by Patrick Gale
After seeing the children safely into the playground, Wanda drove directly into town, while she was still fired with humiliation and rage. Only half aware of why she was there at all, she found a parking space then half-strode, half-ran back to the department store. For a moment she froze as it seemed that the salesman and his trolley had vanished but then she saw with a start that he was only feet away, helping a woman peel a long, red creation off her own head of nondescript grey.
Instinct and a kind of warning glance from him told her to stand back until the woman had made her purchase then, as she stepped forward he greeted her with a blandly surprised, ‘Ah, Madam,’ and asked if she wished to try on the same model again.
‘No,’ she told him. ‘It’s perfect. I know it is. I was just being silly before. About the hair being human I mean. I don’t know why. Perhaps it made me think of nuns. But now I…’ She faltered, her mouth suddenly dry with nerves. His face briefly clouded by concern, he asked if she would like to wear it immediately.
‘Oh no,’ she said, scandalized. ‘Wrap it up, please I…I’ll try it on again once I get it home.’
He wrapped it in tissue then shut it into a bag so discreet it might have contained a roll of curtain-heading tape or a box of talcum powder.
Meeting the extravagant price with a handful of notes from the horde she had pared from her housekeeping budget, she experienced a dizziness that verged on the erotic and she had to hurry to the coffee bar to eat two slices of cake to recover her equilibrium. It was only as she sat there, terrible booty on the chair beside her, softly munching, reduced like the immobilized shoppers around her to a contented sugar-trance, that she noticed the bag was not one of the store’s own but of a different provenance entirely. It was black with small gold lettering which boasted outlets in France, Luxemburg and Florida. Silence, the company appeared to be called, which put her in mind of libraries. Perhaps it was meant to be pronounced in a French accent to sound less an imperative, more a bewitching promise. In small curly letters beneath the title the bag whispered, Your secret is our pride. She wondered if the store’s management knew the salesman was there at all or whether he slyly played on the employees’ ignorance of one another’s purpose and throve in their scented midst like a parasite on a sleek but cumbersome host. As if to confirm her suspicion, he had moved his trolley again when she glanced around her from the downward escalator. He had shifted his favours from foundation garments and hosiery to between costume jewellery and winter hats.
At first she only wore the wig at home, when she was safely alone, honouring it with all the ritual befitting a complex pornographic pursuit. She would lock doors and draw curtains. She took off all her too familiar clothes, the better to focus on the wig’s effects, and wrapped her body Grecian-style in a sheet or bath towel, much as she had done as a slyly preening child. Every time she stretched it anew across her knuckles and tucked it around her scalp she felt afresh the near-electric sensations that had first surprised her in the store. She was fascinated by what she saw, transfixed before the unfamiliar woman she conjured up in the mirrored doors of the bedroom cupboards. If the doorbell or the telephone rang during the hours of her observances, she ignored them, although, lent courage by curls, she made a few anonymous calls to people she disliked, words slipping from her lips which the unwigged her could never have uttered. Had her husband come home unexpectedly, he would have caught her in as much guilty confusion as if he had surprised her in some rank adulterous act.
And yet with each resumption of blondeship she grew less timid. The woman in the looking glass would not be ignored, it seemed, and her influence proved cumulative. Wanda grew bolder. She began to make short daytime excursions in the wig and did things she imagined a woman with such hair would do. She drove to smarter districts than her husband’s where she sat in pavement cafés and ordered a glass of red wine that brought a flush to her cheeks or a searingly bitter double espresso whose grounds she savoured on her tongue. She bought expensive magazines, flicked through them with a knowing smile as though she recognized the people within, then, casually profligate, left them behind on restaurant tables without even bothering to retrieve the small sachets of free samples glued to certain advertisements.
She had a pedicure at an elegant chiropodist’s, which left her feet dangerously soft in the new black shoes she had bought herself. Then, inspired by the pleasure of watching a woman crouch below her working at her feet with little blades and chafing devices, she paid to have her toe and fingernails painted traffic light red. This last impulsive indulgence seemed a miscalculation at first since it could not be shut away in her wardrobe like the wig and the shoes or easily washed off like the new, distinguished scent, but her husband seemed to like her with claws. Or at least he did not seem actively to dislike her with them. A few weeks ago she would have thought them entirely out of keeping with her rather homely character and what she thought of as her ‘look’ but now they seemed no more than a newly exposed facet of her personality. Her fingers seemed longer and more tapering than they had before, her clothes less a necessity and more of a statement.
It was only a matter of time — two weeks, in fact, before she dared to leave the wig on when she picked the children up from school. As she waited by the gates, other mothers complimented her on her bold new style. She did not duck her head or offer bashful thanks and explanation as she might have done before but merely smiled and said, ‘You think so?’ for their opinions were now entirely unimportant to her wellbeing. The children, especially the other girls on the school run, usually so slack in their compliments, touched her with their enthusiasm.
‘It’s amazing!’ they cried ingenuously. ‘You look like a film star!’
