Make Yourself at Home

by Ciara Geraghty

  ‘I’ll be back in forty minutes,’ Rita said to Hugh. ‘Will that be enough time?’

  ‘Enough time for what exactly?’ said Marianne, feeling panic advancing on her like a tide.

  ‘I’d give it an hour,’ said Hugh, eyeing Marianne’s hair. ‘To be safe.’

  It was quiet in the salon once Rita was gone. Hugh went to ‘put on a brew’ and Shirley frowned in concentration as she swiped at the ends of Bartholomew’s hair with a pair of scissors. Beneath the dome, Ethel was snoring. Marianne had no idea if she should sit and, if so, where, and if she should take her anorak off before or after sitting down.

  ‘You can pop yourself here, dear girl,’ said Bartholomew, patting the chair beside him, ‘now that mummy’s boy has finally left.’ The seat was still warm, which Marianne usually found uncomfortable but she was cold and glad of the heat in this instance.

  Shirley plugged in a hairdryer and began drying Bartholomew’s hair with vigour, wrapping pieces of it around a brush, then rolling it out, her tongue trapped between the gap in her front teeth.

  ‘Could you be a little gentler?’ Bartholomew suggested, raising his voice to be heard over the drone.

  Shirley snapped off the dryer. ‘Do you want to look your best at the interview tomorrow?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know why I applied for that job,’ said Bartholomew, forlorn all of a sudden. ‘I don’t stand a chance.’

  ‘Not with that attitude you don’t,’ said Shirley, swivelling his chair round so she could glare at him. She held up the hairdryer, pointed it at him like a gun. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘are you going to stop bellyaching?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Bartholomew, perhaps sensing that Shirley’s stock of patience was thinning. Marianne was surprised it had lasted so long.

  Shirley turned his chair so that he was once again facing the mirror and resumed her machinations.

  Hugh appeared with a mug in each hand and a packet of Club Milk trapped under his arm. He looked at Marianne. Then he laughed. Marianne glared at him.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Hugh. ‘It’s just, you look petrified.’

  ‘I am most certainly not petrified,’ said Marianne. ‘I just … it’s been a long time since I had a haircut.’

  ‘Really?’ said Hugh, smirking.

  ‘That’s not very professional,’ said Marianne stiffly.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Hugh, handing her a mug and a Club Milk. ‘Can we start again? I’ll be as professional as I can.’

  Marianne nodded. She was suddenly tired, in the wake of the earlier adrenalin rush in Centra.

  ‘Why don’t you take off your anorak?’ suggested Hugh. ‘I’ll pick you a novel to read.’

  ‘Why aren’t you offering me a magazine?’ said Marianne, gesturing towards the one Bartholomew was engrossed in.

  ‘Do you read magazines?’ asked Hugh.

  ‘No.’

  Hugh picked a book out of the bookcase. Little Women. ‘Have you read that one?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course,’ said Marianne. ‘When I was a child.’

  ‘I left school early,’ said Hugh. ‘So I’m catching up now.’

  ‘Are you one of those hairdressers who keeps up a persistent line of patter?’ she asked him as he helped her into a black smock.

  Hugh appeared to give the question careful consideration. ‘Sometimes,’ he said. ‘When the situation warrants it.’

  ‘This is not one of those times,’ said Marianne.

  ‘I’ll be quiet as the day after Hogmanay,’ Hugh promised, gesturing to the chair at the wash basin. Marianne sat down and now Hugh was behind her, gathering her hair in his hands, easing her head over the lip of the sink. He was uncomfortably close. Marianne could smell him. He smelled like a hotpress. And something else. Lemongrass, she thought. Possibly a hair product. His hair certainly looked glossy enough. A lock of it slipped from behind his ear and trailed across Marianne’s cheek. It was soft and silky. Marianne thought about her coarse hair clogging up the sink.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ said Hugh, tucking his hair behind his ear. He trained the shower head on the ends of her hair. ‘How’s the temperature?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine,’ said Marianne. Her voice was tight. She felt hot. She tried to remember to breathe. She had heard people in the office talking about how relaxing it was. Having their hair washed. How they’d nearly fallen asleep.

  Marianne couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so uncomfortable. She couldn’t see Hugh but she could feel him all around.

