by Poorna Bell
Rob, this is your song.
Chase the Rainbow is a game-changing book. Poorna Bell’s moving account of the pressures on modern men could be a life-saver. This is a brave and bold work that will inspire us all to talk openly and honestly about depression once and for all. Everyone should read this book.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON
This isn’t a love story that ends in a kiss at sunset. It isn’t one where love is more powerful than the universe.
It is one where love was strong, endured a storm so bad it almost destroyed everything; where it forgave, was deep and true, and where it remembers and was honoured.
But it’s not one where love wins the fight.
In this story, a boy meets a girl. Their first date is a sushi restaurant; the warmth of dim sum and tempura blowing steam and condensation against the wintery cold outside.
The boy shares his love of smoky Caravaggio paintings, newts, plants, birds – every living thing that crawls, runs and swims across the face of the planet is given his admiration (barring slugs – he definitely doesn’t like slugs).
He tells her he loves her, he wants to marry her, he can imagine their International Beige babies (he is creamy white, she is brown like a nut); he shows her his favourite flower: sweet-smelling freesias that he brings to her door.
In spring he buys her daffodils almost every day because he delights in waking up next to the buttery yellow petals that brighten her bedroom table.
The girl falls in love – how could she not?
This boy is the kindest person she has ever met.
So she looks only at the light because it is blinding and it is bliss, and she doesn’t see the darkness he is desperately trying to hide. If she sees it, he thinks, she will turn away in disgust and not love him any more.
Not understanding she would love him to the ends of the earth.
So the boy marries the girl, and after the streamers are packed away and the thank-you notes sent out, he spends the next three years in bed.
He sweats, he tosses, he cries, he turns. He is being eaten by a demon that is slowly taking everything away from him, as if it is a game of chess and he is the pawn.
When it has him open, vulnerable and alone, it will move in swiftly when he is at his most defenceless.
And then one day, the boy stops crying. He stops fighting. He spends his last day in a state of calm happiness. He knows he loves the girl. He knows he loves his family. But love has nothing to do with it.
He tells them he loves them, but he cannot stay. He cannot live with the person he has become.
And so the boy takes himself away into a winter’s night. And amid the sound of insects, the murmur of birds roosting in the trees, he goes to the woods, and he slips the noose around his neck.
He looks the darkness in the eye. They both nod, because they knew it would always end this way but, man, did he put up a good fight.
He has been here before, many times. He has seen the door, many times. But this time, there is no looking away. There are no last words.
He takes the love everyone has given him and leaves it at his feet. There is only the door, and he steps through with relief in his heart.
And so begins our grief.
Chapter One
‘Hello? Hello? Are you still there?’
I was going to kill my friend Tania. Most people in January are busy squeezing themselves into gym kit they won’t use again come February, signing up for online dating after shucking off a bad relationship, or self-flagellating in the pub because they’ve failed to quit drinking.
While most nations use the start of the New Year for positive new beginnings, we Brits love to turn it into an existential crisis.
The reason why Tania’s days were numbered is because I specifically told her that 2009 was going to be the Year of Me. No more dating, no more bozos, and perhaps I’d finally set up that nunnery I kept talking about.
So what did she do? She sent me two things without forewarning: 1) a bottle of horny goat weed pills in the post and 2) an email to me and her Kiwi friend Rob introducing us to each other.
I mean, Jesus wept, Tania, it was January. And not just any time in January, mid-January – that crotch of the year when you have no money, your diet has gone down the shitter, and you still have ten weeks of winter left to go.
It was cold, raining and dark, and I, like most women, tended to grow body hair for extra warmth and sport gnarled, horny toenails like that old Indian guy in The Guinness Book of World Records because I wouldn’t be wearing sandals anytime soon.
I didn’t want to leave the confines of my cosy home. I didn’t want to have to dust off my Gillette Venus razor and fish out the nail clippers. And if I was disinclined to do this before I called my blind date, then I was doubly disinclined after I had talked to him on the phone.
He spoke with such deep, long pauses – at the last count nearly six seconds had passed between sentences – that I was concerned he might have a medical problem. Plus, his accent didn’t help – beyond making out a few words like ‘Friday’ and ‘sushi’, I couldn’t understand a word he was saying.
I mean, how concerned should I be? Did he have narcolepsy? Was he going to fall face first into his salmon nigiri during the date and I’d have to revive him by being inventive with chopsticks?
‘Hello?’ Ten more seconds of this and then I was cutting him off.
I had started the year with my traditional New Year’s Day missive to myself in a new diary, which usually was written hungover, full of promises of what I would and wouldn’t do. This year had been no different but it had a particular tone – I had reached my limit of dating men who didn’t deserve my affections.
I wish I could start a diary for once feeling like the sunshine was bursting out of my arse, but in keeping with tradition, that is unfortunately not the case. I’m getting over a broken heart (again).
I’m just wondering when any of it is going to work out and I keep dreaming of my soulmate but getting no closer to finding him in real life.
It may not have been the stuff of Shakespeare but Silent Bob on the phone here was not presenting himself as soulmate material.
