Short Story — Shaving heads

Sean French
Aug 28, 2017 · 15 min read

Steam shot up sharp from a big black kettle sitting on the stove in the centre of the small shack. The wall of the shack facing the sea was made from woven beech, it let blue twilight dapple across the heads of the three young men sitting quietly in the centre of the building. They had woven this house out of shit found lying around alleyways of the town and branches from the woods. Over the years, pieces had been added as they had been found; a bicycle wheel was embedded in the north wall while 6 stacked crates formed part of another — all interwoven in the mesh of branches they had gathered. They sat around the kettle waiting for it to boil and not making eye contact with one another. The day had been spent loudly and physically; joking and breaking things and running but as the sun quietened in the sky they became softer and darker with each other until now in the twilight they sat each in their own worlds. A nervousness was in the air now and it was unfamiliar to the three of them, but made sense on a night like tonight. The three lads sat expectantly with their tea cups in their hands and Michael, slightly older than the rest of them, reached out and poured the tea. The splashes were clear and crisp as they stared at the moving liquid, the only stimulation in the still room. Thomas’s cup shook ever so slightly in his constantly restless hands and quiet murmurations moved through his tea. Abraham sat on his stool and watched the contrasting movements of the other two. He watched Michael’s big burnt farmer hands leading the pot of tea and craning just above the other lads’ heads while Thomas touched his knees together quietly. He thought that he should be finding it strange to be leaving these two forever tomorrow and found it hard to imagine, he had been looking at them his whole life and so found it hard to look at them again now and not feel the same as he had every other time — picturing living outside of their company was near impossible when they were so deeply interwoven in to his everyday experience. They were in that fundamental layer of experience itself, in the same way that he perceived colour and light — he perceived Thomas and Michael. Not that that was to say he liked the two of them, again, to like or to dislike didn’t really apply, they were to him on a level deeper in which it didn’t occur to question — he never questioned whether he liked or disliked his constant breathing or his need to eat and drink, they are just parts of existing; axioms from which more transitory things can be added or removed to improve or decrease the quality of life.

The three of them sat there in the unfamiliar silence until eventually Michael spoke.

“So Abraham, when do you head off?”

“Ferry’s in the morning, 6 o clock. So was thinking I should probably get an early night tonight”

“It’s actually mad that you’re going away mate.”

“Yeah, yeah. I know what you mean”. Thomas watched the other two with his big owl eyes flitting back and forth.

“I don’t really know what to say. Y’ know, I’ve never done this before — saying goodbye I mean… obviously” said Abraham.

“I can’t really think of anyone who’s left before” said Thomas over the rim of his tea. None of them had done it before, most people in the town didn’t leave. Most settled down in the quiet peaceful routine either working in one of the little businesses in the centre or instead turning to farming on the outskirts. The three of them were quiet again.

“Yeah you’re right there” replied Michael. “Well, actually my auntie left before to go to London, I think it was. There was no work back then really, not that there is now, but I think she got a job somewhere in London cleaning offices.” He took a sip from his tea, staring at the stove. “Don’t know why she didn’t just do it here.”

“Yeah you can clean anywhere, can’t you? Don’t know why she’d drop everything here and fuck off to London” said Thomas. Neither of them looked at Abraham for a moment. “Suppose it’s different for you though Abe I’m not trying to say you should stay, I’d like you to, don’t get me wrong, but yeah, you’d be mad to not take the opportunity”. The room died down again. Abraham had been blankly watching a tiny ladybird climbing up the boot of Michael’s shoe and took a moment to respond.

“Yeah I get you Thomas” he said quietly. Thomas was talking about Abraham’s story which had been accepted into a book of short stories by a publisher in London. They had reviewed the rest of his stories and now were offering him a deal to publish a novel. They said that it was necessary he relocate to London where he would have easy contact with them and the marketing team and other practical groups like that. “Yeah it’ll be great. I’d be stupid not to, wouldn’t I?” he said. He looked at the other two hesitantly.

