thirty-four

All towns, however small and prim they might be, seem to have one street which gains a certain notoriety. Although the shops and houses in that street may look similar to those in any other part of town, for some reason it becomes a place where certain illicit activities are concentrated.

In the street there is always at least one house where the cars of lonely men are always parked outside. There is always a car park behind rented flats above a row of half-stocked shops, a car park where (in between the stolen and abandoned 'hot hatches' and the occasional burnt out BMW) boys meet at dusk. The boys, who look as if they should still be in the park playing football or at home watching cartoons on TV, smoke endlessly as they wait for their suppliers or customers to arrive. The car park is littered with little piles of fag ends - urban molehills on a fallow field of tarmac.

On the corner of the street is a pub where once a week the surviving dealers meet, a pub where (for the price of a pint) someone will tell you which house to park your car outside if you are lonely, what time to be in the car park if you want a little something to get you out of your skull, a pub where there is always some kid with a knife playing pool alone and a man propping up the bar with prison tattoos and a pocketful of gold bracelets, who, for cash, no questions asked, can beat wholesale prices on just about any commodity you might care to mention.

In Westing this street is called Battle Street.

If you were to browse through the weekly crime round-up on page seven of the Westing Chronicle (between the weddings on page six and the cinema listings on page eight) you could not fail to notice that Battle Street is the address most often given by the petty criminals who have that week passed through the magistrates' courts. In recent times there has only been one murder there - a man stabbed to death in a bed sit by his landlord after an argument over a gas bill (which it later transpired the tenant had paid). However, there have been a number of other violent deaths in the street- a man who never regained consciousness after being kicked in the head in the pub car park, a girl who died of a massive heroin overdose given to her by a former boyfriend, a small boy knocked down by a stolen car. However, these acts (according to the people who decide such things) were not premeditated and the culprits were therefore charged with lesser crimes, manslaughter, death by dangerous driving and the like.

At the far end of Battle Street was a huge old house, set back from the road, which everyone presumed was a squat. However, some years before, the house had actually been bequeathed to one of it's tenants, an unassuming, clean shaven botanist who lived on the third floor and never charged anyone rent. The house had a huge padlock on the outside of the door (and inside, propped up against an old umbrella stand, were a couple of emergency baseball bats). But if you really had no where else to go, your persistent knocking at the door would (nine times out of ten) be rewarded with a spare mattress in a corridor where you could sleep out of the wind and the rain, at least for a couple of nights.

The house was barely furnished, but there was a communal room packed with very old sideboards, cabinets and sofas and a small but excellent sound system. It was a room where (despite, or maybe because of, the disfigured furniture) many of the occupants felt more at home than they'd ever felt anywhere else in their lives before.

Upstairs, behind an iron door, was an attic divided into two areas. The smaller area housed a disused laboratory of dusty glassware. The other area was full of pot plants in space age, foil-lined chambers - all bright lights and chemical nutrients (like a nursery of young triffids, a botanical invasion force preparing for government).

One night there had been an infamous raid in which the police (acting on a tip-off from a disgruntled former tenant who had been thrown out of the 'squat' for theft and a variety of other antisocial activities) had stormed the attic and confiscated a range of rare sub-tropical cultivars (which theoretically you could have smoked but were not renowned for their ability to lift you onto a plane of higher consciousness).

Although the police had never officially apologised for their clumsy handling of the whole affair, on subsequent raids they tactfully tended to leave the botanist's attic well alone (ironic, really, as by then the harmless tropical hybrids had been completely replaced by row upon row of Cannabis cultivars of an unusually high potency).

No one ever stayed in Battle Street very long. Some simply got restless and moved on, fed up with the noise of parties and stolen cars speeding up and down the street every night. Some moved on to stay one step ahead of their debts. or were evicted by bailiffs with crowbars, bin-liners and chain-tugging pit bulls. Others were dragged cursing from their beds by teams of plain clothes policeman, or were carried off more gently to a waiting ambulance or hearse. Whichever way they left, no one stayed there very long.

However, as one person vacated the street, another person of similar persuasion (as if carried in by some mysterious tidal force) arrived to replace them. There was always a new house for lonely men to visit, a new flat where the kids could go to buy their drugs, another anonymous alcoholic trying to start fights with the same old lampposts. Aside from the lampposts there was only one thing in Battle Street that never really changed and that was Antonio's the time-warp barber shop, which had been there for over a quarter of a century.

