A History of Forgetting

by Adderson, Caroline

  Not a child, then. When she stood, Alison saw a grown woman in miniature. She looked straight down on the perfect blue-white path of her parting, two blue-black fields of hair on either side. ‘It’s Ali, right?’ she asked as she led Alison through another pair of columns to a gallery where three stylists were working.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m Thi, the manager, and this is Donna.’ Thi stopped beside one of the stylists who, pausing in her work, smiled at Alison, though not exactly in a friendly way. She wore a helmet of platinum hair, chin-length, cut at angles. ‘Oh, Ali.’ She stressed the first syllable—Aa!—the same sound she’d make if she found a hair in her soup. ‘Shucks. A-lee, we thought. We were expecting a big black bruiser.’

  Thi kept her moving along. Between each station, a half-column rose from counter to ceiling and a different bust stood, each with eyes rolled back showing whites. On the far wall, trompe l’oeil windows looked out on an idealized garden where nudes of both sexes posed.

  They passed a bust in a matted wig and sunglasses. ‘Christian works at that station. He’ll be late. Here’s Robert. Robert, Ali.’

  Roxanne was the stylist with the nose ring at the sinks shampooing her client. ‘I love your hair,’ said Alison. Roxanne’s was the most hair Alison had ever seen on one person at one time, a great tendrilling mass of brown. It seemed impossible that she could support a whole head of it on such a thin neck.

  ‘And Malcolm’s in the back,’ said Thi. ‘I’ll show you the back room, Ali.’

  ‘Don’t leave her alone with him,’ Roxanne teased. ‘He bites.’

  ‘What kind of name is Thi?’ asked Alison as they moved on.

  ‘Vietnamese. T-H-I. You know, like what the Queen drinks.’

  The stock, supply, lunch and laundry rooms were combined in a six-by-twelve-foot square; dye samples stacked on style books stacked on the microwave, then on the shelves Pepto-Bismol, dishes, a fan, perming solution, sugar cubes, bulk shampoo—all the verticality, squalor and cramming­ together of a slum. This was the slum off the Forum.

  The man on the bench covered his face to sneeze, then looked at her from behind the tissue with a wet-eyed, sour expression. Thi said, ‘That’s Malcolm. What do you think so far?’ She took two mugs from the shelf and filled them, sliding one towards Alison.

  When Thi wasn’t looking, Alison rapped knuckles on the columns and scrutinized the walls. She’d never been close to antiquity, not even in a museum, so could feel unjaded awe for replicas and marble mocked up with a sponge. ‘I like that it looks so old.’

  ‘Post-Bankrupt-Italian-Taverna,’ someone quipped from the doorway just as Alison picked a package of coffee whitener out of the clutter on the counter.

  ‘Here you are, Christian,’ Thi chided. ‘Your client’s waiting.’

  Alison saw him framed in the doorway, his face flattened like it was pressed against glass. He was small, bigger than Thi, of course, but tiny for a man. ‘That’s bleach activator you’re putting in your coffee,’ he told her and laughed a grating warble.

  Thi shooed him off.

  ‘I love coffee. I love Thi. I love Thi, but she doesn’t love me . . .’

  The bar fridge, tucked under the counter, was where she would find the cream. It would be a day of little chores, Thi explained, until Alison got to know the place. ‘The dryer’s ready to be unloaded and that’s the cupboard for the towels. When you’re finished, let me know. I’m up front.’

  Alison dumped the tainted coffee in the sink, cringed and rolled up her sleeves. Under all the submerged dishes, tea bags clogged the drain. Malcolm was still there on the bench, breathing heavily through his mouth, head lolling against the wall. He didn’t look like a stylist. Much older than everyone else, he looked, in those clothes, like an out-of-stylist. An over-stylist—his hair rinsed a lustreless black. Also, there was a musty smell in the tiny room that seemed to be coming from him.

  ‘So, Malcolm. What do you do?’ she asked.

  His eyes opened. He seemed surprised—by her question, or that she’d talked to him at all. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Do you own the place?’

  He started to cough, a deep phlegmatic hacking, and pressed his fingers to his eyes.

