by Poorna Bell
‘So, there’s something I should probably tell you,’ said Rob.
We were in a taxi on the way to his house after dinner, around four weeks into dating. We held hands across the middle seat – gingerly, because there was a weird white stain exactly on the spot you’d expect a weird white stain to be.
Things had moved really quickly, but I knew I had never been happier.
Two weeks before, when I was still deciding whether to go on another date, I fell ill. I had a cough like a sailor who smoked forty unfiltered roll-ups a day, and everything in my chest hurt. I looked like two horror films that had had sex with each other – everything oozing, red eyes and a vacant stare from too much cough syrup.
I didn’t want to see him. Even my mother tried to get off the phone as quickly as she could while I hacked into the receiver, and this is a woman who used to let me blow my nose on her nightie.
‘I’m bringing you chicken noodle soup,’ he said.
‘Oh God, no. I just can’t face seeing anyone.’
‘That’s okay, you don’t have to. I’ll leave it on the step, ring the doorbell and scoot away so you won’t have to see me.’
I paused. ‘You’d seriously do that?’
‘Yes.’
‘This isn’t some kind of mind-fuck where the soup is a metaphor for something else?’
‘No. It’s real-life, no-strings-attached (mainly because I’ll make sure I remove the string ha-ha) chicken noodle soup.’
He turned up with rapidly cooling soup in a giant pot. I let him in the door. ‘You look beautiful,’ he said, kissing me on the lips.
I caught a glimpse of my reflection. My hair was matted at the back. My nose was peeling. And looking back at him, I saw he was serious.
Who was this man, who made chicken noodle soup, and who was starting to move so fluidly through my life, through my bloodstream and into my heart, when I had no recollection of how I let him past the gate?
Winning my heart was not easy, yet he had passed every stage. He called, he genuinely listened to what I said. When I stayed over at his house for the first time, we didn’t sleep together.
Instead, we kissed all night. In the morning, I woke up next to a steaming cup of tea with a ceramic zebra’s head emerging from the liquid.
‘Well done, fucko,’ it seemed to say, ‘you’re a goner.’
A week later, our social calendars collided at his house, although we hadn’t been due to meet. I had been at a bar for a friend’s birthday; he had been out to a dinner party. The birthday shindig was full of pretentious twats in Camden, and I didn’t think Rob would mind me turning up at his house. I texted, he texted, and it was on.
When I came through the front door, which was already open, Rob was cuddling Daisy while sprawled in a cream armchair.
‘Hello,’ he said, smiling with the flush of many red wines. ‘We’re going to get married and have brown babies. We’re going to make International Beige babies. I love you.’
By a hair’s breadth, I was more sober than he was. ‘I’m sorry, what?’
I needed to make sure I’d heard what I heard. After a few drinks Rob’s accent was even more incomprehensible so, phonetically, it sounded like: ‘Harro. We’zxsplish married. Brown babies. Shminternational Beige. Ruvoo.’
He repeated himself, I listened. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t scared. When men had declared their love before, and I wasn’t ready or I didn’t feel it, I would nod and plot my escape through gritted smiles.
But I could feel something huge shifting; tectonic plates of New Zealand and India moved across continents and lay beneath our feet, layered on top of one another.
‘So, do you remember what I said yesterday?’ he asked me the next morning, with his arm stretched underneath my pillow, breathing in the back of my neck as I faced another cup of tea with the floating zebra head. Clearly, he thought I liked this mug when in fact I felt it silently mocked me.
‘Yes,’ I replied, my smile hidden from view.
‘And?’
I wriggled around under the sheets in a 180-degree turn to face him and looked him in his blue eyes. ‘You know I feel it. I just want to say it at the right time.’
He looked happy, his eyes meeting his smile. ‘You’re so beautiful.’
‘Stop trying to get me to say it.’
A few months into our relationship, summer had finally arrived and we were in the park, lying next to each other.
