Violent Disorder by Barry Mark

Author:Barry, Mark [Barry, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Green Wizard
Published: 2013-07-28T22:00:00+00:00

Hockley is the shopping street of choice for all Nottingham’s students and young transmetropolitans, with its eye-wateringly expensive desigqif wis wners, its extraordinary boutiques, its eccentric milliners, stubborn cobblers, high-end confectioners, gothic raptures, EMO bazaars, eclectic jamborees and plethora of coiffeurs – some charging up to thirty seven pounds for a gent’s short back and sides.

Thirty seven pounds.

They discussed this, stopping outside Jerome’s, a charcoal and silvered imbroglio, with an astonishingly sparkling windowpane the full height of the frontage. It appeared to be more like a nightclub than a barber, all seats occupied, six men waiting, reading papers and playing Crash Bandicoot on complimentary Playstations.

This barber here, Beefster. Look at the price.

I know. I can see. Thirty seven quid.

Thirty seven quid for a haircut.

And there’s a queue, dad. You tell me this every time.

Do I?

Yes, you do, dad. Thirty seven quid for a just out of bed haircut. Your mate wrote about it in Ultra Violence.

Yes, he did.

Mini-Beefy grinned. Next thing you’ll be telling me about is the criminally priced return ticket on the Skylink to the airport.

Eight quid. It’s incredible. Eight quid.

Oh, and the just out of bed haircut is now out of fashion. The new trendy haircut is the one Danny Craig has in the new Bond.

Skyfall?

That’s the one. Still thirty seven quid, dad, but a different cut, Mini-Beefy said, wryly grinning.

I could never pay thirty seven quid for a haircut, HobNob replied.qSaturdayenld

Two young men in matching black short-sleeved shirts, winklepicker shoes and impossibly tight black trousers walked past and into the shop. They heard HobNob. One of them winked at him.

Cheeky…

…come on, dad, I’m starving.

They walked past Stoney Street, and The Angel – where HobNob spent Christmas Day a few years ago in one of his trenches of despair – and the Left Lion offices, underneath a training centre for pole dancers.

Stoney Street is Hockley’s border, an invisible line, like the border between Iraq and Iran, evanescent, permeable, indistinct, a cut-off point where Hockley ceases to be bijou and desirable, a place to be seen, a place to swank, and becomes Nottingham again – threadbare, tacky and worn out. The transformation happens quickly: England’s bipolarity writ large.

One minute you are walking past a pair of beautiful Scandinavian-looking women with moussed blonde hair, golden jewellery that would shame Croesus, fur coats of dazzling, febrile colour, talking into iPods and tottering about on three hundred quid a pair stripper heels, and the next, in the blink of an eye, without knowing how, as if you had gone through an unsettling jump in the space-time continuum, you are in the middle of a punch-up between two homeless arguing over a hat while standing outside an off licence that has no business being there.

An anomaly, a border oddity.

There is a porn joint that sells vibrators with names (including one called Modok because of its oversized head), and a kebab palace that never closes, not even for Christmas Day. At the bottom, is the dirtiest charity shop in the City, servicing the biggest homeless hostel outside London.

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