Miraculously, I manage to get up in time for work despite my interrupted night’s sleep. I’m far from fresh, though, so when I open the door to leave and spot Doreen with her back to me, watering one of the plants in the hallway, my first temptation is to close it again and wait until the coast is clear.
Glancing at my watch, I see there’s no time to do that. Dammit. Why am I always running into her? Hasn’t she got anything better to do than hang out in the communal areas of the building, looking for people to bother? And if she calls me Liam again this morning, I might actually lose it with her.
I decide to race past her at top speed, in the hope she barely notices me. Not that it works.
‘Morning, Liam,’ she chirps. ‘Going anywhere interesting?’
‘Work,’ I reply without stopping, growling internally.
‘On a Saturday?’ she replies, like she’s never seen me do this before. ‘You poor thing. My Bob worked his socks off Monday to Friday, I’ll tell you. But he never once had to work at the weekend. That was his relaxing time. It’s a different world now, I know, but not a better one. No wonder everybody’s so stressed.’
I’m already at the bottom of the stairs by the time she’s stopped talking. I almost walk out of the door without saying anything in response, but instead I call: ‘That’s life. Bye now.’
‘Goodbye, Liam,’ she replies. ‘Have a good one.’
A couple of minutes into my walk to work, I spot a young woman in a bright pink hooded coat letting her pet poodle crap on the pavement without bagging it up, despite being right next to a bin. It makes me see red.
‘Hey,’ I bark at the twenty-something. ‘Aren’t you going to pick that up?’
She has dark, greasy hair scraped back in a high ponytail and is sucking on one of those chunky vape devices. She looks me up and down, pouting, before puffing out a huge cloud of vapour. ‘No, I don’t have any bags.’
‘Why not?’ I ask her. ‘What kind of dog owner are you? That’s bloody disgusting and a health hazard.’
She shrugs, vaping some more, a bored look on her face. Then she walks on regardless, black poodle at her side.
‘People like you shouldn’t be allowed to have pets,’ I call after her. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You’re a disgrace. If I see this happening again, I’ll take a photo and report you to the council.’
‘Whatever,’ she replies, unfazed, not even looking back. Her attitude makes me want to scream; I grit my teeth and continue on my way.
Being a Saturday, the barbershop is pretty busy. I’m not talking busy like one of those trendy establishments geared towards the cool kids: the kind where your achingly hip barber, probably wearing a waistcoat, spends as much time eyeing their own reflection in the mirror as making your hair look nice. But there’s a constant stream of paying clients, which is good enough for me, and this helps the day pass quickly.
By four o’clock that afternoon, though, I’m starting to flag. My limbs feel heavy and I’m lethargic. I fear I might be coming down with something, although it could simply be my lack of sleep catching up with me.
I keep going for another couple of hours. But when I finish giving a twitchy teacher a number one buzz cut just before six o’clock and no one else is left waiting, I decide to call it a day.
As I’m cleaning up, having locked the door and changed the sign from OPEN to CLOSED, I hear someone knocking.
Not again. My mind jumps back to the last time this happened, on the night of the storm. I turn around – about to bark something arsey at whoever’s there – only to have the wind knocked out of me, dumbstruck by the person I see. I blink a couple of times in case my eyes are deceiving me and I’m hallucinating.
‘Hello there,’ a muffled voice says through the glass of the door. ‘I’m sorry to bother you while you’re shutting up. I don’t know if you recognise me, but … well, I’m here to offer you an apology.’
‘Right,’ I say, fumbling through my trouser pockets for the keys. ‘You’d better come in.’
I certainly do recognise the visitor I let inside and offer a seat. How could I forget her after she spoke at the funeral yesterday and then shrieked at me to leave the reception soon afterwards?
I can honestly say that Iris’s aunt was pretty much the last person I expected to see at the door when I turned around. And yet here she is, large as life, a visitor in my barbershop, twirling one of her red curls with her right forefinger and fidgeting in her chair. After the last time we met, it’s quite a change to see her looking so uneasy. Considering how she humiliated me, I do take a little pleasure in this, I must admit. But I play nice after reminding myself who she is and that she must still be struggling to contain her grief.
‘It’s Rita, isn’t it?’ I say for want of anything better. ‘Can I, er, get you a brew?’
‘No, no,’ she replies. ‘I won’t keep you. I’m probably the last person you want to spend time with after the way I treated you yesterday. That’s why I’m here. I’d like to explain what happened and why I said what I did. I’m so terribly sorry. Would you hear me out?’
