I take off my sunhat.
Audrey Hepburn stares at my hair.
‘Well, that’s perfectly easily solved!’ she says, after a long moment’s silence. She springs to her feet and – with the hand that’s not clasping the cigarette-holder – grabs the kitchen scissors from the kitchen worktop. ‘I’m jolly good with hair. I used to cut all my friends’ hair in London after the war, when we were too poor to go to the hairdressers!’ She puts her head on one side, still smoking, and considers me for a moment. ‘You know, a fringe would look marvellous on you.’
I have my doubts about this, because although it’s been roughly two decades since I last had a fringe, the memories (and the photographic evidence) are still with me. And it didn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, look marvellous. It made me look like an oversized hobbit. On a Bad Hair Day.
‘Oh, yes …’ Audrey Hepburn is saying, happily, as she takes one of the huge loose covers off the arm of the Chesterfield and starts to tuck it in around my neck. ‘A fringe will be impossibly chic! Not to mention the way it will bring out your cheekbones.’
Memories of oversized hobbit-dom are fading, to be replaced with a vision of that moment in Roman Holiday where Audrey Hepburn has all her hair lopped off by the barber, rocketing from gauche schoolgirl to international beauty in the time it takes to fade out and fade back in again. Not that I’m suggesting I possess the other advantages Audrey has (elfin features, incredible bone structure), but if she really thinks a fringe would make me chic …
… not to mention that Getting a Makeover was one of the things I always used to do in my Audrey Hepburn dream-world. Admittedly that was in the serene surroundings of an old-fashioned beauty parlour, and not in a cramped flat surrounded by boxes. But still …
‘Could you really make me look chic?’ I ask, wistfully. ‘And a bit … well, a little bit like you?’
‘Oh, Libby!’ She rests her cigarette holder on the kitchen worktop, and leans towards me in a cloud of L’Interdit. Then she takes a huge hank of my hair in one still-gloved hand, and starts to slice through it with the scissors. ‘I’m nothing so terribly special.’
I stare up at her. ‘You are joking. Right?’
‘Not at all.’ Her scissors are working quickly, confidently. ‘I mean, think about it, darling: put any of us in a fabulous dress like this one, throw in some Tiffany diamonds to wear, and we’d all look breathtaking.’
‘Hmm. It helps, of course, if you really are breathtaking.’
It’s her turn to let out a snort, though obviously she manages to do so in an elegant and Gallic sort of way (i.e. without damp snot frothing out of her nostrils).
‘Breathtaking is as breathtaking does, Libby Lomax. Here you are getting all hung up on not being blonde or curvy enough … I mean, just look at me!’
I do. I do look at her. And she’s every bit as flawless as she’s looked in every movie and photograph I’ve ever seen of her.
‘When I started out in Hollywood, all anybody wanted was the pneumatic blondes. Jayne Mansfield, Doris Day, poor darling Marilyn … I couldn’t possibly compete with them! So do you know what I did?’
‘Er – carried on looking exactly like you do now, got a starring role in a major movie opposite Gregory Peck, won an Oscar and got every girl on the planet wearing Capri pants and ballet flats for the next fifty years to try to look like you?’
She stops snipping for a moment to give me a rather sharp look.
‘I played to my strengths.’
‘Which is all very well, when you’ve got strengths …’
‘Everybody has strengths,’ she says, gently. ‘Even you. Especially you. And it would do you no end of good, Libby Lomax, if you started to believe it. Now hush, and let me concentrate on this fringe.’
I do what I’m told, and hush, while she moves the scissors round to the front of my head and starts to snip, daintily, with the tip of her tongue resting in concentration on her lower lip.
She’s probably right, if I really think about it. That it would do me good if I played to my strengths a bit more. If I stopped comparing myself to the sort of blonde bombshells that attract men like Dillon O’Hara and made the most of myself, instead of grunging about the place in jeans and a grey hoodie. If I stopped trailing in the wake of my little sister and did something – well – that I actually want to do, instead of doing something badly that I couldn’t give two hoots about …
‘Done!’ she suddenly sings out, and then steps back to admire her handiwork.
Her face falls a moment later.
‘Oh.’
This is not the tone of someone admiring their handiwork.
‘What do you mean, oh?’
‘Nothing! It looks …’
‘Chic?’
There’s another long moment of worrying silence.
She picks up her cigarette holder from the counter and takes a hasty, rather anxious draw.
