Series 2, Episode 1: The Rzeszów Covenant
‘If we sit here long enough, nothing will happen.’
It was a quiet Friday morning in Millport, late October, and the men of the barbershop were drinking a cup of tea and eating a morning pastry. Just after ten a.m., and so far, the two barbers – crack, haircutting genius Barney Thomson, and ace barbetorial padawan, Keanu MacPherson – had had one customer each, and there were currently no more on the horizon. The streets of the town were quiet, a cold wind was coming in from the sea, rain was in the air, and few people were abroad.
‘Aye,’ said Barney, nodding, before taking another bite of his Bavarian apple cinnamon Danish.
Igor, deaf, mute hunchbacked hairdressing assistant – who’d recently been voted Cosmopolitan’s Hottest Barbershop Sweeper-Upper 2020 – nodded sagely. Sure, if we sit here long enough, nothing will happen, didn’t really make any sense, but it was, as the millennials say, a mood. Or is it Gen Z who say that? Or are Millennials and Gen Z the same thing? No one really knew. Or, at least, Igor didn’t.
Keanu popped the last of the chocolate pecan doughnut into his mouth, licked his fingers, then got out of his chair and went to stand at the window, as though he believed his own words, as though they might atrophy in silence, or perhaps turn to stone where they sat, permanent memorials to themselves, the last great barbershop on earth.
Barney was sitting on the customers’ bench, staring straight ahead, not really thinking about much. He certainly wasn’t looking at that morning’s newspapers, currently lying beside him, so far untouched. On top of the pile, a picture of a scientist holding a generic test tube on the cover of the Express, beside the headline, Scientists Create Vaccine From PM’s Spunk As Boris Saves Christmas.
Keanu looked out over the white promenade wall across the road, beyond which the sea roiled against the day, the waves hitting the shore, white spray dissolving in the wind.
‘Amazing what happened when you went to London,’ said Keanu, absent-mindedly, mug of tea hovering just beneath his mouth.
‘Hmm,’ said Barney.
‘I mean, you got plucked out of here like that lot were plucking a goose. Didn’t think we’d ever see you again. Yet, here you are. Home again, safe and sound.’
‘Hmm,’ said Barney.
‘I mean, d’you think that story will ever be told?’
‘Doubt it. Some things are best left unwritten.’
‘I guess,’ said Keanu.
‘Arf,’ said Igor, nodding.
Earlier in the summer an agent of the government – and a mysterious figure from Barney’s past to boot – had arrived to take Barney to London, so that he could lend his years of haircutting experience to the Prime Minister’s ongoing battle against coronavirus. Or, more accurately, the Prime Minister’s ongoing battle with rubbish flyaway hair.
Barney didn’t like to talk of what happened next. It was a tale of adventure, betrayal, corruption, greed, murder, treason, treachery, sex and dinosaurs, but who really wanted to hear about that? There was enough madness already in 2020. What people wanted, thought Barney, was silence.
Maybe that was just what he himself wanted.
‘Maybe one day,’ said Keanu, ‘it can be made into a TV show. Or a movie. Barney Thomson 2020, The Untold Story.’ He made the banner headline to mark the title of the show, then turned around to include the others in his vision.
‘Sure,’ said Barney. ‘Everything else has been on Netflix, that might as well be.’
‘Cool. Who d’you think they’ll get to play you?’
Barney, surprisingly, had already thought about this. After all, who hasn’t imagined their own life as a movie, even if it would just be a long, slow movie in black and white where nothing ever happened.
‘Al Pacino,’ he said.
Keanu smiled, Igor shook his head. Barney lifted his cup of tea and took a drink. A small smile traced the corners of his mouth.
* * *
‘You fucked it, mate,’ said Barney’s customer.
Naturally he wasn’t talking about his haircut. It was literally years since Barney had made a mess of anyone’s hair. Changed days from his time at Henderson’s in Partick, when he had been the Conservative Government of barbers. He’d looked like he knew what he was doing, but in reality, he’d just been shit.
He was currently giving Old Man McGuire, the most regular customer in town, his weekly Strictly cut, which involved mousse, triceps and fourteen different pairs of scissors.
