Fetaure Wall
WHEN HE opened the door, she laughed, then took his head in her hands to examine it more closely, and kissed the corner of his jaw.
“Is it bad?” he said.
“Yes,” she said, kissing him again. “But I can fix it.”
He’d bought his clippers at the pound shop. They did the job in their own way, having cut a feature wall of stylised alopecia above his right ear that looked like a labyrinth game for children from the side of a cereal box.
She’d bought her clippers from her father’s barber, a small dark man who smelled of lavender, talked socialist poets and, whilst keeping the particle board and formica of his real-life shop pristine, dreamed of chrome and red leather, checked linoleum and a peppermint twist pole. At university she’d made her drug money from a bedroom industry of punk haircutting.
In the bathroom, he removed his shirt. She laid out the components on a hand towel, oiled the blades and clicked in the comb.
He fingered the remaining combs, small numbers embossed just below the teeth, deducing. “Don’t you think a Number One will be too short?”
“It’ll have to be a Number One to fix that.” Secretly, she was pleased
She toured his hair with her fingers, checking the weight and direction of growth. It was finer than it looked and the colour of nutmeg, growing in a whorl withershins from the crown, lying flat because the shafts grew along the scalp: a desirable tendency to avert The Hedgehog Effect. His skin was pale enough to show its underground of purple, blue and green; his shoulders were dusted with the freckles of a healthy, outdoorsy childhood. She had no freckles, having spent her childhood indoors reading, drawing pictures, watching incomprehensible black-and-white matinees and nurturing a resentment for all things healthy and outdoorsy.
She was 13 when a multiplex cinema opened in town, prompting a remarkable improvement in the population’s access to the latest action blockbusters, Disney holiday features, and nauseating date movies starring Drew Barrymore.
And once a year there was a film festival that consisted of fewer than ten films documented in a two-fold monochrome leaflet, all of which contained either a) subtitles, b) homosexuality, and / or c) other subversions to be screened once only in off-peak hours.
Since it was well known that McDonalds and the skateboard park were the only appropriate places to skip school - the park being popular with those seeking to engage in “kissing with tongues” - her attendance at the 10am showing of a Belgian documentary failed to provoke the suspicion of zealous, community-minded ticket-rippers.
She sat alone without popcorn or crisps. There were no advertisements for hairdressers or rest homes, no trailers for animated bible stories. Subtitles ceased to be a peculiarity in her cinemagoing, although she had realised only recently that ”films with subtitles” did not mean that the title had a second line, as in:
2001
A SPACE ODYSSEY
At each showing she would count five or six heads that broke the faint blue horizons made by rows of empty seats, thinking that the tickets sold would probably not pay to run the projector, let alone the projectionist. She craned her neck to peer into the small windows near the source of the stream of dusty light, wondering if projectionists still existed. The word itself sounded as obsolete as stenographer, spurrier, falconer. When she saw movement in the space beyond the glass she hoped for ghosts.
Of all the lonely film-going experiences of her adolescence, two were most formative in her psychosexual development: Seven Years in Tibet and Romper Stomper. Her fantasies were of neo-Nazis and Buddhist monks. She imagined watching them suck and fuck each other in a flurry of saffron robes, confederate flags, sandals, white Yfronts, neem beads and cherry Doc Marten boots to a soundtrack of prayer bells and Oi! Oi! Oi! She was unconcerned as to whether their philosophies might line up, finding religion and fascism equally vile. She imagined touching them and them touching her, but most of all she imagined her fingers discovering the freshly-shaven hairline, a nape of sailrope-taut tendons and the secret vertices of naked triangles behind ears.
She began shaving her own head out of aesthetic reverence.
Slices of hair rained on his shoulders, collar and cheek-bones. She blended the patchiness in as best she could, stopped, checked, touched up, stopped, checked, touched up, stopped. She polished the shavings from his body with a towel and swept the floor, then joined him in the shower.
