by Pip Adam
Elodie screeched in delight. ‘Yeah,’ she said through hiccups of laughter. ‘Yeah, organise it with Tommy. Tommy has a handle on the money.’
Neither of them said anything for a moment. Elodie laughed but didn’t say anything else, except ‘inconvenience bonuses’ under her breath, which started her laughing again. Carla thought maybe the conversation was over, so she said, ‘Okay. Thanks. And sorry.’
‘Totally not your fault.’ Elodie breathed the words out, her laughter coming in again. ‘It’s not anyone’s fault. It’ll be fine. It’ll be great.’ Then that laugh again.
‘Yip.’ Carla was already grabbing a jacket and her bag. She threw her hairdressing roll into it. Duey had everything at the salon but she needed her scissors and combs. She pulled out her cut-throat razor while she cradled the phone. It was clean. She showed it to Doug.
‘Anything else,’ Elodie finished.
‘No. No. Just thanks.’
‘Thank you,’ Elodie said. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘Yip.’ Carla stepped outside the flat. She saw Doug look up through the shrinking gap as she closed the door. The damage to the door was starting to show from the outside. Maybe Doug would be gone when she got back.
She opened the door again and pointed to the corner of the flat, away from the door. Doug looked at her and didn’t move. Carla backed out and closed the door. Bad luck, she thought. She was still holding the phone to her ear. Don’t return once you’ve left. The hallway was quiet. Someone had left a bike in the hallway. There was shouting from one of the other flats. She walked down the stairs, swiping her phone and putting it in her bag. She had to walk to the train station. There were cars in the car park outside the flats. The back of the building was covered in white wrap. It looked like they were converting the rest of the building to flats. She wouldn’t know for sure because she wasn’t talking to her landlord, but the whole building was wrapped up in white plastic. It used to mean leaky building, but now they used it so tradesmen could work in all weathers. The weather was getting worse but no one could do anything about the weather, just the conditions out in the weather.
As Carla walked down Felton Mathew Avenue she called Guy. Cars rushed past, fast. The BMX track was deserted because they’d found some sort of chemical leaching into the soil. The whole area used to be orchards. The track was fenced off now.
‘Guy?’
He wasn’t working at World anymore. He was a waiter. But he could be at the salon in an hour. Then she rang Dominic and a long beep met her. She stopped, swore. A bus drove past, then a large truck. Carla checked the number Tommy had given her, dialled again. Nothing. ‘Fuck.’ She had to get to the train or she’d miss Guy. She rang Tommy. It rang and rang and rang and there was no reply.
‘Fuck.’
She cut across the Countdown car park and broke into a slow jog, past the storage company on the other side of the road, past the pits full of stones of various sizes out front of the building supplies place. She had never worked out what they did in there. She turned into the path that led past the prefabs where the men drank milky tea out of thermoses. A train was coming. She stopped at the level crossing, feeling it pass, then ran to the platform. Hunting in her wallet for her Hop card, praying it still had some credit. The whole time she was ringing first Dominic, then Tommy, until the noise of ‘not there’ was drilled into her head. Some teenagers got on ahead of her. Five girls with five kids in tow. One of them said, ‘Isn’t it weird there are five of us and five kids and none of them are our kids?’ And the others laughed. All of the teenagers had their hair straightened. They were made up with contour and they pulled their hair through their first two fingers like they didn’t want to forget it was straight. The humidity was getting to it, though. The sky was grey now, all the morning sun was gone and it felt like there was rain somewhere. Tiny strands of the girls’ hair flew away, escaped back into frizz. Straightened hair had been around too long. It was time for a change and this looked like it.
Not one of the girls had her hair in a bun. Buns on top with falls of straight dark hair down the back had been all over the place a year ago. Tight knots on top, pulling the skin around the eyes back, pulling the eyebrows high and arched.
In the 80s, Carla and Duey had worked on a fashion show at a department store in Remuera. They both left school the second they turned 15 and started work as apprentices in a deep, long, ‘family’ salon, which had been owned by an Austrian for years. He was funny and a great hairdresser. Then he’d wanted to go skiing more often, so a woman bought it. She had vision. A nail table and two beauty therapy rooms at the back of the salon. There’d been a laundry. The new owner moved the laundry out the back, into the staffroom, which she figured they didn’t really need. ‘Everyone just goes outside,’ she said.
