The Barbershop Seven (149 page)

'Certainly, Ping,' said Ephesian.

'Delightful,' said Phat. 'Wednesday I will call, you let know the time, I will.'

Oh, for crying out loud, shut up.

'Very good, my friend,' said Ephesian.

The line went dead. Ephesian gripped the receiver then placed it back in the cradle. He stared at the Moroccan rug he had picked up in Rabat ten years previously. His eyes always fell on the same orange camel in the row of ten. Well, why wouldn't Ping Phat want to be here? They had uncovered the whereabouts of the most sought-after relic of these times. They were about to be present at the biggest event in two thousand years of history. Was there anyone on the planet who would not want to be there, given the chance?

The door opened. Jacobs entered carrying a tray, Ephesian's dinner covered by a large silver lid. Jacobs laid down the tray and began to rearrange the table.

'Well?' said Ephesian.

Jacobs placed the dinner plate in front of him and lifted the lid, so that the roast pork steamed out at them, then he poured some more wine into Ephesian's glass and put the bottle back in its small rack at the side of the table.

'Clearly,' said Jacobs, his voice measured, 'something requires to be done about Mr Phat.'

'Yes,' said Ephesian, nodding. Then he added, 'Bullet in the back of the head he needs,' although he could not manage the accompanying rueful smile.

The expression on Jacob's face flickered and then he turned and left the room, leaving Ephesian alone with his roast dinner and a new decision to be taken.

***

L
ate at night, Ruth Harrison lay in bed watching the streetlights on the ceiling. Twenty-eight years of marriage had ended and with it nearly three decades of arguments over whether or not to sleep with the curtains closed. Now she had the decision to herself, yet she felt suddenly bound to do as Jonah would have wished. So she lay with the curtains open, as he had liked and she had always hated. Had she been self-aware to any level, she would have realised she was only doing it to compensate in some way for her ambivalence over her husband's death.

As she lay, she wondered what she could do with her future, and what she could do with the insurance money which she assumed, wrongly, she would have coming. And at the same time she felt guilty that she was contemplating the life of the merry widow so soon after his unfortunate demise. However, as the delicious Jane Austen once wrote:
Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can.
And talking of guilt, she no longer had to feel guilty about the Reverend Dreyfus.

She smiled. Sure, he hadn't come round this evening, not even in the moment of her distress, but she knew he'd had the Bible Study Group to lead, and he always worked on the following week's sermon starting on a Monday night. He would be round the next day to discuss Jonah's funeral arrangements and their new life could begin. He was one man who would not be living up to his Christian name.

There was a noise in the hall outside her bedroom door. She gasped. Immediately her body tensed; she felt the fear and surprise in every bone; she gripped the bedclothes and looked at the door. Another sound, another footfall, closer to the door.

She held her breath. She wondered if she should pick up something with which to defend herself. Yet she couldn't release her grip on the bedclothes, no matter the meagre protection they provided.

Another footfall, this time slightly beyond the door. Her eyes were wide. Another, then another and then she heard the bathroom door open and close, the bolt hurriedly placed over. Head pressed back against the wall, bolt upright with fear, she listened. Toilet seat up and then the long stream into the bowl of water, trickling to a conclusion.

The flush of the toilet. Silence.

She waited for someone to emerge but the footfalls had stopped and there were no further sounds of bathroom activity.

She waited. And she waited. And Ruth Harrison was still sitting bolt upright in bed waiting, when the sun came up and began to flood her bedroom with light at just before six o'clock the following morning.

––––––––

B
arney was standing at the window watching the rain sweep across the main street. A chill north-easterly was bringing it from behind, so that the window of the shop was clear and he had a good view of the agitated sea and the few moored boats bubbling nervously about on the water. Igor stood behind him, one eye on the window and Barney's back, the other paying scant attention to dusting the rail around the middle of the shop. Having dusted it the day before, it required little attention.

