The sneeze, trapped under her skirt, roared wetly up through the darkness and threw his mother into a fright. She kicked out her legs, fell from the chair and sailed through the open window. She left young Charlie blinking In the sudden daylight and holding a warm but empty shoe.
Geraldine’s death broke the old barber’s heart. He pickled himself with brandy and brooded. He tried not to blame the boy but the shoe haunted him. After the funeral he stalked Charlie for days in a stubborn attempt to remove the fragment of mother from child. But Charlie clung to the shoe and screamed.
When Charlie was finally packed off to school he managed to take his mother’s shoe with him. The scent of the worn leather was a balm to his troubled spirit and a comfort through the cold dormitory nights. It became a secret article of worship.
Every child had a smuggled household god. A small boy named Carver had brought a necklace of amber beads that he wore beneath his pyjamas. A boy called Snitcher carried a biscuit tin secured with a piece of frayed ribbon. The tin contained an old toothbrush with bent bristles, a belt buckle and a stump of lipstick. He would arrange these objects beneath his pillow before he could settle down to sleep. At night when the doors were locked and the lights went out, this miserable tribe of pygmies would rummage and mutter for hours in the dark as they prayed to their curious fetishes.
As the years passed the deities took many different disguises. Carver traded his necklace for several dog-eared copies of Stiffy, a magazine so dangerous that its pictures were rumoured to strike you blind if you dared to look at them in daylight. Snitcher emptied his biscuit tin and began to collect pictures of Elvis Presley. Blue Hawaii. Viva Las Vegas. But Charlie never gave up his shoe.
It was a fancy high-heeled slipper, a narrow purse of blue leather balanced on a curving spike, and its power grew more potent as Charlie grew older. In the end it seemed to hold such fascination that it might have been Mary Magdalene’s sandal or contained the shrivelled foot of the Buddha.
Carver, who would grow up to work in a deep pan pizza restaurant and steal scraps of food and poison his wife with contaminated sausage meat, wanted to buy the shoe with a special Christmas edition of Stiffy starring a nympho in see-through scanties playing in winter wonderland. She’s the sort who’d eat you for breakfast! Look at the size of her baloneys!
Snitcher, who would grow up to be an instant coffee millionaire and live in Florida and wear women’s clothes and die of a heart attack because of bad harvests in Central America, offered to trade his wristwatch and a signed photo of Elvis in concert. Take the watch. It cost a fortune. Luminous means it’s radioactive. Every night it glows in the dark.
But Charlie could not be tempted.
He was happy enough at school. He learned to smoke and swim and to swear in foreign languages. After two years in the carpentry class he managed to finish a pipe rack which he sent to his father who trod on it. He was slow at sport and stunned by mathematics but found that he loved to draw and paint.
For a few precious hours each week he would sit in the art room, hunched over sheets of coarse grey paper, coaxing his hand to obey his eye. Nothing gave him so much pleasure as the smell of pencil shavings, the crumble of charcoal under his fingers, the taste of a paintbrush in his mouth. While he worked he found himself absorbed in daydreams, carried into a secret world secure as the shelter of petticoats. There was nothing to harm him. There was nothing to fear.
When he woke from the reverie and looked around, it surprised him that others found the work so difficult. Carver, who would draw nude women with all the dexterity of an aboriginal cave painter, was defeated by a flower or a bowl of fruit. Snitcher managed nothing but cartoon portraits of Elvis Presley. They were both amazed by Charlie’s gift. He could draw anything He was a genius. It seemed to them that he had mastered a baffling conjuring trick and they made him perform it endlessly. They made him doodle on walls, desks and the backs of their hands. One boy asked for a spider tattoo, red and blue ink on the side of his neck. Charlie was always willing to perform his simple magic. And yet, no matter how closely they followed his hands, they could never discover how it was done.
Charlie’s only enemy was the art master. His name was Figgins. He was as short and dirty as a winter’s day. He had the hands of a butcher and a dreadfully withered leg. He hobbled through the world. He loathed boys almost as much as he hated artists. The Impressionists were blind. The Cubists were mad. The Abstractionists were criminals. They were all faggot wops and crazy dagoes.
