Instrumental (9 page)

I'd train my fingers to play every variation of every group of notes in every possible way and then play the whole passage through, and fuck me if the fiftieth time through I didn't play it perfectly as written. It was like a door opening: spend a few hours working methodically and slowly and you will end up playing brilliantly much, much more quickly and reliably than just going at it with a sledgehammer approach. It was a huge revelation, because what it meant was that all the pieces I'd thought impossible to play suddenly became possible. I finally understood the 0.2 of a second rule that Edo had told me about – the idea that to most people, that length of time is just a blink of an eye, but to a Formula One driver it is the difference between coming first and coming tenth. Most people can get good enough at the piano in a relatively short period of time, but to get to the top, to up your game by the 0.2 of a second required to move from good to great, can take twenty-five years of this kind of relentless, concentrated, consistent work. I felt like someone who'd been paralysed from the waist down and was suddenly able to walk again, albeit with a lot of hard work and training.

And so that is what I did. Hard work and training. Every month I
would fly over from Gatwick to Verona, spend four days with Edo and then go back home to practise. It was in equal parts soul-destroying and exhilarating. He was so nasty, so critical, so hyper-controlling – often I'd see a mobile phone winging its way towards me from the corner of my eye as he hurled it at me in disgust, or had him screaming at me, spittle flying out of his mouth, raging at me in Italian. On the (very rare) occasion I played in a way he found acceptable he would simply shrug and say, ‘What's next?' My piano scores are still filled with his writing – delightful acronyms like DWTFYW (‘do what the fuck you want', to be heard in his exasperated, disappointed, surly tone), BABY KILLER (expressing disapproval over an interpretive approach of mine), and the simple, if accurate, SHIT. But I didn't really care because I was playing pieces I had been in awe of my whole life – Chopin's Third Sonata and Second Piano Concerto, Beethoven's ‘Waldstein' Sonata and Op. 109 sonata, Bach's Partitas, giant Chopin pieces like the Polonaise-Fantasie and F minor Fantasie, Rachmaninov études, Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies.

We even bought a new piano, the most beautiful Steinway Model B. And for what it's worth, Steinway truly are the best pianos in the world. There simply is no competition. And their prices reflect it – I increased our mortgage to buy the piano (a vomit-inducing £55,000) and it sat in our front room, the most profoundly valuable thing I'd ever owned.

I would spend hours each day practising – and practising correctly, too; slowly, methodically, intelligently, before treating myself by playing through the whole piece and seeing people walking by outside stop and take a few minutes to stand still and listen (I would close the
shutters out of embarrassment but still peek through and see them there). We had a nanny who looked after Jack for a few hours each day while I practised, and then we would spend time as a family cooking, walking, playing, hanging out. It felt almost believable. The noise in my head had receded, replaced with notes and music, and it seemed to allow me some space to function more effectively. Life was a bit less fragile and a little softer and easier. It seemed manageable.

And Jack was still being a miracle, learning to walk, talk, laugh and grab. Still the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen in my life. I, from the outside at least, had it all: a pretty, supportive, successful wife and perfect child, a lovely 2,000-square-foot home with a giant garden and brand new Steinway, time and space to pursue my dream career, plenty of money in the bank, lush car, good friends – it was the ostensibly complete life.

There are many things I wish for. Cricket matches to not be able to last five days and still end in a draw. A massive increase in awareness and funding for mental health units and rape crisis centres. A six pack. KFC to deliver.

But most of all, I wish I could settle for what things looked like rather than what they felt like. I wish I could just have looked at my life then and said, ‘Yep. Nailed it. Settle in, relax and enjoy.' How much easier things would be without my head. It should have been obvious that symptomatic relief brought about by a change in career, as with any new miracle fix, be it a new girl, a bit more money, a new house or a fucking holiday, is invariably temporary. It quickly becomes harder and harder to convince the self that things are different, and before long my previously silent brain companions started coming
back to the foreground in my head and letting me know how fucked I was.

The unease that I had felt when my son was born returned and I started to feel this cold hand of something grimy and slimy crawling up the back of my neck. This fucking thing that just would not leave me alone no matter how hard I tried to move away from it. This giant, filthy come-stain that had been following me around like a malicious stray pit bull for decades.