  She let him alone. He clearly wasn’t well. After she had washed the dishes and tamed the static-spitting towels, she tiptoed out, back to the gallery where she found Thi at one of the sinks bowing over a client. Up front the phone started to ring.

  ‘Can you get it, Ali?’

  ‘Vitae,’ Alison said, assuming that was how she should answer.

  On the telephone, old people always sounded to her like those old vinyl records, their voices popping and scratchy. She plugged the music in the background out of her other ear and still barely heard the caller say she was the one who cancelled with Malcolm that morning.

  ‘You’re afraid?’ Alison asked. ‘You had a fright?’

  ‘Am a . . .’

  In the appointment book Alison pencilled ‘Mrs. Parker’ in a slot for the next day.

  ‘Take her phone number, too,’ said Thi over Alison’s shoulder, smiling approvingly when Alison hung up.

  ‘Ninety.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mrs. Parker. She’s ninety. How about sweeping up?’

  ‘What does Vitae mean?’

  For a second she pondered. ‘You know, I haven’t got a clue.’

  ‘I have so much to learn,’ said Alison on her way to get the broom.

  Passing Christian again, she paused to watch him draw out a strand on either side of his client’s face to compare the length. The woman was staring at Christian in the mirror, either not aware of or not bothering to conceal her fascination. There was more than one thing wrong with Christian’s face: eyes unsynchronized, maybe a birth defect.

  Alison started under Robert’s chair, sweeping the whole salon and, moving through the room, hearing omnisciently all the conversations—Christian’s client asking, ‘What could I do? What would you do?’ Someone up front coming in late and saying, ‘Forgive me.’ When she got to the end of the room, Thi, passing, pointed out the little trapdoor in the wall. Alison pushed the pile of hair against it, then stood peering into the dark place where it fell.

  ‘Where does it go?’ she asked, but Thi had gone.

  Just before her break, she was given, to her surprise, her first real task.

  At hairdressing school they practised on each other, foaming chatter. Billy loved it. ‘Scrub me, baby. Rub-a-dub-dub.’ But here, perhaps because it was an actual salon or maybe because the decor suggested it, everything seemed ancient and symbolic. The client leaned back in the chair. She poured the water over his head, watched his forehead unscoring, the shuttling under his eyelids slowing, his jaw releasing. Suspended in her hand, his head grew heavier. She knew then that whatever concerns he had come in with, she was washing away. Her choice of career, now that Alison had finally made it, she had explained like this: ‘I want to make people look good. If you look good, you feel good. I want everybody to feel good.’ Naive, perhaps, and idealistic, but she was, after all, the daughter of a woman who ran herself ragged for charity and looked it—hair and person frazzled. ‘We hoped you’d be a nurse,’ said her mother, who to Alison’s great regret could not see that hairdressing too was a healing profession.

  She pressed around the client’s head with a towel, then showed him to Robert’s chair. Robert, in his crocheted vest, hiply ugly, appeared a moment later. After introducing himself, he asked the man what he could do for him today.

  ‘Something different.’

  ‘Good. Who do you want to be?’

  The client laughed. He didn’t exactly know. Robert, a ring through his knowing brow, advised. Alison watched him moving hands in the air, lightly touching his client’s head and hair.

  A few minutes later she sat down in the co
rner to watch Robert through her break. Something was different, though she had missed the transition while she was in the back room getting the client his coffee. Now his expression had turned serious. Already he and Robert were engaged in an intimate conversation, which she could not hear over the music. Perhaps it wasn’t so strange considering the limited time they had: an hour together, ninety minutes at most. At every station, the white faces of the busts stared out with the usual blank, bored dispassion, but Robert was actually listening. Listening was also Robert’s work.

  ‘What could I do?’ she had heard another client say earlier. ‘What would you do?’ So it was not only to look good that they came. They came to be offered a pierced, sympathetic ear. For advice, for judgement to be reserved. To confess. The snip-snip-snip of the scissors lulling.

  ‘Forgive me.’

  When her break was over, she went back to the reception area. Christian’s last client, the woman who had been puzzling over his face, came out of the changing room. Alison said, ‘Wow! You look great!’ The woman beamed as she paid. She paid a lot, but it was worth it. She looked good. She felt good. She had been absolved.

