1.

When Emperor Angel first outlined her plan to me, lavishly and enthusiastically – licking every word – from the nest of jumpers and coats that buried a chair in the corner of my shatteringly untidy room, something long ago locked away came to the fore of my mind, and when she had finished speaking – without waiting, and as opposed to asking all the obvious questions (“Are you serious?” “How do you know all this?” “What use could I be?”) I began to uncover and unravel and untangle this strange something right there in the room. I told her -

I’ve got this memory, I said – something my dad might have told me when I was younger, concerning a visit to the hairdressers when he first moved to London. He’d got his appointment in the morning, thinking he could slot it in neatly before work – half hour to get his hair done (it was just a cut and blow dry) jump on the bus and in High Holburn by 25 past, giving him five minutes to scuttle down Chancery Lane at pace, suit and tie, with his hair finally neat and not raucous – all the better to fit in down there in the law district. He got to the hairdressers on time – there was only one stylist there and she seemed to be putting the finishing touches to the customer before him. Snip here. Snip there. Taking her time. Musing.

Somehow, this touching up took her five minutes beyond my dad’s (if was my dad – as I say, can’t remember who told me) appointment, but that wasn’t much matter. He could be five minutes late, if the haircut was good enough. Or maybe it wouldn’t take half an hour after all. He didn’t want anything fancy. Just make it neat, trim, slick, short, whatever.

There’s some wrangling at the till for a while. Previous customer, a genial Scotsman, is looking to buy some product. He discusses with the stylist what might be best. Items are taken off shelves, passed back and forth across the counter, then replaced. This takes them to ten minutes beyond the start of the appointment. The stylist flashes a quick sign and a whisper at my dad (let’s assume it was my dad after all) indicating that she won’t be much longer. It’s OK – even if he does turn up late, he can invent a decent story about the appointment, about it somehow stretching out farcically over an hour. Again, if the haircut’s good, if it impresses.

Credit card is passed over. PIN entered – these were the days when you had a personal number that you committed to memory and that allowed you to use your card wherever – so, potentially, a trusted associate or loved one could use your card if you told them the number. (Emperor Angel nods vigorously, because she is old enough to remember these days). The man enters his PIN, the sale is confirmed, the machine that holds his card in its teeth makes happy noises and everything is done. This is the point where he should leave, but instead, he checks his receipt (receipts, in those days, were a paper record of the transaction, mainly for the customer’s benefit). Something is wrong. Something is quite wrong. He queries it with the hairdresser.

My dad is trying his utmost not to look uncomfortable and impatient, but his watch hand is slowly arcing towards the quarter to mark. Maybe it’s time to go? But the hairdresser quickly sets the Scotsman up on the phone – he’s phoning his card company to discuss what is wrong with the transaction - in those days you could talk to a real person at the other end. The hairdresser then ushers my dad into a seat, wraps the black cape round his neck and asks him what he’d like. He produces a picture from a catalogue, hurriedly cut out and scratched where it’s been folded in the middle. He starts to describe what it is about the style he likes, but the hairdresser is eager to get started – to not delay any further – yes, yes, she says, and starts hacking away at his hair.

His hair, I should mention, is not really just in need of a trim. It’s been allowed to grow quite long. So once the hairdresser has cut off a few choice clumps, it is decidedly, remarkably uneven. Understand this: he can now no longer get out of the chair. He would look ridiculous. Better to not turn up at all than to wander into work so sheared. Of course, then, this is when the Scotsman calls the hairdresser back over and has further words with her. They both catch my dad’s mask of anxiety in the mirror – he is trying his best to keep it down, but like a fist pressing through a plastic bag, its shape is increasingly apparent. Without having to confer, the hairdresser and the Scotsman agree to let my dad in on exactly what has happened and why it is more important than his getting to work on time.

What has happened is this: the machine has charged the Scotsman £8,900 instead of the £89 that makes up the cost of his meticulous haircut plus his bag of hair products. He has to be at the airport very soon, to leave the country, and cannot very well do so without knowing that he’s going to get the nine-ish grand back. He doesn’t look, speak or dress like the grotesquely affluent type - £9k is a lot of money to him. The hairdresser understand this too and is eager to show that she will go to every effort to make sure the business is sorted out

Horror of horrors, now he has entered his PIN number – neither of them noticed the number was wrong, if indeed it was, when the machine asked for it – his card company say that they cannot cancel the exchange and that he will have to secure a refund from the hairdresser. But this hairdresser is just the woman who works there in the morning – she doesn’t own the salon. That guy won’t get there until eleven, by which time the Scotsman needs to be in the departure lounge.

My dad is sitting there in no fit state to hotfoot it to the office, bound by the black cape, in a comfy chair, as the gap closes between the minute hand and the hour mark, while the hairdresser disappears to look for someone – who knows who? While she is gone, the genial Scotsman tries to joke about the situation and apologises – I should mention, because it’s important, that both hairdresser and Scotsman have already apologised at least once – and my dad tries to smile and play along and imagine how he will put the story to his new bosses, to his friends, to his daughter however many years down the line that might be - I believe it was my dad (as I told Emperor Angel the story, I felt more and more certain of it). The Scotsman explains, again, very reasonably and with much joviality, that he simply can’t leave without making sure he’s going to get the money back. He tries to elaborate, but there’s really not much to be said at all. Either the machine did something wrong, he said, or, I don’t know, she … or he made a mistake.

The ‘she…or he’ refers to the hairdresser – it is evident the Scotsman is doubtful as to the purity of the woman’s sex. Does he think she’s a transsexual, or just a transvestite? My dad doesn’t know – and he is too busy nodding and agreeing and smiling and tipping his head this way and that to think about it much. His brain is being shaken about, after all, and he’s now electric with anxiety. His explanation will have to not just be convincing and entertaining, but very witty – he will have to remember the Scotman’s ‘he or she’ line, perhaps place it in a better context (timing is everything) and – I don’t know – exaggerate the amounts involved maybe.

The hairdresser comes back in with someone – likely a friend from a nearby shop - whose sole function, it eventually transpires, seems to be to help them arrive at a decision on what to do next. He doesn’t know what to do with the machine, but he chimes with good-humoured sympathy when he sees the receipt. The Scotsman again explains his predicament. The hairdresser again explains her predicament. The newcomer is very understanding, and sees that this is not something easily resolved.

And then it hits my dad, this feeling – this is the point he usually came to, whenever he told this story – and I heard him tell it numerous times to visitors, to siblings, to relatives returning from adventures in space – it hits him that here is mankind at its most ideal. No one seems to be too angry. Everyone understands everyone else, and is managing their own fluster dutifully. No one has even done anything wrong, or so it would seem, and so dad chose to believe. Yet they were in an impossible situation, an unhappy situation, a terrible situation, which was also having a knock-on effect on him. What had happened? Utopia had gone rotten. Why? All because of one little machine.

Here, my dad would smirk, sometimes snort – the recollection amused him so much. One machine, with one moderately simple function (it didn’t even have to calculate the amount) had screwed up the morning for all three of them. And taken a chunk out of the fourth participant’s schedule as well.