Once again the piano started to turn on me, the lustre of learning these magnificent new pieces started to fade, replaced with constant self-criticism at my inability to play them perfectly. I was getting more and more frustrated, starting to spin out quicker and quicker day by day, like someone had turned on a slow-boiling kettle in my stomach and mind that was gradually getting hotter and hotter. I wasn't sure what had happened or why, but I knew something wasn't right.

And functioning as an adult, husband, father, civilised human being while all this was happening was something of a challenge. I carried on, on autopilot, for as long as I could, but I was fighting a losing battle and I knew it. It was a question of when – and not if – all hell would break loose.

Ironically, it started when I asked for help for the first time. It was getting more and more apparent that I was unable to function the way I wanted to, or the way my family needed me to. I'd successfully kept my wife out of the loop for a long time – not hard to do when there are changes of career, work deadlines, new houses and a toddler thrown into the mix. I had, in the past, made a couple of oblique references to abuse in front of her, but it had never been discussed or
properly acknowledged. Whatever honest version of love had been there in the beginning had either disappeared completely or (more likely) was buried under the weight of denial, relentless point-scoring and my own self-obsession.

I could deal with suffering, but eventually I couldn't deal with my family paying the price for it. And one day, looking online, I found a reference to a charity that focused on helping male survivors of sexual assault. I'm not sure why, but I called them. Maybe it was boredom, maybe I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. Maybe it was a final, desperate attempt to see if anything could be salvaged or made bearable.

They were based in London Bridge and offered me a confidential appointment the next day. And the big question, still, is ‘Had I known what would unravel, would I still have gone?' Probably not.

I arrived (two hours early, as normal) and eventually was shown in to a standard ‘shrink's office by Ikea' room – two comfortable but not too comfortable chairs, a low coffee table between them, Kleenex in the middle, muted tones, wanky seascapes on the walls. A woman with the loveliest face imaginable was there. Open, kind, totally loving and non-judgmental. And, for all my resolve to dance around the subject, to not talk about anything too personal, keep the walls up, it all came out. Thirty years of it just poured out of me from start to finish. Everything in as much detail as I could remember. I didn't make eye contact once, but just went at it like an actor auditioning for the role of ‘autistic, lunatic, ashamed rape victim'. And the only thing I remember her saying to me afterwards was, ‘Have you told your wife?' Which was as alien a concept to me as suggesting I start training to walk on the moon.

‘Of course I haven't told my wife!'

‘Why not?'

‘What the fuck! Why the fuck would I tell my wife?'

‘Because she's your wife. This has all started to come out now and the road is going to get trickier and narrower, and you're going to need as much support as possible.'

That's another thing they don't tell you. Once you start talking you're fucked. The perpetrators who swear you to secrecy were right all along. You can't put it back in the box. It's like lancing a boil, except what comes out is a seemingly endless jet of pus, bile, toxic waste that does not diminish or lessen but rather increases in intensity and volume until you are fucking drowning in it.

‘You need to tell her. You need to tell her today. You need to ask her for some help.'

I had told a stranger, with guaranteed confidentiality (I had asked about that at least twelve times to confirm it), and not given my real name or mentioned any identifiable names of schools or teachers. And now, apparently, I had to tell my wife things that I had spent my entire life locked in and hidden away.

And the thing is that I knew she was right. Not because I felt I needed support, but because this thing was out of its box now, and just like bungee-jumping off a cliff, once you leave the edge there is no going back. I was in freefall, and Jane was, potentially, my parachute, and I knew, just absolutely knew, that now it was out there in the atmosphere I was in real danger. If you spend long enough thinking
you will die if you tell your secrets, then you end up believing it. If a rapist tells a five-year-old child again and again what monstrous things will happen to him if he ever tells anyone, it is assimilated, unquestioned, accepted as absolute truth. And I'd told someone and the clock was now ticking and time was running out and I was more fucked than I'd ever thought possible. To all intents and purposes I was now a five-year-old masquerading as a thirty-one-year-old, with no defence, no skills at dissimulation I could fall back on, no way out but through.

I texted my wife and asked her to meet me for dinner that night at a restaurant we both loved. I got there feeling clammy, sick, just ill with fuckedness. Because I knew that what I was going to tell her would eventually destroy us once and for all and that she was in no way equipped to give me what I needed. I didn't even know what I needed. So I felt like a suicide bomber with a backpack full of C-4, about to blow up a bunch of innocents and unable to back out. Relax, I know it's not the same thing. But feelings sometimes feel like Auschwitz, even if in reality they're closer to Butlins. Real compassion comes from understanding that what feels true for someone is, to all intents and purposes, true. Doesn't matter a bit if it is patently untrue to you and everyone else. And this terror felt true to me. It was my reality, however skewed that may seem.