  Alison peeked around the column, saw Malcolm knuckle-deep in the sea-foam curls of an aging client. This was an older neighbourhood, so perhaps the woman had come in because it was close, but Alison wondered how she stood the music. Maybe she was deaf. Malcolm, chairside manner elegant and doting, fluttered around the old lady. He had come alive.

  ‘Vee-tay,’ she practised saying, walking home from the bus stop. ‘Vee-tay. Vee-tay.’ It was a word you had to smile to say, drawing up and back the corners of the mouth in the ‘vee’ and showing teeth. She hoped she was pronouncing it correctly.

  The house was an old mansion divided into apartments. Alison clumped up the wooden stairs, unlocked the main door and stepped into the vestibule, where the walls were stained with luminous migrating colour from the stained-glass windows. She put her key in the apartment lock, kicked off her killing shoes going in. Billy appeared with a bouquet of flowers.

  ‘That’s sweet!’ She kissed him.

  ‘How was the first day?’

  ‘Wonderful, but I’m totally beat. It was a lot of work. A lot of fun. I think I’m going to need a tattoo.’

  She brought the flowers to the kitchen, its usual mess— unwashed dishes, dried spaghetti in hardened doodles on the ceiling—Billy’s trick.

  ‘How many people work there?’

  ‘Um.’ She counted on her fingers. ‘Seven, including me. One I didn’t meet. I really liked the manager. She’s this cute little Vietnamese girl.’

  ‘How many are fags?’

  ‘Billy,’ she said chidingly and, under the sink, found an empty pickle jar for the flowers.

  ‘I’m just asking. Out of sociological interest.’

  She had something to ask him. That the scientific names she had learned for scalp disorders were in Latin didn’t occur to her. She asked Billy because he dropped Rattus norvegicus, Mus domesticus and Mesocricetus auratus, ad nauseam.

  ‘What does Vitae mean?’

  ‘Shit-for-Brains, think.’ He pressed against her hip so she could feel he was hard. ‘Vive l‘amour!’

  ‘That’s vive, not Vitae.’ She propped the flowers up in the jar. He took her hand and began leading her away.

  ‘Where are we going? Oh, Billy, I’m tired. I just got my period.’

  ‘Great,’ he said, pulling her into the bedroom. ‘We’ll pretend you’re a virgin and I’m deflowering you again.’

  She fell back on the futon, giggling.

  2

  From that first day, Malcolm was struck by how wide-eyed and eager to please the new girl was, how quaintly sweatered. She was the answer to his prayers: someone smiling in the morning and offering him coffee, someone, finally, he could trust his fragile clientele to. She would lead them to the dressing room as if helping them negotiate a busy street. She seemed to know where they were stiff and into which ear to speak, seemed to understand, as well, that Malcolm was suffering. She would actually talk to him, not about anything important—he didn’t believe her capable of uttering anything of substance—but her funny questions made him laugh. She was a great dollop of a dear, a Girl Scout in plain clothes. Perhaps the world was full of such young women. Malcolm wouldn’t know. He didn’t have much to do with the world any more.

  ‘Your cold seems better today,’ she said as Malcolm was hanging up his coat. He didn’t turn or acknowledge her in any way; he seemed not to have heard her. Under the coat, he was wearing a sports jacket that had to be a joke, sleeves too short, his shirt cuffs escaping in inches at the wrists. She got the feeling he was actually wearing someone else’s jacket.

  ‘Malcolm?’

  He swung around. ‘Were you talking to me?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alison. ‘You’re feeling better?’

  ‘Not worse,’ he conceded.

  ‘You would know, I bet. What does Vitae mean?’

  ‘“Of life” or maybe “for life”. What that has to do with a hair salon, perhaps you can tell me.’

  Alison, amused by his tone, said, ‘I kind of like it. It makes you think.’

  ‘It makes me think what an idiot that woman is.’

  ‘What woman?’

  ‘That Amanda person! This is not her only venture. She has plans for a salon in Kitsilano, too. You’ve heard of it—the Aztec temple? What will the next one be, I wonder. A Christian Science Reading Room?’

  Alison didn’t know what he was talking about or why he seemed so annoyed. Then Christian came in. ‘Mal! I love it!’ He touched the jacket sleeve. ‘What is it? Fortrel?’

