Curse Of The Clown Read online

  Walked laughed softly to himself, then tapped the briefcase he still held in his lap.

  ‘I’ve had the same pair of scissors since my first year on the job. Started in a small shop, the back end of the Gallowgate, in nineteen fifty-seven. Mr Ribelli gave me them. Sad really. He’d been saving them for his son, then his son died in a motorcycle accident. Poor kid, and poor Mr Ribelli. Didn’t last so long himself after that. And so I’ve been carrying these scissors around with me ever since. Still have them now, just in case.’

  ‘If there’s a haircutting emergency,’ said Barney, and Walker laughed softly.

  ‘Aye, a haircutting emergency. Though, to be honest, lovely scissors that they are, you would not want me in charge of them.’

  ‘What make?’ asked Barney.

  ‘Bender Strattocutter 4-70.’

  ‘Holy shit,’ said Barney, impressed. ‘They must be worth a tonne.’

  ‘Collector’s item,’ said Walker. ‘But, right enough, from a bygone age. They will be buried with me.’

  ‘That seems right,’ said Barney.

  He thought of his own scissors. Top of the range Burger Kämpherts, but he’d never had any kind of attachment to any pair of scissors. Too much moving around in his previous life, too many short stops here and there, too much time spent on the run.

  Walker noticed Barney looking at the leather briefcase, and he nodded, lifted the case and opened the top.

  ‘They have such exquisite balance,’ he said. ‘Just to hold them, to feel the precision of the manufacture...’

  He stopped, words froze on his lips. He swallowed loudly in the quiet of the hotel lobby, the silence. Frozen silence. He opened the bag slightly wider, even though everything about him looked as though he didn’t want to.

  Then movement. From the bag, emerging slowly from the top, then popping out into the open and beginning to rise up into the air, a small red balloon. Up it went, inflated by an automatic mechanism on the opening of the bag, and from it trailed a piece of white string, and then, attached to the string a small note, the writing turned away from them, and then tied to the end of the string, and passing no more than a few inches from Walker’s face, a tiny, shrivelled penis.

  After it had passed above the height of his head, Walker was finally able to take a breath, and another loud sigh.

  ‘Oh, God,’ was all he managed to say.

  Barney, still watching the upward flight of the midget balloon, said nothing.

  21

  Six Months Earlier

  For months Norman walked the earth and got in adventures. He scoured the trade press for barber opportunities. Rejections came at a rate of one hundred per cent. Sometimes straight off the bat, sometimes after interview, sometimes after a tryout at a shop.

  There were so many young people training to be barbers, and they brought youth and pizzazz and enthusiasm. How could Norman compete with that? He was in his late forties and dependable and safe and dull, with nothing new to offer his art, and he was up against exuberance and flair, a willingness to push the boundaries, a readiness to try absolutely anything if it would either give the customers what they wanted, or lead the customers to something they hadn’t realised they’d wanted until it was offered to them.

  And suddenly, there he was, somehow against expectation even though it was him who’d started the ball rolling, wearing a suit, and a shirt and tie, sitting in front of a woman in a bank. He’d had to buy the tie, as he’d only had two in his wardrobe; one black, the other featuring the Aristocats.

  The latter might have helped in the interview, but Norman wasn’t to know. He bought a plain dark blue tie to wear instead. The plain dark blue definitely did not help.

  ‘You’ve had no work at all for the past twelve months?’ asked the woman as she read through the papers, lifting her head only once she hadn’t got an immediate response.

  ‘Yes,’ said Norman.

  He was intimidated by the surroundings. He hated that he was still intimidated by anything. At some stage, surely, you stopped feeling like a schoolboy.

  ‘Why is that?’ asked the woman from the bank.

  She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, and had such an air of confidence about her that Norman’s self-confidence was further imperiled. And worse, she reminded him of Sophia. She was Sophia, in Norman’s estimation, if Sophia had had intelligence to accompany her certainty and her attractiveness. He’d viewed not having to listen to Sophia talking as one of the few plus points of losing his job. Now here he was, sitting in front of her more intelligent doppelgänger, asking for help.

