by Ho Sok Fong
“In blue uniforms?”
“No, white ones.”
“What are they doing?”
“Directing traffic. Someone died and the funeral’s about to start. Cars are parked everywhere.”
“We had to drive around for ages before we found a spot.”
A pause.
“Are the police here a lot?”
“I’d say so. Always driving in, strolling around, poking about. Who knows what they’re looking for.”
“Have they ever questioned you?”
“No, no, absolutely not.”
My mother stood staring out of the window. Eventually, she came back over and sat down. There was only one hairdresser in the salon and so everyone had to wait their turn. The room reeked of hair gel. A thick bank of hair clippings lay across the floor like a glossy black pelt.
The hairdresser combed out a handful of a girl’s hair, then snipped it off.
“Such gorgeous hair,” she cooed.
The flattery had no effect on the girl, who was completely wooden, sitting as though tied up with an invisible rope. Her mother sat behind her, chatting about school, about how the holidays were almost over, and the various new rules and regulations. There were prescribed lengths for fingernails, hair, skirts. Skirts had to be below the knee, she said. Then she moved on to punishments: first a verbal warning, then demerits. It was all very strict. And these things cost time, as well as academic points. The girl was very still beneath the voluminous salon gown, like a tent pegged to the seat, and her hair slid down the tent’s canvas like fallen leaves, landing at her feet. She let it fall, acting as if the conversation had nothing to do with her.
“It’ll grow back,” said the hairdresser. “When it does, you come and see me.”
“The school might loosen up,” said another woman. “Sometimes they’re strict to start with, then they relax.”
“Then you can leave it long and style it however you want.”
The hairdresser was dressed entirely in bright red, giving her a striking resemblance to Little Red Riding Hood. Her face was very white against her lacy, petal-shaped collar. She trampled back and forth across the pile of black hair, concentrating on the haircut.
She seemed about thirty. Quite pretty, if a little tired-looking. Every so often, she chimed in with the conversation. From her well-timed gasps and witty retorts, it was clear that she understood everyone’s Hokkien, although she replied in an Indonesian-accented Malay. Her Malay was fluent and easy to understand, suggesting that she’d lived here a long time.
The other ladies admired her outfit and she chuckled good-naturedly, crinkling her eyes.
“You haven’t been back long. Are you planning to go away again?” she asked me, out of the blue.
I started, unnerved that she knew anything about me.
“We’ll see. Depends what comes up,” I said, vaguely. I didn’t have a definite answer.
A little later, I finally remembered where I knew her from. About four years earlier, I’d been home for the university holidays and she had come around to call on my younger sister. Her accent was stronger then.
“She’s not here,” I’d said, in Malay. Then I’d gone back to my books.
Aside from that fleeting encounter, I drew a blank. Why was she in this salon, ushering in customers and showing them to their seats? Was she an overseas worker? No, she couldn’t be, because I’d heard her discussing the salon with the women earlier.
The women had asked what it cost for a place like this and an old woman sitting off to one side answered, “Over a hundred thousand.”
The women gasped. “That much! Does she own it? What’s the interest on the mortgage?”
The hairdresser cut in. “No interest, it was paid for in cash.”
“And how much to fix it up?”
“Around forty thousand,” said the hairdresser. “It was just a room. There was a wall here and I knocked it down to open up the space.”
So it was hers. A clean, new, spacious, snow-white salon with its own garden. And because she had this house, this home of her own, she wasn’t someone’s maid, or a helper in a restaurant or a hawker stand. She wasn’t beholden to anyone. Which would mean she was the boss. Yes, she was definitely the boss—how could she be anything else, if she was making a living out of a place that belonged to her? I wasn’t sure of the relationship between her and the old woman. And I didn’t understand how she could have afforded all this. The house, the big shiny mirror, the row of wheelie chairs and hood dryers, the renovations. I couldn’t even afford an apartment.
The hairdresser laughed at the other women’s jokes. She made her own easy additions to news of goings-on in Lemon River Town, in a way that made her seem more a part of the place than I was. I felt like an eavesdropping outsider. She seemed to be just like them, with their children, mothers-in-law, and husbands, all belonging to the same small town. I’d been away too long and now there were Lemon River folk I didn’t recognize, and names I’d never heard before. I had no idea how things worked anymore.
In a corner of the room, there was a table plastered with banknotes, and on the table was a radio, hardly bigger than my palm. I started fiddling with the dial, trying to change the channel. The speaker was like a deformed mouth, crystal-clear one moment, fuzzy and crackling the next.
The women’s chatter bored me. Whose kid was earning big money, who’d been swindled, who was in the hospital, who’d been robbed, who had loaned money, who had debts, who’d helped pay whose debts off. Disjointed words and phrases burrowed into my ears, then dripped out in time with the ticking of the clock. The women talked into the mirror, entirely at ease, gossiping, haranguing, pausing every so often to fluff their hair. It made me feel awkward, which was why I had retreated to the corner, where I could no longer see my own reflection.
