by Rachel Cusk
‘We’re talking about your natural authority,’ Dale said.
The woman in the next chair was reading Glamour magazine with an expressionless face, while the other stylist’s fingers worked at her intricately tinselled head, painting each strand of hair and folding it into a neat foil parcel. The stylist was diligent and careful, though her client didn’t once glance up to look.
The salon was a lofty, white, brilliantly lit room with white-painted floorboards and baroque, velvet-upholstered furniture. The tall mirrors had elaborately carved white-painted frames. The light came from three big branching chandeliers that hung from the ceiling and were duplicated in reflection all around the mirrored walls. It stood in a row of dingy shops and fast-food outlets and hardware stores. The big plate-glass shopfront sometimes rattled when a heavy vehicle passed outside.
In the mirror, Dale’s expression was unyielding. His own hair was a dark, artful mop of grey-streaked curls. He was somewhere in his mid-forties, tall and narrow, with the elegant, upright bearing of a dancer. He wore a dark, closely fitted jersey that showed the suggestion of a pot belly above his lean hips.
‘It doesn’t fool anyone, you know,’ he said. ‘It just makes it obvious that you’ve got something to hide.’
I said that seemed preferable to having what you wished hidden on public display.
‘Why?’ Dale said. ‘What’s so terrible about looking like what you are?’
I didn’t know, I said, but it was obviously something a lot of people feared.
‘You’re telling me,’ Dale said glumly. ‘A lot of people,’ he went on, ‘say it’s because what they see in the mirror doesn’t feel like them. I say to them, why doesn’t it? I say, what you need isn’t a colourwash, it’s a change of attitude. I think it’s the pressure,’ Dale said. ‘What people are frightened of,’ he said, lifting the back of my hair to look underneath, ‘is being unwanted.’
At the other end of the room the big glass door jangled open and a boy of twelve or thirteen came in out of the darkness. He left the door standing ajar and the cold wet air and roaring noise of traffic came in great gusts into the warm, lit-up salon.
‘Can you close the door, please?’ Dale called in a peevish voice.
The boy stood, frozen, a panicked expression on his face. He wore no coat, only a grey school shirt and trousers. His shirt and hair were wet from the rain. A few seconds later a woman came in after him through the open door and closed it carefully behind her. She was very tall and angular, with a broad, flat, chiselled-looking face and mahogany-coloured hair carefully cut in a bob that hung exactly at the square line of her jaw. Her big eyes moved rapidly in her mask-like face around the room. Seeing her, the boy raised his hand to plaster his own hair sideways over his forehead. She stood for a moment, alert in her soldierly wool coat as if trying to sense a danger, and then she said to the boy:
‘Go on then. Go and give them your name.’
The boy looked at her with a pleading expression. His shirt was undone at the collar and a patch of his bony chest could be seen. His arms hung by his sides, the palms opened in protest.
‘Go on,’ she said.
Dale asked whether I was ready to have my hair washed; he would go through the colour charts while I was gone, and see if he could find a match. Nothing too dark, he said; I’m thinking more browns and reds, something lighter. Even if it’s not what you naturally are, he said, I think you’ll look more real that way. He called across to the girl who was sweeping the floor that there was a customer ready to go down. She automatically stopped sweeping and leaned the broom against the wall.
‘Don’t leave it there,’ Dale said. ‘Someone might trip over it and hurt themselves.’ Again automatically, she turned around and, retrieving the broom, stood there holding it.
‘In the cupboard,’ Dale said wearily. ‘Just put it in the cupboard.’
She went away and returned empty-handed, and then came to stand beside my chair. I rose and followed her down some steps to the warm, lightless alcove where the sinks were. She fastened a nylon cape around my shoulders and then arranged a towel on the edge of the sink so that I could lean back.
‘Is that all right?’ she said.