  ‘It’s tough out there,’ he said. ‘A tough market.’

  ‘You think?’

  He wasn’t sure what to say to that. It appeared the young banking executive was questioning his barbershop knowledge, and why would she do that? How could she know more about the world of the barbershop that he did?

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Tough.’ A beat. ‘Very tough.’

  ‘Here at the bank,’ she said, saying the words the bank as though they should be capitalised, like it was the only bank in town, ‘we have helped more barbershop and hairdressing start-ups than any other type of business in the past thirty-six months. Coffee shops on the high street reached their limit a few years ago, and began to tail off, and along came barbershops to fill the void. We call it the Premier League football bonanza. Footballers all have the best hair these days, have you noticed?’

  Norman hadn’t noticed.

  ‘Footballers all have the best hair,’ she repeated. Her name was Tiffany. ‘Well, interesting hair, at least. They make the effort, and the youth of today, the generation influenced by the popular culture of football, all want the hair. They can’t have the ability, they might want the footballer’s abs, but that takes effort, so what’s left?’

  Norman didn’t answer.

  ‘The hair, Mr Lindorf,’ she said. ‘The hair is what’s left. As a result, there has been an explosion in the barbershop business, and we here, at the bank, have been on the front line helping to detonate that explosion. Which is why I find it surprising you’ve been unable to secure a job.’

  She could certainly talk as much as Sophia, and the one benefit was that it had allowed Norman time to think of a position to take.

  ‘Mine are the ways of old, I admit,’ said Norman. ‘It’s not as though everyone, every man, wants a footballers’ cut. There may be an explosion of youth getting their hair attended to, but at the same time the general population is ageing. And that ageing population doesn’t want to look like...’ Norman tried to think of a specific footballer with ridiculous hair, but Norman didn’t know footballers, never mind what kind of hairstyles they had, and so in the end he finished the sentence, rather weakly, with the words, ‘a footballer.’

  The banking executive held his gaze for a few moments, an unimpressed gaze, a gaze that said she thought Norman was completely and utterly useless, and then she looked back down at his application.

  ‘You’d like to borrow ten thousand pounds to lease and refurbish a unit on Old Stirling Road?’ she said, a statement of fact that should have been an easy question for Norman to answer. The tone in which it was delivered, however, implied doubt, as though there was something absurd about it. Ten thousand pounds hadn’t seemed so much to Norman.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, as boldly as he could manage.

  ‘Do you know how many barbershops there are on Old Stirling Road already?’

  ‘Seven,’ said Norman.

  ‘Seven,’ she said in agreement.

  She lifted her eyes and looked at Norman once more.

  ‘Seven,’ she repeated.

  ‘I’m offering a different barbershop experience,’ said Norman, missing much of the confidence with which he wanted to deliver the statement.

  She looked back down at the application, read over a couple of paragraphs, then looked up and said, ‘A traditional barbershop experience.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Norman.

  �
��And how would that differ from the Old Stirling Barbershop, which is not itself on Old Stirling Road, but just around the corner, three blocks from the site you wish to occupy?’

  Norman thought that through, unsure how to phrase his reply. By the time she started speaking again, he hadn’t found an answer.

  ‘And Birtlemann & Sons, on Old Stirling Road itself, a little further along, but occupying the same unit for over a hundred years?’

  ‘That’s what I’m aiming for,’ said Norman, getting his answer in quickly this time.

  ‘You’re aiming to be the same as what’s already there?’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘You’re aiming to be different to the old guard, and different to the new guard. What is the magic new/old path you propose to take? It’s not entirely clear from your bid?’

  Norman thought he’d made his case as well as he could in his application. All he could think of now was to repeat what was already written down in a slightly different way, but she had gaslighted him so perfectly (thinking on it later, he would definitely consider himself gaslit), that his confidence was shot.

