In Search of Silence

by Poorna Bell

  When it arrives, it slinks out of the shadows. It is daylight. I am in a place, a home, I feel loved. But it comes anyway, and it bares its teeth and says:

  You feel terrible.

  You will always feel terrible.

  You are going to die.

  It repeats the last line over and over again.

  I feel Rob’s death around me; it is a quicksand around my feet. I’m not in England, I’m not at home. I am in New Zealand, and I don’t know how to call for help. I am paralysed, I want this to be over with. I am going to die. Rob’s death is finally going to kill me. This is what I have been terrified of. That, eventually, his death will catch up to me and claim me too.

  What do I do? How do I stop feeling like this? What must I remember? Am I GOING TO DIE?

  Remember, this is a panic attack. Think, Poorna. What happened the last time I had a panic attack as bad as this? I was with Rob, in Goa, and he held my hand and made me breathe properly. I put aside the sharpness of missing Rob and I breathe. Slowly feeling returns to my hands and I can move.

  I decide I have to leave the house. I go to the gym, but the feeling still follows me. It’s not a cute puppy nipping at my heels; it is a black oil slick that clings to my shoes, travelling up my spine and curling around my brain. I work out; I try to forget. Louise, a childhood friend of Rob’s, now my friend, texts me out of the blue. Do I want to meet for coffee?

  I half-type a reply that I’m busy but something hits override and says: ‘Yes.’ We meet for coffee. Louise thinks she is speaking to all of me, but she is only addressing 50 per cent. The other half has been shoved behind a curtain, like an unsightly mess when guests are round. She can’t be allowed to see it, and it takes every ounce of energy to ignore its chittering, which I drown out with a mantra: Keep Your Shit Together. I tuck my thumbs tightly into my palm. It’s a small gesture that no one will notice but it strangely soothes me or, at least, keeps me sane for the time I’m out in public.

  I tell Louise before we part ways that I’m struggling a bit and I’m glad we met. She looks concerned, and asks how I am, but I still can’t tell her everything that is going on with me.

  She offers to drop me home, and we chat about other things. I look out the window as we drive past my favourite sushi shop in Takapuna, and we get stuck in traffic on Lake Road on the way home, chatting some more.

  I can’t say it to her in the car, and I don’t know that I could ever say it to her because acknowledging the words, the feelings, makes me terrified for my existence.

  But Louise probably saved my life, or, at least, my sanity, as it teetered on an abyss. I flicker between thoughts of life and death as we pass the fruit shop that Felicity loves visiting. I think absently of picking up some cherries which are ripe and in season. I am glad that I have started thinking of things like cherries.

  I start silently naming fruit to keep this fleeting feeling of calm going: cherries, plums, peacherines, peaches, nectarines, apples, pears, feijoas, cherries, plums . . .

  Although meeting Louise helped, when I get home, the feeling returns and now I know I am in trouble.

  Whenever I have had a panic attack, it passes, and I feel exhausted but better. I began having them when Rob’s problems started to get really bad, but then I didn’t have them for a long time after that.

  After Rob died, I have maybe had two of them. But they have always dissipated. This is the strongest and longest panic attack I have ever had.

  Once I’m back in Felicity’s cottage, I feel this unbelievably strong certainty that I am going to die. That if I do not get on a plane back to England RIGHT NOW I am going to die in this living room and that will be the end of me.

  I don’t know how, but I know with certainty it’s going to happen.

  Maybe I’ll lose control and kill myself. I always knew people bereaved by suicide are at a much higher risk of suicide themselves and, finally, it has come to make good on its promise. I mean I don’t want to kill myself, but I am so convinced in this moment it’s going to happen.

  When I look back on this, it seems ridiculous, because of course I wasn’t going to die in Felicity’s sweet little cottage. But at the time, I was sure of it. There was nothing you could’ve said to convince me otherwise.

  I decide I can’t be in the living room. And I can’t watch television because I can’t focus on anything.

