The Barbershop Seven: A Barney Thomson omnibus

by Douglas Lindsay

  Her eyes flicked away, her head filled with random thoughts; of Winona Wanderlip and Jesse Longfellow-Moses, hair dye and anal implants and what to do on cold and wet Sundays in January.

  She caught the movement towards her in the corner of her eye. Didn't even have time to turn. A flash of blue, the Hyundi careered off the road, bouncing on the kerb, so that when it struck her, the full force of it caught her at the top of her thighs. Approximately the same area that had felt the full warmth of Wally McLaven's massage.

  The driver straightened the Hyundi on impact, Filiben was blatted aside like a balloon, and her head hit the ground travelling at 17.8mph. It was that which killed her.

  The Hyundi sped on up the road, engine smooth and placid, the only sound having been the dull thud of impact, turned the corner in the opposite direction from the bus, and was on its way. And throughout it all, not a curtain twitched.

  Peggy Filiben's body might have lain there undiscovered for some time. However, despite the killer's determination that this murder would go unseen, despite the precautions and due circumspection, there had still been someone there to bear witness. And as Filiben's body lay limp and spiritless on the pavement, another car approached along the road, and pulled up beside the corpse.

  See Those Boats? I Built Them All. Do They Call Me Harry The Boatbuilder? Nah. But You Shag One Sheep...

  Barney Thomson, and the rest of the team, had been back in the country for a little more than three hours. He'd returned to his room, as he thought he should, but after another hour of staring at the walls and mundane methodology artworks, thin and crispy carpets and docudramas on the TV, he'd headed out onto the streets of Edinburgh for the first time since his mother had taken him there at the age of seven. It had changed, as far as he could remember, in the previous forty-three years. Not that Barney knew he was fifty; or felt fifty; or looked fifty, for that matter.

  Quickly found himself in the World's End at the corner of High Street and St. Mary's, with the tourists and the curious, ordered a bottle of American beer and a packet of peanuts, ensconced himself alone at a table in the corner, and watched the punters come and go, high tide low tide, the bar filling up, thinning out, and filling up again.

  Strangely, after an hour or so, well into his third beer, he was quite happy. Enjoying the solitude and quiet of a noisy bar, watching the people of Scotland, as Winona Wanderlip called them, as well as the visitors of the world, savouring the cold taste of beer as it hit the back of his throat, and the haggis and chips which had just been delivered to his table. Still no nearer discovering the truth about his past and how he'd come to be in the employ of Jesse Longfellow-Moses, but it wasn't as if his life was horrendous. He was settling into it, going with the flow and not seeking the facts, in the belief that the facts would eventually find him.

  He was feeling decidedly languid when the chair opposite him was pulled out from the table, and he smelled and recognised the expensive fragrance without immediately looking up from his plate.

  'Edmund,' he said.

  'Barney,' said Rebecca Blackadder, with a wry smile. She could ask people all she liked not to call her Edmund, but it never made any difference. It was the penalty she paid for having a cool name.

  'Been looking for you,' she said.

  'Been here all along,' he replied.

  She took a sip from her gin and tonic and smiled again. Finally he looked at her, caught the movement of her lips across her teeth, the relaxation of the smile, the warmth and beauty in the eyes.

  'How many bars have you been in?' he asked.

  'Seventeen,' she said. 'Had a drink in every one.'

  He nodded. Didn't say anything; didn't look at her. Smiled a little.

  'Also looked in three pizza joints and four brothels.'

  He gave her a quick glance.

  'And did you eat pizza and shag some women?' he said.

  'Some of the above,' she replied.

  'Why are you here?' he asked quickly, looking at her this time, his voice losing the flippancy of two seconds earlier.

  'Doctor's orders,' she said.

  'Right,' he replied. 'And is the doctor going to tell me who I am?' And he shovelled some haggis into his mouth. It was delicious; spicy and crisp.

  'You're supposed to work it out for yourself,' she said. 'I could tell you any old shit, and your brain would work its way round to creating memories to back that up.'

