In Search of Silence

by Poorna Bell

  I didn’t know if he knew about Rob; I didn’t care.

  The rest of the time, I just observed life. I didn’t have to wonder what direction mine was going in. There was no pressure where I was, only the current curling and uncurling around me, and for a time I was standing motionless, caught between those two worlds.

  When Rob was alive, we were under such intense personal and social pressure. We were so worried about buying a house, career trajectories, trying for kids, being financially solvent, presenting a front to the world that we were doing fine.

  All of that evaporated when he died. I didn’t think of where I needed to be, or where other people thought I should be, because those concerns paled into insignificance compared to the need to stay alive. I debated my existence almost every day.

  I’m not being dramatic – people bereaved by suicide are 65 per cent more at risk of taking their own life.

  This was the best and only thing the grief ever gifted me: what it felt like to be utterly free of the expectations of other people, and, to a deeper extent, of myself.

  But at some point the world offers you an ultimatum, because the nature of all living things is to move, grow and change.

  So, do you want to be a part of me or not? it asks. And it never stops asking.

  Around fourteen months after Rob died, I started to feel the first green shoots of recovery. It started with small things like buying a new bed and sorting through his things that had been kept in the loft.

  I started weightlifting because it made me feel empowered but, more practically, I didn’t have another person to rely on to flip mattresses or move furniture around. It moved onto bigger things like finally buying my own flat and signing up to online dating.

  The surface grew nearer. I wiggled my fingers through that shiny bright portal, dipping back down when the rush got too noisy, too overwhelming. Like a moray eel, I had created a burrow of darkness, silence and peace, somewhere to offset the brashness of day-to-day life.

  But these increasingly frequent forays into the real world were making me less of an observer and more of a participant. The more I did things that were a part of it and not the otherworld I had lived in for the past year, the more I was being noticed and drawn into the expectations of others.

  Of my own accord, I started experimenting with dating. I wasn’t looking for anything emotional, when my head still swirled with the mist of Rob, but I really missed being physical with someone.

  ‘Darling, are you sure it still works?’ my friend Martin said.

  ‘Oh, har har,’ I replied.

  As soon as I started dating the same guy more than a few times, people said, ‘Oooh, this sounds promising.’

  ‘Promising for what?’ I replied witheringly.

  The final straw was when one of my friends, married and with kids, said, ‘So, when do you think you’re likely going to be in a relationship?’

  Was this really how it was going to be? Now that I had finally stopped looking like I was 10 degrees from going batshit, it was fair game to place me back in the sardine run?

  While I may have been back in the real world, I wasn’t the same person. I was in some ways sadder, wiser, but also my existence was much bigger, more honest.

  I could accept a new person into my life, but I didn’t need another person to be happy, and that was a critically important distinction.

  To be made to feel like I wouldn’t ever be properly happy unless I was back on that track and seeking those same things again was nonsense.

  I realised, once I moved past ranting about being single and happy, that it wasn’t just single people who were subject to these narrow expectations. A side effect of speaking so openly about Rob’s death, and writing about addiction, mental health and how it affected our relationship, was that people from all walks of life told me a lot of things they wouldn’t have normally told others.

  They knew I hadn’t judged Rob despite everything he had been through, and so if I was capable of that, then maybe I wouldn’t judge them. And I didn’t.

  It seemed as if those expectations never ended, and shunted people towards goals that may not have been theirs. Whether it’s being single, dating someone, getting married, having kids, having more kids, and so on.

  Are the lives we have the ones we want, or the ones we felt pressured to have? Do we really want those things, or would we have done things differently? What is our own thought, our own hope, and what is the echo of everyone else’s?

  I needed to figure this out, because the aspiration for the picture-perfect life doesn’t prepare you for when things go sideways. It is selling you only half a story, because it implies that when you attain whatever it is peddling, you will be happy. It doesn’t tell you that the goal is a shimmering mirage in the desert that evaporates faster and faster as you move towards it. That no one has it figured out, or reaches their deathbed and says, ‘Yes, that worked out exactly as I expected.’

  The more I swam into the world of the living, the more I was aware that this echo was causing such dissonance. I felt like I needed to paddle faster, to process my grief quicker so I could get back on the baby and marriage track.

  I knew it wasn’t right, but I couldn’t think about what I wanted because the echo was what I had been programmed to want since I could remember. It was the collective thoughts and dreams of society, my pre-grief self and everyone around me.

  There was my life in London that I loved: nipping into art galleries, putting on smart dresses, talking to smart people. I liked weekend runs along my river, meeting friends for boozy Sunday lunches, driving over to see my mum and dad in the countryside.

  But underneath all of that normality lay the memory that still haunts me. It plays over and over again in my mind, and it’s as sharp and as clear as the moment it happened. It was the first time I saw Rob in the funeral home.

  My best friend Mal had flown over to New Zealand with me. When we arrived at border control, she went ahead of me at the immigration desk. She and the border police looked back at me; I knew then that she was explaining to him why we were over for such a short period of time. I saw the look on his face as it crumpled in understanding.

