The Gift of Women (5 page)

What should I do if I took up the pen, I asked him. What would he do this time around? Write ad-copy, or be a reporter and write about the Troubles in Ulster and everywhere else? Or would he be like me – run, jump and smash tennis balls and show others how to do the same? In any case, I was married, settled down, wasn't I? With two boys, in a family beyond the complication of any more Wellesley women.

Then, he wrote to tell me he was proud of me. I was so sane it turned the old family ghosts in their graves. The Roundhead Wellesleys, the ones mad enough to come to Ireland in the first place with their good General, Cromwell. They put out propaganda, even then. Proclamations and pamphlets, with decrees and appeals to people, who couldn't read a word of it.

Pen and paper. William is moving exclusively into paper. Did I tell you all about that in my last letter? In case I didn't, the new computers and their printers eat a tree a minute. The future lies in paper, William says. From the length of this you probably agree. How many pages have I disposed of, and have I got any nearer to the nub of the matter, Tina?

I offered to stay again after we came over for Mummy's funeral. I told you that.

But you can't stay here with your children, not in this house, not in this country, not with this problem of ours. That was Daddy's new line now. How glad he was, or so he said, that I had escaped the crazy vanity that the Irish cherish. I should count myself lucky and stay on the other side of the Rockies. So little colour all about, in Ulster. Only drab grey and green – the people on occasion touched up with a bit of blood.

Then, there was something else very dotty that Daddy said about the beauty of our family piety. Stripping oneself before God was a Wellesley tradition, a legitimate puritan streak. But it had been planted among a race of embellishers.

For him the embellisher bit went into Wellesley ads. My anger at him almost choked me.

There's nothing pressing, except my sleep. I can't write any more now. William is reading a report on a report, or something. His glasses are on his forehead and he's looking through the door at me. Will I wave for you?

September the nineteenth. This next part will come recorded on a tape wrapped in the rest of the letter, Tina. I realized I wasn't writing you anymore. I was talking to you, and I couldn't cope with the quotation marks and etceteras if I was to let you know who was saying what and so on.

“In any case, the more philosophical he was about the situation, the more Daddy was distancing himself from Sally and leaving her to her own devices. Same for me, Tina. The longer this letter gets, the farther I feel removed from her, but coping with her at the same time.

“When he died, Daddy had another twenty letters, not mailed. Sally piled them up and read them in the Green Room. What fascinated her, I suppose, must have been that the more he wrote about Mummy, the more he mixed her up with Sally. That was her victory.

“Did I get mentioned, even though they were addressed to me? Out of sight, out of mind. He apologized in the last letter. To me, that is. ‘Forgive me for keeping you away,' he said.

“Daddy always talked two ways at once.

“…She was shuddering and shivering, sitting naked in front of the photograph in the Green Room, as thin as Mummy by the time they broke into the house and Mrs. Moir got back to me on the phone. I called the Helen's Bay barracks. Daddy had been dead for days. Pickled, the police told me when I got there and I talked to them in person. He probably died happy, but my sister! They say they are used to psychotic displays, and very few suicides these days. But my sister, I informed them, had killed herself trying to sit as naked and lovely as my mother in the photograph. Their reply to that? They wished all the killings in Ulster were about something as simple as wanting to take your clothes off.

“But wasn't that what it was all about? I wanted to scream. Mad, repressed expression. But I kept my temper when I said it.

“That struck them none too kindly.

”I took her in the car after that. I knew what I had to do. I drove the road round all those drumlins from Comber to Downpatrick. Cold cu-Cumber, Daddy used to call it when we passed it in the old days, headed for Newcastle and the Slieve Donard Hotel. Remember Miss Arthur's line for drumlins – ‘Basket of eggs topography.'

“Sally still sat as she liked to, with the window down and her hair pouring into her mouth. Her hand kept dragging it off her tongue. Not so she could talk. She hadn't had a thing to say since I pushed her into her clothes.

“She had dresses and jeans and nothing in between. No suits, nothing to do a decent day's work in, or to make the trip. I got her a Chanel suit for a journey of an hour and a half.

“I put her away, Tina.

