by Pip Adam
At least you’re not living in a ghetto, she was saying. At least it isn’t as bad as that, there are people suffering, like, real people – real suffering, don’t bring me your ‘How do I invoice for the workbook shots?’ Don’t give me that.
Carla wasn’t sure how Tommy made his living. She presumed it was through the company. She went to a small business seminar once. The IRD sent her because they were sick of her paying her tax in so many different ways. Every year they owed her a lot. That’s what she suspected. She kept saying to them, ‘But it’s legal? The way I’m doing it? It’s legal, eh?’ And, ‘Yes,’ they said, they had to admit that it was legal, but not the best use of anyone’s time. Wouldn’t she rather have the money in her account? Earning interest? She’d been in trouble with them before. Just before she went away. She didn’t think she did want her taxes sitting in her own bank account, because the way things were going it wouldn’t be in there when it was time to pay them. She’d spend them and then when the end of the year came, no matter how she managed it, she would be in trouble with the IRD again. Sometimes she wondered if that was really what they wanted.
Duey was looking around. Checking they had everything. They had everything. Why did she not just leave? Should Carla give her something for coming? Did Carla need to pay Duey for tonight?
‘You don’t want a drink, eh?’ Duey asked.
‘Nah. I’ll get a taxi,’ she said. She lived like a queen.
‘I could take you. I’m starting late tomorrow.’ Saint Duey.
Carla shook her head. ‘What about that nape?’ But Duey would say it was fine. Carla knew it wasn’t, knew it would give her hell tomorrow, knew that Duey knew that, but she’d say it was fine.
Duey nodded, stuck her hands deep into the pockets of her jeans. ‘Yeah. That nape is going to give you hell.’
‘I don’t think I could have done anything else with it tonight, though.’
‘Nah. Absolutely. If you’d tried to fix it tonight ... yeah, you have to wait for that overnight growth.’
Carla watched Duey leave. She didn’t really say goodbye. Just gave a wave and everyone kind of shifted slightly in their task to let her know they knew she was going and that Carla was by herself. Everyone liked Duey.
At the tax course, they had said you should always pay yourself a wage, not just use the business account as a personal account. Your wages were part of the equation. Carla did not run her business that way. Did she even have a business? She didn’t want to have a business, but the way she worked it was: she paid her taxes and then she ran for her life. She looked at everything she needed to pay and made decisions about who could wait. Rent could never wait, especially at the moment. If she let her rent wait at the moment, the landlord would be over very quickly, and she would be kicked out sooner.
Tommy said, ‘Oh well, see you all tomorrow,’ and waved, and then said, ‘Oh, actually. Elodie. Can I talk to you?’
Everyone else left, saying goodbye to Sharona. She hardly noticed because she was already on to the next thing. Tommy talked to Elodie, but Sharona couldn’t hear what they were saying from where she was. It looked like business and she didn’t give a fuck anymore. She was tired.
After about ten minutes, Tommy finished, and Elodie left, then Tommy went upstairs to his apartment. Finally, Sharona was by herself again. Looking at the garments on the forms, knowing now that they also needed a belt. She rang Alice but it went to voicemail because she would still be on the plane because it took a long time to get to Bali. But she rang anyway.
‘Alice,’ she said. ‘Hi, it’s, um, Sharona, here. Look, sorry. Work. But anyway, have fun.’ Then there was nothing to say, because there was nothing left to say, because Sharona was a heel and her daughter was away and she was the worst type of mother, the type who left her daughter places and it didn’t even matter. It didn’t even touch the surface, because Sharona had all the samples to get finished. And that seemed so important right now. Maybe her perspective had gone. Maybe it was because she hadn’t left the workroom all day. But what was important right now was that she got the alterations finished and pressed the clothes and got rid of any of the mess that Elodie and Carla had left on them.
There was a sprinkling of tiny black hairs in the collar of the T-shirt. Sharona went to her bag and dug deep into it, finally dragging out her makeup bag. She let it flip open and found her tweezers. She stopped, holding the T-shirt and tweezers in either hand, looking at her reflection in the window. She looked like she was about to do needlepoint. Like a peasant woman from an old painting. She laughed.
