Instrumental (6 page)

I look at it on paper and feel baffled that I made it through boarding school, even with the help of music, fantasy and cigarettes. An anxious kid, shitting all the time, not sleeping, twitching dozens of times an hour, no social skills, terrified all the time, hooking himself out to strangers, smoking and drinking and yet this kid somehow made it to adulthood. It is a fucking miracle. And yet rather than feel proud, ready to seize all the bonus time I've been given, most of the time I just feel ashamed and pissed off that I'm still here.

Shame is the legacy of all abuse. It is the one thing guaranteed to keep us in the dark, and it is the one thing vital to understand if you want to get why abuse victims are so fucked up. The dictionary defines shame as ‘A painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behaviour'. And that definition breaks my heart a little. All abuse victims at some stage classify what was done to them as wrong/foolish behaviour that
they
have engaged in. Sometimes if they are incredibly lucky they can then realise and accept at a core level that they are wrong about that, but usually it is something that deep down they always,
I always,
believe to be true. The first family friend I told about the abuse had known me all my life. I was thirty when I told her and literally the first thing out of her mouth was ‘Well, James, you were the
most
beautiful child.' More proof that I caused this. It was my flirtatiousness, beauty, neediness, sluttiness, evil, that made them do those things to me.

Shame is the reason we don't tell anyone about it. Threats work for
a while, but not for years. Shame guarantees silence, and suicide is the ultimate silence. It does not matter how much you scream at them,
Good Will Hunting
style, ‘it wasn't your fault'. You may as well say the sky is green. The only way to get through to them is to love them hard enough and consistently enough, even if from a distance, to begin to shake the foundations of their beliefs. And that is a task that most people simply cannot, do not, will never have the energy and patience to do. Imagine loving someone that unconditionally. Being that kind, gentle and loving so consistently and getting back rage, suspicion, paranoia, doubt, neediness and destruction most of the time. It is like rescuing a beaten dog from the pound who thanks you by mauling your kids and shitting on your floor day after day. It is a thankless task and one that, when it's even possible, 99 per cent of the time can only be achieved by someone who has had years of training, charges
£
200+ an hour in Harley Street and then goes home to his wife and kids thinking, ‘Thank fuck I'm done with working with That for the day.'

I am many things. I am a musician, a man, a father, an asshole, a liar and a fraud. But yes, most of all I am ashamed. And perhaps there is a chance that I am those negative things as a result of being ashamed. That if I can accept, befriend, diffuse that feeling of blame, fault, badness, evil that is inside me, the defects and beliefs that seem to keep the world operating against me will fall away.

TRACK SIX

Scriabin, Piano Concerto, Last Movement

Vladimir Ashkenazy, Piano

Scriabin was a Russian pianist and composer. He started out writing lyrical, Chopinesque music and gradually became more adventurous, atonal and dissonant as he explored synaesthesia and the relationship between colours and music. He even invented an instrument with notes corresponding to colours called the
clavier à lumière
to be used in his work
Prometheus: Poem of Fire.

He injured his right hand over-practising the piano, which somewhat forced him to move from pianist to composer, and from thereon in dedicated his life to musical symbolism and weirdness, seeing himself as some mystical, messianic character. (‘I am God,' he wrote in his journal. A bit too often.)

He and Rachmaninov were the Blur v. Oasis of late nineteenth-century Russian music. And, sadly, no one was more famous during his lifetime, and few were more quickly ignored after his death than Scriabin.

His Piano Concerto, written before his shift to more far-flung harmonic landscapes, is still today criminally underplayed even though it equals, even surpasses, many of Rachmaninov's concertos.

I LEFT SCHOOL AT THIRTEEN
and went to another boarding school. A hyper-expensive one filled with future leaders, captains of industry, despots, trust-fund crackheads and playboys. Harrow.

And I have to be careful here, because if you tell anyone that you were lucky enough to go to a school set in sixty acres with its own shooting range, theatre, cadet force and a staff-pupil ratio of about 12:1 and complain about it, they will feel, perhaps rightly, that you should shut the fuck up then and there. And the school and its facilities were excellent. Stupidly good. Offensively snobby and well-to-do. And yet I was exactly the same as I'd always been. Five years of the same shit – hiding in loos, same-sex promiscuity, locked in practice rooms with a piano, sick to my stomach, anxious and twitching.

I know. I'm bored of it all too. So much so that I'm going to skip this whole fucking five years and file it under the heading ‘more of the same'. I cannot bear to write one more self-indulgent word about how much I struggled going to a
£
30,000 a year private school
WITH ITS OWN SQUASH COURTS, CINEMA AND FARM
in leafy suburbia. But there are two things I do need to talk about from that time and I'll try and keep them brief.

The first thing was I fell in love for the first time. And by ‘fell in love', I mean I was catapulted into a maelstrom of feelings that I had never before experienced. It was the best kind of love, the only kind of ‘first love' that exists. The love of mix-tapes, violent obsession, poetry and furious wanking all the time.