Igor was thinking about toast and marmalade and bacon sandwiches and a good muesli and the first cup of tea of the day which is always the best. Barney stared out to sea, thinking of the guy who set out to row across the Pacific, realising a few hours in that he'd forgotten his tin opener.

Maybe that's what he needed. Some grand adventure to answer his continuing mid-life crisis. He had wandered restlessly for some years, encountering absurd murder and death wherever he went. Always thought that what he needed was to settle somewhere, a quiet town where nothing ever happened and where one sleepy day blended seamlessly into the next. But had he not found that already, only for it to prove equally unsatisfactory? From Helmsdale to Annan and others in between. Nowhere seemed right, and though he now felt happy enough standing looking out over a view that felt new and familiar at the same time, how long would it last? He clung to the barbershop as some continuing certainty in his life but maybe that was what he needed to get rid of.

He needed to get out there, do something grand. It didn't have to be something that had never been done before, just some great final act of magnificent stupidity. Row the Atlantic. Walk the Silk Road. Climb all those peaks in China that no one's ever heard of before. Invade Poland. Visit all the Scottish football grounds in one season. Something big and illustrious, something that he could write a book about and appear on Parkinson to discuss.

He turned and looked at Igor who was running a silk cloth along the top of a dusty picture of George Hamilton III, hair as immaculate as ever.

'Igor,' said Barney.

Igor turned, picking up the vibration.

Barney gestured to the picture and ran his thumb across his neck. Igor nodded.

'Arf,' he said, and he lifted the picture from the wall, took it into the back room and popped it into the bin.

Barney looked back out to sea. For all the murder and ludicrous adventure that his life had entailed, here he was arriving mundanely at cliché and conformity. Hitting middle age with his legs encased in concrete and nowhere to go, contemplating rowing across the Atlantic in a preposterous attempt to give his life some meaning. He wondered how many thousands, how many millions of men were standing or sitting or lying at that very second, thoughts mincing through the mud, lost in middle-aged gloom and contemplating some huge act of audacious folly to compensate for a complete lack of self-value.

He imagined making the big decision to row across the Atlantic; making all his plans, fixing up corporate sponsorship, remembering his tin opener and some tins, doing months of training up and down Loch Lomond in bad weather, before heading off down to the Canary Islands to set off. Then he'd get to Playa San Juan on Tenerife, first thing in the morning, feeling brave and bold and decent and courageous, a man alone with his destiny, and he'd look along the beach and there he'd see the fifty other middle-aged British blokes who were having a mid-life crisis that day, all nodding to each other and saying 'Morning, Gerald, nice day for it'. Flask of tea and off they'd go to redeem their existence.

When the Spanish or Italians have a mid-life crisis they get an eighteen year-old girlfriend and start driving a Ferrari. It's much more British to do something really grand and stupid like run marathons, climb mountains or sit in the basement trying to build your own spaceship. At some point you wake up and you realise you've achieved fuck all, and the only thing for it is an act of monstrous and supreme folly.

'Arf,' said the voice behind him and Barney turned. They looked at each other. Barney felt as if Igor had been reading every one of his thoughts.

'Aye,' he said, 'I know.' Igor nodded.

The shop door opened to the first customer of the day. Barney moved away from the window and a ninety-three year-old great grandpa minced into the shop, looking for a Snoop Dog cut, and more than willing to tell Barney about the time he'd climbed Mont Blanc naked in December in his '50s, that his two favourite things in the whole world were the feel of an empty wine bottle and the way snow falls off branches in clumps during a thaw, and that the thing which annoyed him more than anything on the planet was the way it was completely impossible to get a Weetabix from the packet without covering the kitchen in crumbs.

––––––––

R
uth Harrison nervously fiddled with the cafétière, squirting hot liquid over the kitchen work surface beside the kettle as she pushed the plunger down over the Tesco's own, Columbian grade A, strength 6 filter coffee. She twitched. She muttered a low curse at the mess and the fact that this happened every single time she made herself a cup. It so annoyed her that she usually went for the more mundane pleasures of instant but this morning she needed a much higher dosage of caffeine. Even if it did serve as a diuretic, which she could have done without at that juncture. She looked over her shoulder, shivered, bit her bottom lip.

