The Barber

A short story. Based on some prompts from a literature forum.

Before

 

The shop bell tinkled. A wall of heat blasted through the door in protest against the fans and air conditioning attempting to keep the scorching summer at bay. And the man walked through the door.

He had been coming to this particular barber’s shop for over twenty years now, and he knew the barber well, or as well as anyone could be expected to know their barber. The barber knew him better.

They exchanged a series of general pleasantries that were politely personal, but indifferent enough that they could have been between any two acquaintances in the world. The man sat down and made himself comfortable. The barber prepared for work.

As the barber got started, he struck up conversation. The man responded, babbling away incessantly as the barber knew he would. He appeared to be only half-listening to what the man was saying and paying more attention to his hair, but the latter had become such a routine job by now that his mind was focused almost solely on the conversation, for the man fascinated him more than most of his customers.

The barber’s interest lay in the fact that the man was so willing to speak, and not just to talk. There were those who came into his shop who responded only superfluously to whatever he said, and long stretches of silence punctuated their conversation as the scissors and razors and brushes clamoured busily to try to fill it. Then there were people who spoke enthusiastically the whole time, but whose voice his tools still overpowered, drowning out the long-winded nothings they uttered. And then there was this man, for whom the noise of the haircut ceased utterly.

The barber never examined the man directly, as he had observed that when he did, the man changed subtly; his outpourings lessened, his demeanour became quieter and his stature diminished as he shied away from the spotlight cast by the barber’s gaze. The barber likened him to a quantum particle, which, in being observed, changes its properties. He wasn’t quite sure from where he knew this, but by the nature of his work, he knew a lot of people, and therefore a lot of things.

Instead, the mirror became his looking-glass into the man’s mind, as he could study him through it without him realising and take in not just what the man was saying, but the minute gestures and movements of his face as he said them. The man never noticed when he was being watched in this way �" for who looks at themselves in a mirror when they are truly showing themselves? �" and so the barber was able to learn a very great deal about the man in a very short space of time.

The man believed, or so the barber speculated, that the general apathy towards each other that defined their relationship protected him from judgement or further intrusion into his life when he spoke so freely. There were customers with whom the barber was far friendlier, but knew a lot less about, and he believed that it was precisely because their relationships were warmer. Despite the intense heat of the day, there was no warmth in the man’s tone as he spoke, but nor was it cold; it simply was, and the man thought that on leaving the shop, it would cease to be. But he was wrong, as the barber remembered almost all of what the man told him.

He remembered when the man had been engaged, and subsequently married. He remembered the birth of the man’s first son, and his second, and finally his daughter. And he remembered exactly how the man had described each event: his excitements, his worries, his eternal ‘what-if’s. The man often imagined the worst possible outcome of an event and fixated on it. The barber was not a superstitious man, but he often thought that if anyone were to attract disaster by constantly keeping it at the forefront of every waking thought, it would be this man.

But it had not yet happened, and so at precisely six-monthly intervals (the man’s haircuts were astonishingly regular) the barber was offered a glimpse into the entirety of the man’s life. Not just what had happened, but exactly how it had happened, and what the man had thought, felt, or experienced as it was happening. And this was enough for the barber to feel that he knew the man slightly too intimately.

On this particular occasion, the man was talking about his daughter, his youngest child, learning to drive. She had been taking lessons for the last few months, and was almost ready to take her test.

The barber sensed that the man was proud of his daughter. His eyes shone a brilliant blue, sparkling in the sunlight, as he spoke of her achievements, the praise she was given by her instructor, and her hard work which had earned it. But, as the barber had expected, pride quickly turned to trepidation, and the man’s eyes changed so radically that they appeared a different colour. They dimmed, lost all sense of life behind them, and appeared much closer to a dull metallic grey than the gemstones of sapphire that had been there earlier.

The barber knew the man’s worries before they were ever spoken, because they were simply so ordinary, so common-place. And yet the man spoke them as if he were the only one to ever consider them. Did he truly believe that no-one else had ever worried that their daughter might be hurt, or even killed, in a car accident? The barber did not think that the man was truly so self-absorbed, but he always puzzled over what other explanation there could be for the way the man spoke.

Later, after the haircut had ended and the two parted ways, the barber noticed that his cat was sitting in the corner of the shop. This did not surprise him; in some ways it was surprising that cat had not made its presence known a while ago, for it seemed to enjoy listening to conversations between the barber and his customers, and this customer in particular. The barber did not know for how long the cat had been sitting there, but he had a strong and unaccountable suspicion that it had not missed a second of the man’s visit to his shop. The cat stared at the barber for several moments, and then turned and skulked away through the door at the back of the shop.

 

After

 

The shop bell tinkled once more, but this time it was a gale of bitter, chilling wind that penetrated every corner of the room, breaking the small amount of heat that had previously been there. And once again, the man walked through the door.