To amuse myself, I started to fantasize that they were all nursing deep, dark secrets that, sooner or later, would have to come to light. I listened to scrambled fragments of the afternoon news and pop songs, with one ear still tuned to the women. Their voices masked the crackle of the radio as it searched for a wavelength. At some point, I gave up adjusting the dial.
The radio broadcast a short news bulletin about a missing person. A few years back, a man had gone missing in Lemon River.
The hairdresser spread a large white towel over my mother’s shoulders and assessed her hair in the mirror.
“He was such a big man,” said my mother. “It’s strange they never found him.”
“I know, very strange! All this time, and still no sign.”
The hairdresser ran her hands through my mother’s hair as she spoke.
“What are we doing with it? You want the bangs permed as well?”
“Up to you, just make me look pretty,”joked my mother. She looked squarely at her reflection in the mirror, focusing so hard that she seemed to sink inside it, leaving her body behind as a doppelgänger, there to assume the trials of life on her behalf.
“If he got drunk and fell into the river, a body would have floated up. And if he’s buried somewhere, they’ll dig him up eventually. But if he’s alive and in hiding, no chance,” said one of the women.
“I heard he’s hiding abroad.”
“No, that’s Ah Tuo.”
“Ah Tuo went to Thailand to get away from a creditor.”
“How long before the police stop looking?”
“Who knows with them. You want them to look and they won’t. You’d rather they didn’t, and there they are, making trouble.”
The hairdresser said my mother’s hair was too brittle for an electric perm but they could try out a new serum, which would curl it without doing any further damage.
“Is that OK?” she asked. “It’s only twenty ringgit extra, but it’ll take a bit longer.”
Her eyes automatically went to me, the grown-up daughter. I nodded, smiling, said, “Sure, no problem.”
She beamed.
“We’re not in any hurry,” I
added.
It was true. Neither of us had much going on. My mother no longer had to rush around making lunch for a whole family. I’d been back home, unemployed, for more than six months. The people who used to keep my mother so busy had moved out of her life; even I only flashed in every so often. Why not stay in the salon, looking at ourselves in the mirror and chatting to the other reflections? It was like a scene from one of the soap operas I used to watch as a child on the state television channel. The actors spoke their lines in different languages but seemed to be talking about the same thing—I say “seemed,” because I couldn’t understand everything, so can’t be sure. At the time, I didn’t understand why they had to do that. But now, in the salon, I was discovering that people really did talk one language and listen to another. Except, of course, they weren’t speaking Malay and Hokkien in the same melodramatic wails as the soap actors. Maybe people only speak like that when they argue.
There was a funeral procession on the next street over. A woman had just left it and come into the salon, and she told us it was for a youngest daughter who had killed herself. Heartbreaking, she said. A year before they had all been at her wedding.
“I heard she had depression.”
“What about her husband? Is he there?”
No, he hadn’t come. That was strange.
The women made guesses about why that might be. It most likely had to do with a mistress, according to them. But a mistress was only natural, once a man made a bit of money! Nothing strange about that. Most men never had any intention of divorcing their wives; they wouldn’t be so stupid. For a wife to kill herself over it, well, that was just silly.
“Life’s worth more than that,” they pronounced, then sighed in unison. The thought of such misfortune made them shiver. Adversity: always so much more thrilling than happiness.
In the mirror, I could see that the salon door and windows were tightly closed. The tinted window glass filtered the sun, keeping the room gently shaded. The walls were a spotless white and the floor was covered with pretty blue and white ceramic tiles. Somehow, the whole place felt too new, too airy, too big. There wasn’t a single mark on the cream sofa. Outside, there was no shop sign marking the salon. The hairdresser was running the business out of a private home without a license. Some of the women were exclaiming about it: “Really? No license, but you open anyway?”
For the first time, I noticed the bunches of flowers lying in the street outside.
“Can’t I invite a few guests over to my own house if I feel like it?” asked the hairdresser.
As far as I could see, the salon was fully equipped. There was a three-tier cart with a little toolbox on top containing razors, combs, and clips in an assortment of sizes. In one corner of the room, there was a hair-washing station, with a reclining chair connected to a white porcelain sink. The usual hairstyle posters were stuck all over the walls. In short, there was every hairdressing item you could think of, in full view. It struck me as odd. If a policeman came knocking at the door, there would be no hiding what was going on.
Time slipped through hair and washed away down the sink.
I looked at the women’s reflections. They were spread along the folding chairs and sofa pressed against the back wall. None seemed willing to come forward and sit in front of the mirror, as if afraid the new wheelie chairs would collapse the moment they sat down. The chairs on either side of my mother were empty, giving the impression that she’d been wheeled on stage for a one-woman performance.
“How long since your husband died?” the old woman asked her.
“Ten years now.”
“Well, aren’t you something. It’s not easy, raising children by yourself.”
My mother barely glanced at the other women, keeping her gaze focused on her own face instead. I wondered whether she was seeing something different than what I usually saw; some kind of beauty that she was hoping other people would notice.
“People always say that,” she replied. “But I thank my lucky stars I never remarried. I couldn’t have faced my kids.”
