The Barbershop Girl

by Georgina Penney

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘No, Ross. I’m afraid that’s not going to happen now you’ve put your foot in it.’ Ben caught sight of Amy’s shocked, hurt expression and winced, realising he’d now stepped over the line himself. ‘Here she is now. Play nice.’ He held out the phone and when she didn’t take it, held it up to her ear. ‘Start talking, Ross. She’s listening.’

  ‘Amy, is it?’ The booming voice was gruff and a lot quieter now, but still no doubt loud enough for people walking on the street outside to hear.

  ‘Yes.’ To Ben, Amy looked like a kicked puppy.

  ‘I thought you were Ben.’

  ‘That’s alright.’ Amy spoke quickly. ‘I’ll put you back onto Ben now.’

  ‘I’m so—’ Ross began, but by then she’d managed to twist herself out from underneath Ben, collect her robe, and leave the room.

  Cursing under his breath, Ben moved to the side of the bed and rested his elbows on his knees. ‘You can forget about the rest of the apology. She’s gone.’

  ‘Oh. Well,’ Ross said in an abashed tone and then recovered true to form. ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  ‘Writing, you idiot. I had a screenplay to polish and I’ve finished your bloody book. Or the first draft at least.’

  ‘What? Oh. When do I get to see it?’

  ‘When it’s edited to my satisfaction.’ Ben stood up and looked around the floor for his discarded jeans, pulling them on with one hand.

  ‘Is it any good?’

  Ben paused with the phone in the crook of his shoulder as he buttoned up his fly. ‘Yes, actually. Not what you were expecting possibly, but I think it’s good.’

  ‘The blonde – Babyface – in it?’

  ‘Yes. Her name is Amy and you still owe her an apology. You owe me one too considering how much you’ve just bollocksed things up for me.’

  ‘I’m not going to say I’m sorry to you. If you’d bothered to call, you wouldn’t be in this mess.’

  It was an indicator of just how pissed off Ben was that he hung up at that, not even bothering with pleasantries. Locating the cricket jersey he’d worn the night before and yanking it over his head, he went out to find Amy, only to be foiled by the discovery she was taking refuge in that abomination in her backyard.

  Deciding that he’d let her have a few minutes of peace and quiet before prostrating himself at her feet and begging forgiveness, he collected his keys and went out to get the overnight bag he’d thrown in his car the day before.

  Ben’s roar of outrage snapped Amy out of her brooding commune with nature. Hearing the anger in his voice, she pulled her clothes together and sprinted through the house as fast as her shoes allowed.

  ‘Ben?’ she called, urgently looking around. An inventive round of swearing from her driveway told her exactly where he was.

  ‘Ben?’ She came to a dead stop, placing her hand over her mouth in shock.

  Ben’s Aston Martin was a putrid mess. During the night someone had upended every rubbish bin in the street over the top of it. The bits of the car that weren’t covered with slimy leftovers and miscellaneous detritus looked scratched and battered, as if someone had run keys along the paintwork.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Oh no? Is that all you can say?’ Ben was standing in the driveway in bare feet, hands on his head and every muscle tensed for a fight as his eyes shot icicles.

  Amy gripped her robe tightly around her body. ‘Let me get dressed and I’ll help you clean it.’

  ‘Clean it?’ Ben exclaimed with cut-glass precision, gesturing to his car. ‘It’s a fucking disaster! Some bastard managed to destroy my car and you think we can clean it up just like that? Call the bloody police. Better yet, I’ll call them.’ He strode past Amy back into the house, fury emanating from every pore.

  She jumped out of his way, feeling sick to her stomach.

  Ben was right. It was a disaster. It smelled worse than it looked, too. Whoever had done this had made a point of spreading her next-door neighbour’s dirty nappies across the windshield. She was about to turn away to follow him back into the house when a folded, relatively clean, piece of paper trapped behind a windscreen wiper caught her eyes. She reached for it.

  The word ‘BITCH’ written in large black letters greeted her eyes.

  ‘Oh no,’ she repeated, feeling ill. The friendly senior constable must have got around to paying Liam that visit.

