I met Martin on a wet Tuesday morning in Dublin, the kind of morning where the rain seems to come up from the footpath as much as down from the sky. I had an interview at half eleven near St Stephen’s Green, and I was standing outside a small hairdresser’s off Aungier Street, looking at my reflection in the dark window and trying not to cry.
I had been out of work for seven months. At first, I told people I was “between things,” which sounded almost elegant. By the fifth month, I stopped meeting friends for coffee because I couldn’t keep pretending that a flat white was nothing. By the seventh, I had learned which shops reduced bread late in the evening, and I had started walking everywhere because the bus fare felt like a luxury. The interview that day was for a receptionist job in a clinic. It wasn’t my dream, but it was a door, and I badly needed a door to open.
The problem was my hair. It sounds small now, but that morning it felt enormous. I had cut my own fringe with kitchen scissors two weeks earlier, after watching a video online and convincing myself I could manage it. I could not manage it. My ends were uneven, my hair had grown heavy and shapeless, and under the grey Dublin sky I looked exactly how I felt: tired, worried, and not quite held together.
I must have been staring too long because the door opened and a man in a black apron leaned out. He was in his late fifties, with silver hair combed back and glasses hanging from a cord around his neck.
“You’re either admiring the signage,” he said, “or you’re deciding whether to come in.”
I laughed because it was easier than explaining. “I’ve an interview,” I said. “I was just checking the damage.”
He looked at my hair, then at my face. Not in a cruel way. More like he recognised something.
“What time?”
“Half eleven.”
He checked the clock behind him. “Come in. I’ve twenty minutes before my first booking.”
I shook my head immediately. “I can’t. I’m sorry, I don’t have the money.”
He opened the door wider. “I didn’t ask you for money.”
Inside, the place smelled of shampoo, coffee, and that warm electrical scent of hairdryers. There were two chairs, a small radio playing low, and a row of photographs tucked into the mirror frame. Some were of children in school uniforms, some of older women with fresh curls, some of people standing awkwardly in suits, smiling as if they were trying out confidence for the first time.
Martin sat me down, tied a cape around my neck, and said, “Tell me about the job.”
So I did. At first I gave him the polished version: clinic receptionist, good with people, organised, quick learner. But there is something about speaking to someone through a mirror that loosens the truth. Maybe because you don’t have to look directly at them. I told him I had worked in retail until the shop closed. I told him I had sent out more CVs than I could count. I told him I had started waking at four in the morning with my heart going mad, thinking about rent.
He trimmed quietly while I talked, his scissors making small, certain sounds. When I apologised for oversharing, he shrugged.
“Half this city is holding itself together with borrowed tape,” he said. “You’re not the only one.”
Then he told me his own story. Years before, after the crash, his brother had lost his job and gone to an interview with hair he hadn’t been able to afford to cut. He didn’t get it. “Maybe the hair had nothing to do with it,” Martin said, gently lifting a section near my cheek. “But he believed it did. And that belief sat on him heavier than the rejection.”
After that, Martin began putting a note in his window: If you have a job interview and need a haircut, come in before ten. No charge. He said some people cried. Some tried to pay later. Some never came back. One man returned two years later with a box of pastries and a baby in a pram. A woman who got work in an office near Grafton Street sent him a Christmas card every year. “Not everyone gets the job,” he said. “But everyone deserves to walk in feeling human.”
When he finished, he turned the chair slowly. I looked different, but not drastically different. That was the magic of it. I still looked like myself, only less defeated. My fringe sat softly instead of accusingly. My hair had shape. My face looked clearer. I hadn’t realised how much shame I had been carrying in something as ordinary as a haircut.
Martin brushed
Note: Please be aware that these are written in confidentiality and there is not reference or mention of any real people and their sentiments here. Every incident and Story tends to be emotional so please read at your own emotional risk. Website is not responsible for anything related. HumansofDublin.io is not related to the photography project HumansofDublin by Peter Varga