The hairdresser did not join in. She kept her head down, eyes on my mother’s hair. She rarely looked in the mirror. It didn’t seem to interest her at all. Of course, her job meant that she couldn’t avoid it completely, but the few times she did look up, she looked at her clients, never herself. The light cast long shadows beneath her eyes, streaking her cheeks. She twirled locks of hair around her fingers, then twisted them around small rubber curlers. Her fingers were slick with hair lotion, running through my mother’s faded, dry hair. Her fingernails seemed to grow longer with every twist. So did the hair.
My mother continued to stare into the mirror, but maybe she wasn’t really looking. Maybe she was listening to the drama that had started on the radio, although those kinds of far-off stories are never as gripping as the ones right under your nose. The most interesting secrets are always about people you know.
The old woman disappeared into the kitchen and emerged with a tray of milk jellies, which she began busily handing out to the women. I turned her down, because I find cold foods hard to swallow. The others tucked in.
“You should go out and enjoy yourself,” the hairdresser said to my mother.
“Going out costs money,” said one woman.
“Get Ah He’s god-ma to take you,” said another. They all burst out laughing.
“I heard she hits a nightclub every couple of weeks,” said yet another. Then she turned to tell me that the milk jelly was delicious and I should try it; the sweet vinegar sprinkled on top made it sweet and sour at the same time.
“It’s shocking. Fifty years old if she’s a day, still going around in denim miniskirts, dancing a-go-go like a girl half her age.”
“Good for her,” said the hairdresser.
“Carrying on with all those men, not a thought for what her kids might think.”
“We’re all different,” said my mother. “No harm in having fun, just don’t get too carried away. That’s when you end up getting cheated.”
“Like this friend of my brother-in-law’s, she was cheated out of hundreds of thousands of ringgit!”
“Men get carried away too.”
“And they get what’s coming to them! Broken homes, death, divorce, children all over the place, debts, bankruptcy. Reputations down the drain.”
“Like Old Teik’s son.”
“He’s a bad seed all right. Cleaned that family right out, now his poor old dad has to live in a pigeon loft.”
“It aged Old Teik to no end. He gave that boy everything.”
“And then the boy runs off to England, where apparently he’s washing dishes.”
“They should pretend he went missing.”
“You know that’s not how it works. He’s rotten, but he’s still their son.”
The hairdresser wrapped a white towel around my mother’s head. Her hands were shaky, and she had to try a few times before she could get it to stay. It was probably the air conditioning. I was cold too, and starting to get hungry.
The conversation wound back to the dead girl with the funeral on the next street over. Such a pity, declared the women.
“After all, it’s only natural. What cat doesn’t chase mice?”
“So long as he keeps bringing home money, that’s the main thing.”
“Don’t kick up a fuss.”
“These things are infatuations, they never last long.”
It was as if there were ghosts whispering in the walls.
“You can’t take them too seriously.”
“No point trying to fix what you can’t change.”
“Keep it to yourself. If he says nothing, pretend you know nothing.”
“You have to learn to turn a blind eye.”
“They always come back in the end.”
“Do I have to wait much longer?” asked my mother.
The hairdresser nodded. “About half an hour.”
She left the room and returned with a broom. She swep
t the hair trimmings as though reeling in a net, leaving behind an expanse of bright white floor glaring up at us.
“Aren’t any of you getting haircuts?” asked my mother.
The women shook their heads.
“Every so often these things drag on. Some men end up bringing their mistresses home with them. And then how is someone supposed to pretend they don’t know?” one of them asked.
“I’ve still got jellies in the fridge, let me get them.” The old woman stood up and walked unsteadily to the kitchen.
One of the women inspected her feet. “Look at them,” she said. “I don’t know what’s going on, they get so swollen.”
“If you press on them, do your fingers leave marks?” asked another. “If they do, it’s water retention.”
Topics of conversation drifted up and away, like bubbles. Someone asked the old woman for her milk jelly recipe, and she responded by urging her to have another one.
The hairdresser swept silently, then went to set the empty wheelie chairs in line, pausing behind each one and looking straight into the mirror, as if her gaze were a measuring tape, helping her ensure that they were even. She’d dropped out of the conversation, and her mood seemed to have darkened. Business couldn’t have been going well, seeing as no one else was there for a haircut. It looked like my mother would be her last customer of the morning: four wheelie chairs remained empty. It was also possible that she had just tuned out and couldn’t follow what the women were saying. That happened to me sometimes. I’d get tired and suddenly wouldn’t understand a thing.
Whatever the reason, she was mute. Not even half a sentence of Indonesian-accented Malay passed her lips. She seemed to vanish into the walls; the air had no space left for her voice.
Ten minutes passed. “I’ve still got twenty minutes!” said my mother. “Where’s she gone?”
She wasn’t there. Not just mute and camouflaged; she had actually left the room. I hadn’t noticed when she disappeared, but I did suddenly start noticing things that I’d previously overlooked. I saw in the mirror that there was a light hanging down from the ceiling, with butterflies fluttering against its shade, attracted by the glow. Until that moment, I hadn’t even been aware of its existence. It cast a circle of light and a circle of shadow onto the floor. I was certain it hadn’t been on before—I must have noticed it because someone had switched it on.