Rob said: ‘Haven’t we somehow, through pure chance, got exactly the kind of love you can make a whole life out of? I never saw this coming but now I have you, I’ll never let you go.’
I loved it so much I immediately wrote it down on a napkin.
I don’t know how he knew.
‘It’s fair to say he was smitten from the start,’ said Anoushka, a close friend of his.
At the beginning I’d tried to come up with excuses for why we shouldn’t have another date, because deep down I didn’t want to get attached and risk being hurt. But he always knew, and his faith gave me faith in myself, and in us.
When I felt myself falling, when I felt that parts of me were reforming into something new and different, and full of Rob, it terrified me. I had never been this happy, had never experienced this kind of connection, and I felt it rewriting the person I was, strand by strand.
I looked up from the crook of his arm where my head was resting and said: ‘Rob, I’m so scared something bad is going to happen to us. I feel so happy but I feel like I don’t deserve it, like it’s too perfect.’
He kissed my head. ‘Nothing’s going to happen, honey.’
Sometimes we place so much pressure and expectation on love. It’s as if it sits in a glass bottle on a high shelf, and we believe that if we take small sips of it, it will fix the problems we have in our lives. And when it doesn’t, it feels like we failed.
The problem isn’t whether or not we love. Or how strong it is, or even whether it’s the right kind of love. The fact is, we are conditioned from an early age to believe that love is perfection – not just that it is a goal to strive for, but that it is a solution, a rescue from an otherwise unhappy existence.
I don’t know a single person who doesn’t want to be loved. Who doesn’t want to hear the reassuring murmur of another person’s breath in the room, to feel the counterpoint of yourself reflected in someone else and draw comfort from how well they know and love you.
But fairy tales and the dream sold by society that love and marriage are the main currencies with which to buy happiness do not prepare you for the challenges that lie ahead.
So when you are holding hands in a car, avoiding weird white stains, speeding to a future of fresh sheets, mugs of zebra tea and the legs of your loved one wrapped around you, and the person you are falling in love with says: ‘So, there’s something I should probably tell you,’ you are already gone.
‘Okay,’ I replied, ‘what’s that? You’re already married? You’re gay? You want me to be your beard? You’re not actually a nerd? I hate to tell you, but I think you’re a pretty big nerd.’
I always was the talkative one in our relationship and usually my verbal diarrhoea made Rob smile.
But this time his smile didn’t quite meet the crinkles around his eyes, and my words fell flat, oddly hollow in the space between us. Suddenly, that middle seat stretched into a desert and we were standing on opposite dunes trying to see each other under the night sky.
‘It’s not a big deal, but I’d rather I told you. We have depression running through my family, and I have it as well. I haven’t been properly depressed for a long time, but I thought I should tell you.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’m glad you told me.’
‘There’s nothing to worry about, okay?’ he said.
‘Okay.’ I pressed his big, calloused hand tightly and kissed the back of it. I wasn’t concerned; I didn’t think any more of it. He might as well have told me he had athlete’s foot.
A comfortable silenc
e fell between us, and we watched the trees in the nearby woodland pass us by, the red lights of parked cars along the edge, its occupants creeping around for love in a dark place.
Depression wasn’t something I knew much about.
I knew people felt sad, and had trouble getting out of bed, but then after a while they stopped feeling so terrible. I only knew of one friend who had it after undergoing surgery, and she recovered eventually. So how bad could it be?
Like the web of an unpleasant dream, I brushed it away from the corner of my mind. If Rob wasn’t worried, I wasn’t worried. I trust him completely.
I was happy and I had finally found the love of my life.
There is something unusual going on with the beech trees.
Whole forests of them cover the area of Fiordland in New Zealand, and these ones aren’t like the golden glades you see in England, where writers dream up bunnies in waistcoats and Prince Charming trots through on a white horse.
On either side of our path, the trees are covered in lichen; dark green lace gobbling up entire trunks, curtains made of feathery fronds draped from branch to branch. The trees fan out deep into the distance, an immense tangle of roots appearing to climb into other worlds.
