Series 2, Episode 9: The Gandalf Consideration
‘So, what d’you make of the whole Harry and Meghan furore?’ asked Keanu McPherson, Millport barbershop second-in-command, as the men of the shop stood at the window at the start of another day, looking out on a bleak, silent scene, no wind blowing, gentle rain falling on the calm, still waters of the Firth of Clyde.
‘Who are they again?’ asked Barney Thomson, world-renowned, hirsutological genius.
Igor, shop anchor and backroom controller of events, sniggered quietly into his mug, then took another bite of the first pastry of the morning, a maple Bavarian wurstumsatz.
There were no customers yet, but the days were still quiet, in these last few weeks before total lockdown came to an end. Slowly, in ones and twos, they would come. For now the men had coffee and pastries, Radio 3 was playing quietly in the background, currently, Hildegard of Bingen’s 12thC misery epic, I Urinate The Blood Of Christ, And With It I Die, the pile of that day’s newspapers was neatly stacked on the customers’ bench – on top, the Guardian, headline, Matt Hancock Ate My Flesh, Claims Upset Nurse – and all seemed right with the world.
‘I’m not letting you away with that, old man,’ said Keanu.
‘You usually do.’
‘Not this time. You’ve got Harry and Meghan on one side, you’ve got Piers Morgan on the other. Whose side are you on?’
They drank their coffee, then glanced at each other and burst out laughing, Barney shaking his head, smiling wryly as he turned back to the view.
‘OK, I could have framed that better,’ said Keanu. ‘You’ve got Harry and Meghan on one side, and the Royal Household on the other. Whose side are you on?’
Barney shook his head slowly again, the same small smile on his face, as he watched a gull descend on an old man walking slowly across the road, expertly pluck out his right eye, then fly off into the grey sky.
Shorn of their regular supply of fish suppers, the gulls had been getting more adventurous.
‘Can I hope they both lose?’ said Barney.
‘I know what you mean,’ said Keanu. ‘It’s like when England play Wales at rugby. But no, you can’t. There’s a gun at your head, and you have to take sides.’
‘There’s no I-really-don’t-care get out of jail free card?’
‘That card does not exist.’
‘Igor?’ said Barney, stalling. ‘Have you taken a side?’
‘I’m on the side of the oppressed staff,’ said Igor, though as ever it emerged from his lips simply as the single-syllable arf, and as ever Barney and Keanu understood him anyway.
‘Decent,’ said Keanu.
‘Wait,’ said Barney, ‘can I then, be on the side of the oppressed staff?’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
‘Igor has an oppressed-staff card. You don’t.’
Barney smiled to himself as he looked out over the vast, grey seascape. Far in the distance, etched like a matchbox model against the horizon, the packet ship SS Coriolanus moved sedately on its way, as it began the long journey from the bustling factory port of Troon to the sugar islands off the coast of Virginia.
‘Arf,’ said Igor, looking at Barney.
‘Fine,’ said Barney. ‘By default I’m on the side of Harry and Meghan. Happy?’
‘Nuh-huh,’ said Keanu. ‘You have to give a full justification.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘This is a barbershop,’ said Keanu. ‘Everything is being recorded for posterity, and will end up in the records of the Barbershop Museum in Cleveland. You can’t just toss around idle statements on huge issues like this one, you can’t just casually say, oh, I’m on Harry’s side and I hate the Queen and want to abolish the monarchy, without justifying it.’
‘Arf!’ said Igor in agreement, smiling naughtily behind his mug of coffee.
Barney finally turned and looked at Keanu, eyebrows raised, when the door opened. The first customer of the day.
‘You’re up,’ said Barney, and Keanu laughed and took a slurp of coffee.
‘Big Malky!’ he said, turning to the customer. ‘What can we do for you today?’
‘I’ll have Variated Sturminster Newton, please, mate,’ said Big Malky Nine Spleens, as he removed his jacket.
* * *
‘You know what a STEVE is?’ asked Keanu.
Old Man McGuire, in for his weekly Galileo-Galileo-Galileo-Figaro cut, squinted at him in the mirror. Meanwhile Barney was sitting on the customers’ bench reading an article in the National – Sturgeon Aims To Open First Scottish Chip Shop On Mars By 2030 – and Igor was sweeping up at the back of the shop.
‘Is it a cunt called Steve?’ asked Old Man McGuire, who looked disgruntled at having his moment of silence interrupted. Of course, Old Man McGuire always looked disgruntled.