  The weight and comfort of the first hugs as I came out of the airport of John, my brother-in-law, Prue and David. The first glimpse of Felicity’s face – Rob’s aunt – as we bundled into her home where we were staying for the next few days.

  Diazepam. Daylight.

  A short drive, or was it a long drive? At any event, a drive.

  Meeting Ryan, the funeral director. Being introduced as Rob’s wife. Knowing that we needed to pick a casket, flowers, music. The fucked-up diametric opposite of a wedding: no beginnings, only an ending.

  Would you like to see him? Yes, more than anything, because all I have wanted over the past twenty-four hours is to be with him. No, because that will make this real.

  Seeing him. Not knowing how to even pull language together to describe the moment, only that my mind doesn’t know what it is seeing. It is him, it is not him. Why is he blue? Where is his pinkishness, his almost permanent state of sunburn? Where is the rise and fall of his chest?

  What was happening there was loss. But although the shape of this loss was mine – the loss of a partner, the broken dream of love, feeling let down by the world, an uncertain future, intense sadness – it was also a loss so universal that almost every person, in some way, shape or form, has felt its familiar grasp.

  And there comes a point, whether through death, loss, illness or heartbreak, when you are forced to take inventory of your life. I loved my life in London, but there were parts of it I wasn’t happy with, that I needed to question.

  Sometimes the realisation that something needs to change is forced through without kindness or sentiment, so roughly that your whole being is cut up with the violence of it. You look about your life, and you realise that you don’t recognise the things in it. They no longer fit the person you are.

  Before Rob, I would hav
e let other people influence and steamroll over my own thoughts. But after Rob, after that moment in the funeral home, I realised that beyond the frivolity of YOLO (You Only Live Once), there was something very real about the fragility of living that we seemed to either ignore or take for granted.

  I didn’t want to live a life of apathy, of regret. But I didn’t know how, within the strong tidal pressure of being in London, I was going to figure it out. How life just wouldn’t end up rolling into one Sunday lunch after another, grumbling about bad dates and work stuff.

  How, before I knew it, I’d be repeating ‘Oh, my God, when did it become May/September/December’ by the water cooler as my colleagues and I did every year.

  When you are in an echo chamber, it is almost impossible to find the frequency of your own voice amid the din and push of others.

  3

  HELLO, IT’S ME, YOUR WAKE-UP CALL

  For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a job. When I was younger, I was a bizarre little child who wasn’t grossed out by feet and, during a time when we lived in India for a bit, I sold pedicures to my grandmother and aunts using a scrubbing brush and the bum bucket. (It’s the bucket Indians sometimes use to collect water, accompanied by the bum jug, which ferries the water to wash your behind.)

  As I grew older, and we moved back to England, my sister and I used to help out in my uncle Ashok’s shop during school holidays.

  We lived in the Kent suburbs, while he and his wife Geetha owned a shop in central London that seemed like The Most Exciting Place On Earth.

  We were terrible employees: all we did was bag groceries, dust a few shelves and eat about ten times the amount of our pay in chocolates and fizzy drinks as my aunt and uncle gave us free rein of the shop.

  Seeing so many different characters pass through those doors was probably why I started falling in love with London. I took it further by sneaking up there as a teenager and going to Goth club nights at the Electric Ballroom in Camden, which seemed witchy and eye-popping.

  When I reached legal age, my first proper job started in the butthole of retail: selling double-glazed windows over the phone. It helped fund my trips to London.

  By now, my love of London was so deep-rooted there was no question of me not going to university there. While studying English, I worked every Saturday in Selfridges, and my first grown-up job after leaving was working as an intern journalist for a ratty local South Asian newspaper located in a dodgy part of east London. I worked solidly until they offered me a permanent job that paid lower than minimum wage. But it was a step on the ladder.

  Although I had always worked for things I wanted – from teddy bears to combat trousers – I was absolutely terrible with money. It dribbled out of my fingers as soon as I got it. But it taught me that, to get anywhere in life, you needed to work hard. If given an opportunity, seize it, be diligent and use your initiative.

  A lot of this work ethic comes from my mother and father.

  Having immigrant parents is mostly uncool when you’re a teenager because they set curfews and threatened to chop the balls off any boys you fraternised with, while your Western mates roamed the high street at night in miniskirts, Rimmel lipstick and snogged random boys in the park.

  I still goggle while watching white parents on TV who let the girlfriends or boyfriends of their teenage kids stay overnight in their bedrooms and then fret about whether they are having safe sex.

  Firstly, I wasn’t allowed a boyfriend when I was a teenager; secondly, they’d be allowed as far as the living room; and thirdly, my safe-sex conversation with my parents was one line: ‘Don’t do something that would disappoint us.’ And even then, I can’t be entirely sure it wasn’t about kissing and getting a cold sore.

  A bummer when you’re a kid, but as an adult, you understood how far their work ethic had taken you.

  My mother in particular was insistent that my sister and I always made our own money. ‘You never, ever want to rely on a man to provide for you,’ she said.

