by Ruth Thomas
Joe is lucky because (a) he does not mope around for hours in front of mirrors, and (b) he has not inherited my straight, straight hair.
Instead he has his father’s waves and kinks. Curls I used to long for. When he was still a baby people sometimes described his curls as ‘angelic’, which made me simultaneously proud and envious. He had these dark golden, bouncing curls. He had, the hairdresser used to inform me on my visits to Fringe Benefits, ‘hair to die for’.
‘You see the way Joey’s hair stays in place?’ she said, attempting, with a cylindrical brush, to flick some life into my hair. ‘People pay a fortune on perms to get their hair to sit like that.’
‘Really?’ I replied, thinking how strange it was to describe hair as sitting, like a patient dog.
‘That do you?’ the hairdresser asked then, bending down towards my face and pulling two strands of hair across my cheeks, to check they were the same length. They weren’t, quite.
‘That’s great,’ I replied. ‘That’s lovely.’ And I smiled in the mirror. I didn’t have a clue what I should do with my hair or my life.
I visited Fringe Benefits for over a year but my conversations with Lorraine never really got past the subject of how lovely my haircuts were. I was no good at conversations with other girls any more: a part of me, at that time, had closed down. Sometimes I thought I might begin a conversation about something – my plans to go back to school or to sixth-form college – but my nerve would buckle as soon as I saw the other clients ranged around the walls like wilting foxgloves beneath the lilac hairdryers.
I should go somewhere else. I’ve been coming here too long.
‘So, what would you like today, Rowena?’
My own flat, nice toys for Joe, a career, some fun, a boyfriend, a girl friend.
‘Just a trim today please.’
Lorraine considered and tapped the side of her face with her fingers. She had a silver bracelet on her left wrist, with the letter L attached to it.
‘Ever thought of a more flicky sort of fringe?’ she said one afternoon. (It was 1982 by now: Joe was two and my old school peers had all started at university.)
‘Hmm,’ I replied, looking around the salon at the women beneath the hairdryers. At the dried-out Easter cactus plants, the curled magazines and the cups of tea. It felt as if nothing had moved in there for years.
‘Go on,’ Lorraine coaxed, ‘have a bit of a change.’
I had an hour to spend at the hairdresser’s before I had to relieve my mother of babysitting duties (babysitting was a huge strain for all concerned).
‘OK,’ I said, ‘it’s about time I had a different look.’
‘Your little boy’s lucky, isn’t he?’ Lorraine observed, pleased that she had persuaded me. She pinned my hair up at the back and gently pushed my head forwards. ‘Them curls.’
‘He gets them from his dad,’ I replied wickedly into my plastic grey cape.
‘Really?’ Lorraine asked, her voice fading away. She cleared her throat, embarrassed. Everyone in that part of East Grinstead knew about the posh schoolgirl who had the baby, but pretended not to.
‘So,’ Lorraine said. ‘I’m going to do a sort of flicky look at the front, and short at the back.’
‘OK.’
Far away, in the distance, a radio was playing Bob Marley. No woman, no cry. Someone turned on a hairdryer. Someone laughed.
*
I remember leaving the hairdresser’s that day, running because I was late and Joe would be crying and my poor, ill mother would have on her long-suffering face. I remember turning the corner by the butcher’s shop, putting my hand up to the shortness at the back, the new flicks at the sides, and thinking, ‘I could be different. I could be different.’
The hairdresser helped me make that decision. She must have transmitted something through her silver scissors, along my hair and directly into my brain.
I began to think more clearly in those weeks. In a notebook covered in yogurt, I wrote down my achievements and plans:
I’ve got:
1. Maths and English
2. An A in French O-level
I could:
1. Go to sixth-form college
2. Study French
(University? I wrote in brackets. Nurseries? Grants? Check library, newspapers.)