‘Go on,’ said Barney, stepping back from the cut, smiling at McGuire in the mirror.
Keanu looked round from his position at the window, having barely moved in the past hour. Igor, meanwhile, was sweeping up at the back of the shop, even though the floor, as usual, was one of the most immaculate surfaces this side of Scandinavia.
‘You said Trump would resign before the election.’
Barney nodded.
‘That, Frank, is correct, I did.’
‘Well, what have you got to say for yourself?’
Barney held his gaze for a moment and then shrugged.
‘I was wrong?’
McGuire humphed.
‘That it?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘You were wrong?’
‘Well, I was.’
‘I know, it was me who pointed it out.’
‘That’s all there is, Frank, what else d’you want me to say? I thought he’d run away, he didn’t. Probably just wishful thinking on my part.’
McGuire humphed again. He was, as he humphed, shaking his head, making it impossible – or, at least, inadvisable – for Barney to resume the cut.
‘Not much of an explanation,’ said McGuire. ‘I mean, you’re standing there, you’re this famous barber philosopher guy. People listen to you. You have a position in society.’
‘He’s not wrong,’ said Keanu.
‘Arf,’ said Igor, nodding, now leaning on his brush, taking in the conversation in that strange way of his, given that he was deaf, and lip-reading wasn’t an option, since McGuire was wearing a blue face covering.
‘You’re the town sage,’ continued McGuire, his tone cantankerous. ‘I mean, I used to think that years from now some cunt would write down the stuff you say, and your name would pass into legend. Barney of Millport you’d be known as, and there’d be a little red book of your sayings, and a statue along the front there, and possibly a prize in philosophy named after you.’ He paused. Barney waited for it. it came. ‘Turns out you just talk shite, like the rest of us.’
Barney couldn’t help smiling, which was the effect Old Man McGuire’s curmudgeonliness usually had on him.
‘Never said I didn’t,’ he said.
‘Humph,’ said McGuire, and now he broke the harsh look and stared at himself in the mirror. Barney gave it a moment, and then moved back in to get on with the cut.
A few snips of the scissors, then McGuire said, ‘So, what d’you think’s going to happen on Tuesday?’
Barney smiled ruefully, knew that Keanu too would be smiling, even though he’d turned away again to the window.
‘Why d’you care what I think about Tuesday?’
‘You’re a sage.’
‘You just said I talk shite!’
‘You do! But like I said, everyone talks shite. Maybe you, in your official sage capacity, talk marginally less shite than all those others. So, go on, we all know you completely fucked it before, but this is your chance at redemption.’ McGuire barked a laugh, then added, ‘Everyone loves a good redemption story. You can be Jimmy Stewart in It’s A Wonderful Life.’
‘Jimmy Stewart doesn’t need redemption in It’s A Wonderful Life,’ said Barney, to the accompanying click of his scissors.
‘They think he stole the money.’
‘But he never actually stole it.’
‘Aye, a decent enough point, son,’ said McGuire. ‘He didn’t steal the money, and you were talking shite, which means you can get even more redemption than Jimmy Stewart. Let’s hear it.’
Barney, the flawless professional, stepped back for a moment to judge the course of the cut, and then returned to the delicate job of trying to craft anything from the little hair that McGuire actually still had.
‘Fine,’ he said.
‘Excellent,’ said Keanu from the window. ‘Igor, get the kettle on, Barney’s doing his American politics soothsayer routine.’
‘Arf!’
‘Calm down,’ said Barney, though he was smiling as he shook his head. ‘Right. Trump loses the vote by, I don’t know, ten to fifteen million, but due to their ridiculous system, and all the blatant cheating his side will do, they’ll manage to make it look closer than it is, and maybe be able to dick around with it for a few weeks. However, ultimately they’ll have got their arses handed to them, and even that Machiavellian spunkmuppet McConnell won’t be able to stand in the way of the tide, and they’re going to have to accept they lost. The presidency, the House, maybe the Senate.’
‘Not bad,’ said McGuire. ‘Not especially sage, mind you.’
