by Shari Low
Do not speak. Do not speak. Do not. I was talking to myself and, apparently, Mrs. Marshall’s much lauded psychic powers (for three years she’d been telling me about her weekly conversations with her sister Patsy, who has been dead since 1988) were switched off, because she didn’t pick up on my reticence to discuss the matter further.
‘I mean, who’d have thought wee Gary Collins would turn out to be a star? I knew him when he was a toddler running about in the nuddy and now that lovely Ross King on the radio says he’s going to be bigger than Jason Donovan.’
Yep, who’d have bloody thought it? Stardom. Fortune. Fame. And now he had a number one hit with a song he’d told Smash Hits that he wrote after ‘a night with an old girlfriend, when he realised that they weren’t physically compatible and he would have to break her heart’.
I could feel the familiar anxiety twisting my guts and it was all I could do not to pepper the walls of the shop with a dozen heated rollers. Getting ‘humped and dumped’ on the night you lose your virginity was bad enough, but to have someone actually write an international hit that basically accused you of being a terrible shag? My dignity had officially battered itself to death with a rolled-up teenage music magazine.
Our whole town knew that he never went out with anyone called Sue and, let’s face it, it’s not exactly a leap of artistic creativity from ‘Sue’ to ‘Lou’. Oh, the humiliation. It was painful enough when only my nearest and dearest knew that he’d got his way then buggered off before daybreak, but now? Public shame. People laughed at me in queue at the post office. The ladies in the baker’s couldn’t look at me with a straight face. And if one more teenage boy rattled the window of the salon and made rude gestures at me there was going to be carnage. The only small consolation was that I’d heard he dumped Rosaline Harper the minute the money started coming in and now she had a flourishing career in a Glasgow massage parlour called Wandering Hands.
I suddenly realised that I’d stopped backcombing Mrs. Marshall’s curls and was now rubbing the side of my hip.
‘Are you OK there dear?’
I snapped back to the present. ‘I’m fine thanks, Mrs. Marshall. Just an old injury. It plays up when I’ve been on my feet too long.’ Deep breaths. Deep breaths. And let the tension go. Mr. Patel had been teaching me how to take calming breaths but I had a feeling that I was too far up the stress scale to be cured by inhalation and exhalation alone.
‘OK, you two, you can relax.’ I attempted a calming, carefree smile in the direction of Rosie and Angie. ‘And if you’ve finished clearing up, you can head off. The girls are coming in so . . .’
‘Hellooooooooooooo!’
Mrs. Marshall’s psychic powers may have been tuned out but it seemed like Lizzy’s were right on form as she charged in the door at that exact moment carrying multiple garment bags aloft in each hand. ‘Hi, Mrs. Marshall, you’re looking deadly,’ she announced with a grin. ‘The men won’t be able to keep their hands off you at the bingo tonight.’
Mrs. Marshall blushed furiously. Her husband had died in the 70s but she’d reliably informed me that last year he’d finally given her paranormal permission to move on and find a replacement to share her twilight gambling years. Thus the weekly hair appointments and the interest in songs about matters of the heart by local bloody heroes.
Lizzy hung her baggage on the nearby coat stand, kissed me on the cheek, then plonked herself down on the next chair, ignoring the fact that a large strip of gaffer tape was the only thing stopping the foam stuffing from escaping the red leatherette covering.
There was no denying the shop was getting shabby. And, in all honesty, that was the biggest reason for my general dissatisfaction with life these days. The Gary Collins episode was just my lost cherry on top.
The salon was owned by Donna Maria, an eccentric Italian lady who had lost all interest since she married the bloke who owned the town’s mattress warehouse a few years before. They now lived in permanently rested bliss and spent all day counting his considerable fortune. Apparently there was big money in mattresses – and not just in the way Rosaline Harper made it.