The truth of the matter was that, although I pretended to be a hard-drinking tomboy who didn’t care about being rejected, I secretly wrote Dear Diary entries about how I believed in true love.
Alongside the gig ticket stubs were flowers I pressed in the folds, as if they would breathe substance into a silent wish. As with anyone who wants love in their life, what I wanted was to be seen, the good and bad, my limitations and potential, and for that person to unconditionally love what they saw.
When I sobered up, I wrote another entry shortly afterwards.
I wait for a love so big it lives in every part of my life. Where the morning becomes a moment of quiet peace and entangled limbs; body upon body in a loving sprawl.
I wait for the man who can see beyond my skin and really looks into me. He is out there, he has to be. Only a big love will make me lie still.
It wasn’t that I thought I was unlovable, but I knew it was going to have to take someone exceptional to deal with the type of woman I was. Especially since I came from a family of crazy lady warrior types, who were both fearless and vulnerable, immense fun yet unreasonable and in need of grounding. We needed men who earthed us but didn’t bore the pants off us at the same time.
‘Hello? Christ, are you still there?’
‘Yeeeeeeessss.’ He sounded like the whale from Finding Nemo, except in this scenario I was Marlin, not Dory, and I didn’t know what the fuck he was saying.
‘Just email me.’ I put the phone down.
While I would later find out that Rob had been on the tail end of a three-day party when we first spo
ke, burned out and bonged up, I discovered he was much better on email.
Like me, he was a journalist, but, unlike me, he didn’t strap on a pregnancy suit to find out whether people would give up a seat on the Tube, run around a cryo chamber in a bikini to see if his extremities would freeze or visit a woman who deciphered the future from coffee grounds.
This guy actually knew stuff and wrote about the environment. He spoke at conferences. It wasn’t just his profession that made him different from the guys I normally dated (they tended to be DJs or personal trainers – all emotionally unavailable and poor); he wasn’t shy about showing me he was interested.
I had just finished my first travel commission at the Guardian as a freelance writer, and my piece on kayaking around Kerala was due out a few days before our first date.
‘Congratulations on the “throwing fag butts at dolphins” line,’ Rob wrote.
I was touched that he’d gone out and bought a paper.
Rob worked mainly as a trade journalist and wanted to branch into consumer journalism.
‘It’s not that I don’t enjoy writing about the environment (apart from air pollution, I hate air pollution),’ he wrote, ‘and I even really like my other regular contract, which is a little publication on land contamination (sexy, huh?), which is a rather fiendish combination of ecology, chemistry, toxicology and politics. Oh dear, I think my inner science nerd is exposed.’
He was funny as well as clever.
Tania made the mistake of assuming we had forgiven her for the blind date email and asked our opinion on this guy who couldn’t tell the difference between ‘into’ and ‘in to’.
‘People who can’t spell are crap in the sack. Scientific fact,’ wrote Rob.
Tania wrote back sometime later in the week to tell us that a quick search revealed this guy was actually married.
‘Aha,’ replied Rob.
‘You said crap in the sack, not morally crap,’ Tania fired back.
‘Same thing.’
During our email exchanges, he also asked me on a second date to a restaurant opening before we’d even had our first date, something that normally would have sent me running had he not caveated it with ‘assuming we don’t hate each other on sight’. I said no.
Charming and witty though he seemed, I still wasn’t convinced this would be a goer.
Especially when – in my ignorance of confusing New Zealand with Australia – I thought I was going to get some young, tousle-haired, blond surfer from Home and Away, and what I got – according to the picture Rob sent so we’d recognise each other on our date – was a skinhead in a Celtic t-shirt cuddling his gigantic dog Daisy.
I didn’t hate dogs, but after an Alsatian bit my mother on the arse when I was a child, I wasn’t enamoured with them either. And Daisy – a mix of pit bull, mastiff and boxer – looked like she ate arses for breakfast.
We met in Fujiyama, tucked away in the backstreets of Brixton. A night sharp with cold, streetlights shining halos where it greeted the mist from our mouths.
My flatmate and best friend Mal dropped me off, and I bitched the entire way about how this guy was just going to be another bozo. ‘Or he’s going to wear flip-flops to the date, like that last guy did.’
I refused to get out of the car, clutching onto my seatbelt for dear life. When Mal finally prised my fingers from the dashboard and booted me out, I knew there was no going back. Mainly because she sped off the moment my feet hit tarmac.
It is funny when you look back on first meetings. I had met men who immediately set off Roman candles and fizzing sparklers. And they lasted all of two seconds.
Rob was something much slower than that. He looked like a man carved by sea, sun and earth. Broad shoulders, thick forearms. A long nose and a strong jaw.
Crinkly around the eyes when he smiled, like lines drawn lightly in sand, a close-shaved head that made him look tough and lean, but when you looked closer, you saw softness in his eyes.
He got up when he saw me approach the table, and he stood up when I went to the bathroom. This was that mythical chivalry thing we’d heard so much about while learning Jane Austen by rote.