I’m intrigued, so of course I say yes. But gagging for a cup of tea myself, I tell her it’s on the provision she changes her mind and accepts my offer of a brew. This makes her smile, immediately easing the tension in the room.
Rita’s dressed in dark jeans and a grey puffer jacket, which she finally unzips while I’m topping off our mugs with milk. I’m not sure whether it’s mainly down to the curly hair and brown eyes, but I can’t help noticing how much she looks like her niece: even more than Iris’s own mother, based on what I saw of her yesterday.
‘Thank you very much,’ she says when I hand her the tea. ‘It’s really very kind of you.’
‘Hey, it’s only a cuppa. It’s not like I slipped in any booze.’
She grimaces. ‘Just as well, I’d say. I don’t think I’ll be drinking for some time after yesterday. I had way too much. It was all so hard to get through.’
As Rita blinks back tears, I hand her a tissue.
Thanking me, she says: ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get upset like this. That’s not why I came here.’
I sit down next to her. ‘I understand. It must all still be very raw.’
After taking a moment to compose herself, Rita grabs my hand and looks me square in the eye. ‘You seem like a nice man. Please accept my apologies for how I mistreated you yesterday in front of everyone. I’m so embarrassed, I had to come and see you. Fortunately, my son Guy, who you met, was able to put me in touch with your cousin Meg. Once I explained to her what it was about, she told me where I would be able to find you.’
‘Right,’ I reply, annoyed that Meg didn’t give me a heads-up. Mind you, I’ve been so busy today, I can’t even remember when I last checked my phone. Come to think of it, I stuck it on silent earlier after being bothered by one of those ‘I believe you were in a car accident that wasn’t your fault’ nuisance callers, who I duly scolded. It’s quite possible Meg has tried to contact me and not managed to get through. I resist the urge to reach into the pocket of my jeans to have a look.
‘Anyhow,’ Rita says. ‘I’m embarrassed to admit I was already pretty well away by the time we ran into each other. That, together with my emotional state over losing my niece, was a bad combination. Essentially, I got the wrong end of the stick. I totally misread the situation and mistook you for someone else entirely.’
Hearing this comes as a surprise. ‘Really? I got the impression from what you said at the time that you didn’t know who I was.’
She squirms in her seat. ‘I didn’t, not for sure, but I had a suspicion, which turned out to be totally wrong. This is embarrassing too, although I’ll try to explain. There was a patient of Iris’s – Eddie – who’d been pursuing her for some time. You know, romantically. She was never interested and she did say that to him, but apparently not in a forceful enough way to get the message across. She was far too nice to tell him to get lost and leave her alone. So he kept on chasing her, sending flowers and various other gifts, hoping she’d eventually cave in and give him a go.
‘He was verging on a stalker, if you ask me, always making up minor illnesses as an excuse to get an appointment with her. But again, Iris was too nice to see things that way. Even though I could tell it freaked her out from how she spoke about it, she’d then go on to argue he was lonely and harmless, albeit something of a hypochondriac.
‘At the same time, she admitted being afraid to tell him about her plan to go to Africa. She knew he wouldn’t react well to that, so I advised her not to mention it. What did it have to do with him, anyway? Of course, a part of me didn’t want her to go, for my own selfish reasons. And yet I knew it would be a great experience for her and I was glad it would get her away from bloody Eddie. Who knew what he might have ended up doing otherwise? I thought he was downright creepy.’
‘So you thought I was this weirdo?’ I ask.
She shuffles her feet, briefly placing a hand on my arm as she replies: ‘Yes, but please don’t be offended by that. I’ve never met Eddie. All I know about him is that he’s single, divorced, a few years older than Iris and, um, he’s a little bit bald.’
‘So it was mainly my age and my lack of hair, right? I am also divorced, as it goes, which makes me wonder how you could tell. Do I give off a certain sad man vibe?’
Rita’s eyes stretch wide open with horror at my suggestion. ‘No, no. Not at all. It was only the other two things, honestly. I had no idea that—’
‘It’s fine. I was pulling your leg.’
‘Oh, thank goodness. I feel bad enough already, without digging myself any deeper. I really don’t know why I jumped to the conclusion that you were Eddie. I suppose I’d been worried he might turn up at the funeral; then when I saw you kneeling by the table, with Claire in tears, I put two and two together and made five.