“The chief psychiatrist's chat about lessons, exercises, relaxations, made it sound like the Insane School for Young Ladies of Quality in Downpatrick.

“Mr. Barton, that was the man's name, he took us round. He was proud of his pastel walls and their ‘therapeutic' potential. But he whisked her off after trying to get her to say something. Like a potted plant the cat had peed in – she must have given him a stinking look or said something under her breath that he heard.

“Four more days went by without a word out of her to me. I stayed in Newcastle and came every morning and afternoon. Then, she did say something. I suppose it was when she was sure I was worried enough to keep coming back.

“‘I can't hear the seagulls,' was what she came out with.

“That hurt me. The sea was near enough. Seven miles.

“‘You're in Downpatrick,' I explained to her. ‘St. Patrick is buried close by, in Saul. We passed it when I drove you down.'

“‘Why didn't you stop?' she asked me. ‘We could have visited him.'

“‘If you'd asked, I would have.'

“As soon as I said that, she began to strip and it sent me into a rage. I grabbed the belt to the jeans she was wearing, pulled it out and held it buckled to her neck. I started tightening it. But she was already smiling at the pain it must have caused her, consulting, somewhere inside herself again. I yelled at her and she went on, peeling off the clothes while I held her by the neck.

“At that point, I was either going to go on and strangle her or let her go on doing what she wanted to.

“I let her go.

“But why do it in Downpatrick? She wasn't in the Green Room – all the walls were pastel perfect. I supposed, in the end, it was a shrine near a shrine she was setting up for people to come and pay homage at. Old St. Pat in Saul had taken over from Mummy on the wall. The two of them, living out their passion for divine revelation.

“Which doesn't reduce my guilt or my problem at all. She could stay there forever, in ‘dementia praecox,' as the shrink of the pastel walls says his colleagues used to call it. But Tina, could I have brought her out to the West Coast?

“What Saints are there for me to tell her about in the Pacific Northwest? Who could give her the sacred admiration she needs. She would be just another dazed blonde, a beached log, but sinking in her madness beside girls who could still bob about, even if every man on the West Coast ran in and out of them like the tide.

“But perhaps I'm cruel and unkind to the girls here. Let me know soon, Tina. Let me know.

“Gerry.”

Maybe it's the damaged leg crooked in our direction, his knee nudging my thigh as he does the back-and-sides that gives him this combat stance. Maybe 'cause he's short he has to thrust his scissors up, or if down – like, it's from his tippy-toes, and that seems to turn those scissors into scimitars and Afran into an assassin, not a bona fide barber. Or it's his thunderhead of hair, sharp jaw, eyes daring every male on the street to come in for the fricassee of his scissors that keeps them all from finding out.

“He's incredible,” I say to his partner. Other customers, sitting and waiting for the partner, might take what I say as a promo for the impaired. But my hair
is
thicker. What I call my UFO – the shiny, balding disc of white skin that floats on top of my head, the tonsure I bear, like some sorry monk's – shrinks under the blades.

“If you like him, it happen,” says his Libyan partner and the Kurd grins. But do any of those going bald, who need his cut and follicular fill-up, see it? They stick their noses in their tabloid, like it has men's perfume in the print.

And so, for many moons, like wee boys my neighbour, Billy, and fellow agers squirm in their chairs and their unease always undoes what Afran, the Kurd, conjures. Then, they don't like how he retreats to his cubby hole at the back of the barber shop, pulls a curtain across and mumbles in what must be Kurdish, or he goes on in his stammering and staggering English. There is a computer, a monitor, an office chair in there, and a Persian mat (it's not big enough to be a carpet) on the floor. Enough to take his knees, if he prays on it. Often as not, when he pulls back the curtain to come out, he has left a plastic container rimmed with the remains of his lunch on top of the monitor. Like a silly upside-down hat with a creamy fringe at the bottom.

At the end of the day, he takes off his white barber's jacket and puts on a padded black bomber to go home. On his way to the bus stop, he pulls open the flap to the night safe at the Royal Bank. Holding the flap, his head bobs a few times as if he communes with the depository or addresses doubts about dropping the day's take into its chute. Then, he crosses the road and boards the 99 Express across town. No, he doesn't kneel and whizz home on his tiny prayer mat, but the 99 Express slices through the city, west to east.