The water came in a spray, with alternating passages of hot and cold. I closed my eyes, following the successions and returns, the displacement of one temperature by another and then its reinstatement. The girl rubbed shampoo over my head with tentative fingers. Later she tugged a comb through the hair and I waited, as though waiting for someone to untangle a mathematical problem.
‘There you are,’ she said finally, stepping back from the sink.
I thanked her and returned to the salon, where Dale was absorbedly mixing a paste with a small paintbrush in a pink plastic dish. The boy was now sitting in the chair next to mine, and the Glamour-reading woman had withdrawn, her hair still in its foil parcels, to the sofa by the window, where she continued to turn the pages expressionlessly one after another. Next to her sat the woman who had come in with the boy. She was tapping at the screen of her mobile phone; a book lay open across her knees. The other stylist was leaning with her elbow on the reception desk, a cup of coffee beside her, talking to the receptionist.
‘Sammy,’ Dale called to her, ‘your client’s waiting.’
Sammy exchanged a few more remarks with the receptionist and then ambled back to the chair.
‘So,’ she said, putting her hands on the boy’s shoulders so that he involuntarily flinched. ‘What’s it going to be, then?’
‘Do you ever get the feeling,’ Dale said to me, ‘that if you weren’t there to make things happen, it would all just go tits-up?’
I said it seemed to me that just as often the reverse was true: people could become more capable when the person they relied on to tell them what to do wasn’t there.
‘I must be doing something wrong then,’ Dale said. ‘This lot couldn’t run a bath without my help.’
He picked up one of a set of silver clips and fastened it to a section of my hair. The dye would need to stay in for at least half an hour, he said: he hoped I wasn’t in a hurry. He took a second clip and isolated another section. I watched his face in the mirror as he worked. He took a third clip and held it between his lips while he separated one strand of hair from another.
‘Actually, I’m in no particular rush myself,’ he said presently. ‘My date for this evening just cancelled. Luckily,’ he said, ‘as it turns out.’
In the next-door chair, the boy sat staring interestedly at himself in the mirror.
‘What do you fancy?’ Sammy said to him. ‘Mohican? Buzz cut?’
He gave a sort of twitch of his shoulders and looked away. He had a soft, sallow face, with a long, rounded nose that gave him a ruminative expression. A strange secretive smile was forever playing around his plump pink mouth. Finally he murmured something, so quietly that it was inaudible.
‘What’s that?’ Sammy said.
She bent her head down towards him but he failed to repeat it.
‘Strange as it might sound,’ Dale was saying, ‘I was quite relieved. And this is a person I really like.’ He paused while he fastened a section of hair with a clip. ‘I just keep getting this feeling more and more these days –’ he paused again to fasten another – ‘that it’s more trouble than it’s worth.’
What was, I asked him.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said, ‘maybe it’s just an age thing. I just feel like I can’t be bothered.’
There had been a time, he went on, when the prospect of spending an evening alone would have terrified him, would actually have seemed so intimidating that he would have gone anywhere and done anything just to avoid it. But now he found that he’d just as soon be on his own.
‘And if other people have a problem with that,’ he said, ‘like I say, I can’t be bothered with them.’
I watched his dark figure in the glass, the fastidiousness of his quick fingers, the concentration on his long, narrow face. Beh
ind him the receptionist was approaching with a phone in her hand. She tapped his shoulder and held it out to him.
‘For you,’ she said.
‘Ask them to leave a message,’ Dale said. ‘I’m with a client.’
The receptionist went away again and he rolled his eyes.
‘I persist in the belief that this is a creative job,’ he said. ‘But sometimes you have to wonder.’
He knew quite a lot of creative people, he went on after a while. It was just a type he happened to get on with. He had one friend in particular, a plumber, who made sculptures in his spare time. These sculptures were constructed entirely from materials he used in his plumbing job: lengths of pipe, valves and washers, drains, waste traps, you name it. He had a sort of blowtorch he used to heat the metal and bend it into different shapes.
