40 bones: letters from Derbyshire to London to St Malo
40 bones is a monthly letters series tracking the correspondence between D Mortimer and Kasra Jalilipour.
Two trans writers and artists trying to MAKE WORK IN THE HELLSCAPE. The letters are candid, humorous and cover a range of topics including medical transition, sex, gossip, money, shame, the act of writing, and the weirdness of being.
Follow along as Mortimer and Jalilipour somehow!!!!!!!!! get through the day
By D Mortimer and Kasra Jalilipour
03/07/2026 — Derbyshire
Dear Marlo,
Have you ever been haunted by a look?
Last year, I remember you telling me about the homoerotics of having your hair cut by your local barber. I think a haircut by the right person can feel very erotic. As can getting tattoos or piercings by the right person. I remember a woman I had a crush on offering to shave my undercut once many years ago, and it was a very tantalising feeling that has stayed with me. I remember the feeling of her breath on the back of my neck as she blew away the shaved hairs, and I like the fact that she stopped there, that she didn’t get closer, even tho at that moment I wish she hadn’t, but I now think sometimes the yearning, the not knowing and the daydreaming, is better than the reality of sex.
I don’t know if I told you that I developed a sweet friendship with a localish barber. I tried to visit him in the last half hour so it would be just him and I, as I found the stares of his colleagues and customers uncomfortable. We would talk about our families and growing up in the Middle East. Once he was done with my face, he would play music in his mother tongue on the big shop tv, and translate it for me. Last spring I bought him a hyacinth pot, as a new year gift for Nowruz. I chose white as it was the most neutral colour. When I arrived at the shop his friends were sitting by the entrance. They asked me, “what I wanted?” What a loaded question. I said I was looking for him, called him by his name, and he appeared from the back of the shop. I handed him the flower pot, bringing a wide smile to his face. He smelt the flowers and thanked me several times, then placed them in a ceramic pot by the window. The shop atmosphere was both sweet and tense. I don’t know if he realised that his friends were watching us very closely. I asked for the usual haircut, mid fade, a bit off the top. His friends still sat behind us, their faces reflected in the mirror in front of me, still watching. Afterwards he asked me if I wanted my face tidied. Which I hesitantly accepted. He prepared his razor and just before I closed my eyes I looked back at the mirror and saw his friends’ locked gaze, staring back at me, one last time. To my relief they were gone when I opened my eyes. You and I both know what the friends may have been thinking, or why their gaze may have been haunting me. I wondered about the questions they may have asked him about me afterwards, and the answers he may have given them. But that’s not even the haunting gaze I wanted to tell you about. I stopped going to him after that day. Mainly due to a local Kurdish barbers opening up much closer to me. But I still kept thinking about my old barber, and my sudden disappearance (or ghosting?) and I keep wondering what he thought of me. I had never asked him to tidy my facial hair, it’s something he offered, and as much as I try not reading too much into people’s perception of me, it’s really hard not to when it comes to hair.
I had not seen him for a year, until a few weeks ago, my girlfriend and I were at a local cafe one afternoon, and as we finished our orders, my old barber and his friend walked through the door. He looked genuinely happy to see me, we shook hands, “where have you been?” He asked, and I felt obliged to make a lie about my work load and traveling. My girlfriend and I sat at a table outside and they sat a couple tables down from us. We exchanged some smiles. It was a hot day, my girlfriend leaned in for a kiss, and as I kissed her I opened my eyes, I don’t know why, I think it was an unconscious decision, and in that moment I realised that the cafe window behind us was reflective, I saw my barber’s face in the mirror, looking at us, confused, and a smile on his face, but more like a smirk. He didn’t know that I could see him, then he leaned in to his friend and said something. And that’s the look that has been haunting me.
I used to carry a sense of guilt for cheating on him with a new barber, but after that day, I felt vindicated in my decision. I still feel sad about the whole thing.
My new barber is lovely tho! We talk about politics, Iranian TV shows. He sometimes asks me to translate Iranian songs for him. And one time I paid him with foraged plums for a haircut. The kind of plums that reminds us both of home.
Anyways, who’s cutting your hair these days?
Here’s a picture of a wild Bea Orchid that appears only once a year in a scrubland near my house:
12/07/26 — London and St Malo
Dear Kasra,
My barber. It’s funny you should mention him. I’ve recently started seeing him again after a long hiatus. He is a boxer. We talk about his new flat by the arsenal. Which stag he is going on next. Girlfriends. When I was on T, I developed a bit of a crush on him, it’s true. He’s handsome and I trust him with my hair. He is solid. Unlike Jay. I will get to Jay. I like the way he folds my ear to shave the hard to reach bits. My earlobe flexes like pasta dough. Feels stupid and nice. It flashed through my head once what John would do if I asked him to pull my hair. I didn’t. It was enough to think it, as you say.
