‘No!’, she says, horrified, sliding into the water.

  We swim together for ten minutes or so – racing each other – and then I find her, at the end of a length, clinging to the edge of the pool.

  ‘Can we go home?’ she says, in a small voice. ‘I feel a bit tired.’

  ‘Of course!’ I say. She seems reluctant to get out of the water, until I realise why, and fetch her towel.

  She shivers all the way home, even though I hug her tight. ‘You can have my body warmth,’ I say. ‘And when we get back, I’ve got tea ready, and we can eat it on the sofa, and you’ll have that lovely, tired-but-happy feeling in your legs. It’ll be cosy.’

  ‘I’m not that hungry,’ she says, in an odd, distant voice.

  ‘That’s because you’ve got too hungry,’ I say. ‘Wait until you see your tea. You’ll get hungry then. It’s a special one.’

  I’ve made one of her favourites – lentil soup, with a toasted-seed salad and homemade bread. These are all things that she loves.

  But when we get back, she looks at it, and says, ‘Sorry, but I just feel a bit sick. Maybe I’ll eat it later.’

  ‘You probably feel sick because you’re so hungry,’ I say.

  ‘Maybe,’ she says – in the same distant voice that feels like something I can’t get a purchase on, or find a way into. It’s a curious trick. How can a voice do that?

  She goes to her room.

  I wait an hour, then bring the soup up at 6pm.

  ‘Maybe later,’ she says.

  I bring it back at 7pm.

  ‘I still feel so sick.’

  At 8pm, I go into her room, and leave it on her desk. The delicious smell will, surely, compel her to go over and try it.

  At 9pm, I find the tray outside her room, untouched.

  ‘Maybe the chlorine in the pool made her feel sick,’ I say to Pete, in bed, at midnight. We’ve been talking for two hours, now. ‘I’m a fucking idiot. But she’ll wake up tomorrow starving, and it’ll be okay. It’ll be better tomorrow.’

  It is not better tomorrow. This is the weekend the storm breaks.

  She does not eat breakfast – ‘I still feel sick’ – or lunch – ‘Stop going on about it!’ – or tea – ‘Mum, you’re freaking me out. Leave me alone.’

  By 6pm, I am determined to sort this out. There will be a reason – a worry, a thing, a single thought – that is making her not eat, and I will make her tell me it, and then I will solve the problem, and then she will eat. This is, surely, the simple logic. She knows why she is too unhappy to eat, and I will make the unhappiness go away. This is what we have done with every other problem in her life.

  I go to her room. Her hood is up. She’s just sitting on her bed, rammed into the corner.

  ‘Baby, what’s wrong? You’re not eating.’

  She shrugs.

  ‘Just tell me! Whatever it is, we can sort it out.’

  I sit on the bed. She shrinks away from me. I hug her – if I hug her long enough, she’ll melt, and then she’ll cry, and then she’ll tell me. That’s how it always works.

  That’s not how it works any more. She becomes stiff, and hard, in my arms.

  I let her go.

  ‘Tell me!’

  ‘You know what’s wrong with me.’ That distant, cold voice.

  ‘I don’t!’

  Maybe I do, but I don’t want to say it, because – that might put the idea in her head if she hasn’t.

  You need to eat, or you’ll become ill. If you feel terrible now, it’s because you’re starving. Just eat something – I promise you’ll feel better.’

  ‘You control my life.’

  Oh! I didn’t expect this! It’s so wrong I become angry.

  ‘Control your life? That’s balls. You have more freedom than any teenager I know. You can do whatever you want.’

  Slyly, furiously: ‘You’re trying to make me eat, when I’ve told you I don’t want to.’

  ‘That’s because I know how sad being hungry can make you. I promise you’ll feel better if you eat.’

  She’s silent. Then: ‘Why don’t you know the right things to say?’

  ‘What are the right things to say?’

  ‘You know.’

  I don’t know. I really don’t know. I promise you, I don’t know. Or: I’m too scared to say them. I don’t want to say it. I am in charge of this silence.