‘He makes them in his garage,’ Dale said. ‘They’re actually quite good. The thing is, he can only do it when he’s off his trolley.’
He took a new section of hair and began to fix the clips around it.
On what, I said.
‘Crystal meth,’ Dale said. ‘The rest of the time he’s quite a normal bloke. But like I say, in his spare time he gets himself tanked up on crystal meth and locks himself in his garage. He says that sometimes he’ll wake up on his garage floor in the morning and there’ll be this thing beside him that he’s made and he’s got no memory at all of making it. He can’t remember a thing. It must be really strange,’ Dale said, inserting the last clip with pincer-like fingers. ‘Like seeing a part of yourself that’s invisible.’
He liked his friends – he thought he might have given me the wrong impression earlier – though he knew plenty of people who were still carrying on at forty the way that they had been at twenty-five: he actually found it slightly depressing, the spectacle of grown men frenziedly partying, still shoving things up their noses and whirling like brides on packed dance floors; personally, he had better things to do.
He straightened up and examined his work in the mirror, his fingertips resting lightly on my shoulders.
‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘that kind of life – the parties, the drugs, the staying up all night – is basically repetitive. It doesn’t get you anywhere and it isn’t meant to, because what it represents is freedom.’ He picked up the pink plastic dish and stirred its contents with the paintbrush. ‘And to stay free,’ he said, coating the brush with the thick brown paste, ‘you have to reject change.’
I asked him what he meant by that, and he stood for a moment with his eyes fixed on mine in the mirror, the paintbrush suspended in mid-air. Then he looked away again, taking a strand of hair and applying the paste to it with careful strokes.
‘Well, it’s true, isn’t it,’ he said, somewhat petulantly.
I said I wasn’t sure: when people freed themselves they usually forced change on everyone else. But it didn’t necessarily follow that to stay free was to stay the same. In fact, the first thing people sometimes did with their freedom was to find another version of the thing that had imprisoned them. Not changing, in other words, deprived them of what they’d gone to such trouble to attain.
‘It’s a bit like a revolving door,’ Dale said. ‘You’re not inside and you’re not outside. You can stay in it going round and round for as long as you like, and as long as you’re doing that you can call yourself free.’ He laid aside the strand of painted hair and began to paint a new section. ‘All I’m saying,’ he said, ‘is that freedom is overrated.’
Next door to us Sammy was running her fingers through the boy’s dark, unruly hair, feeling its texture and its length, while his eyes looked sideways in alarm. His hands gripped the chrome armrests of his chair. She swept the hair first to one side then the other, looking closely at him in the mirror, then picked up her comb and made a neat parting down the middle. The boy looked immediately anxious and Sammy laughed.
‘I’ll leave it like that, shall I?’ she said. ‘Don’t panic, only joking. It’s just so that I can get it the same length on both sides. You don’t want to go around with your hair all different lengths, do you?’
The boy looked away again silently.
‘What’s it called,’ Dale said, ‘when you have one of those bloody great blinding flashes of insight that changes the way you look at things?’
I said I wasn’t sure: a few different words sprang to mind.
Dale twitched his paintbrush irritably.
‘It’s something to do with a road,’ he said.
Road to Damascus, I said.
‘I had a road-to-Damascus moment,’ he said. ‘Last New Year’s Eve, of all times. I bloody hate New Year. That was part of it, realising that I bloody hated New Year’s Eve.’
A group of them had been at his flat, he said. They were getting ready to go out and he starting thinking about the fact that he hated it, and thinking that everyone else probably hated it too but that no one was prepared to say so. When everyone had their coats on, he announced that he’d decided to stay at home.
‘I just suddenly couldn’t be bothered,’ he said.
Why not, I said.
For a long time he didn’t reply, painting the strands of hair one after another until I thought he either hadn’t heard my question or was choosing to ignore it.
‘I was sitting there on my sofa,’ he said, ‘and it just suddenly happened.’
