Dancing in the Darkness (3 page)

I
t was strange the way my mind operated 20-odd years ago. I don’t recall planning to study History and English Literature at Bath College of Further Education. I suppose it would have been because my grades stank. In the event, Bath was twee and harmless, like a pretty old lady – the land that time forgot. It was just about random enough for me.

When I got there, no one understood my Scottish accent, so they christened me ‘Hamish’. Soon, however, I withdrew from student activities, dropping out early in the second year. I’m never comfortable going through the motions as a rule – unless I’m moving my bowels, of course. The reason there’s nothing as underrated as a good shit is because there’s nothing worse than being full of shit. That’s one thing I do know.

To justify dropping out of a BA Honours degree, it was imperative I read a lot of books – if only to prove to myself I wasn’t actually thick. I tended towards ‘underground’ writers – Russian, Irish, Black American and even occasionally women – until I was put right off by a rambling old soak who called herself Joyce. For light relief, I enjoyed the cartoon
Peanuts
and especially the character Snoopy, mainly because he was a dog rather than a stupid human.

Soon I had turned to music, performing distorted, down-tuned bass guitar and snarling facial expressions in a band called Swing –
art-noise
terrorists who would sabotage polite jazz soirées and confront the audience with dissonant squalls of feedback. Alex – half-Indonesian, Baudelaire-obsessed and fond of wearing a monocle – was the star of the show. He would manipulate an old miked-up violin with a food mixer before studiously sawing it in half, as though performing a magic trick at the London Palladium.

Alex slept in a customised open coffin and tried to convince me that golden autumn leaves are nothing more then ‘tree shit’. Instead of making a big deal about thinking
outside
the box, he just kicked back and thought
inside
the box. Alex was
intensely lazy and rarely left the flat, possibly on account of the ridicule he invited from passers-by, but he was my friend and I didn’t care. In fact, that’s what bound us together – neither of us cared. Or at least, we tried not to.

I took my cue from the opening passage of Henry Miller’s ode to apathy,
Tropic Of Capricorn
: ‘Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos.’ One day, in the midst of said chaos, my father reappeared out of the blue, after 16 years without so much as a bang on the ear. He possessed a magnificent beard and a shit-eating grin that spread from one big ear to the next like bush fire. I had to admit, when push came to shove, he was my father. And as long as he didn’t try to push me, I’d try my best not to tell him to shove it.

A
t my father’s invitation, I went to visit him in the West Indies. Home was a swanky
hideaway
on the island of St Kitts, up in the mountains – the former governor’s private residence no less, with stunning panoramic views of the sea. It was amazing what all those withheld child-
maintenance
payments could get you.

It was hard to make up my mind about him – he was a tropical Rasputin one minute and a
reallife
Pirate Of The Caribbean next, possessing all the qualities of Oliver Reed except for the ability to act. No one who met him could fail to notice a spectacular scar, etched like the fossil of some ancient caterpillar, around his right eye socket – 47 stitches worth. He’d been glassed by a West Indian ‘yardie’ in a bar, after trying to impress my younger brother Chris by telling a group of them
to ‘Keep the bloody noise down so I can talk to my son.’ (Austin had inherited some of the belligerent headmaster rituals of his own father who’d worked his way up to that position from a family of coal miners, lording it over the son at both home and school).

But he wasn’t an outright monster. When we first went sailing together I couldn’t help discovering an old-fashioned prude lurking within. We were enjoying a drunken day’s cruising around the island on his yacht,
Monkey Hanger
, when Austin noticed us drifting into a coral reef in choppy water. He barked orders at his Texan girlfriend, Kirsten, who was in the galley below, to come up on deck and help. I’ll admit I noticed she wasn’t wearing any underwear as she dashed to adjust a sail and her long, but not long enough, T-shirt flapped upwards in the wind – but really it wasn’t such a big deal. After all, wasn’t this supposed to be an emergency situation? Austin’s priorities abruptly changed, however. ‘COVER YOURSELF UP, WOMAN!’ he growled in his Hartlepool accent, as if his and his two sons’ lives depended on it. It didn’t make any sense to me. Imagine if we’d ended up coming a cropper, all over the forbidden glimpse of a Texan beaver?