  The screaming starts an hour later. I’ve never heard her scream before. It’s ungodly – it sounds like something trapped, even though she roams around the house, locking herself in the basement, then the bathroom, as Pete shouts, in panic, ‘What are you doing in there?’ and tries to kick the door down. We’re both, suddenly, very frightened. When she finally comes out of the bathroom, she bolts down the stairs and tries to run away into the street – Pete grabs her, and she roars ‘YOU’RE HURTING ME! HELP! HELP!’ as we drag her back into the house.

  She finally collapses, sobbing, in bed, at 2am – repeating ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry’ over and over, crying, as we watch Absolutely Fabulous on my laptop, and I wince every time Edina Monsoon says ‘I’m so fat.’

  ‘I love you,’ I say. ‘I love you’ means a million different things. Here, today, it means: Please don’t be unhappy. Please don’t be ill. Please tell me what’s wrong. Please don’t leave us. Does she know this? Does she know that this is what ‘I love you?’ means, here in this bed, as I hold her?

  ‘I love you too,’ she says, and falls asleep, holding my hand.

  I wake next to her, on Sunday morning, and stare at her face. Asleep, she looks – perfect. Serene. Everything in her body looks right. The problem is in her beautiful head – where one tiny synapse misfires, one neuron sparks too hard. Something the size of a grain of sand, in some tiny electrical root, buried deep in her head, is causing all of this. I imagine being able to put my hand inside her head and remove this tiny thing – just as I have splinters of wood or glass from her feet. One tiny thing wrong. But it’s somewhere I cannot reach. The calls are coming from inside the house.

  She does not eat today, either. She walks around the house with dark smudges under her eyes – eyes which look different, today. They seem oddly glittering, snake-like. She looks like she’s seen a vision or is hearing other voices. I am more scared than I have ever been in my life.

  At 7pm, we Google ‘eating disorder specialist’.

  God bless the NHS – at 8pm, a doctor rings us back, and says, ‘Bring her in as soon as possible.’

  We are seeing a doctor now, which means we will be safe, and this whole thing will end soon. Maybe it will take a couple of weeks, but she will be well by Christmas, at the latest, and we will look back at these bad couple of months, and laugh.

  ‘Remember when you didn’t eat for three days!’ I will chuckle, as she eats her turkey, and she replies, ‘Yeah – that was so weird. Not like me at all! Soz! Another sausage, please!’

  In my mind, the biggest, hardest thing has happened – we have admitted she has an eating disorder, and we have sought professional, official, medical help. They’ll know exactly what to do, and they’ll fix her fast – because, we’re us, and she’s her – and things will go back to how they were.

  In reality, we go to a hospital that seems like a huge grey Soviet block, with clusters of cancer patients smoking in the rain, by the doors. Why would you place a children’s mental health unit inside a building that seems designed to inspire terror, and hopelessness, in a child? Does benign architecture cost that much more? Over time, it would cost less, surely, than the cost of missed appointments – for, the first two times we go there, my girl refuses to enter the building; weeping at the idea of entering somewhere so sinister, and grim. I cannot blame her – it terrifies me, too. It feels like, once we cross the threshold, everything will change. We will, officially, be a problem.

  On the third attempt – after another week of weeping – we see a serious doctor, who tells her that it sounds like she has a problem. He then passes us on to a nurse, who is very kind, and helps my girl write a list of all the food she should eat in a day: three meals, and three snacks. We are to come and see this nurse every week – to ‘check in’ – and we are on the waiting list for therapy.

  I wait, throughout the appointment, for a prognosis, a schedule, a plan, some firm advice – the bit where they go, ‘And, tah-dah: here is the cure!’ – but … it all seems so vague.

  ‘But what do we do?’ I ask, in the end. ‘What happens?’

  ‘Well, we don’t know her story yet,’ the nurse replies, kindly. ‘We have to wait, and find out.’

  On the way home, my girl stares at the piece of A4 paper they have given her, with her ‘Eating Plan’ written on it, in biro. Porridge, toast or cereal for breakfast, a sandwich and a yogurt for lunch, and sausage, mash and broccoli for tea, with a pudding, and biscuits, or cheese, for snacks.

  We all know she will not eat this. This is Chamberlain’s piece of paper, held by a hungry, sad girl. We all know what she should eat. But neither she, nor we, know how she should.

