Low life
Looking different
Jeremy Clarke
Icut my face shaving the other day, quite badly, up near the cheekbone. If I'm not more careful, I'm going to cut my head off one of these days. It looked impressive, the cut. The thin straight horizontal line about an inch long made it look as if I'd been glassed rather than merely complacent with a Gillette Sensor Excel. It gave my sad mundane face an unexpected dash of character. I thought.
I'm sick and tired of my face. If a nick in it could make such a welcome difference, I reasoned, maybe if the barnet went as well my facial appearance would be transformed. So next I went up town and had my hair cut off. skinhead style.
It was Grand National day. Before getting my hair cut. I popped into the bookies and put a termer on The Last Fling. At the barber's, I asked for a 'number three', which is done with electric clippers and leaves the hair about a centimetre long all over. It worked. I looked totally different — sort of ready for anything. I returned to the bookies and shoved another tenner on Blowing Wind plus a fiver on Manx Magic. 'Bit drastic. isn't it?' said the woman behind the counter, referring not to my bet but to my sudden lack of hair.
That afternoon we had a few shants in the pub and ended up round at Geoff s, my next-door neighbour. Geoff is one of several people I know who save themselves time and money by cutting their own hair with electric clippers. Geoff generally does his outside the back door, using his reflection
in his kitchen window as a rough guide. He always has the more brutal 'number one', and wasn't the slightest bit impressed by my 'number three', however different I thought I looked.
'Call that a frigging haircut?' he said.
So when we went back to his place after the pub, while his three grown-up lads wrestled on the kitchen floor in front of us, Geoff gave me a number one with his electric clippers. A 'proper haircut' as he calls it. When he'd done, it was very uneven, so he went over it again, pressing down much harder, and the finished result was actually much shorter than a number one. Instead of hair, I had a sort of five o'clock shadow and I looked different again. I hadn't realised my skull was so small, for one thing. Previously, if I'd seen a head that size and shape on someone, I'd have regarded it as concrete evidence of separate or arrested evolutionary development. And yet here was I with a skull like a tennis ball. Still, there were some interesting white scars on my scalp I hadn't known about that made me look dead hard and interesting.
Also, I'd won some money on the Grand National. Of the three horses I'd backed, two were killed, but one had survived the race and come third. I walked back up to town to collect my winnings. Feeling the coldness of the east wind on my head, I meditated on that poetic verse in the Bible about the Lord tempering the wind against the shorn lamb.
Between my house and the bookmaker's is a tattooist's shop. I had an idea and went in. 'I'd like a tattoo,' I said to the tattooist, who had holes in his earlobes the size of five-pence pieces, 'on my head.' In for a penny, I thought. I knew exactly what I wanted. too. I'd wanted one for years. I wanted. I told him, the brand mark of the Miura torus bravos, the bravest breed of fighting bull in Spain. The brand is in the shape of a capital A, with a small semicircular handle attached to the outside of each of the slanting uprights. Three inches high I wanted it, I said. On the side of my head. In black.
The tattooist drew one in pencil on the back of an old envelope. It would cost me 15 quid and he could fit me in on Monday afternoon. If I was sure I wanted a tattoo on my head though, he said. I'd have to have my head shaved beforehand. He was a tattooist, he said, not a barber. I paid him in advance. At the bookies, the woman behind the counter said, 'My God! What happened to you?'
Geoff surprised me by knowing all about Miuras. He's a car freak, and back in the Sixties the fastest production car on the road was a Lamborghini Miura. He got out an old Observer's Book of Cars and showed me a photo of one. The designer had done the bulls proud. As Geoff lathered up my bonce he said, 'You're going to regret this you know, when you're old and bald.' I told him to please nick my scalp with the razor as much and as hard as he liked.
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