Free Instrumental by James Rhodes Page A

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 thesame 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