*
I remember writing this as I lay on my flat stomach, on a tartan blanket in my parents’ garden, my son nearby, crashing into the flowerbeds. He was wearing the little jacket I had found in Oxfam – the one that had the typographical error printed all over it: cutey pi. He turned his head and smiled at me and said something in infant language about the leaves on my mother’s variegated holly. I leaned across and kissed his cheek.
*
My first step towards a career was a course for early school-leavers and people on benefit. It was located in a grey council building in the hinterland of East Grinstead. I left Joe with my parents for the day and clanged up the metal steps, a new cardboard folder under my arm.
The course was called ‘Steps to a New Career: The Challenge Ahead’.
The tutor (a woman whose name, I recall, was Felicity) was very upbeat. She wore enormous, swaying earrings and spent the whole of the first hour telling us how she had sorted her life out. Her name used to be Dawn, but she didn’t like that, she almost shouted, so she had changed it by deed poll. This was an example of how she had Overcome a Difficulty. And this attitude could be applied to finding a career.
We early school-leavers and people on benefit looked at her. There were eight of us. This was part of a government-sponsored ‘Into Work’ package. Either you attended or you paid back £100. (‘You get a free lunch,’ the ‘Into Work’ adviser had told me at my local DHSS office. ‘There is such a thing. I believe they do quite nice sandwiches.’)
Felicity’s life story involved four jobs, two years in America and a divorce. ‘So,’ she said in conclusion, ‘that’s enough talking from me. Now I’d like you all to introduce yourselves. Let’s start with you. Tell us all who you are and what your last job was.’
She turned to the very scared-looking man sitting beside me.
‘My name’s Bill,’ he squeaked. ‘I was a joiner.’
But he was better at joining wood than groups like this. He shoved his hands beneath his thighs, turned and looked at me.
‘Oh,’ I said. I wasn’t expecting to be in the spotlight so suddenly. ‘I’m Rowena. I’m just a …’
But I didn’t want to say anything about Joe. I didn’t want to say I had left school at fifteen because I had got pregnant.
‘A what?’ Felicity asked, smiling at me.
‘I don’t know. I just …’
‘No no, you never just do something, Rowena,’ Felicity said.
‘OK. I was … I am … I kind of …’
I thought of Joe and felt treacherous.
‘I’m a mother,’ I said.
‘That’s better,’ Felicity said, looking a little alarmed, her earrings sparkling beneath the fluorescent lights. ‘None of us is just something. The word “just” is not allowed in this room.’
And she stood up, walked over to the whiteboard, wrote JUST on it, then drew a line through it.
‘“Just” has been exterminated,’ she said. I almost expected her to throw her head back and laugh, like a villain in a cartoon. Instead, she smiled mildly, sat down again and looked at me.
‘Being a mother is one of the toughest jobs there is’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I mumbled, feeling that I might be about to cry. I was aware of the woman next to me bracing herself for an ordeal.
*
Some events, some days stay in your mind and you don’t even know why. I remember that day with great clarity. I remember having to do something called ‘Accelerated Learning: Dilemmas and Solutions’. This had involved shuffling around the room until we found someone to discuss a dilemma with. We had to discuss two problems each within six minutes. I grabbed the first person I could f
ind – a curly-haired woman who had once worked in a café. Her problem, she told me, was that she used to eat half the cakes before they had even made it on to the counter. ‘I did it for weeks before anyone found out it was me,’ she said, and I nodded sympathetically, like a priest in a confession box.
‘I mean, apart from putting on the weight,’ the woman said, ‘it meant we used to run out of things to sell by four o’clock.’
I tried to apply my mind to a solution. ‘Maybe,’ I suggested, ‘when you get a new job, you could eat a bowl of cereal or something before you …’
The woman looked at me and gave a small, unamused laugh. ‘It wouldn’t be the same if I just ate something at home,’ she said. ‘It was the thrill of the chase.’
She looked at her watch. ‘That’s one and a half minutes anyway. You have to talk about a problem now, duck.’
‘Oh God,’ I said. I couldn’t think of a small enough problem. Also, I really didn’t know how I could follow the woman’s cake story.