‘As for my yelling at you rather than asking you nicely to leave, that was definitely down to the alcohol. Again, I can only apologise, especially now I know who you really are and what you went through with Iris. It was so lovely of you to come to the funeral. As soon as I realised my mistake, I was mortified. I did try to come after you there and then, but it was too late. You’d already gone.’
‘Wow,’ I say. ‘At least that explains things. I did wonder exactly what it was I’d done to make you so angry. Now I understand what happened; the fact you made the effort to come and tell me this is much appreciated. You didn’t have to track me down. You could have left it. So thank you. Consider your apology accepted.’
Rita breathes a sigh of relief. ‘Oh good. That’s a weight off my mind. It’s been bothering me ever since it happened. Thanks so much for your understanding.’
I ask how she and the rest of the family are coping with Iris’s death.
‘So, so,’ she replies, taking a sip of tea from her mug. ‘As you’d expect, really. Until yesterday, everything was building up to the funeral, making all the arrangements and so on. There was so much extra stuff to think about – worrying about the press turning up against our wishes, for instance, which thankfully they didn’t. Now that’s over, I suppose we have to face up to the harsh reality of day-to-day life without her in it. We’re only at the start of the grieving process. It’s going to be tough for all of us, but especially Claire and Stan.’
Nodding, I add: ‘I get the impression you were pretty close to Iris.’
Rita’s eyes glisten with fresh tears. ‘That’s right. Living around the corner from my sister, as I always have, we see a lot of each other and our respective families. I have two sons: Guy, who you know, and Russ. Have you met him?’
I shake my head. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Okay. Well, I always quite fancied having a daughter too, although it never happened. I think that made me extra fond of Iris. She was like a surrogate daughter, if you like. I used to take her shopping when she was little – things like that – and we developed a strong bond. I think the fact I wasn’t her mother actually made us closer at times. She’d confide in me about stuff she didn’t tell Claire and Stan, such as what was going on with Eddie, her stalker.’
‘Her parents didn’t know about that?’ I ask.
‘Not the full details, no.’
‘And did he turn up to the funeral?’
‘Perhaps. Honestly, I’m not sure. If he was there, I didn’t spot him and he didn’t make himself known to me or any of the other family. I’m not sure exactly what he looks like, remember. Hence the fact I mistook you for him.’
I tap a forefinger on my right temple. ‘Good point.’
‘One of Iris’s colleagues would surely know,’ Rita adds. ‘But I didn’t fancy asking any of them at the time, especially not after making such an idiot of myself with you.’
‘No one will think any the worse of you for how you reacted,’ I say. ‘Grief makes people emotional. Everyone understands that.’
As we continue talking, our mugs of tea growing cold, the conversation flows surprisingly easily considering our recent acquaintance. Moving on to discuss more general matters, Rita reveals she’s fifty-seven years old and a semi-retired hairdresser.
‘A fellow snipper,’ I reply. ‘If someone had told me twenty-four hours ago that we’d be chatting like this, getting along and having things in common, I’d never have believed it. So when you say you’re semi-retired, what does that mean exactly? Do you still work part-time, or—’
‘I have a few regulars – mainly friends – who I cut and style from home, but that’s about it. I used to run my own salon in Prestwich.’ She winks as she adds: ‘Unisex, so I know a little about cutting men’s hair too. But a couple of years back, someone made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. They bought me out and that was that.’
‘This buyer of yours, they don’t want a barbershop in the Northern Quarter too, do they?’ I ask with a grin. ‘This semi-retirement lark sounds right up my street.’
‘Get away with you,’ Rita replies. ‘How old are you: mid-thirties? You’re a young man. You’ve still got your best years ahead of you.’
‘Thirty-nine, actually. But I’ll take what you said. That sounds infinitely better than “nearly forty”, which is how I tend to think of myself.’
‘Hang on. You’re one of those glass-half-empty types, aren’t you?’ she says, pulling a face and shaking her head with exaggerated disapproval.
I laugh. ‘Busted. How can you tell that from one conversation?’
‘I used to be married to a man like that: pessimistic Pete, I called him. We got divorced a long time ago. He used to drive me crazy with all his negative thoughts. But I loved him, more fool me, and then he ran off with someone half my age. You know how it goes.’
‘More than you think,’ I reply. And then, to my surprise, I start spilling my heart out to this near stranger. Is it because I’ve just realised something about her reminds me of my late mother? It could be. Who knows? I definitely don’t make a habit of doing this. And she really does remind me of Mum, although I can’t yet put my finger on why.