  Now, years later, I know how mental health services work. To be brutal, wherever you are in the world, they are swamped. Child and adolescent mental health is a booming, dark phenomenon in the uncertain twenty-first century, and in the building we walk into, there are children who look like skeletons, or who have made multiple attempts on their lives, or who live in chaos with parents who are also mentally ill. In the tiny, cramped waiting room, we sit with children with NG tubes; children with bandaged arms and scarred faces; children who fight, and run away; or else just sit there, quietly crying. Several are on their own – I can’t begin to imagine what their stories are.

  In this Pandora’s Box of unhappy, pained children, my girl – my girl, who is eating less than 600 calories a day, or else nothing at all; who is screaming; who is not sleeping; who is ringing from school at 11am in the midst of a panic attack, begging to come home – is not at the top of the list for help. I can see how desperate the situation is – on three separate occasions, during appointments, our doctors have to excuse themselves for an emergency on the Eating Disorder ward. The looks on their faces tell you something of the seriousness of these emergencies – these are the children who will not drink water, in case it makes them fat; or who have smuggled blades into the unit, crept into the bathrooms, and quietly shredded their arms.

  The mental health unit is like a tiny rescue boat in a sea filled with drowning children. It is the ones who are repeatedly slipping under the waves – the ones who are minutes from death – whom they must attend first.

  In this world, my girl – who turns up to every appointment so politely, and quietly; who says ‘please’ and ‘thank you’; who listens attentively, and never argues back; who is still able to walk – is a low priority.

  She needs – I find out, by ringing the eating disorder charity Beat; by ringing a friend who is a child psychologist, and by reading every book I can get my hands on – a dietician, and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. The hospital has just lost their only dietician, and the waiting list for CBT is a over a year long.

  In the meantime, what we are left with is the weekly ‘check-ins’, and a list of foods she will not eat. For three meals a day, seven days a week, we are on our own with this illness.

  We have help; but yet we must wait for help.

  ‘Why won’t they help?’ she will sob, at 2am. ‘Help me. Help me. Help me. Help me.’

  Here are all the things you can do while you are waiting for the professional psychiatric help that will stop your daughter being scared of food and, by association, life. Here are all the ideas you will come up with to make the days better!

  Buy new plates, bowls and cups – thinking that they might make eating ‘nicer’.

  Redecorate her room – thinking a different-coloured wall could ‘lift her mood’.

  Buy her specially engraved spoons, with ‘I choose joy’ and ‘Joey doesn’t share food’ – the motto of the sandwich-obsessed Joey Tribbiani in Friends, whom she loves – written on them, to make eating ‘happier’.

  Drive six miles at 10pm to find a shop that is open and sells the particular and only brand of tofu she will eat.

  Enrol her for ‘equine therapy’.

  Eat more than you would usually eat – Look! I’m eating! You can too! There’s nothing to be scared of!

  Plan outings and holidays with the clinical rigour of a war strategist: emailing cafes, restaurants and hotels in advance, to see if they serve any of the tiny range of foods she will eat, and bringing your own supplies in a Tupperware box if they don’t. Explaining to friends that you’ll be coming to their house, and this is what you must say, around the dinner table. This is what must be on the plates.

  Fill a whole drawer in the fridge with chocolate – for you know, sometimes, in the night, desperate with hunger, she will come down and take a small piece – like a hummingbird, sipping a tiny bit of nectar. The idea she might, one day, find none, fills you with a level of horror you had never thought possible.

  Scout every hotel and house you go to – lest there are scales there that you must hide.

  Have sudden, violent visions of hurting anyone in her earshot who says, ‘I’m so fat!’ or ‘I’ve eaten too much!’ or ‘I mustn’t have that – it’s naughty!’

  Dream of shutting down Netflix when they broadcast teen-dramas like 13 Reasons Why, and films like Close to the Bone, about eating disorders, mental illness and self-harm.

  Go into her room in a fury one day, when she is out, and take every picture of Amy Winehouse down off the wall, and put them in the bin – crushing them down into all the mashed potato and Quorn sausages she has not eaten. Fuck you, Amy Winehouse. Stay away from my child.

  Try to fill her room with life, instead: a tank of tropical fish; flowers, two pet rats. Look! Here is the world! It is your world! There is so much beauty and joy!

