In Search of Silence

by Poorna Bell

  But I also saw the look that bloomed on my sister’s face when Leela was just being Leela – saying something funny or being affectionate. Priya’s entire countenance changed, as if she remembered her spark of creation, and all the wishes and dreams she poured into this child she had wanted so much, and now here she was, calling her the most powerful name in existence: Mama.

  Do I want a child because I want to feel like that about someone, or do I want a child because I feel, above and beyond, one of my life’s purposes is to be a mother?

  That muddled feeling leaves me unsure of what my motivations are. It tugs not only on my concerns around my biological clock, but an unwanted memory that has probably shaped me more than I realise.

  We were ten, my friend Vishnu and I. Mum, Priya and myself were living in a sweet and small flat in Bangalore, right in the centre of town, while Dad was still back in England trying to sell our home in the midst of the recession.

  Vishnu’s dad worked for the Brooke Bond tea company and they lived in the big house opposite our apartment block, separated by an empty plot of land awaiting commands of construction. We could see each other if we timed it right – me from my balcony on the second floor, him on his parents’ balcony standing above a wall of pink bougainvillea.

  Although we were in the middle of the city, our homes sat on a quiet, undeveloped side road. A mere five minutes out onto the main street would take you into the blast of rickshaw horns and vendors trundling along with wooden tables selling vegetables, fruit and collecting old newspapers.

  But the dirt road was our domain. We bent it to our will by playing hopscotch and hide-and-seek, riding our bikes fearlessly up and down.

  We didn’t have satellite TV, iPads, video games or smartphones back then, so entertainment was in the form of comic books and playing with your friends.

  Vishnu’s mother worked, as did mine.

  So we went out to play, a lot. When the monsoon came down, we played indoor games. And when the sun came out and wasn’t scorching hot, it was back to exploring the building site or kicking our ball around.

  We had the run of the place, but there was one place we knew not to go. It sat at the end of the lane, shrouded in darkness. You knew that if you accidentally kicked a ball into the yard, you’d make a sign of the cross and say your goodbyes to it.

  This house had a sad, empty feel about it, as if it had shown up thirty years ago, and nature had forgotten it was there.

  Any plants that grew had done so through the school of hard knocks; an evolution that had arrived at the hands of hard Indian summers and the relentless rains. The leaves dark and sour, anything flowering long since fled for kinder turf.

  It belonged to a forty-something lady named Ms D’Costa. She wasn’t seen very often, but when she emerged, her long, thin, brown body moved across the yard like a wraith as if checking the world was still turning outside her front door.

  She definitely didn’t seem to like people very much. And when she was seen outside, she seemed tired, as if the dust had crawled in and made a home of her, filling her with emptiness where a life should be.

  She hated it when our balls landed in her yard, and sometimes kept them like prisoners who had committed the crime of trespass. If she released them, she almost always did so begrudgingly and through a gust of sharp and prickly words. We’d argue whose fault it was that the ball was kicked into the yard and the loser had to dart in and collect it without being detected.

  Rumours abounded about Ms D’Costa because she lived on her own and didn’t have children. Maybe she looked after an elderly, incontinent parent in there. Perhaps she used to be married but her husband died. Or she killed him.

  If you got too near to her house, the darkness of her home would snake around your ankles and pull you in and you would never be seen again.

  There was something not quite right with her, people said, because wasn’t it weird that a woman of her age lived on her own? And didn’t have kids?

  Although we didn’t see Ms D’Costa a lot, from time to time, as I got older, she would creep into the edges of my thoughts. The sense that we had got it wrong about her.

  What had happened to her life to make her like that? Was it just that she actually had a tragic past or that she had become a reflection of the emptiness in which society saw her – no husband and no kids?

  Did she struggle with a mental illness like depression and that’s why her curtains were always drawn and she rarely left home? When I think about it, she always seemed tired and sad, rather than angry.

  All I know is that no one bothered to ask. Her otherness made her an object of fear and strangeness, and rather than asking about her life, people avoided her.

  ‘You cannot be what you cannot see,’ the saying goes, and all my life, single, older women were spoken about in pitying tones, as if they lived a half-life and were permanently doomed to carry around their unhappiness.

  In twenty-seven years, I’ve never really stopped thinking about her. Or any of those other women. Maybe it’s because somewhere, deep down inside, I have always worried about turning into them.

  Christmas comes and goes, peacefully. It’s my first Kiwi Christmas, and I don’t miss the cold.

  ‘But does it feel like Christmas?’ my mum asks on the phone.

  Ever the smartarse, I reply, ‘Do you mean is my stomach bloated with overeating and am I drinking to compensate for the fact that it’s dark and miserable? Then, no. Because it’s warm and sunny. And it’s better, in some ways.’

  While I’m here, I’m staying at Felicity’s house again, and we fall into our little routine. Felicity is very passionate about interior design and every so often I’ll come back and find the furniture rearranged or the art moved about.

  Felicity walks her dog Finbar in the morning, while I take to the gym or go for a run. Then we have a brief chat about our day, might reconvene for a drink around 5pm on the sunny wooden deck and have an early night.