  'If I died two and a half years ago,' he said sharply, 'how the Hell am I supposed to work out why I'm not dead anymore?'

  She nodded, black hair moving across her forehead. Sometimes the untrained person could cut through the bullshit of the professional. In fact, she frequently had cause to reflect, it happened on a regular basis.

  She leant back against the chair, looked at his plate. The smell of his meal nagged away at her stomach, but she'd already eaten. And Barney wasn't waiting for her to join him. Not that this was Barney Thomson as the world had known him before. She didn't approve of him being here, of his very existence on the planet; but it wasn't his fault.

  'Genetics,' she said.

  'Ah,' said Barney. 'Go on.'

  'You remember the Dolly the sheep thing?' she asked.

  'Not really. Did they mix a human and a sheep?' he asked. 'They must've had difficulty finding the guy for that experiment. They put an advert in the paper. Man Wanted To Shag Sheep. Previous Experience Preferred, But Training Will Be Given. After a couple of days they only had thirty-three thousand applications.'

  She was laughing. Barney Thomson made her laugh. And she was a woman. No one had ever been able to say that before.

  'Not quite,' she said. 'Dolly the sheep was cloned from cells of a parent sheep. Advanced stuff, even now, but that was it, pure and simple.'

  She hesitated. Barney ate his dinner.

  'I'm listening,' he said.

  'It's pretty controversial. But, you know how these things are. The stuff that was reported wasn't the half of it. There's another laboratory outside the city, doing all sorts of things the public knows nothing about. Even more cutting edge, even more frightening.'

  She stopped again. Her voice had dropped lower and lower as she talked, and Barney imagined that she shouldn't be telling him any of this. For whatever reason, she was on his side. Although, then again, she'd admitted the night before that she was there at the behest of Weirdlove, and Barney had already come to realise that you couldn't trust Weirdlove any further than you could drive a Ferrari with liquid edible underwear in the petrol tank.

  'So, where do I come into it?' he asked. 'Am I the result of a cross between a cow and a toilet seat, or something?'

  'No,' she said, 'although there are some of them in the government.'

  Again she stopped. Barney followed some unknown green vegetable around his plate, forked it with the last of his haggis, then took a long swallow of beer, draining his third and last bottle of the night, popped the last of his chips, and looked up at her.

  'I'm going to go home now,' he said, 'or what passes for home. You want to tell me anything before I go?'

  He didn't want to go home. He wanted to stay there all night, talking to her. But there was something in-built, making him back off.

  'Your brain was kept in a jar for the past two and a half years,' she said, matter-of-factly.

  William Matthews, 19, happened to be walking past their table at the time, and nearly dropped the five drinks he was carrying. In fact, he'd heard the words as 'your brain was kept in a bar', which sounded like a pretty cool place for your brain to be kept for that length of time.

  'That explains a lot,' said Barney. 'Is it still in the jar?' he asked, which would explain even more.

  'No,' she said, with a smile, 'I'm afraid it's definitely inside your head.'

  'But it's been crossed with a sheep's brain? That would explain the woolly thinking.'

  'Let me finish,' she said, suddenly extending her hand across the table and touching his. This had to be difficult for him,
and he wouldn't be the first man to hide behind lousy jokes. Look at Jim Davidson. 'There's a laboratory near the coast, you know the type of thing. Looks harmless on the outside, bit of a run down farm. Don't even have any noticeable security, because they don't want to draw attention to it. They've been doing experiments in RCD since not long after the war.'

  'RCD?' said Barney. 'That'll be what? Really Crap Doctors? Designer doctors, the government's answer to the GP shortage. You bring them out, they fuck up your health, then they get locked away in storage for the night. Coming soon, designer nurses, designer train drivers, designer ministers and designer advertising consultants. There's already five of them to every normal human being in the country, but they've persuaded the government that they need more.'

  'Barney,' she said, softly, and this time she held a gentle finger up to his mouth; touched his lips. He shivered. He stopped talking. She held her finger against him longer than was necessary, held his gaze at the same time. Finally lowered her hand, and wrapped her fingers around his.