  ‘You’ve got good quality hair,’ he said as he swept her fringe away from her face. ‘Is that chestnut brown your natural colour?’

  ‘Yes.’ There was nothing natural about her voice, which came out as a sort of high-pitched squeak. She could feel Hugh’s enormous hands through her hair. It felt like he was … was he massaging her scalp? No, he was just applying the shampoo, like a normal hairdresser. She had to relax. But the shampoo smelled like rose petals and the water was warm and soft, and his hands in her hair were gentle and careful, and she tried to remember the last time somebody had touched her like that.

  ‘Are you okay?’ asked Hugh. ‘Water not too hot, is it?’

  ‘No, it’s … fine,’ she managed to say.

  He rinsed her hair and she felt relief. It was nearly over. But no, he was off again, shampooing a second time, his fingers now kneading the base of her neck.

  ‘Conditioner,’ he said when he had finished the second rinse.

  ‘No,’ said Marianne, louder than she’d intended. But he was already working the conditioner through her hair.

  ‘It wasn’t a question,’ Hugh explained when she opened her eyes to glare up at him. ‘I was just letting you know.’

  Marianne squeezed her eyes shut. Resigned herself.

  ‘See?’ said Hugh. ‘I can now get my fingers through the entire length of your hair without fear of entanglement.’ He sounded pleased with himself.

  Marianne tried not to notice the delicate movement of his fingers along the strands of her hair, slick with conditioner. She tried not to be so aware of him, behind her. Even over the din of Shirley’s hairdryer, she could hear him breathing, a steady, slow breath that seemed deeper than it should, as if he were concentrating on a complicated mathematical equation.

  Finally, he turned off the water and wrapped her hair in a warm towel before leading her to a chair in front of a Hollywood-style mirror, lined with brutally bright bulbs.

  ‘I’m knocking off now, Hugh,’ said Shirley, whipping the towel from Bartholomew’s shoulders and scrubbing the back of his neck with it.

  Bartholomew shifted this way and that, trying to dodge her. ‘Leave me a few layers of skin, can’t you?’

  Marianne tried not to look at herself in the mirror. Under the lights, her face was a harsh white and her mouth and eyes seemed too big and too loud in its small circle. Beneath her eyes, the semicircles of skin were a bruised blue. If Marianne had been the type of person who carried make-up in her handbag, she might have gone so far as to apply some.

  She couldn’t believe how long her hair had grown, past her shoulders. It had a tendency to curl out rather than down but, in the weeks since her arrival at Ancaire, it appeared to have done both.

  ‘Nice work, Shirley,’ said Hugh, smiling at Bartholomew, whose quiff rose from his forehead like the masthead of a ship, high and full and gleaming. Shirley, a little pink around the edges and breathing hard, nodded briefly but couldn’t quash a small smile of pride that stole across her face.

  She lifted the dome off Ethel’s head and blew gently on her cheek to wake her up. Ethel’s hair was an even brighter purple, now that it was dry. When she put on her white wool coat, she looked like a child’s blackcurrant lollipop.

  ‘I could sit under that dryer all day,’ she sighed. ‘So warm.’ She took a plastic scarf out of her handbag and arranged it carefully over her hair.

  ‘It’s yours whenever you need it, Ethel,’ said Hugh, reaching down to tie the scarf u
nder her chin.

  ‘Free gaff, you two,’ said Shirley, smirking at Hugh and Marianne as she pulled a beanie over her head and reefed herself into her leather jacket.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Bartholomew, wagging his finger at them. ‘No hanky-panky.’

  ‘Where’s the fun in that?’ said Ethel, closing the gold clasp of her handbag.

  Marianne’s face flooded with colour as if she was some awkward teenager with an awkward teenager crush. She acted like she hadn’t heard them and concentrated on the blurb at the back of the book.

  Jo March and her sisters live in genteel poverty in Massachusetts with their mother.

  She read the line over and over until it no longer made any sense, and Shirley, Ethel, and Bartholomew had been shown the door by Hugh.

  Now he was behind her again, studying her reflection in the mirror. In her head, Marianne begged him not to make any reference to what the others had said. Not even a jokey one. Especially not a jokey one. She would have no idea what to say or do. She never knew.

