by Poorna Bell
Aotea (aka Great Barrier, I am trying to get used to the Maori names for stuff we never used the Maori names for when we were kids) was visible on the horizon as the sun came up, but there was rain coming up from the south, so Hauturu (Little Barrier) was hidden away. I have an image at the moment of Hauturu as a ginormous taniwha in the shape of an octopus, slowly (and balefully, it would have to be balefully) opening its eyes, with the bush proving to be no more than the moss on its (baleful) brow. I imagined it moving slowly towards the harbour, stopping to wrap a ginormous tentacle around the crater of Rangitoto, pulling it into the sea, causing a tidal wave that would push the container ships up against the cliffs, the yachts in the marina up onto the motorway, send seawater frothing. I pictured people standing on Maungauika watching the taniwha follow the wave in and tear down the bridge, before generally eating people and making a menace of itself. Okay, it looked cooler in my head than it does written down.
Mythology says taniwha can live in the sea or dark caves, but they can also live in rivers. And some say that if a person had dealings with one when they were alive, they may transform into a taniwha when they pass away. I love the idea of a person’s soul pouring into a creature of seawater, moving amid the depths of the ocean, gliding over underwater forests of coral.
A hundred taniwha are meant to live in the Waikato, which is New Zealand’s longest river, each one representing a great Maori chief. As rivers go, it is a powerful spiritual link between the land of the living and the land of the dead.
Waikato begins its journey at Mount Ruapehu in the south, winds its way to Lake Taupo (the largest in New Zealand), and then empties into the Tasman Sea. Along its entire 425 kilometres, the speed and landscape can change from sedate water to thundering blue foam crashing over rocks.
Prue, David and I are at a café next to a calm part of the river, sipping the best cappuccino in the world. When driving south from Auckland, it’s a convenient stop. The reason why it’s the best isn’t because they use Allpress or beans harvested under the light of a full moon. It’s because when I close my eyes and feel a little burst of sweetness as the chocolate dust hits my tongue, I imagine Rob next to me, as he was almost exactly three years ago.
It’s not sadness, rather an imprint of a time and place before I knew the full truth about what was happening with him.
We were all on our way south to Waitomo to look at glowworms, and he made fun of Prue in the gift shop. ‘You’re never going to buy anything, Mum,’ he hollered as she pottered around the merino slipper section, while David looked patiently on, having done this dance many times before.
Now, we are on our way south this time to Rotorua, to the land of sulphur and hot springs. We will always be three, never again four.
Although I feel Rob’s absence, I wonder if he is a beautiful taniwha, taking a break from swimming with kingfish and thinking about who to eat, and is watching us from the rushes of grass below our window.
If Rob is a taniwha, I wonder if he thinks about the only time we visited New Zealand together.
Chapter Six
It was 2013 and Rob decided it was time to visit New Zealand for our first trip there as a married couple. As it was my first time, we tried not to pack too much in. So apart from the trip to Waitomo to see the glowworms, we spent the rest of our time in Auckland with the friends he grew up with and his family. Simple walks on the beach, a trip on Wesley’s yacht, and nights at Felicity’s drinking red wine and eating Otago cheese on her deck.
His younger brothers John and Alan came over for Easter, and we spent some time with them. John looked so much like Rob and his mother, except with a mop of blond hair, and Alan looked very much like David, except with a shaved head and a tree tattoo across his chest.
Rob drank beer every day. I saw the worry work its way onto his parents’ faces with each can that was opened, and I sensed a bad history there around his drinking. But what I noticed in New Zealand was that Rob was almost completely different to how he was in England. Grandiose, loud, and with an even bigger swagger. Verging on obnoxious.
I had no problem with my husband having a voice (it was better than his usual long silences) but there was something about it that suggested armour and artifice, a stranger’s face stapled onto his real one. A desperate urgency to show how well he was doing, how confident he was.
After one particularly loud monologue (which involved him talking over people), I looked at him and said: ‘Seriously, dude, who are you?’
He talked endlessly about his insomnia and borrowed sleeping pills; I remember Prue approaching me to ask if he was all right. I think she was worried he was verging on mania.
‘He’s fine,’ I reassured her. In hindsight, I realised I was basing my diagnosis purely on Rob’s assertion that he was fine.
One sunny afternoon, we were driving into Auckland city from Orewa, in his uncle Chris’s clapped-out Honda, with the windows rolled down, listening to nineties rock on Radio Hauraki. Rob was going to show me a potted history of Robert Owen Bell circa 1987–95, from old houses to favourite teenage haunts.
Green Day’s Dookie had just come on.
‘So, I just found out L is addicted to heroin,’ he said casually.
‘What?!’ I yelled and turned down the radio. L was someone very close to us.
‘Did you talk to him? Tell him under no uncertain terms to quit?’
‘No, how could I? I’d be a hypocrite.’
‘Yeah, but you’re not a junkie. You don’t use heroin. Surely that’s worth saying?’
He shrugged and looked straight ahead. ‘I don’t think anything I say will make a difference,’ he replied.