Donna Maria had more or less given up on the salon now and left me and two other stylists, Wendy and Pamela, to run it. There were definitely pluses to the situation – flexible hours, long tea breaks and free hair maintenance for family and friends. But the cons outweighed the pros. The salon was getting tired. Every day was more or less exactly like the one before. And as long as I stayed here nothing was going to change. Lately, I’d been beginning to think it was time to move on. I had ideas. Plans. Ambition. Things I wanted to achieve. And I would, just as soon as I stopped daydreaming about getting my own salon and rising to stardom in the hairdressing world and took steps to actually achieving it. Quitting a dead-end job in Weirbank would be a start, but then, apart from the teenagers making filthy signs at me through the window, I was comfortable here. Happy. Content. Some of the time.
I gave Mrs. Marshall’s coiffure a final spray and used a hand mirror to show her the back view. She acted like it was a delightful surprise despite the fact that I’d been styling it exactly the same way since the first day she sat in my chair.
‘Right we’re off then,’ Angie said, as she and Rosie headed for the door.
‘G’night, girls,” I chirped. “Don’t forget your share of the tips. I’ve left it in an envelope on the desk.’ It wasn’t compulsory to share tips but the memory of surviving on thirty quid a week was too fresh to keep the perks to myself.
‘Doing anything nice tonight?’ I asked, praying that whatever Angie was doing, she’d be accompanied by a responsible adult. She reminded me so much of Lizzy at that age: dippy, accident prone, funny, naive, with a fractured relationship with reality.
‘Yeah, we’re going to see Silence of the Lambs,’ Rosie replied.
‘I hate nature films,’ Angie said, pouting.
‘Me too,’ Lizzy interjected. It was like looking at two kindred spirits, separated at birth.
The bell on the door trilled as the girls left, passing Ginger on the way in. We heard the clanging of the bottles before we saw her. One vodka, one gin, one tonic, accompanied by two large cartons of fresh orange. And, by the looks of things, she had a head start on us.
She did something between a stagger and a lunge towards the first available seat and then forgot to keep her feet on the floor, so spun around three times before coming to a halt. Thankfully, dizziness prevented her from catching the look that passed between Lizzy and I.
‘What about you girls then? Are you off to the cinema tonight too?’ Mrs. Marshall asked as I helped her on with her coat. If she really had psychic powers, wouldn’t she know this already?
‘Nope, we’ve got a hen night tonight,’ I replied.
‘Oooh, lovely! Whose is it? Anyone I know?’
I made a practised effort to inject excitement and enthusiasm into my expression and tone, then gestured to one of my lifelong best friends.
‘As a matter of fact, it’s . . .’
Ten
‘Marry me?’ he repeated.
Despite the streams of tears that were flowing down her face, his breathless girlfriend sniffed loudly, then, after an excruciatingly long pause, broke into a beaming grin.
It was the third proposal in La Fiora that Valentine’s night, but thankfully, the only one at our table. Walking into the restaurant had been like entering the land that decorative restraint forgot. Pink walls. Pink streamers. Pink table covers. Pink balloons. And smack, bang in the middle of it, three guys with very pink faces looking about as comfortable as my posterior in my too-tight pink pants.
It took several rounds of unidentifiable pink cocktails before the mood completely relaxed and the laughter at our table rose to our normal level, much to the irritation of the earnest couples attempting to have a poignant romantic experience at the surrounding tables.
Admittedly, I’m slightly biased against the traditional celebration of pink tinfoil tat.
Valentine’s night is my least favourite night of the year. A lifetime trapped in the sycophantic love fantasy of Dave and Della Cairney, topped off with the romantic success of, say, a celibate hostage in a siege situation, had left me with a severe aversion to the day of fluffy pink hearts and flowers. I’d decided that should I ever meet Saint Valentine, I’d have no option but to lock him in a room with a three-foot padded card that belted out ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You,’ on a repetitive loop.
Since the disaster with Charlie it had been strictly short-term relationship stints for me. A few weeks here and there, and the minute they started to act like the relationship was going to get any deeper than a meaningless fling, I’d give him the ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ speech and move on to the next one. It was safe. Easier. Less complicated. And, actually, more fun. I had the occasional man for formal functions, movies, weekend breaks and bendy activities and my girls for nights out, carefree jollies and adventure. As far as I was concerned, that’s the way it was going to stay. We were like Thelma and Louise, but with an extra passenger and without that cute cowboy. What was his name? Brad something. Bound to be a one-hit wonder, but in the name of the clitoral shakes, he was gorgeous.
