by Poorna Bell
But I don’t think I ever properly recognised that the highs of being in love with a wild thing are always accompanied by the greatest of lows: when you want them to stop, to be tame alongside you, they can’t.
Although Dr Shanahan helped me to see that Rob’s lying was always around his addiction, and never about anything else, I don’t know if I can fully reconcile the things that made me fall in love with Rob with the parts that lied and manipulated.
Was the drug Rob’s wife and I was the affair? Rob would have hated such a statement because he thought he was better than that. But however much he hated it, it was the reality.
In the end, he lost his job, Daisy, me, the house – all of it.
The man I knew, who had fought for a semblance of normal life, would not willingly have let that happen, so what does it tell us about the fact that it did?
When I went over to New Zealand for the funeral, his brother John and I talked a lot. Poignantly, this would be the start of a relationship between us that was not possible when Rob was alive, because the two of them didn’t get on.
‘I felt when we came over for your wedding in 2011,’ he said, ‘we were presented with this version of Rob we’d never seen before. Well behaved, respectable. Once wild, now tame. I mean, was that really him?’
Sifting what was real and what wasn’t is a daunting task. But I do know that other people’s accounts make me reassured that the best parts I loved about him were also what they loved about him.
When I asked Jesse about his favourite time with Rob, he said it was when they went to Grenada together in 2008, the island where Jesse’s family is from.
‘It was my first time ever going there, and Rob was a big reason I ever went in the first place. He lectured me quite a bit about knowing my homeland and not being a real West Indian until I went there. And what a lovely and insane two weeks we had.
‘Every day was the same: Rob would wake up early – I’d sleep in until noon. I’d find him in the garden, shirtless, taking pictures of butterflies and lizards. He’d cook breakfast. We’d go down to the beach. We’d swim and chill for hours.
‘Then I’d start watching horrible original sci-fi movies, while Rob sat next to me, reading for hours and hours.
‘Every so often he’d look up from his book and tell me something about cricket, or spiders, or how on islands it’s especially important to conserve water and I was doing the dishes wrong and I really should be more earth conscious, or tell me that I had horrible taste in television, or inform me how he was going to get darker than me from the sun.
‘We all know how much Rob wished he was a brown person.’
Our last overseas holiday together was in India in 2014, where we gathered for my cousin’s wedding. Rob had been clean for two months. I had been worried about his behaviour but he was superb – the guy I fell in love with had returned. When we weren’t running around doing wedding-related stuff or meeting relatives over dosas and chicken curry, we had an easy, sleepy routine while based in my parents’ modern flat in Bangalore.
In the guest room where we stayed, there was a balcony overlooking the rest of the street, where he sat smoking cigarettes while having his first ever pedicure. He had been ordered to by Mum after she caught a glimpse of the thick crusts of hard skin underneath.
The reason why he had acquired these hobbit feet became evident a few weeks before, when Rob went to Sainsbury’s without shoes on and I only realised when I saw someone staring at his bare feet.
‘JESUS CHRIST!’ I yelled. ‘Where the HELL are your shoes?’
He shrugged. When I saw people walking around without shoes in the supermarkets in New Zealand and was told it was a Kiwi thing, it made more sense.
Rob wore his lungi every day and would walk around the neighbouring streets, making sure he visited the tiny Ganesh temple and talked to his new friend ‘Swamji’, the priest who ran the place. He spotted fruit bats from the balcony, and spied a cuckoo in the trees.
He even made friends with the guy at the end of the street whose job it was to fold used paper and sell it on for a pittance at the recycling plant. This person, probably at the lowest end of the economic chain, assumed Rob was a white hobo due to the lungi and vest, and offered to lend him some clothes.
In the middle of this familiarity and family life, our drug secret was ever present. We had to pay a visit to the dentist because Rob’s teeth were rotting and crumbling in his own mouth because of his heroin use.
