Chase the Rainbow

by Poorna Bell

  ‘No, there’s nothing for you in there,’ he replied.

  Aw, I thought, he’s trying to fob me off. I bet he has a surprise.

  The memory slid down a crack; I forgot that he never did give me anything.

  Soon after I moved in, Rob and I were sitting up in bed when he said: ‘I don’t want you to worry, but I’m going to talk to my GP about going on some mild antidepressants.’

  I wasn’t worried.

  ‘Are you okay? Is there anything I can do?’ I thought it was like going to get antibiotics. He’d have the medication, it would fix it. It made me think he was on top of it and being responsible about it too.

  The year was 2010. This was before I knew anything substantial about depression. When I think of this person, the person I was, I am both envious of her naivety and sad because she had no idea what she was dealing with.

  ‘I’m fine, honestly. I just think it’s best to get on top of it before it gets worse.’

  ‘Did something happen to, you know, cause it?’

  ‘No, it just happens sometimes in cycles. It comes on and goes away again after a while.’

  ‘What does it feel like?’ I snuggled closer, trying to wrap my arms around his torso which sometimes seemed so broad it was like trying to encircle a huge tree.

  ‘Think about your best day,’ he said. ‘Everything is going right for you. The sun is shining. It should be the happiest day of your life, right?

  ‘Depression is feeling as if you are having the worst day of your life, over and over, even when you should be happy, like on the day your first child is born.

  ‘How you want to feel doesn’t make a difference because this is how you feel. You are extremely sad and there is nothing you can do to escape it.’

  There was a shiver in the room, as if something darker had been summoned in for show-and-tell, and now it was circling our bed, smacking its lips.

  And then all of a sudden it was gone. I didn’t give it a moment’s thought.

  In the first six months, Rob Cruise moved out and Mikey stayed.

  Guests were a regular feature of our life, whether they were Kiwi relatives who’d come to stay for a few weeks or visitors for dinner. We’d eat in the lounge with its wooden floorboards and dodgy low ceiling, and, if the weather was warm, we’d sit out in the garden.

  The garden was the most beautiful thing about the house. Rob showed me before and after pictures, and a lot of work had gone into digging a pond, creating little nooks for certain types of flowers, each pocket telling a story. Snake’s-head fritillaries bowed their heads under larger shrubs, alliums stuck fluffy purple balls up as far as they could go. Plants with leaves like finest lace shared space with his loud and proud banana palm tree.

  One day, we were visited by a friend who brought along a rescued Mediterranean spur-thighed tortoise named Aubrey.

  Rob’s eyes lit up. ‘Oh my God. I’ve always wanted one.’

  As it clomped around in the garden, it gave us the most evil stare I have seen on a creature. Like if you replaced the jackal that gave birth to Damien with a tortoise.

  I was concerned about the growing ark of animals in our home. Along with Daisy, there were some newts, my (rapidly ailing) goldfish and the axolotls – who were increasingly in my bad books after I discovered the blood worms they ate were stored NEXT TO THE ICE TR AY in our freezer. But Aubrey was here to stay.

  Despite Rob’s devotion, Aubrey spent his entire time trying to head-butt or hump people’s shoes. Daisy and I were united in that we hated him, and we were pleased when Aubrey – during his first attempt at emancipating himself from our house – finally disappeared.

  ‘Oh well,’ I shrugged, ‘you gave it your best shot, Rob.’

  Rob looked at me. ‘What do you mean? I have to look for him.’

  ‘Why? He was a total bastard that spent the entire time trying to attack our feet and he doesn’t even like us very much.’

  ‘He’s my creature,’ said Rob, on the verge of tears. ‘He was in my care and I lost him. I have to find him.’

  I was surprised by Rob’s reaction, partly because I didn’t see how anyone could love Aubrey, but mostly because I hadn’t seen Rob this emotional in a while. For some time it had been hard to get a grip on how he felt, and when I asked him if he was all right, he’d say: ‘I’m fine.’ Even when we had company – guests he’d invited himself – he’d leave me to do all the talking and disappear for what seemed like hours.