Which was true. They all smoked and there was a small courtyard, cut off from the clients’ view by a stand of bamboo. When Duey and Carla started, some of the seniors still smoked in the salon, while they were cutting hair. All the clients still smoked. But the new woman was all about being professional, and smoking in the salon was not professional. She’d asked everyone who worked there to stop smoking in the salon. It sort of worked. No one really realised how addicted they were until they tried to apply their first colour without a cigarette.
The new owner thought that if she could get the apprentices trained as quickly as possible to apply colour and to process perms, it would leave the senior stylists free to see more clients. It was revolutionary at the time. She’d learnt about it overseas. In Britain. So she employed a whole bunch more apprentices, and retrained Carla and Duey. They were buddied up with a senior stylist and put to work. The owner liked Duey. ‘June,’ she said. ‘You’re a natural.’ Carla was cack-handed. It took her six months to learn how to braid. The new owner made friends with all the businesses around the area and the department store next door decided they would have an autumn launch. Of their clothes. A fashion parade, with drinks. For their valued customers. Everyone was marketing in those days. The stock market was running high and everyone had time to think about new ways of doing business. Everyone felt optimistic about this new thing, business. Everyone was professional and everyone thought what they were doing was making the difference, when really, when everything went to shit, it became clear it was just money. You really couldn’t do anything wrong when there was a lot of money around.
That night at the fashion show, they’d pulled back the models’ hair hard to make their faces tight and their eyebrows arched. At one point Carla looked over and Duey had her knee dug into her model’s back, pulling like a dentist. Everything took so long to explain. She couldn’t just say Gustl’s anymore, she couldn’t just say Milne’s. She had grown up in the far past. Like when Gustl would say to her and Duey, ‘There was one colour of hair dye in my day and it was bleach.’ Everything took so long to explain.
That was what the buns reminded Carla of, when she saw them last year on the train, and then they’d started doing them for photos. She looked up and down the train now, but they were all gone. The buns were over. The arch had even gone out of some of the girls’ eyebrows. They’d straightened their hair but they weren’t holding it at bay anymore – if it blossomed into a haze they weren’t as worried. Duey and Carla had seen it coming one day when they were sitting in the salon having a drink, watching people on the street.
‘Lot of natural curl,’ Duey had said.
‘And frizz,’ Carla replied.
Carla lifted her phone, high, so it still looked like she was working on it, and took a photo of the clutch of girls and their babies. The kids were singing now, all of them, ‘Heads, shoulders, knees and toes.’ This was generally where it started. They wore it on the streets in Glen Innes first, and on the train to Henderson. She didn’t have a car but really that was an asset. She could sell the semi-straighten back to Tommy, Cal and Kurt because none of them were ever on the train or the bus.
Carla looked at her phone again. No
thing. She rang Tommy and it rang and rang and rang and then went to voicemail. She left a message. She knew she’d left a trail of missed call notifications. If he was away from his phone he’d pick it up and the first thing he’d see was that he’d missed four calls. Four calls. Carla weighed it up. She didn’t want to look naggy. That was the worst thing a woman could look, especially an old woman. She needed to look calm and cool, like it didn’t really matter but also like she understood that it mattered a great deal. Would four calls look naggy? She decided it was too close to risk another call. She’d have to wait. She sat back. She rang Cal, then Kurt, talking quietly while the train ran over Orakei Basin and Hobson Bay – water on both sides so that the train seemed to become an aquatic vehicle. The tide was out, the grey mud looked like it could swallow anything. Cal and Kurt didn’t have Dominic’s number. Neither of them really knew Dominic. Could she call the agency? There wasn’t an agency on the back of his headshot, but Tommy had said they were both from 62. She called. The agency didn’t have a number for anyone by that name. She could just sit back and enjoy the train trip. That would not look naggy. She looked at her phone one last time. If he had it on silent it would hum and hum and hum to tell him there was a call coming through and then it would vibrate to tell him it had sent him a message, telling him he’d missed the call that was coming in. She’d ring once more.