  Malcolm turned and walked away, the smell that hovered around him trailing. Alison identified it now: mothballs.

  Left standing with Christian, she said good morning. For no reason, he reached out and touched her hair. ‘Listen,’ he whispered. ‘I saved your life. You should buy me lunch.’ He meant the bleach activator she’d put in her coffee a few days ago.

  ‘Sweetie. It could have killed you.’

  Another busy morning—answering phones, folding towels, sweeping hair. Apparently they were going to teach her something, but in the meantime she performed all these banal tasks with cheer.

  At lunch, Christian came to fetch her in the back room. Roxanne stopped them on the way. ‘Where are you going?’ Christian told her, next door to the deli. ‘I’ll meet you there,’ she said.

  Cowbells clanked on the deli door. The young man behind the counter looked up from his newspaper and, smiling at them, slipped a pencil behind his ear. ‘My . . .’ said Christian, seeing he had been doing the crossword puzzle. ‘An intellectual.’

  The deli man laughed. He was wearing a clean white cap and jacket. Strung in rows above him, cudgels of sausage.

  ‘This is Ali, my assistant,’ Christian told him and Alison rolled her eyes. ‘She’s the brat in my bratwurst. My little friend.’

  ‘What’ll you have?’ the deli man asked her.

  She ordered a bowl of soup, then took a table over by the window, the cloth red-checked, the napkin holder a mock cuckoo-clock chalet. ‘My fantasy,’ Christian said, joining her and speaking low so the deli man wouldn’t hear, ‘is that one day he won’t be wearing that smock thing.’

  Now that he was across from her, she no longer had to avoid looking at him for fear he would think she was trying to figure out the problem on his face. Where to look, though? When he fixed her with the bright tack of his left eye, the right veered off, distractingly. She followed its dead-end gaze, only to refocus abruptly on the left straight-ahead eye again. The moment she did, it veered—a back-and-forth confusion like the old gag where two people jam in a door frame after so many after-yous. Soon she realized she wasn’t listening to what he was saying—something about lederhosen and embroidered braces—so she looked elsewhere on hi
s face, to the flattened nose, the nostrils squashed almost to slits. He snuffled when he breathed; he nasalized. The scarred skin above his lip was shiny and pink.

  ‘You have found me out,’ he said suddenly, covering his nose and mouth with his hand. ‘I am a hairdresser with a harelip.’

  Alison was mortified.

  ‘You’ll get used to me,’ Christian said, then pointed behind her where a travel poster hung on the wall. It was a mountain scene—crowded peaks tapering skyward, a tiny napkin holder perched in a stone cleft. ‘That’s the Eagle’s Nest,’ he said. ‘Hitler’s infamous hideout.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘Ja, ja. Who vill be our first victim? I know! Mal de coeur! Malcolm Malcontent. Isn’t he bad? Isn’t he just plain mal. He was born that way, you know.’

  ‘Born what way?’ she asked, still thinking of the harelip.

  ‘Born wearing slacks. Later, he spent his formative years in France—thus the supérieur demeanour. You know Faye’s?’

  ‘Whose?’ Alison asked.

  ‘Faye’s of Kerrisdale? Malcolm was Faye.’ He paused, one eye listing towards the counter where the deli man was ladling out Alison’s soup. ‘But I should tell you about Roxanne before she gets here. She has a little problem.’

  He mimed a finger down his throat.

  ‘She’s really thin,’ Alison agreed.

  ‘I bring her vitamins. She’ll eat those. You could drop some in her coffee, too. Now, James—’

  She had met Jamie that morning. He looked more like a construction worker than a hairdresser, both forearms scribbled to the elbows with tattoos—lyrics in a continuous spiral starting at his wrists. He wore his red hair in a clutch of corkscrew curls.

  ‘It’s real,’ said Christian. ‘It’s natural.’

  ‘What is?’

  He smoothed both hands over his own yellow down. ‘James is a true redhead whose sole purpose is to mate with other true redheads and thereby replenish the redhead population which has been in steady decline since the Vikings. When you see him filled with angst it is inevitably because he has been fooled by a pretender.’