Series 2, Episode 8: The Ice Cream Absurdity
‘They can give us these dates, they can make promises, but it’s all so far away,’ said Keanu. ‘Now, this is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but with the silence of a never-ending lockdown, trapped in a cycle of death, despair and endless repeats of Midsomer Murders.’
Barney Thomson, staggering barbershop genius of legend, and Keanu McPherson, barbershop sidekick pursuivant, were standing at the window of their Millport shop, looking out upon the world. The world outside the window was so dull and grey and still, they could have been watching a black and white Ingmar Bergman movie from the fifties. One of the miserable ones.
They were drinking coffee, waiting for shop sweeper-upper Igor to return from the baker’s with that day’s supply of fresh pastries. The barbershop had only been open twenty-nine minutes, yet already it had the feel of the kind of day when customers would be scarce. The lockdown barbershop exemption in Scotland was beginning to feel like a luxury, most accepting that it only had cross-party Holyrood support as politicians on all sides of the chamber were concerned about how they looked. Many observed that it would be nice if they were more concerned with the amount of shite they talked, but looks, as ever with politicians, were of more importance.
And after all, who can blame them? In politics, appearances are everything. If Ed Miliband, buoyed by sensational hair, hadn’t uttered the famous words, ‘Fuck, aye, I’ll have a roll ‘n’ bacon, what could go wrong?’ Britain would still be in the EU, the UK wouldn’t have been Covid Death Per Population Champion of the World, and everyone in the land would be eating caviar and Lindt chocolate for breakfast. But he had to have that bacon fucking sandwich.
Every morning at the Milibands, Justine says, ‘Roll ‘n’ bacon, Ed?’ and Ed says, ‘Never gets old, love. I’ll have a single shredded wheat with a slice of banana, thanks.’
‘Getting bored?’ said Barney.
‘Yep. The whole thing’s driving me nuts. They really need to open shit up right now. Everyone’s going mental.’
Barney gave him a sideways glance and a small smile.
‘Except you,’ said Keanu, ‘who appear to be living your best life.’
‘Look on the bright side, kid,’ said Barney. ‘We’re in the UK, rather than Australia or New Zealand. Down there, they get one case, and they shut down entire cities. Here, we get down to several thousand cases, and people are like Scooby Doo when someone mentions snacks. You’ll be… doing whatever it is you think you usually can do in Millport soon enough.’
‘Fancy a couple of weeks in Hawaii actually.’
‘Sounds nice,’ said Barney. He left it a moment, then added, ‘Don’t think we’ll be able to spare you, though. It’s going to be pretty busy around here when lockdown ends.’
He laughed quietly to himself, and Keanu – who would likely never end up going to Hawaii for two weeks, because most people don’t, let’s be honest – smiled ruefully and shook his head.
Somewhere out in the world, the clock struck nine, though not the clock on the wall in the shop, which just ticked its steady way from one second to the next. Radios played the news, and people settled in for the morning’s headlines. Matt Hancock nominates self for Nobel Smug Wanker Prize…Still no vaccine for stupidity, lament scientists…Salmond issues Sturgeon naked mud wrestling challenge…Seeing better options, Brits start emigrating to Mordor… America pretty much already fucked, says Biden…
The door opened, and in walked Igor, a large bag of pastries in each hand.
‘Arf!’ he said.
‘Just in time,’ said Keanu smiling.
‘I’ll stick the kettle on for a fresh cup,’ said Barney.
And thus did the day begin.
* * *
‘It’s like watching Scotland play rugby,’ said Tom Tugenbottom, in for his monthly 112-Gender Pompadour Aftercut.
‘What is?’ asked Keanu, snapping back into the conversation, having drifted off.
‘Life.’
Keanu looked at Tugenbottom in the mirror, nodding as he did so, aware he was still out of the loop.
‘Life is like watching Scotland play rugby?’
‘Aye.’
Another moment, then Keanu decided he probably ought to resume the cut, rather than wallow in his own confusion.
‘How’s that then?’
‘I said.’
Keanu was aware that Barney, still standing at the window watching the waves and the sky and the gulls and the packet ships out of Weymss Bay heading for the south-west passage to the penguin islands of the South Atlantic, was smiling silently to himself. Hears everything, thought Keanu.