Since I pay him this much attention, and because I let him cut my hair, other customers keep asking me what's he up to behind the curtain. As if letting him cut my hair has made me intimate with every mumble that exits his mouth in his little retreat. But being Moslem, would his little place be called a retreat, and having no idea what it means, my neighbour, Billy Barlow, declares it to be a
haj
, a hell hole.

“He's calling him again,” Billy tells me, when Afran's voice comes through the curtain, clear as sanded glass his voice comes in, “Yes, yes, stop loss, twelff dollars and sixty sens!”

Billy elbows me. “Twelve bucks and sixty cents…” Billy's a Shop teacher and has chisels for elbows. “Twelve bucks and sixty cents – what for?”

I elbow Billy Barlow back.

“Extra payment. To stop customers losing their hair after he cuts it?”

Billy gives a guffaw, followed by a gurgle as he swallows his gob of mockery. “Are you serious?”

In the hot, late-summer afternoon, only three of us are in the shop. Billy and me, waiting, and the one up for the Libyan, who squirms as he listens to us. I get up and go to the curtain to ask Afran how long he will be, and there's Afran, hunched forward in his chair, prayerfully, or like he's passing a kidney stone, nodding and talking to his cell phone.

“Please, I talk business to my broker.”

The curtain whips back into place.

“Kurds, very special,” says the Libyan to the back of his customer's head. “Kurds and business, like chicken and egg, always hatch this or that. But Afran special, he have
djinn
.”

“Gin sling, cotton gin?” Billy badgers.

The Libyan partner eyeballs Billy. “His
djinn
! You like him, more hair. You not, bit maybe fall out.” Second eyeball job on neighbour Billy. “Which you like grow, money or you' hair?” (What's the Libyan implying, Afran offers a choice?) Then, he turns from Billy and myself to watch the soccer on the TV, set high on a bracket in the window corner, above the window box, where cacti lean west to the setting sun.

Can Afran apply his
djinn
to the stock market, where human emotions and the fundamentals bash each other up and down, like Punch and Judy? On the same formula, ‘You like it, it grow,' Afran's key to needing less custom. As if reading my mind, the Libyan comes back to Afran. “North of the Kirkuk, Afran learn make things grow of nothing. Some dirt, some water, like Allah make man of nothing.”

“Aha,” says I, “he's a farmer who became a barber.”

The client in the chair gives the Libyan a hard look, wanting him back at work on his short back and sides.

I'd love to give him a kick in the back and sides for shutting off the info on Afran.

As it is, I'm left to mull over those growths that aren't cancer and watch Billy plant his feet on the metal footrest, like Butch Cassidy mounting his horse. I have had my own encounters with inexplicable growth. Like Billy, I planted my feet down once, but on the floor, wrestling with a green, wool cardigan my mother knit me. I yelled at its fake, Aran-island ribs for it to quit growing on me. Crazily, it grew, like the sheep was still alive in the wool. When it reached my knees, my mother cut it back up to my hips. Again and again, till I was too spooked to wear her gift that kept growing. I took it on a hike and threw it in a field. I screamed at it to go graze till its buttons turned back to cloven hooves. But was it me who brought the wool to life in the ugly cardigan? No way. The thing in the tips of my ma's knitting needles, same thing as in Afran's scissors, did the trick. Though Afran doesn't swamp and smother me with his prodigious gift, like my mother.

“Does he go back?” I ask the Libyan, who works on Billy Barlow's hair, top of the head, like it's inches higher than it is. I haven't been back in two years to see my mother in Ireland and I ask the Libyan out of guilt.

“He-can-not-go-back,” the Libyan says, each syllable timed to a snip at Billy Barlow's hair. Billy's eyes roll, but mine narrow.

“Afran No. 1 Baghdad barber. You see Saddam hair, thick black bear hair. Afran, Saddam barber.”

“What?” Billy almost stabs his face on the Libyan's scissors. “And you were Muammar Gaddafi's!”