  She quickly refolded the piece of paper and unthinkingly scrunched it up in her hand when Ben returned.

  ‘Don’t touch a thing,’ Ben barked, coming back to glare at his car. ‘The police will be here soon and I don’t want a bloody thing touched. Just go back in the house and leave it the hell alone. As it is, I’m going to have a hard time explaining to them about the alarm system being off last night because I was under the misconception that no one would dream of trying anything like this.’ His words were clipped and his expression pure fury. Amy found herself shrinking away without even realising it.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ben.’

  ‘So am I,’ Ben growled. ‘I should have bloody well known better than to park it here. What was I thinking? Look at it.’ He turned around and gestured to Amy’s little house, her pride and joy. ‘The place should be condemned. You don’t even have proper facilities, for God’s sake. Bloody tin-pot, working-class piece of shit.’

  ‘Ben?’ Amy tried again, feeling every one of his words like a knife blade.

  ‘Just go back inside and put some bloody clothes on.’ He sliced his hand through the air. ‘The last thing we need is for you to be arrested for indecent exposure. A mess. A bloody mess.’ He turned away from her as he said the words.

  Looking down, Amy felt a wave of mortification sweep over her. She wasn’t wearing any make-up. Her hair wasn’t done. She was only dressed in the lacy black wrap she’d put on to go to the toilet minutes before and had been standing outside flashing her legs and almost everything else to the whole street. Feeling her traitorous lip begin to quiver, she turned and hurried back to the house, stopping only long enough to grab a curious Gerald by the collar and haul him back through the front door.

  It took ten minutes for a patrol car to stop by, their reaction time no doubt sped up by Ben telling them the car in question was an Aston Martin DB9.

  Ben barely managed to keep his cool as he answered the woefully inept questions directed at him by a pimple-faced teenager masquerading as a policeman while a middle-aged policewoman, the brains of the operation, walked around the car, taking down notes. Ben knew it was all for show and was just about to go from being barely civil to downright aggressive when the policewoman asked him if he owned the premises.

  ‘No, but I can get the lady who does.’ He gestured impatiently for them to wait and then strode inside the house.

  Amy was in the kitchen furiously beating the hell out of what looked to be cake batter, her shoulders rigid enough to be cast concrete.

  ‘The police need to talk to you,’ he said without preamble, still feeling the fury boiling in his veins.

  It wasn’t just about a damn car. It was the bloody principle of the thing. Some bastard had damaged his property, offending him to the core. It had been years, years, since he’d been the recipient of this kind of bad behaviour and, unsurprisingly, he wasn’t taking it any better now than he had then.

  ‘I’ll go see them.’ Amy carefully rested the wooden spoon she was holding against the side of the bowl and walked out of the room, collecting a small piece of scrunched-up paper from the kitchen table on the way.

  ‘What’s that?’ Ben demanded, eyes narrowing.

  Instead of answering, she kept walking. A few seconds later he heard the front door bang.

  He followed her, fully intending to see what was going on, but didn’t account for Gerald, who’d taken up his usual post across the kitchen door. By the time he’d collected himself from the floor and threatened the dog with stuffing and mounting, Amy had returned.

  ‘Th
ey’ve got the report ready for you to sign,’ she said curtly, brushing past him and stepping daintily over Gerald as she returned to the kitchen. Her expression was unreadable but her body language screamed upset and Ben’s pervasive sense of outrage departed long enough for him to realise that he’d probably have a considerable amount of grovelling and apologising to do in the near future. He didn’t have the time or the patience for it now though. She would simply have to understand. Someone had just ruined his bloody car. If anything warranted behaving badly, surely this did.

  He finished up with the police as quickly as possible, collected the police report and put a call through to his insurance company.

  Marginally relieved that his beleaguered car would be taken care of, if not his offended sensibilities, Ben returned to the kitchen to find Amy still looking as wooden as the spoon she was using to scrape the batter from the bowl into a cake tin.

