Instrumental (10 page)

And thank fuck for that. Because after walking on trembling, I sit on the stool and something takes over. I disappear in a good way. Without flying out of my body, without searing pain in my ass, without tears and blood and concrete boots. It is the best thing ever, like having a four-handed, naked, hot stone Bach massage. Everything goes by in
a flash and, at the same time, the world seems to slow right down and all of my anxieties about time disappear. There is infinite space in between the notes, total awe at the sound my fingers are producing (not the quality, simply the fact that I am somehow doing this), a sense of coming home. This must be what Sting was talking about when he was raving about tantric sex.

It goes well. A few fluffed notes, no major memory lapses (I still have a recording of it), decent voicing (where the melody sings out properly), new (to me) musical interpretations of pieces that have been played for centuries. And I realise that all of those fantasies about giving concerts that I had as a kid, that kept me alive and safe in my head, were accurate. It really is that powerful. And I knew I wanted to do it forever. No matter what.

We had a big dinner afterwards to celebrate. I was treated kindly. Even Edo, who had flown over from Italy, was complimentary. My wife brought me flowers. We ate all the dim sum. My adrenaline levels had spiked, crashed, done cartwheels. I didn't sleep that night. Now, a few years down the line and after a couple of hundred concerts, this has become almost normalised for me. But then? It was like having sex for the first time with someone who was your spiritual twin. And hotter than hot. A bigger high than heroin and cutting and everything else destructive. It was my own personal, private nirvana.

And for a few weeks, it stayed with me. I was still cutting regularly and hiding it from Jane (long-sleeved T-shirts helped). I was still wrestling with voices in my head I didn't understand or want. But I was functioning well enough. And I was still enjoying some kind of afterglow from giving my first concert. I'd had a taste of something that
felt immortal. Looking back, those few weeks post-concert seemed to be like walking on a tightrope while largely oblivious to the circling sharks underneath waiting for me to fall off. My life revolved around my son, my piano, my razor blades and doing my utmost to convince my wife and the rest of the world that everything was OK.

I did a pretty decent job of not thinking too much about things (harder than it sounds) and threw myself into other endeavours. And for a short time, cutting aside, it felt like we had a chance.

I don't think I shall ever understand what happened next. On paper it seems like this was the perfect springboard into a new career. I could have found an agent, given more concerts, forged my way in this weird, wonderful musical world. Carved a little niche just for me. My life could have been a succession of concerts, practising, hanging out with Jack, working on my marriage. That would have been lovely. Normal and extraordinary at once. I could have put down the razor blades, found a decent shrink to work through some of the bigger mind-bombs, put one foot in front of the other day by day and moved gently towards a good life.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, was stopping me from doing that. Again, this is why it is so hard to have patience with people like me. In front of me are two doors. One clearly labelled ‘Good Life', the other ‘Hell'. And not only did I walk into the dark one, but I did so whistling, all nonchalant, rolling my sleeves up purposefully. I strutted like the biggest cock in the world into Arma-fucking-geddon.

TRACK ELEVEN

Brahms, ‘German Requiem', First Movement

Herbert von Karajan, Conductor

Brahms was both traditionalist and innovator when it came to composing. He was a leading light of the Austrian musical scene but didn't get involved in the War of the Romantics between composers such as Liszt and Wagner, who represented a more radical approach to composition, preferring to stick to a more conservative route. One of the holy trinity of Bs (along with Bach and Beethoven), he remains one of the great musical grandfathers of our time, with his symphonies, piano concertos, chamber music and piano compositions a consistent part of the mainstream repertoire.

As a kid his family was so broke he was forced to play the piano in ‘dance halls' (read ‘brothels') to earn money, and possibly because of some dodgy experiences that occurred at that time he remained unable to form any real, functional relationships with women as he grew up. He did, however, have a massive boner for Schumann's wife Clara. The fact that immediately after her husband Robert's death Brahms rushed to be with her and that they both destroyed numerous personal letters to one another seems to imply there was something going on worth hiding.

In 1865 his mother died and, wracked with grief, he wrote his ‘German Requiem', which to this day is one of his most celebrated and performed works. It had a slightly inauspicious beginning when the timpanist at its premiere misread the dynamic marking as ‘ff' (very loud) rather than ‘pp' (very quiet) and drowned out the other musicians, but since then it has become one of his most performed and admired works.

There is something overwhelmingly haunting about religious grief, and this piece of music, like Mozart's and Fauré's requiems deserves its place in music history as the absolute pinnacle of the genre.

MY WIFE PUT HER ARM
around me one evening. Normal thing to do. Rather nice, even. That afternoon had been stressful for me and I'd cut. I'd got it down to once or twice a week, but this was a fresh one, and when her hand touched my arm, I flinched. Couldn't help it. She asked me what was wrong, I got flustered, she wouldn't believe me when I said ‘nothing', there was the weight of a lie in the air, and she told me (not asked me) to show her my arm. And so I did. I was so tired of hiding stuff from her. I'd remembered back in the day when she and I had first started dating, how kind she had been, how solid we had seemed, how invincible. That couldn't have just disappeared, no matter how big an asshole I appeared to have become.

