There’s the usual chatter in the barbershop. Have you got the day off, then? Any plans for the rest of the day? And the mother/daughter combo that runs the place compete over sound waves, their voices rising steadily as conversation stretches further on, the mundanity held on to like a seer stone.
These are revelations that Chris Mars will happily ignore as he waits his turn for the wig snip. He twitches. An actual shoulder twitch. He considers leaving, but no, the sweat-matted hair needs a cut.
Rays of biblical light breach the clouds, and for a moment, Chris is the only one bathed in a godly aspect. He blows heavy air between his lips, garnering the exact attention he seeks to avoid. The sun retreats.
A sound of trimmers, the smell of barbicide. A young girl with her head down, earpods rooted firmly in the canals, sweeps off-cuts the colour of black, brown, blonde, grey. Eight quid a trim but everyone pays a ten sheet and says, “Keep the change,” because they don’t want loose coins because who wants loose coins these days? The smiles of gratitude are well-rehearsed. The daughter’s borders on the authentic, the mother’s carries an air of entitlement. Perhaps Chris is overthinking this one.
He scratches through nests of hair, rummages for a source of his irritation. He pulls free a charcoal tuft of mane, holds it to his eyes like King Kong and what-you-call-her.
“Are you ready?” The daughter asks.
“Yeah, cheers,” Chris says. He pretends to adjust his belt and drops the fluff behind him onto the red plastic seat.
He jumps into the hair-cutting throne, doesn’t know whether he should help with the cloak (or is it a bib?), not sure where to look, or what to say.
“What can I do for you today?” The daughter asks, and he thinks she reads straight from her script of standard hairdresser statements, questions, conversation starters.
“The usual.” He pauses. “Please.”
“What’s that, then?”
He sees a different woman underneath. Snarling, sarcastic, stronger than he. “Just take an inch off. Tidy it up a bit.”
She goes to work with deft hands and diligent focus. Chris eyes himself in the mirror, unmoving, hoping as the chatter resumes that he will play no part.
Until he feels a sharp tug on his head.
“What the—” the daughter asks.
Chris spots her reaction in the mirror: red cheeks, mouth agape, pulling a matted rope of hair from Chris’ skull, a never-ending line of black, like a magician’s chain of rags removed from a sleeve. Everyone shop-bound turns to face the freak show. They stare as the daughter loops hair between her hands, over and over—it keeps coming, feeling like string grazing cardboard, the daughter’s morbid curiosity taking over until a few feet of inches-thick follicle sits on the floor.
“Maybe I should go,” Chris says, standing. The staff step back against the walls as he makes for the door. “I’m not paying, though.”
No reply. As he walks away, the hair pulls further from his head. The daughter panics and throws the handful she’d gathered onto the shop counter where it snags in a splinter of wood. Her hand cups over her still-open mouth.
The bell above the door tinkles as Chris steps outside, the wad of hair still caught, and he walks down the street drawing a cord at head height across the shop fascias. Those he passes gasp in horror. He throws back a selection of shoulder shrugs and dismissive head shakes.
Chris enters the local Co-op, his confidence at odds with his predicament. The cable of hair snags in the door, and Chris draws a new ligature down the aisles until he picks up the carton of iced latte he came for. Wide-eyed staff tell him it’s on the house.
As he leaves, hairs snag once more in the entranceway, completing the foundation of web he left within the shop. His new belt of hair runs perpendicular to the one he left from the barbershop. He eyes it curiously. A strange thing to see. Chris unscrews the cap of his cold coffee and glug glug glugs until shrieks of horror distract him. He shrugs at a pram-pushing mum, avoids eye contact with the late-morning coffee break electrician, and says to the kid bunking off school, “What are you looking at?”
Chris arrives at the Cameron Homes office where he works in the staff canteen. A new door to snare beckons, and right on cue, as he enters, it snatches his thread, the jolt forcing him to drop the coffee carton.