Six months after this conversation was Rob Broke My Heart Day.
It started as a fairly normal day. Well, normal for us; he had stayed in bed the whole of Saturday. We had moved to a big flat in Streatham after selling Oakdale, and I spent all day on my own, doing the food shop, cleaning the house, in between trying to cajole him to get up.
I remember sitting on the sofa – which my parents had bought us for our wedding – and thinking, This is the third weekend in a row where he has just lain in bed.
By Sunday, I was furious. He was still in bed. The sheets stank of sweat, sheets I would have to change because I couldn’t sleep in a dirty bed.
I couldn’t even bring myself to talk to him. I was so mad. He always does this. What is actually wrong with him? Why is he so goddamn lazy? Doesn’t he care about me at all?
So I left the house to go to the gym. It was a bright, cold day in October – the cusp of autumn and winter. I had an amazing workout, and I vowed that if he hadn’t got up by the time I returned, I was going to kick off.
Of course, he hadn’t got up by the time I returned.
He said hello to me from the bedroom. I ignored him. ‘Baby,’ he said.
He kept saying it. ‘Baby. Please talk to me. Please.’ All the while still lying down in bed.
I went into the bedroom, now so angry I was ready to pack a bag and leave.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and looked into his pale, sweaty face. ‘I’m sick of this. I’m fucking sick of this,’ I said. ‘You have to tell me what’s wrong. I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s going on with you.’
He gazed at me. His face washed clean of any energy, his eyes scared. His mouth silent.
I felt disgusted and fed up. ‘You know what, Rob? Forget it.’
I made as if to get up and he said: ‘I’m worrying about money.’
It wasn’t good enough.
‘I don’t get it. You’re working all the time – where is your money going? You don’t spend it on yourself. You’re wearing clothes that are literally falling apart. You don’t go anywhere. What is going on?’
I don’t know why he chose that moment. We must have had this conversation so many times, about money and him being in bed, his insomnia and so on, that it felt like a tape stuck on a loop.
Maybe there was just something diffe
rent about that day.
Maybe he was simply tired of pretending his life was okay when he was actually smoking his future away in his dank little bathroom at the other end of the flat.
But that day, he actually told me the truth.
‘I’m a heroin addict.’
I didn’t know – outside of having a fever – that it was possible for someone’s words to make you feel cold and hot at the same time. That you could feel as if your future had contracted to a pinpoint but at the same time had grown unbearably long in the face of the battle ahead.
I didn’t even utter the words ‘Are you joking?’, like people do in the movies. Because I knew it wasn’t a joke. In the first few seconds of knowing, it immediately answered a lot of the questions around his behaviour, his physical state of being, his inability to do even the simplest of tasks, his total and utter retreat from life.
‘I feel sick,’ I said and ran downstairs to my home office. I remember facing the wall and dry heaving. I remember going back upstairs and asking him questions like a robot.
‘How long?’
‘Three years.’
‘Why have I never seen needle marks on your arms?’
‘Not all heroin users inject, I smoked it on foil so you wouldn’t know.’
‘WAS THAT WHY THERE WAS NEVER ANY FUCKING FOIL IN THE HOUSE?’
‘Yes.’
‘Were you an addict before we got married?’
A pause. ‘Yes.’
‘So this whole time you’ve been lying to me and pretending it was depression, when you were actually a junkie?’
A pained look in his eyes at the use of that word.
‘Not exactly. My depression has been really bad.’
‘How bad?’
‘I tried to kill myself six months ago when I went camping.’
Oh my God. Oh my God. What the fuck was happening? How had my life gone from The Good Life to The Wire in the space of five minutes?
‘How?’
‘I tried to gas myself with the car’s exhaust in a tent but Daisy pulled me out.’
‘Were you going to leave a note?’
He held his hands out. ‘What could I say that would make it okay? At least that way you wouldn’t know I was a drug addict.’
I felt like I was going to explode. Everything was so intense; the fury about being lied to met with the cold, horrifying realisation that Rob had been so close to dying. That I would have received a knock on the door from the police saying he was dead, and I would have had no idea why.
The next few moments were a blur. I think I said all the things an addict’s wife or husband would say. I’d like to think this isn’t stereotyping because the behaviours around addiction are often so similar: lying, manipulation, chaos, pain, sadness, disbelief.
I asked him how he could do that to me. How could he lie to me if he loved me? How could he put me through this? How could he leave me on my own for so long? How could he dupe me like that before we got married? How could he make me feel I was the one going mad with paranoia?
‘WHAT KIND OF MONSTER DOES THAT TO SOMEONE THEY LOVE?’ I shouted.
I don’t know in what order he said the following, but he told me it wasn’t that straightforward, that I was the single most important thing to him and that he’d tried to quit in secret. He went through withdrawal hundreds of times; he just couldn’t stick to it.
He said he lived with this pressure, the stress of feeling sick that he was lying to me every single day. He had sold the house to pay off his drug debts, and then had just racked them up again. So, in addition to being a drug addict, he was also back in debt to the tune of £30,000.