I have never seen anything like it.
We are forty-two walkers swallowed up in this vast, primordial sprawl along the Milford Track. Soon, the ethereal greenery surrounds us completely; it humbles us, renders us mute.
Although the landscape seems forgotten, a closer look reveals it is more like the earth dreamed up from a time before we messed her up. We have been given the chance to see our planet in her youth, and there is nothing eerie about her.
Not today, anyway.
She is reminding us of how the world was, how it still could be, which in turn makes us introspective and think about who we are, the things we’ve pointlessly been holding on to and who we want to be.
We don’t have the luxury of distracting ourselves from the bigger questions. Smartphones don’t work here and it’s hard holding a conversation when you’re wheezing up a mountain.
Everything that loves water has gathered. In the distance, day-old waterfalls spray white foam from cracks in the rock face. Beneath my feet grow tiny intricate mosses, alive and springy, not like the decaying patches in half-remembered gardens back home.
I let the other walkers move past to allow a pocket of solitude, time to think and close my eyes. As they move on ahead, the sound of their walking poles clacking in the distance, my head has never felt so empty, so peaceful and free from worry.
This is right where I am meant to be.
I know people say that in romantic films when they are catching each other’s lives by the tips of their fingers at a train station or an airport, but despite the fact that I am alone, dressed in walking gear that makes me look like a ten-year-old boy and starting to smell like a ripe sock, this is the place.
My expectations for life were left behind on the boat that dropped us off at the start of the track. I unpacked the burden of concern my friends and family have for me, the hope of having babies, the worry that I will be alone for the rest of my life, the hurt of the last few years, the loss of a world that once had a husband, a dog and a house in it.
Here, it’s just me and Rob.
Coming to New Zealand, I hoped, would reset some of the terrible events of last year. While in Auckland, Rob took his own life in the woods at a nature reserve.
Thinking about his last moments set off a primal growl with grief in its throat; it smells of earth, sadness, tears and love; it sounds like hearts cracking, lives breaking and reforming.
When it comes to suicide, every pinprick of light that surrounded the darkness of their death is pounced upon; we hope against hope that our loved ones, while they died alone, didn’t just die with despair.
So the fact that my nature-loving husband killed himself in the woods tells me something of him was still in there before he died.
But the more I read into his death, the more I feel as if only now am I beginning to understand Rob. Many people assumed I came here to find out why he died. But I came to find out how he became the man I loved when he lived.
Chapter Two
Rob didn’t live that far from us – about five minutes by car – but it may as well have been on a different planet. Balham was all yummy mummies and cute delis.
Streatham, where Rob lived, was chicken-shop-land. Pavements littered with tiny bones, home to people who drifted like lost ghosts along the high street vomiting strong, stale beer in dusty doorways, shop fronts selling mobile phone covers and protein powder.
The area did have some fabulous houses, though; grand Victorian beauties with frilly crenulations, dark-red brick and white piping around the edges. Houses with gardens – a rarity in London – and big, open greens where people walked their dogs and paused under huge, leafy trees for shade.
The first time I took a taxi to his house, his instructions were: ‘Go down Oakdale Road, you’ll see a row of Victorian houses. When you come to the oddly shaped 1970s butt-ugly triangle house, that’s mine.’
The house was as grim as he described it; rebuilt after being bombed during the war and badly made, with thin walls and low ceilings. The bathroom looked like it was being eaten slowly by mould, and the kitchen counter was buckling under moisture.
It was a brown, school dinner of a building. But Rob loved it – it was his first house, and I respected that.
Rob owned it with his friend Mikey, who lived there along with another friend, Rob Cruise. It had a particular feel and smell to it that places inhabited only by men do – half-wolf, half-human.
It was reasonably tidy, but smears of mud and blood on the walls revealed its true nature as a den, and I knew there were parts of the house that probably hadn’t been cleaned since they moved in.