  So I wait in my room. And I read.

  I slow down my breathing and I face a wall, breathing in and out, in and out.

  You’re alive, you’re alive, you’re alive.

  This will pass, this will pass, this will pass.

  Somehow, I fall asleep. Somehow, I make it to the morning. The feeling returns but not in such intensity. It’s like watching an old television and seeing the images flicker in and out between white noise.

  In five days, I will be going to the remote west coast of the South Island for my solo road trip. There is a part of me that is terrified that I may end up in that dark place again and no one will be around to help me. But in the same breath, I feel relief at the prospect of being lost, because at least if I lose my mind no one will be around to see it. For all the work I have done around being honest in my life, there is still a huge part of me that doesn’t want my loved ones to see me unravel. I want everyone to think I am handling this well, and I can’t stand the thought that they might be worried about me.

  Further down the line, it takes time and the right collection of words from a friend to articulate it, but this inability to let go, making out like I have my shit together all the time, keeping up appearances, is gasoline in the tank for the part of my brain that likes to people-please.

  In the space between my panic attack and my trip to the South Island, life moves at a very slow, sludge-like pace. I meet Gabrielle for brunch and we talk about work and music and life. I go to the gym. I visit the cemetery. I don’t cry again, not for a while.

  Somehow, I inch my way to the day I need to leave for the South Island.

  When I tell my friend Tania about this much, much later when I am back in England and we are in that sweet, lazy part of the afternoon after a lunch of food and white wine, she says, ‘I don’t know what caused it, but it seems obvious why you were able to get to that point where you could start the trip and be okay with being on your own.’

  We had just been talking about my panic attack.

  ‘Poo,’ she said gently, ‘you give a lot of yourself to people. You’re always worrying about whether they are okay and what you can do for them. And a big part is that you’re worrying about inconveniencing people or showing that you’re struggling. So no wonder you felt better when you were on your own because even if things weren’t awful, they certainly weren’t great, but you didn’t have to pretend to anyone that you were fine. When you weren’t.’

  It definitely explained why those feelings dissipated, but it didn’t explain why I had the panic attack in the first place. That wouldn’t come until later.

  In Nelson airport, I start the car – a fat, sturdy red Kia with a four-wheel drive. The engine hums a little purr to say hello.

  ‘Hello,’ I say back. I check my mirror, touch my bottle of water reassuringly, check my sunglasses and hook up my iPhone to the sound system.

  I’m still not sure this is a good idea, and not just because of I’m Going To Die day.

  Two weeks ago, a storm battered the west coast and carved it up; the sea ate it like pieces of chocolate. Two days ago, there was a cyclone that had less impact but shuddered 150km winds through the top of the South Island and ran out of breath by the time it hit the Southern Alps.

  I’m driving solo, on roads I am unfamiliar with, but there is no turning back. I don’t want to be the person who cancelled their trip because they were too scared. Plus, I may not get the chance again: to lazily explore the coast in this way, and on my own.

  The thought hidden behind that is: at some point, maybe I’ll meet someone. If that happens, I won’t be able to take mysel
f off solo for weeks at a time. For instance, when Rob was alive, it wasn’t that he wouldn’t have let me do it alone, but more that I didn’t want to. I loved sharing my experiences with him and having him along for the ride.

  I had to see this trip alone as the love letter to myself.

  As I begin driving, the signs of town life peel away like tiny bits of shell, faster and faster as I pick up speed. Soon, the signs for plums and avocados, the cafés, the big DIY stores and supermarkets recede in the background, and all I am left with is the open road.

  The road cuts into single-lane highways. On either side are grasses that tip into valleys that run down and gather pace, hitching up their green skirts and leaping into mountains and rivers and waterfalls into the distance.

  It is greener than I could’ve imagined and, after a time, I feel as if I am heading into the centre of something that is both a landscape and, yet, myself.

  People told me about the wildness and remoteness of the west coast, and that’s exactly what I need. I feel wild and remote inside, and have done for some years, and there is a part that yearns to see myself reflected in my surroundings.

