Chase the Rainbow

by Poorna Bell

  School in Mangalore was a sea of brown bodies everywhere – I had never seen so many other girls who looked just like me. It was strange at first because it seemed so familiar, I felt so at home, and I didn’t have to think about anything there. I wasn’t split in two. I didn’t have to explain to my school friends about Indian food – it was like a hive mind working in unison.

  The only thing that didn’t fit in was my English accent. The other kids weren’t mean about it – they just mentioned it as a matter of fact. ‘Your accent is different.’

  I didn’t want to be different. I had big ole green eyes stuck on a coffee-coloured face – that was different enough for me. I didn’t want this accent trapped inside my mouth like an Everlasting Gobstopper.

  I dropped it quickly; it came very easily to me. Eventually we moved from Mangalore to the garden city of Bangalore – before it turned into a giant shopping mall and still had greenery and beautiful old colonial houses.

  We waited for my dad to arrive. One year passed, and then two.

  Recession was blowing through Britain like an unforgiving wind, and he was finding it hard to sell the house. Two years turned into five and, by the end, my mother had had enough. It was time for our family of three to move back to England and become four once again.

  Moving to England as an on-the-cusp teenager with scrawny limbs, a predilection for thick, white slouch socks, a lingering affection for teddy bears and a clinginess to one’s sister and mother was not a recipe for success. In fact, I’m impressed I didn’t have the shit kicked out of me on the first day of school.

  But that accent, now with its hard emphasis on the d’s, t’s and rolling r’s had to go again. This time the kids weren’t matter of fact; they looked at me as if I had just emerged from under a smelly, curry-stained rock and, as far as they were concerned, I could pack my bags and crawl back under there.

  So I quickly wallpapered over a new accent and made friends. A big group of friends, actually. We were all into a mix of punk, goth, metal and indie music, and we’d spend hours on a weekend fighting over who discovered our favourite bands first, mooching around and looking at boys.

  I was lucky my parents didn’t own a corner shop and expect me to heft boxes of Fanta around. I mean, the Indian shopkeeper did become a stereotype on mainstream television, but that was not to say there weren’t loads of them around.

  But this is when I truly became aware of this double life I led. I went to great pains to hide my English accent from my parents.

  The Telephone – and I refer to it in the reverential capital as it was a crucial conduit to the outside world (in actual fact, my friends’ own unexciting family homes) – sat in a weird annexe at the front of the house, separated from the kitchen and lounge by a glass door. When friends called, I’d slam the door shut and talk like the Artful Dodger. I’d get extremely twitchy if my mother walked anywhere in the vicinity of the door lest she caught wind of my accent.

  Food was a biggie. I was aware, from visiting other people’s houses, how badly Indian food ponged. It sewed itself into curtains, coats and hair and proclaimed loudly on public transport: Hey! I eat curry for breakfast, lunch and dinner!

  I would edge away from these people as fast as possible. I eat chicken nuggets, unlike this curry muncher, my eyes pleadingly conveyed.

  I remember when my cover was blown.

  A friend had come over to stay. Let’s call her B.

  B wanted some chocolate, so I got some from the veg box in the fridge. She ate it, job done. Then two weeks later, another friend, C, said: ‘Look, I don’t want to make you feel bad, but B was saying something mean about you.’

  In hindsight, I don’t know why the fuck girls do this to each other. They are in the possession of some hurtful information that will do the listener no good, yet blurt it out like dal in an American’s gut.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ I said as nonchalantly as I could. Of course, there was nothing casual about this. My brain went into panic mode.

  C clearly wanted to offload this information. She opened her mouth and out came the dal.

  ‘Yeah, she said she went round your house and you gave her some . . . chocolate.’

  ‘Okay,’ I replied, a bit relieved but irritated at the anticlimax of this story. From C’s sotto voce you’d have thought B had come across the monkey-head stew from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

  ‘That was it?’ I asked.

  C wrinkled her face. ‘B said it tasted funny.’

  ‘What kind of funny?’

  ‘Just . . . you know, weird.’