‘It’s a space thing,’ said Keanu.
McGuire regarded Keanu warily in the mirror.
‘Go on, then, son, but I think you should know, I don’t even know where space is.’
‘So, they’re these kind of weird streams of light in the sky, kind of aurora-esque, but they’re not auroras. They’re caused by a completely different phenomenon.’
Keanu paused the chatter, while his scissors continued to snip away at the sparse hairs on McGuire’s head, looking to see if he’d managed to engage him. The expression on McGuire’s face hadn’t changed.
‘Am I now supposed to ask why it’s called Steve?’
‘Interesting you mention that,’ said Keanu, smiling. Old Man McGuire always made Keanu smile. ‘There was a group of amateur astronomers who observed a STEVE over Alberta in 2016, and they didn’t know what it was. So, they named it Steve, because… wait, d’you know the movie Over The Hedge?’
‘Naw!’
‘So, there’s an animated movie called Over The Hedge, and in it there’s a giant hedge, and the animals don’t know what it is, so they name it Steve.’
McGuire looked strangely, angry-curious, at Keanu in the mirror.
‘Wait, what? Animals don’t know what a hedge is?’
‘Right.’
‘But they can talk?’
‘Aye.’
‘So, we’ve got literally the smartest fucking animals to ever walk the earth, but they don’t know what a hedge is? What kind of dumbass animals are these?’
‘Anyway,’ said Keanu, still a-snipping and a-smiling, ‘the general scientific community started to properly investigate it, they established it was caused by hot gas, and by hot, it’s like three thousand degrees centigrade and stuff, zipping through Earth's magnetic field, super-fast. Then they kept the name Steve, except they back-acronymed it, so it now stands for Strong Thermal Emissions Velocity Enhancement.’
Old Man McGuire’s face was now contorted into a perfect storm of bewilderment, confusion, annoyance, anger and contempt.
‘Think I prefer it when you talk about football, son,’ said McGuire, ‘though to be honest, you know fuck all about that ‘n’ all.’
‘I don’t know, Mr McGuire, I think these we snippets you pick up on the Internet can be really interesting.’
‘So, what, you just read that Steve shite on the Internet?’
‘Of course.’
‘So, you stand there like yon eejit Brian Cox with all your thermal ejaculation shite, but in fact, all you did was spend ten minutes on your phone. Any cunt could spend ten minutes on their phone. I spend ten minutes on my phone. Some days, double that.’
‘That’s the size of it. But then, not everyone can look at everything on the Internet, can they? So, when you see something interesting, it’s nice to share.’
Old Man McGuire regarded Keanu in the mirror, eyes narrowed. He glanced at Barney, sitting behind, but he wasn’t engaging, then McGuire settled a little further down in his seat, the international barbershop signal of a customer having had enough of a conversation.
‘Speak for yourself, son,’ muttered McGuire darkly.
‘And here’s another thing. I was reading about the time John Coltrane played in Glasgow in the early sixties…’
‘Fuck me…’
* * *
The day passed like any other in these times of lockdown, partial vaccination and political upheaval. Customers came and went in ones and twos, clouds flitted across the sky, rain fell and rain dried up, as spring came upon the land and the wind picked up and blew in from the sea. Barney and Keanu cut hair, in between long intervals of standing at the window, watching the world as it turned pedestrianly on its axis, while Igor swept the floor, kept the shop shipshape, and joined the chaps at the window when some tea and pastries and introspection were called for.
On the customers’ bench, the stack of that day’s newspapers lay largely untouched. The Daily Express, headline Criticising Tories Now Punishable By Death, lay on top, beneath which, in a forlorn scatter of rancid verbiage, lay The Telegraph, It’s About Time Women Just Shut Up And Made Dinner, Says Raab; The Times, Blood-Spattered Patel Machine Guns Protestors In New Clampdown; the Metro, Glass Ceilings To Be Made Concrete As Tories Tell Women To Fuck Off; Sun, Covid Babe Grows Third Boob As Orgasm Cures Coma; The Mail, I’m Not A Racist, Says Racist; and the Mirror, Dancing On Ice Babe Says Meghan Inspired Her To Feed Mother-in-Law To Pet Alligator.
The men had just polished off a post-lunch, deep-fried Tunnocks tea cake, something which they had all agreed to never eat again, and they were looking out upon the land and the sea, waiting for something to happen. So far, nothing was happening.