  ‘A tow truck’s coming along with a replacement car within the hour.’ He took a seat at the kitchen table, one knee bumping up and down with pent-up energy. He stared at Amy’s back, waiting for her to say something, but she didn’t. Instead she opened the oven and slid the cake tin inside.

  ‘They said I should have it back within the week if the damage is only superficial.’ He waited for a response but still got nothing other than her shoulders tensing even more under the crisply ironed white shirt she was wearing.

  He noticed, for the first time, that she’d dressed impeccably in a shirt, chocolate-coloured pencil skirt, seamed stockings and dark brown leather heels. Her hair was done up in one of those impossibly difficult-looking bun things she favoured, and her make-up was immaculate. Red lipstick. Black eyeliner. If clothes were armour, she was dressed for war, and the frilly pink apron she was wearing was a breastplate.

  ‘It’s a Sunday.’ He watched as she began running water to wash the dishes. ‘Why the full regalia?’

  Amy’s hands stilled in the sink. ‘I didn’t want to look like a mess.’

  ‘A mess?’

  ‘Although since I live in a tin-pot, working-class piece of shit, it doesn’t really matter, does it?’

  Ben sat back, stunned at his own harsh words coming out of Amy’s mouth. He’d never heard her swear before and it didn’t suit her. It sounded positively obscene.

  ‘I wasn’t talking about you,’ he said with both shock and irritation.

  ‘No, you were talking about my house.’ Amy turned and he saw for the first time that she was genuinely, extremely upset. ‘I work really hard for this house, Ben. It’s mine and I put every cent I earn into it. I make my payments every month. Everything that needs doing, I do it. It’s all I ever wanted in my life and for you to just act like it’s nothing—’ Her face crumpled.

  Ben knew he should react but he didn’t. He couldn’t work out what had happened. One moment he was furious that his car had been vandalised, possibly beyond repair, and the next minute he felt like he’d kicked a sack full of puppies. Rather than focus on the latter, he took refuge in his earlier self-righteous fury.

  ‘Someone vandalised my car. In front of your house.’

  ‘Yeah, but—’

  ‘So I think that entitles me to be a little pissed off, don’t you think?’ The words cut through the air between them.

  ‘It does, but—’

  ‘Or do you think it’s amusing that the rich Brit bastard got taken down a peg or two? For your information, I worked hard for that car. I never asked for money from my parents and I worked my arse off for every cent I made, everything I own. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but you seem to be acting like that’s nothing.’ He stood up, catching the chair before it toppled backwards with an impatient gesture.

  He wanted a bloody fight. He wanted to find the bastard who had dared to ruin what was his and beat the living hell out of him, but instead the only target in sight was Amy. It all felt wrong, terribly wrong. Amy’s kitchen, Amy’s house, was suddenly too small. He had to get some air.

  ‘I’ll be waiting outside,’ he said abruptly, storming out to the front of the house with a growled ‘Move’ to Gerald who, for once, got out of his way.

  As luck would have it, the people from the insurance company pulled up only moments later. His car was loaded on the back of a tow truck and the forms signed for the loan car within a matter of minutes. Ben snarled at the tow truck driver when he had the temerity to snicker, but it gave him little satisfaction.

  He palmed the keys of his temporary rental, a rather lacklustre BMW Z4, and watched the tow truck retreating, then considered returning to the house before thinking better of it. He was still bubbling with fury. It would be better to go home, cool down, get some sleep, then call Amy later. Surely she’d understand. If she could forgive him for a two-week radio silence while he was writing, she’d surely understand why he needed time to himself right now.

  He climbed into the car and pulled out of the driveway, only just missing the sight of Amy standing in the doorway, watching him go.

  Amy waited two hours after Ben left, foolishly expecting him to come back and apologise so everything would be alright again.

  When he didn’t, she got angry. Really angry. She wasn’t sure who she was angrier with: herself, Ben or Liam, who’d decided to pick last night to truly get nasty.

  She hadn’t told Ben about the note, intending on showing the police first to verify if there was anything they could do. She knew it was wrong not to tell him but this was something she had to resolve herself. Liam was her problem.

