Lying in the hairdressers. The back of my neck is being ground into the china rim of a basin, arched and tense.
“Is that temperature okay for you?”
It’s unbearably hot. I can feel my scalp blistering and swelling. Is she emptying a kettle on my head?
“Yeah, that’s fine thanks.”
It’s a semi-chic salon: black tiles and marble surfaces, extra-large mirrors, bowls of wrapped humbugs, piles of male grooming mags.
“Is that pressure okay?”
Do it harder. Harder. Go on,
harder
.
“Yeah, that’s fine thanks.”
I can almost feel the sheen of the trainee’s peroxide hair as she lurches over me, giving my head a rub and a tug. Flecks of shampoo make darts for my eyes and slipstreams do mischievous runners down my forehead.
“Got the afternoon off work then?”
“Nah, I’m a student.”
“Oh right, cool.”
She starts kneading my head like she’s fashioning a man out of plasticine.
“What do you study?”
“English?”
“Oh right, cool.”
We are reaching nirvana on the head rub. I close my eyes and strain after relaxation.
“Where do you go to uni?”
“Oxford?” I say, apologetically.
“Oh wow. Are you like well clever then?”
“I don’t know about that,” I say modestly.
“How did you get into Oxford then?”
“Well, I guess I was clever enough.”
“No need to be arrogant about it.” She continues to rummage through my mop. I wonder if she can tell from that angle that I’m blushing. “So what do you want to do with that?”
“With what?” I ask.
“An English degree.”
“Oh, I see. No idea really.”
“Typical.”
“
The suburbs are dreaming
,” sings the stereo. “Typical,” echoes the babe. He’s next to me with one of those shower-cap contraptions on his massive head, waiting for some color to set, flicking through a magazine larger than his body. “Hey gal,” he says to my head-fiddler, “ask him about his thesis.”
“What did you do your thesis on?” she says obediently.
“You wouldn’t be interested.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s so boring.”
“Why did you do it then?”
“Okay. Well, I uh, oh you know, I looked at doubles in Shakespeare through the, uh, lens of dialecticism,” I stutter in embarrassment.
“Oh, okay.”
“Yeah, see, it’s pretty dull stuff … I guess.”
“So are we talking like the Master/Slave dialectic from
The Phenomenology of Spirit
?” she says as she squeezes some conditioner into her palm and lathers it up.
“Urrr, yeah, kind of,” I say, rather stunned. “Exactly, really.”
She thinks about this for a second while she begins to rub the conditioner into my hair. “That’s a bit anachronistic, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
“Applying nineteenth-century philosophy to the early modern period?”
“Told you,” says the babe. “I hated that thesis … he lost so much sleep over it; it really tired me out. I’m the one who has to bear the brunt of all the stress and hard work, you see. I am anti theses, that’s for sure.”
I look up and my eyes meet the babe’s in the mirror. We share a reflection and I watch in astonishment as large, bulbous bags begin developing beneath his eyes. His hair thins and recedes slightly, like something in a time-lapse movie. I urgently need to go for a slash … I feel like I’m gonna split if I don’t get out of here soon.
“Here, how does the color look, fella?
I’ve had bare blonde put in it
innit.”
says the babe,
his speech turning colloquial,
the accent all chavved up.
“Gonna look proper phat.”
“Huh?”
“Gosh, Eliot, don’t irk me with your
ghastly false ignorance, okay?”
he says,
posh as a swan.
“It proper fucks me off. This one
finks everyfink’s so
polarized. He can be a
frightful old bore.”
“Which plays did you look at?” asks the trainee.
“Sorry?” I mumble, not knowing where to look or what to think.
“Which plays did you write on … for your Shakespeare thesis?”
“Oh.
Henry IV
mainly.”
“One or two?”
“One.”
“Hotspur as Hal’s double?”
“Yeah.”
“Makes sense. Hotspur being the dutiful son that Hal should be … And then I guess you have Falstaff representing the opposite possibility available to him. Two poles of being: the ambitious and the waster; the worldly and the simplistic; the aristocrat and the lowly fool.”
“Well yeah.”
“Things aren’t that transparent though,
are they, Eliot?”
says the babe.
“It
just ain’t as fucking easy-peasy-
lemon-squeazy as you’re tryina tell
yourself. It ain’t so black and
white, boss.”
“What are you
talking about?”
I ask.