Sharona turned from the window, pulling her glasses up to her eyes, and leant low over the white T-shirt so she could pluck out the hairs one by one.
Carla would text her. She could phone, but despite the way it would look, she didn’t want to wake Duey up. They’d be shooting in nine hours.
She typed ‘You up?’ into her message app.
It would look like a booty call. She knew that. That was the ironic joke she was making. Duey would get it. Carla could just keep trying. Trying new things like this. Maybe this was the type of friends they were now. There was really very little to lose. She was walking along Symonds Street, working her way to Courtsville, to Duey’s apartment. It was automatic. There were taxis on Queen Street but Carla had walked up K Road and down Symonds Street towards Duey’s place. She looked at the text again and deleted it so she wouldn’t send it.
She stopped outside the Langham. Their cocktail bar closed at midnight. She’d be pushing it but she walked in anyway. The lobby was busy and she didn’t really want to buy a drink so she smiled at the concierge and sat in one of the armchairs. Her hairdressing bag made her look like a tourist. She and Duey used to drink in the hotel bar when it was the Sheraton. It was open late during the week. Carla loved working. Sometimes she would meet friends of hers who were still school students at Alfies. She loved paying for drinks with money she knew she’d earned.
It wasn’t that it was cold in the lobby, more that Carla was tired and agitated and hadn’t eaten. She thought about Doug. She should get home, but the fucking nape. She needed a hairdresser. She wasn’t sure what she could do about it now. Nothing, short of waking Dominic up and shaving it off. Shape, fade, she wasn’t sure. But she really wanted to talk to Duey about it. Maybe she needed to talk to Duey.
It was 1.30. Why would Duey be up? She had work in the morning. On her phone Carla brought up the photo of the nape again. It was ballsy to keep it hard like that. She couldn’t tell if it was cool or awful. That was pretty much where she operated. Was it old-school or old-fashioned? Were they in that phase? The one where you could play a visual pun like that? Like, whoa, what happened there? ‘That looks like 1987’? It came instinctively most of the time, but lately, in the last few weeks, in the last day especially, she was questioning everything. It was like swallowing wasn’t a reflex action anymore. She had to concentrate in a way she hadn’t had to for a long time.
Was it that phone call? When they’d called Sharona? Hassled her. Asked her to come out for dinner. Wound her up. Was it too much like the old days? Something had made it happen and now she couldn’t get it out of her head. Everything looked like the old days. She needed to talk to Duey. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe Duey was part of it. Maybe Duey was all of it. Duey. She relaxed in the chair and looked at her phone again, but agitated, undecided, no idea what to do next. She needed to get home to Doug. That was it.
She sent Duey the photo of the nape. If she was awake she could send her a message; if she was asleep it could wait until tomorrow. Doug. Terrifying Doug. Then her phone beeped in her hand. She fumbled and looked at it and it wasn’t Duey. It was Elodie. ‘You home?’ the message said. ‘No,’ Carla replied. No. No. And now she would have to make it true because Elodie was sweet and she didn’t want to get caught out lying to Elodie. ‘No. Just seeing Duey about that haircut.’ And she sent it and then she wrote another: ‘I’ll probably stay in town,’ and she sent it and back came
‘k’ and Carla settled into the seat, waiting for Duey to text back.
When her phone vibrated, she thought it might be Sharona wanting her to drop round some food or get something else for her. Or it might be someone from work. God knows why. No one from work would call this late. Not on a Wednesday. When she saw it was from Carla, Duey couldn’t believe she’d thought it would be from anyone else. Who else would message at this time? Like really. Carla worried about herself a lot and she seemed extremely worried about this fucking haircut.
