Instrumental (7 page)

I very quickly stopped going to lectures, took so much acid that I could not distinguish reality from fantasy, smoked heroin (at once the
greatest and stupidest thing I've ever done in my entire life), chain-smoked marijuana, bought vast quantities of speed and cocaine (ostensibly to deal, in practice to greedily shovel up my own nose), shoplifted, hid away and did not have a single friend. Not one. There was a girl who was pretty and kind. But after a week of being around me she rather bravely told me I needed a nurse not a girlfriend and that if I didn't stop getting high she'd never speak to me again. And she stuck to her word, bless her.

Most of what happened that whole year is missing from my memory. I have flashes: being followed by police; leaving to drive somewhere at 3 a.m. and being unable to figure out how I made it back home again; leaving London high as a kite in the middle of the night and managing to drive to Edinburgh in just over five hours (usually takes at least seven); trying, invariably unsuccessfully, to fuck a bunch of girls; driving the wrong way down one-way streets because ‘it's quicker this way'; seeing a doctor who told me I had the lung capacity of a sixty-year-old (smoking class A drugs which crystallise on your lungs does that do you); wandering around the city in the middle of the night hallucinating and talking at strangers.

The side effects were unpleasant. Destructive, and because of that, rewarding, but unpleasant. And when I got home at the end of the first year and my mother saw that I had degenerated physically and mentally to beyond the point she could explain away to her friends as ‘teenage shenanigans', I was sent to a psychiatrist. And I went without a fight. All the fight had been knocked out of me and it was just easier to do what I was told by this point. He spoke with me for about twenty minutes and made a call, and I was taken immediately
to a hospital with locks on the doors and windows, silent, surly male nurses, and brilliant pharmaceuticals.

And so began my first psychiatric hospital experience.

How I wish psych wards had a loyalty card programme, with cards stamped for each day spent inside rather than each latte bought, where every tenth one resulted in a free day. It was a strange place, filled with stupidly young anorexic wives of millionaires, surly teenage children of rock stars and jaded celebrities fighting against the seductive allure of ‘just one more line'. I was put on a combination of anti-psychotic medication, and after a few days began the excruciating process of group therapy, one-on-one counselling and whatever US-inspired method of treatment was currently in vogue.

After a week or so I decided simply to play along in the hope of getting out without being turned into an institutionalised zombie. I cried and talked about my inner child, participated in the twice-daily group meetings, shared my feelings of inadequacy and my faux-heartfelt desire to change and stop getting high.

And sure enough it worked. I was making ‘tremendous progress' and was released back into society after five weeks, my little booklet of NA/AA meetings under my arm.

Edinburgh had made it very clear I would not be welcome back there – apparently turning up to exams visibly high and being offensive to lecturers was a bridge too far, and so I packed my bags and went to Paris. A year of French girls, learning a new language and that brilliant, über-middle-class word, ‘rest', seemed like an excellent idea.

To recap, poor Jimmy goes from a
£
30k-a-year private school to university, where he doesn't have a good time. He ends up in a
psychiatric hospital paid for by his medical insurance, gets out and goes to Paris to recover by hanging out for a year in one of the most beautiful cities in the world and learning French.

You're no doubt weeping for him already.

I got a job at Burger King grilling les Whoppers, rented a flat that was so small there was a cooker in the bathroom and when the bed folded out I could literally climb across the entire room from front door to far wall without getting off it, and decided to stop drinking and using drugs.

And I've got to say it was, perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the best twelve months of my life. There was a succession of girls (the best way to learn French), hundreds of French Narcotics Anonymous meetings (the second-best way to learn French), middle-of-the-night chess games, nights spent dancing in loud, sweaty clubs, new friends and a slow accumulation of days without alcohol or drugs of any kind. Could anyone be miserable in Paris? I've yet to see a fat Parisienne, the city has the heart-stoppingly beautiful architecture that can only come from surrendering to enemy forces in the early days of war, art, coffee, crepes, husky accents, a natural disdain for work, and smoking everywhere.

I had some tricky moments staying clean – a couple of sly drinks thinking that perhaps I could do it in moderation, and quickly realising that getting pissed at 3 a.m. and wandering around the dodgier parts of Paris trying to score heroin wasn't necessarily healthy. About halfway through my time in Paris, somehow, miraculously, I poured away the rest of my last ever drink on 29 March 1995 and, through the gentle miracle that is twelve-step groups, stayed clean and sober.

And overall things improved dramatically.

The voices stopped (auditory hallucinations are a common side effect of both psychotropic drugs and trauma), the madness receded and I had a glimpse of a life that seemed fun, frivolous, even manageable. I bought a little electronic keyboard (the idea of a real piano fitting in that flat was preposterous) and did the best I could with it, but I was starting to realise that any dream of making a career out of playing the piano was simply too far-fetched. I might as well have wanted to become an astronaut. And so I just stopped playing completely. I distracted myself with anything I could that wasn't chemical, and was determined to make up for all the lost years of isolation and terror by resolutely trying to cram a whole reclaimed teenage life into a year. And then I applied to a bunch of universities in London with the aim of reading psychology.