  'This is pretty fucking weird, Barney, it's all right to be freaked.'

  'Good,' he said, 'because I'm freaked.'

  'Rapid Cell Development. They don't just clone the sheep or the mouse or the tsetse fly or whatever, they grow it to adulthood at an incredibly accelerated rate.'

  'Why?' said Barney, interjecting where she had not intended to stop talking.

  'Christ knows,' she said, shaking her head. 'Because they can? Because no one's done it before? Who knows what their reasons are? But there are always going to be people who'll pay for that kind of technology, so they're pushing it big. Have been for years.'

  'So they took my brain...?' said Barney, and that very brain wasn't really computing any of this. It was as if they were talking about someone else.

  'They took cells from it, and they grew you. This body you're in, they grew in less than two years.'

  He stared, he gazed, he gaped, he wondered, he marvelled, he doubted, he mistrusted. His mouth was slightly open. He reached for the bottle, put it to his lips, forgetting it was empty.

  'I'll get you another,' she said.

  'No, go on,' he said quickly.

  'The one thing they can't do yet, is develop the brain at the pace of the body. So, when your body had reached the adult state they were looking for, they removed the brain, and transplanted your original brain.'

  'Which had been kept in a jar,' he said.

  'Yeah,' she said.

  'I'm sceptical here,' he said. 'I mean, I realise I'm messed up, 'n' all, but what you're saying, that has got to be bullshit.'

  'You'd like to think so,' she said. 'But if it was, you wouldn't be here.'

  He leant forward, then he sat back. He glanced round at the other customers. He tapped his fork on his empty plate. Scraped it around, dug up the few morsels that were left.

  'Bollocks,' he said, finally. 'I mean, why me? Why not do it with George Harrison or Jimmy Stewart or some scientist or other. Why me? Why Barney Thomson? What did I ever do?'

  'Availability,' she said. 'First law of construction, whether it's buildings or people. You can only work with the materials available to you. They have a guy on the inside at St Andrews University. That's where your brain was being stored.'

  'In a jar,' said Barney, with melancholy.

  'Yeah,' she said. 'Really, you don't have to keep going on about the jar. There's not that much difference between a jar and anyone's head. You were a trial, not a lot more than that. Then Jesse found out about you, knew that you were this renowned barber guy, and fancied having you as his personal hairdresser. Parker did the rest. They kind of switched you on a couple of days ago.'

  Barney spun the beer bottle around so that it toppled and rolled along the table. He grabbed it just before it fell, then repeated it. Switched him on.

  'I'm losing credulity here,' he said. 'I'm not sure, but I have memories of being this murderer kind of guy.'

  'That's what everyone thought,' said Blackadder. 'But after you died, a government inquiry was established to examine your life. More or less exonerated you of everything you'd been accused of in the past. Two minutes after that, you weren't news anymore. The press forget in seconds, and the public trundle along in their wake. So, now you're just like this new guy. A new life, a new body, new everything.'

  'Still miserable as fuck,' he said with contemplation, reading the label on the bottle, trying to grasp at normality.

  She squeezed his fingers, her hand never having left his.

  'We'll see what we can do about that,' she said.

  Barney engaged her eyes and automatically lifted the empty bottle to his lips to cover his vague discomfort with the close attentions of a woman.

  Did it sound plausible? Of course it didn't. But then, just because you don't comprehend something, doesn't mean that it can't happen. It wasn't like he understood the physics behind nuclear fission, wind, the evolution of planets or why women have more orgasms, but it didn't mean they weren't all true.

  He took the bottle away from his face because he realised he looked like an idiot. Tore his eyes away from hers, looked at the floor of the bar and contemplated that it would, at least, explain why his very existence seemed to be such an anachronism.

  Nuthin' Much

  A similar scene to the one that had unfolded with the strange disappearance of Melanie Honeyfoot, re-enacted itself in the Scottish Executive the following day when Peggy Filiben failed to materialise for work. She'd had a six-thirty with a journalist from the Mail on Sunday – she'd always enjoyed giving the press total access, but doing it spectacularly early in the morning, especially on a Saturday – so when Mike Holgrum was present at her office, and she wasn't, the alarm had been raised. Peggy Filiben never missed an opportunity to talk to the press.