‘Go on,’ said the woman, ‘We all have problems. I’m all ears.’ But actually she was all eyes. Her eyes were enormous behind her glasses.
So I talked about getting pregnant. How I had not meant to but it had happened, quick as anything – there was this bloke I had had a crush on, and now I had a twenty-six-month-old son and I had screwed up. And my best friend didn’t talk to me any more. I hadn’t seen her for well over a year, but time … time seemed to have done strange things. It had moved and it hadn’t moved.
‘I love my baby and everything …’ I said, instantly regretting what a private subject I had chosen. The tears were beginning to well up behind my eyes, as they often did in those days. ‘You know, I wouldn’t ever have wanted to …’
The woman looked at me. She blinked. ‘You’re young,’ she said, somewhat irritably. ‘How old are you?’
‘Seventeen.’
The woman gave another short, slightly bitter laugh.
‘The world’s your oyster, darling.’
‘Yes, but it’s not, is it? It’s not exactly …’
The woman picked three shortbread biscuits off the catering trolley. ‘Have you tried to patch things up with your friend? Maybe she could babysit for you.’
I found it hard to comprehend how obtuse this woman was.
‘It’s a bit complicated,’ I said. ‘I really don’t think that’s likely to happen.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because we fell out. She thought …We never really talked about it, but I think she might have thought …’
I stopped talking. The woman was staring at me, her eyes enormous and uncomprehending. She took a bite of shortbread. I imagined how I might once have talked to Sally about her. The way we would have spoken about it. And a little picture came into my head then, of how it might have been; how different it might have been, if Sally had remained my friend. She could have been like an aunt to Joe. She could at least have continued to be my friend. But now I didn’t even know what she did any more. I didn’t know where she spent her days. She had left school, apparently, got some job in a plumber’s merchants: that was all I knew.
‘Quick, we have to swap again now,’ the woman said, looking around her at the other couples in the room. Then she launched into a story about going to the vet’s with her dog. ‘He had a distended stomach,’ she explained. ‘He looked like one of those airships. He looked as if he was about to explode …’
And I listened and looked at the rain bouncing off the window sills and knew something about my life would have to change.
Up-and-Down Buttonhole
Her award-winning embroidery was sent ahead a few days ago. Fed-exed, as somebody informed her on the phone. But she could not bear to do that to Mary and Martha: couldn’t place them in the hands of some man in a uniform and watch them disappearing into the ether. What if she never saw them again? What if they ended up on the other side of the world, received with confusion by someone in Alaska or New Guinea? So she packed Mary and Martha carefully into her portfolio, covering them in white tissue paper, smoothing the threads on the rough side.
*
She is on the point of leaving for the airport when there is a phone call.
‘Sperlin?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Sperlin?’
‘Oh. No, you’ve just missed her, I’m afraid. She’s on her way to school.’
‘Cool. Cheers.’
And he hangs up. Sally doesn’t have a clue who he is.
Two more calls follow while she is running around wondering where her keys are. The first is from Sue at In Stitches. ‘Nervous?’ she asks.
‘Extremely. And I’ve just gone and lost my keys.’
‘You’ll find them.’
‘Ha!’
‘We’re all rooting for you, Sal. You’ll be fine.’
‘Thanks,’ Sally says, looking up and seeing her keys on top of the bread bin. ‘I’ve just spotted my keys,’ she says.
‘Told you you would.’
Sometimes she feels her friends have more faith in her than they should.
The third call is from the Reverend Avery.
‘How is the, ah, embroidery coming along?’ he booms.
‘Oh, fine. Yes, it’s … I think I’m on the final leg of the foreground now.’
‘The final leg of the foreground,’ Reverend Avery muses. ‘Hmm.’
And neither of them seems to know how to continue. Sally looks at her watch. She pictures a plane taking off.
‘Are you using sequins?’
‘I’m actually getting low on sequins.’
‘Low on sequins. Ah.’
