‘Style and colour.’ He sighed impatiently. ‘Midnight blue is not your colour. As for the style, your hair is far too floppy and your face is too…’ He stretched his hands like an accordion player.
‘Wide?’
‘Fat.’ He closed one eye and held up a thumb like an artiste.
‘Can you fluff it up like yours?’
‘I don’t fluff! I jizsch!’ He rolled his eyes again. ‘Hair like yours should not go up but out.’
Philippe had a peculiar way of cutting that I put down to artistic genius. He cut in rapid bursts with his eyes closed. After each flurry of scissor work he sighed and surveyed his handiwork. The cutting took less than five minutes.
‘Voilà, voilà!’ He did a flamenco flourish and clicked his scissors above his head like castanets.
‘That’s it?’ My hair looked like a wilted lettuce leaf.
‘I haven’t coloured or jizsched yet!’ He did the thumb trick again. ‘I see amber with nougat glimmers.’
‘Isn’t amber like ginger?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’
My scalp was tingling from the hair dye and my hair was still wet when Philippe placed two adhesive strips over my eyes and assured me that surprise was part of the jizsch experience. My anxiety rose as the blow-dryer whirred to life next to my ear. I didn’t like surprises involving blindfolds and it was all Carmel’s fault. My one shot at blind man’s bluff had ended in disaster. Instead of hiding behind a bush or a chair, Carmel had lured me into Roslyn Scone’s garden and called out from behind a large cactus. It took Mum several days to remove all the cactus needles. The incident left me with a profound fear of all desert plants.
‘Voilà encore!’ Philippe removed the eye strips.
I looked at the mirror and blinked. Then blinked again. My hair was bright ginger and streaked with peroxide white. It had been teased into spikes but instead of standing up, the spikes stuck out sideways like two giant sea urchins. Even more disturbing, I could now see a resemblance to my brother John in my face. When I unfocused my eyes, I could’ve been John wearing the fright wig of a clown. I suppressed a wave of carsickness.
‘The amber-nougat is superb!’ Philippe narrowed his eyes and leaned back from his bony hips. ‘I’ve followed the natural horizontal plane from the crown of your head.’
I was too stunned to say anything. My hair was too flat on top to be a Terrence Fig and too ginger to be taken seriously. He may as well have called me Art Garfunkel and be done with it. I was holding back tears as I was unwrapped and bustled toward the unfriendly girl at the counter. Her face lit up when she saw me.
‘Fabulous! Love the horizontal effect. Très originale.’
‘Really?’ I touched the outer perimeter of the urchins. The hair had been reinforced with something powerful and felt like fibreglass.
‘That amber is très David Bowie.’
‘Très?’
‘Very très.’
I had to admit, Bowie’s hair had been ambery on the cover of Aladdin Sane. On Scary Monsters he’d gone all the way and done bright orange. I examined myself in the mirror over the counter. There was no doubt about it, the colour was très David Bowie. And the horizontal plane was très originale. I’d never seen anyone in Hobart with hair as horizontal as mine.
I stepped out of the salon feeling très revamped and walked briskly to the bus stop, monitoring my image in shop windows along the way. I had agreed to visit Dad’s place and was now running late. The visit was Carmel’s idea. She’d talked me into meeting her there to see his new car. The hairstyle must’ve upped my credibility because the bus driver didn’t say a thing as I bought my ticket. He just stared hard and raised his eyebrows.
‘You’ve missed them, mate. He’s taken Carmel out for a spin.’ Trevor Bland glanced at my hair and smiled. Compliments weren’t his style. ‘Come in and have a drink while you’re waiting.’
This was a turn-up for the books. I’d never been offered a drink by an adult before, especially not by a friend of my father. Trevor led me to the kitchen, a Spartan room painted pastel yellow. ‘What’s your poison, mate?’
‘What time is it, Trevor?’ I had to be at work at five.
‘Beer o’clock, I reckon.’ Trevor flashed me an eager smile and consulted the digital Casio on his wrist. ‘It’s three-thirsty.’
