I nodded. ‘Say all the cheerios you want to, Boss’ – a title I bestowed on him on only very special occasions as a mark of my respect. ‘I’ll see that your shop gets gutted while you’re away.’ He laughed and the workmen, since it involved the use of only a few facial muscles and could be done without taking their hands from their pockets, laughed too, soft guffaws.
‘I won’t be long,’ Joe said and this was followed by its dutifully edited echo, ‘not too long at all . . .’
I nodded and tried to look jovial, but privately beneath all that skin rufflement to produce a fake grin, I was saying to myself, ‘Yeah, Joe, by the hang of you, you won’t be long at all. Black car day soon, Joe, the one when you get to ride with the flowers.’
Whether Joe was going to the chemist or to say his ta-tas, didn’t really matter, I guess he just wanted to be absent when the mirrors started to come down. It’s all over for a barber-shop when it checks in its mirrors. The sudden loss of the repeated image was a perspective shrinkage hard to bear, I suppose. How could you barber on without the doubled reassurement of a benchful of customers, a nice big healthy crop of hair to be harvested?
With the departure of the old man the pair of workmen got down to some intensive loafing. One of them went to the exertion of planting his behind on the bench. The other one took up a folded-arm stance by the doorway as if keeping an eye on the thaw had been one of his assigned tasks. I’d seated myself in the window-chair for the last time.
His sentence made porous with yawns, the guy on the bench, the Daily Record crackling between his mitts, said: ‘It’s like something oot a cartoon, so it is.’ The mirror in front of me just caught his glance and no more. ‘D’you see it?’ He actually prised himself from the bench and came across to me in his slow lumbering gait. I could’ve told’m that I’d had a front row seat at the mummy/bubble car drama, but I took a shufty just the same. Aw jeezuz, look what they’ve done to wee Lucas – they’ve turned’m into a bastard’n tree.
BUBBLE TROUBLE FOR MATT, THE MUMMY! ran the headline to a splodge of journocrap, a larky treatment which was in keeping with the photo which depicted this stark white tree with its limbs hoisted on weighted wire-pullies to the ceiling and wee Matt trying to grin chirpily from a hole in its trunk. A nurse was to be seen, lots of her, beaming radiantly as she held a sprig of mistletoe over Matt’s bandaged napper.
‘What some folk’ll do to get their face in the paper, eh?’ said workman number two who was still doggedly supervising the thaw. His mate, who’d actually been standing totally unaided for over two minutes, astounded me even more by producing a screwdriver. ‘C’mon,’ he said, ‘we’d best see to getting this lot down.’
Once they’d actually got started the asset-strippers made steady enough progress. Soon they’d unscrewed the mirror at the far end of the shop. It glittered and flashed with some of its old zest as they lowered it to the floor. I could imagine the avalanche of reflected objects which had long roosted there, sense their astonishment at being disturbed so drastically at this late hour of their existence. These now untwinned objects included a dusty coathanger which’d hung on a wallpeg for as long as I can remember. It’d once been the property of someone called Robbie, a name he’d lovingly poker-burned along the hanger’s frame. No doubt the conceited Robbie and the clothes this simple object had borne for him on its wooden shoulders had gone the way of all things perishable, as had many of the faces that’d so briefly lodged in that cruellest of inventions – a device that won’t spare us from the ravages exacted upon our flesh by the drip-drop-drip of the acid we call Time.
Where the mirror had been, a squatter shadow had already taken up residence. With a sort of tortured care the workmen carried the looking-glass – it was brimming over with novel reflections – to the door. In its passing, the mirror carried off my head (the back of it), and the chair I was lounging in. Reminding each other to have a care, that the underfoot conditions were treacherous, the workmen, with slow crunching steps, made their way towards the van.
About ten minutes later Luigi returned with Joe, whom he’d picked up on the way. Apparently Luigi’s ‘business matter’ had been the delivery to Old Mooney of his P45 and monies due to him. But Mooney still hadn’t showed up in the Brannigan household. My heart sank when I heard this for I’d still hoped that there’d be at least a tenner left from my ‘winnings’. ‘We’ll send it Registered Delivery,’ said Luigi. He tenderly laid the fingers of both hands on his ears. ‘She’s a very loud woman, his daughter.’
The last mirror came off the wall and the barber-shop stood steeped in a gloom the overhead lights could do little to dispel; it looked like it’d been shorn of a dimension, and in a way, so it had. I said my farewells to Luigi and Joe, exchanged handshakes and that was that. Joe got a bit teary-eyed while Luigi, in a Cossack hat and sheepskin jacket, very vigorous looking, curtly disassociated himself from a non-profit-making affair like sentiment and began to hustle the workmen. ‘No, not that thing – it stays!’ he said, as they prepared to uproot the Weans’ Chair. All in all it wasn’t turning out to be much of a day for Granda Gibson, what with his clock sliding down the stairs to its utter destruction, and now this outright rejection. Joe sighed, humped his shoulders then accompanied me from the shop. Standing in the slush we shook hands again.
‘Good luck, Tommy. May your bambino be like you – only faster, eh?’
‘Sure Joe,’ I laughed. ‘I’ll send you a postcard from Down Under.’
His wave faltered some and he turned away with a look of puzzlement.
Oops, Rhona, and I promised you’d be the first to know. Never mind, a man may share a secret with his barber but only on the day he retires of course.
Smiling, I made my way across the glassy rubble, heading for the Planet. I was curious to know how the poor mummy had fared in the bungling hands of Cullen and Killoch. There just had to be a few laughs in there.
Was it only Friday last that a deepsea diver was to be seen stepping hesitantly from the auld fleapit? It seems years ago somehow. Maybe it was years ago. Maybe it hasn’t yet happened. Have a chat with Mr Dunne the next time you see’m doddering along like an amiable old mole in one of his improvised time-warps. You won’t fail to recognise him for he always dresses entirely in black, as if in mourning for clockroaches the world over. Other clues? Well, he might have a pencil behind his ear, and he could just be reading aloud from his favourite book: Nothing Dies!
I haven’t read it myself yet, but one thing’s for sure – it provides a dandy excuse for skipping Talky Sloan’s funeral!
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First published in Great Britain 1992
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This Minerva edition published 1993
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Swing Hammer Swing! Page 38