  Yet he spent half the night combing the garden with a head torch and eventually found Aubrey in the back alley where he had made a break for it, but had fallen asleep as the sun went down.

  After a few more escape attempts, and similar search parties, the final straw came when Aubrey chose to sit at the bottom of our pond rather than remain in our garden a moment longer.

  ‘I fished him out,’ Rob said gloomily.

  ‘That tortoise needs to go,’ I replied.

  Shortly after Aubrey left (donated to some mad-eyed tortoise lover who said to me: ‘You must be so sad to let him go.’ I replied: ‘Devastated.’), Mikey also moved out.

  My older sister Priya, returning from New York after splitting from her first husband, asked if she could stay with us for a while. Like Rob, she also worked successfully as a freelance science journalist.

  We had a three-bedroom house, she was one of my favourite people, Rob was one of my favourite people – I was in heaven. They shared a love of science, and Priya found it easy and calm to be in our house. Her presence also distracted me from gradual changes I noticed in Rob’s behaviour.

  After moving in, the first thing I noticed was that he started spending ridiculous amounts of time in the bathroom. I didn’t want to be some kind of weirdo who lurked outside, but when he was in there for bordering on thirty or forty minutes, I began to wonder whether he was prone to monster shits and had kept it secret from me this entire time.

  ‘Rob, what on earth are you doing in there?’

  ‘Jesus, woman, can’t you just leave me in peace?’

  You can see why I stopped bugging him when he was on the toilet. It’s not cool to be the person who clock-watches another person’s dump.

  The second thing I noticed was his insomnia.

  Rob smoked, and the first time I went round to his house for dinner, he puffed on a couple of cigarettes during the course of our evening. Towards the end, he rolled up a joint, which took me aback.

  ‘No thanks,’ I said, as he offered it to me. I didn’t do drugs, and I was a bit surprised that Rob, being thirty-four then, hadn’t quite grown out of smoking weed, a drug I associated with spotty teenagers. (Mainly because I tried it when I was a spotty teenager.)

  After a bit more digging, I found out that Rob actually smoked weed every day. Sometimes in the morning, and definitely at night. I didn’t know anyone who smoked daily, and I didn’t want to. I’d dated a couple of guys who had smoked dope when I was younger, but I felt deeply uncomfortable around Rob using it.

  ‘I’m sorry, Rob,’ I told him after several dates, ‘but the drugs thing is a dealbreaker. I understand if that’s what you want to do with your life, but I can’t be with someone who uses that every day. I don’t think it’s right.’

  We had a long chat about it.

  ‘How is smoking weed different to drinking?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s two different highs – I’m bouncing all over the place while you’re in slow motion. It takes you about five minutes to laugh at a joke I’ve made. Plus I can get mine at a corner shop; you have to call your grim drug dealer.’

  ‘I think it’s semantics but . . . ’

  ‘It’s not semantics, it’s the fucking law.’

  He used drugs recreationally and had friends who did the same, but it was no big deal, he said. ‘To be honest, I’ve been cutting it out of my life anyway, so if this doesn’t work for you, then that’s fine.’

  ‘It doesn’t work for me,’ I said.

  The first year of our relations
hip was blissful, but this was the one dark spot. A spot that kept recurring.

  I’d find out he’d gone dog walking with a friend and had a bit of his weed. Or we’d go to a party and he’d spend most of the evening tripping from one joint to another, the miasma and fug gripping him in place.

  ‘I didn’t realise you wanted me to quit completely,’ he said when I told him how unhappy it made me. ‘But it’s no big deal, I’ll give it up.’

  So he gave it up. I didn’t see a trace of it in our home, and that’s when his insomnia began.

  Where we once went to bed together and woke up in each other’s arms, I would often go to bed alone, his side dark and cold. ‘I’m sorry, honey,’ he’d say, ‘I just can’t get to sleep.’

