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TRACK FIVE

Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 32, Op. 111, Second Movement

Garrick Ohlsson, Piano

In 1770, a child is born into difficult, violent, terrifying circumstances. His family is riddled with alcoholism, domestic violence, abuse and cruelty Things get so out of control that at sixteen he takes his own father to court to wrest control of his income so that his family can eat.

While in his twenties, he singlehandedly drags music by the scruff of its neck from the Classical into the Romantic age, focusing on emotions, looking inwards, flouting convention, staying relentlessly true to his own convictions, composing for the orchestras of the future and resolutely indifferent to others’ perceptions of him.

Totally deaf wracked with pain, emotionally fucked, he composes his thirty-second and final piano sonata in 1822, a few years before his death.

It represents the absolute summit of his musical output for the piano.

Two movements long instead of the usual three or four, it manages, somehow, to transcend the level of human existence we inhabit and take us somewhere higher, where time stands still and we actually experience the concept of ‘interiority’ that he had spoken about and the inner worlds his music represents. This was music not for God or the Court; it was about feelings, about looking inwards, about humanity, ee cummings wrote that ‘to be nobody-but-yourself – in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting’. Beethoven lived that every day of his goddamn life.

A WORD ABOUT TIME. BECAUSE it’s important. Space is nothing without time. Time is a buffer. A safe space in between stuff happening. There is literally nothing as comforting to me as a completely empty day in my diary. No meetings, dinners, appointments, coffees with friends, dates, concerts. The knowledge that I can be at home all day with enough time to do whatever I need to do. It’s the reason I arrive stupidly early to appointments, get to Heathrow five hours before my flight is due to leave, believe that a ten-minute car journey needs an hour. If there is enough time then I am safe. Needing six clear hours to do two hours of practice is about right. Same with every area of my life. Every album I’ve recorded I’ve been allotted three or four days’ recording time and have used half of it. Exams completed within half the allocated time. Deadlines met magnificently early. Chores done in a third of the time needed. It’s great for business, not so great for personal stuff. Dates don’t want to order within thirty seconds of being given a menu and be done with dinner after forty-five minutes. They don’t want to be next to someone constantly on the verge of a breakdown if they haven’t left for a party round the corner two hours before the start, who is always the first person to show up, who they know when you say ‘meet at 6’ will be there waiting at 4.30, hopping from foot to foot like a slightly anxious meerkat.

I am driven by a hundred thousand different forms of terror. Terror of being criticised, of running out of time, of not being good enough, of getting things wrong, missing out on something, not being able to focus on other things that may come up, letting other people down. It is a constantly shifting, free-floating anxiety that no matter what is done to assuage it, will easily and quickly attach itself to something new I haven’t even thought of yet. Like playing some David Lynch-inspired game of Whack-a-mole where every time you hit one on the head, a dozen more shoot up around you. And they smirk at you and say the most awful things and remind you of just how fucked you are.

I wake up with it. Always have.

If there were an ultra-neurotic Jewish mother, on coke, who was beyond evil and got wet off malevolence, that is that part of my mind. And so I hurl myself at the fucking piano as if my life depends on it. I throw myself into work. And from the outside I look like any other hard-working motherfucker who just wants to do the best job possible and not let people down. But the reality is that if I don’t then I will die, I will murder, I will fall apart in the worst possible way. It is incredibly lucky that occasionally the urge for self-preservation looks like you have a decent work ethic. Fear, masquerading as humility and commitment to the job at hand, is enough to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes.

And that’s how I got through school. Terror-driven homework, panic-studying for exams, trying as hard as I could to make time expand and increase and cocoon things so that there was, at the very least, the illusion of safety there. I was a smart kid, too. The greatest benefit from being serially abused as a kid is the ability it gives you to read situations, minds, energy. Put me in front of an adult and I will know within a few seconds what they need to hear and see in order to feel comfortable and amenable to me. It worked brilliantly with teachers – depending on the kind of person they were, I was either homesick, vulnerable, tough, plucky, cute, flirtatious, needy or independent. And it got me whatever I wanted. Extra time in exams, higher grades, extra chocolate, leave of absence from PE, pocket money. Whatever. The point is that I figured out by the age of ten that I could be in any situation and survive, sometimes even flourish, because I have the manipulative power of a superhero.

Abuse sets you up for life to be a survivor. With that part of me that split off during the rapes running the show, I can exist with no money, no friends, nowhere to live and not only appear to be OK but actually appear to be thriving. During dark times friendships mean nothing; humans are seen only as routes to getting certain things – money, comfort, approval, a job, sex, and once their purpose is served it is on to the next one. The best ‘friends’ are the ones who I can keep coming back to for more and more over years – businesses always value repeat customers the highest, with good reason. Interactions are often simply transactions for victims of abuse. And sociopaths. That’s why diagnoses are so fucking difficult – autism, Asperger’s, PTSD, bipolar, various psychopathologies, narcissism, all share so many core attributes in the diagnostic manual. So I could be generous and say I have Asperger’s and therefore I am quite manipulative and struggle with empathy, or I could say I’m a psychopath who is incapable of empathy. Both fit. Take your pick.

The problem, the great problem, is the following: while it serves a purpose, while you think you can remember all the lies, all the different characters you need to play depending on who you’re with, eventually, after a few years you begin, inevitably, to lose track. It starts to catch up with you. And you start to doubt yourself. And that’s when the trouble starts. You need to remember everything, and if you can’t, or aren’t quite sure if you’re ‘broken, broke victim’ to a certain person as opposed to ‘successful go-getter’ then everything falls apart. So turning up in a brand new BMW for a weekend away with a friend who believes you’re struggling to make ends meet requires serious explanation, more lies to keep track of, more information to retain. It is exhausting, terrifying and the stakes can be very high.

One of my diagnoses was dissociative identity disorder, where I have a number (thirteen if you’re curious) of ‘alters’ who, depending on the situation, take turns to run the show. In effect that means I have thirteen people available as and when required, to do the job of one. It is like a military operation, and partially explains the memory problems, because the alters don’t always communicate with one another effectively, if at all. Some are good, some are cold; all share one common goal – to survive no matter what.

There doesn’t seem to be a cure, as such, for DID but it can be managed. The alters can be identified, acknowledged, talked to and made friends with. The less useful ones can be told to keep quiet, the more helpful ones encouraged to assimilate with the whole. That was a fun few days with the doctor.

And when it has got too much and I’ve had to walk away from a friend/relationship/colleague, when I’ve screwed things up because it all just got too complicated, it doesn’t really matter because I can just start again with someone else, but it’s frustrating to lose. Annoying to drop the ball and fail. Must try harder. It becomes almost a kind of game. And in a way it’s sad because most of my friends and family genuinely love me. They believe they know the real me, and even if they’ve got doubts about some aspects of my behaviour or personality, they naively, if charmingly, believe that those doubts simply make them smart and empathic because they can see my many layers and still love me and understand me. But there is a complexity to things that people who weren’t fucked as a kid just cannot understand.

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.