KateF

Or is that a bit melodramatic?

Probably. Ah, but remember what it was like when you were sixteen and hormones were racing and Bryan Adams' "Everything I do, I Do It for You" had been in the charts for sixteen weeks that long, hot summer of 1991.

You didn't want anything to do with your family. Especially not your Dad who spent his days shouting at people over nothing and telling you you were fat and to leave the room when adults came in, and your Mum who spent her days sunbathing topless in the garden, unless she was sitting topless in the kitchen while a parade of people, from your slow fifteen year old neighbour from up the road getting his biology lessons in the flesh, to slightly bemused members of the Ex-pat community, pretend unsuccessfully not to notice.

My parents had always had a separate living room from their three children, and things that weren't for children's ears. When you grow up in a house of secrets, then that's what you think is normal.

How do you overturn that?

You need someone who likes to break secrets apart. To dig underneath what's hidden, to explode it, reveal it. Not because they want to save the world, a family or themselves, because then they'd be too invested in what they might uncover, but someone who'll do it just for the hell of it. Someone who likes to shatter what's whole, make order into chaos, turn things inside out, just because they can.

Oops. Melodrama again. But sometimes, situations that are so deeply repressed and held in, which trap lost feelings and facts underneath them like layers of earth gradually grinding matter into coal, or diamonds, have a way of attracting powerful forces to release them.

Catalysts. Earthmovers, Chaos merchants.

Enter J. A 46 year old self- described "ageing adventurer". His father had been a professional gambler, so he knew a thing or two about how to try and control chance and chaos, and how the house always wins in the end, but that needn't stop you enjoying the game.

He sounds like a character in a book. But, I was sixteen and loved books more than life, so someone who sounded like he should be in one, was definitely going to get my vote and move my earth.

How we ended up in my parents bedroom on the 9th of August 1991, looking for "things that might explain some of their secrets" is another story. But there we are.

Picture us there in the sparsely furnished, stone walled, French farmhouse bedroom. Me, wearing shorts and t shirt, tanned, shoulder length brown hair, no idea at all that I'm actually quite an attractive teenager. J, all firm lines and strength and definition, though his cropped black hair and beard, and beige t shirt and shorts don't disguise his 46 years. We're opening drawers and cupboards and J's saying "Do you know your Dad's got a secret camera system wired up in your house in England?" and I'm saying I thought it was just an intercom put in between his office and their bedroom for a joke, when I open a maroon suitcase with metal buckles and see a pair of handcuffs and lots of little dictaphone tapes with writing on, and photographs with some confusing arrangements of limbs on, and I shut the case and stare at J. He matter of factly comes back over and reopens it. Says, very nonchalantly "Your Mum and Dad have advertised in the English language newspaper you know for men to sleep with your Mum. I wonder if they're blackmailing them".

Picture me now. Unfortunately I'm not having a dramatically visible reaction though. I probably look just the same as I did two minutes earlier, but my eyes are a bit blanker. I've honed the art of the non-reaction by being the calm one in my parents epic rows. The calm centre of the storm that my brother and sister would shelter near. And I suddenly remember a row when I was maybe seven or eight. My Mum saying over and over again, "Shall I tell them?...Shall I tell them what we're arguing about?". In the same way she might say "Shall I throw your pudding away if you don't want your dinner?" and you knew the answer was meant to be "no." But Dad had said he wasn't bothered, she could tell us, and my Mum had choked out "Your Dad wants me to sleep with other men while he watches", and somehow we'd all then entered a collective family amnesia about it for the next eight years or so. And now the pill had worn off, I was like one of those patients in that film about people who'd been asleep for thirty years and suddenly woke up. Or is that a simile too far? Especially since I was looking more dazed than anything. "You look like a bubble's burst" said J, and that was before I'd even found their marriage certificate...

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Weight at Jan 2011; Too heavy
Goal by March 2011; Be less heavy