The real Mr Eddy

 

My dad was a disabled veteran from the war with a wife and four sons to keep on an inadequate pension. Because of his circumstances the spin off was he got a few perks from the kindly citizens of our small city. One of those perks was a free haircut for him and his four boys down at Eddy’s. Eddy, or Mr Eddy to us boys, had a two-room barber’s shop down town. There was an opaque glass wall and a door dividing the two rooms. When you stepped in from the street there was a counter to one side with all kinds of tobacco, chocolates, combs, brushes, hair oils, dandruff eliminators and all things to do with men’s toiletry.

           To the very front of the counter there was an array of chewing gums set out somewhat enticingly in their boxes and I, probably along with other boys, used to nick a packet of that chewy on the way out when Eddie was out the back engaged with someone’s hair. I kidded myself that Eddie was well off enough not to miss just one small packet each month. Chewing gum was a luxury my family couldn’t afford. Though I must admit I did it with some guilt. I mean he was cutting my hair for nix, but that fresh hot tangy hit of peppermint was something I just couldn’t resist.

           Mr Eddie cut our hair mostly on Mondays after school because it was his slackest time. He called it his belated service to all those brave men who went off to the war to fight for their country. Those brave, brave men, he’d say and shake his head. I began to think Mr Eddie had a really soft side. On Mondays, for instance, he always had his radio on a music station - orchestral music mostly. He told me he loved all kinds of music. I remember one evening when there a whole lot of stringed instruments playing ever so sweetly in the background he suddenly stopped cutting my hair and said with some feeling: If music be the food of love, play on.            

           Shakespeare said that, he told me. Do you learn about Shakespeare? I shook my head. You will, he said, you should. That bard said almost everything there was to say about life. Then he went back to snipping and humming away with the music in the background. I thought I’d ask my teacher about Shakespeare. He sounded pretty grand.

           Mr Eddie also had a fondness for quoting poetry by Banjo Patterson or Henry Lawson, or some such. He sometimes spouted a few lines from their poems when he was snipping away at my hair. Music and the poetry, he told me once, made his life worth living.             

           But it was only on Monday evenings he said those sorts of things. My dad was surprised when I told him. Funny thing that, he said, Eddie was all sport Saturdays. My dad told me that what Eddie didn’t know about sport wasn’t worth knowing. Damn it, my dad said, that bloke could predict winners better than the local paper’s sports journalist yet he never went to see a game in his life. He’s a bit of a genius when it comes to sport, my dad reckoned.           

           So I worked out that there were two sides to Mr Eddie. He liked poetry and music but he also wanted to be one of the boys. Just about all his men customers worked at the canning factories, or the shoe factories, or the Zinc Works and shopping emporiums and hardware stores. Those men, my dad said, who through the week sweated their lives away for the captains of industry. They congregated in Eddy’s shop and sipped a beer or two out of sight, chewing over the sporting fat before either going to the game or home to their family responsibilities. According to my dad the excuse Mr Eddie gave for not going to the footy was that his customers kept him too busy cutting their hair. It’s the beer you blokes drink, Eddie quipped, it irrigates your scalps. How can I take Saturdays off?           

           Well, that was he said on Saturdays, but I knew there was a different reason. Mr Eddy didn’t go to any sport, be it athletics, or cricket, or any place where able-bodied men hit or kicked a ball about because of one simple fact - he hated all sporting activities because of his own affliction. He had one leg shorter than the other. The different lengths of his legs was well known, you could see the built up heel. You could hear it thump on the floor. Everyone took it for granted, but Mr Eddie didn’t. It’s all right to talk sport in theory, he told me, but being there, watching and thinking what could have been, was too much.

           He told me all about this when there was only me and him in the shop. Me, a boy of twelve, and him a grown man; it was a somewhat unusual friendship and a friendship that came about in an unusual way. I once showed him a story that I’d written at school about the war and how my dad got shot. He sat in the vacant seat next to me and read it from start to finish. When he read it I was surprised to see his eyes water up. Then he got up and went across to a cupboard and opened it. I heard him blowing his nose. When he came back he was carrying a new packet of paper towels as if that’s what he went for.

           He asked me if I got a good mark? I told him yes. I told him that I was the best at writing stories in the class. My teacher Mrs Peach often lent me books to read. She expected me to become a writer. He nodded his approval and from that day on he used to talk to me about himself and how he felt about things. He said I would understand because I had the sensitivity of someone a lot older.

           He told me once that he cut the hair of all the returned soldiers and their sons and learnt all about sport because he felt so guilty that he had to stay home cutting hair when all his able-bodied friends went off to the war. Some came back and some didn’t, he told me. It was all so terribly sad. He said that he would have cut the hair of all the soldier’s daughters too but that he was a single man and it wasn’t a good idea. Someone would see something bad in that. There are some people who see bad in everything, he said. I think it’s because they are unhappy with their lives. I’m unhappy with my life but I don’t think bad thoughts about others.

           He also confessed to me once that he would have liked to marry but who would want a man with one leg shorter than the other. But the war I said…like my father, he was shot up and he got married. There are lots of men without legs, without arms, in wheel chairs even and a lot of good women around who would marry them - widows and things, lots of them.

            Ah, he said, but they are men who went to war. I’m just an old stay at home cripple who does his best by cutting the hair of the wounded and the widow’s children. I do my best but it’s not enough.

           I was getting quite heated. He just didn’t know how good he was. But you cut hair and you entertain with your knowledge about sports and things, I insisted. Men come here to listen to you. You’re a…I couldn’t think of the word I was searching for but I knew there was one.

           He wasn’t convinced. He shook his head and finished cutting my hair. He took off my white cape and shook it out on the floor. He stared down at it on the polished linoleum, pushing it around with the toe of his boot as if he was trying to figure something out. Then he gave a big sigh picked up his brush and set to work whisking the hair from my shoulders with an unusual vigour. Ah, he said finally when he put the brush away, if you only knew just how much I hate sport.

            I left him that night sweeping up the hair on the floor. He seemed to have forgotten I was there. I put on my jacket and quietly left. In the outer shop the display of the neatly packaged chewing gums on the counter seemed less enticing than before. To hell with tangy peppermint, I thought. I walked on by and through the door and out into the sun-setting street.