Trevor’s fridge contained butter, sausages, a bottle of milk and beer. Three of the four shelves were stacked with Tickworth lager. This arrangement must’ve pleased my father. ‘You can’t go wrong with beer’ was one of his stock phrases. He believed beer-drinkers never became alcoholics. A drinker only became one of those if he drank the hard stuff. Dad also insisted that beer was an excellent deterrent to drug use. He liked to warn against drinks that came in large open glasses. ‘Drug peddlers slip things into the fancy stuff and get you hooked but they can’t get the drugs down the neck of a beer bottle so easily. Stick to beer. You can’t go wrong.’ Dad thought he knew everything.
‘Have you got whiskey, Trevor?’
‘So it’s whiskey you want.’
Trevor put down the two opened beer bottles and took out a dusty old bottle of Spirit of Cork. I recognised the bottle from our china cabinet. Dad had won it in a Christmas raffle years ago. He didn’t drink spirits but out of spite had taken the bottle with him when he left. Trevor filled a regular beer glass with the whiskey and handed it to me.
The whiskey was like nothing I’d ever drunk. It tasted like the smell of perfume and sent a jolt of alarm across my shoulders and down my arms. The inside of my mouth shrivelled. My tongue stiffened and felt like a wooden clothes peg. I swallowed with a shudder and took another. By the fifth mouthful I’d neutralised my nervous system and my eyes had stopped watering. I looked over at Trevor. He’d quietly finished his first bottle of beer and seamlessly moved on to the second. Trevor Bland was a benign, shadowy person to me. I’d known him all my life but had hardly exchanged a word with him. I now noticed he wore glasses. They were dark, old-fashioned frames that gave him the look of Mr Potato Head. He saw me looking and smiled.
‘I hear you’re working down at the docks.’
‘At the waterfront. The hotel.’ The whiskey was sending out heat waves. I felt as if I’d swallowed a hot-water bottle and it had lodged in my chest. The second glass was going down easier than the first.
‘Lots of nonsense goes on down there.’
‘The hotel’s got four stars. The place is a magnet for VIPs. It’s a career stepping stone.’
‘You ever been into those public facilities?’
My hand froze halfway to my mouth. I looked at Trevor and shook my head, downing the rest of the whiskey. The hot-water bottle exploded behind my ribs. I broke into a sweat.
‘Just wondering.’ Trevor refilled my glass and expertly popped the top off another beer bottle with a knife handle. ‘Lot of rough trade, I hear.’
I nodded and continued drinking.
‘You ever considered the priesthood?’
‘No.’ I shook my head. Conversation with Trevor Bland was a minefield. I knew where this was leading and had to put a stop to it. ‘I’ve never wanted to be a male nurse either.’
‘I’d never tell your father this, but I almost took up the dog collar once.’ Trevor looked into the distance and smiled. ‘Imagine, I could’ve been taking your confession right now.’
‘I have nothing to confess.’
‘Don’t worry, mate, your secrets would be safe with me.’
‘What secrets?’
The front door opened and Dad’s laughter filled the house. It had been years since I heard that sound. Carmel called out something from the front step as he walked up the hall. Dad entered the kitchen and his laughter stopped like a turned tap.
‘What the hell have you done to your bloody hair?’ His mouth stayed open at the end of his sentence.
‘I’ve had it amber-nougated.’ I wanted him to laugh again. I tried to stand but my legs were rubbery and elusive.
&
nbsp; ‘That’s my whiskey!’
‘Spirit of Cork for a corky Corkle.’
Dad didn’t laugh.
Trevor got up and started doing something at the sink.
Carmel came in and whooped. ‘Hey, it’s Coco the clown!’
‘David Bowie.’
‘It’s ginger.’
‘Amber.’ I’d lost the desire to be funny. ‘Where’ve you been?’
‘Joy riding. Dad let me drive the Holden. You missed lunch at the Red Rooster.’
The Red Rooster was my father’s idea of quality dining. The helpings were large and the prices cheap. It was furnished with plastic seats and tablecloths and its windows were permanently steamed up. The salt and pepper came in old instant coffee jars with holes punched in the top and you ordered your meal through the service hole over the deep fryer. Half a chicken and chips was the same price as a whole chicken and chips. Dad said only stupid people took the half-chicken option, and on this we agreed. The chickens were preboiled and thrown into the deep fryer as ordered.