Where was I? Right – girls, together forever, no man could come between us.
‘You know, I’ve got a feeling Dominic is going to pop the question tonight,’ Ginger had announced in the taxi on our way to meet our respective dates.
‘What – fancy a shag? He pops that question every night,’ Lizzy joked. ‘Don’t think I don’t hear you two at it in the bathroom. And I don’t even want to know why my loofah has disappeared.’
While the taxi driver had a choking fit in the front, Ginger leaned over and ruffled Lizzy’s newly styled hair. It was pulled up and tied on top of her head and then spiked up with a can and a half of fast-set hairspray. She looked like a cross between Pebbles from The Flintstones and Cher after an altercation with a live electrical socket.
‘So what would you say?’ I asked Ginger after I pulled them apart and leaned over to thump the driver between the shoulder blades. Thankfully we were stopped at a set of traffic lights. He gasped out a thanks as the lights turned to green.
‘About what?’ Ginger asked.
‘If he asked you to marry him.’
She thought about it for a moment, her face flushed to a shade close to her hair colour. ‘You know what, I think I’d say yes.’
‘No way!’ And there was Lizzy’s familiar screech. ‘We’re much too young for all that marriage stuff.’
‘No we’re not. Half the girls we went to school with are already married and Stacey O’Conner has four children.’
She was right. But, in fairness, she had married on her sixteenth birthday and her ‘miracle twins’ were born six and a half months later. The priest maintained they were premature and it was an act of God, despite the bouncing babes weighing eight and a half pounds each. Her next set of twins were born two years later and I don’t think she’s been out of the house since.
Determined to avoid an argument, and pretty sure Ginger was being deliberately provocative, I steered the conversation on to safer ground – the merits of Kevin Costner – and kept it there all the way to the restaurant. Ginger getting married? No way. She’d only been seeing Dominic the draughtsman, for a year and she’d only just qualified as a podiatrist – and yes, she still hated the sight of feet. However, although she only admitted it in times of severe intoxication, I knew she still hadn’t lost hope that there was more to life than growing old in Weirbank. Ginger was destined for bigger things than a small town could ever give her – she just hadn’t found the escape route that led to a different life yet. Still, if I had to put money on anyone flying from here it was Ginger. As soon as she had a few months of experience in the clinic, I reckoned she would head off to work in Glasgow, meet some wild rocker who was having issues with his corns, and never be seen again.
When we reached La Fiora the bloke at the door told us that our partners were already seated. We let him take our coats and then converged on the foyer mirror, dabbing down the shine with Elizabeth Arden powder and sharing a Max Factor lip-gloss.
‘What about you and Sam, Lou? Any chance this one will last longer than a week?’ Lizzy probed.
Sam was my sympathy date. He worked in the same huge construction company as Ginger’s boyfriend Dominic the Draughtsman and Lizzy’s man, Adam the Accountant. There would have been a nice poetic balance if he was Sam the Surveyor or Sam the solicitor. Unfortunately, he did something in a department called AT. Or was it ET? Or IT? To be honest, over the half a dozen times or so that the other guys had dragged him along with us to even up the numbers, he’d talked about work so much that I’d started switching off as soon as he spoke about anything office-related.
‘Nope, don’t think this one’s going anywhere,’ I answered. ‘He’s a bit too geeky for me. He claims that one day we’ll all have computers in our houses and communicate with each other by talking to the screen. I think he’s on drugs.’
