You can't fool me, Dennis

You can't fool me, Dennis

My uncle was, without a doubt, an oddity in the family. My father was a short, stocky  ginger man with a button nose and cauliflower ears, the exact picture of their mother. Their father was even worse, though somewhat taller he was beer-bellied had a bulbous neck, to the extent that he resembled a frog in a suit. I was the picture of my own mother – plain – but my uncle was a immense man with curly black locks and slightly androgynous features. In a group photograph he looked like the heroic knight who had just saved the peasant family from banditry or dragons. We were content folk, all of us, including my mothers' parents and to a lesser extent her housewife sister in Liverpool, but my uncle treated every aspect of life either as a light-hearted adventure, or as an excruciating existential quest. I thought myself lucky for he was kind to me - whilst he would quarrel incessantly with his brother over the pettiest and most severe of matters, I was always “darlin'” to him. When I was young he would pick me up and fly me around the room; when I briefly took up smoking in highschool he would giggle to himself when he caught me having a sly one on the road, and when I took up photography he bought me supplies, photobooks, emailed me about talks and communities I never went to. The problem was that long after I had given up photography he was still committed to it – every Christmas another photobook, every birthday rolls of film or zoom lenses, like he was trying to urge me in a direction he felt he was too busy to go in himself – which was half right, he was an important and fairly well-off business consultant of some kind, but never had children. He had been engaged twice and involved in various long-term relationships seemingly since adolescence, relationships my grandparents always hoped would bear fruit, but there would always be some decisive act of commitment he'd have to make, and he'd never follow through.

I didn't mind the photobooks, in fact I adored them. I never felt the need to go to a gallery except on dates with overly-ambitious boys, everything I ever wanted to look at I could find at home without ever having to use a computer. Recently my uncle showed me a collection he had just bought for himself detailing off-the-grid life. He talked about it with great enthusiasm – not of the photographer, whom he had never heard of, nor of any of the technical details he knew nothing about anyway, but quite simply his enthusiasm about off-the-grid living.

“I had a friend who slung it out for two years in Australia, picking apples and living in a caravan. Said it was the best time of his life... then his girl went and left him and went back to the city. He tried hanging on without her, lasted two weeks. Pleaded with her to stay when he got to Melbourn, she refused, and he ended up moving to Sydney. Madonna's “Live to Tell” was playing on the radio when he reached the city limit, and he just started crying right there. Been obsessed with the song ever since”.

His friends from his high school and university days seemed like a wild bunch, and he always remembered them in the best light, recalling amusing anecdotes in a vivid, intense tone.

“You remember Dennis?” I nodded. He always asked and I never did, not from those occasions when I was a toddler and he was working on his thesis, but I always nodded because he would tell the same stories over and over. “Dennis went off the grid after university. Just like that! The rest of us all got part-time work or went on gap years, he just up and left one day and no-one's ever seen him since. I imagine he's still out there, but who knows? He had a mind like you wouldn't imagine. He coulda been a big man, an important man, but he just decided “nah, fuck this, I'm out” and just like that.... I always said I'd do that.”
Instead Graham piddled about Europe for a year on the pretence of a relationship and maybe doing a PHD in critical theory in Munich, but then one internship led to another and suddenly he was “the big man”. Or the biggest man in the family, anyway. Not that my dad, the exhausted and fairly conservative bus driver, would hear of it.

“Anyway I'm sure he's still out there, up north somewhere... I'd love to meet him again, talk about life over a joint or two. The ideas he introduced me to! Jesus...”

I never told my uncle, but I had met Dennis on several occasions. Having barely changed his appearance, he was instantly recognizable from old photographs and exaggerated descriptions of distinguishing features, and was now selling The Big Issue outside the church I volunteered at, occasionally gracing us with his presence. His stint off-the-grid had only lasted 4 months and he was more famous for an anecdote people often told about him when he worked as a scaffolder on the Fourth Road Bridge –  during an awful storm, he and his colleagues wanted to take their break in the painter's portacabin, their own one leaky and lacking in electricity. The painters snubbed them, saying they had their own one to go to, so after the shift, Dennis snuck into the painter’s portacabin, took out an industrial-sized tub of margarine from the fridge, emptied out the years' supply of marge, shat in it, then carefully replaced the marge and put the tub back, finishing his contract before anyone noticed. For whatever reason, he seemed fairly content with life.