Wild Hunger. CHARLOTTE LAMB

just happened,’ was all Keira could say to him. She felt like death, and knew she must look it. She had seen the distaste in Gerard Findlay’s eyes and felt sick herself. He was the very last man in the world she would have wanted to see her in that condition. It had been a deep shock to find herself looking into his eyes. For a second she had almost thought she was imagining him, and then she had realised he was not a figment of her imagination, he was really there, and she had been shaken to her depths.

      ‘Just happened?’ the doctor repeated, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘Oh, please, Keira! We both know there is more to it than that!’

      Keira looked at him helplessly, her face white, her eyes smudged and shadowy in that whiteness. ‘All right! I couldn’t cope. When I knew I’d lost that contract I felt so bad. I didn’t mean to let it happen. I came home and I was hungry; I started to eat, and the next minute…’

      ‘It triggered an attack.’ Dr Patel nodded. ‘It is insidious. Something makes you unhappy, you need the comfort of food, you start to eat and you can’t stop, but you are afraid of putting on weight, so you make yourself throw up. It is an endless circle. The only way out of it is understanding yourself and why it happens. As soon as you feel yourself losing control you must stop, go for a walk, go to see a film, ring up friends, visit people, do anything to distract yourself.’

      ‘I know, I know. Oh, and I tried so hard this last year; it hasn’t happened for months and months; I kept it under tight control, put on lots of weight.’

      ‘You needed to,’ the doctor said quickly, frowning at her. ‘Don’t start telling yourself you’re fat! You know that’s another trigger. The truth is, you’re still underweight for your height.’

      He saw the evasion in her face and knew she didn’t really believe him; that was the problem with all bulimia sufferers—they couldn’t trust in what they saw in the mirror. They saw a very different reflection and they never believed what other people told them, either. Their obsession was too deep, as deep as their need for love and reassurance.

      ‘Keira, Keira,’ he said, shaking his head at her. ‘Believe me, you are too thin. My wife is a very sexy woman, most beautiful, and she would make two of you!’

      That made her laugh and her face relaxed a little. ‘She wouldn’t thank you for that if she could hear you!’

      Dr Patel’s eyes twinkled. ‘Oh, she would be flattered—in my culture being thin is not so prized as it is in yours. I like women to have round hips and breasts like watermelons. I don’t want to go to bed with someone with the figure of a boy. That doesn’t excite me at all.’ He grinned at her. ‘I am sorry, Keira, but you would have to put on a lot of weight before I would think you were as beautiful as my wife!’

      Keira giggled, then said wryly, ‘But I’m a model, Doctor. I have to stay slim or I won’t get work. The camera puts pounds on you. That’s why I lost that Rexel contract—they thought I had put on too much weight.’

      He looked irritated. ‘Then they are very silly people. You are much more beautiful now than you were a year ago! A little weight has improved you.’

      ‘Tell that to Rexel’s ad men,’ Keira said bitterly.

      The doctor watched her shadowed face and sighed.

      ‘I wish I could have the chance! I would box their ears for them. Believe me, you have been looking much better lately. It is a great pity to ruin it now; you don’t want to have to go back to the clinic, do you?’

      She shook her head, grimacing, remembering the regime in the private clinic to which her stepfather had sent her when her weight had got down so far that it had shocked her mother when she’d seen Keira again after a gap of eighteen months.

      Keira had agreed to have medical help only because her mother was so distraught. Keira hadn’t really believed she was ill. The first month in the clinic had been a long struggle between her and the medical staff. It had taken some time before she had begun to listen to them, begun to understand what she had been doing to herself. Since then she had been through a bitter battle to start living a very different life, and she was angry with herself for having fallen back again.

      ‘That’s the last thing I want! I couldn’t stand going through that again!’ she assured the doctor, who smiled.

      ‘Good girl. Then what you must do now is break this pattern before it starts. I think you should take a holiday, get away from the problems that have caused the recurrence.’

      ‘But now I’ve lost Rexel I’ll have to get other work, which means I must be in London.’

      ‘That can wait, my dear, believe me. The most important thing at the moment is for you to get back to the position you were in a year ago, feeling strong and sure of yourself. Going away will help you see things more clearly; from a distance everything will look different. Go somewhere sunny. Just relax and have fun, forget everything else. Eat three meals a day, never eat alone, don’t eat in between meals, but above all if you feel an attack threatening do something. Get a friend to go with you, stop you going near food. That little girl out thereSara, is it? Get her to go with you. And while you’re there go out all the time, keep busy, surround yourself with lots of people.’ He smiled at her. ‘You have broken the cycle once, my dear. Don’t let it re-establish itself.’

      ‘I won’t. Thank you, Dr Patel.’ Keira smiled at him. His soothing manner and understanding had made her feel more human.

      When he had gone Sara came into the bedroom and sat on her bed. ‘What did he say?’

      Keira told her and Sara nodded. ‘I think that’s very good advice. You haven’t had a holiday for ages, you’ve been working so hard.’

      ‘Rexel kept me busy,’ Keira said, her mouth turning down at the corners as she was reminded of the lost contract. She had hoped for so much from it—the constant appearance on TV had been making her face instantly recognisable everywhere she went. Being seen on magazine covers, or inside magazines, never had that sort of impact. Of course, she had known it couldn’t last forever, but she had hoped for another year, at least.

      Sara gave her a sympathetic look. ‘I’m sorry, Keira—it must have been a terrible blow. But at least now you’re free to take other work, and after you’ve been the Rexel girl and on TV all the time for a year your face is famous—you’re bound to be offered lots of jobs.’

      ‘For a while, maybe. But I’m getting too old! You know how young you have to be in this business. In a few years the place will be overrun with girls of seventeen who’ll get all the jobs, and I’ll be out, finished. I’ll be lucky to get a job modelling clothes for home-shopping catalogues.’

      ‘You’re just depressed. You’ve got plenty of time to make it into the big league; you’re only twentytwo.’

      ‘I feel a lot older.’ Keira grimaced, her mouth turning down at the edges, then shot Sara an accusing look. ‘By the way, I’ve got a bone to pick with you.’

      ‘A bone?’ For once Sara’s brilliant grasp of English failed her; she stared blankly.

      ‘Gerard Findlay!’

      ‘Oh…’ Sara put one of her elegant little hands up to her mouth, giggling helplessly.

      ‘It isn’t funny! You know I hate the man—I certainly didn’t want him to see me looking like that! I could kill you!’

      Sara looked apologetically at her. ‘Sorry, I was in a panic. I just needed…’

      ‘A man to tell you what to do!’ Keira finished for her, eyeing her with half-impatient amusement. ‘I know you; when a problem comes up you always scream for a man.’

      ‘They are so useful! I wasn’t brought up to break down doors; think what it would do to my nails!’

      Keira looked at Sara’s long, beautiful manicured fingernails and laughed. Sara was smart, lively, very shrewd and down-to-earth, when she was with her own