  Slagging. That’s what they called it in the office. Good-humoured slagging. Or joking. Or having a laugh. We’re just having a laugh, Marianne. As if she should somehow know how to do that. Or, more often, how to take it.

  Perhaps if she said something first. Set the tone. Her mouth was dry when she opened it.

  But it was Hugh who spoke first. ‘I’m going to brush it first, okay?’ he said, holding a rake comb in his hand and looking at her in the mirror.

  Marianne nodded, relieved. ‘And then what?’ she asked.

  ‘And then whatever you like. I can do all sorts: undercuts, overcuts, blunt cuts, slicks, tapers, fades …’

  ‘I would have thought purple rinses are more your area of expertise,’ said Marianne.

  ‘I do believe you just made a joke,’ said Hugh, twirling the handle of his scissors around a finger, like a gunslinger.

  Marianne nodded. ‘It must be the fumes of the industrial-strength hairspray.’

  ‘So what’ll it be?’ asked Hugh.

  ‘Um, a trim?’

  ‘Excellent choice,’ said Hugh. ‘And, because it’s your first time here, I will throw in my blow-dry special.’

  ‘What’s your blow-dry special?’ Marianne couldn’t help asking.

  ‘It’s pretty much a standard blow dry, but you get a Happy Hair badge at the end,’ said Hugh, opening a drawer where there were many Happy Hair badges, in different colours.

  Marianne struggled not to smile. ‘Okay,’ she said gruffly, settling back on the chair.

  She opened the novel at the last page. Read the last paragraph. Then to chapter one, which she began to read.

  ‘Do you always do that?’ asked Hugh, coaxing the comb through Marianne’s hair.

  Marianne nodded. ‘I don’t like surprises,’ she said.

  For the next fifteen minutes there was no sound other than the snip-snip-snip of Hugh’s scissors along Marianne’s hair. Even though Marianne did not like surprises, she was surprised none the less to find that she did not overly mind the procedure. Hugh had a solid presence and cut her hair with an attention to detail that Marianne had not expected. On her previous annual visits to hairdressers – she never went to the same one twice – she was always on tenterhooks, anticipating the catch of the teeth of a comb in the fold of her ear or a throwaway remark about the unruliness of her hair or the casual insistence of this product or that product, regular application of which would transform her gnarled thicket into flowing locks.

  Hugh was careful with the comb and made no remarks, throwaway or otherwise.

  He cut her hair. Marianne read her novel. When she turned a page, she formed the habit of glancing at him over the top of the book, careful not to move her head. Everything about him was big. His hair, his face, his whole head. But there was a curious sort of delicacy along the line of his jaw and across the raspberry pink of his mouth, and while his green eyes clashed noisily with the rash of bright orange freckles across his face, Marianne found her habit of glancing at his face at every page turn sort of reassuring. Like she was in a safe pair of hands. This surprised her, as did the conversation, when it began. Because it was Marianne who began it.

  ‘How come you picked hairdressing?’ she asked, the next time she turned a page and glanced up.

  ‘Well,’ said Hugh, straightening and looking at her in the mirror, ‘it’s easier than clearing drains.’ He grinned. ‘Smells a hell of a lot nicer, too.’

  ‘Is that what you used to do?’ asked Marianne.

  Hugh shrugged. ‘I mostly did drugs, to be fair. With a few wee jobs in between to pay for them. I once got a job in a spray-tan place, if you can believe that.’

  Oddly, Marianne could believe it.

  ‘They even wanted to keep me on. But, Jesus, the smell of the place. Worse than drains.’

  Marianne laughed. She couldn’t help it. Nor could she blame Hugh, who looked sort of startled. She stopped laughing. ‘You didn’t answer my question,’ she said.

  ‘Did I not?’

  ‘About why you chose hairdressing?’

  ‘I didn’t choose it as such,’ said Hugh, lifting Marianne’s fringe and trapping it between his fingers before snipping at the ends of it with his scissors. ‘The judge said it was either rehab and an apprenticeship or he’d send me to the Big Hoose.’

  ‘What’s the Big Hoose?’

  ‘Barlinnie prison. All my brothers had been there and gave it a pretty poor rating on TripAdvisor.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Marianne.

  ‘So I did the hairdressing. It was the only class available.’

  ‘You must have had a good teacher,’ said Marianne stiffly.