‘Aye,’ said Keanu, ‘but if you’re going to put that kind of major philosophical thesis into the barbershop realm, you kind of have to flesh it out, mate.’
‘Hmm. Not so sure about fleshing it out. Basically you’ve got two states of being: one where you know everything’s shite, and the one where you start to get a bit optimistic, then it turns out everything’s shite anyway.’
He looked at Keanu in the mirror, while Keanu avoided his gaze, and continued to snip away at the top of his head.
‘It’s not going to get me in the Barbershop Customers Hall of Fame, is it?’
‘Probably not,’ said Keanu. ‘I think rugby itself is the problem. All the arbitrary rules, and the endless scrums, and the kickers taking forever to kick a penalty that was randomly awarded in the first place, when the ref blew his whistle and pointed at a bunch of men in a big heap, one of whom had his arm in the wrong place.’
‘See they kickers,’ said Tugenbottom, warming to his subject, now that Keanu had engaged, ‘drive you nuts, by the way.’ At the window, Barney used his superpower – elective deafness – to tune out the conversation, and to submerge himself in the melancholic still of the blue-grey sea. ‘Yon Owen Farrell. Holy fucking side-eye, Batman. It’s like every time he takes a kick he says to the ref, I’ve got a minute, right? and the ref says, have five, mate. Then he stands there like he has to sneak up on the posts in case they’ll move. Our Greig did it ‘n’ all, but at least he wasn’t as bad as that fucking guy.’
Igor enjoyed watching rugby. As a younger man he’d been a decent hooker, back in the early days of the Romanian rugby renaissance. Indeed, there were some who traced the downfall of Romania as a rugby nation to the time Igor was chased out of the country by pitchfork and torch-wielding villagers, but rugby commentators generally considered the two incidents coincidental rather than interconnected. Now, with a rare bit of rugby chatter in the shop, he leant on his broom, half listening in his own peculiar way, and half reminiscing about the glory days in old Hunedoara.
‘It’d be the easiest thing on earth to get rid of it, though,’ said Tugenbottom.
‘Give them ten seconds to kick the ball rather than an hour?’ said Keanu, who realised he’d released the kraken.
‘Aye, well, there’s that. But I was thinking they need to start when they’re young. The first time Wee Billy takes eight minutes to kick a conversion from under the posts, the teacher needs to call him over and say, hey, Wee Billy, see that thing you did with the kick there? If you do that again, you’re finished, and Tyler gets to take the kicks for the rest of the season. But Tyler’s shite, says Wee Billy. Aye, he is, but at least he’s no’ a wee prick. That’d sort him out, right?’
‘Aye,’ said Keanu.
‘And another thing,’ began Tugenbottom, and so passed the next several hours, Keanu locked in the Dante’s Inferno of mindless rugby chatter.
* * *
There had been a couple of customers, although not so that the day could have been described as getting going or picking up. One of them had ruffled the neat pile of the day’s newspapers that lay on the customers’ bench, attracted by the banner headline of the Telegraph – Cry God For Boris, England And St George!
There was something about that unruly pile. Usually Igor would have straightened it out, or Barney would have sat down, had a quick look through the headlines, then left them neatly stacked. But today that pile seemed to have something to say, speaking as it did of the old times, when the shop was busy, and there was no point in keeping the papers neat and orderly, as another customer would be along shortly to rummage through. The pile was the foreshadowing of the summer to come, when the flowers would be in bloom, the ice cream would melt on the vine and the customers would be aplenty. And while Barney had embraced lockdown the way Brexiters embrace Spitfires, he appreciated that others who walked amongst them – Keanu, for example – were keen for it to be over.
And so, the Telegraph was now in the middle of the pile, lost in a sea of print media lies and disinformation. On the top was The Mail, headline, New Manipulated Stats Show UK With World’s Lowest Covid Death Rate; beneath which lay the Guardian, Matt Hancock Can Just Fuck Off; the Express, Oxford Reveal Vaccine Made From Distilled Essence of Boris Sex Appeal; the National, Sturgeon Takes Out 17 Dissenting MPs In Night Of The Long Chib; the Sun, Love Island Babe Wakes From Covid Coma With New Boobs, Speaking Pure Maths; and the Mirror, Blair Returns With 5 Great Reasons For New Iraq Invasion.