Duey didn’t care anymore. She was up watching TV, not able to sleep. Carla could have come round, but Duey just didn’t want her to. She wanted to watch TV in her track pants and drink tea and eat toast and just not think about anything. This was usually how she slept. How she spent the sleeping hours. Up, watching TV. She watched a lot. At the moment she was watching Friends from the beginning. Joey had just said, ‘How you doing?’ for the first time. Ross and Rachel were not together and she was pretty sure Monica didn’t have a job – or maybe she did. Everyone said none of them worked. Duey had said it. ‘They have that amazing apartment and none of them work.’ But now she was watching it again she saw she was wrong. They were all working. Work was an important part of most of the storylines. It was just a misremembering. A thing people said and then it became true. That seemed to be the most important factual commodity these days – anecdote. Opinion. Feeling. The American people were sick of experts. Elodie’s dad was sick of analysts – he didn’t know anything about that study, he hadn’t read the report, any reasonable New Zealander would see it his way.
A couple of weeks ago Duey had been looking at the weather. It was 13 degrees in London and 13 degrees in Auckland. Fuck, what a fucking shambles. The world was ending. Duey could tell. It wasn’t just cynicism, or because she was old. It felt like the end. They’d all be underwater, soon enough. There was nothing anyone could do about it. She could have recycled the containers from dinner – but recycling was just relocating. The power lay very firmly with the people who didn’t want to do anything. People like Tommy and Elodie didn’t want to do anything. They’d been born into a dying world, and now they just accepted it. Wondered about the possibilities it would bring. So Duey stayed up, holding the world together with her worry. Trying to make it keep spinning through some kind of observer effect. Surely it wouldn’t end while she was watching it. Maybe she just wanted to see it end.
She had half an eye on the clothes in Friends, the hair. Carla and Duey had learnt to cut in the year of the Rachel. They’d missed the Lady Di completely, railed against it even, but then everyone wanted this. It was tricky. Duey never fully got it right. It was deceiving. It looked like long layers. Just very, very long layers but now that she saw it again – it was disconnected in a way that the salon they learnt to cut in just wouldn’t allow. Most of the senior stylists were Sassoon-trained. That was kind of what held the place together in the 80s, after the crash. A cut was often all people could afford and they didn’t mind paying more for it if it lasted as long as possible and didn’t require any product to convince it into place. For it to last, everything needed to grow out in a supported way. The Rachel was disconnected – no one taught Duey how to cut a disconnected haircut. One part couldn’t take off on its own, on some errant plan.
Sassoon had been a freedom fighter. No one had really known that until he was given an award a few years ago. Duey had known it. She wasn’t sure how, but when everyone started talking about it she found she already knew.
Joey’s, Chandler’s and Ross’s hair was always bad. It changed all the time. One episode Joey could have a loping mop and the next it was short and worked down with a shitload of gel. There really wasn’t a lot else but gel when Carla and Duey first started. Then there was Dax wax, then there was Fudge. Duey had always loved cutting men’s hair. She and Carla had been taught that there was one haircut for men, and all haircuts were adapted from it. Don’t ever layer unless he’s going to wear it forward. Don’t ever promise anyone anything their hair won’t do. It was this that set the hairdressers at the salon apart; it kept their books full, which meant they could keep the product shelf at the front of the salon the same size, while all the other places took out chair after chair and loaded it up with shampoo bottles. People don’t want to be sold at. They just want to sit down, have a cup of tea or a glass of wine and have their hair done. It had been a privileged position. People don’t like to be sold at, but hairdressers like to be sold, and so do owners. Owners who weren’t hairdressers. Owners who were businesspeople, who understood profit margins and upselling. A butcher who reinvented himself as a hairdresser. People leaving other retail to run a salon, then two salons, then three. That was the problem with growing. It was never enough.
Phoebe was stroking Rachel’s hair and saying, ‘Pheebs.’
‘That’s your name,’ Rachel said.
‘Oh,’ Phoebe said, jumping back in that way she did. ‘Oh. I thought that was just what we called each other.’
Duey laughed. She held up the phone again. Dominic’s nape looked bad. She couldn’t quite work out how Carla had managed to make it look that bad. That took effort. That’s what she would have said to Carla before, when things were easy. ‘Whoa,’ she would have said. ‘Wow.’ And they would have nodded and laughed with each other.