Shut up, it's true.

What was rather lovely is that I wrote to seven universities saying that I'd just got out of a psych ward where I had been successfully treated for drug-induced psychosis and was keen to study psychology at their fine institution etc etc, that I knew I had missed the application deadline and that Edinburgh would not be providing any references but please could I come because I'm all better now? And five of them said yes without any further prompting, let alone interviews. My gift for bullshit manipulation was still golden.

And after a year of, literally, fucking around, I came back to London, fluent in French, and waltzed through the doors of University College London. Still clean and sober. Still nuts (in remission, perhaps, but nuts). Still running from a childhood which by now I had semi-successfully buried pretty deep down.

Here's another side note for anyone who went through similar childhood trauma: you cannot outrun this stuff.

You cannot hide from it.

You cannot deny it.

You cannot push it down and expect it not to eventually reappear.

Had I known what was going to happen to me down the line I would have happily checked into any psych ward in the world for a year to deal with it, no matter what it cost in money and time and lost opportunities. The grief I would have saved myself from by taking a few months out to work on my stuff (a kind of gap year for mental people) would have been immeasurable. But I was stupidly, blissfully, idiotically oblivious. I figured if I could manage not to think about things, deny everything bad, distract and avoid, I would be immune to the past. It would, like a body buried under the patio, in time decay and disappear, albeit with a bit of a lingering smell. And so I focused on being a good student, tried my utmost to avoid self-examination, and got on with day-to-day life.

It was a dull, albeit semi-productive, three years. I had swapped the piano, alcohol and drugs for girlfriends and hookers and completed my assignments, hidden myself away in the arms of another blonde, brunette, whatever, and got to the end of the course. I adopted the persona of a grandiose, slightly freaky douchebag to keep people at arm's length, and was utterly uninterested in any kind of social life or self-improvement.

I did however manage to begin and maintain a relationship with Matthew, the man who became my closest friend. I knew instantly that he was safe. He was tall, stupidly handsome, brilliant and kind.
And those qualities have only grown over time. The guy is a psychologist who holds two PhDs and does vital, life-changing work. And he just doesn't care that I forget things (birthdays, plans, social niceties like asking about his news etc), sometimes come across as rude and insensitive, get needy and weird and can suddenly go quiet on him for no reason.

He was my first friend.

He is still my best friend and worth a thousand vague acquaintances I could have made at university.

I walked away with a semi-respectable 2:1, didn't go to graduation, and then, because it was time to earn some money, I opened the
Evening Standard,
applied for the first sales vacancy I saw (financial publishing) and, after a brief ten-minute interview, got the job.

TRACK SEVEN

Ravel, Piano Trio

Vladimir Ashkenazy, Itzhak Perlman, Lynn Harrell

Ravel was an asexual, mother-obsessed Frenchman who wrote fewer than ninety compositions during the course of his life. The son of a Swiss inventor and a Basque mother, he was a chain-smoking dandy who sweated blood over his music and had each note dragged out of him painfully, slowly and methodically. He and Debussy were the greatest exponents of Impressionist music France ever produced and despite being somewhat fucked by the trauma of serving as a truck driver during the First World War and later suffering brain damage from a collision with a Parisian taxi, he remains the towering genius of French music.

Hanging out with Gershwin in Harlem jazz clubs lent a certain swagger to his music.

His piano trio is a force of nature; visceral, energetic and somehow much bigger than the three instruments it was written for, it was the last piece he wrote before enlisting in the army. Four movements long and demanding an almost superhuman level of virtuosity from the performers, it's a swirling, whirling kaleidoscope of colours and dreams. He said that the only love affair
he had ever had was with music, and all of that repressed sexual energy got thrown into the mix as a result.

IF THIS WERE A MOVIE
, I'd freeze-frame it right about now. This was a huge turning point for me, even if I had no clue what was really happening in my life. Ostensibly it all seemed normal. Complete your studies, get a degree, get a job, start out on a career path, fall in love, get married, start a family. This was what was happening to me and I was unaware, incapable of stopping it. I was labouring under the totally misguided belief that someone like me, with my history and my head, could pull this off. Breaking myself, wallowing in victimhood, fucking shit up – yes, absolutely. Being a stand-up, productive, normalised member of society? Not so much. In the movie I'd make it go all
Sliding Doors
style and go down another route totally opposite to the stupid bloody route I'd chosen. And I'd see very quickly that doing pretty much anything other than pretending to be normal would have been a safer bet.

But I didn't. All my own fault. Even if some guy from the future had stood in front of me shrieking at me to do something different and doing a Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come on me I wouldn't have believed him. Because I'd long ago, consciously or otherwise, started running away from myself and what was real for me, and by now I couldn't change course even if I'd wanted to. There is a horrible irony in knowing that I spent most of my life running away from the things that would ultimately save me (honesty, truth, reality, love, self-acceptance) because I believed they would kill me.

