HOW MANY MALCOLM'S?

Maybe there are two types of children. Ones who arrange their hair back after it has been ruffled by a passing adult, and ones who just let it be. I think I left mine rumpled after our uncle Malcolm ruffled mine on his way back from the toilet. He came out with some white powder all over his thick 70’s ‘tash. “What’s that?” I asked. “Malcolm powder”, he said with a wink.

Looking back, I wonder if this happened during the same visit that he had brought his own cat with him. He’d given it LSD and it spent the next two days shaking behind the toilet. He had erected a tent in his bedroom for some reason, and me and my sister played in it one day when visiting with our mum and dad. My sister found a box of matches in it, and took them to the adults in the living room, winning praise for spotting this potential fire hazard. Then, I found an unlit smokers pipe in there, and rushed this to the grown-ups expecting similar praise, but was met with affectionate laughter. Maybe it was the same tent that, years later, led to a knock on the door from our neighbour, asking us if we knew there was a tent in our front garden. Malcolm had pitched up and taken up residence. There it was in the small front garden of a terraced house, like some sort of tent sit-in protest against suburban life, just yards from the busy road that had claimed the life of two of our own cats.

I moved into my teens and Malcolm moved in and out of our lives. I remember these things as I look at a drawing he did that hangs on my wall. Two children looking up from a climbing frame. It looks like it’s been drawn from the perspective of a passing cloud. Our mum says the two kids are me and my sister, and that he was always fond of us. Malcolm got thrown out of three art colleges, always finding places because he was so good. There’s a rumour that I’ve never been able to pin down that he did some art for Pink Floyd. It’s fitting that it’s a hazy rumour, hard to grasp and long gone like a fog of blue smoke from a massive reefer puffed towards the damp ceiling of a London bedsit. I wonder where his talent came from, and who it went to. Our nan would do strangely bland watercolours of landscapes and hummingbirds. My art skills seemed to dry up after a promising career aged around 12, never progressing beyond stick cowboys and indians and later my favourite footballers. My dad would stick them with sellotape onto a cabinet next to his office desk. Mum would scribble angular men's faces in notebooks. The only drawing of my sister's I remember is of a house - the classic chimney, 4 windows, triangular roof and garden path.

One seventies summer, our dad’s brother came to visit from Karachi and he and Malcolm struck up a friendship. They were soon off chasing blondes in Scandinavia together. On one trip back they were busted for trying to smuggle some hash back in. Malcolm was let go but our darker skinned Uncle was detained. Our dad went to sort it all out, being a tax paying British citizen. But he was given short shrift. You never quite belonged if you were brown in 70’s Britain. Meanwhile, the real outsider roamed free. Our uncle married one of those blondes and moved to Sweden. Malcolm ended up in Norwich. He shacked up with a sweet but child-like woman about whom everything was slow – the way she moved, the way she spoke in a slurred European accent. She visited us once. Mum offered to run her a bath and her eyes lit up. Slowly, like a dimmer switch.

These days, when sitting by a Stockholm lake with my Uncle, I sometimes wonder what twists and turns of fate or decisions taken would have led to Malcolm being sat beside us. But he’d started to disappear long ago. His mum, our Nan, apparently told him to join the army – that would sort him out. She seemed to think that war and the military was both the answer to everything and to blame for everything. The woman down the road whose hair had gone prematurely grey – “it’s the war”. Why did grandad never leave his caravan bed during trips to Butlins? “It’s the war.” Your sons losing the plot? Join the army. But he couldn’t any longer be drafted, so instead he drifted. To all sorts of places. There’s a saying that the phone ringing in the dead of night can only mean two things – death or sex. But Malcom was a third reason. There was one late night call from a man in Paris, saying he had found Malcolm wandering the streets, and the only sense he could get out of him was a phone number, so he rang it. 01 567 9282. 01 567 9282. The burden of his care often fell on our mum. Trips to panels of physiatrists. “Why do you want to stay at this facility” they would ask. “Because God’s a chair leg” he once replied. If you think about it, it makes sense. For some people, remove the Lord from their lives and they will topple over. Towards the end of his days, our mum would end up driving around the streets of Norwich looking for prominent dustbins, where Malcolm would often be found looking for dog-ends. I went with her once and found a haunted, skinny balding man. No hair to ruffle.

The garden shed with the rubbish bin propped up against it, lid half on, all charcoal and shade, just like I imagine the alleyway that lies behind the shed. The futuristic city beneath a red sky, with rising highways and chrome sky scrapers. The field of mushrooms sprouting into erect dicks. All these hang somewhere, in hallways, bedrooms, lounges, until one day they'll be taken down and packed away, leaving only the stain of a frame. Malcolm himself is already long gone, and it seems like he took the name with him. After all, how many Malcolm’s do you know these days?