  ‘Mr Lindorf, I’ll be blunt,’ she said. ‘The explosion in barbershops was as sudden as it was remarkable, it peaked quickly, and now we’re starting to see the less well run and the less popular ones, the ideas that were always a shot in the dark, starting to close down. If you’d come to us with this a year ago, six months even, maybe we’d have given it a shot. Maybe. But your résumé is not a good look. You were let go for reasons we can but imagine, and you’ve been unable to find another job even though the position of barber has been one of the most available in the past twenty-four months. I saw Home Office figures that showed barbers as the most common immigrants over that period, such has been the demand. And yet you, with thirty years’ experience, have been unable to find work. That does not bode we –’

  ‘Customers love me when they get the chance to... when they... you know, when I can give them a haircut, when they can see what I can –’

  ‘It’s not a sympathy competition, Mr Lindorf.’ She held his gaze across the desk, and then, still looking at him, she theatrically lifted a rubber stamp, thumped it down on the paperwork and said, ‘Application denied.’

  Norman sat in his chair staring across the desk at his rejection, as she held the pose.

  She may only have been twenty-five, but she’d been the meanest of the mean girls in school, and was, without fear, favour or doubt, the meanest bastard in all the Scottish banking world. She lived for moments like this, sucking the lifeforce from the faces of desolation on the other side of the desk.

  Words of supplication formed in Norman’s head, but even he, in this desperate and pathetic state, was man enough not to utter them.

  He rose quickly, and leaned across the desk to lift his application. She pulled it away from him, her face somehow blank and sneering at the same time, and said, ‘I’ll keep this for my files. We’ll need it for the next time you apply for something.’

  Norman held her gaze for as long as possible, which was not long as she was reducing him to his constituent parts where he stood, and then he turned quickly, opened the door, left the office, and slammed the door behind him.

  As he walked along the short corridor, back out into the reception area, he knew all the other customers would be looking at him, they would recognise his failure, they would feel his disease, and while their faces would be blank, they would be laughing at him, sneering as much as the woman back in that room.

  Norman’s humiliation was immense, and now he was a volcano, ready to explode.

  The barbershop rebuffs had left him on the edge of carrying out retribution. This had been his last chance at redemption, and it had been slammed in his face.

  Now it would be open season. Now they would all feel his wrath.

  Barbers.

  Customers.

  Bankers.

  He never should have come to see a bank in the first place. Whose idea had that been? Jesus.

  No, he thought, snarling at the pavement, his lips contorted. Not Jesus. It had been that bastard in the shop in Millport. Easy words, feigning encouragement, then the sly look round at his mates. Us, he was saying, the three of us against this sad sack, in here looking for a job, the fool.

  Every one, every last one, they were all going to suffer.

  ‘Fuck!’ screamed Norman, as he walked away from the bank on a grey Edinburgh morning, and looked up at the sky.

  There were a lot of people in the street. None of them looked at Norman. Someone screaming fuck at the world as they emerged from that particular bank was not a peculiar occurrence.

  Above him the crows cawed angrily in response.

  22

  One Month Earlier Than The Previous

  Six Months Earlier Scene

  A regular day in Millport, the kind the town had seen since the island was first settled by marauding Mongolian warlords in the mid-thirteenth century. Blustery, mild winds from the south, bit of chop to the waves, high clouds against a blue sky, the threat of rain later in the afternoon.

  The men of the shop were discussing the great issues of the day. They’d done Brexit, they’d covered Russian interference in western politics, they’d stuck a foot in the toxic mud of the decline of the UK’s foreign policy into moral repugnance, they’d trawled through the septic wasteland of the narcissistic infantilism of Donald Trump, they’d cast a doleful eye over the concentration camps and the genocide of the Uighurs, they’d buried their heads in the sands of the desertification of planet earth, they’d planted a flag in the other habitable worlds of the galaxy, and now they were talking about bagels.

  ‘Arf!’

  ‘I’m with Igor,’ said Barney.

