There’s a price list on the counter and I run my eyes over her list of ‘services’. I don’t need a cut and finish and I don’t need to know what a Hollywood wax is to be sure I don’t want one. I can’t see what I want. I hate going off-menu in any context, but desperate needs call for desperate measures.
‘Can I help you?’ A woman about my mum’s age comes bust-first through a louvre door. Her hair is short, swishy and streaked with plums and burgundies.
‘I don’t suppose you do an old-fashioned wet shave?’
‘Not the old-fashioned kind.’ She smiles kindly. ‘Cut-throat razors and choppy seas aren’t the best combination. If you want to take the fuzz off I can sort you out with the clippers and a safety razor, though.’
‘How much?’
She looks me up and down, clearly sensing my desperation.
‘Thirty pounds.’ Her smile now seems edged with mockery, and instead of the Thirty fucking quid that backs up behind my teeth, I say, ‘Yes please.’
She tucks me into a huge bib and ties a towel under my neck; it would almost be comforting in other circumstances. At the clippers’ touch, coarse red hair floats to the floor. I’m expecting a can of shaving foam but she lathers me up with a shaving brush and soap, so exactly like the one my dad used to use that suddenly I’m back in Chile for the ’91 eclipse. Mac and I were about twelve, with perhaps three whiskers between us but determined to start shaving, and when Dad was passed out on the beach, we went through his sponge bag and helped ourselves to his things. We were half blind with laughter as we lathered up, then used his crappy blunt old razor, still thick with his greying bristles, and cut our baby faces to ribbons.
This memory whirls me along to another; we had a lot of firsts on our travels with Dad, usually while he was out drinking or sleeping off the drink in a hotel room or a beach cabin or a trailer somewhere. The following summer we smoked our first cigarette, stolen from the soft paper packs of American Spirit he used to smoke; the tobacco was organic, which Dad took to mean it was virtually a vitamin pill. We weren’t laughing when we did this; it was deadly serious, a fumbled ritual that then became funny when we realised that if you wanted to light the cigarette you had to actually breathe in at the same time. This accomplished, I took the first drag and nearly fainted. Mac said it went down better than oxygen.
The year after that was Brazil ’94. We were fourteen. Dad made a road trip of it; we drove from the airport in New Mexico all the way down to Brazil, where his old friends were staying. En route we got drunk for the first time, stealing a litre bottle of Whyte and Mackay rum I thought would last us the week. It was gone in half an hour. We both threw up, and only Mac went back for more. I have never touched it since.
That trip I ought to have had my first kiss, too, but Mac had other plans.
The rum was gone, but there was a bottle of gin, which we took down to the beach where all the eclipse chasers’ kids lit bonfires and drank at night. They were mostly Americans and our London accents were an aphrodisiac. While Mac told a sexy, punky seventeen-year-old I can tell you’re a very spiritual person, I got quietly chatting to a girl called Ashley who had the kind of slow-burn prettiness it was easy to dismiss at first glance. She was sharp, funny, and when she asked me if I wanted to ‘make out’ I said yes, in a minute, and then immediately disappeared to take a leak at the bottom of the cliff. When I came back to the fire, Ashley was on her back in the dunes, my twin writhing on top of her with his hand in her bra. Even then, his sex life was already a series of overlapping conjugations. His justification for his serial infidelities was that time is a great absolver; the further in the past the deed, the easier it is to live with until it gets to the point where you barely even did it. Knowing that guilt will one day fade, he says, makes it fade all the faster.
He’s always been full of shit.
Later, after Ashley had shaken off the sand and gone home to her parents, Mac didn’t understand why I was so angry; he actually said he was ‘breaking Ashley in’ for me. As though any girl would want me after she’d been with him. It’s a sour memory that makes me wince, and the hairdresser nicks my skin. My eyes are flung open; in the mirror, a red rivulet runs between white crevasses.
‘Ooh, silly boy,’ says the hairdresser. I hold still while she scrapes what’s left of my beard off my face. Christopher Smith is gone and Kit McCall is revealed. Beth will be expecting a bearded man and I hope that if we do come face to face, this will buy me a few seconds to read her cues.
The cut on my cheek bleeds whenever I smile and when I send Laura my apology in the form of a selfie, I show her my good side.
Back on the deck, the sun is setting over Tórshavn. I decide to stay here rather than take my chances in the bars below. The ship is shiny; reflection is everywhere, in glass doors, polished brass and curved chrome. Every time I catch myself in one of these ersatz mirrors I’m in the same position, stroking my chin, a parody of a philosopher, or the professor I never became.
Chapter 30
LAURA
28 May 2000
It was a Friday evening, the first real summer night of the year. On the pavement below, the pubs and cafés set out tables and chairs, as though an afternoon’s sunshine was enough to turn Clapham Common Southside into the Champs-élysées. Pavement smokers took in smog along with their nicotine, but a clean zephyr carried fresh air over the treetops into our stuffy flat. I was on the balcony, trying to give Kit some space; the twins had had a blazing row the previous day when Kit had refused to lend Mac money. Kit was on the futon, moping over his laptop, when the house phone rang. I picked up.
‘It’s all kicked off,’ said Beth by way of hello. ‘I need to see you.’
‘Sure,’ I said, untangling my foot from the mess of wires that pooled around the base of the telephone table; if you weren’t careful, one mistimed tread would pull the plug on the phone, the internet and the TV all at once. ‘I don’t think we’re doing anything at the weekend.’