She knew that children’s ideas of glamour were hopelessly tawdry and overblown, that, in the undereducated estimation of little girls, anything forbidden them — lipstick, bosoms, cigarettes, false eyelashes — was of its very nature beautiful so that mere prostitutes acquired a near-royal loveliness for them. She knew she should not take their effusions as a compliment. She knew she should play along for a moment or two then expose the wig for the fraud it was. After all, she would still have shown herself to be that rare thing among mothers — a good sport with a potential for sexiness. But then she saw how her daughter was sitting, squeezed into her usual corner of the back seat, mutely glowing at the praise her mother was receiving from these all-important peers. She even received a rare gesture of affection from her son; a warm, dry hand placed on her shoulder as he boasted of the points he had received for a geography test. She imagined the disappointment, disgust even, on their faces if she suddenly tugged the wig off. They might not praise her as a good sport; they might simply declare her mad. She was not yet so far from her own childhood as to have forgotten that madness in mothers was even less forgivable than bad hats.
So she drove on. Wigged. A game, laughing lie made flesh. She laid rapid plans. If she could make it through the night undetected, she would cash in the rest of her rainy day fund, call at her usual salon the next day, throw caution to the winds and have her own hair dyed and styled to match the wig. At the thought that she would thereby become the woman in her looking glass, the stylish, effortless woman of her daylight excursions, she felt herself suffused with a warm glow that began in her scalp and ran down her neck and across her breasts and belly. She gazed at the suburban roads unfolding ahead of her and smiled in a way that might have scared the children had they been less absorbed in their own chatter by now. She dreaded her husband’s return however. She dreaded his mockery or anger. Once supper was safely in the oven and the children were bathed, she locked herself in the bathroom to check with a mirror that no tell tale label or lock of her own hair were showing. The look was perfect however. She reapplied her new carmine lipstick, gave the back of her neck a squirt of scent then stood back to admire her full length reflection, stepping this way and that. He had a treat in store. He had a whole new wife.
Which were his own words
exactly. At first he was perturbed. He wanted to know what had suddenly made her do it.
‘You,’ she said lightly. ‘You said you wished I was blonde like that actress. So I am. I can always change back if you don’t like it.’
‘No’, he said, looking at her in an uncertain, sideways fashion as he mixed his gin and tonic and poured her a sweet sherry. ‘No. Don’t do that. Was it very expensive?’
‘Not very.’
He had no idea how much women’s hair cost to fix. He naively thought it was maybe twice what he was charged by the barber in the station car park.
‘Supper’ll be about five minutes,’ she said. ‘I’m running a bit late. And I don’t want a sherry. I want a gin.’
‘But you like sherry. You always have sherry,’ he insisted.
‘I’d rather have what you’re having,’ she said. ‘If there’s enough that is.’
‘Sure. Of course there’s enough. There’s always enough.’ He tipped the sherry back into its sticky lipped bottle and poured her gin. ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘I go to the office and when I come back I find a whole new wife.’
She simply smiled. ‘Plenty of tonic,’ she said girlishly. ‘Or it’ll go to my head.’
Over dinner he admired her nails too, apparently only noticing them for the first time now that she was blonde. He tried not to stare but she felt him watching her whenever she walked over to the cooker or the fridge.
‘What are you staring at?’ she asked at last, amazed that he had made no comment on the unpleasantly chemical pudding she had made by whipping milk into the brown powdered contents of a convenient packet and tossing in a few biscuits soaked in cherry brandy.
‘You’ve killed her,’ he joked. ‘Haven’t you? You’ve gone and killed her and put her outside in the deep freeze or something.’
She paused at the dishwasher with her back to him and shuddered involuntarily.
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said as soon as she could. ‘You’ll give me the creeps. Coffee?’
‘Please.’
‘In here? Or are we playing Scrabble?’
‘No games tonight,’ he said, affecting a yawn. ‘I thought perhaps an early night…’
She had always wondered how oral sex would feel when performed on her but in all the years of their marriage he had never offered and she had never thought it entirely proper to ask. Tonight, emboldened by the unprecedented interest he was showing in her hands, her feet and her borrowed hair, she realized that she needed no words to ask him. While he was giving her breasts more attention than the usual cursory lick, she simply placed a hand on his head and pushed. He hesitated for a moment as though unable to believe what she was suggesting so she pushed again, quite firmly, so that her wishes should be unmistakable. The surprising pleasure he proceeded to give her had little to do with anything he was doing to her and everything to do with what she was doing to him. She had always supposed that sex was a matter of submission, patience even, but now it dawned on her that it was eight-tenths power.
She woke with a headache. She wondered if it had anything to do with the gin then thought that perhaps the wig was too tight. Could her head have expanded? Did heads expand? Like hot feet? The headache intensified as she dressed. She scowled as she brushed her teeth and teased the wig back into shape on her scalp. Downstairs the pain broke out as sulkiness, when she complained about being expected to polish her husband’s shoes, and naked temper when she shouted at her daughter — her beloved Jennifer — for complaining that there was no fat-free milk for her cereal. Where these displays would normally have been beaten down by louder ones from the offended parties, she was amazed to see her husband mutely take up the boot polish and her daughter reach for the gold top with something like terror. Landed with the school run again by some cooked-up excuse from another mother, she thought her head would burst with the added burden of the children’s chatter. She paused at some traffic lights to rifle her bag for painkillers which she gulped down without water, heedless of curious stares from behind her. Odious Morag — whose favour her children only cultivated because her parents had a swimming pool and threw vulgarly ostentatious birthday parties for her — had already riled her by insisting on sitting in the front like an adult because she said the back of the car ‘had a bad smell’. She then began to tease Jennifer for having a crush on a teacher.
