by James Rhodes
The selfishness of the victim is the hardest thing to tolerate and treat with compassion. We are idiots. It is nigh on impossible to love us. We push and we push until finally we get what we want – more victimhood. Sometimes my capacity for tolerating and desiring pain is infinite, a bottomless pit of self-hurt and a perverse thrill in seeking more and more.
I guess I could look at this a slightly different way. That my son being born was the beginning of the end of my old life and the start of a new, much more fulfilling life. And in hindsight, that makes perfect sense and would make Deepak Chopra fiercely proud. But spending so many years walking through quicksand, fighting imaginary fires, feeling a never-ending sense of dread and despair, takes its toll.
Things started to happen to me that baffled me because I hadn’t experienced them for years and years; I’d cry for no reason, find sleep either impossible or the only possible thing I could do. The scariest thing would be losing time – just checking out, without being aware I was doing so, and come back a while later, be it minutes or hours, with no memory of what had happened. My childhood tics started coming back – squeaking, twitching, tapping, light-switch-clicking – and I lost my appetite for everything from food to sex to TV. The lights were going out and I had no clue why or how to stop it.
So I looked for distractions. I looked for a way out that didn’t involve homicide or suicide. And all roads led to music. They always do. I couldn’t be a musician, I knew that after ten years without playing a single note on the piano that was not an option, but perhaps I could become an agent. Anything that got me out of the City and even vaguely towards music had to be a step in the right direction. And so I did what an egocentric City-working cock would do – found the address for the agent who represented the greatest pianist in the world and set about forming a business partnership with him.
It wasn’t hard. A case of Krug, a few emails, a meal or two and I was set. His name was Franco. He lived in Verona. He had looked after my hero, Grigory Sokolov, for twenty years. Grigory Sokolov – without question, the greatest living pianist. Arguably the greatest pianist of all time. A man who managed again and again and again to use the notes of a piano to reach into your soul, rip out whatever was in there, shake it about, polish it, take it for a ride and then put it back again in a way that just fit a bit better. This guy, this weird, autistic savant. This chubby, awkward, introverted statesman of the piano, had been my musical crack for a decade since I’d heard his first album. It was all Chopin. And live. Most live albums (my own included) are cobbled together from at least two performances; the producers and engineers take all the best bits and merge them together into one ‘live’ album. If the label is feeling especially cheeky, they also go into the studio post-concert and cover any dodgy bits, a process known as patching, and make sure they don’t mention it anywhere. It’s a blatant misrepresentation, but we do it because we’re needy and insecure and cannot bear the thought of offering something that is less than perfect. But not Sokolov. One concert, one take, some cold, coughing Russians in the audience and the most visceral, staggering performance of Chopin’s Second Sonata and Op. 25 études I’d ever heard. It’s on iTunes – don’t just take my word for it.
There began a love affair, made even more tantalising given he has only released a tiny handful of albums. The rest were gathered online, child-porn style, via developmentally disabled pianophiles (it’s a real word, I promise) and listened to in total awe.
So the thought of working with his agent, who had brought him over to the West from Russia as a young man and turned him into a phenomenon, performing to sold-out audiences all around the world, was overwhelmingly exciting.
With Jane’s blessing, I quit my job, my excitement just about countering the slight feeling of nausea at walking away from such a reliable income, and Franco and I decided we’d both chuck in €30,000 and open a London office. But before doing that we agreed I should go to Verona for a couple of weeks and learn the ropes. Which I did. Eagerly.
Franco lives in the only high-rise building in Verona, towering above the city with the most extraordinary views, floor-to-ceiling windows, a €1,000 coffee machine and a Yamaha grand piano. That, right there, is all you need in this world. And after dinner on my first night he asked me if I played the piano. I mumbled something about not having played for years but that I used to play well enough for a teenager.
So he asked if I’d play him something. And I, being hungry for approval and attention and a bit high from the pasta and views and Italian-city smell, sat at the piano and somehow whacked out a piece by Chopin. It was, to my ears, messy and embarrassing. But I’d remembered all of it, got through it and, a little bit red in the face, turned around afterwards to see his reaction. He was sat there, jaw on the floor and totally silent. And after a minute he simply said to me: ‘James, I have been doing this for twenty-five years and I have never heard someone play the piano like that who was not a professional pianist. You are not going to become an agent. You will come every month here to Verona, stay with me, and study with my friend Edo who is the best teacher in all of Italy. You may not become successful, but you have to try.’
And that was that.
He then spent the next few days dragging me round to all of his friends’ houses (all of whom had pianos) and forcing me to play to them like some kind of newly trained puppy. And it was weird and wonderful and scarcely believable to me. After a decade of not playing and trying to make peace with the fact that I would never be able to do what I’d always dreamed of, Franco had thrown a hand grenade into the equation.
And one morning we ended up at Edo’s house. And this was one of the guys who really changed my life forever. The most violent, aggressive, arrogant, dictatorial bastard I’d ever met. The perfect teacher for someone like me who was lazy, ill-disciplined, badly trained and overly enthusiastic. I had my first lesson with him that day. We walked together to the music shop and bought a Mozart sonata (the F major one, for those who care). Which was a shit start because (a) I hated Mozart (in much the same adolescent way I hated everything I didn’t know or understand, because I was too small-minded and lazy to get to know him better), and (b) I thought we should start with a massive, showy Rachmaninov concerto.
And then we got to work. In a way I had never known existed. Slowly, carefully, with an almost inhuman attention to detail, intense concentration, a ton of pencilling. He showed me tricks that made everything possible, the most useful being his rhythm method; most tricky passages in piano-playing involve runs of fast notes. And he broke down those runs into groups of either four or three notes at a time. And then further broke them down into different rhythms – ten in total, each one putting emphasis on a different one of that group either by accenting it, or dotting the note before (holding it down 50 per cent longer than marked). It was a bit like a long-distance runner breaking down each and every mechanical movement he’s asking his body to do while running a marathon and then practising each micro-movement again and again one after the other until he starts to put them all together.
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, conc
entrated, 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.