We ordered cold Tiger beer because it was steaming hot inside the restaurant. When he removed his sweatshirt, his t-shirt stuck to it and rode up to his neck, showing me the most perfectly toned, creamy white torso. That was unexpected.
Thankfully, my jaw dropped while he was still navigating his shirt over his face. Then we talked and talked.
Despite my initial cynicism, I had a good time. Rob was unlike any person I had ever been on a date with. He didn’t look like the men I usually went for (apart from his strong nose, I loved that. Oh, and the flat torso). And he certainly didn’t act like most of the men I normally went for.
‘Good morning, dear, I hope you had a good time,’ came the message the following day. Normally, if a guy sent me a message (if), it would come so late I could have already been dead and nostril-deep in a bowl of cornflakes for all they knew.
We talked about our second date. ‘The only thing that crossed my mind,’ he said, ‘was a classical gig if there was anything decent on, as you said you’d never been to one.’
Brownie points for paying attention but I didn’t want anything too stuffy.
As it was my turn to arrange the date and I knew he liked music, we spent date number two drinking rum on ice, watching an old (literally old – they were each pushing eighty) folk band in a now-defunct bar on Tottenham Court Road.
It was a risk – I knew he was all Fugazi, Turbonegro and The Specials – but this was the only gig on that night, and it turned out he had a huge soft spot for country and western.
As the evening went on, I wondered whether he was going to kiss me. There he was, rabbiting on about James Taylor, and I looked at his mouth. A thin line on top, a fuller lip below.
I didn’t know if I wanted Rob to kiss me. I mean sure, I already knew I loved talking to him, but I hadn’t had a semi-sober first kiss for a long time.
Plus, my last one had gone terribly wrong.
It was with some guy I met on (another) blind date and it felt like a washing machine had gone sentient and was trying to run a spin cycle via my mouth.
By the time Rob and I left the bar, there wasn’t even a hint of puckering up. In my head, I had already decided there wasn’t going to be a third date if the guy couldn’t summon up the nerve.
We took a black cab back to mine, with the intention that it would drop him home in neighbouring Streatham straight afterwards. ‘Two stops,’ I told the driver firmly.
As we neared my flat in Balham, Rob was seized by a mysterious urge to urinate.
‘Honestly,’ he said, ‘I know what this looks like but I really, really need to use the toilet.’
We let the cab go. I felt heartless kicking him out immediately, so we sat on Mal’s black leather sofa, had a nightcap and talked some more.
He was from a Catholic middle-class family in Auckland; I was from a Hindu middle-class family based in Kent by way of Bangalore.
‘So what degree did you do?’ I asked.
He looked at his glass. ‘I didn’t.’
‘But, you’re a journalist?’
‘Yep. I quit school at sixteen. Worked as a bartender, landscape gardener, truck driver. Took a six-month course when I was twenty-five and retrained as a journalist.’
‘And you own your own house?’
‘Yes.’
As all journalists will realise, this is pretty spectacular considering the first ten to fifteen years of your career will see you earning a salary so measly you’ll become an expert at cadging free drinks and raiding your parents’ change pot for coins.
Or, in my case, being lucky enough to have a Mal who charged me pittance rent.
I was impressed. Rob was actually a grown-up man.
As the clock ticked towards 3am, I decided it was bedtime. Solo bedtime.
But then Rob said something which, while not romantic, was cert
ainly true to his nation’s straight, no-bullshit ethos: ‘So, this is the point we figure out whether we are going to be mates, or something more. Are we going to kiss or what?’
I looked at him, and I remember this moment etched onto my memory as carefully and gently as if by a calligrapher’s brush.
I got up.
I sat on his lap, with my legs tucked behind me. I placed my hands on his face and, as I came closer, I could feel his heart beating faster and faster – badoombadoomBADOOM.
And then we kissed.
It wasn’t Roman candles or sparklers. This was far older than that. This was a spark that started in the centre of the earth; it surged through the ground, past rock and roots, and entered through our feet.
Perhaps it might have stopped there, as just a very good kiss. But every time Rob and I kissed, every day, for six years, it never once lost the spark that shot from a point beyond our understanding and wrapped us in its glow.
The reason I know that love like this wasn’t delusion, or what we wanted to believe, is because I always recognise its counterpart in other people.
Like this video made by a colleague of mine who filmed her eighty-year-old grandfather talking about how much he loved his wife, who had dementia and lived in a home.
He presses her hand, strokes her hair. He looks at her with the desperation of someone who is trying to make smoke stand still and doesn’t know how to stop pieces of her evaporating, as must happen every day.
At the end of the video, he says simply: ‘I love her.’
And I feel it.
I feel the love he had for her and I recognise its counterpart in me, in terms of what I had for Rob. There are people I instantly see it in, and people I don’t. Trying to contain Big Love from your voice is impossible; so if it isn’t there, I don’t think it ever was. If you’re wondering if this is IT, it isn’t.
Because real love is light, it is fire. It catches and blows into a million sparks and it settles down on you hot and sizzling, and when it cools, it becomes strength, it becomes part of you; it changes you entirely.