  When he did sleep, he had nightmares that made him yell out. From the research I did, I understood that the insomnia was part of depression, but the weed had probably dampened his ability to dream for however long he had been smoking, as it has been shown to suppress REM sleep and all the important functions it performs.1 Now that he was starting to dream again, maybe the nightmares that had been held at bay for so long were lining up to be heard.

  I hated that we didn’t go to bed at the same time. I felt that we were no longer like two walruses who fell asleep with our flippers wrapped around each other and were more like anglerfish going it alone with the light snuffed out.

  The longer it went on, the more I felt the insomnia take shape. It pooled around our lives and slid blocks of ice between us.

  As it began to claim him, it robbed us of breakfasts together, drew lines under his eyes and laughed when we made plans. ‘You’ll never end up doing them,’ it said. ‘I’ll make sure he’s too tired to even get out of bed.’

  I also became concerned about whether he was getting out of bed in the morning to work. This resulted in guerrilla tactics and using Priya as my eyes on the inside. I’d call from the office and ask: ‘So, how’s work? How are you? Anyway, quick question – is Rob awake?’

  ‘Um, freelancers’ code, sis,’ she replied. Meaning, it was up to freelancers how they divided their day, so she wasn’t going to tell.

  ‘He’s asleep, isn’t he?’

  ‘I can neither confirm nor deny.’

  While Priya lived with us, I didn’t feel the full impact of Rob’s changing behaviour. Instead of watching TV with him, I watched it with her. We went to films together, cooked big dinners at home and went out for drinks.

  The loneliness only set in after Priya left. I didn’t even notice that we hadn’t actually lived on our own together during the whole two and a half years we had known each other.

  I didn’t tell a lot of people Rob had depression. When we increasingly began to cancel on double dates, dinner parties and visits to art galleries – embarrassingly, sometimes a matter of hours before we were due to attend because Rob would only decide he couldn’t go at the very last minute – I didn’t know how to talk to people about it. Partly because I didn’t want people to feel sorry for me, or for them to view Rob differently, and partly because he himself found it hard to say: ‘I feel unwell because I’m depressed.’ It was always the flu, insomnia or a bad stomach.

  When you or your loved ones don’t have a mental illness, it is almost impossible to comprehend what it’s really like. It’s not black and white; in fact, it deals almost exclusively in grey.

  Of course, I started to feel alone a lot. There was just stuff I thought couples did, like go to garden centres together, fight over IKEA furniture and have coffee. Silly, boring, mundane things, but their absence keenly felt when you don’t have them.

  But life with Rob wasn’t predictable. One moment I would be confused and hurt by his coldness, the next I would have my beloved back. Bunches of fat, yellow daffodils would sit as quiet declarations of love by my bedside table, kisses were shared in the hallway, elaborate dinners of slow-cooked ribs would be laid at the table. And no matter how bad our day or how low he felt, we began and ended with I love you.

  The truth was that although there were a lot of times when I was on my own, and I couldn’t understand why Rob was in bed so much, there was love and there was goodness.

  We held our little world safe behind closed doors, and I didn’t want other people’s judgements placed upon us. The overwhelming attitude towards depression is acknowledged in the summary of the illness on the NHS website:

  ‘Some people still think that depression is trivial and not a genuine health condition. They’re wrong. Depression is a real illness with real symptoms, and it’s not a sign of weakness or something you can “snap out of” by “pulling yourself together”.’

  Although I didn’t fully understand what it was, I Googled ‘how to help your partner when they have depression’.

  During my explorations, I found a superb blog by author Jamie Flexman, who argued that it is actually a physical illness, not a mental one, because it is caused by the brain.

  ‘Last I heard,’ he says, ‘the brain [is] a part of the body, and a damn important one at that.’

  His description of what depression actually feels like also helped.

  ‘Depression is like trying to run through water and being told to get over it is akin to suddenly being able to move like you can on dry land. It’s impossible. You can grit your teeth and attempt to get some momentum going but ultimately the density will prevent you from moving quickly.

