Okay then.
Fuck’s sake.
Once upon a time.
Look. Do I really have to do this?
Are you sure?
The Shaitan who watches over me to ensure I fill in this piece of paper rushes across to me and snatches the paper off the table where I am sitting.
It is probably best to explain the pecking order of things around here. I wish someone had bothered to tell me. That way I could have prioritised exactly who it was I was meant to be scared of. When I first started out I had no idea, and that’s not a good starting point in almost any venture believe you me.
Collectively we are the jinn, which makes me a jinni. Singular, you see. Never djinn and definitely not genie. That’s all down to Disney that. Oh, and you can forget lamps and what have you. I mean. Who would take up residence in a bloody lamp? Or get imprisoned in one. How would you even get into one for a start? I mean. Think it through. All the Disney stuff started with what’s his name and a cave filled with treasure. Not much of a retirement plan is that, now? Oh I know - where can I hide all of my fabulous treasure? Wow! A cave! Just the job!
Believe you me, you wouldn’t want a jinnie guarding it either. As far as I am concerned I would get bored after about ten minutes - if that - and just wander away. Nope. Jinnies and treasure do not sit well together my friend. Though we are more than a little predisposed to the wishes thing. As you will see.
So. The lowest in the food chain are the Jann, and then the Jinn, which is yours truly as I have already said. Then there is the Shaitan a member of whom is currently giving me daggers from where he is standing glaring in front of me whilst simultaneously slowly muttering curses under its breath. Above him are Ifrit, and finally the head honchos are the Marid, and believe you me, you don’t mess with those guys. Oh no.
“It must start with “once upon a time!” shouts the Shaitan in question and pushes the piece of paper at me so that it almost hits me in the face. “It always starts with, “Once upon a time.” You know that. One such as you must surely have undertaken this punishment before.”
“And what does that mean?” I shout, throwing the pen down onto the table where it rolls a little way and then clatters to the floor. “One such as I?”
“You know perfectly well what I mean!” shouts the Shaitan, his face now a mere inch from mine. “Fill in the paper. Confess and we can get to the three wishes.”
“All of this is ridiculous.” I say testily, but I do not pick up the pen. To my great surprise the Shaitan does so for me, and tosses it onto the desk.
“It is hardly ridiculous.” He says. “In fact the Marid, blessed be his name, takes a very dim view of your behaviour, and believe you me you do not want him on your back. Not ever.”
“It is a simple misunderstanding.” I say and the Shaitan tuts just as the door to the cell swings open and in steps the Marid.
He has taken the shape of a half man half bull today, and as he strides into the room flames and smoke pour from his snout, his large dark hooves melting the floor where he has trodden, leaving burning footprints behind him as he walks. I cannot help but feel that perhaps he is trying to make a point.
“Do we have the confession yet?” he roars and the Shaitan beside me almost shrinks in his presence. I wonder why the Marid is here, having jumped over the Ifrit, but then it is a wishing thing I guess and so it looks like the problem, such as it is, has gone straight to the top, which is most definitely not good news for yours truly.
“Not yet, oh great one.” He stutters and as the Marid hears this fresh flames flicker about his snout. “There seems to be a problem with the wording in fact,”
“The wording?” roars the half man, half bull.
“The jinni here seems to disagree with the words, “Once upon a time”.”
“I see.” Says the Marid, “charge sheet?”
The Shaitan pulls a small scroll from inside his robe and passes it to the creature who unrolls it and begins to read. He snorts loudly once or twice and then hands it back.
“Tell me, jinni. Are you hard of hearing?”
“Of course not O great one.” I say, showing all due deference. The Marid has great power and even I do not wish to enrage him.
“I see.”
In the centre of the room a round orb appears, spinning slowly in the air. As it turns a scene begins to appear in the glass. The first thing I notice is the music; piano music being played, and played, I must say, extremely well. Then the picture clears and I see that in the orb is a bar, and around the bar are several rough necked looking guys standing listening to the small man who is enthusiastically playing a concert piano. The man and the piano are on the bar however, for both are small in size, the man no more than a foot high.