In the window of Antonio's was a black sign on to which plastic letters were arranged in a seemingly random mixture of red, green and white words:

trim .........£2.5

long hair..3.00

flat top.....£2.75

spike.....£3.5

s/head.......2.75

gel..................50

Beside the sign was a picture drawn in black ink of men who looked like minor, early sixties pop stars, modelling a variety of hair fashions. Most of the styles shown were fairly dodgy, but there was one - the second illustration down on the left hand side - which was not too far off how I'd have liked my hair to be. In an ideal world, I would have been able to lead Antonio out of the shop and point to the picture in the window and say 'look that's how I want it cut - quite long on top, with a number two cut tapering down behind the ears and the nape of the neck.' But, unfortunately this is not an ideal world.

Over the months I had asked for everything on the board (aside from a s/head - which I presumed stood for skinhead) and had invariably ended up with an untidy flat top, for which Antonio always charged two pounds fifty and for which I always paid him three pounds.

It was almost lunchtime by the time I reached Antonio's. I paused, as always, to look at that illusive black-ink quiff hanging in the window (the way people pause to look at a photograph of a twenty-acre mansion in the window of an estate agent's before going in to rent a bedsit). I sighed and entered the salon, opening the door to that familiar smell, a mixture of Camel cigarettes and stale shampoo. The cigarette smell I could understand as Antonio chain smoked constantly as he cut. The shampoo smell was more of a mystery as I had never seen Antonio ever give anyone a hair wash. I suppose there must have been a secret supply of industrial strength shampoo stashed away in some cupboard - leaking out its scent as if to say (hey, remember me? I'm still here if you ever need me guys).

I sat down and watched Antonio clip away at a customer's head (a thin head held very still on a thin neck which disappeared into a dark shirt hanging loosely over narrow shoulders). Antonio puffed at his fag. His reflection grinned at me from the mirror.

I used to think that Antonio's wild welcoming grin was one of personal recognition reserved for regular customers. But, having spent several hours in the 'salon' watching people come and go, I realised he smiled the same way at everyone - friendly and reassuring (like a brain surgeon smiling at a patient prior to performing a lobotomy).

Aside from the thin man in the barber's chair, there were only two other people waiting. The first of these was an old man with slicked back white hair. He wore brown trousers, a cardigan and shoes like leather slippers, the kind of clothes that can only be successfully worn by someone who is well over seventy. The second man was younger. He wore a canary-coloured Fred Perry T-shirt and had some kind of military crest tattooed on his forearm. I couldn't really see what he looked like because he was reading the paper, his head angled away from me as he surveyed lists of bizarrely named horses from which to hopefully pick out a twelve to one winner.

I waited expectantly for the man to relinquish the paper, but, to my disappointment, when he'd finished looking through the sports pages he turned to the story on the front. From the way the man's lips slowly moved as he read I could tell I was in for a long wait and so picked up a worn copy of National Geographic magazine and browsed through an article on the indigenous people of the Bolivian jungle (a part of the world as yet unconquered by Playtex). After I'd had my fill of blowpipes, dripping foliage and poisonous frogs I flicked through to an article on peanut farming entitled Buried Treasure In Jimmy Carter's Backyard. I turned to the cover. March 1975, it said.

The magazine was one of the more modern items in that museum of a place, a place redolent of a time before the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix, before green mohicans and footballer perms, a time when every man and boy in the town had a short back and sides every week, a time when there must have been a barber busy behind each of the salon's four matching chairs, mirrors and sinks, before it was just Antonio and his TV.

Football Focus came on as Antonio snipped the old man's white hair with his one remaining pair of scissors.

"It's the kissing I can't stand," said the man, watching the screen out of the corner of his eye, as a group of Leeds players celebrated a rare goal. "There was none of that in our day. There was nothing clever about scoring a goal. If you missed, well then they might have something to say about it."

Antonio nodded uncomprehendingly and pretended to concentrate on his snipping.

"It's the money," said the man. "That's what's killed the game. Just look at those shorts. They're like a pair of lady's knickers."

The man caught my eye in the mirror.

"Do you play?"

"Sometimes," I said.

The man nodded, but (thankfully) then seemed to lose his train of thought. He remained quiet until he'd paid for his cut and was leaving the shop, and suddenly turned to me and said, "Keep your knee over the ball. Keepers never like a ball along the ground. Players these days always want to try something fancy up in the air. But your keeper, if it's up high, he'll take it every time. Keep your knee over it, and you won't go far wrong."

