The Barbershop Seven

by Douglas Lindsay

  Maggots Of Melancholy

  There's a saying amongst aurally-challenged, mute hunchbacks, and it goes like this: just because you're deaf, doesn't mean you can't hear.

  Igor had a reputation amongst the ladies as a good listener. None of them knew whether it was because he could lip-read or if it was because he instinctively knew what you were saying, but not one of his many confidantes in town doubted for a second that he understood everything they said to him. They could tell him what they liked and Igor was never judgemental. That was one of the many beauties of the man.

  Ruth Harrison had returned home from her devastating meeting with the Reverend Judas Dreyfus, her heart broken. Perhaps the townsfolk would think she mourned for her dead husband and that might be no bad thing. She was shattered and broken and she did not care. She'd gone home, she had opened the fridge door and she had determined that she would spend her days sitting in front of the television, watching awful confrontational chat shows about men who were bastards, and she would drink wine at such a lovely steady pace that she would always be drunk. And then she had heard the footsteps padding heavily on the upstairs landing, she had heard the bathroom door open and close, she had heard the stream of urine and then the toilet flush, and she had immediately run out of the house, nerves shredded, in desperate need of someone to talk to. Someone she could trust.

  She opened the door to the barber shop. For the first time that day Barney was inactive, the seemingly endless stream of old men looking for young haircuts having finally dried up. He raised an eyebrow, knowing that this woman was not here for a bouffant hair-do and a tonne of product.

  She looked at Igor. Igor returned the look from where he swept. Igor's face automatically showed compassion for her loss, although he knew that she had long since tired of Jonah, his financial whims and his repellent personal habits.

  'I need to talk, Igor,' she said.

  Igor smiled and ushered her to the bench. Ruth looked at Barney. Igor shrugged sympathetically, as if to say, we're all in it together. He's one of us. She looked at Barney with uncertainty but was swayed by Igor's expression. If Igor trusted this man, then so would she.

  She sat down, looking from barber to barber's hunchbacked assistant and back again.

  'Barney Thomson,' said Barney, putting her at ease.

  'Ruth Harrison,' she said.

  'Ah,' said Barney. 'I'm sorry.'

  She nodded in that way that you do, then turned back to Igor. Some day she would need to talk to him about the Reverend Dreyfus but not yet. Not while the wound was open and bloody and sore and being feasted upon by the maggots of melancholy.

  'This is going to sound strange, so I'll just say it.' She hesitated, she steeled herself. 'Jonah's still in the house.'

  Igor look surprised. Barney immediately thought of the prosaic and wondered if the ambulance had still to come to remove the body. That happens in today's Britain.

  'How d'you mean?' he asked.

  She turned to Barney, wondering if she should give him the whole story. His eyes were trusting and, whilst telling herself that all men were bastards, she decided that she would take him into her confidence.

  'I was in the bathroom yesterday, really needed to go. Jonah comes to the door hammering to get in, I said, well to be honest, I said, go and pee in the kitchen sink. He must have been desperate, you know, I didn't realise. Else, you know, I would have let him in and everything.'

  Igor knew that that was a whopperooni of a fib.

  'So he thumped down the stairs and that's when he tripped and banged his head. That's how he died.'

  Both Barney and Igor had already heard the story but they both shook their head sympathetically as if hearing it for the first time.

  Igor did a thing with his hands.

  'Oh aye,' said Ruth, 'they came and took him away really quickly. Even cleared up, you know. Luciens was very helpful, wouldn't even take a cup of tea.' Of course, he's a man, and therefore a complete shite of the highest degree. 'It's not that.' It's the fact that Dreyfus dumped me, it's the fact that Jonah is going to haunt me for the rest of my friggin' life because I wouldn't let him go to the toilet. It's the fact that the stupid bastard kept something unmentionable wrapped in a small bag in the bottom drawer of the freezer.

  'What is it?' asked Barney.

  'He's still in the house,' she repeated after another pause, another bite at the bottom lip of uncertainty.

  Barney and Igor waited.

