The barber who does not ask what I want

The barbershop near the old market has two chairs and only ever uses one. The other holds a stack of newspapers going back further than anyone has read, and a fan that turns its head slowly from side to side as if it too is waiting for something to happen. I go there before anything that matters. A wedding, a funeral, the once a year dinner where the whole family folds itself around three tables and pretends the year has been simpler than it was.

The barber is older than the chairs. He has cut my hair since I was small enough to sit on a plank laid across the armrests, and he has never once asked me what I want. He looks at my head, decides, and begins. For a long time I found this rude. Now I find it restful. There is exactly one decision removed from my week, and he makes it better than I would.

Yesterday I went in before the reunion dinner. The town was doing its late afternoon business outside, the fishmonger hosing down his slab, two motorcycles arguing about a parking space that did not exist. Inside it was cool and slow and smelled of talc and the particular green soap that I have never found sold anywhere, so I assume he makes it himself, or that it simply arrives, the way everything in that shop seems to have arrived before opinions were invented.

He draped the cloth. He tipped my head with two fingers, the way he always does, more suggestion than force. And then he talked, as he always talks, not to me exactly but past me, into the mirror, in a running commentary that requires nothing back. The price of ikan kembung. A grandson who has moved to the city and calls on the wrong days. The road they are widening for no reason anybody can see. I said mm, and mm, and that was the whole of my contribution, and it was enough.

I watched myself become tidier in the glass while the fan turned away and came back. It is a strange intimacy, being touched carefully by someone who is not thinking about you at all, only about the work. There is no performance in it. He is not trying to sell me a wax or ask about my holidays. He is doing a thing he has done a hundred thousand times, well, and letting me sit inside the doing of it for fifteen minutes.

When he finished he turned the chair so I could see the back in the second mirror, a courtesy I have never once needed and would not dream of interrupting. I paid what I have paid for years, which is less than it should be. Outside the light had gone gold and the coast road smelled of frying.

I arrived at dinner looking like myself, only more so, ready to be asked why I have not married and to have no better answer than last year. But my hair was right. In a family, on those evenings, you take your small certainties where you can find them.