Tommy could hear a wave cut through the radio his father had on. Someone was calling his phone. The radio was on talkback. Always talkback. To catch the temperature of the nation, Jerry used to say. Everyone on talkback agreed with his father, so the temperature, Tommy supposed, was comfortable like Samoa. But on a good day. Not too hot, not too cold, just perfect for him and his business and his friends.
‘Bombay Sapphire are making a gin and tonic perfume,’ his father said. Then laughed.
A 46-year-old had been convicted for masterminding an elaborate human trafficking scam.
‘I haven’t had a gin in years,’ Tommy said.
They were in his father’s office in Fort Street. The precinct had been redeveloped into shared spaces and laneways. Jerry had owned 64 Fort Street for a long time but it had really come into its own since the street had been overhauled. It used to be the foreshore, before they reclaimed the wharves. Jerry’s office was just round the corner from Duey’s work. Tommy wondered if he should drop in, talk to her again about being in the photos. His father had the newspaper open and was reading it. He didn’t look at Tommy much but when he did it was over the top of his reading glasses because he still had damn good long sight. ‘I just need longer arms,’ he’d joke at parties, holding out his glass like it was a book.
Tommy wasn’t sure why his father had asked him to come, but it had felt like he was insisting on it. It went like this. Tommy could sit for hours sometimes just watching his father read, listening to the radio, looking out the window. He was pretty sure his father just came into the office to do this every morning. Although he was also sure that he fulfilled some kind of figurehead function. Tommy suspected that people liked to know he was there. Investors, clients, they liked to know Jerry Hait was in the building, like Jerry still trusted it, believed in it like a sailor believed in an old ship.
Tommy’s father sold alcohol. Not personally. But the companies he owned did. There was a story in there somewhere that Jerry didn’t correct people about. A young man starting out working in an off-licence, weekends, late nights, dangerous times. Standing at the counter one night, looking around, wanting something better, and suddenly hitting on the idea of buying his own liquor store, or working his arse off to save enough money to buy a wine label or a brewery. Poor boy made good. Tommy looked at his father. Uncomfortably he came to the realisation that his father must be about the same age as Carla.
Jerry had never worked retail in his life. He’d come out of university with a PhD in Mathematics and Accounting, and his father, Tommy’s grandfather – the real poor boy made good, or maybe that was bullshit as well – had said to him, ‘Now what?’ And Jerry had shrugged. He didn’t know, but he liked booze. He said it jokingly, then he went away and read a little and talked to some friends and then he came back and laid out the proposal and Tommy’s grandfather gave him some money and it failed and Tommy’s grandfather gave him some more money and it failed again. Then Tommy’s grandfather died, so Jerry had all the money, and he made it work and it worked. Once it was going, once it lifted off the ground and Jerry had the motivation of not having a father to go to, it flew. This is what Tommy suspected, because one day he would have the same place in the world, the place where he didn’t have to come and ask, wouldn’t be able to. But not for a long time yet. His father just kept making more and more money and he believed in Tommy in a way that infected Tommy with hope and love.
Jerry looked up again from the newspaper. ‘So.’ Took off his glasses. Could he be the same age as Carla? And Duey and Sharona? He looked so much older, but every now and then Tommy did the maths. ‘You’ll be shooting the corporate line soon.’
‘Yeah. Once the samples arrive.’ His father liked that Tommy was in fashion. He liked it a lot.
‘That’ll be good.’
No, Carla must be 45, 46 at the oldest. Tommy had seen a photo of her in Pavement from 1992 and then she’d gone away for all that time and she’d been back for a while – six years? Tommy’s father was 61.
Dominic wouldn’t come to get his hair cut. Not tonight. Tommy knew he’d be at the party. There was a fundraiser at The Jefferson. Dominic would be there. It only occurred to Tommy when Carla was asking for Dominic’s number as the meeting broke up, as he was willing the samples into a courier van and into the workroom with his mind, with making sure one part of his mind was focusing in that direction, visualising it over and over again. Thinking at the problem. Your mind had the power to change things. But he had looked at his phone anyway and written down a number. Your mind could change things. It was only a haircut. The haircut could be done tomorrow.
