by Poorna Bell
He tells me he has been drinking in secret for two weeks. He tells me he has been self-harming and shows me cigarette burns pressed into his skin. I want to throw up. I want to leave, run as far as I can from him but I can’t. I can’t leave him alone; my love becomes a chain that binds our feet together.
I’m so exhausted and I need to sleep. He doesn’t understand why he can’t come into the bedroom. Rob hates it when we don’t sleep in the same bed together, which I’ve only made him do once in our relationship when he was detoxing. He becomes upset but I keep the door closed and he doesn’t come in.
Eventually, he falls asleep outside the door.
I wake up in the morning and I call work. ‘There’s been an emergency,’ I say flatly.
Rob wakes up at the sound of my voice, now sober. I ignore him while I get ready.
‘Honey, please talk to me.’
I look at him. This is probably the first time I’ve seen him. I mean, properly seen him. I’ve always known about the beauty of him, but, finally, I have seen the destruction. It has looked me in the eye, it has burned itself onto his flesh, and it is so raw, so much older and more powerful than me. It scares me.
Now that he is sober he looks like my husband again. But I’m afraid of my anger, and I cannot be in the same house as him. I don’t want him to harm himself while I am away. The danger of suicide hangs in the room like the stench of an abattoir, death flapping its wings like a moth in the darkness, worms wriggling in the dank earth.
I can taste the remorse in the air, bitter and full of self-hatred. I know that a hangover and a depressive slump await him. But I need space to think.
‘I’m going to my sister’s. I will talk to you when I get back.’
‘Are you leaving me?’
‘No. I’ll be back in the evening.’
I get in my car and I drive to Priya’s house in Brighton.
For the first time since we married, I start to doubt whether I can do this. Rob’s problems are so great they seem beyond me. How can I stop someone who is steadily destroying himself?
I knew we wouldn’t have a normal life like other couples but I tried everything.
I sold myself into debt to help him.
I have walled my friends off from the truth of my life, and I cannot tell my parents, the two people I love most in the world aside from Rob, who have worked so hard to keep me safe, whose kindness and generosity I don’t deserve, who would go to the ends of the earth for me. I have let them down; this is not the daughter they raised. I disgust myself. I don’t know what I did to deserve this, or where I went wrong.
I hate the person I am turning into. Controlling, paranoid, upset. Permanently broke, permanently angry, a liar, carrying the entire weight of our marriage.
Love is not enough, I realise for the first time. It should be, but it isn’t. We need proper help.
In two days, Rob will voluntarily enter a psychiatric hospital as an in-patient for the first time in his life.
The Doctor’s office was not as clinical as I thought it would be. I imagined a white cube, but it was more like a living room in the suburbs.
The outside of the Priory, when you drive up, resembles a hotel. A white-iced wedding cake of a building with spiralling turrets and manicured gardens. A week’s stay costs £4,000, so presumably all of this is to make mental illness more palatable.
When I dropped Rob off, my anger had distilled into concern and protectiveness. I was relieved we had managed to get private care through my insurance, but I still wanted to know he was in a safe place.
My first awareness of a psychiatric hospital was in Bangalore when I was a child. It was a place called Nimhans. Back then we didn’t know it stood for the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuroscience.
Nimhans became a colloquialism when I was a kid; it was shorthand for crazy. ‘Don’t be a loony or you’ll get sent to Nimhans’ is what we’d say when someone did something bad, silly or unreasonable. It was a place for people who raved constantly, who needed to be strapped down – the stereotypical depictions of psych wards in movies.
If you did something odd, you’d be asked if you’d just escaped from Nimhans. If you wanted to discredit someone, you’d suggest they be carted off to Nimhans.
Our warped view of mental health begins as children, and I don’t know anyone, except Mr B, who has a healthy understanding of mental illness or the hospitals that treat such people. He did because his parents worked and lived in the grounds of a psychiatric hospital.
‘My take comes from being around what the rest of society calls extremely damaged people who need to be removed, treated, fixed or forgotten about. And I only ever saw the humanity in them. What we’ve categorised as mental illness has been our way of categorising them as “Others”.’
At the Priory, I wasn’t prepared for how nice it seemed. But I still wanted to double-check everything. I wanted to see his room, which looked like any you’d get in a four-star hotel.
‘This place looks so fancy,’ I marvelled when I came for my first visit.
‘Don’t be fooled,’ Rob said. ‘It’s still a hospital.’ I was reminded of that when we talked on the phone and every fifteen minutes we’d be interrupted by someone conducting suicide checks.
‘I don’t want to sound facetious,’ he said, ‘but the other patients and I were talking, and if someone really wanted to kill themselves, they’d be able to do it within fifteen minutes.’
A group of people sitting around having a conversation about how quickly they could kill themselves? It sounded fucking horrible but I didn’t say so.
Rob spent two weeks in the Priory, and he seemed to make rapid progress. He appeared driven and, for once, not blasé about his care. Perhaps this was because I had given him an ultimatum. Either he got proper treatment and we had a marriage where we both made the effort 50:50, or I would call it quits and leave.