She knew something was up. I looked dreadful and couldn't meet her eye. And so when she asked me what was wrong I just laid it out for her. Cold, clipped, matter of fact. And I knew there and then we were done. That this fucking guy had ruined me and, twenty-five years on, my marriage too.

The important thing to mention is that my wife was, is, the loveliest woman. She is capable of stupefying levels of kindness and compassion. And I know that it was a case of ‘couldn't' not ‘wouldn't'. She literally could not respond in a way that was going to help salvage things. It was like trying to put a body back together after it had jumped on a hand grenade. With all the willingness in the world, it just ain't going to happen. We left the restaurant and drove home in silence. And I sat in my son's room, looking at his four-year-old little body. And just fucking cried.

TRACK TEN

Liszt, ‘Totentanz'

Sergio Tiempo, Piano

Liszt is the wanker who is responsible for making pianists perform full-length piano recitals from memory. This was never done before – concerts were a mixture of different musicians and genres of music, and performers always used the score. And then this nineteenth-century rock star, the Paganini of the piano and Keith Richards of his day, shattered performance convention by giving long, memorised piano recitals, and playing faster, louder, harder and more violently than anyone had ever done before. He composed treacherous, monumentally difficult pieces for piano: transcriptions of all the Beethoven symphonies for solo piano, virtuoso showpieces based on popular operatic themes of the day, dozens of études which remain almost impossible to perform accurately unless you're a fucking machine.

A child prodigy who quickly morphed into a womanising, super-rich showman, it all got a bit much for him, and several affairs and children later he took holy orders at the age of forty-six and joined a Franciscan order, continuing to play and compose until his death in 1886 at the age of seventy-five.

In addition to two piano concertos, he wrote a few pieces for piano and orchestra, one of which was called the ‘Dance of Death'. He was slightly obsessed with death, frequenting Parisian hospitals and asylums and even prison dungeons to see those who had been condemned to die. Many of his works have titles linked with the same subject, and this piece, this overwhelmingly terrifying seventeen minutes of piano fury is based on the famous Dies Irae – the death theme used by composers from Rachmaninov to Berlioz.

This performance is a live one by Sergio Tiempo and I genuinely have yet to hear a performance so ridiculously bombastic. The guy just has two incredible hands, zero fear and an absolute conviction of what he wants to say. It's astonishing.

HINDSIGHT IS CRYSTAL CLEAR.
I can see now that I had let a very old, very toxic secret out. I had brought my wife into it (without her consent – she had ostensibly married a decent, undamaged, stand-up guy), I had embarked on a ridiculously ambitious career change, and my son had just turned four. What the fuck did I think was going to happen?

Here's another heads-up for victims of abuse. It is, apparently, very common for the world to spin completely off its axis when your child approaches the age you were when the abuse began. I didn't know this. My psyche did. I was blindsided. There was something inside me, clawing at me, desperate to get out, and I just could not keep it in any longer. It felt like my mind was a computer that had been pushed too hard for too long and simply exploded. My brain literally felt hot. It's the weirdest feeling; not pleasant, overwhelmingly
scary. And I was scrabbling around for anything that would fix it, however temporary.

I knew drink and drugs were an option. I also knew that if I went down that route I would end up dead (fair enough) but more importantly I'd probably destroy the people I loved most too.

And then, just as I was desperate to find something that was halfway between suicide and murder, I found razor blades.

I'd done what any self-respecting guy in my situation would have done and gone online looking for solutions to what was happening. And I'd found the glorious, unhinged world of the online forum. Anonymous, intonation-free, text-based cesspits masquerading as help but merely a front for vomiting all of the various neuroses, perversions, kinks and foibles out into the world in the hope of ending the feeling of ‘always alone' and possibly finding someone worse than you. And on one of these sites people were talking about cutting. As if it were a bad thing – how they'd done it again but were furious about doing so and wished they could stop. It was something I'd heard about, usually in connection with teenage girls, but it had never occurred to me to do it myself.