To try to understand the full truth of Rob makes me fearful that the man I married was a stranger. And if the only thing I ever knew was real was that he loved me, who was the person I fell in love with?
Rob was born in December, a chubby little thing with light brown hair, big blue eyes and cheeks so fat Gabrielle nicknamed him Bobble.
It was 1975 in Auckland. Cicadas were calling summer into existence, doors and windows were flung open to press against the heat, fizzy sodas crackled in plastic tumblers on wooden decks and pohutukawas were beginning their slow march from dark green foliage into stiff red blossoms, shooting flames against a blue sky.
In other parts of the world, 1975 saw Margaret Thatcher become the leader of the Conservative Party in opposition, the first woman to lead a major political party in the UK, and, on a bigger scale, the Vietnam War came to an end. The world ended and remade itself as it did every year, with an equal measure of wonder and horror.
But on 23 December, infinite potential was held in those blue eyes, as it is for every newborn. Safe, smelling of milk, swaddled in blankets. Future loves, triumphs, failures waiting in the wings in the burning glow of new life.
Baby Bobble ate, slept, pooped his way to being a toddler, and a couple of years later John came along with his shock of blond hair, and after that came Alan, looking exactly like his father.
Rob’s birthdays were celebrated with cake, parties and paper hats. Toothy Rob is captured in a photograph where he will live now forever, with arms planted on his hips, smiling at the camera, surrounded by cousins and friends thrust into shorts and t-shirts.
When he wasn’t tracing pictures of animals and plants with his friend Mark Gilbert, he was obsessing over geckos and skinks. There were cages, the specialist food they needed to eat. Memorised notes of every species of gecko and skink that existed in New Zealand. It explained a lot about his later acquisitions of the axolotls, salamanders and newts.
When he was growing up in 1980s Auckland, Prue and David were pretty strict practitioners of their faith but have since softened, in part due to their own humanist beliefs clashing with dictates of the Church.
Boy Rob played the violin. He was perfectly behaved. He went to the Junior Naturalists’ Club with his mother, who studied botany and instilled in him a love of plants and the way the planet worked. He got his love of classical music from his father, who worked as an accountant.
There are pictures of a young, bespectacled Rob with long, lanky legs, a mop of brown hair, bright blue eyes and this beautiful smile.
I asked Mark, a close family friend who had known him since he was four and who described their time in the Junior Naturalists as them being ‘animal nerds’, to tell me what Rob was like. They were born hours apart and shared their birthdays every year when growing up.
‘Clever. Nerdy. He was always the most observant person in the room and I was always a bit jealous of it. We played at each other’s houses a lot with Lego, Star Wars toys, cricket and making mud in their back garden.
‘He was a huge influence on me. We were competitive, or I was comparing, and there were lots of times I think I felt a bit in his shadow.’
Mark said Rob had a wonderful imagination, and wrote stories even when he was at primary school. ‘One was going through the jungle in South America – that was the first time I heard of an anaconda. Another was a Western mystery.’
Somewhere between nine and eleven, Rob was being bullied by older boys. He told me once, in tears, when he was trying to piece together why h
is brain worked the way it did. ‘Why can’t I let it go?’ he said. ‘Why do I keep going back to it, every detail of it, when it’s been years? Why did they do that?’ I looked at his tears and I clenched my jaw.
My sadness for the little boy who still lived within this man, who had some of the sweetness and inquisitiveness pummelled out of him, was being burned off by the rage I felt. I was Kali, limbs of indigo blue, bringing death, destruction and wildness against these little shits who had hurt him, stringing their skulls into necklaces and drinking their blood like wine.
Bullying makes a child feel worthless. When you consider a child who is bullied and factor in depression – which can start as early as seven – I imagine the consequences to be immense. Rob believed that his depression started very young, and when it did begin to cause problems for him the circumstances were not in his favour.