So there I was, propelling myself forward and using terror as fuel. Still no piano, no self-examination, no past, no concept of who I am or what I was. I was on autopilot. And, fuck me, it is still amazing to me how easy it was to pull off.

My job involved selling advertising and editorial to businesses around the world for financial publications no one read. And as it involved manipulating, lying to and cajoling older men, I was absolutely amazing at it. I was earning commission on every sale, alongside a small basic salary, and while my friends were starting off on
£
20,000 a year, I was pulling in
£
3,000 to
£
4,000 per week without breaking a sweat, working until 5 p.m. every day and never on weekends. Admittedly, my weird time neurosis meant I was in the office by 7.30 a.m. every day, my desperate need to succeed and appear to be number one helped drive me, and the money made me hungry for more.

If there is a career designed both to feed self-hatred of unimaginable proportions, while also stroking fragile egos, working in the City fits the bill better than most others. Especially as I was clean and sober – all that money for a single guy aged twenty-two was guaranteed to buy me a few years of distraction and evasion. I took girls to the most expensive hotels, bought them unimaginably stupid presents, travelled around the world, had suits made for me, ate in restaurants where the first course alone cost more than a meal for four at Pizza Express. I was a massive, catastrophic cock. A parody of everything bad about the rat race and the human race.

And here's another cool thing about abuse – the body never forgets. So I could run as fast as I liked, distract myself as much as possible, but every fucking day I was practically shitting myself with anxiety
on the Tube, my body was falling apart, my muscles were like taut, creaking old ropes, my head felt like it was in a vice for sixteen hours a day. And once again my back fell apart.

I had operation number two, enjoyed the dubious thrill of A-grade narcotics after a few years of being clean, and rushed straight back into my life of denial.

And then I met the woman who was to become my wife. The poor thing didn't stand a chance. I didn't have girlfriends, I took hostages. And Jane (at her request I have agreed to use a pseudonym) was the perfect candidate. She was pretty, ten years older than me, had been married twice before and seemed to have escaped from the 1920s world of Gatsby, prohibition and big parties. I was, in all truth, looking for a mother; she was, well, I've no idea what she was looking for, but it could not have been me unless this was some massively inappropriate cosmic joke.

I think she simply wanted a husband who wasn't an asshole. And I, cruelly if subconsciously, played right into that. I hurled Tiffany at her, took her away for weekends at the George V in Paris, sent her flowers three times a week, insisted she move from her shitty bedsit in Streatham to my flat after just two months, paid for everything and did everything I could to play the role of ‘awesome suitor'. And I did it despite myself. Despite knowing it was likely a huge mistake. Despite knowing that this was not me, that I was incapable of a relationship. I wanted to rescue her, feel good about myself for doing so, and live this Disneyfied fucking fairytale existence. And it was a disaster. I knew it was going to implode, that it was unsustainable. And so I asked her to marry me. Because that was what you did after eleven months with
someone, that is what normal people did, that would balance out the crazy in me, that would add a layer of ordinary to my life.

We got engaged. My body kept sending me messages to stop. I had yet another back operation, a big, fuck-off, serious spinal fusion.

We got married. I cried during my speech because I couldn't find a way to stop things inexorably moving forward. Two days later, 9/11 happened. Our honeymoon was overpriced and hollow. I got stung by a wasp on my ass. I woke up in our bridal suite in some exotic hotel in the South of France, realised I was now married, and somewhere far away, something horrible started to laugh and laugh and laugh.

I've honestly no idea what I was thinking, beyond that rather sad hope that if I continued to do what normal people did then I would somehow become normal. But the idea that a man like me could not only get married, but maintain, nurture, commit to a marriage was fucking ridiculous. My whole concept of love was skewed. Love for me was attention, sympathy, point-scoring, based on external opinions and external, material things. It was not about shared values and shared beliefs. It was naive, dysfunctional, unhealthy and selfish. It was a child's love for a parent, not a man's for his wife. And it is a challenge to write about this stuff without wanting to punch myself in the face again and again until there's nothing left. But it is what it is.

We made a ‘perfect home' with ridiculously expensive furniture. It looked beautiful and felt vacuum-packed. I threw money around and did all I could to distract us from the inherent flaw with our marriage which was that I (I cannot, will not speak for her) was totally, utterly incapable of maintaining a functional relationship. She was, is, a really
lovely woman. She is kind and compassionate, empathic and funny, and she has a brilliant mind.

And then she fell pregnant. It was a long and clumsy and painful fall. Something cataclysmic seemed to have happened even though nothing tangible had changed and I started falling deeper and deeper into despair and panic at what was about to happen. My world was on an unstoppable collision course with forces unseen and magnificent in their strength as I scrabbled about pretending to be one person, knowing I was quite another. And here's probably a good time to pause for yet another moment.