“Yeah obviously, you can’t stay” Michael said, looking directly at Abraham for the first time in a while. The words “you can’t stay” had an unexpected weight to them and Abraham felt like there was a slug slowly moving in his stomach. It would be symbolic suicide to stay, he would wither away working in the family’s shop and lose interest in writing.

He thought then of an old man who lived outside the village who he saw skimming stones on the beach every now and again, and he thought of himself as that man sitting there skimming stones refusing to think about anything that wasn’t purely practical. One of those old stoic partially-unfulfilled men sitting quietly and numbly while the days pass until death. He was excited to go. That’s what he would become if he didn’t leave — maybe.

The light was growing darker and darker around the little shack.
“So this is the end of this place too then” said Thomas looking around at the mosaic walls. “It was probably going to collapse some time soon anyway”.

“I don’t know about that” said Abraham. He stood up and kicked a shopping trolley at the base of the east wall, it shook a little and some dried mud came undone but the wall still stood strong. Abraham felt a sudden unexplainable surge of frustration and kicked it again but still the decade-old mosaic hut sat unmoveable. A monolith. He wanted it to fall down because somehow it would make things easier. Again, the room fell dead quiet and all the three young men could think to do was listen to the crashing waves outside and the beginnings of rain on the roof.

Abraham sat and pictured the rain trickling down smooth rocks surrounded by the blue twilight. The sort of light endowed with extra energy than when the sun is fully exposed, the fact it is on the verge of disappearing made him picture it as squeezed light. About to disappear and so gasping for life. Like water surging through a cave morphing and squeezing and exploding as it passes through the tighter gap. Then he thought about what it would be like to capsize in a boat and then eventually emerge. He would be gasping and screaming for air like a newborn baby thrashing in amniotic fluid. Then he thought about rain falling on the smooth rocks again and then he finally rested on the image of water pouring over a smooth head, his head — like a stone smoothed by waves.

Suddenly, an idea occurred to him.

“Lads, could you shave my head before I go.”

“Shave your head?” asked Thomas.

“Yeah, shave my head. Properly bald.”

“What? Like a skinhead?”
“Yeah, not like a nazi or whatever. I just want it shaved — I don’t know.”

The two of them stared at him. Thomas with mildly bored confusion, and Michael with curiosity.

“Yeah, sure we can Abe” finally Michael said.

“Thankyou” said Abraham quietly.

There was a pause, and then Michael piped up.

“Abe let’s go out one last time before you go”.

“I’ve got to get some sleep before I catch the boat”. Abraham felt the slug twist in his stomach, felt its silky slime slide through and fill his intestines. He looked out through the gaps in the sea wall at the waves curling on themselves over and over again and felt calmed by the patterned forces. But then he thought of the boat moving across those waves again and the slug twisted once more. “I need to sleep”.

“One last time. There’ll be people down in Lavery’s” said Michael.

“One last time” said Thomas.

Abraham didn’t say anything but Thomas grabbed him and yanked him out of the hut. The three of them pulled up their jackets.

They walked out of their shack, down a small trail to the beach and across toward the town.

As the night got darker, the lights of the town grew brighter and they walked slowly along the smooth curve of the beach.

The town was barren and empty at night except for Lavery’s, the small pub in the centre of the town by the beach. Here a few villagers were always there but tonight was a Saturday so there were a few more than usual out and about. Abraham watched Thomas and Michael quicken their pace as they saw the pub like moths toward a lightbulb. He saw their silhouettes impress themselves upon the slowly shifting lights from the bar. Time felt slower as he took in the hazy black shapes moving in the muffled red light and the damp sounds of conversation nearly, but not quite, drowning out the incessant sounds of the sea behind him. He thought again, watching their shadows, about how many times he had seen this scene and how he still couldn’t picture them outside of his perception of the world. Their black shapes shifted and moved in the red light as if part of a two dimensional screen, they were not pieces that could be added or removed but parts of the light itself forming a collage of senses in front of him. It was hard to picture what would happen if the collage was tugged away.

