My prankster friend Barney has announced his official retirement though he won’t say what job it is he is retiring from. Over the decade I have known him, he has held myriad positions, some in authentic work spots; others in fantasy land. Name a job and Barney has in some tenuous way been associated with it. His career — real and imagined — has stretched between being a mountain guide to a brief stint as CEO of a private firm (that as it turned out operated out of a studio apartment and dealt with binding books, and where he was the only employee.) He has even ventured into the field of women’s make-up and, as a door-to-door salesman, sold cosmetics.

Some of the elderly ladies who parted with their cash after being lured by his glib sales talk, he has recalled with anecdotal detail in his talks with me. On one occasion, a savvy old thing in her early 70s (whose door he had knocked on earlier and been rebuffed) invited him in and asked him to demonstrate the various eye shadow shades he was selling. Barney apparently reached into his sales kit for a mirror so he could show her what she looked like with each application, but the lady demurred from having it applied on herself, saying she wanted to see it, so could he please (“Take a seat, please, Mr Barney, take a seat,”) apply the colours one by one, in thin arched rainbow streaks on himself?

So Barney, sensing a bit of commission, obligingly set about colouring his eyelids and batting them, up and down, while the prospective buyer stood close, peered and inspected and even looked doubtful.

Short story

“Unfortunately the light is a bit dim on the sofa, stand near the window please,” she suggested. Barney obliged. The seventy-plus-one went into raptures and clapped her hands in delight. “They are lovely,” she declared, “I’m going to take a whole box.” Barney’s heart jumped. “I think my sister would like a whole package too, do you mind if I took a picture to show her when she gets back?”

Well, that is the story, in short, of how Barney came to be photographed wearing mascara and parting with two boxes of rather expensive eye-make up for just a few gratis cents, in exchange for not having the pictures published anywhere.

And today, at the mall, Barney is a tad agitated because his cosmetic life has come back to haunt him. His wife, Mrs. Barney, has asked him to pick up a few items from the beauty shop — some skin revitalising cream, a bottle of wrinkle remover, a tube or rapid curl and some eye stress gel. Mrs. Barney is apparently indisposed and wishes to look her fittest on recovery — before she runs into any of her girl friends.

“Try some of them on yourself at the shop. They have testers,” she told Barney before he left the house.

“I know about testers and stuff, mate,” Barney grouchily tells me at the mall over coffee, “I sold the bloody things for years. I just don’t want ever to be seen trying on women’s make up, certainly not in a blinking shop. Every place has CC TV now and I don’t want to find myself trending on Twitter and places like that.”

That’s the matter with Barney. He’s never stopped believing he is celebrity disguised as common man. He’s so afraid he’ll get rumbled one day. “Why can’t she just let her blinking friends see she’s been ill, eh? What’s all this cover up?” he asks, adding, grumbling still, unconsciously quoting Marcel Achard, “Women have a passion for mathematics. They divide their age in half, double the price of their clothes and always add at least five years to the age of their best friend.”

He’s unaware that it is precisely an utterance like that, that is more likely to cause a Twitter scandal these days, with his name at the centre.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.