A shaving brush

Found in a cupboard this morning, this derailed my plan to speak of underpants and morning coats: my shaving brush, from Taylor’s; only ever used with a pewter dish of unperfumed soap from Truefitt & Hill.  A seven-year beard has made them long redundant.

Briefly, they were tools for an intimate task I could never have imagined while turning them over in my hands in the panelled shops of St James’s. Silver-grey stubble roughening slackening, papery cheeks in a dull-pink hospital room. He would never go so long again without a shave.

This is a test that you must not fail; yet you will.  Removing the prickles that reddened the skin in the dried-spit corners of his mouth; it was too hard. Good enough would have to do; to do it again would do no good.  

Malt whisky and water wiped on his lips with a miniature sponge on a stick; a dangling bag on the bed-frame, gathering liquor the colour of 15-year-old scotch, drawn from a barrel charred on the inside.  The too-warm air was thick with him, as he dissolved a little more with each breath.  Trying not to breathe him in, I pulled the blades through the soap between the rise and fall of my breath, just like shooting a gun.  

   “Having to dab and work
    Closer than anybody liked
    But having, for all that,
    To keep working.”  

              Seamus Heaney, The Butts 

When I asked the barber if the badgers were harmed to get the brushes' bristles, he replied, “Well, I don’t think they hold the badgers down and shave them, sir.”