Knives cut. Knives cut, knives cut, they cut and slice and sever and there are two of them an inch from my neck. This is what I’m thinking. Here’s what I’m saying.

“I’m in your hands, mate.” The steel resting on the collar of my shirt, silver against white.

“How about a fade?” He’s brusque and cheery, market trader-style.

“What’s a fade?” I imagine horizontal mohicans, or a single tuft of hair emanating from the side of a great bald dome.

“It’s a kind of side-shave. A little like him, over there.” He points at a framed poster of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

“What, Brad Pitt?”

“Yeah, he looks good. How about it?”

I want to be civil, but at the same time this is my hair we’re talking about here. I have limits. “I think he looks good because he’s Brad Pitt. Wouldn’t people see me and say look, there’s a guy with Brad Pitt’s hair, but not his face?”

He screws up his face and I remember that offending your barber might be little like offending your waiter. Would this guy spit in my hair? It’s possible, so I cut the silence as quickly as I can - “You know what? You’re the expert. The hair…preparer. Make me look good,” and I manage a smile into that big mirror, “any means necessary.”

This happens every time at the barber’s. I leave it so long - in both senses - that I start to forget what the experience is like, start to build it up like a dentist’s operation. Every half-imagined hair disaster rears its head like a Narwhal, and imagine that’s what I’ll look like, not to mention the situation itself, how does a guy sit in a chair and have another guy touch his head, actually cut things off, things that are then left on the floor like blood or fingernails, how it all this allowed to happen in Western society? But then some expediency, some life event makes the thing happen. Life has a way of poking it to you like that, you know? There’s a job interview or a wedding or a funeral, and suddenly you have to look like you’re part of society. And so I have Auntie Grace’s consumption to thank for being here. And you know what? I’m starting to like it again, the second half of the pattern. You know when unlucky businessmen are sent on training days, and they have to fall into each others arms without looking, to build trust? That’s what I loved about the barber’s. The sense of surrender, trust, and danger.

Gary or Barry or Dave or Dan rolls out the standard patter with his tools. “Going anywhere nice for the holidays, mate?”

I’m not, but why spoil a good story with a stranger? I say the first country that comes into my head, a hangover from old GCSE Geography days. “Vietnam. Gonna tour the country on a motorbike, end to end.”

“Oh, like that guy,” he eyes the blade of his scissors with a critical bent, “Ewan MacGregor, wasn’t it? Hey, I could do your hair a little like his, if you’re up for it. Go the whole way.”

“Not a bad idea. It’ll fit into the helmet, at least. And you can do that thing hairdressers and mums are always talking about… growing into it, isn’t it?”

“Oh, always. Don’t worry, we may have just met - first base - but I’m not leaving you in the hands of a Vietnamese barber with one eye and no arms.” He starts measuring individual strands, slicing at them randomly with a single scissor blade. “We can build… time into this.”

Time is what I’ve been looking for, all along. Motorcycling was a lie, but Vietnam might not be. I’m weighing things up right now. Gary came back from Thailand and he just wouldn’t shut up about it. I love the guy, god knows I do, but there’s something in the human constitution that just makes it impossible to truly enjoy another person’s happiness, not to the level you’d want. Is it evolutionary? Do I fear that he’s drinking to deeply from a pool of collective joy, leaving none for me? 

My eyes close as I remember the second great thing about this biannual appointment: where else, my friend, where else but the barbers do you get to really think in this life? The toilet, maybe - but that’s always overshadowed with this sense of utility, like thinking is frivolous pastime when you have the more noble one of shitting to be getting on with. But here? As long as I keep my head still, anything that goes on inside it is totally up to me. And there’s been a lot going on.

“Tell me…”

“Dan. Sorry mate, you were-?”

“Sam, sorry. Listen Dan, since we’re both here for the next half-hour or so… can you keep a secret?”

“I’m keeping a thousand already, another on the pile won’t hurt.”

“One of the perks of the job, right? Okay, listen to this.”

And somehow my words have become so deadly serious that he stops, the comb hanging in my hair, and leans down, playground-style.

“Dan… I’m a woman.”

“With a crown like that? Well, obviously.”

Img: Daniel Barnard

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