The pub always looked better from the outside than the inside. It looked like there were more people there than there actually were because Sheila, the owner, let people smoke inside as long as they stood beside the window. So from the outside, the place looked packed, but when you went in you saw the core was hollow. There were three windows with smokers pressed up against them, sucking and puffing into the gap where they swung partially open. In the first, there were two good looking girls — Patsie and Orla — who Abraham went to school with but thought he would have nothing to say to them even if he went up to them and tried shooting the shit, they would probably ask about him going away anyway and he would tell them that he was excited it was a big break and all of that — give the whole shpeel. He didn’t have a whole lot to say to anyone really. He looked at them leaning against the steamed up glass and looked at their pale hands and the two of them lost in conversation and felt the slug twist again but not in a painful way, it felt more like he felt looking at good looking women when he was younger and having sexual feelings was new and more exciting. He thought about it some more and, in a way, he was looking at them in a new way again, this was the first time he had looked at them knowing he wouldn’t see them again. Not that they were that important to him, but they meant something to him on some level.

Inside the room there was spinning and people dancing like whirling dervishes — he felt a little sick to look at it all. The red light hummed in the room making faces more abstract like watercolours. There was music playing. A soft hum too but Abraham was finding it harder and harder to concentrate on the specifics. He felt dizzy and so made his way over to the bar and sat down. He felt himself drifting out of space and time. Becoming unstuck. He caught his breath again and focused on his hands for a bit. This wasn’t the first time he’d felt like this — becoming more liminal by the second. Sometimes when he was younger he had thought about leaving the town and he had got that vague longing feeling in his stomach. But now it was much a much more unsettling feeling, and it wasn’t due to his own doing anymore but some greater force sweeping him up and carrying him out across the sea to a new life.

Suddenly, a face lurched out of the ink blot shapes in front of him and it took a second for him to recognise who it was.

“Olivia, how are ya?” he said. Olivia was nearly as tall as him. She looked directly into his eyes when she was speaking, which he liked. They had known each other since they were children and had grown parallel to each other and then as they got older had started to bend away from each other.

“Yeah, I’m good, I’m good. How are you?” She elongated the ‘you’. “What’s all this I hear about you leaving?” She hit him on the arm. She held eye contact with him waiting for an answer.

“Yeah, yeah. It’s true, I am leaving” he shouted over the music. He tried to think of something more to say but that was the gist of it so he took a sip from his drink. She still looked expectantly at him. The lights moved around her face and the cream of her face changed red, green, blue in the melting lights from the dancefloor. The sound of the room filled his ears like some kind of transparent syrup and he felt his body become heavier with the bass touching its way inside his bones. “I’m excited, moving on to bigger and better things. I’ll miss Lavery’s though.” He laughed nervously. It was an obvious joke to take the piss out of Lavery’s for being scummy or whatever and they were both aware of this.

“I don’t know, I’m sort of jealous of you getting to go off to tell the truth” she said. He felt suddenly grateful to her for saying this but wasn’t entirely sure why.

“It’ll be good.” They both paused again and sipped from their drinks, Abraham’s eyes nervously flitted around the room. “Do you wanna dance?” he said suddenly and leaned up away from the bar, she smiled at him “come on, it’ll be a laugh, come on” he said. He didn’t want to talk to anybody right now.

Normally words were a way of neatly categorising the stream of consciousness and shifting bodily or mental sensations of life — and it felt like a success when he managed to get it down in words. But he had no interest in getting it down in words now as something was lost through that whole neat and tidy process of categorisation. Life could be filed and assorted into some kind of coherent narrative which you tell yourself everyday — but that wasn’t life itself. Actual life was beyond words, pre-words, pre-thought — it was the warm sensations or sharp cold sensations that pulse through the body and the mind but can’t be expressed in words. This is what he should be looking for.

“Yeah Abe let’s go”. Olivia stood up smiling. She led him onto the dancefloor, Abe was smiling and stopped thinking again. Even though him and Olivia had nothing to say to each other, even though he had nothing to say to anybody here, maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe he was just looking at it all wrong and he didn’t need to leave at all because he could be perfectly content dancing like this and not thinking at all. Going to the world of pre-thought.

