A Haircut and the Promise of an Early Lunch


In the morning I found a small barber shop and, due to the handsome young man inside wielding the scissors, I decided on the spur of the moment to get a haircut. I sat on the red leather couch and waited for my turn in the chair. 

There were two people on duty today; my young man and a young woman, who was now chopping away at the straggly mane of a man in his early-60s whose name, it transpired, was Johnny. It seemed that he was a publican at a pub called The Ship. It was quite hot in the shop so she decided to turn on the upright fan, which she now directed at Johnny. It didn’t seem to be working very effectively because Johnny suddenly said, 
   “Twist the knob, girl, twist the knob. Give it a good ol’ twist”.
   “Wo’choo say?” she replied, with mock seriousness, “Twist yer knob? You dirty ol’ devil!” They both laughed. The young barber paused in his work on the head of a sullen man in his mid-fifties and said,
   “You wanna watch ‘im, Charlotte, wiv ‘is reputation!”
   “Ooh, I know”, she replied, “Wanderin' 'ands, an’ all!”
   “That’s right”, continued Johnny, “Did you hear that I broke up with Pauline? ... Yes, it wasn’t gonna work … Yeah, we broke up late one night in the carpark. She said, ‘You know what your problem is? You’re a flirt’. I said no I ain’t, I ain’t a flirt … And just at that moment do you know ‘oo pulled up in ‘er car? Bloody Carla drove up! She wound down the winnder and says, ‘Allo, Johnny, ‘ow yer goin’?’… Well, that was too much for Pauline. She took one look at Carla, wiv all ‘er makeup plastered on, and ‘er big bust ‘angin’ out an’ she says ‘Well, that just proves my point, doesn’t it?’, an’ she walks off wiv the ‘ump an’ I ‘aven’t seen ‘er since. Not that I’m complainin’, she was ‘ard work, she was, in bed and out.”

The young barber’s customer paid and he ushered me into the chair.
  “’Ello mate, watcher after today?” he asked. I told him.
  “Where you from, then?” he continued. I told him that I was from Australia and that my parents had taken us there when I was ten, in 1968. “Oh. Well, yer doin’ orright, fer yer age”, he offered, “I fought I ‘erd a twang.”

He was wearing shorts and a baggy singlet with ‘MIAMI’ printed across it. He began with the clippers up the back of my head. I kept glancing up in the mirror to watch his lovely arms in action as he busied himself around the back of the chair, frowning slightly in concentration, his bulging bicep flexing with each snip of his scissors: I even forgave him the winged angel that was tattooed upon it. His hands were very soft as they brushed across my forehead, and as he reached up to grasp my hair his beautiful armpit yawned in my face, full of black curls, and it was all I could do to stop myself chowing down within it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Bethnal Green Send Off

     A family shambles into the pub, all dressed in black. It comprises a set of obese twins, one of whom is the mother of a boy and a girl aged about eight and nine.       "My god", she says to the barman, "I need a fuckin' drink after the day I've 'ad." She orders for the entire entourage and they all sit around three tables, which they hastily drag together. The woman now spots me in the corner and she galumphs over on unsteady, knock-kneed legs, with a plaintive look across her pale, doughy face.     "'Scuse me luv, can I take summer dese chairs?" She gestures to the three empty seats around my table. I tell her she can. "Only, I cremated me muvver dis mornin'. " she says, apropos of nothing. I give her my condolences.       She seats her two children on tall stools at the bar. Another family member arrives with two bags of McDonald's food. He places these in front of the kids, who eagerly dig in. The adults sit ad...
Read more

Clomping Through the NPG

   Three gangly, teenage American girls spread out and clomped around the wooden floors of the National Portrait Gallery in their chunky boot heels, loudly calling out to each other about the portraits in the Elizabethan rooms.     "Lookit this guy! He's so cool! Look at his beard. So hipster. I LOVE it!"     "Oh wow! This woman is, like, ancient. Check out that bling!"     "He's, like, a king or some shit! Lookit his hat! " I sought to escape them by slipping into another room, but they followed me in. This room contained a group of young schoolchildren who were sitting on the floor quietly listening to a lady Gallery guide explain to them the beautiful portrait of Henry IV. The three girls seemed completely oblivious to this, and they edged around the room still shouting out their observations on the people in the paintings.     "Gahd! that looks like that dude in that movie, you know who I mean?" ...
Read more

The Old Marquis

     I found myself at the French House in Dean Street, Soho, where I sat at the bar and had a number of glasses of the house lager. I eavesdropped on the conversations.      A young man in his late twenties asked his friend, a woman about thirty, how she was.      "Oh, alright, I suppose," she replied, "except for having to shove suppositories up my father's arse for the last ten days."       Two old gents were seated on the stools under the window. They were red-faced, very merry, and very loud.             "And, of course, when I was sixteen," one said, "I was taken under the wing of the old Marquis, and I went out to live on his estate. He taught me a great deal about society, and food, and wine, and what to wear to table, and that sort of thing. All kinds of things, really. It was the perfect education for a young chap, in all sorts of ways ... And, of course...
Read more