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I watch his hands, an energy of fingers that welds him to his scissors, and I think of past barbers in their clipping handfuls:
the last, a squat Italian, snipping in North London who spoke, as this one does, an Esperanto of haircuts, with numbers tidying up the hairy nouns; “ You want the one”, for a little left on, or “ Zero, yes?” for follicles and their nothingness.
He had a poster of Roma and one for Spurs, layered in crew cut turf, with Ginola, a Samson among the shorn Philistines.
Mr Hussain motions to the chair. Falling into his arms is like the old game of trust. There’s a hair’s breadth moment, that hangs, light and airborne, slowing in the dust beneath a white rumpled sheet. I could be anywhere:
outside in some crowded piazza, scalped, and the skull’s blood crying; “Perche mi scerpi ? Non hai tu spirito di pietade alcuno ?” *,
or in another Jahangir Saloon, with my mop of hair sticky in Mirpur’s heat. As someone else is getting done, I wait on a cane chair, staring at two photos tacked to a mud brick wall. They gel. One holds in place a crying child
shrunk by the the barber’s chair he’s caught in. He clings to a toy ambulance. No help will come.
The other has a quiff and I wonder how I know that face. He is a haircut more than my doppelganger’s. A scented profile slips out of the chair, lets the door to. He doesn’t tip, but leaves a dust trail shimmering in the street of barbers…..
It’s all come off; the untidy locks, the unreachable wisps at the back of the neck, are carpeting my toe-caps.
Mr Hussain holds up a hand glass and does his infinity trick, 'just like that', the mirror steadying an endlessness of ruler straight nape, and beyond me, in perpetuity, plastic flowers flashing in their dry vase.
It’s o.k., I nod, doing some mental arithmetic. Mr Hussain doesn’t have a price list. So, what would I pay myself ….
to be here, with other men’s hairstyles and the packet of me for the weekend, in the mid morning sun streaming, bouncing off the tiles in an Oak Lane shop. I reckon three or four quid…. three being lucky and four’s a leg to stand on.
*From Dante’s Inferno:” Why do you tear at me. Have you no sense of pity!” Canto X111 line35-36.
The stall in Essex Road, North London, provides a 24 hour service because staff are unable to dismantle its elaborate display of fruit and vegetables
12am and the oranges are out late posing their juicy circumferences, kissing deep in a jerry-built pyramid, its foundations wickedly for sale. The colour staggers, its end butts another beginning with orange balanced against the sodium street light.
I can’t say if those giddy slopes will ever come down. Their undoing is too intricate; the loss of such high colour must slide into the hypothetical. That’s more boxes, with packing up becoming elastic, stretching beyond cold store, cargo hold, ox cart and the dark grove zesting orange.
The staff blow open brown bags and steady the blur of citrus that custom might spoil. The apex of a pyramid climbs skyward, wobbling orange securely: its point is to juggle bright permanence with frailty through the flickering night.
Should cynicism be a registered industrial disease?
My best advice is to do nothing, for doing nothing does increase options. If maybe, perhaps, and the airy possibilities were laid end on end they would featherbed, and as you made it, so you would lie in it. You may rest assured that should the worst happen, storm clouds are cosy metaphors. On second thoughts and there are just seconds, before inertia gets critical, I am talking facial muscles that contradict, I am springing leaks of self inflicted energy.
A body of opinion maintains that the blunders we will make are all monumental. This is a slur on St Paul’s. No one gives a preaching apostle a break. And he thought he was safe as light and stone. In spite of this, I would still recommend suspended judgement, suspended animation; I would give you a quick demonstration but I am tied up right now.
Hardly have we set off, when there's the voice, male and decisive, with an inflexion of jollying along. "The next stop is Leeds Please take all your belongings with you". I understand the thinking behind it; travel displaces the mind, leaves the routines of wallets, keys, and umbrella days waiting in a siding. The journey time is enough to the next unspecified stop, to recollect belongings that I would be pleased to take.
There is a triangle of land formed by the railway lines, a small holding on it with improvised shed, water butt and vegetable patch. Not much is happening. The gate is off ; there are plenty of docks. I belong to places like this. Given someone shovel-handed, I would have its resolute spirit, of little to do but schemes to play with, set beside me. The voice again, but further off this time:
"Take pleasure in all that belongs to you." The next stop is a British Museum case with a spindly terracotta boat adrift between Abyssinian and Egyptian, I can't remember from where it was taken. I covet its clean earth-bound line, the orange restraint, a simple utility that won't float in the bath of paradise. My eyes squint at the sun soaked deck, and see her through the other world of long corridors.
The grave robber breaks the seals, the tunnel opens to reveal the start of Leeds: an empty factory yard, a public house on its own and cosseted, as if meant for an after-life. My seat catches the back of my hand; I am leaving jacquard moquette, with purple chevrons to boss an army of blue dots; I ought to take that before the dog inconsolably howls, and lights inexplicably go out.
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