  'He's haunting me. Or something. I don't know how many times I've heard it since yesterday afternoon. He was in his office before he died. Came out of there up to the bathroom door. Now there are footsteps coming out his office door, they pad up to the bathroom, the door opens and shuts, he takes a pee and then flushes the toilet.'

  She looked wide-eyed at them. Igor looked wide-eyed back, very impressed with this bathroom tale of the paranormal.

  'You think Jonah is stuck for eternity taking a pish?' asked Barney, trying to keep the doubt from his voice.

  She looked sombrely at them.

  'Aye,' she said, 'that's exactly what I think.'

  Barney shrugged. There are stranger things in life than that.

  'So would you like us to come round and check it out for you?'

  At this Ruth Harrison dissolved into a liquefied pile of mush, looking with huge relief from Barney to Igor and back.

  'Would you?' she breathed. 'Would you?'

  'Sure,' said Barney. He and Igor exchanged a glance. Kind of a Steve McQueen/Yul Bryner Magnificent 7 kind of thing, although had they acknowledged that that was what they were doing, they would probably have fought over which of them got to be Steve McQueen. 'Igor,' he continued, 'let's saddle up the horses and move on out.'

  Igor smiled, although it emerged as a grimace, and the men set about their business. The Magnificent 2. Hired hands, sent out into the world to fight the paranormal. So in fact, it was more like Ghostbusters really. But then, who dreams of being Dan Ackroyd or Bill Murray?

  ***

  Fifteen minutes later Barney and Igor followed Ruth Harrison into her house. They had come to sit with the traumatised woman, to allow the house itself to bear witness to this bizarre tale of the supernatural.

  Almost four o'clock and Barney had easily taken the decision to close early. He removed his jacket. Igor removed a variety of rough garments he wore to exacerbate his natural hump and stoop, Ruth put her coat over the banister and turned on the lights.

  'Cup of tea?' she asked.

  'That'd be lovely,' said Barney. 'Hardly any milk, no sugar.'

  She looked at Igor who made his request for tea with a slight nod. Everyone in the town knew how Igor took his tea.

  'You want me to go upstairs and have a look?' asked Barney.

  She turned, kettle in her sticky little paws, and stared at Barney with amazement, wonder, surprise and incredulity.

  'You'd do that?' she said.

  Barney shrugged.

  'Didn't come here to just drink tea,' he said. 'Igor, you stay with Mrs Harrison, she shouldn't be alone.'

  'Arf.'

  'Oh, thanks, Igor,' she said.

  Barney got a sense, as he left the room, that there was something between Igor and Ruth Harrison, and he smiled at the thought. Bless 'em. Had no idea of the existence of the Reverend Dreyfus or of the mental torture that Jonah's widow was currently having to endure, but when you're broken, defeated, humiliated and crushed you are at your most vulnerable, and Ruth Harrison had always had a bit of a soft spot for Igor.

  Barney slowly climbed the stairs. This was new. It wasn't like he hadn't encountered a killing field's worth of death in his time, but none of it had ever come back to haunt him.

  Top of the stairs and he stopped, took a look around the landing. A couple of pictures on the walls, oddly tasteful. Imagined, correctly, they must have been Jonah's choices. A large chest of drawers, which he assumed would be filled with all the junk and pillows and sheets and duvets and clothes that they nev
er used but didn't like to throw out.

  He stepped into the room that Jonah used as an office. Suddenly he remembered something from long ago, a memory subverted or forgotten. When he and Agnes had been house-hunting before they'd married. An old house in Cambuslang not far from a school. A quiet road, big Victorian houses set back, with large front gardens. Hadn't had a hope of being able to afford it but they'd enjoyed themselves looking. They had gone up the stairs with the estate agent showing them round. There had been a small middle landing with a couple of bedrooms off. The estate agent had pointed them out but had not gone in. Agnes had stood back. Barney could feel it but had been curious.

  He'd walked into the first room, a blue bedroom stripped bare. A couple of alcoves, carpet taken away, the floor stripped down to the wood. There'd been another door directly opposite and it had drawn him on. Slowly he'd walked across the room and opened the door.