When I asked why he hadn’t told me before it got so bad, he answered simply: ‘I knew how you felt about drugs. You would have left me.’
So he’d attempted to quit without me knowing or ever finding out that he was this person. But of course, as any healthcare professional will tell you, you cannot do recovery alone.
But to him, the person he had become – lying to everyone, losing all his money and his house – went against the grain of everything he believed in. He was meant to look after me and cherish me and, in his eyes, he was failing in that every day.
He wrote me a letter, about the lying and drug use:
Why did I lie? Part in fear at your reaction, in fear of disappointing you. Because one of the nastier things about this addiction is it makes lying the default position, and the lie on the tip of your tongue slips out, the lie is told and every moment that passes, you’re building a pyramid of lies and the truth slips further away.
And also that original grand error. The never-valid self-delusion that I can somehow fix everything myself and it will all disappear as if it never happened.
In the days that followed Rob’s confession, I was haunted by memories of events altered in the light of what I now knew.
The sound of crinkling foil that Rob said was a newspaper as he shooed me away from the bathroom door. Endless trips to the corner shop for Lucozade when he was actually buying drugs. Inexplicable disappearances late at night without telling me, later explained as going to the petrol station for cigarettes.
But one of the most unforgivable: the real reason why he was so late coming to the hospital on the day I was diagnosed with my heart problem.
I think he expected me to leave him. But there was absolutely no question of it even though he had let me down so badly.
He needed understanding and love and I was going to help him. When I calmed down, I realised how awful it must have been for him. I’m not saying he deserved full absolution, but he lived with that feeling of shame, guilt and self-loathing every night, for so long. I couldn’t stand that he’d been in that much pain.
I didn’t want him to carry it any longer.
There was no way I was going to let the person I loved most in the entire world die in a fucking tent, alone, because he was too scared to ask for help.
I just wished he had told me sooner.
Although my world was blown apart, I couldn’t tell my friends. I certainly couldn’t tell my parents who – while no strangers to addiction in our family – didn’t understand why addicts couldn’t just ‘stop’. How could these two people, who attended our wedding on that beautiful, bright summer’s day and watched as he promised to protect me, ever forgive him?
I put off calling them in the first few days after Rob’s confession. Their voices reminded me of a time and an innocence I no longer had. I felt like I didn’t deserve their love.
Walking down Streatham high street I saw couples walking side by side, and I was filled with such jealousy, such longing to be like them. I felt as if I was holding something so heavy, I didn’t know how I could bear it.
I had to meet up with friends and smile. Chatter on about work, when inside I was dying. ‘We’re thinking of buying a house next year,’ I would hear myself saying, when we could barely make rent.
No one knew that the equity of our house had gone to pay huge debts, money I now knew had passed through Rob’s bloodstream, into his brain and sweated into our sheets. Every time I washed those sheets, the money we earned disappeared in a froth of water and suds.
Rob had spent the last three years leading a double life and now I found myself doing the same. When everyone asked how I was, I said I was fine. So that became my refrain. How are you? ‘I’m fine.’ How’s Rob? ‘Oh, he’s fine. We’re both fine.’
Behind closed doors I struggled with forgiveness and the constant fear that he would die if I strayed too far from him. Never has the word ‘fine’ been so far removed from its actual meaning.
All my life, I’ve lived with some sort of duality. I didn’t even realise that until recently.
My family consists of Mum, Dad and Priya, who is older than me by four years. When we were little, we lived in Maidstone and my dad drove a red Golf Volkswagen while working as an orthopaedic surgeon. My mum made the slog up to London every day to work for the Inland Revenue.
As a child, my sister was sent to live in India with my mother’s parents – they lived in a flat at the bottom of a compound in Mangalore, home to summer rain and red sandstone. I think this was because my mum couldn’t look after the two of us with her job, and they needed the money. I remember my sister’s absence like a deep ache, but then my parents made the decision to move back to India.
Perhaps I had shown an unhealthy attachment to fishfingers over chicken curry, or maybe it was the English accent coming out of my brown mouth. Or maybe they were dismayed that I was becoming like my school friends, more concerned with toys than good grades. In any case, they decided we needed to be more Indian.
In India, it didn’t matter if you had an entire stable of My Little Ponies – bad grades meant you were a bozo, and bozos didn’t have friends. So the plan was that my mother and I would move first to our grandparents’ house in Mangalore, then my dad would sell the house they owned in Maidstone and move once the sale had completed.
I was seven, and the mosquitoes greeted my arrival with enthusiasm. It was also a time when I learned that a lot of people take electricity for granted. We sat there in the dark during one of the many power outages, candles lighting a room (at that age, they weren’t romantic, just spooky, especially if a careless uncle had allowed you to watch A Nightmare on Elm Street ten years too early), insects humming in our ears, the fans silent and impassive in the face of sweat dribbling down our faces.
Once the joy of seeing my sister – I touched her face to check she was real and offloaded all the presents I’d carefully picked in the hope she would love me more if they were the right kind – had faded, it was replaced with the ache of missing my dad.
But in between the lack of Dad, there were other things to consider.
Namely school.