‘Trump won’t concede though,’ continued Barney unabashed. ‘He can’t. He’s incapable of admitting he lost anything. That’s why he’s spent four years setting up the narrative that the vote’s fixed. So, instead of conceding, he’ll resign in December.’
‘Ha!’ barked McGuire. ‘I knew it! Still banging on about resignation. You’re a one-trick pony, son.’
‘Hear me out…’
‘Aye, I am, I just need to interject every now and again to meet my grumpy old man objectives.’
‘Whatever,’ said Barney. A beat, then he added, ‘I’ve lost my thread now.’
‘Diaper Donnie’s resigning in December,’ prompted McGuire.
‘Aye, right,’ said Barney. ‘So, he resigns rather than admit he lost. He hands power over to that robotic, fake-Christian turd-monkey Pence, who gets to call himself the 46th President for the rest of his life, even though he’s only actually president for a few weeks, with the quid pro quo that he pardons Trump and his family, of every federal crime on the books.’
Barney thought about it for a moment, and then looked at McGuire in the mirror and shrugged.
‘That’s all I’ve got.’
McGuire held his gaze for a moment, then his old, wizened hand appeared from beneath the cape and he contemplatively scratched his chin.
‘You know, I think that might be not bad,’ he said. ‘What about you?’ he then added, glancing at Keanu. ‘You think the boss is on to something?’
‘As good a theory as any,’ said Keanu. A moment, the men contemplated this uncertain future, then he added, ‘Unlikely to put any money on it, however.’
‘Oh, God, aye,’ said McGuire. ‘Your man here might pass for a sage in this town, but he still knows fuck-all about politics…’
* * *
And so the day went, a nothing day much like most days that had passed in 2020. For such a shit year, when so many things seemed to be going wrong, the world teetering on the edge of the apocalypse, an awful lot of people had done virtually nothing, spending endless days stuck in small rooms, living a life on repeat, a Groundhog Day life, one alarm clock blending seamlessly into the next.
Barney, nevertheless, had got quite used to it before being dragged off to London, and now he was enjoying the still of a quiet day in the barbershop more than ever.
One customer, two, three customers, four, no more. The hours passed, lunch came and went, Barney manned the shop while Keanu took a stroll with his partner, Sophia, and Igor nipped along the road to the lawyer’s office where his true love was waiting for him with a chicken and lettuce on granary, and a bag of salt & vinegar. Barney ate vegetables and rice from an old Tupperware tub, and washed it down with his fourth cup of tea of the day. No customers disturbed the banquet.
And now, the afternoon was swirling by, a muddle of seconds and minutes, jumbled one on top of the other. The men of the shop were standing at the window, looking out on the world, a cup of tea each in hand. The world outside the window was quiet, although it was, as the Band Aid fellows would point out, a world of dread and fear. The virus was spreading, faster now than in the dark days of the spring, and few were there amongst the people who would be able to avoid its rasping, grasping touch.
‘What d’you make of the brazen bull?’ Keanu threw into the mix out of nowhere, ending a near fifteen-minute silence, when the men had drunk the kind of neverending cups of tea that usually only exist in fiction.
Igor shuddered. Barney looked concerned – he didn’t like it when Igor shuddered – and then gave Keanu the eyebrow of curiosity.
‘Go on.’
‘You ain’t ever heard of the brazen bull?’
‘Nope. Is it a pub in Largs?’
‘It’s not a pub.’
‘Is it a bull with an unusually high level of confidence, even for a bull?’
‘It’s this supposed torture/execution device from ancient Greece. They’d make a life-size, hollow bull out of bronze with a door in the side. They’d put the victim inside the bull, lock the door, then light a fire beneath it and roast the person alive.’
He nodded at the description, then took a drink of tea. The tea, as if by magic, was still at the perfect temperature, even though it had been poured some twenty minutes previously.
Barney and Igor looked out upon the seascape, the waves still tossing white froth in the wind, the gulls swirling in the breeze, their mournful ululations carrying songs of melancholy and loneliness far away across the sea.
‘Is that a real thing?’ asked Barney.
‘Might be,’ said Keanu. ‘Might not. It was told that an intricate series of pipes was connected from inside to the bull’s mouth, so that the screams of the victim would emerge as more melodic wailing.’