  After a few hours of driving and a pit stop to pick up groceries, I get to the outskirts of Karamea. Most people don’t normally come to this part of the coast unless they are doing a walk called the Heaphy Track, because it requires you to drive an extra hour and a half out of your way, up and down winding roads.

  Most people like to make things easy and start at Westport, the highest point on the west coast you can get to without needing to backtrack.

  I didn’t want easy and, besides, something was calling me north.

  After a time, I catch the first gleam of the ocean and I pull over the car. There is no one for miles in front or behind me. I pick my way across some debris caused by the storm a few weeks ago, and I face the most dramatic, thundering beach I have ever seen. It is huge and powerful; a creature of air and water humming back and forth for miles and miles.

  Its song begins somewhere deep down, and by the time it reaches my feet it is playing through the very last notes. There is spray on her tongue, silver in her voice where the sun catches her.

  I feel humbled. I feel lucky. There are lots of rocks and I build a little tower to say to Rob, I came here and said your name.

  I get back in the car, put some music on while I watch the theatrics of the ocean. Green Day, Faith No More, Smashing Pumpkins. Type O Negative’s ‘Black No 1’, a song literally about black hair dye. I used to listen to that song when I was fifteen, blasting it on my Walkman while taking the train to go and meet my friends.

  I think about that girl, this beautiful, scrawny little thing with big green eyes, who wore leather boots and fishnet tights. I can almost recall in perfect clarity how it felt to lace up those boots, the eyeliner raccooned around my eyes.

  How the only things important to her were a) good English grades and b) boys.

  God, I miss her.

  Or maybe what I miss is an existence where the most important thing that day was going to a record shop to buy a song about hair dye, and my biggest worry was whether a boy would notice me.

  Who am I? I ask the seashells. What manner of creature have I become? Will I forget how to love? What if I can never love again? What if all a man can see is my sadness and he’s scared to love me?

  The ocean roars back but says nothing.

  Later on, I arrive in the centre of Karamea, and there’s a part of me that unfolds with the long stretch of road ahead. It is so quiet and empty. I feel a sense of relief that I have brought myself here.

  That unconscious part of me knew I needed to be here, and I finally see why. I had to willingly take myself away, to choose this for myself. I wanted to get lost, and here I am, far, far away from anyone I know, everything I know.

  The sense of peace carries upon those wild seas and pumps them down the long roads flanked in golden grasses.

  After I park up, I meet Steve, the guy who runs the local motel, who also runs the local pub attached to it. As I walk in there are stares – not because I am Indian, but because I am a woman.

  Seven guys are clumped around, looking shiftily into their beers, and something suggests they do this every day at 5pm.

  The motel is strange – very clean, but like a perfectly preserved 1970s suburban house. The shower is hot and there’s a cooker so I can make myself some scrambled eggs with cheese. I fall into bed for a deep sleep.

  The next day I head to Oparara Basin with my guide, an older lady named Yvonne. The basin is in a national park that sits at the top of Karamea, which is interwoven with a network of honeycomb caves.

  After picking our way through the trees, we come across a basin filled with crystal-clear water stained the colour of syrup from all the tannins in the beech trees.

  The remote location means the caves don’t see a huge number of tourists, and it is part of the bedrock from back when New Zealand was part of the mysterious, now submerged continent of Zealandia.

  Here is where the bones of extinct giant birds lie and living giant snails crawl. It is the closest thing I have heard of when it comes to magic. The ghosts of forgotten creatures whisper in forests of ferns and moss, the scent of their existence is so recent when compared to other parts of the world.

  Yvonne tells me about her experience of living in Sydney. Her family is from a different part of the South Island, but she has lived in Karamea for some time because her ailing father is here. She loves the quiet of it. She can take her kayak out when the sea is calm, and her back garden is the bush filled with robins and fantails.

  ‘I couldn’t stay there for too long,’ she says. ‘I felt like the city was going to swallow me up.’