I felt a wave of carsickness at the thought of deep-fried chicken. My stomach was turbulent and watery. Trevor’s kitchen was suddenly very small and hot. There were too many people and too many uncomfortable unspoken things. I had to get out. No, I had to get to work! It was ten to five. I looked at Carmel. ‘We’ve got to go.’
‘Keep your hair on, Ginger Nuts.’ Carmel winked at Dad. ‘Nothing stops the Locomotive.’
I heard Dad’s voice as I stumbled down the hall, ‘He’s as pissed as a newt on my whiskey and didn’t even look at the car! And what’s with that bloody hair? He’s as bad as that brother of hers.’ I swung out of the house and into the blinding white of an overcast Hobart afternoon. Carmel’s hand landed between my shoulder blades and propelled me into the Hub’s ute in the driveway. The journey passed in a sickening flash with ‘My Sharona’ belting out of the cassette player. It was five to five on the ute’s clock when we jerked to a stop at the rear of the hotel. Carmel bundled me out and took off with a screech of tyres.
The effect of the whiskey seemed to expand exponentially as I entered the hotel. I followed my usual route to the service bay but found myself directing action from outside my body. I fumbled into my uniform, leaving half the jacket buttons undone. The hat wouldn’t sit on my hair so I gave up on it and scurried out.
A Merino Casino tour bus was pulling up as I got to the front of the hotel. I put on a sprint to reach the door and was almost there when my foot caught on a kink in the carpet. I tripped and fell headlong, skidding the last two metres on my stomach like a bobsledder. My chin came to rest on the foot of a large woman. She shrieked and clutched at the buttons of her cardigan.
The driver appeared. ‘What the bloody hell?’
‘I saw ginger fur.’ The woman removed her foot from under my chin. ‘I thought it was one of those Tasmanian wombats.’
‘Debble.’
I wanted to explain that it was a Tasmanian devil not a wombat but my tongue had hardened and the inside of my mouth had shrunk. I realised I was thirsty, thirstier than I’d ever been in my life. The idea of water cut through the murki-ness of the whiskey. I pushed myself up and lost balance, latching on to the driver. We locked arms at the elbow and I swung him around like a square dancer.
‘Get the hell offa me, you clown!’ He shook me loose at high speed.
Stumbling to stay upright, I crossed the road and mounted the kerb at a gallop. I made for the fountain in the middle of the roundabout, a large cement structure of a naked woman in a clamshell. Throwing the front half of my body over the clam rim, I scooped water with my hands, drinking greedily until the rage of thirst abated and my head cleared. The front of my uniform was saturated but I was beyond caring.
When I turned, I saw thirty people staring at me from the tour bus. Bevan Bunion was standing on the kerb next to the driver. His face was crimson. He pointed to me and despite the distance and haze of whiskey I could see two fingers. His index finger was doing the pointing while his pinky stood out in self-righteous imitation.
‘You’re fired!’
‘Ha?’ Fired? My mind whirred. I shook my head.
‘I’ll ha you!’
‘And I’ll hardi-ha you!’
‘Clown!’
Firing me was one thing but calling me names was pure spite. I sat down on the clam and cupped my hands around my mouth like a megaphone.
‘And you’re a…’ I tried to think of something that would really hurt, something personal and below the beltline. ‘…an onion head. Bunion the Onion. That’s what everyone calls you.’
There, I’d said it.
Satisfied, I rocked back on the edge of the clam and experienced the dread of freefall. I heard a splash. Everything went dark.
26
I came to in a strange bed encircled by curtains. My mouth was dry and my head was dull and painful. I was examining a plastic bracelet on my wrist when a hairy hand pulled back a curtain. It belonged to a thin, unshaven man in his sixties.
‘You right, mate?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Should’ve heard them whinging when they carried you in. They reckoned you weighed a ton.’
‘A ton?’ To my groggy mind, a ton seemed faintly possible.
‘They’re keeping you in for observation. You’ve probably got a brain tumour. I’ve got one the size of a duck egg just behind my ear. They’re as common as hell.’ The man tapped the side of his head. ‘Mine’s inoperable.’