  The sun had been shining brightly into the room. The window was opened slightly and the light net curtain was moving softly. Wooden floor but this one was polished. The walls were spartan, a creamy off-white, no pictures or other decoration, yet they had not looked bare. In the warmth of the sun, the room had almost had a Mediterranean feel to it. There'd been a small table with a sewing box, with an unfinished small crocheted blanket lying next to it. An old rocking chair had sat next to the table, positioned so that whoever sat in it could look out of the window at the orchard in the garden across the high wall next door. In the slight breeze coming in through the window, it had almost seemed like the chair had been slowly rocking.

  And, standing there in that room in the warmth of the sun, Barney had felt a great weight of sadness and a sure and certain knowledge that he was not alone. The hairs had risen on the back of his neck, he could feel the fright in every cell in his body and he had quickly turned, closed the door and walked back through the blue bedroom. The estate agent and Agnes had been waiting for him on the landing, heads down, no conversation.

  'She's still in there,' Barney had said.

  The estate agent had nodded, Barney had looked at Agnes and the two of them had walked back down the stairs and out of the house and never looked back. And slowly, over the years, the memory of that uncomfortable feeling had faded away, until it had completely vanished. Until now and Barney was standing looking at the empty chair from which, a little more than twenty-four hours earlier, Jonah Harrison had risen in a hurry and walked out to his death.

  And yet, while the memory had returned, that same feeling was not there. No hairs springing to attention on the back of his neck, no feeling of fear or discomfort, no awareness of there being another presence in the room.

  He walked back out into the hall and into the bathroom. A small narrow room, toilet, sink and bath all crammed together like commuters on a train. A lot of feminine products, no sign whatsoever that there had ever been a man in the house.

  Still nothing. No sense of anything unearthly, anything that wasn't meant to be part of this world. Not that Barney felt he had any sixth sense for the undead but when there's something present, usually it works its way into your head. There was nothing. Decided that Ruth Harrison must be suffering from shock. An instant judgement.

  He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. Tired eyes, seen too much, in need of a long rest. Sleep, a lot of sleep. Maybe death, maybe that was all they needed.

  'Jesus, Barney,' he muttered at his reflection, 'get a grip.'

  He heard footsteps outside on the landing. Igor must have torn himself away from the Widow Twanky and come up to investigate the ghost himself. Ruth must be confident that old Jonah wasn't suddenly going to try and get a beer from the fridge.

  The footsteps approached the bathroom, then Barney heard the door open and close, the lock placed hurriedly across. He was standing two feet from the door staring at it. It hadn't moved.

  Now he felt it. The extra presence in the room. Every sense was heightened; he felt cold and hot at the same time. He shivered, a great wracking of his body. He heard the toilet seat raised, although it did not move, and then the sound of a long stream of pee into the centre of the bowl. He pressed himself back against the sink, staring down at the toilet. There was nothing in front of him but he could sense it and hear it and he was as sure of it as he had been of anything he'd ever felt in his life. Jonah Harrison was in the room with him.

  The sound of the water dribbled to a halt and was followed by the toilet flushing and a long and relieved sigh. And then, as soon as it had come, the feeling was gone. Jonah was gone and Barney was alone. The tension in his muscles and on his skin relaxed, he was imbued with a feeling of overwhelming relief, the feeling that Jonah Harrison had just left behind. He relaxed.

  The doorbell rang. Barney was juddered from the good feeling in which he had allowed himself to wallow. The moment had passed. Jonah Harrison had visited the toilet and the instance of micturition was gone. Barney walked out of the bathroom and back onto the upstairs landing, only vaguely curious as to who the visitor might be and how much sympathy they were about to heap upon the weeping widow; unaware that one of the two men currently standing outside the door had come armed not with condolences but with implements of torture.

  No One Will Survive

  'I mean, really,' said Romeo McGhee. 'She's this super-neurotic, highly-strung, constantly pre-menstrual, malicious, vicious, irrational, over-stressed uber-bitch, and all you women have her up there as, like, this icon or something. A feminist icon. And that just sums it up, man. Feminism in a flippin' nutshell. It's like you pick the weirdest, freaked out Loony Tune of a woman and make her your role model. Women are so screwed.'