  So the media had it even before building security or the police, and Holgrum jumped with both feet at the coincidence of two cabinet ministers going missing in the same week. Before alerting anyone to his suspicions, he had established the last person to see Filiben at the parliament and how she'd travelled home from work, he'd spoken to the bus driver who'd dropped her off, and he had visited the scene and discovered blood on the pavement, not that far from the bus stop. He'd stopped short of breaking into her house, then he'd finally informed the police of his enquiries, two minutes before he'd informed everyone else.

  The day flew by in a torrent of media speculation and frantic police investigation. And at the end of it, the authorities had nothing more than the sighting of Peggy Filiben alighting from a bus, never to be seen again. They had confirmation that the blood on the pavement was indeed hers, and that was just about that. The members of the cabinet had been forced to reveal that they'd been in session, what with that being the last time that any of them had seen her alive. None of them, however, gave voice to the possibility that there might have been a connection between the meeting and Filiben's disappearance. That would just have been too implausible and frightening to think about.

  The bus driver had vaguely remembered the blue car, but that was about as far as it went. 'All look the same, don't they?' he'd said.

  And it just so happened that the driver of the Hyundi was as surprised as everyone else that Peggy Filiben had disappeared. The plan had been for her body to be found, squished to a pulp, on the pavement. So, there was something suspicious going on. Above and beyond the fact that members of the cabinet were getting murdered.

  And so the fifteen officers that had been put onto the task of locating Melanie Honeyfoot were multiplied five-fold, the press screamed murder, there were cries of serial killer to be heard in the corridors of the parliament, and there were more than a few people in Holyrood looking over their shoulders and wondering who was going to be next.

  Shagtastic!

  Monday morning, the weekend having slipped quietly by. The Sunday papers had questioned the disappearance of the two Cabinet ministers right enough, but it hadn't managed to get quite as many column inches as th
e beginning of the latest Pop Idol series. Already there were complaints of bias about the lack of Scots selected for the televised stages; and the uproar had pushed the mystery of the disappearing cabinet women definitively onto the inside pages.

  Politicians had to learn their place in this personality driven age; the trouble being that most of them still thought that they dined at the top table of public interest. And if the press weren't all that concerned about the spectacularly attractive Filiben, they were unlikely to be too bothered if any of the rest of them disappeared. (Apart from those cabinet ministers who'd played football for Rangers and Scotland, and who were a little bit cheeky.)

  ***

  Wally McLaven had been allowed to cherry pick his deputy minister at the office of Tourism, Culture & Sport. Patsy Morningirl was a lovely girl, with a bit of a gorgeous-but-thick-as-mince look about her. Whenever there was any comment in the press to be made about Tourism, Culture or Sport, Wally himself would be there, cheeky and cheery as ever, with a ready smile, quip, and saucy hand up the skirt of the nearest female journalist. The male journos loved him because he'd played football, the female journos loved him because there was always the chance they'd get to shag the man who'd scored three goals for Scotland in World Cup Finals. So, the fact that his deputy was a complete and utter eejit meant little, as her existence in the Executive was almost totally nugatory. Even the press weren't that interested in her Amsterdam-hooker looks, because they had Peggy Filiben to gawp at.

  To cut more quickly to the point, Patsy Morningirl was there because Wally McLaven had banged her a few times, she'd threatened to tell his wife, and he'd got her the position. Although he had also attached the caveat that if he was going to have her around on a regular basis, then he would be allowed to continue banging her. Patsy had agreed.

  So, when Winona Wanderlip strode past McLaven's secretary – who attempted to stop Wanderlip charging in uninvited, but thought, who cares and gave up – and marched into his office, it was to find Morningirl flat out on top of Wally's desk, pants to the wind, skirt at her waist, and Wally with his breeks at his ankles, pumping away like a ferret.