The function of art was to glorify the struggles of man. Art was colossal. Art was the marble of war memorials, the tombs of generals, heroic statues of cavalrymen. Art was the epic canvas depicting battles and great processions. Art was the regimental silver, the marching band, the triumphal arch. There was also church art and the function of church art was to glorify the terror of God. Flood, fire and pestilence. Art had a duty to serve its purpose with cold precision and discipline.
Figgins had wanted to be a soldier but the army had refused him. He thought of himself as a crippled fighting machine. He took Soldier of Fortune magazine and owned a collection of replica guns. He could recite from memory all the major battles of the Second World War together with the casualty figures, dead and wounded, for the Allied and Axis forces. He had a wardrobe of mothballed uniforms, a box of medals and a genuine silver Schutzstaffel dagger. But while he dreamed of running with mercenaries through blood-spattered African villages, he wasted his life counting pencils and smacking the ears of nut-brained boys.
He lurked in a corner of the room, watching the class with his dark mad eyes. He was proud of any boy who could prove he possessed no natural talent, had doubts about those who were willing to learn and was deeply suspicious of Charlie Nelson.
He was appalled by the boy’s enthusiasm. It wasn’t natural to sit in a room sketching little bunches of flowers when you could be in the gymnasium banging another boy’s brains to pulp with a pair of decent boxing gloves. It was wrong. It was frankly effeminate. He did everything he knew to ridicule and discourage the child. But Charlie never surrendered. He wanted to be a painter.
14.
While Charlie thought of these distant schooldays he slipped imperceptibly into a trance and without even knowing how it had happened or thinking it anything out of the ordinary, found he was back in the evil-smelling art room, a small boy sitting at an ink stained desk drawing a vase of wilted flowers.
Carver was sitting close to him, scribbling fantastic diagrams of women’s reproductive organs on little scraps of paper to be passed among his smirking friends.
Snitcher was at the back of the room. He had just completed an Elvis Presley and was sitting peacefully picking his nose.
Figgins was propped against a window, reading the back pages of Combat & Survival. For the last few minutes he’d been deep in thought, considering the purchase of a genuine, military surplus, tactical assault vest with trauma pouch and pistol holster. But there were so many temptations. He couldn’t decide between the vest and a pair of police issue high-speed handcuffs. He knew he was a danger to himself but he had the drive and ambition to be a danger to others. He smiled as he turned the pages.
He looked even more terrible than Charlie remembered him, a humpbacked dwarf wearing a heavy tweed suit and mirror-polished army boots. As Charlie worked on his drawing he heard the master hobble towards him until he was leaning over the desk.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ he snarled at Charlie. ‘When are you going to pull yourself together, you pathetic ponce?’ He wrenched the pencil from Charlie’s grasp and broke it between his hairy fingers. ‘What do you think you’re going to do when you leave school? Do you think you’ll be drawing for a living?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Charlie said nervously.
Figgins nodded and paused for thought, tapping his cane against his leg. ‘Have you ever met an artist?’ he inquired in a kindly confidential manner.
‘No, sir.’
‘Well let me tell
you something about them,’ Figgins said, puffing out his chest like a mad old turkey cock and looking around the room. ‘Artists are generally froggies, dagoes, spicks and wops,’ he announced to the class. ‘They’re artists because they’re sodomites. Pacifists and pansies. They have no regard for authority. They have no discipline. They have no backbone. They’re beatniks. They cheat and steal and interfere with one another.’
Carver tried to suppress a snigger but Figgins heard him spluttering and gave him such a smack in the face that the boy was knocked from his chair and fell on the floor in a flurry of lewd confetti.
‘And do you know what we do with an artist when we find one in the army?’ Figgins said, returning to Charlie. ‘Do you know what we do with a fairy when we catch one?’
‘No, sir,’ Charlie said.