There were currently no customers, and the men of the shop were enjoying a mug of tea and a doughnut.
‘Amazing that none of us has put on any weight,’ said Keanu, through a mouthful of jam-filled, strawberry-frosted, sugary goodness. They were standing at the window, looking out on the unchanging grey world of Millport in late February. ‘I mean, we literally eat six pastries a day each.’
‘When you eat a pastry for the right reasons, it doesn’t contain any calories,’ said Barney, and Igor nodded.
‘Is that actual science?’
‘More or less.’
‘Decent.’
And so, for a length of time that seemed peculiar given that it doesn’t actually take that long to eat a doughnut, the men watched the world, drinking tea, and eating the kind of endless leavened fried dough deliciousness that only usually exists in fiction.
There was little action outside to amuse them, but they didn’t mind. They had the clouds and the distant hills, the everchanging seascape. A lone yacht passed from left to right, coming from beyond Farland Point, travelling between the Cumbrae islands, heading, they supposed, for the Kyles of Bute. Far to the right, in view for no more than a minute or two, the Vanguard-class Royal Navy submarine HMS Velociraptor, passing on its way from HMNB Clyde in Faslane, to carry out dinosaur patrol in the waters off the coast of Costa Rica. The gulls were a little more sparse than usual, which meant, more than likely, that the giant sea eagles had returned, although they were not known to be nesting in the area. Having lost a few of their number, the cries of the gulls were even more melancholic than normal, lamentations to haunt the soul.
‘What d’you last night?’ said Keanu suddenly, deciding it was time for a little light conversation, the gulls, perhaps, eating away at the core of his id, threatening to drag him into the depths.
‘Arf,’ said Igor.
‘Oh, right,’ said Keanu. ‘Was it any good?’
‘Arf.’
‘Nice. Might give it a go.’
Igor nodded, then gave Keanu the raised eyebrow of inquiry. After all, anyone who asks the question what d’you do last night? more than likely has something to talk about, be it of little significance or not.
‘We watched News Of The World. Decent movie,’ he said.
‘An in-depth exposé of the corruption at the heart of the Murdoch empire?’ asked Barney.
‘You’re not really up-to-date with movies, are you, old man?’
‘I saw the most recent Sean Connery.’
‘From 2003?’
‘So, News of The World, nothing to do with the nefarious Murdoch then?’
‘Tom Hanks, set in the aftermath of the American civil war. He travels from town to town reading the news. It’s like a live radio bulletin.’
‘Was that a thing?’
‘No idea, but it looks authentic, sounds plausible, so you know, from now on I will believe it was a thing.’
‘Did you Google it?’
‘I enjoyed the movie, but it turns out I’m not interested enough in whether it was an actual thing, to spend thirty seconds on the Internet finding out.
‘Every second on the Internet counts, after all.’
‘Arf,’ said Igor, nodding.
The men had all finished their doughnuts at the same time, and now they looked out to sea, mugs of tea in hand, taking in the day.
‘But it was a good evocation of the chaos and lingering danger at the end of a conflict. I mean, we talk about WWII all the time in this country, like endlessly…’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘Arf!’
‘Exactly. But not 1946 so much. We never talk about 1946. 1946 was an absolute, wild west shitshow in Europe. All sorts of unsavoury things went on. There are probably lots of really dark and grim European movies about it that we don’t see, because we’re too busy watching Dad’s Army and The Great Escape.’
‘We are who we are,’ said Barney, gloomily. ‘Stop me if my philosophy gets too complicated to follow.’
‘Just about keeping up,’ said Keanu, smiling.
‘Let’s not talk of Britain,’ said Barney. ‘It’s too depressing. Tell us about Tom Hanks.’
‘Nice film. Hanks is as Hanks does. There’s an underlying current of danger, but overall there’s a feeling of optimism, of emerging from the darkness. The movie’s about a kind of father-daughter relationship with this wee lassie he stumbles across, and she’s great. Doesn’t have to speak much.’
‘I like movies with characters who don’t speak much.’
‘Losing fifteen minutes in screen time wouldn’t have killed it, but there’s virtually not a movie released in the last fifty years you couldn’t say that about. Apart from Avengers Endgame, which could’ve lost two hours and fifteen minutes.’