“Pardon the equivocality
for a second—”
“Stop punning!”
I scream.
“It’s
linguistic onanism!”
“—but ain’t you being a bit
of a wanker?”
Do you ever feel like your life is in a constant state of rehearsal? Like you’re always wondering when the clinch is going to come? I feel like an eternal sub. “Late?” exclaims a customer to my left. “What do you mean,
late
?”
“I’m sorry,” says the stylist hovering above him—the stylist who has broken the rules. “We should have washed that off five minutes ago. The timer didn’t sound, I’m afraid. I apologize … it’s entirely my fault.”
“I do believe that’s your alarum,
Eliot.
Wake the fuck up.”
It’s a most twenty-first-century scene, here in the King’s Arms, here in our twenty-first-century scene.
The start of a century, it’s a nothing phase; those first two decades a lacuna in the hundred-year sweep. It’s a nominal dilemma born of numerical obstinacy: the ’40s are the forties and the ’80s the eighties, sure, of course, but this here decade is nothing but the slops of numerous misfits. Some settle for the noughties, smacking as it does of nihilism and reprobates. But that’s rather dismissive, is it not? The next decade doesn’t get much better: the teens? Sounds like some crappy American high-school flick. And what about 2011 and 2012, those big uncooperators? Shall we reformulate and go for a duodecade and octennial followed by eight decades? Shoot me for being pedantic, but I have had a few pints.
What we are facing here is a problem of—
“
Would
,” says Jack, watching a tall brunette walk past with her friends. She notices his attention and looks at the ground, smiling. All the girls spin to grab a peek, but I continue doing what I’m doing, drink in hand, dreaming. My bladder is starting to fidget.
“You’d do anything?” says Abi, always resistant to the notion of another girl being considered attractive.
“Yeah, but he’s mad for it,” Scott says, harping on Jack’s Mancunian roots.
“Lad!” remarks Jack, qualifying himself. Ella doesn’t appear to be enjoying the tone of the conversation, picking a crusty old coaster to pieces. Scott, greatly excited, is fiddling about in his trouser pockets. He’s playing with his touchy-feelies: softened washing labels cut from jumpers which he rubs in moments of nervous energy—is this kid private school or what?
“You fiddling with your touchy-feelies, Scott?” I ask.
“No,” he says, hastily placing both hands on top of the table and blushing profusely.
“Bless him?” says Abi. I flinch as my bladder ups the ante.
As I was saying, what we are facing here is a problem of conceptualization. We just don’t know where to place ourselves, and neither will history. The Roaring Twenties and the Swinging Sixties we ain’t. Can’t be. We resist totalizing models and interpretations; we don’t provide the chronological shorthand. We’re a loose bunch: a confused series of tenuously associated, random events. How will we be referred to? How will they homogenize us? Or will we be overlooked as an untimely mass of singularities? We have no foreseeable narrative, untaggable as we are. Ours is a lost period, shopping around for identity, spiraling off in referential chaos.
“Back in a sec,” I say, rising from the table. Need the toilet—time to break the seal—will be pissing like a racehorse from now on—the three rooms leading there are rammed—playing dodgems on a full bladder—reached capacity—at least five people give me the glare as I buoyantly pass—collisions and spillages—lube me up—fetid smell—slide me through—suspiciously wet door handle: the Gents.
What we do have, down here in the fledgling twenty-first century, is performance. Our entire tangible lives are performance; we are consummate professionals. The performance of self is nothing new of course; but it’s never been so rampant, so vital, so fundamental.
“Where’s Eliot?” Sanjay will be saying at our table, just returned from the bar.
“Toilet,” someone will reply (“Toilet?” if that someone is Abi), and Sanjay will say “typical” because it’s typical for me to be in the toilet.
Performance: rampant, vital, fundamental. Our lot follow celebrities, red circles flashing round their defects—their unforgivable cellulite and unthinkable lack of abs—and adjust ourselves accordingly. We turn on MTV, where the M stands for Materialism, and make our demands, warp our expectations, perform performance. Even our language is performed: the twenty-first-century phrasebook all cliché and slang, empty razzmatazz and Neanderthal droning.
Undo fly—keep head up—stare straight ahead—do not look down—do not eye the steaming stainless steel—dripping bubbling reflection—I am not inspecting your tackle—I repeat, I am not inspecting your—I am strictly focused on the job in hand—ten seconds of dry delay—seriously, I am not looking at … and we’re away.