  Then there are the different phases of tactics you employ, to make this sad, angry girl eat.

  We began with a simple logic: she is not eating because she is unhappy. Therefore, we must make, and keep, her happy. Then she will eat.

  We began by being parodically cheerful – greeting her with an overly lighthearted ‘Oh my God you’re home!’ as soon as she came through the door, then bombarding her with the evening’s schedule of carefully planned joy: ‘I’ve run you a lovely bubble bath, then you’re going to put on your snuggliest pyjamas, and then I’ve set up an obstacle course for the rats, and we’ll teach them tricks! How cool! I’ve made your absolute favourite dinner, and we’ll watch High School Musical on the laptop while you eat, and then I’ll give you a relaxing foot massage while we look online for pretty dresses.’This was all done with the best possible intentions, of course – but when a girl trying to step into adulthood whilst in the throes of a mental illness sees her parents suddenly acting like they’re on The Truman Show, she will, obviously, find it all quite unsettling. Sometimes, the enforced jollity helped – she would meekly bathe, dress and be snuggled, exhausted by the day. But, more often than not, she would understandably retreat to her room – issuing forbidding an ‘I just want to be alone, thanks’ to the cartwheeling fucking clown knocking on her door and saying, ‘Daddy’s got Buckaroo out, darling – you love Buckaroo!’

  Buckaroo with two jazz-handing parents is not, I can tell you now, the cure to an eating disorder.

  With her retreated to her room, we embarked on Phase 2: Intellectual Reasoning. She’s a clever, clever, girl, and we’re reasonable, modern people – we could simply bombard this illness with explanations, and chase it out that way!

  I am still haunted by the look on her face when we would both knock on the door, and come in, like the fucking Logic Squad, to explain to her why she shouldn’t be ill any more. Sitting on the end of the bed, wearing the faces of Enlightenment philosophers, we would TED Talk our sad thirteen-year-old girl: ‘This could turn into a really serious problem, love – so we need to nip it in the bud. You need food for energy; you need food so you don’t get depressed. When you’re starving, your brain function drops, and your cortisol levels rise, leading to this anxiety we can see is so bad for you, sweetheart, so – eat! It’s very simple!’

  Oh, those explanations! Pete and me, sitting on her bed, lecturing her for hours – lovingly, rationally, firmly – on the logical solution to her problem. The more sullen and unhappy she would look, the longer our illustrative anecdotes; colourful metaphors; histories and reference points. We called on the history of nuns who fasted and hallucinated; experiments conducted on prisoners, and dogs. We talked at her for hours – as she shrank, smaller and smaller on the bed. Oh, we believed in common sense! Oh, we believed in our power as communicators! Oh, how we crushed her – steamrolled her with all our thoughts, and beliefs! Oh, how hurt we were when she nodded, in the end – ‘Yes. I see’ – but then still. Refused. To eat. Her message: Fuck you, Wikipedia. I am sad.

  A week later, I am in the chemist. I’ve spent five minutes pretending to buy deodorant. I finally walk up to the counter.

  ‘I need – my daughter has cut her arms,’ I say. ‘I need dressing for razor cuts to her arm. What should I get?’

  I can’t believe I’m saying these words out loud. I expect the whole room to fall silent. This feels like an aberrant, and awful, admission – something outside the normality of this small, local pharmacy. I’m not sure the chemist will know what to do. I’m worried I’ll upset him. Or that he’ll throw me out of his shop, or call Social Services, to report me for being so bad a mother, my daughter has self-harmed.

  Instead, the chemist calmly walks over to a shelf, and says, ‘Here – you need medical tape, sterilising spray, and sterile dressing pads. We’ve sold out of the small ones – we’ve only got the large ones left.’

  He gives me the things.

  ‘There’s a lot of it about,’ he says, matter-of-factly, shrugging.

  The biggest problem when you have a child with an eating disorder is this: every tactic you have ever used in parenting is useless. Worse than that: it’s wrong. You can’t get through it on instinct, or logic, or emotional appeals, or punishments, or anecdotes, or rewards – everything you’ve used since the day they were born. What you need, urgently, to do, is forget about being a parent, and become a mental health professional, instead.