Our father was a gracious host at first, but after a week or so started resorting to type. Were we really supposed to feel
that
grateful for his re-emergence into our life? If it was thanks he wanted, I might as well have thanked my bum for taking a shit. I did agree to take his Alsatian, Marley, for a walk twice a day, up to the volcano and back, but that was just to get out of the house. On the way, we’d see the spider monkeys playing in the sugar-cane plantation. What a life they had, lolling in the sun, sucking on the sugar and shamelessly masturbating all day long. Despite their rotten teeth and fading eyesight, they looked happy enough to me.

I was broken out of this reverie when my father and brother told me they had plans for a jungle expedition. It took us a whole day’s trek, then we spent hours making clearings with our machetes for the planting of mangoes. At least, that’s what my father told me the clearings were for…

I was smoking a lot of weed for the first time in my life – there was a lot of it around. And that should have given me a clue, yet still I didn’t see the connection. Being a stoner had transformed me from the space cadet I’d always been into a lethal space commando. In the midst of a stoner haze, everything seemed within reach – as long as you sat
well out of reach. Months of Caribbean living passed in a blur of sunny basketball humiliations at the hands of local street kids, while the heavenly tropical breeze caressed away the blisters and our family discord.

One day, my father flew to Miami to pick up a vacuum-packing machine. On the way back, he explained to Customs it was for peanut farming. That wasn’t so inconceivable – peanuts were popular, after all. Surely only people who were allergic didn’t like them?

I
t was more than symbolic that the 250
vacuum-packed
pounds of Caribbean marijuana were destined to arrive in Scotland. You could call it a sentimental homecoming for a father and his two sons, but strategically it made sense too. The coastguard in Oban consisted of an old dear who came on board for a natter and, though the cargo was stashed directly beneath her as she sat sipping tea, there was never any great panic.

An inconspicuous Honda was hired to journey southwards, where the goods were stored in a Brent Cross lock-up. My brother and I rented a dingy basement flat on a Camden Town backstreet while my father checked into the swanky Regents Park Hotel. It soon became apparent, however, that 15 years in the Tropics had left him out of sync with city life. The unaccustomed comforts and distractions turned his head to mush and he duly got taken for a ride, fronting 20 and 30 parcels at a time to dodgy third-hand contacts who’d then disappear on him, never to pay up.

It was easy to disappear in London and pretty soon Austin did likewise, sailing back to his Caribbean idyll and asking us to shift around 120 leftover packages. Unfortunately, the stash was getting drier by the week, losing its moist green stinky appeal. As loyal sons, however, and on a cut of
£
300 for each bag sold, we endeavoured to do our best for him.

Steed, as I’ll call him, had one of those scary, immobile faces and something of the Frankenstein doppelganger about him. He was an old-school ducker and diver who brought us huge boxes of knocked-off sausages in his vintage Jag and always talked like he was underwater and in slow motion. You could almost see the bubbles coming out of his mouth. I never got round to telling him I was a veggie – it might have caused a screw to come loose and a bolt to drop out.

He may well have been
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
next to our
Cheech and Chong
, but Steed had his connections and an uncanny knack for shifting stuff, regardless of what shape, form or
quantity said stuff came in. I imagine he’d have been ideal as a washing powder, ‘shifting’ the stains normal detergents can’t reach. Within six months we’d cleared the lot between us and made a fat chunk of lovely cash for an absent but delighted father – not forgetting a tidy wedge for ourselves.

There were a few scary moments. Early one Saturday afternoon, I arrived at Paddington Station for the train to Bath with a backpack of supplies for West Country ‘trustafarian’ hippies strapped casually to my shoulders. Five 1lb bags in total – each about the size of a small pillow. Word about my new vocation had spread like wildfire in the sleepy hamlet of Bath, which was now about to get even
sleepier
. ‘Hamish’ – the twat with the stutter who played in that weird band – was now a
big-time
drug dealer. As I sauntered towards the platform, a cluster of policemen with ‘sniffer’ dogs caught me unawares.

Now, here was a real dilemma. It would have been the easiest (and most simple) thing to simply turn round and miss the train, but I just couldn’t bear to see that ticket wasted. It sounds daft, but that kind of thing crucified me – unless you were brought up in Scotland you’ll probably never understand. Besides, I reasoned with myself, surely
they were checking for IRA bombs? That’s what my ‘free-male’ intuition informed me, anyhow. I’d suffered the same momentary panic earlier in the week when news bulletins announced that North London locks-ups were being searched by
anti-terrorist
squads.