  He took a sip of tea. They all did. The mugs of tea they were drinking seemed to have lasted a very long time, throughout the discussion, as though they were being magically refilled.

  ‘Really?’ said Keanu. ‘But bagels are a thing. They’re supercool. Everyone likes bagels. Bagels with smoked salmon and cream cheese. Bagels with, I don’t know, something else. Cinnamon bagels. Bagels with seeds.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say they’re the ultimate triumph of marketing over taste, because obviously there’s a lot of competition,’ said Barney, ‘but you know, they’ve got that whole New York vibe, like you’re eating the distilled essence of Central Park, the Empire State Building, the Brooklyn Bridge and Frank Sinatra.’

  ‘Totally!’ said Keanu.

  ‘And yet, when it comes to it, all you get is a bit of insipid, doughy nothingness.’

  ‘It’s a carrier. It brings you the deliciousness of the smoked salmon, cream cheese and pepper, with a bit of lemon, filling in the carb gaps, and presenting a fascinating and fulfilling backdrop to the main event of the sandwich.’

  Igor and Barney looked unimpressed.

  Outside a seagull had settled on the white promenade wall and was looking at them from across the road. This was, in fact, Barney’s own seagull of doom. The gull who appeared every now and again as a sign of foreboding. The trouble was, Barney had to be innately feeling it, otherwise, the gull just blended in, because, after all, it was a gull. To stand out it would have had to have been an eagle or a vulture or an ostrich or something. An ostrich loping along the road would certainly have got Barney’s attention. A gull at the seaside on the west coast of Scotland? Not so much. It needed Barney’s buy-in, but it wasn’t coming.

  Nevertheless, there he was. The portentous gull of the apocalypse. Something wicked was this way coming, as Shakespeare might have observed.

  ‘Imagine,’ continued Keanu, ‘you’ve got a bucolic country scene...’ He paused, he stared across the road, he looked at the seagull without recognising its significance, he said, ‘What does bucolic actually mean?’

  ‘Arf.’

  ‘Right. So, you’ve got a bucolic scene, a river flowing through it, the best looking woman you ever saw in your life lying, like, naked on th
e grass by the river. Right?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Barney. ‘And what? She’s eating a bagel?’

  ‘No, this is a metaphor.’

  ‘She is the bagel?’

  ‘No! The bagel is the framing of the scene. The bagel is the snow-capped mountains in the background. The bagel is the soaring eagle against the majestic sky, the high cirrocumulus, and the palpable feeling of summer in the air.’

  Igor and Barney looked at him, mugs in hand. A moment. Another.

  ‘So she’s not eating a bagel?’ said Barney.

  Keanu was about to object, realised that Barney was pulling his leg.

  ‘The bagel is the perfect frame for the perfect sandwich filling,’ he said.

  ‘And the woman is the smoked salmon and cream cheese,’ said Barney.

  ‘Exactly. Or some other delicious filling.’

  ‘Except there’s literally nothing else that’s worthwhile putting on a bagel.’

  ‘It’s not about that, it’s about the bagel being the perfect sandwich frame.’

  ‘Yet, so is bread,’ said Barney. ‘And bread’s lighter and more versatile, comes in many different variations, and can, on occasion, actually taste of something. Its ubiquity perhaps makes it a little more difficult to do cool, pinpoint, Sinatra-esque marketing, but bread, as a sandwich conduit, is your beautiful mountain backdrop to your smoked salmon and cream cheese lady, while a bagel is like the artist never bothered his arse painting anything at the top.’

  ‘Arf!’ barked Igor in agreement.

  Keanu laughed, lifted his mug, drained it, was nodding to himself when he lowered the mug and looked across the road at the seagull on the promenade wall.

  ‘We can agree to differ, gentlemen,’ he said.

  Barney and Igor shared a glance, and then they all found themselves staring at the gull. A moment, just that and nothing more, when they might have cottoned on to the oncoming storm, and then the door to the shop opened, and the moment was snapped.