  It makes me think about London. Most of the time, when I worked in the heart of London and lived on its outskirts, I danced along to its same, frantic frequency. I would only notice the dissonance in moments when I stepped outside of it, or I was having difficulty keeping pace. Then, I felt as if it was going to swallow me up.

  But being away from it, I don’t think I feel like that about it any more. When I was in Nepal, I met a guy who is originally from the north of England, and we were talking about London, and the pressures to keep pace, and how people just drove themselves mad about the same two things: work and money. He has never lived in London.

  He said, puzzled, ‘But I don’t get it. I would’ve thought that in a city, especially one like London, you have so much freedom to be whoever you want, do whatever you want.’

  I sighed. ‘You would think that, but people like to impose their own prisons wherever they go.’

  At the time of that conversation, London and I were separated. I didn’t want to go back to her. I was glad to be free of her. I resented how unhappy she had made me, how scared, tiny and cautious she made me feel about certain aspects of my own life.

  Maybe it has been long enough, but when I hear Yvonne say that, I think no. I don’t worry I will be swallowed up by London. I remember the London I first fell in love with while hanging out in my uncle’s corner shop. It smelled sweet, it felt exciting, a bit grubby yet full of life, colour and fizz.

  The purest result of travel is that it reminds you of how big the world is, how unfixed things can be.

  A city can’t gobble you up if your mindset is bigger than concrete and gasoline. You didn’t just chance upon your life by accident – you built it that way. The reason travel is important is because it provides the backdrop with which to evaluate everything in your life.

  Which is: you didn’t happen upon your life, your loves, your friends, your work. You built it yourself. If you built it yourself, you can choose what to keep in it and what to remove. If you built it yourself, it means that even if the wrecking ball comes and smashes it to dust, you can build it again. How do you know this? Because you did it once before.

  The following day, after Karamea, I drive to Punakaiki. Punakaiki was one of the places that had its road chewed up like a piece o
f tobacco and spat out into the sea by cyclone Femi.

  On the way, I stop at the lookouts that mark the way to Punakaiki – it’s evident the long, rolling sea is in a mood, thundering against the shoreline. The sky is the same colour of hurt: grey and full of sorrow.

  I stop at a little track and watch the remains of sea plants spreading in a fan just out of reach of the water’s fingertips. The sand is every shade of black and grey, tiny stones that flicker in the light.

  Further down are the Pancake Rocks. I’ve gotten used to New Zealand’s literal way of naming things: Hole in the Rock, One Tree Hill, Greymouth, Cape Foulwind (smells of seal poop) etc. It’s literally like someone said, ‘What does that look/smell like? Oh, yeah, let’s call it exactly that.’

  Thank God for the Maori language and its beautiful complexity of meaning that overrides the blunt English names.

  Hole in the Rock is Motu Kōkako, Greymouth is Mawhera. Even New Zealand, which was named by Dutch cartographers after a place in Holland called Zeeland, is Aotearoa, meaning ‘the land of the long white cloud’.

  The Pancake Rocks are pretty – layers of limestone shuffled on top of one another like a library of stone books, but there are too many people around. Backpackers incessantly discussing the topic of food or buses, old people who smell wonderful and clean, and young Instagrammers in incomprehensible outfits and carrying lacy parasols.

  Afterwards, I hire a kayak near where I am staying to get away from them. Ken the kayak man informs me that the river is not swollen, but there are mini rapids.

  ‘They are just small though and the others who went out this morning came back alive,’ he says. Is Ken joking? I can’t tell sometimes with the Kiwi sense of humour.

  By the time I get to the river, I feel pretty silly for panicking. It’s muddy where the rain has stirred up the silt, but in the middle it is shallow and crystal-clear. I dip into the water and head off into the bush. Rising up all around me are ferns, palms and birds flitting between the trees. Soon, it has swallowed me up in its quiet embrace. I can’t hear anything – not the sea, the backpackers, nothing.