The receptionist rises from her seat. “Chris pal, you’ll need to clean that up qui—”
She freezes on the spot; some form of petrification, or a time anomaly that Chris sometimes suspects affects people in his vicinity.
“Clara?” He says.
Fowler, the Managing Director, is next to enter the lobby—lucky Chris. Fowler says, “Clara, I need you to—WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?”
“I… Er… It’s an iced latte, I’m sorry, I bumped into the door when I came in,” Chris says.
“No, not that,” Fowler says. He composes himself with a deep breath, then places his handful of folders on the reception desk where Clara still stands like a waxwork. “Chris, er, take the day off. Have a shower and get some rest. And if you don’t mind my saying so, consider a haircut and shave. Sorry, awfully forward of me, that one. Ignore my patter. Just come in tomorrow when you’re ready.”
“Um, okay.”
Chris leaves, the hair snagging once more, and he pulls the lock at a new angle down Chasetown High Street toward The Crown pub. If he can’t shop in peace, get a haircut without funny looks, or even turn up for work without shocking his boss, then damn right, he’s gonna have a lunchtime pint of Stella.
The door is locked. Chris rattles it. Definitely locked. He leans to one side while he hangs on to the handles. The opening hours haven’t changed. He rattles the doors again. Still locked.
Punters peer through the windows, sipping their drinks, pointing at the cables of hair now lining the street, the last of which still connects to the back of Chris’s head.
“Let me in,” Chris says.
“Fuck off,” comes the voice of the landlord.
Chris turns around and leans back against the doors. His hair snatches between them. He exhales with his eyes closed.
“I said fuck off!”
“Okay, okay, I’m going.”
As he steps away, the hair pulls, and the pub entrance becomes a new point of origin. Chris rummages through his mane, scratching at irritations, and misses the thick filament pulling from his skull. Still, he looks in disapproval at all those who cross the street to avoid him.
“Fuck this,” Chris says. He’s going home. Better alone than this shit-show.
It’s more of a saunter than a walk. Chris takes in his surroundings. Cars slow as they pass. Curtains shift in their windows. West-facing gulls perch upon the gutters of the abandoned gym, belch out grey skies and squawks of sadness. A sickness churns inside Chris, a fever of cold sweats, as clouds draw across the sun, pulling colour from his small patch of existence.
He passes the cenotaph grounds. Pre-school children dance in circles, sing nursery rhymes, wear faceless masks while their parents sit on wooden benches, saturnine, drooling over vacuum-packed nutrition and waiting for their time to stand and live. Their mechanical routines are on a clockwork cycle of repeat repeat repeat, but Chris is free, and the day is his. Colder, he shivers.
Chris Mars’ home is a two-up, two-down former council house in a terraced row that was built to serve the local colliery. Inside are beige walls, bare, and a single brown leather armchair in the centre of the living room. He opens the back door to release the smell of damp, then slumps into his seat and stares at the pattern of black wires, like cracks, running from kitchen to bathroom to bedroom, from soulless room to soulless room, the visible ley lines of his groundhog day.
He’s free, he thinks. The day is his. He goes to the kitchen and pulls scissors from the drawer, runs the cold metal along the strands; he’ll do it, he’ll cut himself loose, he’ll cut and cut until his tethers evaporate. No rush. Chris sits, this time on the edge of his seat, running the steel along the flesh of his forearms. He opens the scissors to expose the sharp edges, leans back, chuckles to himself, but chooses to do nothing, remain static, and allows himself to drift into sleep.
Waking in the early evening dusk, the sounds and smells of the neighbourhood invade his home; neighbours on one side have sex, on the other side they barbecue under the moon. He sits shaking, tears shuddering loose, with the back door still open so the spiders and flies can enter and dance on the silk strand webs of his hair.
He heads upstairs to run a bath, takes the scissors with him, where he’ll sit until the water goes cold and his toes turn to ivory.