As soon as the picture in the orb appears it vanishes again leaving only silence in the cell broken only by the sound of the Shaitan sniffing once loudly.
“The wish was for a twelve-inch pianist?” asks the Marid softly and I can almost see the Shaitan trembling. What I cannot decide is whether it is shaking through laughter or through fear. His face is definitely giving nothing away.
“I must have misheard.” I say and the Marid places the pen in front of me and begins to dictate. Reluctantly I take up the pen and begin to write.
“Once upon a time.” I write, cringing inwardly as I do so.
It does not take long, and having finished I pass the paper to the Shaitan who knows better than to examine it and so passes it straight to the Marid who snorting flames, gives it the once over and then nods. As he does so a small device appears on the table in front of me. It looks very much like a slot machine. It has a small glass front in which three reels are already spinning, and at its side is a large brass handle. The dials are spinning so fast that it is impossible to see what the symbols are, but I know what this device is, and I know also that the dials do not contain pictures of lemons or cherries. No. The dials show the face of every single person alive on the planet, and when I pull the handle the dials will rest upon three randomly picked people.
For these three people I will have to grant a wish, and my performance will be closely monitored. Get it wrong and I may very well wish that I had ended up stuck in a lamp or an urn somewhere.
“Pull the handle, jinnie.” says the Marid, and as I do so I see the Shaitan grinning wildly.
“Does anyone have a coin?” I ask politely, pointing at the small slot with a groove in it on the top of the machine.
“I beg your pardon?” says the Marid, anger in its voice.
“I need a coin.” I say. “I never carry cash these days. No need really.”
“Is there a coin, Shaitan?” roars the Marid, turning its fire tinged gaze upon the now quivering clerk who makes a show of going through its pockets of its robe, a feat that takes a surprisingly long period of time. Throughout the Marid taps its foot loudly, it's scowl increasing by the second, the flames in its eyes and mouth now almost as red as the Shaitan face.
“My lord, I…” begins the Shaitan just as I pull a coin out of one of many pockets.
“It’s okay.” I almost shout in surprise, “I found one!”
The Marid almost breathes flame down upon me as I reach forward and smiling, place the coin in the slot. There is a flicker of light on the surface of the machine and so I pull the handle and the dials begin to slow and now I see faces start to form on the dials as they slow down. There is a loud “Ker-ching” noise and the first dial stops. The face of this one is a man and he is cutting hair with scissors. He looks late thirties, and is talking, talking, talking.
The second dial rolls to a stop and I see now an older man who is serving drinks from behind a bar. He looks worried. The final dial shows a man wearing a headset and he is talking too, but he doesn’t look like he is listening. He looks younger than the other two, and to be quite frank, looks like trouble. There is something about him that makes me wary.
Nevertheless, the dice are cast and as I sit looking at these three the Shaitan be
gins to scribble hastily in its ledger that it has produced seemingly from nowhere.
“The first is a hairdresser named, “Les”. He is a simple soul but is disillusioned about his lack of success in his acting career.” says the Marid.
“An easy wish then.” I say, smiling broadly.
“He cannot actually act.” smiles the Marid.
“Ah.” I say, “No matter. I think that is hardly a hindrance these days.”
“If you say so.” smiles the Marid, flames flickering about its smile. “I would not know anything of these matters. So to your next wish. The second is a man who runs a public house. That is to say an establishment where people go to drink beer. His name is, “Rudge” and you will find that his trade, and therefore his livelihood is hampered by the legislative powers of the land in which he dwells.”
“As many things are.” I smile to the Marid who merely scowls at me in return. By my side the Shaitan continues to scribble in his ledger furiously.
“The last is a worker in what is known as a “call centre”.”
“Ah.” I whisper in disgust, for I have heard of these for they are spoken of in whispers by those who are damned to work in them.
