Pippin
Pippin
“Perhaps the only beautiful thing in life is to have been infinitely ravaged.”
Michel Leiris, Manhood
The concrete stairwell epitomises Seventies Manchester, four coloured carpets ringing the top. Afternoons locked in toilets; purple, green, grey and blue. The IRA half a mile away, ground shimmering beneath my feet.
I have been playing the piano for seventeen years. Mother chatting idly with the assistant, trembling in an empty municipal hall. It’s Grade 8, the performance good, and, charging back into a room suddenly full, shock imprints itself in adults’ eyes. The twelve-year-old comes to an abrupt halt.
The Royal Northern College of Music, 1994-1999, from age thirteen. I will talk about anything, find nothing taboo, but the one thing I will not discuss is those Saturday years.
***
I’m proud of the things that seem to require no skill. Taken for granted that I can notate a four-part chorale on hearing it twice, that I read music as fluently as words. But give me a house within three square miles of mine and I can tell you what newspaper they read, how often I deliver it and a precise description of the door. Can put up or take down a music stand in two seconds flat. After lying awake for hours or waking after uninterrupted sleep, can place the time to within three minutes. (My one, and probably only, instinctive connection with objective external reality.) Perfect platform etiquette, learnt from professionals at the age of ten.
Clare G–. Graham M–. John and Judith D–, mayors in turn, their eldest daughter a suicide; atonal chamber music for ten numbing the mundane trauma of strangers. Gaynor S–, her father my god, whom I despised, feared, effortlessly outclassed. Katie A–, almost equally talented, perfect pitch inherited from the dismissive father who later, grudgingly, confessed my class. Our friendship hinging on almost. Peter Y– and Marnie, Elgar and Scheherazade in a cold school hall. Bariolage, Brian, yes, I remember. Be proud of me. And Katherine, oh god. Katherine W–. She’d talk of meerkats and Burnley F.C. with the infinite delicacy of bones beneath the invalid’s skin, her taut, transparent, freckle-spattered skin. Elizabeth S– at the Bury flicks. Fat Angela played the same instrument, and the next time I see her, she’s playing it on TV. Peter D–, the best teacher in the North. She’s only thirteen, and there’s nothing more I can teach her and, with those words, doomed. Hello, Pippin.
Those early days set the pace, left me determined to overtake. Choosing my life at fifteen, the endless struggles with my mother leaving me on the streets. Talked off the railway line. By seventeen, smashed, spirit-soaked, exhaustively trawling these Burnley fightclubs where the only light glints off cheap sequins and smashed glasses and the swiftly removed wedding rings of the football team. Passing out at one, 7am travelling drunk, sobering up on the walk and hungover all day. Kicked out of classes for refusing to work. Youthful tousleblond Tim, Jonathan M–, endlessly, heartbreakingly kind. Penny S– and Karen H–, for some reason impressed. S.B., the rancorous coiffured sow, scattering prodigies with her stinking begonia scent. Walking through Manchester with two Oxford friends, Litsa L–; the heavy pageboy hair, reddened Slavic lips, missing my flair. Andrew K–, velvet-clad Mrs Gray, the kind Scottish woman I can no longer name. There is no doubt in my mind that Ria is a composer. Dedicating Octavia to Alina after she promised to perform it, after she died. Suicide. A fine flautist with a Seattle scholarship, performing in cheap red satin; a dowdy hand-me-down, shadowed beneath the sheen. Sarah, stricken with cancer, told me the news, and five years on I can’t shift the noose from my mind. The same week, little Ian. Like Alex, M–. I knew neither well, but the mourning hung close and low.
On the green, Luke spied on my Shostakovich. He learnt it first, but I learnt it faster; the entire first movement, from memory, in a week. Familiarising myself with the score on an American plane, sobbing in a shit-smeared phonebox because it was not quite good enough. Percentages of perfection. Even now, I cannot handle it. Ah, Charlotte Church, born five years too late. You were not the first, and you will not be the last.
Oh Nicholas, Nick, my unlikely Adonis; your Tippett, Mendelssohn, your Brahms. Sam A–, T.S. R–, no, fuck you. I will not think about this. I have said nothing, and will say no more.
***
They think I’m an English student, a journalist. A joke.
***
The twinge of a pulled dorsal interossei, Chopin stretching these long-fingered but ultimately small hands. These hands that can cover a world.
I’ve grown up. Returning to the three hours a day I never did, an hour on 36 repeated notes in the left hand. Patient, dedicated (Serena, princess with fiery eyes), chastising rather than slamming fists down hard. Not feigning legato by jamming the pedal down. Leaving the rubato alone. Performing Debussy’s First Arabesque since eleven, it has taken ten long years to realise that the power is in what you hold back. Indescribable, indomitable power massing beneath my hands.
“I have traversed a sea of blood...
Let the sun appear! let him illume my career! it matters not where it may end.”
William Beckford, Vathek
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose leaves
The way I feel today - 10 July 2004
Just seventeen - 17 March 2004
Roads to freedom - 25 February 2004
Confessions of a failed self-harmer - 25 February 2004
Manchester, united - 25 February 2004