  At Christmas, we have sixteen people over, but it isn’t stressful. Everyone is meant to bring a dish, and that cuts down on the pressure placed on one person to cook. There is salmon cured in gin-soaked beetroot, celeriac puree, crab tartlets, salmon dip, thick slices of bread, potato salad, and of course the Christmas ham.

  Prue and David have a new miniature dachshund puppy named Monty, a ball of black and tan fluff who terrorises Finbar while we pile our plates high.

  After everyone leaves, it is Felicity, her sister Gabrielle and me left. ‘Let’s go get trousered,’ Felicity says, and we grab beer and red wine.

  We sit in the garden and close our eyes against the sun. I hear the lovely lilt of Gabrielle’s voice as we talk and cackle, the noises of Felicity pottering about. The air is calm, and Rob is gone but not forgotten.

  I’m happy to be here, with the embrace of this family, my family, around me. In two days, I’m going on holiday with Prue, David, Rob’s brother John and his girlfriend Sam.

  The Bay of Islands is renowned for its beauty – lush green rocks emerge from turquoise blues and aquamarines, narrow strips of land peel off from the edge and dive into the sea, ringed in gold sand.

  Like most of New Zealand’s sights, there is more to her than meets the eye: she is actually a drowned river valley, hence her unusual shape.

  This part of the North Island is known for its long, sunny days, which is why so many people come here to retire. A drive through the area unravels fruit orchard after fruit orchard. If the sky seems bluest here, that’s because it is.

  A researcher back in 2006 measured the levels of colour in the sky using a special portable spectrometer devised by physicists, and found that it has the bluest sky after Rio de Janeiro.

  Sun-drenched days and signs for blueberries and fresh ice cream can make it seem impossible to imagine anything bad happening here. It’s the place of idyllic childhoods and lazy afternoons, swims off the pier and running your hand through water so pure it looks like it trickled through from paradise.

/>   But talk to a Kiwi and you’ll hear how economically depressed the area is. Stories of ‘P addicts’ – addicts to methamphetamine – surface. Addiction to the drug is high in this area, and the impact on kids in surrounding schools is awful – children from chaotic homes often arrive without a packed lunch.

  I think about this as Prue and I later find ourselves picking vegetables and fruit in the garden. John and Sam are arriving the next day. David is on the computer. We’re all staying in a house that belongs to friends of theirs who are keen gardeners and have spent a lot of love, time and money cultivating their own produce.

  In the warm and still summer air, we talk and prod strawberries for their ripeness. I put one in my mouth and through the sweetness I taste the echo of where it was once connected to earth. We find silver beet and cherry tomatoes.

  Carrying our haul back to the house, I put my vegetable basket down on the table and pour the two of us a glass of cold white wine. I talk to my mother-in-law about our plans for the next few days. My father-in-law tells us bits of the news as he reads it online.

  It is sleepy, quiet, familiar. The warmth of the house makes me doze off; I feel safe and loved.

  It seems unthinkable that in four weeks, I’ll go through one of the strangest, most unsettling two days of my life, where I am convinced I will die.

  10

  IN SEARCH OF SILENCE

  It is always easier to long for something that is the best version of itself because it never happened.

  When I miss Rob, or I mourn the loss of what we never had, such as having children, I’m missing the dream, not the reality. When I miss being in a relationship with him and being loved, what I am thinking of is the most heightened parts of those emotions – the elation, the happiness, the safety – not feeling alone, let down or disappointed.

  If I trace a fingertip from this loss of an idealised life back to my present day, the question I overwhelmingly want an answer to is: will I ever be happy?

  I think I am asking the wrong question. Of course I have been happy. I was happy when I lay in the sun. Happy when I was laughing at a joke Felicity made when we were discussing life and the universe on her deck. Happy when I thought about my calm little flat and how I’d worked so hard to get it.

  Happiness is a positive emotion, so it sounds counter-intuitive to say this – because surely everyone wants to be happy – but there is a problem with it being set as the ultimate goal in life. We now have happiness experts dedicated to telling us how to be happy, a state we desperately crave because we think it will solve our problems.

  All it does is create a permanent emotional hunger. We look at people’s social media accounts and see them leading happy lives. We tell ourselves that if only we had a body that looked like that person, or if we had a gorgeous partner, then we’d finally be happy. It has become a commodity, and the irony is that this type of ‘organised happiness’ – i.e., achieved through planning and goal-setting versus spontaneity – doesn’t even feel like happiness by the time it arrives in your life.

  The goal of happiness is a good and positive one – I would never want to deny someone that. But the exception is when your life isn’t on the same trajectory as everyone else’s. Then, it quickly rots and decays, and what should be a powerful motivator and generator of goodness then churns up all the anxiety and negativity within.

  In any case, desperately trying to make happiness your permanent state can be disastrous.

  After our Bay of Islands trip, I have a few weeks in Auckland before heading off again to the South Island. Sitting in a sunny reading nook in Felicity’s house, I think about how the expectation to be happy is associated with certain points in your life. For instance, if you are married, you must be happy. If you have kids, you must be happy. It doesn’t allow much room for confessing when things aren’t going well. No wonder most people tuck away what’s really going on behind ‘I’m fine’.