‘Sold,’ said Barney. ‘I’ll take it up with the sergeant, and perhaps we’ll watch it tonight.’
Keanu took a drink of tea. Amazing that it was still the perfect temperature, almost as though an outside force was controlling their environment.
‘You don’t have Netflix,’ he said after a while.
‘What’s that?’
Keanu smiled, didn’t look at him. Even Barney knew what Netflix was.
‘Perhaps the sergeant will have someone else’s illegally-gotten Netflix in a storeroom somewhere, she can bring it home and we can use it.’
Keanu rolled his eyes. Igor sniggered. Barney stared straight ahead, watching as a sea eagle plunged from upon high, removing an innocent bystander of a gull from the game of life as he swooped.
* * *
‘You know me, I’m no’ one to complain.’
There was a moment of silence in the shop, while Keanu, Barney, Igor, Barney’s customer Three-Eyed Angus, and the shop itself considered the words, tossed them around, rearranged them to see if they made any more sense, then accepted that they’d been said as they were, and that Old Man McGuire, from whose mouth they’d come, was basically full of some amount of shite sometimes.
‘But you think you might this time, Mr McGuire?’ said Keanu, who was giving Old Man McGuire his weekly bleached textured crop cut.
‘I mean, I get it, don’t get me wrong. I get why some of these wankers write some of the shite they do on packets. People are stupid. You can’t expect anything from Muppets, other than Muppet behaviour, right?’
‘I agree, Mr McGuire,’ said Keanu. ‘Although I’m not entirely sure what you’re talking about.’
‘Toblerone ice cream bars,’ said McGuire.
‘Of course.’
‘Didnae even know that was a thing. I mean, it shouldn’t be, but it is, so there we are.’
Mid-afternoon in the shop, the day continuing as days did in barbershops. Customers came and went, outside the window the weather came and went, here some rain, here some cloud, here the wind, and here the occasional burst of sunshine or the clatter of hail.
There had been eleven customers all day. Doughnuts had been eaten, tea and coffee had been drunk, there had been discussions on the great topics of the day, and all the while Igor had kept the floor immaculately clean.
Now it was gone four in the afternoon, late February, the dark of evening still a couple of hours away. Barney was giving Three-Eyed Angus a decapitated head of John the Baptist cut, while Igor was taking a moment, leaning on his broom, to admire the beauty of a clean floor, and to listen to Old Man McGuire’s latest forlorn meditations on the iniquities of the world. If that was what one wanted to call them.
‘Now look, son, don’t get me wrong. I get it. When you’ve got a packet of a thing, like, I don’t know, fucking chicken nuggets or something, and on the front there’s a picture of chicken nuggets, and they’re on a plate, and next to them on the plate there’s a wee tub of ketchup, and there’s a few salad leaves because we’re all supposed to be eating fucking salad now, underneath that they have to write serving suggestion. I mean, I fucking get it, even if they two words are written so small that no cunt can see it anyway, but if they don’t write serving suggestion, some arsehole’s going to say, hang on a second, I thought there was going to be fresh lettuce and half a tomato in this box in the freezer section.’
‘Always questionable,’ said Keanu, ‘whether people are stupid or just at it.’
‘Aye,’ said McGuire. ‘And either way, they can get to fuck. Now, here’s the thing.’
He paused to look around the shop. Gauging how much attention he was getting. Pleased, yet annoyed, to see that everyone was listening to him. Even Barney, who wasn’t much of a listener, truth be told.
‘I’m in the supermarket the other day, and I’m walking past those end bits, you know, where they stick all the shite they can’t get rid of, and they take twenty pence off and pitch it to you like it’s exciting. Like, I don’t know, three sheeps’ baws for the price of two, or some shite like yon. And there was a box of four Toblerone ice creams. Who knew that was a thing?’
‘I did,’ said Three-Eyed Angus, from beneath Barney’s scissors. ‘I love Toblerone ice cream.’
‘Aye, well you can fuck off, son, I’d never heard of them, that’s what’s important here. So, I think to myself, Agnes’ll like yon shite, and I might not hate it, so I’ll get a box. A box of four, right. Two each.’
‘You nailed the maths,’ said Keanu, smiling.