‘We’re using Dominic for the shoot,’ Tommy said. Everything would be fine.
‘Derek’s boy?’ Jerry said.
Tommy nodded.
‘Is he a model?’
‘He wants to be.’ Tommy looked out the window. The sun had come out again. He thought it would rain, but it hadn’t. ‘He got some headshots done. They’re good. He’s good.’
Tommy tapped the folder he had on his lap.
‘Oh,’ said Jerry. ‘Let me see those. I forgot about those.’
Tommy had picked them up from Jerry’s accountant on his way over. They were the latest financial reports. His father had asked for more regular ones since last year. Tommy wondered if Kurt’s and Cal’s fathers were the same. He wondered if they all got together and had investor meetings. He doubted it. All the fathers got on but they were very hands off. Or they had been.
Tommy had met Kurt at school. The private school both their fathers had gone to. Kurt had been expelled and went to a public school that couldn’t say no. That’s where he’d met Cal, who had also been expelled from a private school shortly after his family moved from Hong Kong. It was odd being rich in a poor school. Tommy said so, once he finally convinced his parents to let him go to the public school. ‘Not that poor,’ Kurt had said. ‘Surely not in Kohimarama?’ Kurt had said something about ‘white flight’ and they’d laughed, none of them completely knowing what that meant, but understanding, in a way. They didn’t go to school much, not in the end; there didn’t seem much point. ‘I’m not the kind of person who will go to university,’ Tommy would explain to his parents. ‘I’m more of a divergent thinker.’ Jerry would nod. He talked enthusiastically about the next generation.
Tommy’s mother Rachel felt proud. She said that a lot. A creative in the family was something to be nurtured. Not everyone had one. She and Jerry both agreed maths could be taught but there was something especially particular about artistic ability. They often felt – when Tommy walked through one of their dinner parties on his
way out – extremely proud. Like they had produced something exotic, some fresh breeze of new hope.
‘The way he puts himself together,’ one of the others would say.
‘It’s beautiful isn’t it,’ Rachel would say.
Tommy knew that in her heart his mother hoped he was still queer. Maybe, she thought, there was still time but for now he brought round women or no one at all and she kept asking him to shop for her. She’d make him spend hours with her, looking through website after website. Him telling her what to wear and what would need tailoring. To begin with, when he wasn’t so busy, he’d sketched her little look-books of how to put things together. If they bumped into each other while they were out, she’d make her way to him and say quietly, so only he could hear, ‘Did I do it right?’ then spin slightly so he could see all of her. ‘Wonderful,’ he’d say, because she always was. She was in good shape. It occurred to him, again, that his mother was younger than Carla. Or possibly she and Carla were the same age.
Jerry was looking over the spreadsheets the accountant had given to Tommy.
‘So the corporate line?’ It wasn’t a statement.
‘Will cover that.’ Tommy had no idea.
‘And the orders?’
‘Yeah. They look good.’
‘But you didn’t show it at Fashion Week?’
Tommy shook his head. ‘We showed in-season.’
Jerry made a small noise in the back of his throat which could have been in reaction to Tommy, or not.
‘Everyone did,’ Tommy said. It had been a party and the corporate line wasn’t ready. He and Kurt were still fighting. Kurt didn’t like the idea of the corporate line. But they’d had to do something.
Jerry looked up at his son with what Tommy recognised as complete acceptance and understanding. ‘Well done.’
He was always like this. Tommy always felt loved in his father’s presence, appreciated. It wasn’t that he hadn’t done things that disappointed his parents; he just felt there was some core part of him that they saw, and all the bullshit – the smoking drugs at school, the stealing cars – they recognised it for what it was, just a window dressing he’d put up in front of his true, good nature. How did people kill with this kind of love around them? How could people be bitter? It’s like they’d forgotten this love, like they didn’t stand often enough in the light of their parents. In the place where the love shone on them.