But everything hurt, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. And so in the most banal way imaginable, I popped off down to the local chemist and bought a five-pack of Wilkinson Sword razor blades and some bandages.

This part of the book is likely to trigger the fuck out of anyone with similar issues. So skip it or call a friend. And before you judge me too much for what I'm about to share, perhaps a few words about the act of carving your arms up.

Self-harm (SH from here on in) is a wonder drug. It is reaching pandemic levels in the UK, where we already have the highest rate of SH in Europe. Instead of tapas and siestas we are reaching for small metallic objects with sharp edges and strips of absorbent material. And the reason for this is that it is the most effective, immediate and electric high, one that is only equalled by heroin (injecting not smoking) and crack cocaine. It has no come down, no negative side effects (when done right), costs next to nothing, can be done anywhere and you only ever need to score from Boots (or your kitchen drawer if they're closed).

It involves all the ‘safe' elements that make illegal drugs so appealing (ritual, thought control, feelings slam, isolation, escape, general ‘fuck the world' rage) and adds in a dose of visceral self-hatred, immunity from arrest (unless you're very unlucky), greater control, a healthy(ish) expression of rage and the lovely feeling of being able to scream out to the world about how much pain you're in without having to say it out loud. Remember that feeling of wanting to tell on someone at school who was bullying you/abusing you, but not feeling able to? Magnify that by a million and then imagine you could go back in time, set fire to that person again and again, force them to watch you decapitate their family and then do a jig in front of them as they burn slowly to death. You can achieve all of that and then some with a £1 box of Wilkinson Sword blades and a 20p bandage.

And that is why wanting to stop it and seeing it as a bad thing is a losing battle. Something like this can never, will never, be dealt with by talking, mental health charity adverts, waiting room leaflets and well-meaning teachers. It works too well, the pay-off is too great, the endorphin release too intense.

It is a regular, consistent, effective coping mechanism. And it is as rife as the not-so-hidden Valium craze of the 1970s. The majority of those who engage in this behaviour are catastrophically misunderstood, misdiagnosed, mistreated. SH is
not
an indicator of suicidal ideation. It is
not
indicative of a threat to others. It does
not
mean that you are less capable of functioning well. Russell Brand, Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, Alfred Kinsey, Sid Vicious are a few high-profile men who have used it. The list of women is far longer.

This is not something done only by skinny teenage girls (although far too many of them indulge frequently). It is invariably a response to a culture in which we rush around invisible and unheard and find ourselves unable to keep up with the pace and stresses of modern life. A place where, male or female, we must parent, earn and achieve in unsustainable and impossibly increasing ways. And even if we manage to get to that place of achievement, the surprise is that it makes not the slightest bit of difference. We still feel shabby and less-than.

But that day I found a cure, a way to stop feeling quite so shit about myself.

I get home to an empty flat. Jack is out with Jane. I'm shaking as I set out the little cutting kit on the bathroom floor, sat cross-legged. I stare at my arms and decide which one and where. I figure left forearm is the place to start. So I pull off my T-shirt, take out and unwrap a single blade. It is impossibly shiny and kind of scary to look at – smooth, flexible, tiny, ludicrously sharp. I push it down into the skin and then angle it upwards and inwards and drag it hard across about an inch of flesh, pushing down as I do so. At first nothing at all. No pain, no nothing. And then about a second or two later, I see
the skin literally open up, blood appearing magically, pain rushing through my body, the flesh opening. And the blood keeps coming. Far more than I'd thought. I had totally miscalculated the pressure needed. Bandages were going to do fuck all so I grabbed a towel and used that. I was starting to panic – there was blood all over the white, tiled floor, the towel was getting soaked through, I couldn't enjoy my high at all. I had completely screwed this up.

I called my best friend Matthew because he and his wife were a kind of medical power-couple – he a psychologist, she the head of ER at a hospital ten minutes' drive from my house. And of course he came round, drove me to his wife's hospital, had a quiet word with her, helpfully avoiding a psych consult and the long, drunken queue of miserable bastards already there, and she kindly, gently, flushed it, stitched it, bandaged it and let me out.

