by James Rhodes
Example – a girlfriend asks me a question. An easy one.
‘What shall we eat for dinner?’
A Normal will answer, ‘Chicken.’
Perhaps, ‘Whatever you’d like, sweetheart, I’m easy.’
Or, if we’re generous, ‘Pick a restaurant, darling, and I’ll take us there with pleasure.’
A survivor (especially one with PTSD or similar) needs to run through the following questions silently and in a split second before giving his answer:
Why is she asking?
What does she expect me to say?
How will she react if I do say that?
What does she want to eat?
Does she want me to suggest what I know she’ll like?
Does she want me to suggest taking her out?
Why?
Have I done anything wrong?
Do I need to make up for anything?
What is the answer I want to give?
Why?
What will happen if I say that?
Is it a trick question?
Is it an anniversary?
What did we eat yesterday?
What are we eating tomorrow?
What do we have in the fridge?
Will she think I’m criticising her shopping skills?
What does she want me to answer?
What would her perfect guy answer?
What would a guy in the movies answer?
What would a normal person answer?
Who do I want/need to be when I answer this?
What would he answer?
Is that answer acceptable?
Is that answer in line with the ‘me’ she believes she knows?
Am I happy with this answer?
What is the probability she will be happy with this answer?
Is that an acceptable percentage?
If it fails, what is my get-out strategy?
Can I backtrack without causing too much damage?
What tone should I use?
Should it be phrased as a question?
A statement?
An order?
And on and on. In the blink of an eye. Kids at school who are being abused will take too much time to answer direct questions and appear evasive and startled. And they will be labelled ‘difficult’, ‘stupid’, ‘ADHD’, ‘rebellious’. They’re not. They’re in some way being fucked. Look into it.
As you get older it becomes even more ingrained, like breathing. Sometimes, occasionally, it’ll take us unawares. Especially first thing in the morning or when we’re overtired. And so in case we’re not quite bringing our A game when we’re asked a question, we perfect the whole distraction routine: ‘God you’re looking beautiful’, ‘Fuck, my back just twinged’, ‘I love you so much’, ‘I was just thinking about when . . . (insert romantic memory here)’, or more commonly, we stare into space pretending to be lost in thought and not hearing the question when in fact our brains are already racing to come up with a suitable answer. Anything to buy enough time to figure out the goddamn suitable answer.
We are multi-tasking, quick-thinking, hyper-aware, in-tune bastards. And it is a thankless, ceaseless, never-ending deluge of threat upon threat, fire after fire that has to be put out instantly. And because the body/brain cannot figure out the difference between real and imagined terror, they react as if we really are in the middle of a genuine war.
War is the best word to describe the daily life of a rape survivor. There are threats everywhere, you cannot relax ever, you take whatever you can get whenever you can get it because you are so scared of it not being there tomorrow – food, sex, attention, money, drugs. And you keep going on a mixture of adrenaline and terror. Morals go out of the window, the rulebook doesn’t exist any more, you will survive at all costs no matter what. And living like that has certain knock-on effects. I cannot begin to tell you how fucked up the physical symptoms of abuse are. I spent years, decades even, almost chained to a toilet. As a kid at boarding school I was in there pretty much every night, usually around 3 a.m., in agony. Sweating and nauseous from the pain, feeling like there was a knife being twisted into my guts. Shitting what felt like water, too scared to leave the loo for at least two hours. Same again in the morning. I swear I got through childhood on around three to four hours’ sleep a night. It’s great for maintaining weight loss, not so good for socialising.
I know I’m going on about this quite a lot. But honestly, there’s a lot to go on about. It is so easy to assume the abuse stops once the abuser is no longer in the picture and so hard to hear that that is only the beginning of it for those taking the abuse.
It didn’t get better as an adult. That horrific feeling of being on a packed tube on the way to work, sweat pouring off my face, soaking through my shirt, guts absolutely wrenched in pain, not sure if I was going to make it to the loo in time. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I could write a guide to the best easy-access toilets in London. I will, to the day I die, be grateful to luxury hotels. Shuffling into the Dorchester, the Lanesborough, the Ritz trying to look as if I belonged there and heading straight to the john just as my guts exploded in the warm safety of the locked marble-encrusted interior. Luxury hotels fit the bill only because they have multiple stalls and solid doors – Christ, Claridge’s even has a white noise machine outside to preserve decorum. Popping into a Starbucks single cubicle for a terror-dump is a no-no purely because of the fear of a queue forming outside, noises being heard, judgment, stress, anxiety, not enough time.
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 wit
h 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 goi
ng 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.
