Charlton nodded. ‘Grasp Sparrow By The Tail.’
‘You what?’ Barker said.
‘Drive Away Monkey.’
‘What are you on about?’
‘Tai Chi.’ Charlton grinned. ‘Ray’s been doing it for years. We used to take the piss out of him.’ Charlton started waving his arms around in the air, slow-motion, his fingers splayed, like a hypnotist or a magician.
‘What’s the story with the sparrows?’ Barker said.
‘It’s one of the positions. The idea is, you’re always ready. Never caught off balance.’ Charlton finished his drink. ‘What’s Ray up to these days?’
‘This and that.’ Barker flipped the eggs so as to brown them on both sides. ‘He’s got kids now.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Two boys.’
Charlton shook his head. ‘Fuck me,’ he said, and yawned.
Though Barker had put two hundred and fifty miles between himself and Plymouth, he hadn’t shaken off its influence. During his second week as Charlton’s guest, he woke from a dream — or thought he woke — to see the Scullys outside his bedroom window. They looked cold, especially the girl, as if they had been standing on the road all night, their lips dark-mauve like the lips of people with heart conditions, their faces smooth, inscrutable. Two of the men stood on the green mound opposite the house, their arms folded, their feet apart, while the third leaned casually against a parked car. The girl shivered on the pavement, under a streetlamp, both hands tucked into her armpits. All four were staring up at him, their strange, wide-spaced eyes fastened on his window. At last the man who was leaning against the car lifted a hand into the air and Barker saw something dangling from his index finger, something that was flimsy, almost transparent. In his dream Barker peered closer. The man was holding a pair of knickers that belonged to Barker’s ex-wife, Leslie. The man swung the knickers on his finger, almost as if he was teasing a dog. All the Scullys were grinning now, and their grins told Barker everything.
He lay on his back in the narrow bed and studied the pattern of smudges on the wall. Maybe he should have paid Leslie more attention — or maybe there was nothing he could have done. He remembered the smell of other people’s meals as he climbed the five flights of stairs to her tiny attic flat in Devonport. On summer evenings, during their first intoxicating days together, she would put James Last records on the stereo, then she’d strip down to her underwear and dance for him. Her breasts cupped and threatening to spill, her plump thighs curving towards that succulence above — he had never seen a woman who looked so good. He married her in September — he’d just turned twenty-four (she was twenty-seven) — and two months later he heard that she’d been seen with Gavin Stringer in the Garter Club on Union Street. He broke a pool cue on the side of Stringer’s head. That slowed him up a bit. By the time Christmas came, it was someone else — a fireman from Whitsand Bay. Barker tracked him down on a night of gale-force winds in January. The fireman’s hair kept flattening, the way grass does when a helicopter lands. Barker hit him in the stomach, feeling the organs jostle, rupture, split under his knuckles. Then he hit him in the face. Left him slumped on the pavement like a tramp or a drunk, one eyeball swinging against his cheek. ‘All this violence,’ and Leslie shook her head. ‘I just can’t deal with it.’ ‘But it’s because of you,’ he shouted. ‘It’s you.’ That wasn’t the whole truth, though, and they both knew it. The marriage lasted less than a year.
An empty feeling, lying there. He couldn’t imagine the future, what it held in store. He felt it was rushing towards him and yet, no matter how hard he looked, he couldn’t see it coming. Once, when he was about fifteen, he and his brother Jim stole a Ford Capri and drove it along the main road at night with all the lights switched off. Nothing happened. They weren’t even caught. He had the same feeling now, somehow, only the excitement had drained away, the daring too, and panic flickered in its place. He imagined lightning striking inside his brain. He could smell scorched air. He thought of Ray and his Tai Chi. In the days when Barker worked on the door of a night-club, there wasn’t much that could surprise him. He was almost always two or three seconds ahead of any move that might be made. But he didn’t seem to have access to that ability at other times. More and more often he felt hurried, unprepared. He knew he couldn’t stay with Charlton for ever, yet there were days when he couldn’t even leave his bed. He had about eight hundred pounds, in cash. That wouldn’t last long, not in London. He needed to find some work — any work. He was reminded of something his father used to say. Jobs don’t come looking for you. Only the police do that.
One afternoon while Charlton was asleep Barker walked to Petticoat Lane. Rotten fruit clogged the gutters, and the sickly scent of joss-sticks floated in the air. He had the sense that, all around him, people were attempting the impossible: a thin man with a twitchy, unshaven face wedging a steel roll-door open with a piece of wood, a pregnant woman selling second-hand TVs. As he stood uncertainly among the stalls, the sky darkened and rain began to fall. He turned a corner, hoping to find shelter — a café, perhaps. Instead he saw an old-fashioned barber’s shop. The sign in the window said GENT’S HAIRSTYLIST and underneath, in smaller, less formal letters, Come In Please — We’re Open. Barker opened the door, which jangled tinnily, and stepped inside. A row of mirrors glimmered on the wall, reflecting the rain that was streaming down the shop-front window; the glass seemed to be alive, liquid. At the back an old man in a white cotton coat was sweeping hair into a pile. Barker asked him if he ran the place. The old man said he did.
‘I’m looking for work,’ Barker said quietly.
The old man looked up from his pile of hair. ‘How m-much experience you got?’
He had a speech impediment — not a stutter exactly, more a kind of hesitation as he attempted certain sounds. He would say the first letter twice and, while he was trying to make it join the rest of the word, his eyes would flutter rapidly. Then he would carry on as if nothing had happened. Barker found he couldn’t lie.
‘I was in the Merchant Navy for a while,’ he said. ‘That was in the late sixties, early seventies. After that I worked for the council as a gardener. I worked in a garage too. Mechanic. The last few years I’ve been a night manager. Well, they call it that. It’s a bouncer, really. Down on the south coast. Plymouth.’
The old man studied him, still gripping the broom-handle in both hands, lips twisting sceptically to one side of his face. ‘Doesn’t sound like you’ve cut a w-whole lot of hair.’
‘Not a whole lot,’ Barker admitted, ‘but I’ve done it.’
His father, Frank Dodds, had been a barber. The sight of that slowly spiralling red-white-and-blue pole had been one of the mysteries of Barker’s childhood. Where did the ribbons of colour come from? Where did they go? Why didn’t they ever run out? He had learned to cut hair when he was thirteen or fourteen — crew-cuts and DAs, mostly. His clients had flat noses and glossy knuckles, and their tattoos had faded to the dirty bluish-grey of veins. Sometimes they would be drunk. Other times his father had to break up fights. In those days it was more like being a bartender than anything else.
‘Tell you what,’ the old man said. ‘I’ll give you a two-week trial. If I still like you after that, you can stay on.’
‘Sounds fair.’
‘The money’s not m-much good.’
‘You really know how to sell a job,’ Barker said, ‘don’t you.’