  After school, I went home and conducted an investigation via an examination of the veg box. Turns out some bright spark had placed the chocolate next to onions, garlic and ginger – the triad of ingredients that make up almost every single Indian dish. And although it didn’t make sense, I felt ashamed. Ashamed that my Indianness had permeated Cadbury’s finest chocolate produce, and now they knew OH MY GOD WE ATE ONIONS! AND GARLIC!

  After Chocolategate, I did everything to expunge this from the memory of my friends. I ate chips-in-a-bag every day (thankfully, my mother was not the kind of person who would pack Indian food for lunch). My cockney accent went up a notch.

  I even took it so far that I turned into that most niche of creatures: the brown goth. Credit goes to my parents for not batting an eyelid when I emerged like a grumpy, squashed butterfly from my room, dressed in fishnets, PVC skirt, something resembling lingerie and a floor-length leather jacket. I doubt there were many other Asian mums and dads in the nineties who went with their daughters to buy steel-toecap boots for their birthday presents.

  But there were strains. They would not let me hang out in town centres after dark in the same way my friends did. They made it clear in no uncertain terms that if I did stay out after dark, not only would I be grounded but THE NIGHT WAS FR AUGHT WITH DANGERS. In fact, it’s amazing I don’t have a nervous twitch when the sun goes down, considering I grew up before the era of mobile phones and factoring in the (un)reliability of public transport to get home on time.

  If we went to gigs, they insisted on a parent picking us up (from London, no less). And they wanted me to phone them after the gig, which in those days involved finding a grotty payphone in a sea of sweaty people outside the venue.

  They absolutely wouldn’t allow boyfriends, at least until I was eighteen.

  If I’m giving the impression that I stuck to all/any of the rules, I should probably say (sorry, Mum and Dad) that I really didn’t. The person taking us home after gigs was our friend National Rail, and I had my first boyfriend at fourteen. So I led two completely separate lives. Whenever I saw the two worlds colliding (parent-teacher meetings, car pool), I would get very anxious and jittery.

  Duality may buy you temporary peace in the present, but it always catches up with you eventually, and it always comes at a price. Although I tried to escape leading a double life, here I was again, like I had never left.

  As far as I was concerned, when we stood up there in front of our loved ones on a summer’s day in July 2011 and exchanged our vows, I was signing up to a life of beautiful boring coupledom, kids and happiness.

  I walked in front of every single person I loved, and told the man I loved more than anyone that I would be there for him in sickness and in health, and that we would still be fighting over comic books when we were eighty. We swore our loyalty and fidelity to each other.

  The truth about marriage is that, beyond the fairy tale, making all those promises in front of so many witnesses means it’s harder to walk away when things get tough.

  That may sound cynical, and though I stayed with Rob and tried to help him because first and foremost I loved him (and when you love someone you cannot sit idly by while they are slowly killing themselves), I also know that declaring our wedding vows in front of friends and family was an important part of what kept us together.

  But this also placed a huge amount of pressure on how we portrayed ourselves to our loved o
nes.

  It is no coincidence that, after marriage, friends stop talking to each other about their relationships. We don’t want to admit anything is wrong because we have signed up for life. We want to be continuously surprised and enchanted by our partners but we also want stability and reassurance from them. We may not like to admit it, but we look to them to fix what is wrong in our lives and when they can’t (because no one can do that for us), we feel disappointed.

  And we don’t want to be a statistic – one of the Divorced – because, God knows, there are so many of them. So we fudge the truth a little bit when people ask us if we’re okay.

  When I think about my life with Rob, there is nothing I wouldn’t give for one more day before he told me the truth about what was really going on with him. A day when I could still exist in a world where happy endings came true and love saves the day.

  I’m not greedy. I don’t even want one of the good days, like when he bought me an Ajit Kumar Das painting of six cows for my birthday and we had dinner at Chez Bruce, giggling because we ordered exactly the same thing.