  ‘Are you giving me a compliment?’ asked Hugh, pausing to look at her in the mirror.

  ‘I am commenting favourably on your professional hairdressing skills.’

  ‘That’s a compliment.’

  ‘And then you decided to move to Ireland?’ Marianne asked.

  Hugh resumed his careful concentration on her fringe. ‘Rita was a guest speaker at the rehab centre. She spoke about her Get Well Soon programme and I knew I wouldn’t stay clean in Glasgow. The flats were like a den of addiction. If you weren’t using, you were the odd one out. I wasn’t using and I was a hairdresser.’

  He opened a drawer and took out a hairdryer. Marianne wanted to ask him more things. Instead she said, ‘Are you going to straighten my hair?’ Brian had bought her a straightener one Christmas but Marianne had never been able to achieve the look promised by the model on the box.

  Hugh shook his head. ‘It’d be a crime to straighten curls like yours.’

  He said ‘curr-dels’. Marianne’s hair sounded delightful, the way he said it. She couldn’t help smiling when he finished drying her hair and held a mirror behind her head, so she could see the back of it, the sides of it.

  Marianne reached a tentative hand to her head, ran it down her hair. It was soft and bouncy and no longer just a mousy brown but a vibrant, rich, yes, chestnut brown with glints of something like gold in it, as if she had got those things that her colleagues – her ex-colleagues – were always getting. Highlights.

  She looked like a woman with highlights in her hair. A woman with highlights in her hair wearing a tracksuit.

  But still.

  Hugh lifted her hair off her neck and brushed the stray hairs away.

  ‘You going out tonight?’ he asked.

  ‘You said you didn’t do the patter,’ said Marianne.

  ‘I’m not,’ said Hugh. ‘This is actual conversation.’

  ‘I’m not going out,’ said Marianne. ‘How much do I owe you?’

  ‘Twenty-five euros,’ said Hugh.

  ‘It can’t be that little.’ Even Marianne, with her limited experience, knew that hairdressers were supposed to charge you exorbitant prices, then tear a rip in the lining of your coat if you didn’t leave a hefty tip.

  ‘It is,’ said Hugh, handing her a Happy Hair badge.

  ‘Are
you charging me that little because my house was repossessed and my husband left me and I lost my job because I got a criminal conviction for stealing?’

  ‘No,’ said Hugh. ‘That’s just the price.’ He nodded towards a price list on the wall.

  ‘Oh.’

  Hugh pulled her anorak off the hanger and helped her into it. She turned round and nearly laughed with pleasure as her hair lifted and swirled around her head.

  ‘My hair,’ she blurted. ‘It’s … nice.’

  ‘It is, aye,’ Hugh said, grinning at her. His green eyes had disappeared into their slits with the strength of his smile. He looked like somebody who knew where happiness lived and how to get there. For a moment, she considered asking him.

  She was looking at his mouth now. The glistening flush of it. She would need to stand on her toes to reach him.

  She stepped back and fumbled with the zip of her anorak. She tried to remember Brian’s mouth. When was the last time she had kissed him? She couldn’t remember. It was probably a brief peck on the cheek. If she had known it was the last time, maybe she would have taken more notice. Made more of an effort.

  She had no idea why she was thinking about such things. She put it down to the heat of the hairdryer. Her face was flushed with it.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That wasn’t as … awful as I’d imagined.’

  ‘Likewise,’ said Hugh.

  Chapter 22

  ‘You’re looking very pleased with yourself,’ said Aunt Pearl when Marianne arrived in the kitchen.

  ‘I got a good night’s sleep,’ said Marianne, buttering a slice of toast.

  ‘Don’t your troubles seem halved?’ said Rita, setting a plate of warm scones on the table.

  ‘No,’ said Marianne.

  ‘Quartered, though?’

  ‘It’s her hair,’ said Aunt Pearl, leaning towards Marianne and examining her. ‘Did you brush it?’

  ‘Hugh cut it,’ Marianne admitted when it became clear that Aunt Pearl was not going to let up without some sort of plausible explanation.

  ‘Ah, Hugh,’ said Aunt Pearl, and Marianne waited for the rest of the sentence, which, no doubt, would drip with vitriol and disapproval. But Pearl said nothing further. There was even a trace of a smile across her face.