Her first full day as a widow. The first day of the rest of her life. The Reverend Dreyfus would be stopping by, although she had already called him and he had said he was running late. Maybe it was just because she was feeling a bit shaky after the night she'd had, but the insecurity which hadn't come despite his non-appearance the previous evening, had now arrived in droves. This was it. She had become instantly and permanently accessible to him and Dreyfus was absent. If any of his other parishioners had died, he would have been on the doorstep of the bereaved in minutes.

Fridge, milk, cupboard, biscuits. The great wealth of mince pies and cakes and chocolate that greeted her on opening the cupboard door brought Jonah back into her head and she turned on the lights under the kitchen unit, even though the room was already bright. She sat at the breakfast bar facing the door, a point from which she could see the place where Jonah had died, and took her first sip of coffee. It was still too hot, but she let it burn her mouth. In her general state of mental flux and disorder she imagined she could feel the caffeine hit her bloodstream the instant it stung the inside of her lips.

The doorbell rang. Ruth Harrison jumped at the sound, strained nerves, then she quickly collected herself, shook off the feeling, and then instant calm. She'd been wrong about Dreyfus. She took another sip of coffee, then a longer one, even though it burned, so that her breath would at least smell of it. Rather that than the stale scent of a night of worry, especially since she hadn't been able to clean her teeth that morning.

She rose, quick check in the hall mirror, everything as it should be, bit of a pointless dab at the hair and she was ready. Deep breath, could taste the coffee, straightened her shoulders then she opened the door.

Bartholomew Ephesian stared at her with a look of sympathy and compassion, his eyes resting on her chin.

'Mrs Harrison,' he said from behind a large bouquet of flowers, 'I'm sorry about Jonah.'

She stared at Ephesian, wondering who he was for a second, her feelings of confusion mixed with the ruin of her optimism.

'Mr Ephesian,' she said finally, the surprise in her voice betraying the fact that she had only just realised who he was.

'Mrs Harrison,' he said, 'it really was a terrible tragedy.'

'What was?' said Ruth, still confused.

'Your husband,' said Ephesian, as if understanding her emotional turmoil, although he had no concept of what might be going through her head, and neither did he care.

She had never spoken to Ephesian before and, as far as she was aware, he was not known for his spontaneous acts of compassion.

'Yes,' she said. 'So sudden.'

'May I come in?' he asked brusquely, thinking it was possible he could end up standing on the doorstep for the rest of his life.

She looked at him strangely, wondering why he would want to do such a thing, then she glanced unthinkingly past him, looking to see if anyone was watching, looking to see if the Reverend Dreyfus was about to arrive, then she nodded and stood aside for him to enter.

***

H
alf an hour in and things were a little uncomfortable. Beyond the introductory offer of a cup of coffee, which had been accepted by Ephesian as a means by which a minute or two could be killed, there had been barely two sentences strung together. This was death by social nicety and Ruth Harrison had no idea what he was doing there. Minutes would seem to pass without either of them saying anything. They would listen to the old clock ticking and every now and again their eyes would almost meet and she would smile while he grimaced. She wondered if she could just ask him to leave. She also wondered if she should tell him why she hadn't slept all night but Bartholomew Ephesian wasn't a man to be interested in something like that. Ephesian lifted another biscuit, just as the words 'have another biscuit' were about to leave her mouth.
I wish the Reverend Dreyfus would come,
she thought
. I wish anyone would come. I even wish...
She stopped the thought. It wasn't that bad.

'Jonah never went to church,' said Ephesian.

She look vaguely in the direction of his face, shook her head. Lifted her coffee cup and drained it for the eighth time.

'You'll have the Reverend Dreyfus give the service?' he asked.

Slight catch of breath at the name. She looked up again but there was nothing in his face. No insinuation. Why should there be? Reasonable question.