  ‘When depression has its grip on you, life becomes water. The air around you becomes water, crushing you with its weight, and even the simplest tasks become difficult. You feel sluggish, both mentally and physically, and nothing can snap you out of it.

  ‘You have essentially become trapped inside your own prison and true access to your brain lies behind that locked door. Sometimes, briefly, you are allowed outside to stretch your legs but you know this is temporary. Eventually you will have to return to your cell and wait patiently for a time when you are given another opportunity to function like a normal member of society.’2

  I only learned what depression was like after going through it after Rob died, and even then it wasn’t the same type of depression. Mine was a natural response to a life event, in this case a bereavement. His was a lifelong, clinical condition.

  It filled me with horror that he suffered like this for so much of his life. I was also filled with admiration for what he still managed to achieve, despite feeling the way he did. He helped so many people, but for someone so open and giving to others, he was an enigma when it came to his own feelings.

  When he hadn’t slept for a while, or when he was having a bad depressive time, he was unable to communicate what was going on in his head. ‘I’m fine, honestly, honey,’ came the refrain.

  Having never suffered from depression at that time, and still being that naive idiot who took things at face value, I believed he was fine. Of course he wasn’t fine.

  He took great pains to maintain the appearance of the life he wanted. The one in which he didn’t have depression, where he could be a good, stable partner and one day a father.

  He couldn’t talk to me about it because telling me meant that he’d have to acknowledge that this was his life, not the life he sketched out for himself with me and our babies by his side.

  The cost to him on a daily basis must have been immense. Dealing with depression while trying to work and be part of a relationship, which included making dinner, pitching in with housework and trying to see friends – I don’t know how he did it.

  In fact, thinking about it now, the cost of striving for normality for him was absolute. He held on to that dream so tightly that there was nothing but for it to shatter.

  I am in Te Ngaere Bay, a remote place in the north, with Rob’s aunts, now mine, Felicity and Gabrielle.

  Traditionally, I don’t like swimming in the sea.

  As my family originally come from Mangalore in South India, a necklace of land along the Arabian Sea, home to coconut trees and fat, slippery mackerel cooked in tamarind, where fi
shermen slip in and out of the water as easily as their fishing nets, this makes me somewhat of a race traitor.

  I don’t like the cloying texture of the salt water on your skin long after you have left it, sticky and needy, smelling like creatures made of bone and gills, attracting flies to the silver salty trails it leaves behind like an unwanted gift.

  In New Zealand, though, the sea feels like a pure thing.

  The bay is a sliver of golden beach, one side hemmed in by jet-black rocks and a little outcrop that is accessible when the tide is low. We clamber over to see a rusted winch (we wonder if it’s for whaling) and, over the ridge, seaweed is spread out like a pale red crepe carpet.

  At the other end of the beach is a much rougher part of sea. Waves crash relentlessly against the rock; there is even a pohutukawa tree growing from the tip of one craggy peak.

  In the evening light, from the veranda of our rented house, we squint our eyes against the sun. Although the bay is protected by a reef, it is having trouble fending off the waves left behind by a cyclone passing through the Pacific.

  As the waves gather and beat the drum before sunset, they shoot up spray that rises above the rock and towards the hilly green ridge hemming in the bay. The shore grows molten and, below the tips of pine trees lining the ridge, the deep folds of mountains in the distance and the grass lining the dunes, the water turns silver.

  In the evenings, dotterels pass through, as if they were on skateboards, sailing serenely down the shoreline. In the daytime, kingfishers – a bird, like hornbills, owls and nightjars, that Rob and I felt were part of our shorthand as a couple – zip from one tree to another, holding something tasty in their beaks.

  We also see seagulls – which I regard as donkeys of the ocean – pluck hapless clams from the beach and drop them from a great height until their soft white belly is exposed for the pecking.

  The Pacific is not as cold as the North Sea, but it is definitely colder than the Caribbean. I spend the first day in Te Ngaere dipping my toes in, screaming like a character in a pantomime and running back to the safety of the sundeck.