I fell back into a feverish sleep and dreamed about my brain tumour. It was the size of a Californian orange and sat on top of my brain toward the back of my head. The growth had forced the crown upward into a point and was attracting comments. Anne-Marie had just asked if I was the oldest child in my family when I was shaken awake. The nurse was a large woman with wrists made for arm-wrestling. She frowned at my hair and told me to get dressed.
‘What happened to the man who was here earlier?’ My voice was a croak. There was definitely something very wrong with me.
‘He died. Inoperable brain tumour.’
I slumped back on the bed. All the power left my limbs. I imagined Mum and Jimmy Budge weeping at my graveside and felt a stab of pain in the crown of my head.
‘Doctor’s waiting.’
‘Can I have a wheelchair?’
The nurse wheeled me in to see Dr Rhonda Dickey, a big-boned woman with the colourless, no-nonsense face of an accountant. I probed the top of my head with shaky fingers as she read through my notes with a ‘Hmm, hmm, hmm.’ The crown was definitely higher than the rest of the skull. I braced myself.
‘How big is it, doctor?’ I tapped my head the way the dead man had done.
‘Bigger than normal.’ She frowned. ‘But the size of your head has nothing to do with your condition.’
‘The tumour?’
‘You don’t have a tumour.’
I felt warm tingling in my hands and toes. My vision cleared. Dr Dickey had to be one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. In fact, the entire room was beautiful. The linoleum tiles on the floor were a perfect shade of beige. The curtains were pastel blue. The walls were a soothing mint green. What a symphony of colour.
‘You drank too much, fell over and bumped your head. End of story.’ She sighed and shut the file. ‘I think you should get out of that wheelchair. You look ridiculous.’
‘Aren’t you going to bandage me or something?’
‘We don’t bandage hangovers and I doubt we’d have enough gauze to go round that hair of yours.’
Despite the drenching, my hair had kept its basic horizontal structure. The urchins were still intact but the points had lost their sharpness. I stopped in the Gents on my way out and tried to tease some life back into them.
Mum was waiting in the foyer with tears in her eyes. She examined my face and head for damage. ‘Thank goodness. I nearly had a heart attack when that buffoon called.’
‘Bunion?’
‘I told him I ha
d a good mind to sue the hotel.’
‘That clam’s left a lump on the back of my head. It’s a public danger.’
‘He said you’d tried to bite a guest’s foot.’ Mum led me to the car park with an arm around my shoulder. ‘I told him to stop right there, that you’ve never bitten another human being in your entire life. That’s slander, I warned.’
‘I make one silly mistake and I get fired.’
‘The Dingo was never right for you.’ She opened the passenger door of the Torana like a chauffeur. ‘That porter’s hat looked like a biscuit tin.’
‘It didn’t go with the new hair.’
‘What a shame I didn’t see it before the accident. It’s gone all flat on top.’ She shook her head and started the car. ‘What on earth was your father thinking giving you whiskey?’
‘It didn’t cost him anything. It was the bottle he’d won in the Christmas raffle.’
‘And that Trevor should’ve known better.’ Mum shook her head again.
I didn’t reply to this. It wasn’t Trevor’s fault. He was only trying to be kind.
‘I almost forgot to tell you, Julian. You’ll never guess who’s featured in the Wool Board Monthly.’ She paused for dramatic effect as she parked the car. ‘Jimmy Budge! Your old friend from Ulverston.’
Jimmy. The sound of his name hit me like a head-butt. My chest felt as if it was caving in on itself. I pretended to cough into my jumper.
‘You need to lie down and take it easy.’
My mother made up the couch as a bed and put Tiffany biscuits and a bottle of lemonade on a tray. She turned on the TV with the sound down and placed the Wool Board Monthly on the pillow next to the remote control. I was to read, watch TV and put it all behind me. She assured me that something better was sure to come my way soon. ‘You’ve got star quality. Twinkle, twinkle.’
Mum went out of the room and came back lipsticked and dressed to go out. She had an appointment with the doctor for women’s business. I knew this sort of business involved a gynaecologist and didn’t ask for details. Gynaecology had about as much appeal to me as fire-fighting or speedboat racing. I couldn’t understand how any man would willingly sign up for such a job.
Julian Corkle is a Filthy Liar Page 19