  Chardonnay Deluth took her eye away from the periscope and looked at McGhee. She was lying on the floor, resting her head in her hand. He was sitting on the carpet a few feet away, his back against the wall, reading the blurb of a 70's compilation CD.

  'Why d'you say that?' she asked. 'What kind of icons would you like us to have? She's making a statement, she's saying she'll get on in the world without a man, she's saying she doesn't need a man to lean on. You know, it was coming after centuries of women being tied to either the kitchen sink or the bed. So what if it's a little dated, it helped pave the way. It's awesome and it's still going to be awesome three hundred years from now.'

  'All right, I get the whole I Will Survive thing,' said McGhee, 'I'm not dissing that, you know? But can she not give the guy a break, it's not like he's left her? He's just doing his job, for crying out loud.'

  'What d'you mean?'

  'Well, like the guy's an astronaut and everything. What, is he supposed to phone home every day? Is he supposed to be writing her flippin' love letters? Where the heck are you going to find a post box at seven hundred thousand feet? And how many times a day would there be a collection?'

  She looked at him in a certain way.

  'What?' she said.

  'A collection, you know, if you had a post box in outer space, how often would Postman Pat be able to shuffle by there in his little red van?'

  'Not that,' she said, 'what are you talking about? The guy's not an astronaut, he's just some moron who dumped her, and now he thinks he can just walk back into her life?'

  He did a thing with his hands.

  'Now you're back,' he sang, 'from outer space. The bloke's been on a moon mission for six months. Give him a flippin' break, you know.'

  Deluth waited for him to smile, indicating that he'd been joking. He stared at her, recognised the look on her face. Suddenly he could feel the redness begin to rise in his cheeks, as he had a minor moment of epiphany. Gloria Gaynor wasn't a super-neurotic, highly-strung, constantly pre-menstrual, malicious, vicious, irrational, over-stressed uber-bitch after all. And her ex-boyfriend wasn't an astronaut.

  Deluth burst out laughing, falling onto the floor – which was an achievement seeing as she was already down there – tears immediately coming to her face. Romeo McGhee felt very, very stupid. And Deluth was laughing so much she was complet
ely unable to tell him that Ephesian's men, Simon Jacobs and James Randolph, had just arrived at Ruth Harrison's house.

  ***

  Barney walked down the stairs. Still feeling odd about the whole Jonah Harrison thing. Unsure how to take it all and surprised at the feeling of well-being with which he had been left. Two men had just entered the house as he came to the bottom of the stairs. One, weak eyes, supine around the jaw, nervous, a quite dreadful Peter Lorre cut, and Barney could instantly read that his purpose here was not one of condolence. The other man looked much harder, had the guise of compassion about him; wrinkled face and greying hair, deep blue eyes, teeth that were well-acquainted with an expensive dental surgeon, bit of a François Mitterand.

  Ruth Harrison was on the defensive. She'd seen Jacobs about, knew that he occasionally emerged from Ephesian's house to skulk around the town doing his dirty work. Ephesian had been here earlier and she had obviously sent him away before he had found what he was looking for. Jacobs must have been sent down for the same reason, the spineless Randolph in tow.

  They looked at Barney with suspicion, while also noticing Igor lurking by the kitchen door with what looked like, to Barney's not entirely untrained eye, a touch of lipstick on the corner of his chops.

  'I'm sorry if you're busy,' said Jacobs, eyes furtively shifting between Ruth and Barney. Ignoring Igor. 'We need to talk.'

  Ruth Harrison, fortified by a bit of a smooch with Igor while Barney had investigated her late husband's ghoul, stuck out her chest and looked Jacobs firmly in the eye.

  'Well, say what you have to say. These men are here for their tea and they won't be going anywhere before you do.'

  Randolph nervously began to click the nails of his thumbs. Jacobs rubbed his hands slowly, knowing he had to quickly make the call.

  It wasn't as if they needed to get hold of the package right now. There were still over thirty hours to go. But often problems left to fester just keep getting worse. This was one which needed to be sorted out straight away and the presence of the new barber and the deaf mute hunchback wouldn't be allowed to derail proceedings.