So I took off my shirt and showed her and, genuinely horrified, she properly lost her shit. I'd carved the word ‘toxic' into my upper arm with a razor blade.

I know. Very teenage and melodramatic. But it was how I felt. And razor blade font is awesome. But she thought it was much more serious
than I did. I could see her anger, and underneath it love, concern, kindness, fear. She made me promise to go see someone for help, and of course I agreed. She wasn't buying my whole ‘it's really not as big a deal as you think' routine. She gave me a deadline of a week, and, another secret out in the open, I began to spiral more and more quickly out of control.

I didn't sleep. Couldn't move. Couldn't eat. Couldn't talk. Properly ‘on the bed prostrate, eyes glazed over, head hot, fucked'. And when you're like that you have finally reached the point where you don't care any more. There is simply no deeper level of self-hatred and shame you can go to. You're at the bottom and everything falls apart. It is at once exhilarating, freeing and excruciating. It felt like the link inside me that was holding everything together had just snapped – as if any semblance of doing the right thing, being a decent person, had been swept away in a wave of gigantic indifference.

I seemed to accept that nothing was going to work and had there-fore made the decision to kill myself, and with that acceptance came the most amazing sense of liberation.

The best part about wanting to kill yourself is the energy you feel once you've made your decision. It's a bit like being given wings after trudging through quicksand for a few years. Also, the planning involved is extremely fun. It's like making a playlist for someone you love – it needs a lot of thought, you get all excited about what it will end up like and how they will react, you enjoy the process of making it as much as the final product.

I'd figured jumping or hanging was the way to go. And, fuck me, the internet is a big help with this stuff. Swathes of pages about what
height to jump from, suitable locations, what to avoid, how best to do it. I even found a ‘height to weight' chart for those wanting to hang themselves – it ensures the length of the drop is suitable for the person's weight so that they're not left in a coma or still functioning after they do the deed. Handy.

A friend of mine called me as I was in the midst of planning. Stephen. He was a remarkable guy – left school in a Welsh mining village at fifteen with no qualifications at all and by sixteen was playing to a sold-out Madison Square Garden with a huge British rock band. Twenty years later, covered in tattoos and still without any qualifications, he decides he wants to become a surgeon, enrols in Columbia med school, works his ass off and is now, astonishingly, a fucking surgeon. We'd been extremely close a few years previously until he'd moved to New York and we'd lost touch. He caught me on a bad day. I cracked a joke about finding a building to jump off, tried to backtrack, didn't think I'd successfully convinced him I'd been joking, put the phone down and punched myself in the face. I guess Jane had been in touch with him, asking him to check up on me.

I'm rereading this (should have left it to my editor). And I am so aware of the light this shows me in. It is text-book narcissism and self-pity. I see that now. But when you're in it, feeling like you're drowning in this shit, and everything seems so damn real, you cannot see the whole picture. There is no room for reality with depression, trauma, PTSD, whatever you want to call it. My world had collapsed in on itself and there was room only for me and my delusions and ego. There was no other option than to remove myself from the world; one of the most dangerous misunderstandings about suicide is that to
those considering it, it is almost always an absolutely valid choice. It's a bit like being absolutely starving, having not eaten for days, and suddenly being at a restaurant where the only thing they serve is something you absolutely fucking hate and would not in a million years have eaten before, but it's the only possible option. You order it, you eat it, you cram it in your mouth as fast as you can using your hands, you don't stop until you're about to pass out. The reality of my situation as I saw it, together with my raging head, had begun to shake the foundations of my complacency to the point where the element, the luxury, of choice had been removed from me.

There was one possible last-ditch solution that was thrown my way a couple of days before I was going to go through with my plan (my in-laws were due in town from the States and it felt right to wait until they were there so there was at least some support for my wife in the aftermath). I'd gone to an AA meeting, a regular one of mine, and when I got home Jane and my buddy Matthew were there waiting for me. Clearly, Stephen's report of our telephone conversation hadn't been great.

I don't want to talk much about AA because, well, the second A stands for Anonymous. But I will say that in my experience (nineteen years without a drink and still attending regular meetings), it is the easiest and most successful way of stopping drinking. It is a remarkable invention and one that creates miracles day after day, but it is predicated on the fact that there is a certain level of honesty, especially self-honesty, amongst its members. Even that is not necessary all the time; simply having the willingness to stop drinking at some point is enough. But I was going to meetings and chatting to other people
there with a degree of fundamental dishonesty that made it impossible for me to get well. I stayed sober physically, but mentally was a different story. And therefore, other than being dry, I was not a well bunny, and missed out on the opportunity to transcend my demons that so many others in AA have managed to do. I do know this though – had I started drinking again I would be dead. There is no doubt in my mind
it is much, much easier to kill yourself drunk than it is sober. And in that respect I owe AA my life. And now, today, with a newfound honesty that can only really come from emerging out of a violently degrading rock bottom, I also owe it my peace of mind. It is the best thing ever.