‘Arf,’ said Igor, indicating the barren seascape, where even the waves were struggling to muster much enthusiasm.
‘Aye,’ said Barney. ‘You’re not wrong.’
‘Where d’you think all this is going?’ asked Keanu, indicating the wide, wide world beyond.
‘How d’you mean?’
‘I mean, this. This life, this world, us. We come here every day, we cut hair, we stand at the window, we talk about stuff. Where’s it headed? Don’t you feel sometimes that it has to be about something? There must be some point to it all. If there’s not a point, then why are we even here? Why do we exist?’
‘A point beyond cutting hair?’
‘Aye. I mean, cutting hair’s fine ‘n’ all, but there are thousands of people cutting hair. All over the land, all over every country on earth, there are people cutting hair. What’s with us? Why are we, we three in this shop in Millport, why are we the vanguard?’
‘Are we though?’ asked Barney.
‘Well, aren’t we? Don’t you feel sometimes like everything we do and say is, in some way we can’t quite fathom, being communicated to the world? That we exist for a reason beyond cutting hair? We have catchphrases, and the same customers every week, we eat endless pastries, and drink gallons of tea and coffee, and we have these newspapers with peculiar headlines. I mean, I don’t know if actual newspapers really call Matt Hancock a cunt.’
‘I’m not sure,’ said Barney, ‘I mean, Matt Hancock really is a cunt, and the press hounds have been unleashed, so you never know.’
‘Hmm,’ said Keanu doubtfully. ‘I don’t know. I think there might be a higher purpose here.’
‘Well, when you find out what it is, let us know.’
Keanu took another drink of tea, then indicated the world with a sweep of the mug.
‘The trouble is, what if we’re in some quest, mission, adventure type situation.’
Igor glanced quickly at Keanu, looking troubled, then nodded.
‘Arf,’ he said, grimly.
‘Not entirely sure what that would be,’ said Barney, ‘but what’s the problem with that?’
‘Well, it means you’re going to die.’
Barney smiled quietly, as he lifted the mug to his lips. Funny how the very notion seemed to lighten the weight on his shoulders a little.
‘Why?’ he said.
‘Because you’re the teacher. You’re Obi Wan, you’re Dumbledore. You have to pass on your knowledge to your pupil – me – but then you have to die, and it has to be me who completes the quest. That’s my journey, from pupil to saviour of the world.’
‘And my journey’s teacher to dead guy?’
‘Pretty much, it’s what always happens.’
‘Arf,’ said Igor, nodding.
Not far to their left, there was a sudden explosion of action, as a car, tyres screeching, accelerated away from in front of the bank, racing in the direction of Newton and Kames. One second, another, and then a police car, having screamed down Cardiff Street, handbrake-turned the corner, and flew along the main road before them, engine roaring, Detective Sergeant Monk driving, while Constable Gainsborough leaned out the passenger window and fired off a volley of shots at the speeding car ahead of them, from his newly-issued Glock 17.
A flurry of noise, narrowing into the distance, and then out of sight, the fugitives from justice screeched and threw the car left onto College Street, accelerating away up past the cathedral, towards the centre of the island, with the police car in hot pursuit.
Silence descended once more up on them.
‘Been another bank robbery, then,’ said Barney.
‘Won’t get far,’ said Keanu.
The amount of people who robbed the bank in Millport, not realising they were on an island and couldn’t get off without sitting stationary on a ferry for ten minutes, was remarkably high. People, DS Monk often supposed, were just idiots.
‘Where were we?’ said Keanu, after another drink from a mug of tea that was lasting a remarkably long time.
‘I was about to die,’ said Barney.
‘Right.’
‘Although, I think it might be a flawed premise.’
‘I don’t know, Barney, we’re clearly in a teacher-student-important-mission situation.’
‘What about Gandalf?’
‘What about him?’
‘He’s alive at the end of the book.’
‘Arf,’ said Igor.
‘But the mission is Frodo’s, and Gandalf is separated from him in a death-type situation. And it is kind of fake that Gandalf comes back anyway.’
‘Why?’
‘He doesn’t do anything. I mean, really, he acts more as a general. He’s supposed to be one of the great wizards of his age, but when the giant trolls are about to crash through the gates of Gondor, what does he do?’
‘Not much,’ said Barney.
‘Exactly. He shouts some stuff. Stand fast, and man up, and bring your shit. He marshals the troops. He doesn’t conjure up a twenty-yard-thick concrete wall, which would be quite handy, or throw miracle explosives, or do anything really. What’s the point of Gandalf?’