There was a fish tank. Not the pretty tropical kind with guppies and angelfish. This one housed two ugly-as-sin axolotls: prehistoric-looking salamanders, one pure white, the other a boggy green.
I couldn’t get rid of them – it would have been like a stepmother sending the kids to boarding school. But luckily the bog green one was slowly nibbling the white one to death (they can regenerate their limbs but evidently not quickly enough when someone is using you as a regular snack), so there would be a resolution either way without my interference.
With Rob’s dog Daisy in the mix – then a hazelnut-coloured, feisty one-year-old who did not initially approve of my entry into his life – I had to adjust to dog hair, bits of chewed-up toys she liked to squirrel away under her bed, and muddy paw prints tattooed across the floor just after I cleaned it.
Daisy and I met on our third date.
I heard her long before I saw her, and it’s a small miracle I didn’t wet myself in fear – her bark sounded like it was piped through the lungs of a bear. I’d already seen her mugshot: big beautiful eyes, a tiny pink star on her nose and a terrifying jaw that revealed her pit bull genes – and, as I stood outside Rob’s front door, I imagined those very same jaws clamping around my bottom.
‘I made sure I walked her for two hours so she won’t drive us crazy on our date,’ texted Rob a few hours before.
Rob’s ex-girlfriend Monique had bought Daisy as a Christmas present, and when puppy met man it was love at first sight. As my experience of pets was limited to goldfish and an ill-fated stint with a kitten that didn’t last long, I couldn’t quite understand that bond between a dog and its human. But in Rob and Daisy, you saw how much they were knitted into each other.
They’d spend hours on the floor cuddled together, arm in arm, Daisy’s paws in utter submission, Rob rubbing her belly, murmuring: ‘Who’s my little girl, hmm?’ Sometimes, it was pretty galling – when Rob was withdrawn or feeling particularly low – that the dog got more love than I did.
In fact, my cousin Prarthana actually said to him once: ‘When I met you, I wasn’t sure I liked you. You seemed to pay more attention to your dog than you
did to Poorna.’ (Needless to say, this was after it was established that she liked him.)
There is no doubt, however, that animals help people with depression, partly because they supply companionship and unconditional love, and also because they provide a purpose. Rob took his care of Daisy seriously – which meant that, as a big dog, she needed regular walking, and that got him out of the house even when he didn’t feel like it.
On our date, however, there were no cuddles for Daisy, and she looked outraged that another woman was sitting next to His Lordship. Every time we laughed or tried to come close, she’d get up off her bed, blow loudly through her nose and wiggle her big bottom over to us, trying to get some attention.
She tried these tactics every single time I visited Rob’s house over the next eighteen months as a guest, and didn’t deviate from her course even after he asked me to move in with him. Although she grew to love me, from time to time she’d rebel, picking a delight such as choosing to rub her muddy bum only on my side of the bed, or staging a dirty protest in my office.
On moving-in day, when I turned up on the doorstep with lots of boxes, Daisy inspected everything as if to say, Bitch, please.
Rob was less attentive. He met me at the door and announced abruptly: ‘I’m on deadline.’ So I was left to unpack a lot of it on my own, and, over the next few days, I threw myself into spring-cleaning the entire house. I tidied up cans, bottles, packets of food; wiped the cupboards from top to bottom; ran an inventory of the sauces, pickles and jars lurking in the back of the fridge; washed our sheets in bleach to remove traces of Daisy-related mud; lifted everything up and swept, mopped and vacuumed.
While Rob worked in his office – also known as the converted garage – he kept the door closed. When I tried to pop in to talk to him, I found him hastily shutting a drawer.
‘Ooh, is that a present for me?’ I asked. I was waiting for him to make a big show of me moving in – I had hinted enough times that Mal had set a high standard. (She welcomed me with a Capri-Sun and my name spelled out in magnets on the fridge.)