Cue yet another issue with being raped as a kid. It totally screws up your sex/relationship blueprint. For me that meant going on a first date with a girl and suggesting we fuck in the restaurant toilets in the
same tone and with the same weight of feeling as if suggesting ordering coffee after dinner. It wasn't born of lust, it was simply what I thought to be the natural, normal thing to do. It didn't work (we were fifteen), but that look of horror on her face was one I got to become deeply familiar with. And it only served to increase the shame spiral and make sex seem even more squalid and secretive and evil.

But this first love wasn't a girl. It was a boy in the year below me who played the cello, who was beautiful and innocent and kind of like a version of me before everything went bad. Yep. I'm that narcissistic. And it was wonderful not because it was real (of course it wasn't), but because it provided a glorious distraction from my day-to-day reality. It liberated me from my own dramas and provided a focus for all of that pent-up neediness and emptiness that I was so desperate to fill.

My days were spent rushing around to the various places I thought he might be and, when I eventually found him, casually pretending I just happened to be there, sneaking off for cigarettes with him, and making immense efforts to memorise every last millimetre of his face, hands, arms to replay later on. When older boys and stinking men were doing me at night, his was the face I would be thinking of. It was a great obsession. One that lasted for the entire time I was at that school, and gave me a reason to exist. Which is exactly what a first love should do.

I'm not gay. Have never, since leaving school, had sexual contact with a man. But young love really is blind (and not just because it masturbated too much). It has no boundaries, no falling in line with what is correct. It just smacks you round the face and knocks you to the floor, delighting in your total inability to get back up.

Nothing ever happened between us and I don't even think he was aware of my feelings – another reason it lasted so long, I think – but it was a genuine oasis of good in the shitstorm that was my teenage years. It was a life raft of brain chemicals and fantasy, and constructing a potential world of him and me in my imagination was enough to keep me afloat.

Alongside the piano of course. By this time I'd got my first proper teacher, who was awesome, but crippled by having me as a student. His name was Colin Stone and he was, and continues to be, a total dude. He would let me smoke in his garden, indulge my ridiculous enthusiasm for all things piano, listen to me rant and rave until I was exhausted, allow me to attempt pieces I had no business attempting.

The problem was that I was sprinting marathons before I could even crawl. Trying to play pieces that were so far beyond my ability it was laughable, and yet somehow getting through them, carried only by a wave of irrepressible enthusiasm. The facilities there were second to none. Dozens of practice rooms, plenty of free time to lock myself away and play. They even allowed me to go out on my own into London proper to go to concerts. I don't think they'd ever had a student ask permission for that before and it became a rare moment of blissful freedom, trekking down to the Festival and Wigmore Halls on the Tube to listen to the great pianists pound the keyboard.

My life was governed by obsessions – The Boy, Bach, smoking. Every night I would listen to piano recordings of my heroes and stay up wide-eyed and in awe of what they were doing. I would plug in headphones and listen to Rachmaninov, floating away again with music and fantasy, imagining all the while that it was me playing. I found
recordings by Grigory Sokolov, the greatest living pianist, that taught me more about music, life, commitment and passion than anything before or since has managed to do, and would listen slack-jawed and almost comatose at what he managed to do with a piano.

Literally the only thing in the universe I realised I wanted was to travel the world, alone, playing the piano in concert halls. The only thing. I would happily have died at twenty-five to have just a few years doing that. Everything else was a distraction. I knew I was irreparably broken, with no real chance of a proper career or family, but this felt, albeit through the funhouse mirror of denial and dumb enthusiasm, achievable. Musicians were meant to be all shades of fucked up, none more so than classical ones, who don't even have the luxury of ripped jeans, groupies and cocaine – they have to express their issues with stupid jumpers, non-existent social skills and deranged facial expressions, and I knew I fit the bill. All I needed was a piano and my hands and I was good to go. Social skills very much optional. It was the perfect career for me.

And the very saddest thing was that I knew at some level that I still wasn't good enough. I knew it. By the time they were my age, anyone considering a career as a concert pianist would have been playing pieces that I would never in a million years get close to playing. And they were playing them faultlessly. And although my lovely teacher tried his best (which included arranging for me to play to the head of keyboard at the Guildhall School who then offered me a scholarship), it was never going to happen. Not only did I lack the skills, my parents decreed it a no go. They would not support me should I go down that route, and insisted I go to a proper university. And me
being the stupid, spineless wanker I was/am, I didn't tell them to go fuck themselves and go to music college regardless. I sucked it up and said OK.

How awful to have a passion so intense it dictates your every breath and yet to lack the moral backbone to pursue it.