Skated by water, hair and soap, she felt the shape of the bones of his skull in velveteen, and tasted the sweat and fresh water on his throat.
She had knelt down, blinded by water, cock at the threshold of her mouth, when he blurted out, “I have to go.”
She fell back on her haunches, laughing, clearing the water from her eyes. “What?”
He was already shutting off the taps, climbing from the tub and fumbling for his glasses. “I have to go – I’m sorry – I forgot.”
“Where?”
“Work.”
“It’s nearly midnight.”
He rubbed himself down hurriedly. When she climbed out of the bath he rubbed her down, too. “You can come with me. It won’t take long.”
Outside was cold. It was a Monday night; the town was all but deserted. The late-night café was empty but still frocked in party bulbs, bass resounding through its front window. A punk kid in the doorway of a second-hand bookshop begged spare change between sucks from a wine bladder. She recognised one of the patches holding his trousers together; it read, FUCK RACISM.
In combination with self-styled anarchist regalia, her shaven head rapidly gleaned the attention of the town’s only recognisable subculture, known amongst themselves as The Fourth Reich. One of their younger, spottier plebs had approached her and asked what her patches meant. She replied, “If you don’t know what FUCK RACISM means, you’re as stupid as you look,” feeling the pang of anticipatory fear as he calmly turned and walked away.
Several days later, after a late screening of J’embrasse Pas, she was unlocking her bicycle when a rusty turquoise Vauxhall pulled up. The occupants got out and exchanged dogmatic vulgarities. Before they’d pointlessly slammed the car doors that no longer latched, she’d dropped her bike and sprinted.
She had an intimate knowledge of the alleys and carparks that warrened behind the shops and tower blocks, although perhaps better for locating places to drink cartons of wine and talk revolution strategy than for evading a gang of skinheads.
Something small and metal lying on the ground stopped her in the end. She skied on her forearms into a bloody crumple against a block wall. They stood above her and laughed, discussed raping her, decided she was too ugly, and settled for liberating her boots, gave her some boots of their own, then pissed all over her. It burned.
FUCK RACISM washed out with the skinhead piss; she knew it would. She lost the will to keep shaving her head and bought a red bandana to tame the hedgehog. Several weeks later she found herself once again sprinting full tilt through the same alleyways, pursued by a different coterie of local imitators. Something to do with the colour of the bandana. It was that kind of town.
She crunched the ice coating the puddles with her everything-proof soles as he fumbled for keys, followed as he scampered up an exterior stairwell to an unmarked door.
Inside was warm, dry and dimly lit. She kept her scarf and gloves on and waited for the sensation to return to her face. It was a long, narrow room with a low ceiling and walls that sheered off at strange angles. Along one wall three tall machines hummed gently. Each bore an array of coloured buttons on one side, and on the other - a shelf of platters.
He was rushing about the room, fetching and carrying things, reading and writing observations on a clipboard, mumbling to himself. Eventually he came to a standstill, counted seconds on his watch, then pushed the green button. The machine clacked to life, spewing a funnel of light from one end. The platters spun. She felt movement, turned and saw behind her black tape whizzing between a series of pulleys. She could make out small holes on its edges and a myriad of pale horizontal lines. The machine was sending its light through a small window. He was standing by another small window,
staring out.
She began, in a cathedral-whisper, “This is a…”
“Yes,” he said.
She joined him by the small window, gazing at the titles on the screen. A scattering of heads broke the faint blue horizons below.
“Test screening,” he said, and shut the lights in the warm, low-ceilinged room.
They made love on a desk-top with punctilious cue-marking instructions stuck to it.
About to come, she found herself looking through the little windows at an image on the screen, incredulous at first, as though her mind had manufactured something impossible: a skinhead, covered in scars and tattoos, dressed in a ladies’ silk petticoat, fumbling about in a drawer of knickers, masturbating furiously.
Page(s) 50-51
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