  Sergeant Thomas, the police officer writing up Ben’s police report, had taken the note with the intention of comparing it to the other one Amy had given the police, but had said there wasn’t much hope for getting a decent match.

  Since it had been left in the middle of a pile of garbage, there was no way to confirm it hadn’t just been a random scribble someone had thrown away.

  Sergeant Thomas had admitted that vandalism was one of those small crimes the cops couldn’t waste much of their time on of late, much like unarmed robbery. If Liam had stolen Ben’s car it would have been another matter entirely, but that didn’t seem to be his style. He wasn’t a criminal in the most common sense of the word, just a garden-variety bastard out to make a point. That point had more than likely ruined any chance Amy had of making things work with Ben.

  How dare Liam do this to her. How dare he.

  And Ben . . . she didn’t even want to think about how much his words had hurt. Not to mention his leaving without saying goodbye. The worst bit was that she couldn’t really blame him. She deserved his anger. If it hadn’t been for her cowardice in dealing with Liam, his car wouldn’t have been damaged.

  Liam was out to hurt everything she cared about – her home and her salon. Her stomach lurched. Would he target her businesses too? No, surely he wouldn’t. That would be going too far . . . Before Amy’s thoughts got any further than that, she was snatching up her keys and sprinting for her car.

  ‘OH NO. NO, no, no, no!’ Amy wrapped her arms around her waist as she paced from the front of Babyface to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and back again as cars slowed to a near-crawl on the road nearby, rubbernecking at her misery.

  Both salon and barbershop had been doused with a tarry sludge that obscured the lettering on the windows, marred the paintwork and formed shiny black pools on the pavement. Whatever Liam had used was still sticky and he’d been devious enough to throw it over the back door that served as an emergency exit as well. This time the idiot hadn’t even bothered to cover his tracks, literally: there were a number of clearly delineated sticky black shoeprints all over the concrete paving and the car park.

  There was no way Amy would be able to get inside without getting herself filthy. Stepping around the garbage bins Liam had overturned in front of the back door, Amy spotted a white piece of paper stuck to the black goo and pulled it off. Imaginatively, this one said ‘BITCH’ as well, in Liam’s distinctive blocky handwriting.

  If she’d been furious be
fore, it was nothing compared to how she felt now. Idiot. Absolutely bloody controlling male idiot. A surge of sheer indignant rage saturated Amy’s system. What had she done to deserve this other than try to keep people happy? What had she done?

  She was the nice one, dammit. She was really beginning to understand why her sister used to strategically lose her temper when she worked on the rigs just to keep the men around her on their toes. Amy had a feeling that if she’d lost her temper a lot earlier with Liam, none of this would have happened.

  How dare he.

  The police came and went within the hour. They took things a lot more seriously this time around. It seemed vandalising a rich foreigner’s car was one thing but vandalising a local business was another.

  In the end, they came to the same conclusion she had: that Liam had thrown some sort of goop at her store, left a note, then driven off. Because he’d done it all early on a Sunday morning, there were no immediate witnesses. Liam had conveniently left a couple of black tarry fingerprints along with the shoeprints so, at the very least, there was enough evidence to give Amy the grounds to apply for a restraining order. With luck, he’d end up in court for vandalism.

  It would take days to get the black gunk cleared away from the doors and for the painting contractor endorsed by the insurance company to get things back to normal. There was no way Amy could subject her staff or clients to paint fumes while the work was underway, so she cancelled her appointments and gave her staff some time off. By the time she climbed into her car at the end of the day, she was determined to end this once and for all. She’d had enough.

  She hit the road and floored the accelerator. As she drove east towards the hills surrounding Perth, her fury grew. By the time she got to Liam’s place, her hands were shaking on the steering wheel and her head was pounding.

  The seventies bungalow with its stained cream bricks still smelled of bore water and claustrophobia. The meticulously mowed front lawn was bare with the exception of a lone pencil pine.

  The fact that nothing, absolutely nothing, had changed just served to make Amy angrier as she pulled into Liam’s cracked concrete driveway, then climbed out of her car, stomping purposefully to the front door.