Towards the end of the eighties, the Bell family had a lot on. David’s parents died within a year of each other. His sister had terminal cancer. Prue was doing everything she could to keep things afloat, and I cannot imagine it was easy with three young boys. There wasn’t a great deal of attention to go around with such seismic shifts taking place.
Meanwhile, Rob was making the transition that we all do, from the safe confines of primary school to the edgier world of secondary school. Not adults but not fully children either, play-acting with emotions we didn’t fully understand, some lucky not to get hurt, others acquiring wounds that would stay with them for life.
The bullying would have undermined the things Rob loved – all of the science stuff, playing the violin, the passionate attention to detail about the skinks – and one of his friends, Louise Russell, said that Kiwi boys could be pretty rough at that age. She and Rob met when he was eleven, and she described him as ‘pretty weedy looking – I remember he had really skinny legs and these very geeky-looking square-framed glasses’.
On the first day of class, Rob’s teacher asked if anyone had vision or hearing issues who might need to sit up the front.
Louise said: ‘Rob didn’t volunteer but I clearly remember her asking him to move up the front since he was wearing glasses. So he ended up sitting next to me. My first impression of him was of an incredibly angry person. He was fuming, I think, at being singled out for wearing glasses.
‘I said hi and introduced myself as he sat down, and he just folded his arms and pursed his lips and stared straight ahead.’
Louise witnessed him being bullied verbally in that first year, along with a bit of pushing and shoving, but Rob was already learning to change. By the end of that year, he had started smoking and, while still friends with the nerdy people he had arrived with, was starting to seek out cooler people.
‘The way he was when I first met him,’ Louise continued, ‘he acted like someone who had his armour on, who was expecting a beating to come – it was nearly thirty years ago and yet I remember his demeanour so clearly.
‘The fact he was super-brainy and looked like a nerd would have, I’m quite certain, made it inevitable that he was a target for bullies. I bet it all stopped as soon as he started growing, though. By the end of third form he was pretty tall and starting to fill out.’
In that first year, though, something happened that shook their entire class. A classmate, Chris Davies, fell off the back of a milk truck and died. Louise said it was handled really badly; they weren’t offered any counselling and, for her personally, it sparked a bout of depression and destructive behaviour.
‘I don’t remember how he dealt with it at the time, but knowing him as I do I suspect it might have fucked him up a bit as it did me.’
Something I didn’t know about Rob until a year before he died: he was predisposed to self-harm. Very early on in our relationship, I noticed scars at the top of his arm, something that looked like words deeply carved in. I ran my finger over the skin.
‘What’s this?’ I asked with concern.
‘Oh, nothing.’
‘Rob, these look pretty bad.’
‘I’d rather not talk about it.’
Was this what that armour was made of? Carved from his own flesh? Did any of us realise the price it had cost him?
When I was a teenager, I remember self-harm was this really emo way of saying ‘I’m fucked up’ when you weren’t. Some girls would come in with superficial cuts and show them off to each other, and then in a moment the phase passed and we forgot about it.
But beneath the superficiality, there were people for whom this was real. It wasn’t a phase. When we were fledgling adults, a close friend of mine eventually revealed why she always wore long sleeves at school. She showed me: like flesh-coloured bangles pressed hard against the skin, a knife wielded like a pen, writing the pain into ribbon upon ribbon of scar tissue.
Rob’s cuts got deeper as he got older, and he spoke about his depression to friends like Louise.
Although their friendship started in an inauspicious way on that first day when he was bristling with fury, he went on to become one of her closest friends and confidants, even when he changed schools.
‘At a time when we were all so awkward with our bodies, I loved that Rob would wrap everyone – boys or girls – in a giant bear hug,’ she said. ‘He would be warm and affectionate and there was no sexual undertone.’
By this age, Gecko Rob was rapidly becoming a distant memory. He was struggling to come to terms with who he was, but he had somehow fashioned a coat of confidence that he wore permanently. This would be the beginnings of that swagger, slow drawl and air of seeming nonchalance. At its worst points, it would manifest as obnoxiousness, attention-seeking.