"Thanks," I said. "I'll remember that."

The man nodded glumly.

"Goodbye," he said.

"See ya," I said.

And he hobbled out of the door.

Antonio had taken quite a long time over the old boy's cut, and as if to compensate he only took about a minute to sort out the man in the canary-coloured Fred Perry. As the man dusted the hair from his collar, I took my seat on the slightly sweaty plastic and Antonio whisked the protective grey bib around my shoulders (which was a bit like a plastic poncho only tighter around the neck). Although the 'bib' was very thin and flimsy, the way it enveloped your arms made you feel as if you'd been put in some kind of strait-jacket.

I sat completely still as Antonio sharpened up his razor and began the same conversation he had had with me each of the last five or six times I had visited his salon, a conversation in which he spoke English as if he had arrived on the boat from Palermo the previous Tuesday, despite the fact that by all accounts, he had lived in Westing for at least thirty years. I am not really sure if he really couldn't speak English or remember who I was, or whether he was just playing a part - Antonio the crazy Italian barber, a perennial performance which (rather like The Mousetrap on the London stage) whilst there was still an audience for it, simply ran and ran.

Antonio never actually asked you how you would like your hair cut. He simply rested his fag end on an upturned lid (which once secured an industrial size jar of Brylcream but now served as his ashtray) and looked at you enquiringly via the mirror.

"A number two cut up the sides please," I said and with the flat of my hand indicated a line about an inch above my left ear. "And quite long on top please."

"You not want any off the back?" he asked, his fag wobbling in his mouth as he talked.

"Yea, the sides and the back," I said.

"You say only the sides number two." He grinned.

"Yea, sorry, I meant the back as well."

He nodded, put his fag down and picked up a comb.

"Number two all over?" he said.

I nodded.

"And on the top?"

He scissored my hair between his tobacco-stained fingers level with my scalp.

"You want this like number two?"

"No, just a little bit off the top please," I said.

"I do special for you," he said. "Number one all over and I give you free polish."

He mimed waxing the top of my head and wheezed asthmatically with laughter.

"It's all right," I said. "I think I'll leave it long on top."

He coughed phlegm into the back of his hand and wiped his mouth with a hair-covered tissue.

"I only joke," he said wiping imaginary tears of mirth form his eyes and lit up a fresh cigarette. He put the number two plastic guard on his electric clippers and started to shave the side of my head."

"Do you live near here?" he asked (as he had done on my previous six visits).

"Yea, Broadbank Avenue," I said, opposite the Golden Dragon, the Chinese take-away."

"The Chinese."

"Yea, that's right."

"You work in kitchen?"

"No, no. I live opposite. I actually work in town."

"Si, si," he said and roughly combed the top of my hair. "My brother he has restaurant."

"Oh, right."

"Very, very good Italian food."

"Sounds great," I said.

"You know how to cook pasta?" he said.

"Yea, sort of," I said.

"You come work in his kitchen. He teach you real Italian cooking."

He grinned and squirted a drop of oil on to his clippers.

"Actually," I started to explain. "I don't actually work in the Chinese restaurant, I just live..."

I paused as he put down the clippers and picked up his razor - a steel cut-throat razor like something out of a fifties gangster movie.

"Up or down," he asked stabbing the air dangerously close to the few strands of bum fluff I laughably referred to as my sideburns.

"Up please," I said, keeping still as stone.

He nodded and ran the edge of the razor skilfully along the inside of my ear, looking over at a replay of a diving header on the TV. He stood behind me and bent down slightly to shave the back of my neck.

"So you only cook Chinese?" he said, scraping away with the razor behind my right ear.

I didn't dare nod or talk, but managed a smile.

"Only noodles, eh?" he said, laughing.

He coughed and rested his fag end on the vintage Brylcream lid he used as an ashtray. He picked up his double-handled mirror and held it behind my head.

"Isa OK?" he asked, I winced at the sight of my neck which was red raw from the dry scrape of his razor.

I nodded.

"Great, just great," I said.

He removed the grey bib from around my neck and handed me a piece of white tissue (which I disposed of, unused, in the bin by the door - not being entirely certain that it wasn't the one he'd wiped the phlegm from his lips with).

I gave him three quid and gestured for him not to worry about the change.

"If you want to learn to cook Italian," he said. "I speak to Alfonso for you."

"Great," I said. "Just great."