Instantly, the barber knew that something was wrong. Never before had the man looked the way he did today: wretched, pitiful, as though every ounce of hope he had ever had in this world had been shattered into a thousand tiny pieces and blown away to a thousand different places, each one more secluded and desolate than the last.

The force of the seeing the man like this hit the barber like a gunshot to the leg, crippling him, making him unable to move as he beheld the anguished demeanour before him. And he realised instantly that it had finally happened; the man’s worrying had finally caused a terrible, terrible tragedy to befall him.

A moment later, the barber was internally ridiculing himself, again, for his superstition.

It transpired that the man’s daughter had indeed been involved in a fatal car accident three months ago, exactly as the man had been so afraid of at his last visit to the barber’s. It was no-one’s fault; no-one was to blame. She had been driving her car during a thunderstorm, and a bolt of lightning had struck a tree next to the road, which fell over onto her car. She died in hospital of her injuries. The insurance company had ruled it as an Act of God.

Those words, the words which the man said to the barber in a voice as crushed as the car itself, would stay with the barber for a long time. He remembered them word-for-word.

The barber dutifully offered his hollow, meaningless apologies, and tried to proceed as normally as possible. The man made no objection; he did not speak at all for a long time, and the silence stretched between them as the man sat down and the barber began his work.

As time passed, and more and more locks of the man’s hair fell from his head on to the ground around their feet, the man opened up ever so slightly, as though the barber was gradually chipping away at whatever was firmly binding his thoughts inside his head. He began to talk, as he had always done, but this time he was not anticipating the worst that could possibly happen; he was reflecting on it, for it had happened already.

This time, they both noticed the cat. It had emerged with the first word the man spoke, almost at exactly the same time, and sat on a table behind them, so that they could both see it in the mirror. The man stared unendingly into the mirror this time, and though he therefore knew that both the cat and the barber were watching him attentively, he did not close himself to their gaze.

His first feeling was of anger, but he did not know who he ought to be angry at, for no-one had done anything wrong. And so his rage turned inwards and transformed itself into a terrible bitterness against the world, as if he felt that everything in the universe was conspiring against him to make his life as miserable as possible. And of course it was unfair. The terrible injustice that such a thing should happen to him and his daughter was so unbearable that he could not contain it. It poured out of him, not as an explosion of frustration, but rather leaking through every tiny thing that he said and did.

The barber sympathised, because no-one could ever have seen it coming. But then again, disasters are always inevitable, except to those involved.

When the time came for the man to leave, it did not seem as though he wanted to. He got up from his chair very slowly, took over a minute to extract the money from his wallet to pay the barber, and shuffled towards the door. As he opened it, the bell tinkled once more, and again pure coldness burst through the door. The man seemed to embrace it, and trudged out determinately into the winter. The door swung shut behind him, and he was lost from view within seconds.

All this time, the cat had not left its perch on the table. Its gaze followed the man out of the shop and lingered there for a minute or so, almost as if it could still see the man and was following his march into the distance. Then he began to watch the barber, who was sweeping hair off the floor into a dustpan. Even with his back to the cat, the barber could tell it was watching him; its gaze pierced him like it had never done before, and he suddenly felt ill at ease.

He did not want to acknowledge the cat, and so busied himself with his cleaning, taking as much time over it as he could. Eventually, however, he had to stand up, and he turned to face the cat.

But the cat was not there. Seconds before, as though it had anticipated that the barber was going to turn around, it had leapt down off the table and once again disappeared from sight through the back door of the shop.

For a fleeting moment, the barber was filled with the utmost contempt and distrust for his cat, who continuously watched him, listened to his every conversation, and silently passed judgement on him before vanishing into the darkness. And then he berated himself, for it was a cat, and not capable of any such thing.

And so he followed the cat through the door.

Author's Note

Any feedback welcome!

Reviews

[Jarin R. S.]

Obviously I am making this review to be read by someone who has perfected their craft over the last couple of years. Everything I have to say beyond this point is purely optional for you to take and utilizing your future work. I like to begin by saying that this is one of the better stories that I've read. It flowed beautifully. Very easy to read.

However, upon the readers assumptions about the daughters unfortunate accident. I believe you should've possibly played around with that speculation. Whittling it down, give the reader anxiety over this shocking resolution. That could be either done by dialogue, or breaking down the man's emotions further. It was a classic occurrence of "telling, not showing."

There was one other instance where I felt confused. The beginning of the paragraph seemed to be in the perspective of the man walking into the barbershop. While the rest of the story is based off the barber himself. Analyzing the man that he has known for 20 some years.

With all this said, this was a masterfully crafted story from beginning to end. Sure it might not have the sex appeal of action and bewilderment as some other of my favorite stories might possess, but the flow and the elegance of the sentence structure as well as the very explicit detail with every aspect of the man's behavior to grow upon the reader's eyes definitely enhances the draw and the severity of the story and its voice.