It was the push he needed. Rather than going into his sessions with a swagger that said he knew better, he engaged with other people. He was talkative, which was a relief, after months of silence. He told me about the therapy groups, he went to mindfulness sessions; he told me what he’d learned about himself and, for the first time in years, he started going to the gym in the hospital.
Although he had been visiting The Doctor for a least a year before he went in, I believe this was the first proper, intensive care he had received in his entire life.
I made several visits. I popped Daisy in the car and sang to her on the way there to soothe her in the traffic; we spent time in the grounds while he chain-smoked. As Daisy snuffled around for balls hidden in the bushes, there was a steady procession of staff and other patients passing through to say hello. Somehow, he’d already made friends with everyone.
‘Seriously, how do you do that?’ I asked. He shrugged and pointed at a girl. ‘See her?’ he said. She looked like any other girl on the street in jeans and a loose cotton t-shirt.
‘She’s been here for eight months. Eight months.’ We sat for a while in silence, but I knew he was wondering how long it would take for him to become well, and what would happen if he didn’t.
When I spoke to his doctors, they all assured me he was making real progress and was engaging in sessions brilliantly. His main revelation, he told me on the phone one evening, was that he hadn’t realised how lonely he had been. ‘I think I need to stop freelancing and start working in an office,’ he said. ‘I’ve just spent too much time in my own head. And I need to start communicating more.’
Hallelujah. It seemed like we might finally be about to have our life back.
Rob had the option of spending his third week as a daily outpatient, and he really wanted to come home, to me, to his books, cuddling Daisy, and to start a new life for himself. A few days before he was due to leave, The Doctor asked to see me.
I strolled in, thinking this would be just another reassurance that Rob was a superstar and was doing really well. I had never seen him so positive, full of
energy, so committed to being clean.
Although I would grow to like The Doctor – and indeed respect him for his diligence, patience and accurate reading of the situation despite how challenging a patient Rob must have been – when I first met him he scared the living daylights out of me. It also impressed me how, despite having dealt with a lot of people like Rob, and often being faced with difficult odds, he still had hope for each of his patients and treated them with kindness.
‘So, what came first? The depression or the addiction?’ he asked. And, as if reading my thoughts, he fixed his gaze on me and said: ‘We will never know.’
‘But Poorna,’ he continued, ‘I can treat the depression. With the right medication, I can treat it. But I don’t know if Rob really understands how much the addiction is also part of it. At the moment, he’s in what we call the “pink cloud”.
‘When people are in the pink cloud, they do things like book holidays, go out more. And although they seem strong, that’s actually when they are most vulnerable, and that’s when they relapse.’
Rob and I had just been speaking about going to Jesse’s wedding in the Isle of Wight. He seemed so certain that he’d be okay to do it but I was now starting to have doubts.
‘He has to understand how strong his addiction problems are. And at the moment, he thinks most of it is depression. But he has a severe addiction problem that he’s been dealing with for twenty-five years. The only way you are going to get through it is either a proper detox facility, or by him doing the ninety meetings in ninety days at NA, being actively involved in his sobriety every minute of the day, and continuing appointments here. But he has to be able to come out of it, or he will lose everything.’
I felt our life slipping away. It sounded like an impossible task. The confidence I felt at Rob’s renewed sense of recovery was evaporating. The feeling of nausea returned. We couldn’t send him to a detox facility. Mainly because we couldn’t afford it and also because I still hadn’t yet told my parents about his addiction – they thought he was in hospital because of his depression.
Dual diagnosis is extremely hard to treat, primarily because it is hard to disentangle the addiction from the mental illness. It is chicken and egg: do you have a drug addiction because you had mental illness and were trying to self-medicate, or do you have a mental illness as a result of the drugs you have taken?
I found a 2002 study that showed that 85 per cent of alcoholics had mental health problems, while among drug users it was 75 per cent. Dual diagnosis isn’t a fringe issue but far more prevalent and complex than most people would imagine.
In Rob’s case, I believe he had a mental illness that he tried to self-medicate with drug use. He was self-harming long before his substance use became abuse. But am I saying that because I’m still clinging onto old stigmas, and somehow mental illness seems more moral than addiction?
Or maybe the diagnosis doesn’t matter. The biggest obstacle in Rob’s way seemed to be his inability to ask for help, his insistence that he was right and could fix everything, as well as his own shame at being an addict and having a mental illness. A study in 2010 revealed that men had a much higher self-stigma against depression than women.
I looked up Tony Blair’s old right-hand man Alastair Campbell, who now spends his time campaigning for better understanding about mental health. Much of this is driven by his own personal journey. As we sat outside a tiny café in London, I asked how he felt about being admitted to a psychiatric hospital after his breakdown.
‘Some people who get admitted haven’t made the judgement in their own mind that they want to do it. I was so bad – I remember lying in this hospital bed thinking, Fucking hell, how has this happened? and in my head I reached my own realisation that I had to sort this out.
‘Whereas a lot of people when they get admitted think, I’m not as bad as that guy, why am I here, this is a complete waste of time. Or they might think, You’ve put me here because you can’t cope. The patient has to reach their own judgement.’