  A better navigator for life is meaning.

  ‘I came across this piece from [the psychoanalyst] James Hollis,’ Oliver Burkeman said when I emailed him about the book he wrote on happiness, ‘which is that when facing any decision small or large, don’t think about whether it will make you happy, because we are terrible at predicting that. Think about whether it will enlarge you or diminish you. That makes things a lot clearer.

  ‘I can’t tell whether something is going to make me happy, but I can tell when I am stepping up to the plate or whether I am hiding.’

  Although I feel that making the decision to leave my job and go travelling was stepping up to the plate, I feel like I’m hiding. I’m living but it’s not living if I’m too scared to take any step that means having a connection with someone.

  There is so much going on in my head – kids, Rob, love, work – and I feel so untethered to everything I know.

  I know meaning is the right star to set a course for, but I don’t know what will give my life meaning. All I know right now is that I quit a good job to go travelling and I am moving further and further away from what my life used to be. The realisation sets a flutter of panic beneath my heart that refuses to dissipate.

  I should know this by now – that anxiety starts slowly, and then picks up pace until it’s moving so fast, it becomes a blur. But when it is creeping upon you, you can’t look directly at its face and see that it is coming for you.

  After about two weeks of this, a fortnight of feeling it cluster at the corners of my eyes, creep into my pillowcase and worm into my breath, I feel it growing heavier, and more serious. It’s harder to get up in the morning. It sits inside me like my blood is turning to lead.

  I know what I need to do – I need to tell someone. I need to phone a fucking friend. But I can’t. Despite being surrounded by people – my in-laws, Rob’s friends, my friends – despite knowing what I should do having written so many things about mental health, I can’t. I don’t know what has brought this on – I mean I quit my job, for fuck’s sake! This is the least pressure I have ever been under. But not knowing only fuels the panic.

  I definitely can’t tell anyone at home about this because then it feels as if it will mean that I have failed doing New Zealand. That I brought this on myself by coming here despite the fact that the times when I have felt close to disappearing, when I have felt my most unbearable pain, was in London, surrounded by loved ones.

  The problem with depression and anxiety is that depression robs you of your energy and anxiety churns your ability to speak into an incomprehensible mess. I don’t have the energy to grab the words, and then, when I do, I am overwhelmed and surrounded by so many of them I don’t know which ones to grab.

  Why is this happening?

  The obvious factor is that it must be to do with Rob. But I rack my brain – London is a far harder place to deal with Rob stuff because that’s where we lived our life. There is virtually no part of the city that doesn’t contain a fragment of a memory with his smile, the touch of his hand or his loping walk in the frame.

  I don’t know if it’s Rob, an unravelling of myself, a feeling of being lost. I know that if 90 per cent of my brain is operating on an unconscious level, there are things happening that are murky and dark.

  But when Felicity goes away for a long weekend to visit some friends, that’s when the shit truly hits the fan.

  I’m going to describe the location first.

  Felicity’s house is a cottage, and she spends a lot of time and effort on her garden. The front is the prettiest collection of trees, shrubs and flowers. There is one bush with tiny white flowers that bumblebees have claimed as their own, as I discover when I water it with a hose and disperse a lot of disgruntled insects.

  Up the stairs and over the deck, and through the front door. To the left is the hobby room, where Felicity sews her beautiful dresses or paints. To the right is her bedroom, a pretty little suntrap where Finbar likes to hold court on her bed.

  Down the corridor, the cottage widens and stretches into an open-plan kit
chen and dining room on the left, and a living room on the right. The next annexe is the guest toilet and room (my little domain) and, beyond that, the back garden.

  On the day it happens, I wake up late. I don’t have to worry about whether anyone else will think I’m being lazy because there is no one in the house.

  Normally on a sunny day, the light hits the front of the house first, and slowly works its way through, warming it up, until it hits my room in the afternoon, making it the perfect napping spot.

  On this day, there is no sun. It’s as if while I was sleeping, the sky peered into my mind and created something to reflect its contents. There is only rain, thick and heavy rain, the kind that will flood and drench your defences in minutes.

  I wake up and wash my face. I look at my chewed-up toothbrush and make a note to buy a new one. I feel really sluggish, so I have a shower and close my eyes under the hot water, willing the sluggishness to seep out of me and trickle down the drain.

  I wear comfortable clothes, ones that feel kind and soft on my skin. I put the kettle on to make tea and try to formulate a plan of what to do with my day, but the thought is slippery. I can’t get traction on it and I think absently about what to have for breakfast.

  While I wait for the kettle to boil, I sit in the living room and flick on the television. A programme comes on and then, when I hear the loud click of the kettle switching to off, I find I can’t move.

  I’m both hot and cold, and a dread slides down my spine and commandeers my arms, my legs. I knew, I knew it was here – why did I pretend I couldn’t hear it or that I’d snap out of it?

  I heard the wings of it beating before it arrived. It clung to the shadows in the corner of walls, it hid in whispers under the bed. It remained ever so cleverly out of sight yet at the same time present, the tip of its tail, the smell of its breath, reminding me it was there, and then again not.