‘We bend him over a chair and shove a broom up his windward passage. It’s a fine old army tradition. Do I make myself understood?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And why do we shove a broom up his arse, my winsome little friend? Any notions? Any idea?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Because it’s the only way to reach his brains,’ Figgins roared. And as the class erupted into great shouts of laughter, he screwed up Charlie’s drawing, tossed it to the floor and flicked it away with his cane.
Charlie woke up in a sweat, moaning and shaking his head. ‘What happened?’ he said, staring wildly around the room. ‘What have you done to me?’
‘You were back at school,’ Einstein growled, with his ears pressed flat against his skull.
‘Is he finished?’ the Mariner roared. ‘Is that it?’
‘No!’ Einstein said. ‘Give him time. He’s still trying to get the hang of it. Concentrate,’ he said, turning back to Charlie. ‘Concentrate and close your eyes.’
So Charlie closed his eyes and covered his face with his hands and this time he was back in the barber’s shop and his father was alive again and he could smell the soap and the brilliantine and feel the sunlight through the window.
The old man was standing by the revolving leather chair, staring down on a customer. His arms were raised against his chest. He held a pair of scissors in his hand. His shirt was darned at the elbow. There were snippets of hair on his shoes.
A young man stood in the shop. A young man with freckles and a dazed expression on his face. He was standing forlornly in a corner, holding a long-handled broom. It was Charlie.
‘I can see myself!’ he gasped. ‘I can see myself in the barber’s shop.’
‘You’re sweeping the floor,’ the Deep Time Mariner complained. He sounded disappointed.
‘Can you see it?’ Charlie whispered.
‘Everything.’ the Mariner said. ‘Everything but the dog.’
‘It’s long ago. I wasn’t born,’ Einstein said.
The three of them were silent for a moment, gazing down into Charlie’s past as the years began melting away.
15.
A wasp was hanging against the window. The barber snapped at the air with his scissors. Charlie leaned on his broom. The little shop was hot and cramped and Charlie was feeling bored. When the barber had been told that his son displayed an artistic bent he had promptly pulled him from school and set him to work in the shop. He’d half-expected to find the boy wearing green mascara and clutching a plastic handbag. Nothing would have surprised him.
Charlie was disappointed but he tried to learn the barber’s craft. He swept the floor, boiled brushes, strapped razors and helped mix the bottles of sweet cologne. He was made to shave chins, trim whiskers and watch his father at work with the scissors.
His father cut hair like a gardener hacking at nettles He slashed impatiently at the roots and raked through the stubble. The customers were left looking startled, their skulls chafed and their ears full of melting brilliantine.
When Charlie arrived business was bad. Nobody wanted a prison haircut. Young men walked the London streets, hairy as Bible Land prophets, rings on their fingers, bells on their toes, their beards wreathed in fragrant ganja smoke.
‘Lunatics!’ the barber would bark as he watched the world strutting past the window. ‘Look at the state of them!’
‘That’s the fashion,’ Charlie said wistfully, gently stroking his own savaged scalp.
‘Fashion?’ the barber shouted, snapping his scissors. ‘You half-baked potato! I’ve been cutting hair since before you were born. Don’t talk to me about fashion.’
‘Styles must have changed in all that time,’ Charlie said, rather doubtfully. He looked around the walls at the faded pictures of Douglas Fairbanks and the dirty display for Blue Gillette blades. The word Durex in red neon tubing fizzled and crackled over the door.
‘Styles?’ the barber growled. ‘Don’t talk to me about styles. I learned my trade with the Hollywood Correspondence School of Electro Massage and Grooming. I’ve got a diploma. It cost me eight guineas. I’m qualified to nurture the scalps of the stars.’
‘lvor Novello had a lovely head of hair,’ the man in the chair said. He was an old street trader called Dancing Perkins. His head poked through the nylon sheet like a large and poisonous fruit.
‘That’s right!’ the barber said.
‘Rudolph Valentino.’