‘He’s a sage,’ said Barney.
‘Well, that’s all well and good, but anyone can be a sage. It’s like they brought him back because he didn’t want to kill him off, but then, he couldn’t have him do too much because it would get in the way of the quest. Really, Gandalf should have stayed dead, sad though that would’ve been. It’s just the way of all teachers in the teacher-student quest scenario.’
‘Hmm,’ said Barney. ‘Maybe you’ve got a point.’
They drank their tea, while silence came upon them suddenly, as though the weight of what they’d been discussing had fallen over them like a giant blanket of sadness. Even the sound of swallowing tea was lost, the swallowing itself swallowed in the still of the early afternoon.
‘When’s this going to happen, d’you think?’ asked Barney, after an indeterminate length of time.
‘Don’t know,’ said Keanu. ‘Seems overdue. On the plus side, presumably we’ll find out the exact nature of the quest before you die, so you might have a little time left yet.’
‘Arf,’ said Igor, nodding.
‘Another couple of weeks at least,’ said Keanu, and then he smiled, and Barney shook his head, noticing that, at last, his cup of tea was finally running low.
* * *
‘Did you hear the news on the radio this morning?’ asked Barney’s customer, Tommy One Lip, in for his monthly 1860 Munich cut.
Barney thought about it, pausing the clicking sweep of the scissors across the customer’s hair for a moment, then shook his head.
‘You don’t listen to the radio?’
‘Radio 3.’
‘Right,’ said Tommy One Lip. ‘You’re that age. You know, when people have progressed through the channels and they reach Radio 3, the way they move through cheddar strength as they get older.’
Barney smiled, continuing to cut in what would seem, to the outside observer, like a random manner across the top of the head, but which was, in fact, precision barbery of a quality rarely seen in the modern world.
‘But wait, don’t the BBC just have the same news bulletin on all the different channels at the moment?’
‘Aye,’ said Barney.
‘So, how come you didn’t hear the news?’
‘I always get the kettle going while they talk, so I can’t hear it.’
‘Hmm,’ said Tommy One Lip. ‘You’re not interested?’
‘I suppose I am, and I read bits here and there. Enough to be getting on. But I don’t like hearing people talk about it, just gets me mad. And I’m too old to get mad about this stuff. There’s no point. I know I’m not going to do anything about it. That’s for the young ‘uns,’ and he indicated Keanu, who was sitting in his barber’s chair, scrolling through his phone.
Keanu glanced up, aware by the slight movement in the Force that he was being included in the conversation, and said, ‘What?’ and Barney shook his head, and Keanu went back to looking at his phone.
‘So, what, you’re just abdicating your responsibility for the future of planet earth?’
‘We’ve all got our parts to play, Mr Lip,’ said Barney. ‘I stopped ordering Kobe beef straight from Japan, and I haven’t flown to Australia in the past year.’
‘You mock me, sir,’ said Tommy One Lip.
‘We all must choose our own path, Mr Lip,’ said Barney, his voice suddenly taking on a tone of melancholy and resignation. Recognising the latest disturbance in the quality of the room, both Keanu and Igor tuned into the conversation. ‘So, you were saying about the news? What did I miss? Did someone in the government resign for helping to cause the mass casualty event of the last year? Or for the blatant corruption? Or for embracing fascism, under the cover of British nationalistic exceptionalism?’
‘None of that,’ said Tommy One Lip. ‘In fact, the complete reverse. That’s what I was going to say. We got a story about Uber drivers, which maybe is a bit of a story, but it really only affects Uber drivers. Then we got energy company rebates, something about birdsong in Australia and a story about the Beano.’
‘The Beano?’ said Keanu, perking up, and both Tommy One Lip and Barney gave him something of an eyebrow.
‘I see what you’re saying,’ said Barney.