‘You can fuck off ‘n’ all, and that’s no’ maths, that’s arithmetic, so calm the fuck down. I get home, stick the ice cream bars in the freezer, nothing happens for the rest of the day, because literally nothing’s happening at the moment, then we have dinner, and after dinner I remembered the ice cream bars, and I says to Agnes, fancy an ice cream bar, and she says, you bought ice cream bars? and I say, fuck’s sake, I wouldn’t be offering you a fucking ice cream bar if I hadn’t, would I? and she says, aye, why the fuck not, and I get us two Toblerone ice cream bars from the freezer, and hand them over, and Agnes is like, Toblerone fucking ice cream bars, who knew that was a thing?’
‘I did,’ said Three-Eyed Angus, laughing, and this time Old Man McGuire just slung him a look, then continued talking.
‘And there we are, sitting at the table, listening to BTS and watching the news on the tele with the sound off, and I’m about to unwrap the packet, and then there it is.’
‘Serving suggestion?’
‘Aye!’
‘They thought you should eat it with lettuce and half a tomato?’
‘Whit? Naw! All it was, was a picture of the fucking chocolate bar. The serving suggestion – in nine fucking languages by the way – was that you should take the wrapper off. I mean, how many ways can you tell a chocolate ice cream wrapper to fuck off?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Keanu, laughing, ‘how many ways did you find, Mr McGuire?’
McGuire scowled at Keanu in the mirror, and then, in his regular sign of accepting that he was done complaining for the day, he slumped down a little further into his chair, his neck disappearing another centimetre or two below the line of the black cape.
‘Surprised you listen to BTS, there, Mr McGuire,’ said Keanu. ‘You like K-pop then?’
‘Think it’s shite,’ said McGuire grumpily. ‘Agnes likes it. She fancies a’ they young Korean blokes. No’ slow to tell me about it either. But see if I suggests she dresses up like Wonder Woman…’
Another grumble, another scowl, another small slump deeper into the barbers’ chair of disgruntlement.
‘I quite like BTS,’ said Three-Eyed Angus after a few moments, although really it was just out of badness, because he didn’t actually know any BTS, except the one that was used for the Samsung Galaxy advert, but since he hadn’t known that was BTS at the time, it didn’t count.
* * *
Another day in the bag, the men of the shop sitting around investing the end of the day with the solemnity, the quiet celebration and the cup of tea it deserved. For Barney Thomson, seeker of a quiet life, it seemed there’d been a bit more conversation than usual.
Outside the day had turned colder than expected, as evening spread across the land. There was more rain in the air, and the sea was becoming a little more agitated, so that the crews of the old clippers headed for the narrow passageway south were apprehensive about what awaited them in the Irish Sea, and beyond, south-east, to the South China Sea.
Quite a long way south-east, to be fair.
‘I think we need some new anti-conversation strategies,’ said Barney.
‘Arf,’ said Igor, nodding.
Keanu smiled and shook his head.
‘What have you got in mind, boss?’
‘Not sure,’ said Barney, as he looked contemplatively out of the window, out to the sea and the great beyond. ‘I feel like we’ve tried most things.’
‘Think you have to accept, boss, that people come to the barber’s shop to chat. Particularly at the moment, when they can’t go anywhere else.’
‘Maybe we start a rumour that speaking, even with a mask on, increases the chance of infection spread by, like, eight thousand percent. We could start lobbying Holyrood to ban speaking to help thwart the spread of the virus. No conversation except in your own home.’
He looked round at Igor and Keanu, who were sitting on the barbers’ chairs. ‘Think that would work?’
‘Arf!’ said Igor, enthusiastically.
‘Think you’re screwed, boss,’ said Keanu. ‘It’s too late. Maybe last summer, or at the height of hospitalisations this winter, but people are done with this shit. They’re ready to throw off the shackles, get out there, eat, drink and be merry. And everyone has a lot to say.’ A moment, then he added, ‘A lot.’
Barney nodded slowly, his head dropped a little bit lower, he and Igor shared a look of quiet despair, and then he turned away and looked outside.
The day, in the brief time he’d turned his back on it, had died a little more, the sun had sunk a little lower in the sky, the darkness had crept a little further across the water.
This, thought Barney Thomson, is where we are, forever on the edge of night. And so the day in the shop was done.