  I’ll take one of the days when he couldn’t get out of bed. Or even the day Daisy had an accident in the woods and lost an eye, and we had to drive her to the animal hospital where I cried in the car park as he lifted her gently out of the boot.

  The memories came relentlessly, like sheets of binary code rewriting our marriage, personal moments, everything I knew about him.

  I would wake up and, in the first few wonderful seconds, I didn’t remember. Then it would sit on my chest like a boulder.

  It’s not fair.

  The part I had most trouble with was not being told before we got married. Because although I knew I would have married him regardless of how bad I knew things could get with the depression, he got married with a lie in his heart.

  ‘You would’ve left me,’ he pleaded.

  ‘You didn’t give me a chance,’ I replied.

  For a time, I took down the photo of us on our wedding day, me in a blue dress, him in a grey suit, looking at each other and smiling. It was a reminder that I was fooled. That one of us knew the truth and one of us didn’t.

  At times, the grief for that girl, the one who didn’t know, the one whose biggest worry was about her career or her Friday-night plans, was so overwhelming that it threatened to consume me. I hated her. I hated her naivety; I hated her happiness and ignorance.

  Before all of those feelings had a chance to coalesce into rage, I knew that if I left him or if we didn’t act quickly, there was a very real chance Rob would take his own life. There was no time for anger or pity. We needed to kick-start his recovery.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ I asked him. ‘Every clinic I’ve called thinks we’re mad for not putting you on methadone. They said the success rate without it was about 5 per cent.’

  ‘I don’t want to go on methadone,’ he said, anguished. ‘I just don’t want to be an addict. I hate it. I hate it.’

  Suboxone – available only in the US – was another replacement that he had obtained through means I chose not to ask about, but the side-effects wiped him out. They could include: tongue pain, redness or numbness inside your mouth, constipation, mild nausea, vomiting, headache, sleep problems (insomnia), increased sweating, swelling in your arms or legs.

  ‘Do you think you can do this without methadone?’

  ‘Yes, absolutely. I spoke to Dr _______ and we laid out our plan. I go cold turkey and you take everything – car keys, wallet and my phone. I go to Narcotics Anonymous, I have zopiclone in case I can’t sleep, and I’ve started the round of antidepressants he wants to put me on.’

  ‘Okay. Well, then. Fuck them, honey. We’ll be the 5 per cent, okay?’

  He laid out the following:

  ROB’S NEW REGIME

  • Attend more than five NA meetings a week, turn up early, share at every meeting. Soak up every benefit I can from the programme.

  • Get a sponsor within two weeks and fully take advantage of this part of the programme.

  • Call someone from NA every day and text at least two people – and keep a record in my diary of who I speak to.

  • Get up at 8am every day without fail and no matter how I’m feeling. Have one cup of coffee, shower, shave EVERY DAY and walk the dog before work.

  • No more smoking cigarettes.

  • Eat three meals a day.

  • Go to church twice a week.

  • This week organise Yoga, Wing Chun and perhaps Tai Chi? Go to the gym at least once a week with _______, cutting the cycle of not exercising.

  • Purchase home urine tests and take in front of Poorna every two days; this will sort out any bother about my wallet. Access to money won’t be a problem if I’m able to prove I’m clean on a literally day-to-day basis.

  • If I am struggling with my mental health, contact Dr _______ that day.

  • Talk to Jesse about how I am feeling. Make an agreement with Jesse to check in by email every day and let him know where I am at.

  • Take the remaining steps necessary to sort out my finances and tell Poorna exactly what is happening.

  By the end of week two, only three of these things had happened.

  When it comes to drugs knowledge, my life is partitioned into two sections: before I knew, and after I knew. Before, I had no knowledge of serious drug use. I didn’t know what to look for, and when I did get suspicious and asked questions, Rob would effortlessly lie about it or make me think I was being paranoid.

  Although I was angry at Rob and I knew diddly-squat about heroin, I was aware that he needed support, not judgement. Love, not recrimination. It was only natural that my feelings of anger needed an outlet, so I directed them at myself.