  While Dad was doing brutal junior doctor hours in the hospital, Mum worked for Inland Revenue. With two small children, she had to leave the house at 6am, slog all the way to the station, embark on a lengthy commute, do a long day, come home and cook dinner for us.

  Both Priya and I had chosen careers as journalists – an industry that didn’t pay great – and it’s a testament to their open-mindedness that both of them, despite having to work extremely hard to establish themselves, didn’t push us into a career such as medicine, finance or law, like many other South Asian parents.

  In my case, my report card was so lop-sided in terms of grades, the only way I’d work in any of those industries would be in janitorial services. Priya, however, was very good at science, yet rather than become a researcher or an academic, she became a respected science journalist.

  I always knew I was going to become a writer, not because I had a romantic notion of bashing away on a typewriter with pencils twisted in my hair, but because, as early as I can remember, it’s what I did. In the same way that reading books was a conduit into wonderful new worlds that I could go and live in for a while, where I trod on their soil and breathed their air, writing helped me articulate how I related to the world.

  I wrote stories about being bitten to shit by mosquitoes while on holiday in India. I was the nerd submitting poems for the school’s annual yearbook. I received book awards at the end of the school year, and almost every diary organiser since the age of eight had the word ‘writer’ next to the ‘I’d like to be a . . .’ statement at the front of every book.

  But turning all of this into a career wasn’t so evident, and, at seventeen, my goals were flip-flopping all over the place, not helped by my utterly useless career guidance counsellor.

  I wanted to be a writer but I also held aspirations of becoming a TV presenter, and while on summer break at university managed to wangle my way onto a niche Asian TV channel through a friend. My job was to present a five-minute fitness segment, which was laughable considering, at that point in time, I smoked like a chimney and did zero exercise beyond lifting pints of beer to my mouth.

  For research, I read copies of my dad’s Men’s Health magazines that he kept stashed in the loo. Then I’d drive two hours all the way from Kent to a sprawling white mansion in Hounslow where it was being filmed, smoke a cigarette in the car and then attempt to wheeze my way through plank and mountain climbers.

  Sadly, the show never made it to air because of a lack of funding, and presumably because their vetting process for ‘expert presenters’ such as myself was questionable.

  Because I had started out in Asian media, an industry devoid of decent pay, mentoring and career planning – hell, you were lucky if there was even an HR department – I had no idea what I was doing beyond going from one job to the next.

  Around four years into my career, I left Asian media and found myself doing a job in mainstream journalism that initially I was so excited to get because it covered the areas I loved – travel, relationships and human interest pieces. But it gradually became evident that the person I was working for was not the best manager.

  Meetings were like something from Drop the Dead Donkey, the caricature TV programme about a newsroom. You’d get blamed for something that originally started as your boss’s terrible idea or bollocked because you left on time.

  The final straw was over a little column that fell under my remit, where readers could send in messages for people they’d spotted on the Tube and taken a fancy to. Sometimes people sent in the same message in the course of a week, and although I tried to pay attention to duplication, there were 100 other things on my plate, and remembering that Susan Loves Red Backpack Man was not high on my list.

  The editor-in-chief sat me down and explained in a serious tone how he had noticed the same message within the space of a week. He told me how sloppy I was being, and how I really needed to get my act together. I listened to him talking about this column on page 32, which was being used as a
n excuse to haul me over the coals for a job I worked on twelve hours a day, and I thought, ‘Nope, I don’t want to do this. I want to travel and not be shouted at for a while.’

  In journalism, you are used to a certain amount of sadism, but I was increasingly starting to feel like there was a way you could be in charge and not be a dick about it.

  However, being an immigrant’s child can have its drawbacks. Ditching your job to go travelling? It’s seen as a cop-out. ‘It got too hard so I bailed.’

  But, actually, I think there is great power in knowing where the line is for you, because I think it gives you an appreciation of your own self-worth, and you can then turn that into something constructive.

  Otherwise you go on putting up with a lot of shit indefinitely and become more and more resentful, which inevitably comes out one way or another – whether it’s your long-suffering family bearing the brunt of your anger or you end up getting sacked.

  So I quit. It turned out that I had made the right choice anyway. Apparently, I was on a fixed-term contract, except nobody had told me that when I got the job, and I was so grateful to be offered it that I didn’t press for details beyond my salary. When I handed in my notice, having decided to go to India for three months, I was told by my manager, ‘We would’ve had to end your contract anyway as legally we couldn’t keep you on.’

  As I stood there with my mouth open, I realised I had learned a valid lesson about what you should be willing to do and sacrifice for work. I had made the rookie mistake of assuming the company was on my side. No, the company is always on the company’s side.

  The trip to India was fun, but being a typical 27-year-old, I didn’t learn a huge amount other than that you can catch scabies on a train (this happened to my friend), you shouldn’t kiss strange bar owners in Goa (this happened to me) and kayaking through a duck farm is like something out of a horrifying Hitchcock film (also me).