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TRACK THREE

Schubert, Piano Trio No. 2 in E flat, Second Movement

Ashkenazy, Zukerman, Harrell Trio

A few months before his death in 1828 at the age of thirty-one, Schubert completed a fifty-minute-long trio for piano, violin and cello. He had led a short, miserable, broken life with music providing the sole counterpoint to his wretchedness. Schubert was constantly broke, relying on friends for food, lodging and cash. He was invariably unhappy in love, not helped by being short, ugly and over-sensitive to slights both real and imagined. And yet, despite being a walking, talking car crash, he was aggressively prolific – he wrote more than twenty thousand bars of music in his eighteenth year alone, composed nine symphonies (Beethoven had only written one by the age of thirty-one), over six hundred songs, twenty-one piano sonatas and endless chamber music.

The vast majority of his output wasn’t performed until after his death, but this trio was. Chamber music was much easier to perform in private homes than orchestral music, and some homes in Vienna would host regular Schubertiades – informal evenings of his music, together with poetry readings and dancing. In 1828 the trio was given a first performance at one of these evenings (put on to celebrate a friend’s engagement). The slow movement encapsulates perfectly a life too short-lived – funereal and dark, tinged with hope and an insight into the infinite potential of genius.

Written by one of the only composers since Mozart who could conceive and compose an entire work in his head before scribbling it down on paper, this is the soundtrack of a man so depressed he started out his student days training to be a lawyer.

It is a devastating reminder of just how much we have missed out on by his dying prematurely at the age of thirty-one.

Stupid syphilis.

WHAT’S MORE INTERESTING (TO ME) than how I learned to swallow and take it in the ass, is the impact that rape has on a person. It is like a stain that is ever present. There are a thousand reminders of it each day. Every time I take a shit. Watch TV. See a child. Cry. Glimpse a newspaper. Hear the news. Watch a movie. Get touched. Have sex. Wank. Drink something unexpectedly hot or take too big a gulp. Cough or choke.

Hypervigilance is one of the weirder symptoms of PTSD. Every time I hear a loud noise, sneeze, bang, shriek, cry, car horn, anything sudden like a touch on the shoulder, a phone notification, I jump out of my skin. It’s involuntary, uncontrollable, unintentionally humorous and dementing at once. And it’s especially shit with classical music where sudden changes in volume occur all the time (if you see a slightly scruffy guy on the Tube with headphones on jumping out of his seat every few minutes, come and say hello).

There are also the tics. The little and not so little twitches that have been with me since the abuse started. Eyes twitch, vocal chords spasm, grunts and squeaks pop out uninvited and must be repeated until they are just right. And, continuing along the OCD/Tourette’s spectrum, things need to be touched a certain way, rhythms tapped out impeccably on tables or walls or legs, light switches flicked the correct number of times, and on and on.

When I’m playing on stage is where it gets dangerous; if a part of my left hand touches the keys of the piano then I have to replicate the exact same touch with my right hand. I have to. And quickly, too. Which is not something I want to be thinking about and orchestrating when trying to remember the 30,000 notes of a Beethoven sonata. I will also need to sniff one of my hands at certain times while playing (a big ask). And I try (and fail) to pass all of it off as ‘being artistic’ so people don’t notice. I will try and wait until I’m playing a loud bit before squeaking so the audience doesn’t hear me. Will try, on the fly, to change the fingering I’ve spent hundreds of hours memorising to allow me to turn my hand inwards and scrape the edge of the keys to satisfy that unique itch. And God forbid I should see a hair on the key. Then I’ll have to find time to brush it off, mid-performance, so everything is clean. It’s a lot to think about, feels totally out of my control, and there is no satisfactory explanation that will cut it with the critics when it impacts on my playing.

The mental tics are much more insidious. Thoughts literally cannot be stopped or truly dreadful things will happen. So when I’m in a state, thinking about something bad, maybe about my girlfriend being all flirty with some other guy, or perhaps what it would feel like to hurt myself (a different variation on the same theme), it must be followed through until I am satisfied. So when well-meaning shrinks tell me to distract and stop the thought, I just laugh and think, ‘Ain’t going to happen, and actually you should thank me for it because if I do that you will end up paying the price and have some terrible accident, you’ll lose your career and husband, end up broke and disabled and need your own shrink who you won’t be able to afford so you’ll die alone and in obscurity, miserable and afraid. You’re welcome.’

Then there are the really shaming things. Like getting an erection every time I cry. Somehow the body remembers everything and links tears with sexual arousal. I would cry as he blew me. But physiology is physiology and my dick did its job and got hard. And so now when I cry it thinks, ‘Oh I remember this! Up we go.’