Duey spread the photo larger, looked more closely at the nape. She could hazard a guess at what Carla was up to, but it had been way too late to be trying anything like that. Duey couldn’t imagine they’d be shooting it from behind, but sideways would be tricky now and you never wanted to have to stand there and watch every angle to try and protect your work. They could probably Photoshop it away. But would they even understand it needed to be Photoshopped? Every hairdresser in town would see it and talk about it. It wouldn’t destroy Carla, but people always wanted to say she was getting old. There were so many people who wanted her work.
Men’s hair was so much harder than women’s. Carla was scared, or maybe distracted. She had the dog to worry about and the change in date and the pressure of Tommy being there while she cut and she’d had to cut it in the awful light of the workroom. It was understandable that the nape looked bad. The rest probably didn’t look that great either, but she’d only sent a photo of the nape. Duey would message her in the morning. Carla would be on her way home by now. Duey looked at her watch. Carla might be asleep. She could probably message her now but she didn’t want to risk it. ‘Looks fine,’ she’d say in the morning, and Carla would know she was lying. Why did they play the game? She turned her phone off and then there was a key at the door. It was Sharona.
‘Are you sleeping?’ Duey spoke without moving her eyes from the TV.
Sharona grunted.
‘You should sleep.’ Duey had given her the key last year. Sharona was living well out of town now but she stayed so often at the workroom, and Duey was close.
‘Just a shower,’ she said.
‘You should sleep.’
Sharona grunted again and walked into the bathroom, dropping her bag at the door. Sharona was like this every time. She would grunt, wash, sometimes sleep for 30 minutes, say thanks, and leave. Every now and then she’d bring wine and leave it on the kitchen bench. Duey could hear the shower, now. Ross was an arsehole. Phoebe was Duey’s favourite – she was everyone’s favourite.
The bathroom filled with steam quickly. It was large because it was an old apartment. Sharona took off her clothes and they fell around her in piles. She was tired but there was no coming back from that fight. What a waste. She looked at herself in the mirror. She was thick – menopausal thick. There were more and more fat women around, but they were young and fat in the right places – and tight, somehow. All of the plus-size models she’d worked with were nearly six foot tall, so they kind of looked exactly like a five-foot-six size eight. There wasn’t a part of her body she could rest on anymore. Not one bit that gave her any kind of pleasure. She hated all of it. Every time she spent any time nake
d in front of a mirror, there was new hell. She had never wanted to be like that – it felt shallow, but confronted with her naked form she always got a shock. She understood the mechanics of clothes completely. They lied. They made people feel like their bodies were better than they were, but also they pretended to guard against intruders, which, generally, they didn’t.
Duey’s shower was the best shower in Auckland. Everyone had turned the pressure down when they’d started metering the water, but Duey had fitted a water-saving shower rose which meant there was no loss in pressure. Sharona had almost told Carla about it as she left, when she’d asked if she needed anything. ‘I might pop round to Duey’s shower in a bit.’ It was on the tip of her tongue, but she knew it wasn’t right. Sharona had talked to Duey about it and knew it wasn’t right to let Carla know about the shower. At the moment things were tricky, Duey had said when they’d had breakfast that morning, before Duey started work.
Sharona looked at her watch – that had been yesterday morning. Duey and Carla were like fucking high school students. They were all probably closer to death than high school but this just kept going on. Like they would never grow up. She let the water batter her shoulders, it was so nice to be warm, she felt the blood come back to her. Before the meeting she’d decided to take the morning off, but everyone was still antsy about the clothes, so she would have to be there and work and drink coffee and eat sugar and stare into space vaguely until someone wanted something specific, when she would need to pretend she’d been paying attention. Dominic had weird shoulders. Weak shoulders. The T-shirt would need pinning up at the back, or she could put large tacking stitches into it. They wouldn’t be using it again. Then she realised she wasn’t tired anymore. She was in the grip of a second wind. She turned the shower off, dried herself quickly and dressed, pulling hard on her jeans over the fat squeaky skin of her legs. She was lucky she could sew. Nothing fitted her anymore, it all needed tailoring. It was like she was growing into some new, strange species. Everything out of normal human proportion, normal mannequin proportion.