“Indeed.” says the Marid, “Though this one, named Pip for short is a tricky beggar. I wish you good luck with that one, jinnie.”
“Thank you my lord.” I say, bowing to the Marid.
“My work here is done.” The Marid says “and without another word fades to nothing, leaving the Shaitan in charge once again.
“Do you know the rules of your punishment?” he enquires, and I nod, though he relates them to me anyway. “A wish for each person without revealing yourself to them. The wish must be of a good nature, and that means no shifty stuff.”
“No pianists.” I mumble and the Shaitan nods enthusiastically.
“Also you will take no credit for the wishes, for they are forced upon you.” The Shaitan folds his ledger closed and as he does so it disappears. “Feel free to proceed as you will.”
“I thank you.” I say, and so with an ever so slightly theatrical flash of smoke get, as they say, to it.
***
I should at this point explain about the wishes thing, because I can more or less guess what you are thinking. Actually, I don’t need to guess. I do know what you are thinking. I am a jinnie after all. One of the Jinn, and our greatest desire and urge is to grant wishes. So why would three random wishes be a punishment I hear you ask. It is quite simple really. The wishes are at the Jinnie’s discretion. That is to say I decide who to grant them to. Nothing to do with lamps or urns or what have you. No. My choice. My wishes. My rules.
So to be told who I have to give wishes to is abhorrent to any Jinnie, not just I. It is how we work. There is also the small matter of taking credit for them as well. You see, every time I appear and grant a wish it is like a banquet of the finest food to me. My spirit is infused with their joy and gratitude. So to be told who to give the wishes to whilst at the same time not telling them that I have done something for them? Well. Let us just say that I want to get these three done as quickly as I possibly can.
So then. To the first. I have to abide by the laws of my punishment (which the Shaitan has explained to me at length, slowly and cautiously as indeed the Shaitan do) and stay in the background for a while before I grant a wish. So to the first. I am standing outside a small hairdressers somewhere in the leafier parts of England. There is a pleasant village green that the shop is but one of a few that border it and so I peer through the window and I see a man probably in his late thirties, blonde hair, his arms waving about him wildly as he talks to the man in his chair. There is also a large red flashing arrow above his head that he obviously cannot see. As I notice it then it fades. This is my man. Invisibly floating through the keyhole to the shop I take my place beside him and quickly tune into his thoughts.
***
Les looked out of the barbershop window as he finished cutting the hair of the old white haired guy. Sally was just putting the finishing touches to the customer in her chair, and there was only one man waiting. The recently cropped man paid up and left the hairdresser’s Les carefully watching him leave.
“That mad old bugger has been in for a haircut every day this week I’m sure.” he whispered to Sally in a theatrical fashion: loud enough for everyone else in the shop to hear, but not loud enough for anyone to comment on the fact that they had heard. There was an art form to this of course, though normally it involved a fence between the whisperer and the whisperee. Sally stepped away from the customer she was just finishing and looked through the window as the man doddered slowly across the green.
“I did the old guys hair on Monday.” she said, and returned to putting the finishing touches to her customer.
“Quite a dish in his day I should think though.” said Les dreamily, twirling his comb in his hand as he spoke like some kind of hirsute baton. Turning his back on the rapidly disappearing figure he dismissed him from his mind and returned his attention to the shop.
Les had done his preparation for the day, of course. Every morning before starting he looked at the weather report for the day. He did this religiously for the entire United Kingdom, Portugal and Spain. Les found Portugal to be the most popular holiday destination of the three these days and therefore worth knowing. Not everyone holidayed there of course, but it was a good starting point. Beyond that and Spain of course he would improvise, as usual.
“Next!” shouted Les at the one-man queue and the customer quickly approached the chair. Les assumed his usual posture when calling for his next customer, that is to say it was almost if he was assessing the scale of the job, and the cut to come. Les reckoned this customer to be mid-forties. Looked more like a reconstruction than a haircut to him. The man sat in the chair and Les caught his eye in the mirror as he covered him up with a gown. “What’s it to be?”
