way. Cassie sulked all the way home, shut herself away for several days without uttering a word to me. When she did finally show, her rage had stepped up a notch.

    “How dare you tell the doctor that I don’t eat, Mum,” she yelled. “It is my business. Not yours and not his.”        

    She stood in the middle of the kitchen, arms flailing, her tinny ribs visible beneath one of the close fitting tops she insisted on wearing to display what she saw as a model figure. Cassie’s glare cut me. I felt like the devil reincarnated.

    “You need help, sweetie. I’ve tried to do this on my own but I’m lost now. I don’t know what to do anymore. You’re wasting away. I can’t stand to see you like this.”

    “Then don’t look at me.” Hands on hips, head thrust forward. A wild glint in her eyes.

    “Cassie. Please don’t. I only want to help.”

    “So shut up and leave me alone.” She stomped off to her room. At the top of the stairs she called out. “And just so you know, I will not see a doctor ever again.”

The door at the bottom of the stairs opened. As Cassie paced towards the kitchen I was quick to hide the bottle labelled sugar-free lemonade I had refilled with a sugar loaded version inside the refrigerator. Cassie was fifteen at the time, skeletal, walking miles every day and night. She appeared in the kitchen door layered up in clothing, a scarf and woolly hat despite the heating being cranked so high I could barely breathe.

    “It’s cold outside. They’ve forecast rain, too,” I said. “Why don’t we watch a film? I’ve bought some of that toffee popcorn and hazelnut chocolate you’ve always liked.”

    Grey rings circled her eyes, angry red spots shone from her cheeks.

    “Maybe later,” she said, and turned to leave.

    “Be back by one. It’s clinic today. Don’t forget.”

    The front door slammed behind her. Despite her lack of response, I knew Cassie would return home in time for her weekly appointment. She had signed an agreement with the medics, one I knew she would not default on. In exchange for doctors pausing her forced admission to hospital, she would eat a little more, show up at the clinic every Friday to be weighed, have her bloods checked.

   We drove to the clinic that afternoon, Cassie staring out of her side window, me humming along to the radio. The sun had broken through the clouds turning a grey day beautiful. Inside the clinic, Cassie disappeared with the nurse only to return several moments later, an ecstatic grin on the nurse’s face.

    “She’s put on a whole kilogram since last week,” the nurse announced.

    A glimmer of light shone. I began to see faith in that pivotal moment. Yet my faith would soon be shattered. The next morning, as laundry tossed in the washing machine, I heard a knock-knock coming from inside. I found nothing obvious when I emptied the machine but when checking through the clothing I felt small hard lumps in the hems of Cassie’s trousers, in the lining of the jacket she had worn the day previous, child-like stitching on the inner side. I picked it open. Pebbles fell on the floor.

    “You should have put her in the psychiatric hospital when you had the chance. They’d have sorted her out. They’re the professionals, not you.” Having chided me throughout this challenging time, my mother’s unwanted advice didn’t come as a surprise.

    “Cassie doesn’t want to be in hospital, Mum. And I couldn’t bear to think of her being force fed and that’s what would happen. It would be purgatory for her. I’m sure she’d do something drastic.”

    “So she dies either way.”

    Choking back tears, my feet barely touched the floor as I left the house, car keys in hand. I sped off down the road, not knowing where I was headed. I didn’t return home for another three months.

    I woke from the induced coma three weeks after the car accident. Extensive surgical repairs to my left leg, from thigh to ankle, meant weeks of rehab and learning to walk again. By the time I returned home, Cassie had a slight prominence to her tummy, a rounder face. But she seemed downbeat, soulless.

    “There, you see?” My mother proudly paraded a plumper Cassie before me. “This is what happens when you set boundaries for your children and don’t allow them to control you.”

    I took Cassie’s hands. “You look amazing, sweetie. So pretty.”

    We hugged. I felt the meat on her bones, the warmth of her. She forced a smile although darkness sat in her eyes. For the remainder of my mother’s stay I watched Cassie shovel her Grandmother’s meals into her mouth, mindless, not seeming to taste or enjoy what was going in.

    “She tried to throw it all back up again when I first arrived, didn’t you dear? But I put a stop to that too,” my mother announced.