Silver would also visit John to get his haircut. H says we’re chalk and cheese, Silver and I, our own dualism, our own John and Jay. Silver said in all the haircuts he had with John they barely exchanged more than a hello. I can’t help asking John things.
And when the barbershop roof caved in and they all had to move. I followed John to another shop in Hackney. He wasn’t having a good time. I got up out of the chair with my robe still on and hugged him. That was when our hiatus started. I denied it to myself but the hug changed things. I was used to our eyes meeting through a mirror. The hug I gave him was, at once, in too many dimensions and too few. I realised I needed our touch to be one-sided. A need which puzzles me. I don’t need Jay to be so solid. But Jay isn’t my barber. He is my barber when my barber is away. Jay is the not-John. Once, between haircuts, he let me ride his big bike the wrong way up the road.
I am thinking about the flower you gave your barber. And the hug I gave mine. And how both these gifts are charged in the barber shop. I’m also thinking about my friend Paul, who says, ‘every gift is a demand’ and this relation between want and need.
I AM THINKING ABOUT THE WISH.
I do not have many cis straight men in my life, John doesn’t have many trans guys in his. The fascination with each other is reciprocal, I like to think. There is money involved, which creates its own conditions, boundaries, power differentials. John is not my friend and we are in intimate relation with one another. That’s the puzzle of the embrace under capitalism. And the puzzle of the gift. ‘Do you still see Silver?’ John asked me a few weeks back as he shook talc on my neck. Much like you, I wonder how my barber sees us.
Your letter made me think of something else.
When I was a kid. There was a girl. A girl I'd kiss at parties. No one knew. When everyone around us got drunk enough we would peel off, find a room and kiss. One time we were in the natural heart of the party — the bathroom. You could argue it’s the kitchen, sure, heart of the house, but no, the heart of the teenage house party is the bathroom. So I’m in there with this girl, my friend and a few others. Me and her are standing close together, our backs against a towel rail. I move my hand to the small of her back and bring it down. She is wearing a slip dress which falls through my fingers. I feel calm and full of adrenaline. I’ll grow to love (need?) this state.
Later on in the party. My friend finds me and says, “I saw what you were doing in the bathroom, you know, there was a mirror behind you.”
It’s not like no one kissed girls at parties. We’d spin the bottle and pass the love heart. But girls were kissed by girls only ever in the context of a game where boys were also kissed. And you had to want to kiss the boys. Wanting girls alone was freakery. What I was doing in the bathroom was outside the rules of the game.
I don’t know how but I managed to stay in the closet two more years after that. Some collective derangement/wish fulfillment on the part of my friends. If you’re really faggy or really butch they say the closet’s made of glass. Mine was pure mirror. People saw what they wanted to see. Including me.
Confessional writing is the risk of public touch. It finds its analogue in placing my hand between a mirror and a girl’s back or the gay move in the barbershop. I think of John and Jay and not Jay and not John and not-Silver and not-me — when to talk and when to stfu.
Freud said every dream has a wish in it. Like the coin in a Greek cake you can break your teeth on the wishes inside dreams. And Lacan changed it to le desir because wishing was what kids did. They hold their breath, blow, make a wish and never say it out loud.
Kill me if I ever stop doing what kids do.
I am reminded of Freud’s word for wish (Wunsch) when the barbers saw you holding the white flower and asked, “what do you want?” And you replied with the man’s name (!) you said your want aloud.
I have been haunted by looks, yes, but more haunted by what I can’t look at. What I hide from me. Writing’s a way to feel out this hiding place I think, different now, thank God, from the mirrory closet. But is it all that different? This room we are in is glass. We have invited the reader to look in.
Are you writing something now, outside these letters? How personal are you choosing to be? I am still working out what it means to seek communion so publicly, to flout and flout again the tenet not to say the wish out loud.
In writing the self and visiting the barber shop I think you have the answer, todays at least.
Go at dusk.
Marlo
PS in France last week I told my niece and nephew about werewolves (it was the full moon). Here are some pictures we drew together. My nephew wants me to eat him / put him in a pie / be moon and wolf for him / again and again.
Kasra Jalilipour is an Iranian multidisciplinary artist, writer based in the East Midlands. In their creative writing practice they use methods of speculative and auto-fiction. They are interested in the re-imagining of histories through a queer lens, in particular the erotics in depictions of intimacy and violence.
D Mortimer is a writer and artist from London. His first book Last Night a Beef Jerk Saved My Life was published by Pilot Press in 2021. Speed Glum Hero, their monograph, came out with Sticky Fingers Publishing in 2024. They are currently working on their first novel.