Performance is foremost a qualitative notion, here in the twenty-first century. It has a competitive edge. For instance, one of the girls I knocked into on the way to the toilet was a strong 7 and her friend a close 6 (10 being absolutely hypothetical, of course); the cocky barman, with his irresistibly punchable five-year-old face, is a Grade A bell-end. Moreover, the condom machine in the toilet boasts that it can make me “last longer” and “raise my sexual game,” just as the junk mail on my BlackBerry promises “prosperous
lovemaking” and offers to “boost” my “manhood” for only a few dollars a month. He that farthest cometh behind, fainting follows, in this, our most twenty-first of centuries.
Shiver and repackage—quick check of the mirror—rower type next to me delicately tweaking each strand of hair—someone vomming in the cubicle—another, the next along, having his beeriod—rower type now surreptitiously testing his guns—anonymous character still chucking up. Ready to reload, I set off for the bar.
A blip in time then, this, the awkward, tentative first decade. Sure, we remember the ’90s well enough to associate with the twentieth century still, but why would we want to do that? Let’s run away from that. We’re the veterans of the twentieth and the rookies of the twenty-first; old and young, corrupt and innocent, all at once. Innocence didn’t last long, mind. It only took a year, one worldwide NY day, for the last century’s hangover to rekindle into more drunken abuse. Hair of the dog: reckless advice. And so now we’ll spend the entirety of this century—our one stab at a clean slate—running away, Atlassing burden on our backs. But as we well know, there’s no such thing as a clean slate: dates and numbers don’t change a thing, don’t help us forget or remedy. They couldn’t even bring the Internet crashing to its knees like they threatened to.
7—2—1—8. I enter my PIN at the bar. A line of Jägerbombs for all: my treat. The shots plunge into the long trail of energy drinks—those festering pits of liquid marzipan—a chain of splashing dominoes. We’re going nuclear.
Another toilet. Not a toilet in a pub. A toilet in a club.
A toilet in a club, three years ago, on my very first night at Oxford.
“Freshen up.”
It was Freshers Week, and I was in a club called Filth. I was a fresher in a toilet in a club called Filth. Not a toilet in a pub, but a toilet in a club, a club called Filth … and I was a fresher.
“You gots to freshen up. Freshen up for the pussy.”
These words were being said—shouted, chanted, sung, rapped—by a Nigerian toilet attendant (he attends a toilet in a club called Filth, not a toilet in a pub or anywhere else, but a toilet in a club, and that club is called Filth). They are standardized lines, to be heard verbatim in every two-bit nightclub across the country (which begs the question: is there a training manual for this gig? In fact, these crude one-liners make me nostalgic, reminding me of those formative, underage nights out in Wellingborough, sneaking past unwitting bouncers with our elaborate facial-hair ruses and comically deepened voices. “Nostalgia,” from the Greek
nostos
, meaning a return home, like the return of Odysseus and the other Greek heroes of the Trojan War … and like me tomorrow when my parents collect me and take me back …), but on this particular occasion they were being said—shouted, chanted, sung, rapped—in a very particular club, and that club was called Filth.
“No spray, no lay.”
He loitered at the sinks with his array of cheap designer scents, rolls of tissue, a bowl of chewing gum and lollipops, and a saucer for tips.
“No splash, no gash.”
(If only I was making this stuff up! But this is no jock hysteria, no vulgar lashings of lad loquacity. This is about as George-Eliot-George-Gissing-naturalistic, Capote-Wolfe-Hunter-new-journalistic as it gets up in here … up here in
my fuddled muddled head, where it’s nothing but a huddle of puddles of beer and shot memory.)
He wanted to wash our hands for us. I and my fellow cock artists stood staring ahead at the wall while he shouted his idle threats. It’s a piss-take of a sales pitch.
“No splash, no gash, my friend.”
The words were so unfortunate, so tragic, poking their elbows and digging their fists as they struggled from his barely anglicized throat.
“No tissue, no issue.”
He was suggesting that if I didn’t use his tissues to dry my hands (at a price, of course) I would be free from sexual escapade; sexually unfortuitous; coitally inauspicious. We could go one step further, noting the polysemy of “issue,” and argue that he was threatening me with infertility … which is a bit harsh, mate … I just wanted to take a leak. But he didn’t mean this. He meant no splash, no gash.