‘Hmm,’ said Barney, and he too took a sip of perfect-temperature tea. ‘That edges it into the fanciful territory I feel.’
‘You’d hope. It sounds pretty horrible.’
Igor shuddered again. Across the road a slow-moving figure emerged from their left, and they watched the progress of Mrs Cranston as she edged across their line of vision.
Time passed, even more slowly than Mrs Cranston, until eventually both of them disappeared stage left.
‘What made you think of that?’ asked Barney.
A beat, and then Keanu said, ‘What?’ because it’d been so long since they’d been talking, he’d forgotten the subject matter.
‘The bull.’
‘Oh, right. Yeah, I was just standing here, and I’d asked myself the question, what wouldn’t you do to Matt Hancock?’
‘Hmm,’ said Barney. ‘And the brazen bull is as far as you’d go, or would it be too far?’
‘Well, it seems pretty horrible, so I don’t think I could do the bull thing. To anyone.’
‘You’re too nice,’ said Barney.
‘Arf,’ nodded Igor.
‘Maybe for Hancock a Cersei Lannister walk of shame type of thing. And then banishment to the outer kingdoms.’
Barney smiled, took another drink of tea – the mug finally coming towards the end – and then shared a naughty glance with Igor.
‘It’s nice that you want to see Matt Hancock naked,’ he said. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to be alone?’
‘Bugger off,’ said Keanu, taking the joke, as Igor sniggered.
The door opened, the first customer for more than forty-five minutes appeared in the shop, multi-coloured face-covering drawn high up over his cheeks, wild hair still shifting in the wind as he stood in the doorway.
‘Haircut?’ he asked.
‘You’ve come to the right place,’ said Keanu.
* * *
Late afternoon, the final customer of the day, Barney at work, Keanu at the window, locked into the never-changing view of the world, Igor sweeping up at the rear of the shop.
Little had changed since the morning, neither inside nor out. The tide had moved, one supposes, the clouds had frittered from west to east, filling in the gaps where the blue sky occasionally showed, the gulls perhaps had changed personnel, but it was impossible to tell.
Inside the shop, there had been seven customers all day. Conversation had been Covid-centric; occasionally some had touched on the upcoming Scotland-Serbia game, or the not quite so important upcoming US Presidential election. The newspapers had remained on the bench, undisturbed the entire day. The Telegraph’s Magnificent Johnson Saves Earth With New Covid Execution Strategy, the Times’s Covid x Brexit = Great British Bonanza, the Mail’s Giant Sea Mines Placed In Channel As Hero Border Control Step Up Island Defences, the Sun’s Covid Babe’s Dying Wish Granted With London Eye Bonking Session, the Guardian’s Hancock Throat-Punches Upstart Labour MP In Commons For Asking Health-Related Question – ‘the fuck does he think I am?’ says Hancock – the Independent’s Priti Patel Launches Dramatic Leadership Bid With Gove Poisoning, and the National’s 83% Support Indy In New Poll As Ruth Davidson Chokes on Sausage, all lay in an impotent pile, like a heap of unused dung at the bottom of a barren field.
‘So,’ said Barney’s customer, forty-nine year-old Toby Dreadnought, a man in search of a midlife crisis, in for his regular Variated Crane Fly cut, ‘wasn’t it you who said Trump would resign before the election? Made an arse of that, mate.’
Barney looked at him in the mirror, glanced at Keanu, turned back to Dreadnought.
‘We’ve done that one today,’ said Barney.
‘What one?’
‘We’ve talked about this already with another customer. Under the Rzeszów Covenant of 2019, barbers no longer have to repeat a conversation on the same day.’
Dreadnought held Barney’s gaze in the mirror, eyebrows positioned in curiosity, then said, ‘That’s not an actual thing.’
‘It is,’ said Barney. ‘Not all barbers are signatories to agreement, of course.’ He paused, he
indicated a small notice on the wall behind, that few had ever previously noticed, then added, ‘But we are.’
Dreadnought’s eyes narrowed as he tried to make out the document in the mirror, of course could see little of it, then looked suspiciously at Barney.