I played every card in the book to keep them quiet. To not interrogate me, call my wife, come home with me, confiscate my blades. To convince them it was my first time and wouldn't happen ever again, that I was horrified and had made a terrible mistake. And of course that's what good friends do, isn't it? They left me, mercifully, to my own devices, and went on with their business. And I got home, cleaned up the floor and tried again. A little less pressure, a little more attention to detail. And this time it was perfect. Three inch-long slices, not deep enough to require stitches, not shallow enough to allow the pain to subside too quickly. Just right. And it felt like a heroin high. Only cleaner. That feeling of falling back down onto the bathroom floor, satisfied, spent, exhilarated was everything I'd hoped it would be and more.

That's the thing about cutting – not only do you get high, but you can express your disgust at yourself and the world, control the pain yourself, enjoy the ritual, the endorphins, the seedy, gritty, self-violence privately and hurt no one other than yourself. It felt like having a particularly seedy sexual affair, whilst saving a fortune on hotel rooms and not having to betray your wife and forensically scrub cell phones and email inboxes.

And it did its job well. I'd found something, albeit temporary, that helped me function better, be more available, show up for my family, put on the mask. It became a kind of dirty, daily reprieve from falling apart, and gave me just enough strength to act like a husband and father to the outside world, but not quite enough to remove the stink of weird, not-quite-rightness surrounding me while I did it.

I'd play my piano having dropped Jack at nursery school, break between practice sessions to cut myself, pick him up at the end of the day and we'd all spend the evening as a family doing what families do. It was schizophrenic and weird and wrong but I couldn't get out of it.

There is this peculiar twist inside me that forbids me to enjoy things that I like unless they are hidden. With the sole exception of smoking, everything that is pleasurable brings shame. Sex – secretive and hidden away with the lights off. Piano – shutters down, door closed, never in front of other people unless they've paid for tickets. Drugs – alone in a shabby room undisturbed. Cutting – behind a locked bathroom door. Eating – usually quickly and urgently in the kitchen, away from prying eyes. Spending money on nice things – hidden from my wife, done online away from shop assistants, delivered anonymously via the mail
by a judgmental postman. Holding my son – in the dead of night as the world slept, alone in his room, his breathing deafening me.

Life is temporary, dangerous, hostile and aggressive. And I acted accordingly. I should have got out of it then and there. Made my apologies, filed for divorce, surgically removed myself from the equation, fled the country, started afresh somewhere far away where I might have been able to buy a few more years of relative peace. But I didn't. Instead, I decided to organise my first public concert.

It was an outstanding idea. Just as things are beginning to fall apart, when there is pressure coming from every angle – pressure to make the marriage work, to be the best father on the planet, to play the piano like a genius, to be a man – I decide to add to it by giving my first performance. To show those closest to me and myself that I wasn't a total waste of space, and that the work I'd been doing was actually bearing fruit.

I found a concert hall to rent on London's South Bank that had about 400 seats and was a stone's throw away from the Festival Hall. I found a children's charity that I could align it with (so as to avoid the arrogance of charging money to see me play and also pretend I was doing something vaguely noble and altruistic). And I set the date for a few weeks' time.

I was playing a stupendous programme – three giant pieces by Bach, Beethoven and Chopin (the holy trinity of piano music), perhaps 120,000 notes, all from memory, all with the right fingering, all with the right touch, pedal, nuance, all the time being aware of the note that came before and the note that comes after, all merged into one glorious whole and sent out of the piano to a waiting audience. It's
a hell of a thing to do, especially for the first time. Most pianists – well, all pianists – have been doing that since the age of nine or ten, younger in Asia. I had just turned thirty-one. I had no idea about nerves, performance practice, breathing, how to deal with audience noise and how to concentrate for two hours to such a degree. I could barely make it through an episode of
EastEnders
without (literally) losing the plot.

The hall was rammed. I've no idea why. Friends came, friends of friends came, the hall must have emailed their database because there were also strangers, music lovers, randoms, hundreds of people crammed in, last-minute scrabbles to find extra chairs, me backstage wanting to vom, lights down, last coughs, that unique noise heard in concert halls all over the world as the audience settles into the expectation of something beneath words. And on I walk.

Shrinks talk a lot about finding a safe place. Somewhere that you can go to in your head that engenders a feeling of well-being and relaxation. Perhaps the nook of someone's arm, a favourite beach, a childhood bedroom. I know now that mine, invariably, is sat in front of a grand piano, single spotlight on the keys, the rest of the room in total darkness. All I can see in my field of vision is a black and white keyboard with eighty-eight keys and, preferably, the gold letters that spell out ‘Steinway'.