seventeen-past-seven

Nervously nibbling pickled garlic, comfort food of the foolhardy, Bateman repeatedly repeats while telling me for the first time the supposed truth about this, that and (especially) the other. Like myself he went to an all-boys school, something difficult to wish on one’s own worst enemy, a part that Bateman has been flirting with in recent days, but while the A-grade hang-up I achieved was a freakish fear of ruggerball (and thereafter of such perfectly usual preoccupations as caning corrosive curries, waggling genitalia in all-male environments and biting the ears off your inferiors in confined public spaces) with him it was hair. Born with a Charles II perm, Bateman’s hirsute appearance made him the envy of master and servant alike; his status as a pin-up boy, advertising everything from school plays to garden fêtes, eventually provoking an attack of jealous rage from his numerous betters and worsts. Hiding up the nearest tree wearing impractical beige pantaloons, I can only imagine young Bateman’s fear of the mob as they bent back that mighty willow before catapulting him head-first into Blackburn’s deepest hole.

‘Since then,’ he looks out the hair-obsessed town; at the fashionable centre-partings of a thousand thatched rooftops – dwellings where every man, woman and child would kill for a moustache as lavish as mine, for ‘pit hair of such softness, ‘I have relied upon certain products to keep the follicles frolicking, so to speak’

And once again appears the vial of purple liquid, brandished a touch more modestly this time.

‘I’ve been developing this with a couple of underground sources,’ Bateman continues, ‘I’d already had an advance from McCurly and was on my way to see him with a sample when you suddenly and inexplicably…’

‘Hold on,’ I interject out of my seat, ‘first sample of what?’

‘Hair restoring potion. Top secret. But I should have told you BB, as a friend, and as someone likely to mess everything up if not fully briefed.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘We were in Poland,’ Bateman glances out at Hair Tower, the latest fully-woven skyscraper in an increasingly furry Greater Manchester, ‘I noticed your hair, like mine, was disappearing after a fall. I thought you might try to steal the recipe, out of mad desperation.’

‘Do I look vain?’ I ask.

‘It’s like looking in a bally mirror,’ Bateman replies before smearing a steaming purple blob into my forelocks, ‘Except I’m obviously a lot younger and hairier.’

So all is well between us and there is time for laughter and loose ends before the other guests arrive. What of Shifty and Scarface? Trained chemists I am told, moonlighting at the warehouse by day then developing the ‘product’ by night. I point out that many prominent evil doers have begun their working lives as chemists; would Shifty and Scarface also be expecting state funerals? Perhaps, but back in their native St Tropez, Bateman suggests, for their real names are Yves and Laurent. Stereotypes disguised as clichés I muse: ingenious!