  ‘I’m a fucking IDIOT,’ I raged. ‘I brought this on myself. How could I not know? What kind of buffoon doesn’t know that her husband is a HEROIN ADDICT?’

  ‘Look, addicts lie,’ he said with infuriating self-awareness and calm. ‘We manipulate. You didn’t know because I was really good at keeping it from you.

  ‘I’m so sorry for what I’ve done to you, and I can only beg for your forgiveness, but you can’t blame yourself. I did this. Me.’

  I always wondered how it was possible that when a person died of drug use their partner could claim not to know. I’m living proof that it’s possible. That your love for someone simply could not take you to the darkest place it needed to go, where a part of them shivered in shame.

  The only person who made me feel like I wasn’t going mad was Jesse.

  ‘I remember the first time Rob and I talked about heroin,’ he said, when I asked him if he knew Rob had a drug problem.

  ‘He and I were joking about something, sitting on his couch, and he said something along the lines of “maybe a little bit of the old brown” and (this is how stupid I am) I thought he was making some sort of racist joke and I asked him what he was talking about.

  ‘And he responded with something like, “Jesus, Jesse, I’m talking about smack.” And then I was like, “Oh. Oh.” And then things got a bit serious and I asked him if he really did that. And he was sort of cavalier and said, “Yeah, casually.”

  ‘And I said: “No one does heroin casually. You really need to not do that shit, man. It’s terrible. It destroys people’s lives.” And he must have said something to brush me off, or joke about it.

  ‘That was probably the first and last time we spoke about it. Until he called me years later and told me he had a problem, I assumed he had it all under control. Because that fit my perception of him. And probably also because it was the easiest thing to believe.

  ‘But the real question is – what did you really know? And I feel like the answer to that is: everyone knew everything. And no one knew anything.

  ‘I mean, I might have been one of Robby’s more innocent friends that he hid shit like this from, but I feel like somewhere deep inside, I knew something wasn’t right.’

  After he died, some people told me the
y knew about Rob’s addiction all along, not because he told them, but because they weren’t innocent lambs like Jesse and me and saw things we didn’t. They didn’t say anything at the time, and as a result felt guilt I said was not theirs to carry. They didn’t put themselves in this position, Rob did.

  Now I’m like the Supernanny of drugs.

  I know the behaviours; the chaos has a particular pattern, pieces of the jigsaw that just won’t fit. And I know what is inevitably going to happen to that person if they don’t recognise they have a problem, and they don’t seek help.

  A lot of my first month with Rob’s recovery was spent trying to come to terms with what I thought I knew about drug addicts, and what I needed to find out because, hey, turns out what I thought I knew was bullshit.

  Despite how prevalent in society drug misuse is, addicts are most often portrayed in polarised situations. You have the shambling addict outside a mainline train station, homeless, his or her eyes gaunt and empty, dirty fingernails.

  Then, at the opposite end of the spectrum, you have the celebrity addict. The starlet or A-lister who crashes and burns and ends up in rehab. This person’s broken relationship with themselves is front-page news. Then when they die, the world mourns. There are six-page obituaries, memes and columns. Followed by the inquest. Everyone hangs on the results in case the cause of death wasn’t drug addiction. Everyone hopes it isn’t, because in their eyes that’s a different kind of death, a less worthwhile death.

  When the shambling addict is found dead, no one cries. No one wonders about the terrible journey they took, to make it from someone’s son or daughter to an unloved corpse garlanding the damp corners of urban living. They brought it on themselves.

  But the celebrity addict acts as a leveller. This was a person who had success, money and family, and because we live in a society that believes money, family and status protect you from bad things, the realisation hits home that it could happen to your family too.

  How we view drug misuse in society is mostly wrong. A report called ‘Taking a New Line on Drugs’, written in 2016 by two of the leading health bodies in the UK, sums it up perfectly: ‘Drugs are not just substances that are currently illegal. They include socially embedded legal substances, such as alcohol and tobacco, used by the majority of people in the UK. Drugs strategy must reflect this reality, and not create artificial and unhelpful divisions.’