MANIC HAIRCUT

I was in need of a haircut. My flowing locks were touching my ears and I could do nothing with my cow-lick. I was in a strange town and found myself staring into the window of ‘Head Connexions’, a large retail hairdressing emporium which advertised £2.50 haircuts for pensioners. I am technically a pensioner, because I have a senior Railcard, so I thought I could bluff my way through. I went inside. Two girls who looked about sixteen were cutting hair. One, a peroxide blonde with the figure of Tamara Press, was attending to a young man who spent much of the time speaking into a mobile phone. She was presumably older than 16, because alongside her was a young child of about two years, presumably her offspring, seated in a pushchair about the size of a wheelbarrow. Tamara kept giving the child crisps and juice. ‘Joose’ the child would squeal, and when he received same, he hurled the container straight to the floor. The girls laughed long and loud each time. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. There were six chairs in the emporium, one of which was a racing car, into which they presumably inserted a child, for I guessed my girth would be such that I couldn’t sit in it under any circumstances. The mobile young man was having a severe haircut. Tamara ran her clippers round and round his skull until he had a circular tuft around three inches in diameter and half an inch long left in the middle of his scalp and was entirely bald everywhere else. He looked like an American GI who had lost a sheep-shearing contest. He seemed perfectly at ease with this, but my fingers stole to my own thatch. I had spent long enough praying not to go bald naturally without having this fate befall me at the hands of Tamara. In the other occupied chair sat a young boy of perhaps five years. A television mounted on the opposite wall was showing ‘Toy Story 3’ in garish colours. The girl cutting his hair stood five feet tall in high heels, and her own beaver-tail locks were in four different hues, the predominant one being taupe. She had the appearance of a neopolitan ice-cream cone. She kept forming the little boy’s hair into small spikes and cutting a quarter of an inch from the top of each spike. The boy sat absolutely still, staring at the mirror. After twenty minutes she got round to the back of his neck. I was perspiring freely by this time, my nerves as frayed as a tablecloth in a cheap hotel. Eventually, beaver-tail slapped a ton of axle-grease onto the boy’s spikes, and his mother, who was sitting on the window-sill with another infant in her arms, expressed satisfaction with the outcome. I was spared Tamara and beaver-tail, because a new hairdresser wandered in off the street and beckoned me to take a vacant chair. She was a large young blonde girl with a permanent lop-sided grin and a pair of large octagonal glasses. ‘Whatcha want?’ she asked. ‘An eight on top, and a four on the sides, unless it’s the other way round,’ I said, doubtfully. She howled with laughter: ‘’E thinks 'e can 'ave a four on top an’ eight at the sides,’ she said to her colleagues. ‘’E wouldn’t 'ave an 'air left on his 'ead.’ She picked up the electric cutters and started cropping my hair enthusiastically. Presently, she looked out of the window and stopped in mid-cut. ‘Iss the family o’ nine,’ she said to Tamara. ‘Who are the family of nine?’ I asked, with some interest. ‘They come down from the city. A man, 'is partner, four girls and five boys. They needed a bigger 'ouse. The boys’ll be comin’ here for an 'aircut after they’ve been to the bank.’ ‘How do you know?’ I asked. ‘It’s allus the same – they allus do. Just you watch. Trouble is, they all want 'air art.’ ‘Air art?’ I asked ‘No - ‘'AIR ART,’ she said with some asperity. ‘They get shapes in their 'air – one of them wants a scroll pattern down the sides an’ another wants a treble clef - that sorta thing.’ I felt my knuckles turn white as I gripped the sides of my seat. She was right. Within three minutes a weaselly-looking man and five boys under eight years old trooped in.
The girl finished with me and didn’t show me the obligatory hand mirror to see what had gone on round the back. She merely walked to the till. ‘I’m a pensioner,’ I said. ‘I could see that,’ she replied, curtly. I gave her £3.30 and left in a hurry. I thought that I should have struck out for the old red-and-white pole and the ex-shipyard red-leader.  He might have been a forty-a-day man who had had no training whatsoever and brandished his scissors like a cutlass, but he knew his place. He was always respectful and willing to converse about the government, the weather, or football, unlike Tamara and her ilk in this thoroughly modern but manic establishment. However, when I got back to my billet and looked in the mirror, I got an awful shock. It was by far and away the best haircut I have ever had in my life.