‘There’s another!’ the barber agreed. ‘He kept himself immaculate. Ronald Colman. Clark Gable. There was never a hair out of place. They were always jumping out of express trains or being shipwrecked or fighting the heathen hordes. But they were always most particular about their personal grooming.’
‘And Fred Astaire,’ Perkins added. ‘He was another dapper gent.’ He winked at Charlie in the mirror.
‘Fred Astaire had a wig,’ the barber growled. ‘He used to dance with a blasted wig.’
‘I thought that was Ginger Rogers,’ Perkins cackled.
The barber grabbed the scruff of his neck and began to attack his head with the clippers.
‘There are two kinds of haircut,’ he said, with the absolute conviction of a man with a diploma.
‘Short and very short,’ Perkins said.
Charlie didn’t like to argue with them. Regular customers, loyal for more than forty years, continued to come and sit in the chair. They were glad that nothing had changed. It gave them comfort. It made them feel secure. They had watched themselves growing old in these mirrors. Some of these men had so little hair on their heads they only required a hot towel and polish.
The barber taught Charlie everything he knew and found that his son was quick to learn the tricks of the trade. He was happy enough to have him working in the shop, but while they shared the house he began to find that the boy was a source of irritation. Charlie was quiet and clean and spent the evenings in his room. He was no trouble. But the barber had to stop drinking and shouting at shadows and remember to wear his teeth at breakfast. He was too old to break bad habits. It made him feel crusty and constipated. So after a while he suggested that Charlie might like to live in the attic above the shop.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ he announced one afternoon when Charlie was on his hands and knees trying to clear the washbasin pipes. ‘You shouldn’t be living with an old man at your time of life.’
‘You need me to look after you,’ Charlie said, hooking a wet plug of hair from the drain.
‘It’s not healthy,’ the barber said, wrinkling his nose and wrapping the stinking mess in a copy of Sporting Life. ‘You need a little place of your own where you can play your jungle music and entertain your lady friends.’ He grinned at the thought and jerked his thumb at the ceiling.
‘I don’t play music,’ Charlie said, surprised by his father’s concern for his comfort.
‘And you don’t have any lady friends,’ the barber said darkly. 'That’s why you need a place of your own.’
‘But you need someone to cook for you,’ Charlie argued. ‘You can’t live on pork pies and Guinness.’
‘It’s never done me any harm!’ the barber said impatiently. ‘Forget
about me. It’s time you looked after yourself.’
The attic was large and draughty and divided into tiny rooms with the help of plasterboard walls. There was a sitting room with a chest of drawers and a bed that folded into a sofa; there was a kitchen with a table and stove and even a little bathroom, tucked away behind the eaves. The windows had a view of the sky trapped between rooftops and chimneys. At night Charlie could sit on the bed that served as a sofa, drink hot soup and look at the moon.
‘It will need cleaning,’ the barber said mournfully. ‘It hasn’t been touched in years.’ He gazed at the shelf of empty bottles, their shoulders white and hairy with dust, and sighed to remember those faraway days when he was young and glad to be living.
‘I could paint it,’ Charlie suggested, tapping his knuckles against the plasterboard walls.
‘That’s the spirit,’ the barber said, turning away and painfully treading downstairs. ‘You’re supposed to be good with a paintbrush.’
Charlie smiled and said nothing.
He loved the freedom of the attic, and tried to turn it into a studio. He painted the walls white and the floorboards green. He painted the ceiling a summer blue and used the stains in the plaster as clouds. He searched the market for scraps of wood and constructed a crude kind of easel.
At weekends he haunted the Tate Gallery, looking and learning and hoping, in vain, to meet other painters. He bought postcards and prints and studied the masters. He tried to imitate Gauguin, Lautrec, Matisse and Picasso, but everything he copied was transformed by the primitive energy from his swift untutored hands. His work was vigorous, fresh and swirling with life.
In the solitude of the attic he created his own fantastic world in brilliant surges of colour. He had embarked on the grand adventure and nothing could stop him. One day, when he had mastered his art and saved a little money, he would pack his paintbox and set out to explore the world.
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