Dancing in the Darkness

M
y name is Ania and I clean flats and brains. I met this Frankie guy when I went to clean a nightclub in France. One of the irregular customers – Alfonso Art Dealer told me he knows this Scottish genitalman who needs cleaning.

I took on this job as I wanted to work in many places in order to save money for non-terrorist airplane-driving course and sexy cat suit for special occasions.

I was very positively surprised with this Scotty Frankie guy as he had 60% good manners and was not super gay. He told me he was in famous band in England once but to me he didn’t look anything like Spice Grill or Take That.

I began doing secret scribbles about him. When he discovered them I think he got a bit overexcited since he got possessed by a desire to write a book.
I looked at him like at elephant claiming for benefit and said, ‘Anything is possible in your English land of comfort and joy. You try your best and I will correct it if it’s wrong.’

To be super honest, at first I thought Señor Frank was typical
League of Gentlemen
type but soon I figured out that his brain is a good mix and he indeed had lots of adventures.

It is true that sometimes he uses words that even Queen would not understand, but then I clean it up with the speed of light with the bright questions of simplicity: ‘What is this story about?’ ‘Do you want to entertain the humans or feed your post-fame case?’ ‘Do you want to do heritage for humanity or the manuscript for new series of
Big Brother
?’

Of course, I also corrected grammar sometimes – best English teachers in Aberdeen are Polish. I’m the brains behind this whole masterpiece.

N
o one wants to be a runt, but sometimes being a runt can work out better than not being a runt.

It’s fair to say that I was the runt of the litter. It wasn’t just that I was frail and not quite all there, I also suffered from severe mood swings. Even as a baby. At least, that’s what I’m told – I’d be gleefully happy for brief, sunshine-filled moments, then the merest trifle would send me spiralling into a black hole. Perhaps it was the sherry that did it.

Or it could have been my ultra-competitive ‘alpha male’ brothers, born a year either side of me. They were hungrier, stronger, noisier and cuter than me for a start. It wasn’t a state of affairs I was over the moon about, if you want me to be frank. Mum would confiscate my comfort blanket and strip the crib for my own safety.
When I look back, it must have been tough on her having a baby boy on suicide watch at barely 18 months old.

Once I even ate my own shit. The Belgian au pair, Antoinette, was too busy varnishing her nails to notice. I could have grabbed a handful from the potty and smeared it over the kitchen floor, spelling out the words HELP-ME-I-AM-ABOUT-
TO-EAT
-MY-OWN-SHIT-YOU-
DOPEY-BELGIAN
-COW, for all the good it would have done. But being a curious toddler, and half-French to boot, the inclination was to stick it in my mouth. I’ve tasted worse. It’s probably on a par with undercooked liver or stewed tripe.

It should have been my first life lesson: if you don’t concentrate and pay attention, you’ll soon find yourself eating shit. But if you don’t concentrate and pay attention, how are you supposed to learn lessons anyway? They say I was a spaced-out kid. I like to call it ‘deep thinking’. It’s hard to tell the two apart sometimes, so let’s just split the difference and call it ‘growing pains’.

The upshot was that as the years rolled by I just got used to the taste. And the funny thing is, almost 40 years later, I still fantasise – from time to time – about Antoinette scooping up my waste with
those immaculately manicured fingernails. Of course, she never did, but that’s not the point. Why absorb a boring life lesson when you can dream the light fandango?

O
ur father was a classical violinist, and a very restless one at that. He left us when I was seven – but not before an abortive kidnap attempt involving the dead of night, a smelly tartan rug, the back of a Leyland Land-Rover and the
early-morning
knock-knock-knocking of a Tayside policeman’s knuckles on his door. It was the early seventies and I was confused.

After that, he sold our home, a sprawling country pile outside Kinross known as ‘Warwick House’ (over 30 years later I’m still confused – how could he have afforded it in the first place?), before leaving The Edinburgh String Quartet and disappearing to the west coast of Scotland to dive for scallops and build himself a yacht. Two years on,
Monkey Hanger
set sail for the Caribbean and he’s been there ever since.

On the surface, Austin Patterson had a stable family background, and yet he was never satisfied with his lot – if you’ve ever been to Hartlepool in the north-east of England, you’ll probably have a good idea why. Mollycoddled by a gentle mother and demonised by a tyrannical father, he was in many ways the classic war baby, torn between a sense of duty and a sense of disgust at said duty – a rebel in a straitjacket. The unhappy soul became a driven individual, determined to: a) prove a point to the bullying patriarch, and b) get the hell out of there.

He duly won a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music in London and pretty soon he was fiddling his way through the Swinging Sixties – albeit decked out like a penguin in dinner suit and dickie bow for the BBC Concert Orchestra. ‘Fiddling’, in fact, became the recurring motif of his life. More of which later.

Contentment never led to any revolution, it’s true. And restlessness leads to change, which can be better or worse than the original state of affairs. Perhaps restless people shouldn’t live on an isolated farm. Then they wouldn’t wallop their five-
year-old
son over the head for singing ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ while feeding the geese (blasphemy,
apparently, though he wasn’t religious himself) or throw their wife’s homemade pizza against the wall because it wasn’t hot enough.

Some people are bad but their bad intentions result in something good. Take Guy Fawkes, for example – he tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament and now we get bonfire parties every year. But I’m not going to burn my ‘Guy’, despite the shadow he’s cast over our life. Instead, what I’d like to try to do now is forgive him. And the best way of doing that is to celebrate his mistakes. Because, without his mistakes, I wouldn’t have got to where I am now: a retired rocker spouting a lot of psycho-babble.