I sucked in that guilty conscience of mine and walked straight past them, before boarding the train and calling Chris on the ‘brick’
*
. Nervous laughter gushed like cheap Cava at an office party. I had got away with it, though I knew not why or wherefore – just the vague notion that a future of gainful blundering beckoned.

With my bum bag (or ‘fanny pack’ as they call them stateside) bulging with readies and paraded around my waist like a boxer’s title-weight belt, roaches in each of my jacket pockets and a Filofax crammed with incriminating names, addresses and telephone numbers, I was determined to defy the guardians of justice and reward a morally bankrupt father.

I
’ve always been a late developer – not a pubic hair in sight until 17, loss of virginity at 19, first girlfriend at 23 … so it was quite in keeping that I started playing guitar at the crazily late age of 21. That meant, if I was serious about making it, I would have to learn the craft throughout my twenties while subsisting. At the age of 25, I was now ready to set up home in London – not so much Dick Whittington as Dick Head-ington. This one may have had brass in pocket and a shiny new Les Paul copy slung over his shoulder, but it was apparent, even to me, that actual gold was conspicuous by its absence, and the streets were in fact paved with shit. I simply hoped that my father had at least left one useful thing behind, and that his musical gene might miraculously fast-track me to the top of the musical tree.

Pretty soon I set about meeting musicians and getting my own compositions down on a
four-track
tape recorder, doggedly learning and improving inch by inch. It never really occurred to me that the chances of making it were so remote. Big-eared creatures, I thought to myself, had just as much right to fly as anyone – Dumbo was an obvious inspiration.

In the meantime, I tried every job you could imagine, except for taxidermist and taxi driver – the former because I’m a vegetarian and the latter because I can’t drive. I chanced my arm as a cycle courier, landscape gardener, tea boy, barman, telesales man, sous chef, leaflet distributor and dog walker – before finally drawing the line at scout master’s apprentice. Something cash-in-hand always came up. Of course, I didn’t let the day job impinge on the routine of a struggling musician: moaning, getting smashed, slagging off other bands and signing on.

After a time, I found myself slaving for a pittance in the post room of a travel agent – using a false national insurance number so I could still claim benefit. It was mind-numbing, stuffing tickets and brochures into envelopes, but fortunately there was a then struggling comedy scriptwriter named
Roger Drew perched on the stool next to me. Roger has since gone on to be a success, writing
Time Trumpet
with Armando Iannucci for BBC2, conceiving gags for ITV’s
Celebrity Love Island
and drawing the cover for The Darkness’s smash-hit single ‘I Believe In A Thing Called Love’.

You could describe our boss, who I will call Keith (not his real name), as being not only highly competitive, but also highly diminutive – however, I’m not sure if it’s grammatically proper to precede the polite word for ‘short’ with the misleading adjective ‘highly’. The fact is, he took his job as post-room manager a little too seriously – seemingly hell-bent on making life harder work than it already was. In lighter moments he would share nuggets of wisdom regarding health and lifestyle matters, the most unpleasant concerning the benefits of eating strong cheese at bedtime. Keith would proudly relate that he didn’t waste money on toothbrush, toothpaste or mouthwash as he’d recently discovered that the bacteria in pungent cheeses, such as stilton and Roquefort, could attack plaque directly if consumed after a meal, thus preventing tooth decay. The downside was that, each time he opened his mouth to address us, he might as well have shat in our faces. The fact
he was oblivious to our suffering only made it worse. In Keith’s mind, the crucial thing was a nightly cheese plate on the bedside table.

It was hard to know who to feel more sorry for, the plaque or his unfortunate wife. The almighty stench of that stale cheesy breath, wafting out of his mouth at any given time, and a blanket refusal to consider any standard method of oral hygiene, left us with little option but to seek alternative employment. They say comedy is tragedy plus time and they’re right. It wasn’t nearly as funny at the time.

To alleviate the fall-out from this daily torture, I put the hours in as an über-geek (music, book and film), absorbing so much cultural trivia that I convinced myself I was the cleverest sponge on the planet. But sponges need to be squeezed, or they rot. The poverty certainly tried to squeeze me. But the guilt just kept rotting me. I simply couldn’t keep taking and not giving.

All those years on benefit – although deep down I hoped that one day I would make enough money to pay it all back in tax. Of course, there’s no way of knowing for sure, but the ambitious sponge envisages that one day, in all likelihood, it will be well and truly squeezed. And miraculously, that’s
what happened – I paid it back with bells on, and because of that, when it comes to bathtime, I get a little rubber duck in the way of a pension.