At fifteen he went to Rosmini College, where he became part of this large, swirling group of friends – genuinely good people and mostly from good families – who listened to punk and metal. At this stage, Rob was messing around with alcohol and pot, but probably not much more than most teenagers and the group he hung around in.
He grew his hair long – something that didn’t go down well at home – and started to wear Doc Martens and a long trench coat. There was no doubt that his striving to fit in, his evolution as one of the cool gang, was straining his relationship with his parents, who wanted him to behave. They didn’t understand why this was happening; he felt they didn’t understand him and were trying to control him.
That push and pull between a highly conservative atmosphere at home and nineties naughtiness was unravelling their previously perfect relationship to a damaging degree. A significant moment of him asserting his own rights was his refusal to go to church.
So Rob the wonder child morphed into a living nightmare. He smoked, he drank. He cut school, he listened to rock music. So far, so teenager, but it was edgier than that, I gather.
Prue and David’s rejection of Rob’s ongoing rebellion and his refusal to conform, in any way, to their rules or expectations created such a toxic atmosphere that he went to stay with Gabrielle.
It seemed, then, that he began detaching himself from his parents. If they asked him to do something, he’d refuse to do it – even if he didn’t feel that strongly about it. And certainly the one quality that drove me mad about Rob was what he called his ‘contrariness’.
‘If someone is asking me to do something,’ he said to me once, puffing his chest out, ‘I’m just not gonna wanna do it.’ He sounded about fifteen.
‘Rob, I don’t give a fuck. Just do the dishes, because if you don’t, I’ll have to.’
We didn’t fight often, but the phrase I used most often was: ‘I’m not your mum. You are a grown adult in a grownup relationship.’
Despite his great intelligence, he dropped out of school at sixteen and undertook a variety of jobs, from shearing at a sheep station to working as a bartender, driving trucks to landscape gardening.
‘I dropped acid, drank twenty-four cans of beer and drove a truck I didn’t have a licence for,’ he once told me with pride.
I didn’t tell him it sounded beyond stupid – I knew how cleve
r he was and it seemed baffling he had thrown that potential away. But this was history with clearly a lot of unresolved pain that he had refashioned into some anarchist existence.
Although Rob would never go into any great detail about his childhood, beyond that he rebelled and had left home, it was evident to me that he was depressed as a child, and did not realise it at the time.
Plenty of children have to do battle with strict parents and do not end up going down the same path he did. And Prue and David didn’t seem strict in an Amish sort of a way – like toiling in the fields and shunning electricity. They seemed strict in more of an Indian sense – our grandmother, for instance, forbade us to watch Thriller (so we waited until she fell asleep).
To me, it suggests something else was going on, something that neither Rob nor his parents were equipped to deal with.
It’s a common pattern for children who have mental health problems not to be able to articulate how they feel. And once they hit fourteen, what is a child’s mental illness develops into an adult one, with adult symptoms. Adult rage. Adult despair. Adult chaos. However, it transmits without any of the experience, power or vocabulary of an adult because they aren’t one.
A lot of people write this behaviour off as ‘being a teenager’, but what is actually being played out is the struggle of mental illness. These years are crucial in developing good coping mechanisms. But not enough is known about how to help children and parents through mental illness when it presents this young.
We’re only just having a conversation about it now, and I know several parents who are utterly lost when it comes to dealing with their kids who have mental health issues. The immense guilt they feel is not fair – this is a much bigger problem than they have the capacity to deal with. It is exactly as if their child has been diagnosed with a heart condition and they are expected to cure them without help.
A 2008 study said that 10 per cent of children have a diagnosable mental illness (this could start as young as five) but only 70 per cent of these ended up getting intervention at an early age. What chance did Rob and his family stand in 1985, when the prevention and treatment of adult mental illness was still experimental? When, thirty years later, with regard to children’s mental health, it is still in its infancy?