But he knew that wasn’t true, deep down anyway, and he thought again about the old man who sat by the sea skimming stones over and over again until the days passed away into nothing. Sometimes he thought of the old man as care-free, like a little Buddha sitting in a bright yellow raincoat under grey clouds skimming stones to his heart’s content, and sometimes he thought of him as just some bored old man who had been doing the same boring fucking thing for the last twenty years.

As the two of them danced around in the red light with the sound filling their heads like sand Abraham quietly pictured the old man.

By 2am the place had emptied. Olivia had left an hour or so before to get home before work the next day. So the three lads walked back up the beach until the village lights died out and prepared for their final goodbyes. The night was tar black now and the wind was a blue icy cold. The alcohol numbed them too and they felt encased by their own bodies like a shell against the outside elements. The town sounds had died down and it was just the three of them left alone with the wind circling them. The waves were deafening and the wind had picked up into a hostile gale. They kicked a shell to each other quietly along the sand and looked at their own feet.

“Will you shave my head now?” shouted Abraham over the wind

“What?” shouted Thomas.

“Will you shave my head now?” he shouted again.

“Ah, right, yeah, of course mate” yelled Thomas.

Abraham produced a long shining blade which caught the shine of the moonlight. It stuck out like a prong from his clenched hand pointing up and out toward the stars. “Each of yous have a go, will you?” Thomas and Michael stayed silent and watched the sparkle of the steel move up and down to the hilt and back. The knife and the moon were the only sources of light along the stretch of sand and water blackened to pitch by the night.

“Sure, mate” said Michael. He reached out his big farmer knuckles and clasped the knife. The sound of the waves swirled around them again. Abraham bowed his head and fell down to his knees in the wet sand. He couldn’t see the sand in the dark but he felt it move and stick around his shins like the earth was about to swallow him but paused to hold him between its lips. Michael delicately touched Abe’s head with his left hand, touching the fingertips gently against the skull. He moved the blade across Abe’s head ever so tentatively and the first scraps of hair fell past Abe’s cheeks and into his open palm. Thomas watched on, his milky eyes wide and alert. He slid the knife over a second time and the first patch of hairless crown became pale and exposed like bone. Abe and Michael caught each other’s eyes and they wordlessly carried on. Thomas joined and they took turns scraping at his head. They scraped and scraped, growing more confident and frantic with longer and longer strokes. Before they knew it, nothing was left but the pale sphere glistening in the moonlight. Abe’s eyes looked bigger and rounder than before. He looked up at the other two like a new born baby.

Dropping down to his level onto their honkers the three of them, after a pause, fell back on to their arses into the wet muck around them. They silently exhaled and felt the icy wind burn their noses and cheeks. The wind sung like a wild animal as it shot along the midnight beach. There was a new electric energy amongst the three lads.

Suddenly, Abraham sprung up, and howled into the sky. A wolf-like howl. Unrestrained like a child. Without a word to the others, he screamed and howled and yelped as he sprinted away toward the sea. The other two watched the frolicking shadow tearing away into the night toward the thunderous sound of the crashing waves. Abraham tore at his clothes, first letting the wind tear off his jacket, then his shirt, then whipping his belt away and flipping his trousers into the air, he kicked his boots off in each direction either side of him and then whipped his underwear off into the night. He became faster and faster as he was less encumbered by the restraints of his clothes. The two behind him glanced at each other then sprung up and chased after him, running with him but twenty metres behind.

Abraham reached the lapping edge of the ocean splashed into the water, rose up and dived under the curling approaching waves. The other two sprinted right up until the water’s edge and watched as the shimmering pale pink shape of Abraham’s body slipped and ducked through the waves like a pink dolphin playing in the moonlight. Abraham swam further and further out, still howling, sometimes turning over and doing the backstroke, sometimes diving deep under into the murky black. He felt the waves crash over his head. He screamed with delight as the water broke over his head again. He kept himself in motion so he wouldn’t sink. He swam out and out until all Thomas and Michael could see was a little pink dot bobbing out in the vast ocean. He could see the other two far off in the distance and felt them drifting away further and further, but it was ok, and he felt relieved, and he laughed and with another hoot swam back toward the shore like a pink dolphin hurtling through the foam.

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