‘That’s enough,’ Wanda said, wincing at the pain her own voice caused, booming behind her eyes. ‘Stop being horrid.’
‘But it’s true,’ Morag insisted. ‘She always tries to sit in the front row.’
‘I don’t!’Jennifer protested.
‘She does. And yesterday she stayed behind to ask him questions before break.’
‘I said that’s enough!’ Wanda said and found herself slapping Morag on her soft, pink thigh.
For a moment there was stunned silence as Morag looked from thigh to driver and back again. It had been a fierce little slap; Wanda’s palm still stung seconds later.
‘I’ll tell,’ Morag said at last.
‘Good,’ Wanda told her, giddy with the release of uttering words she had too long swallowed. ‘Then maybe you’ll get another slap for being a telltale as well as an ill-bred little madam.’
Morag made as if to cry at this but Wanda silenced her.
‘Stop it,’ she hissed, astonished at the scorn in her tone. ‘You’re too big to play the baby.’
The euphoria of the others was palpable behind their silence as Morag stifled her petulant sniffles. Pulling up outside the school, Wanda defied the pain in her head.
‘Jennifer,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you’re showing an interest in your lessons. I’m proud of you, darling.’ Jennifer shone with pleasure even as Morag seemed to shrink in significance.
Wanda tore the wig off with a gasp as soon as she was clear of the area. Glancing in the mirror to flick her own hair back to a semblance of life, she saw a livid, purplish welt where the thing’s netting had been grinding into her forehead. From time to time as she drove, she would rub hard at it with her fingertips. She had a tendency to raise her eyebrows when people were talking to her, especially when she had no interest in what they were telling her. Possibly this habitual action had made the wig’s chafing worse, producing this shaming record of insincerity.
Back in her house, before she had even loaded the breakfast things into the dishwasher, she hurried to the telephone and called her hairdresser’s. To her dismay, no one, not even a junior, could see her for anything more than a dry-it-yourself light trim for two days. She had a deep, almost pathological sense of consumer loyalty, never being lured by a bargain rate into forsaking the tradesmen she had always patronized without a commensurate sense of guilt which she felt obliged to own when she next entered her usual shop.
‘I bought half a pound of these in that other place on the parade,’ she would confide in a confused salesperson. ‘I never normally shop anywhere but here but, well, you know how it is. I just saw the price and in I went.’
Often as not she would add some placatory lie about the bargain goods having proved inferior to those from her usual stockist as though the thought that her dereliction had been punished would comfort them over her momentary infidelity. It was with a heavy heart, therefore, that she reached for the Yellow Pages and looked up the numbers of rival salons. She would not tip, she told herself, however good they proved; that way the disloyalty would seem less wounding. But neither Bemice of Bromley, Shy Locks or Louis D’Alsace could fit her in. After a few more, similarly disappointing calls, she gave up, called back her usual salon, and made a morning appointment for the next day. It was only another forty-eight hours, she told herself. If she had fooled her small world so far, she could fool it a little further.
To soothe her nerves she left the wig on the hall table for swift snatching up should there be any surprise callers then she threw herself into a satisfactory penance of housework. She scrubbed the bath, pulling a skein of matted hairs from the plughole, cleaned the nas
ty fluffy bit of carpet behind the loo, wiped the tops of the door surrounds and descaled the shower head with a powerful caustic she had recently heard of being used in a desperate suicide bid. Then, with no break for coffee, she set about taking every saucepan and labour-saving device from the kitchen cupboards, cleaning it, washing down its shelf, then putting it back again. She even wiped the sticky residue from jam and marmalade pots. The varnish on her new nails chipped off in places but she slaved on, taking a kind of delight in finding other unpalatable tasks to tackle. She skipped lunch, eating only aspirin because she still had the residue of her morning’s headache, and forged on with polishing her husband’s collection of silver plate trophies and the fiddly cake stand with matching slice which his aunt had given them on their wedding day. (Wanda had kept it in the back of a cupboard, polishing it still more rarely than she used it because it had too many little nooks and crannies and something in her rebelled at using even a discarded toothbrush to clean it.)
Suddenly she saw it was time to be picking the children up again. Cursing clothes, time, duty, she ran to the hall, tossing aside her apron and snatching up the wig. The wig no longer fitted. She glared at her pink-cheeked reflection as she stuffed her hair back behind her ears and tried again. She even checked to see if the label were the right way round. She glanced at her watch and let out a whimper. She caught herself toying with the possibility of driving into school as she was only with a headscarf on in the vain hope that the children would prove less sharp-eyed than usual. This was ridiculous! Wigs did not shrink. It was not in their nature. And heads, healthy adult heads, did not grow. Brooking no nonsense, she tried one more time.