    Cassie nodded. She didn’t look up, said nothing, kept on like a robot loading her fork, filling her mouth, swallowing.

    I should have been happy she was eating. I wasn’t. When I asked, neither Cassie nor my mother would elaborate on what went on between them during my absence. Cassie would shrug, remain tight lipped. My mother would smile and say “proper parenting, dear.” Only at Cassie’s wake four years later did my mother offer her pious explanation.

    “I broker her, that’s what happened. I removed everything she liked. Her music, the TV, those awful childish coloring books you insisted on buying for her. I locked her inside the house so she couldn’t exercise. I put a spoon to her mouth every damn meal until she caved and started to eat. No food, no reward. When she fought against me, I slapped her. Every minute of every day for the entire three months, never out of my sight. That’s all it took to get Cassie back again. It’s what you should have done but no, you had to give into her again. Now look where she is.”

    She turned to look at Cassie’s photograph on the mantle. Then she was gone.

*

    “You didn’t like me when I was thin. You don’t like me now I’m fat, do you?” Cassie asks.

    I sit opposite Cassie’s ghost on a chair I’ve dragged from the dining room. I haven’t yet cleaned up the food mess from the floor. I stare into the myriad colors and textures.

    “I’ve always loved you Cassie. I worried about you when you were too thin. It didn’t mean I disliked you.”

    The saucepan flying through the air, the Bolognese within it spraying across the kitchen cabinets; plates smashed against the floor tiles in my desperation to see her eat. Never have I revealed this to Cassie, but these were the times I disliked her the most.

    “I used to think you were a useless mother.” Misery and wrath cross Cassie’s face like a hologram changes when it is turned.

    “Do you still think that?” I ask.

    “You didn’t understand me. You were afraid to.”

    Cassie’s eyes meet mine. I see the depth of her melancholy, an infinite darkened pool. She is distant, forever out of reach, as she always was. Yet I failed to see it, failed to see why.

    A lump comes to my throat. I cannot swallow it down. I grab the dustpan and brush to clear away the debris from the floor. Next comes the mop, swishing back and forth until the dirty patch shines. Throughout, Cassie is silent, watching me work. Eventually she breaks the peace.

    “Do you miss me?”

    I lean on the mop handle.

    “I miss you dreadfully, Cassie. I just wish our time together had been different. Happier. Less of a fight.”

    Squeezing out the water from the mop, I wonder why Cassie’s ghost did not return with the appearance she bore when she died. Emaciated. Barely there. Was her ghostly bulk meant to taunt me? As if she reads my mind she says,

    “You were only happy when I ate. When I was bigger.”

    So she comes here looking like this because she thinks it’s how I prefer to see her. I drop my head to hide the brimming tears.

    “It doesn’t make me happy to see you like this. To see you so sad. Not back then and certainly not now.” The tremble in my bones reverberates in my voice.

    Cassie judders, her mountainous bulk ripples. Her face crumples as the wailing kicks in. The mop drops from my hand and I move to take her in my arms, stopping in my tracks when I realise I cannot touch her, cannot feel her.

   “It’s okay, sweetie. You don’t have to do this. Believe me. I’d rather you rest.”

    Her crying fades out like the end of a song. She becomes still.

    “You don’t wish to see me again?” Her question is but a whisper.

    “I would give anything to see you again. But not like this and not if it causes you pain.”

    For the first time since she started showing up here, I see her spirit smile.

    5 a.m. the night after and the dusky sky is littered with glistening dots, a chill seeps in through the open window. I shudder, get up to close the window and with the click of its handle my sleepy brain registers that I have not been stirred to the sound of Cassie’s dirge.

    I listen for her cries. Nothing except silence fills the house. I should climb into bed, thankful for the peace. Instead I creep downstairs, each step tentative, not wanting to rouse her or set off her wailing.

   The pantry door opens with a creak. I step inside. Cassie is gone but for her heart charm bracelet lying on the top of the refrigerator. I pick up the bracelet, place it around my wrist, feel her presence against my skin. It tells me she will not return here, that her haunting is done.

    I take the stairs, crawl into my bed. Instantly I fall asleep, Cassie’s heart charm gripped between my fingertips.