Les received several vague instructions that most men above a certain age (usually once the ages between twenty-seven to thirty were safely just a memory) gave to the person cutting their hair and nodded in acknowledgement. There was a pause as Les tried to catch the man's eye in the mirror, and as he finally achieved this he waved the comb extravagantly and leaned forward slightly. In a loud voice that carried across the entire empty shop. Pausing almost as if to make a dramatic point he pronounced brightly, “Twenty-five years in show business.” Slight pause. “Who would have thought it?” The man in the chair wriggled uneasily and smiled. Obviously he was a regular, and had very possibly heard this before. Les settled down to cutting hair whilst at the same time describing his questionably illustrious acting career in microscopic detail.
Les considered it to be a way of passing the time more than anything. He had the usual hairdressing triple whammies of, “where are you going on your holidays?”, “Is it your day off?”, and “isn’t the weather awful?” under his belt of course, but this was something beyond the usual topics. He was fairly certain that not many hairdressers (he refused to consider himself a “barber”) could entertain and regale their customers with stories from their acting career. It was a unique string to his bow, and he intended to play it as much as he possibly could.
In addition, he found it interesting. He paused, scissors in mid snip, remembering when he first caught the acting bug. “Les Sanderson! Come out of that clothes cupboard right now!” his mum had called as he had emerged at the age of five dressed in some old jumper and scarf that he couldn't walk in without tripping over. His mum saw a child in a long jumper. To him he was a pirate, or a secret agent or a king. He really had got the acting bug that early. In fact, (and his scissors paused over his customer’s head mid-snip as he thought of this) he had known he was and always would be an actor even before he had realised he was gay.
“How odd!” he said out loud, and the customer in his chair squirmed a little, trying to catch Les’s eye in the mirror whilst counting his ears at the same time. Les turned his concentration back to the man in the
chair and to his customer’s visible relief began to cut his hair again. The customer hadn’t taken the bait with the twenty-five years of acting line and so it was the weather, holidays in the Algarve and what the guy was doing with his day off. Gardening, it appeared. “Dull, dull, dull.” thought Les and finished the cut as soon as he could.
A minimal tip sent Les into even more of a flat spin and so it slowly but surely came to nearly lunch hour and not a single customer who needed a haircut. It was like this some days, he thought. All or nothing. At this precise moment in time it was definitely nothing. “I think I’ll take an early lunch.” he sighed, looking out of the window and up and down the square outside. There were a few people about, but not many. None seemed to be heading in the direction of the hairdresser's shop however. Les sighed. Everyone seemed to get their hair cut at the same time in Liverpool. It seemed to be all or nothing. Sally simply nodded and Les decided to pop along the square to Mr. Hinnerty’s to get a sandwich.
Stepping out of the shop he made his way along the square to the general store. There was a certain art to getting in and out of Mr Hinnerty’s shop in less than forty-five minutes. The first rule was never to ask a question that could in any way be related back to a tall story of any kind, and the second rule was at all times to remain focused on what you wanted. It was very easy for Mr Hinnerty to distract you, most people found. Les simply approached it as if it were some form of acting challenge or test.
Essentially, the main part of his plan was to pretend that he was simple. For Les this gave one benefit: quick service. From Mr. Hinnerty’s perspective however this made him extremely wary of allowing Les to cut his hair, and he would only ever let Sally do so. Mister Hinnerty was of the opinion that in his view it was a bit of a liberty to allow a man who clearly had a few marbles loose to cut people's hair in the first place. There was however, a compromise of kinds: on most days Les took sandwiches to work with him. Sadly, this was not one of them.
His act worked however, (he did consider the drooling he always managed to do to be particularly inspired), and he left the general store within a time period that would have amazed any other customer that frequented the store, carrying a freshly wrapped chicken sandwich in a neatly folded brown paper bag. Just to be extra careful and provide extra customer service, Hinnerty had written “sandwich” in large friendly letters on the front of the bag,
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