‘What else is covered in this agreement which, frankly, I’ve never heard of before?’
‘Why should you have heard of it?’ said Barney. ‘Just because I know you, doesn’t mean I know anything about the covenants around cleaning toilets.’
Dreadnought took a moment to catch up, as Keanu laughed gently, then he rolled his eyes, accepting the jibe.
‘Fine, whatever,’ he said. ‘So, what haven’t you talked about today?’
Barney resumed the cut, quickly snipping away at the back of the head. This cut had to be executed quickly, and Dreadnought punted out into the end of the afternoon. He had little patience for talkers these days, with the odd exception such as Old Man McGuire, whose irascibility continued to amuse him.
‘The war in Nagorno-Karabakh,’ said Barney. Dreadnought looked blank. ‘The absurd new abortion laws in Poland. Potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan in April 2021. Anything related to the fields of physics and chemistry. The novels of Nobel winner Olga Tokarczuk… it’s really a pretty long list. I could go on.’
‘I don’t know anything about any of them,’ said Dreadnought.
Barney finished off the scissor work, scooped up the clippers, and began to buzz quickly around the back and side of his head. Barbers with Barney’s level of skill can do most haircuts in under two and a half minutes, if they really need to.
‘What about the new season of Star Trek: Discovery?’ said Dreadnought.
Keanu started to say something, but was instantly cut off by Barney.
‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Don’t watch it myself, but I know Keanu does, he has opinions, and we haven’t talked about it today. Unfortunately, you just used the word ‘season’ rather than ‘series’, so that disqualifies you from talking about it, what with us not being in America.’
‘That’s not a thing.’
‘It’s a thing. Section 14 of Rzeszów – we just call it Rzeszów – deals with conversational topics and the influence of outside cultures and language. We’re obligated by its terms to do everything in our power to stop the creep of alien cultures, particularly, to be honest, American.’
He silenced the buzz of the clippers, lifted a brush, quickly swept away around the neck, and then whipped off the cape and stood back.
‘You’re done.’
‘Wait, what?’ said Dreadnought.
He looked in the mirror. He was done. Best haircut of his life. His time in the chair was over, and there was nothing he could do about it.
* * *
Darkness had come across the land. There was little point, now that the clocks had gone back, in standing at the window looking out on the world at this time. All they’d see was their own reflections. Instead, they sat around the shop, drinking a wrap-up cup of tea, chewing the fat of another uneventful day in the shop.
‘Arf,’ said Igor.
Keanu nodded.
‘Yep, nice move on the Rzeszów Covenant,’ he said. ‘And I liked the way you distracted him at the end so he didn’t think to look at the sign. Would you like me to get an actual Rzeszów Covenant certificate printed off to put on the wall?’
‘Sure,’ said Barney, nodding, ‘if you can be bothered writing one. We can run with that.’
‘Why don’t you just e-mail me the real thing?’
Barney and Igor looked at him in the way they’d so often done in the past.
‘It’s not a real thing,’ said Barney.
‘What?’
‘What d’you mean, what?’
‘You just made up it up?’
‘Yes.’
‘On the spot?’
‘Yes!’
‘Wow…’ Keanu shook his head, laughing. ‘Man, I completely fell for that. I mean, I was thinking, shit, I must have missed that in some morning briefing or other. Didn’t like to say in case I looked stupid.’
‘Wouldn’t want that,’ said Igor, sniggering, though it came out as arf!
‘We don’t have morning briefings,’ said Barney.
‘Sure, we do. When we sit around drinking tea, catching up. What’s that, if not a morning briefing?’
‘Aye, fair enough.’
He took a drink of tea, he glanced at Igor, they looked at Keanu and shook their heads in a benevolent way.
‘I look stupid now, don’t I?’ said Keanu.
‘Pretty much,’ said Barney, ‘but you’re OK, we’re not on live TV.’
‘Live broadcast from inside a barbershop is banned by Rzeszów,’ said Keanu, and Barney smiled, and Igor smiled in his own grim way, and the day came to a slow conclusion after the fashion of an American 70s sitcom happy ending.
There would be other days, of course, albeit, in these dark times, no one could be entirely sure how many.