The second thing I wanted to mention was that I discovered drink. I had been drunk before (the gym teacher and others used it on occasion to soften me up), but I had never actively chosen it, bought it, done it of my own volition. And that first time I did, aged thirteen, was the only thing that was on a par with listening to that piece of Bach. Half a bottle of vodka, falling down stairs, puking everywhere, ending up in hospital, being almost expelled from school, the shame and horror of my parents, the police interview (the vodka was stolen), all of it made not the slightest bit of difference. I had found another best friend for when the piano was unavailable. And I used it whenever I could because it was like a magical elixir that made all the noise recede, made me feel 6 feet tall and indestructible, was the only thing that made my head quieten down a little, and was a guaranteed ticket out of my body and inner world within fifteen minutes.

Vodka and gin and occasionally scotch. I hated beer. There was nothing more comforting than finding a quiet place, hidden away, amid the madness of that school where everyone else was doing their fucking prep or hanging out with their friends, where you could sit in the cold night air with a bottle and a packet of smokes, feeling the wetness of the ground soaking through your trousers, seeing your breath escape in clouds that made trippy shapes. Whenever I managed to do that (perhaps once a week if I was lucky, increasing over time
as I got older and had more freedom from supervision) felt like a three-week holiday somewhere warm. It was the perfect escape, and perhaps most importantly it helped me sleep. I would return to my room, everything spinning in the best possible way, fall onto my bed and fly away again. Just like when I was a kid. It meant that I was easy meat for anyone who wanted to use me (but then again I was easy anyway), but I was successfully anaesthetised every time I drank. And for that I will always, always, be grateful.

Alongside alcohol, I'd also been introduced to drugs around the age of fourteen. The damage that the gym teacher's cock had done had caused the lower part of my back to explode. Something so big being forced into something so small again and again cannot be sustained without causing catastrophic damage. I woke up at home one day in the holidays, vomiting from the pain, and was taken to hospital. Morphine and pethidine (heaven) were administered and I had the first of three back operations to repair the physical damage. This one was a laminectomy, as was the second one. The third was a fusion with titanium rods being put in my spine to literally keep me upright.

When I got to the hospital and was asked what had happened, I told them that I had been experiencing back pain for the last few weeks and it had got progressively worse. That no, it hadn't been caused by a fall or other physical trauma, but that I'd had a bad cough recently (smoking induced, though I kept that to myself) and that that morning I'd been coughing hard and felt something snap. I've no idea what my mum told them but imagine it was along similar lines. At no point did any of the doctors examine my ass or consider sexual abuse as a cause – they were baffled as to why this had happened in
someone so young but put it down to a weak spine or a freak incident. Truth be told, I had no idea it was caused by the rapes; it wasn't until years later when I saw a proctologist (I'd been having severe pain in my groin and ass) that he told me both the groin problems and the problems I'd had in my spine were a direct result of aggressive sexual trauma as a child.

I just knew it hurt worse than anything I had ever experienced and I wanted the pain to stop. As the anaesthetist was asking me to count backwards from ten, I couldn't avoid thanking her directly for what was about to happen and looking at her with an expression of such gratitude that when I woke up there was a psych consult waiting who could not understand the raging boner I had for being anaesthetised and put under. Fucking idiot.

So it was the cigarettes, the alcohol, the piano and The Boy that powered me through my schooldays in much the same way as caffeine, a hot co-worker, porn and resentment get most adults through shitty jobs and disappointing families. They made the five years I was there pass by in a flash of hormones, altered consciousness and fugue states. And I made it. I made it through with good A level results (you cannot function at such consistently high levels of awareness, threat and pressure without higher than average intelligence and the ability to apply yourself consistently and vigorously), an offer of acceptance from Edinburgh University, and with the world, or most of it, still believing I was relatively normal, if a little weird and checked-out.

I left school at eighteen, feeling like sixty-eight, and realised that now I was an adult, the rest of my life could safely be spent destroying myself. People were no longer watching over me, I could spend as
much time as I wanted to on my own. And the monster inside me was hell-bent on following through with that intention. My entire collection of personalities was raring to go, desperate to do anything and everything to fuck my shit up in as many ways as possible. And so I did. Hard.

It began in Edinburgh. To my mind a cold, windy, miserable city that seemed to be an exact replica of my inner landscape. I was high from the first day I arrived and did not come down until a year later when I was put into the first of several locked psychiatric wards and rammed full of anti-psychotics.

And holy shit, going on a drug-fuelled rampage was good. I mean, brain-breakingly good in the most sadistic, self-destructive way imaginable. I used myself as my own personal voodoo doll. Wandering around the roughest parts of Edinburgh and Glasgow at 2 a.m. looking to score, paranoia escalating dramatically, hearing voices, knowing that my room and car were bugged by the police, not eating for days, getting so high on cheap speed that I could literally not move for eighteen-hour stretches. There is a unique kind of powerlessness that comes from going missing for days, unnoticed, holed up in a grubby room, heart beating so fast you know it's about to explode, desperately wanting to call an ambulance but not being able to get to a phone in order to do so, resigning yourself to dying alone, mind helter-skelter-spinning, hallucinating things that have no business being imagined, pissing the bed, talking to yourself, shouting to yourself. You question your sanity and it responds out loud.