‘Exactly,’ said Tommy One Lip, who then proceeded to further say what it was that Barney had already recognised him saying. Because that’s what people do. They talk too much. ‘It’s like, wait, what? Are we not in the middle of a global pandemic? Yesterday, there were still over a hundred deaths from Covid in the UK. Is that not news anymore, BBC? The government are trashing the right to protest. Not news. There’s a crisis in the way the police and courts handle sex crimes against women, and they’re answer is brighter fucking streetlights, which they won’t do anyway. Then there’s that global Britain shite, like we’re still a fucking empire, increasing our nuclear weapons, and we’ll tilt to Asia. Oh, fuck off, Raab, you utter prick. And there’s nothing we in Scotland can do about it, because we’re beholden to these same lying, criminalistic bloodsuckers to grant us a referendum, and if we have one without their fucking permission, and then declare independence, we’ll be an international pariah, trading with Transnistria and Abkhazia. But, of course, there are some who would still prefer to do that anyway. Damned if we do, damned if we don’t. None of it news, according to the BBC. But the Beano…’
Barney had moved seamlessly to cutting around the ear, having listened to Tommy One Lip throughout. He didn’t always, after all, listen to what people were saying.
‘And what are you going to do about it?’ he asked.
Tommy One Lip looked harshly at him in the mirror.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘What can you do?’
‘Nothing,’ said Barney. ‘That’s democracy for you. On the other hand, we’re all going to die anyway, so you know…’
‘Not good enough,’ said Tommy One Lip. ‘We need a movement. We need people to march on London.’
‘They’ll all get arrested.’
‘Not if there are millions of us. We can’t stand for this shite. I’m starting a new political party, that’s what I’m doing. You’ve not said much here today, my man, but you’ve persuaded me. Something needs to be done.’
‘That’s the way to do it,’ said Barney. ‘What’s it going to be called?’
‘Fuck The Tories,’ he said, then he looked at the men of the shop in turn in the mirror. ‘What d’you think?’
‘Needs work to become mainstream,’ said Igor, though it emerged as arf, and Tommy One Lip didn’t understand him.
‘Are we nearly finished, I need to get on,’ said Tommy One Lip.
‘Almost there, Mr Lip,’ said Barney.
Tommy One Lip stared harshly at himself in the mirror, as he began to plot his political rise and the overthrow of the corrupt system that had left British credibility on the international stage a miserable and pathetic shadow of its former self.
‘What was it about the Beano?’ chipped in Keanu, after a few moments of silence.
* * *
‘Maybe he’s got a point,’ said Keanu.
End of the day, the chaps standing at the window, looking out on the dying afternoon, the sun having come and gone and come and gone again, rain now threatening from the south, blown in on the trade winds, carrying a hint of Caribbean warmth, but also giant spider eggs, which would soon settle and hatch in the Millport palm trees.
The day had not been busy, and now Barney, Keanu and Igor were enjoying a final cup of tea, accompanied by a tasty, sugared doughnut, as they saw out the remainder of the day.
‘Who?’ said Barney. People, he thought, rarely had points.
‘Tommy One Lip.’
‘Arf,’ said Igor, nodding reluctantly.
‘I mean,’ continued Keanu, ‘I didn’t like to say at the time.’
‘It would only have encouraged him,’ said Barney.
‘And you wouldn’t have wanted that.’
‘No.’
‘So, I didn’t say anything.’
‘I appreciate that.’
‘But really, we’re all, regardless of your political colours, getting played shitless by this lot. They can do what they like. They are crushing everyone, while they rake in illicit cash.’
‘Huge majority,’ said Barney.
‘Right? But they got forty-three percent of the vote. How stupid a system is it where a party that gets just over two-fifths of the vote gets to control everything and do what they like? It’s nuts.’
Barney smiled, as he put the tea to his lips, took a drink, indicated to Igor with a tip of the mug that it was the finest cup of tea he’d had so far this month and that was saying something, and continued to look out upon the coming storm.
‘It is,’ he said, quoting the great philosophers of the day, ‘what it is. No one wants to change it. We’re collectively too stupid to know any better. And the one time we had a coalition government in recent times, everyone lost their shit. That’s where we are, son.’
‘And here’s me, happy as long as the WiFi’s working,’ said Keanu.
‘You’re not alone,’ said Barney. ‘And anyway, I’m happy if the kettle boils.’
‘Arf!’
Keanu took a long drink of tea, staring phlegmatically out upon the world.
‘All this shit,’ he said after a while. ‘I wish it wasn’t happening now.’
Barney laid a hand on his shoulder as he too looked upon the earth.
‘So do I,’ he said, ‘and so do all who live to see such time. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’ He paused, then said, ‘Think I’ll have another doughnut.’
Keanu smiled ruefully.
‘I see what you did there,’ he said.
‘Thanks,’ said Barney. ‘Doughnut?’
‘Sure.
‘Arf!’
And so did the afternoon wind its way to about as satisfactory a conclusion as one could expect in these dark days.