He stirred the paintbrush in the dish, coating each side again carefully with the brown paste.
‘It was this bloke,’ he said. ‘I didn’t really know him. He was sitting there doing lines that he’d laid out all neatly for himself on the coffee table. I suddenly just felt really sorry for him. I don’t know what it was about him,’ Dale said. ‘He’d lost all his hair, poor bastard.’
He unclipped a new section and began to paint it. I watched the way he distributed the paste all along the strand in even strokes. He started at the root but became more meticulous the further away from it he got, as though he had learned to resist the temptation to concentrate his labours there at the beginning.
‘He had this funny pudgy little face,’ Dale said, pausing with his paintbrush in the air. ‘It must have been the combination of the baldness and the funny face that did it. I thought, that bloke looks like a baby. What’s a baby doing sitting on my sofa shoving coke up his nose? And once I’d started seeing it that way I couldn’t stop. Suddenly they all started looking like that. It was a bit like being on acid,’ he said, dipping his paintbrush again in the dish, ‘if I can cast my mind back that far.’
Sammy had started gingerly snipping the boy’s hair with a pair of scissors.
‘What sort of things are you into, then?’ she asked him.
He gave a little shrug, the secretive smile on his lips.
‘Football?’ she said. ‘Or the what’s-it-called – the Xbox. All you boys are into those, aren’t you? Do you play Xbox with your friends?’
The boy shrugged again.
Everyone obviously thought he was completely mad, Dale went on, for staying at home while all of them went off clubbing. He had had to pretend he was ill. Once upon a time it would have terrified him, the prospect of spending New Year’s Eve alone, but on this occasion he couldn’t get rid of them fast enough. He suddenly felt he’d seen through it, seen through them all. What he’d realised in his Damascene moment was that the people in his sitting room – himself included – weren’t adults: they were children in overgrown bodies.
‘And I don’t mean,’ he said, ‘to be patronising when I say that.’
‘My little girl’s about your age,’ Sammy was saying to the boy in the next chair. ‘You’re what, eleven, twelve?’
The boy did not reply.
‘You look about the same age as her,’ Sammy said. ‘With her and her friends it’s all make-up and boys now. You’d think they’re a bit young to be starting all that, wouldn’t you? But you can’t stop them. The problem with girls,’ she went on, ‘is they don’t have as many hobbies as boys. They don’t
have as many things to do. They sit around talking while the boys are out playing football. You wouldn’t believe,’ she said, ‘how complicated their relationships are already. It’s all that talking: if they were outside running around they wouldn’t have time for all the politics.’ She moved around the back of his chair, still snipping. ‘Girls can be quite nasty, can’t they?’
The boy glanced over at the woman he had come in with. She had put down her phone and was now sitting reading her book.
‘That your mum?’ Sammy said.
The boy nodded.
‘She must find you quiet,’ Sammy said. ‘My daughter never shuts up. Can you hold your head still, please?’ she added, pausing with the scissors in mid-air. ‘I can’t cut it if you keep moving your head. No,’ she went on, ‘she never stops talking, my daughter. She’s yakking all day from morning to night, on the phone to her friends.’
While she spoke the boy was moving his eyes up and down and from side to side though his head remained motionless, as if he were having an eye test.
‘It’s all about your friends at your age, isn’t it?’ Sammy said.
By now it was completely dark outside. Inside the salon all the lights were on. There was music playing, and the droning sound of passing traffic could be faintly heard from the street. There was a great bank of glass shelves against one wall where hair products stood for sale in pristine rows, and when a lorry passed too close outside it shuddered slightly and the jars and bottles rattled in their places. The room had become a dazzling chamber of reflecting surfaces while the world outside became opaque. Everywhere you looked, there was only the reflection of what was already there. Often I had walked past the salon in the dark and had glanced in through the windows. From the darkness of the street it was almost like a theatre, with the characters moving around in the bright light of the stage.