I made a final check that my hair was flowing down across the right side of my face. The scar was barely visible now, but that didn’t make me any less self-conscious. A broken pelvis, a broken leg, a fractured shoulder, a cracked nose and a face full of glass that required fifty-six stitches – that was the going rate for a relationship disaster these days. But I wasn’t bitter. I really wasn’t. I’d woken up in hospital eighteen hours after the car crash and spent the next day calming Josie down, persuading Red that it wasn’t his fault and just feeling oh so thankful to be alive and in (almost) one piece. Surprisingly, the Cortina hadn’t been to blame. Turns out that, in a tragic twist of fate, at the exact moment I drew alongside the Hillman Imp, the driver – Mr. Bert McTavish from Kelso – had suffered a fatal heart attack while laughing at a joke his wife told him, causing him to swerve across the road and force my car into the central reservation. Kind of put splitting up with a boyfriend into perspective. I prefer not to contemplate why I’ve never bumped into Charlie since then, but Josie does look a bit shifty when I mention his name.
I’ve learned my lesson – overblown romantic gestures are not for me.
The conversation we’d had earlier was completely forgotten, until a slightly sheepish guy at our table stood up as the pudding plates were taken away and cleared his throat, before lunging down to a one-legged kneeling position and pulling a small red box out of his pocket.
‘Babe,’ he said to his startled girlfriend in front of a shocked audience. ‘I know we’re young and I know we haven’t been together for, you know, years or anything like that . . .’
An appropriately persuasive opening, I’d say.
‘But the thing is, I . . . I, er, love you so much and would be . . . it would be great if . . . do you want to marry me?’
‘Open the box. Open the box,’ I whispered, still stunned but recovered enough to appreciate the sweetness of his words and to understand that he needed a helpful prompt.
‘Oh, right, I’ll erm, open . . .’
The ring was perfect. A small but beautiful solitaire on a white gold band.
‘Marry me?’ he repeated.
Despite the streams of tears that were flowing down her face, his breathless girlfriend sniffed loudly, then after an excruciatingly long pause, broke into a beaming grin.
‘I will,’ shrieked Lizzy. ‘Oh bloody hell, I definitely will!’
No one except me noticed that Ginger lifted her glass and downed her pink champagne in one large gulp.
Eleven
Lizzy
The St Kentigern Hotel, Glasgow. Friday night, 11pm
‘Oh God, I’m filling up. Don’t let me drink any more. I had no idea he was going to ask me. That was definitely a landmark moment for me. I can remember every minute of that night. Every single minute.’
‘Do you remember me thumping Dominic on the way home with the brand-new furry muff I’d bought from C&A that afternoon?’ Ginger asked. ‘I mean, a p
ink furry muff. Is it any wonder the guy didn’t propose to me?’
My eyes were watering profusely now but I wasn’t sure if they were happy tears, sad tears, nostalgic tears or too much wine tears.
‘And I remember the getting ready for my hen night in the salon too. After you told Mrs. Marshall it was my hen night, she went quiet for a minute and then told me that her dead husband had just informed her that I was marrying my lifelong soul mate.’
‘Do you think they have crack in heaven?’ Lou joked.
I feigned dramatic petulance. ‘I can’t believe you said that! Adam is my lifelong soul mate. He is. It’s just that . . .’ Another memory hit me and I back-pedalled furiously. ‘I remember being so thrilled that day. I remember saying “I can’t believe that this time tomorrow I’ll be married!” And then you said . . .’
Lou took up her part of the story. ‘“I can’t believe you’ve been engaged for eight months already. It seems like only yesterday he proposed.”’
Ginger got in on the act. ‘And I said, “I can’t believe we’re having a hen night the day before the wedding. It’s madness.”’
It was so vivid I could almost hear the conversation in my head. ‘And I told you that we hadn’t missed a Friday Girl’s Night in years and we weren’t going to start now. Then I assured you that we’d just have a couple of drinks and then head home for an early night.’
Lou held up her glass. ‘A toast,’ she announced. ‘To youth and foolish optimism.’
Twelve
Lou
Still 1991 – Aged 21
‘Why? Why did we ever think it would be a good idea to have a hen night on the actual eve of the wedding?’ Lizzy groaned.
‘Because we had four hen nights and we were running out of time to squeeze in another.’
It was true. We hadn’t so much had a hen night as a hen month and it had almost been a relief to get to the swapping of the ‘I do’s bit.