So I got home from lying my ass off at yet another meeting about how great I was doing, and was greeted, gently, by my wife and best buddy. They told me they had looked into hospitals that dealt specifically with sexual abuse and suggested (as in, ‘If you don't go we'll make sure you're put there regardless') I go down the next morning and meet with the intake team. They had no idea that I had already found the building I was going to jump from, had made a will, written a letter with computer passwords, bank account details, burial requests etc. And it put me in a quandary. I could lie to them and, instead of going down to the hospital the next day, I could simply top myself then, or I could do as they asked. I could do as they asked because there was nothing else left, and even if there was a fraction of a percentage chance of finding something helpful that could avoid such a permanent solution, then perhaps it was worth it.

And so after a few hours of them repeatedly reassuring me that Jack would be OK, that they could function perfectly well without
me and that my in-laws were in town for a couple of weeks to help pick up the slack, I said OK. And the next morning I drove down to the hospital.

It was a fucking disaster from the start.

I'm not sure how much of this was me being a dick and how much of it was them being unprofessional wankers, but Jesus Christ, this place was horrific. For all their spiel about specific programmes to help deal with sexual abuse trauma there was none of it. A couple of morbidly overweight ‘therapists', a sulky group of heroin addicts sent there against their will by a well-meaning NHS, a psychiatrist who could barely speak English and a bunch of rules enforced with all the glee of a bullied red-headed stepchild finally able to exact revenge on his tormentors.

Any time I opened my mouth to ask a question or see if I could speak to someone higher up in the team I was told to shut up, bootcamp style, and accused of being a troublemaker. I lasted forty-eight hours before deciding it wasn't for me. I'd hidden a pack of razor blades when I'd arrived out in the back garden, which I retrieved and used to cut yet again. Even that didn't do it for me. And so I packed my bags and asked them for my mobile phone, car keys and wallet (confiscated on arrival) as I was leaving. And they said no. Just like that.

I laughed a bit and then said, ‘Seriously, I need my stuff back and then I'll be out of your hair.'

And then they said they'd discuss it and I should come to the office in a couple of hours.

So I wander round the place for a bit and just before lunchtime in I go. There in front of me are a bunch of people I've never seen before.
Doctors, nurses and a few others, all looking severe and vaguely threatening. I giggle and crack a joke about this being some kind of intervention. Nothing. Stony silence.

It was like some low-budget TV court scene. They had searched my room and found the packet of razor blades (‘I never leave home without them' not an adequate defence apparently); they told me that the consensus amongst staff and clients (‘patients' was not adequately PC) was that I was a negative influence; they told me they deemed me a danger to myself or others as a result of this and that they were going to send me to another hospital where I could be ‘more appropriately looked after'. And just like that, the walls came tumbling down.

The removal of choice is one of the greatest terrors you can inflict on someone. From the age of ten, when I left the school where the abuse was happening, I had always had a choice. I could have told someone, I could have been less promiscuous, I could have asked for help, stayed single, pursued the piano, said no to drugs and on and on. I chose to not do all of those things. I even chose, eventually, to ask for help. And now, for the first time since I was five years old and face down on a gym mat, squashed under the weight of a giant, I once again had no choice. I couldn't talk my way out of this (though I tried), I couldn't fight my way out of it (again, I tried, despite a couple of well-built male psych nurses just smirking as I did), I couldn't bullshit my way out of it. I was allowed to call my private GP (at £110 per visit I'd arrogantly assumed he'd be able to sort this) but he simply said there was nothing he could do. I was told to leave my car there and was driven to another hospital about an hour and a half away, crying with rage and frustration.

The intake there was terrifying. I was told to take meds – the first pharmaceutical I'd had in eleven years. When I refused, I was forced to swallow something I couldn't even pronounce. The room spun, my head flew away, everything diminished and I slept for very nearly twenty-four hours flat.

This new hospital was a whole different kettle of mental. It was incredibly meds-friendly. I was basically muzzled with chemicals and left alone for the first few weeks. Getting high after more than a decade drug-free was unpleasant, scary, overwhelming. My short-term memory went immediately – I would introduce myself to the same people again and again – I lost control of my coordination, drooled, sweated all the time. I became a cartoon parody of the ‘mental patient'.

Jane and I decided Jack should not come and see me – he shouldn't have to witness me stumbling around, literally walking into walls, unable to focus or speak properly. I became some kind of lab rat for psychiatrists eager to practise their diagnosing and prescribing skills. After a few days I was, apparently, officially suffering from: bipolar disorder, acute PTSD, autism, Tourette's, clinical depression, suicidal ideation, anorexia, DID, borderline personality disorder. And I was medicated ‘appropriately'.