I didn’t know how much Rob hated being in the hospital. He always made out like he was glad to be there, and I suppose in a way he was, because he saw it as his second chance at our marriage. I don’t know that he ever fully accepted or believed it was a second chance for himself.
But there was a difference between the Rob who went in, and the Rob who came out. The Rob who came out was the man I fell in love with five years before. He was determined, hopeful; scared but glad to have his mind back.
Jesse was one of the few friends to go and visit him. When I asked him how he’d found Rob, he said: ‘It felt like a lot of things had been stripped away and he had his feet on the ground and was being honest with me.
‘We talked about a lot of shit. I mean, especially about how lonely he felt. We talked about addiction. His plans going forward. It felt like he had so many plans. He felt sad – smaller than he usually was, but more real too. He felt relatable.’
When Rob came home, I was suspicious that this new version of him was another mask to fool me. But when I didn’t see the resurgence of insomnia, sweating or unreliability, or strange behaviour with money, I began for the first time to hope we may have a chance.
Hampton is near a huge park called Bushy, a wilder expanse than nearby Richmond Park with its crowds of joggers in expensive Lycra and Old Money walking their pedigree dogs. Instead, Bushy has empty stretches of moor with golden grasses, deer that clomp through patches of trees and hidden puddles perfect for one Daisy Bell to barrel into and cover herself in mud. Where we lived was far removed from anyone we knew, so it allowed our world to become smaller and utterly about us.
We spent time walking, our favourite spot being the Water Garden, cascading sheets of water pooling into a large pond inspected regularly by ducks. To the left, a tiny stream crossed by a bridge, where we came across a secret dilapidated wooden house and tried to peer inside the slats. We found sticks for Daisy, and Rob would put my hand in his coat pocket when the weather turned nippy.
He came to bed with me at the same time every night. At first it was odd. I had grown so used to developing my own little survival mechanisms to fill the space where he wasn’t that it felt strange to have him bounding into bed with me, wanting to talk about his day.
He brought me peppermint tea, and in exchange I’d let him have one of my fancy bedtime chocolates from Fortnum and Mason.
His newfound zeal for the gym meant we went together at the weekends again, an activity I was used to doing on my own. We also did something we had never done before except when on holiday: we went shopping, we got coffee together in the daytime, and just talked. We looked just like any other couple.
He started to look healthier; his skin became plumper, less drawn around the eyes. We took pictures for his new Twitter account because I offered to help him build up an online profile in an effort to get him new work.
I love these pictures. He looks hopeful, happy even.
Three months after he came out of hospital, we went to see James Taylor in concert at the Royal Albert Hall, and when he played ‘Something in the Way She Moves’, Rob pressed my hand and whispered: ‘This song is about you, baby.’
We cried when he sang ‘Carolina in My Mind’, a song that marked some of the darkest moments of Rob’s recovery, playing from his computer while he was stretched out on the bed trying to gather the pieces of his mind shattered after withdrawal.
Every Saturday started the same.
I’d taken to buying white sheets, and we’d wake up in our own little snow-coloured world, our arms around each other. If we decided to go to yoga, we’d be up at 8am and tripping over ourselves to get out of the door and to class on time.
If we didn’t, we’d wake up around nine. We’d kiss each other, our bottom lips meeting at their fullest swell. Then we’d have the same conversation.
‘So, what do you want to do today?’ I’d ask.
‘Let’s go to the gym. We can go to Gosia’s afterwards and have coff
ee.’
‘Mmm. Shall we get some rolls and make sandwiches for lunch?’
‘Yes, and a nap. Got to have an afternoon nap together.’
‘What do you want to do in the evening?’
‘Download a film, maybe. Make something flash for dinner?’
For months after Rob died, as I lay under the sheets alone, my grief swelled with each breath I took. It puffed into my pillows, it crawled under the nook of my arm and into my throat. I held on to it as tightly as it held on to me.
I would close my eyes and call that perfect morning back into existence. I would repeat these lines to myself over and over again, and pretend I was just waiting for him to come back to bed, holding the moment for as long as I could.
I have never been the maternal type.
That doesn’t mean I don’t want kids, but the only person I ever wanted kids with was Rob. It was part of a bigger story than just wanting to procreate. It was about the life we were building together, pouring ourselves into a vessel to create the perfect mix of the two of us.
You know, like when you mix your own paint at the hardware store but presumably more rewarding.
When Rob and I first started talking about children, roughly two months into our relationship, I knew how much he wanted them, and I surprised myself by wanting them as much as he did. We pictured a boy and a girl, both with skin the colour of a cappuccino, crazy curly hair; green eyes like mine, long legs and strong bodies like him.
Then our wants seemed to disappear when he withdrew into full-blown drug addiction.
Around the time of his first stay in the Priory, something wonderful happened. My niece Leela was born.
I have never been broody, but I had never felt such a sharp tug in my belly as I did when I held her. She was like a little old man, scrunched up, with big eyes, so much potential and hope packed into her tiny little body, radiating from her in waves, and I fell in love with her the minute I saw her. I knew then that I wanted to try for children, but I also knew that Rob needed to be in recovery for a decent length of time before this could happen.