The Reverend Avery sounds a little concerned.
‘I’d normally order them in bulk,’ she explains, ‘but I don’t want to … hang around waiting, and I’m off to Edinburgh today. Right now, in fact,’ she adds, the sense of lateness increasing and making her feel slightly sick. She reaches up to the bread bin and grabs her keys. ‘So I’ll see if I can find a haberdashery department while I’m there,’ she says, ‘and stock up.’
She is not sure why she is telling the Reverend Avery the minutiae of her embroidering schedule. Or of her need to hang around haberdashery departments every so often, just taking in the colours, the textures, the minutely beautiful cards and packets.
‘Well,’ she says. ‘I have to go now, or I’ll miss my plane.’
‘Yes. Off you scoot,’ the Reverend Avery says tetchily – making her wonder how on earth he got involved with the commissioning of something as fiddly and irksome as an embroidery.
*
The flight up to Edinburgh is full of people carrying identical conference bags. They are made of black canvas with webbing straps, and emblazoned with the logo We Get There First. Sally thinks of the machine operators who embroidered the logos.
She is standing in the plane’s narrow central aisle behind an overweight young man in a vented suit. His trouser legs (she noticed, as she walked behind him on to the plane) need lengthening at least half an inch. She resists an impulse to laugh as he tries to push past another overweight young man in a vented suit, and their We Get There First bags become wedged fast.
‘You could wait a minute,’ one of them snaps.
‘I’d be waiting all day.’
‘Excuse me,’ Sally says, swerving around them into her seat. She puts her bag in the overhead locker and her portfolio by her feet.
*
She has always been a nervous flier. She grips the flimsy plastic arms of her seat as the plane rumbles along the tarmac, its passengers rattling and swaying like wooden dollies. It lifts abruptly as if a giant child has picked it up to play with. Within seconds they are thousands of feet up, the land beneath them smugly safe. The engine roars, changes pitch (Why’s that? Why’s that?) and Sally’s palms sweat. Beside her a woman sighs and opens a minuscule packet of Planter’s peanuts. Sally closes her eyes and tries not to think how far up and how fast they are traveling. Air journeys always seem i
ncredibly foolish, a kind of unthinking leap into the air.
*
There is a huge crowd of backpackers on the shuttle bus to the terminal, a lot of red Gortex and dangling rip-cords. Sally finds a seat but is nearly flung off it as the driver swerves to avoid something lying on the tarmac. A suitcase. A blue-and-orange checked suitcase, with yellow airport tape wrapped vigorously around it. Where did that come from? Did it fall out of the sky? Then she sees that it has dropped off a baggage trolley. She imagines the same thing happening to her portfolio and is thankful that she has it with her. She hangs on to its handles, the way she once used to hang on to Pearl’s hand.
A man in overalls is standing on the tarmac, waiting to run out and retrieve the lost bag. He makes a gesture to the bus driver, denoting thanks that he didn’t cover it with tyre marks. The driver gives him a little nod and a semi-wave and drives on. How polite people in vehicles can be. How civilised, even on the tarmac of an airport, with that little edge of condescension. Thank you, my man. Making those little waves, like the queen.
Sally gets off the shuttle bus at the main building. It is three-thirty in the afternoon. Cold. The sky is orange. There is a smell of chips wafting east.
In the nothing-to-declare queue she stands behind a young, pregnant woman. She is about six months gone – her stomach has reached that beautiful stage of roundness, that still plausible grandeur. Even after nearly sixteen years Sally still misses that solid state: the validity, the company of another presence with her; the outrageous acrobatics of a baby in her belly.
‘Not much fun, all this standing, for you,’ she says to the woman.
‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ the woman replies. She smiles at her, as if perhaps Sally doesn’t know what pregnancy is like. And Sally smiles back, reminded of that feeling of being unique. Invulnerable. The opposite of what people expect.
*
A short, swarthy man is standing outside the automatic doors, waiting for her. He is holding up a card which says SALLY TUCKWELL.