Sex is an excellent topic also. The ground-swallowing, monumental shame of the orgasm. The images that fly across closed eyelids as you fuck, that force you to shake your head to try and make them disappear. The constant reminders of being touched there, there and there and what it meant at the time and so what it must mean now. The unremitting awfulness of believing at a core level that your girlfriend, wife, fiancee is somehow stained, broken, disgusting and evil because she had sex as a teenager. Despite knowing how ridiculous, how stupid, how illogical that sounds. I had sex young. It was bad. I am bad. You had sex young so you are bad. And so we cannot be together, I cannot respect you. You are so fucking disgusting. Marry me. I love you. You vile fucking whore. There’s a Hallmark card, right there.

There were childhood sexual fantasies of being the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust and wandering around the streets pulling women out of cars and doing unspeakable things to them, getting aroused at the thought of being held down and having to beg for my own life, and a host of other weird and wonderful kinks involving torture, control, pain and God knows what. All before the age of nine.

And those flashes of anger. Corroding, all-consuming anger at everything in the whole world. Anger at happy fucking families, broken families, families, sex, success, failure, sickness, children, pregnant women, police, doctors, lawyers, teachers, schools, hospitals, shrinks, door locks, gym mattresses, authority, drugs, abstinence, friends, enemies, smoking, not smoking, everything and everyone, ever.

Most of all, anger that I really, truly know that I cannot ever make what happened disappear completely. It’s one of those hideous faceblot stain things that children stare at and adults look away from. It is just there all the time and nothing I do can or will ever erase it. And I can try as much as I like to make it ‘my thing’, the reason I am special, a permission slip to behave however I want and to feel like a wannabe, spastic Holden Caulfield even at thirty-eight, but I know all the time, every day, that there is nowhere I can put it, no way I can frame or reframe it, nothing I can do with it to make it bearable or acceptable.

There is an inbuilt mechanism in our psyche that helps with that, and it is dissociation. The most serious and long-lasting of all the symptoms of abuse. It’s really quite brilliant. It started in the gym all those years ago.

He’s inside me and it hurts. It’s a huge shock on every level. And I know that it’s not right. Can’t be right. So I leave my body, floating out of it and up to the ceiling where I watch myself until it becomes too much even from there, and then I fly out of the room, straight through the closed doors and off to safety. It was an inexplicably brilliant feeling. What kid doesn’t want to be able to fly? And it felt utterly real. I was, to all intents and purposes, quite literally flying. Weightless, detached, free. It happened every time and I didn’t ever question it. I just felt grateful for the reprieve, the experience, the free high.

And ever since then, like a Pavlov puppy, the minute a feeling or situation even threatens to become overwhelming, I am no longer there. I exist physically and function on autopilot (I assume), but no one is consciously inside my mind. ‘The lights are on but no one is home’ is the perfect description. As a child that wasn’t good because I couldn’t control it at all, it happened all the time, and it meant I was labelled as spaced-out, difficult, gormless, not all there. I would wander around in shades of grey and disappear for ages. I’d be sent out to the shops to pick something up for my mum and not return for hours. When I did I’d be astonished at the panic and worry I had caused – time just seemed to disappear and I would have ended up hanging out with some random stranger or going somewhere entirely different from where I had meant to go.

Or today I will be chatting to my best friend and discussing, in detail, his plans for Christmas when five minutes later I’ll say ‘So what are your plans for Christmas?’ Not that chatting with a pal about mundane shit is threatening in any real sense of the word, but it has become so in-built, such a part of me, that I often disappear, without even realising it, at even the barest hint of a threat. Like potentially having to commit to seeing someone at Christmas when it’s only November and I may be dead, on holiday, busy, wanting to be alone and safe instead.

Key moments in my life are missing because of this. I look at my passport and know that I’ve been to certain places. I meet people who claim to know me, sometimes know me quite well. I go to restaurants where I’m welcomed back, tell people stories they gently remind me I’ve told them before or were there with me when it happened, and nothing . . . No fucking clue.

On the plus side it means I can watch the same movie and TV show several times without realising it; on the minus side I come across as rude, inconsiderate, a bit stupid. And it is fucking annoying not being able to remember almost everything to the point that it takes me several minutes to figure out what I had for breakfast, why I left the house, what day, month and year it is.

All the more weird that I can remember over 100,000 notes in a piano recital. All the more amazing that sat in front of a piano is one of the few places I am truly grounded.

I’ve been like this for as long as I can remember. As a kid dissociation was the only way the world could be vaguely manageable. If you don’t remember you can’t be terrorised by the past. Our psyches are fucking brilliant – designed to deal with any and all eventualities, at least until they are overloaded and break in two. And yet, even then there is often a way back to something approaching a working state.And my closest friends are aware of it and they don’t get upset when I ask them the same question twice in forty-five seconds or have no recollection of a holiday we took a few months or years ago. Which is exactly why they’re my closest friends and why I can count them on the fingers of one hand.