Then she says, ‘Perhaps if we found you a slightly larger hat …’
‘Oh, God.’
I grab my bag, root about for the little foundation compact I know is in there, flip it open and gaze at my reflection in the little mirror.
It’s not good.
At all.
The compact mirror may be small, but it’s big enough for me to see the extent of the disaster zone. The fringe makes my forehead look like a tombstone. It highlights the length of my nose. It does not bring out my cheekbones; if anything, in fact, my face is more pancake-like than ever before. And it’s not even as if the fringe is the only problem: the rest of my hair has been horribly mangled, too; cut in an uneven crop that makes me look like a startled toilet brush.
‘I thought you said you knew how to cut hair!’ I yell at Audrey Hepburn, who is at least having the decency to look sheepish, while busying herself picking the stray hairs off the Chesterfield. ‘That I’d look chic! With cheekbones!’
‘Admittedly, your cheekbones have rather … vanished.’ She puts her sunglasses back on, avoiding my glare. ‘But honestly, it isn’t that bad! In fact …’ She puts her own (perfectly-coiffed) head on one side, doing a performance of Woman Appreciating Other Woman’s Haircut that wouldn’t win her so much as a TV Quick award, let alone a Best Actress Oscar. ‘Mmm … yes … do you know, now that I’m growing used to it, I think it’s actually quite fetching!’
‘You said I needed a bigger hat!’
‘Yes, but I always think there’s no look that can’t be improved with a lovely big hat! Hubert,’ she adds, meaningfully, ‘would agree with me.’
‘Oh, no. You can’t just fob me off with bloody Hubert again. And I can’t wear a hat every day for the next two months, until this grows out!’
‘Well, then you can wear that fabulous necklace you were holding earlier. That would soon draw attention away from your hair! Maybe with a headscarf at the same time, though, for good measure. Headscarves are simply wonderful! Terribly ch …’ She stops, obviously realizing that I might not be too keen to hear the word ‘chic’ again any time in, say, the next fifty years. ‘I wear them all the time!’
‘Yes, but if I wear one, I won’t look like you, I’ll look like ET in that scene on the flying bicycle …’
And then I stop.
Because it’s just occurred to me.
I’m hallucinating this whole thing, aren’t I?
And if I’m hallucinating Audrey Hepburn, then I’m also hallucinating the havoc she’s just wreaked on my hair.
I feel relief flood through me – relief that after all the shitty things that have happened to me today, at least I don’t really look like a startled toilet brush.
And instantly, hallucination or no hallucination, I feel bad for shouting at Audrey.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
‘Oh, darling, I’m sorry, too. My hairdressing skills might be a little rustier than I thought.’
‘It’s fine. There’s no need to apologize.’ I crouch down to pick up my hat from where I’ve dropped it on th
e floor beside the sofa. ‘I’ll get a proper hairdresser to cut it for real tomorrow and at least now I’ll know to ignore them if they start trying to talk me into a fringe …’
I straighten up with the hat in my hand.
But Audrey Hepburn isn’t standing across the other side of the Chesterfield any more.
I’m alone in my apartment, once again.
Bright daylight streaming in through the skylight is the first thing that wakes me up.
The second thing is the most appalling smell.
It’s not the Chesterfield.
What I mean is, it’s not only the Chesterfield, despite the fact I’ve been asleep with my head wedged into the back of one of its doggy-smelling cushions all night. It’s something even worse, something pungent and eye-watering …
Yesterday’s cheese.
Oh, God, yesterday’s cheese.
The Brie de Meaux, the Fourme d’Ambert, and the specially aged Comté. Oh, and the mystery goat’s cheese from Le Marathon. I forgot to give them to Olly and I’ve left them, by mistake, out of the fridge all night. Sitting in that broad shaft of sunlight that woke me up, and that’s probably been pouring through the skylight for at least an hour now.
I scramble off the sofa, pull my T-shirt up over my nose and mouth in the fruitless hope that it might take the edge off the pong, and delve into one of my boxes for a plastic bag I can scrape the cheeses into.
God, what an awful shame. All that gorgeous cheese, gone to waste. And I didn’t even get to see Olly’s face when I gave him the mystery cheese. Didn’t get to try it with him, our eyes closed in fierce concentration, as we tried to work out whether or not it was exactly the same taste and texture as the one we devoured on the Eurostar ten years ago.
I press the bag down to get the air out of it, knot it tightly (to discourage the Brie from making a break for freedom) and head for the door. There must be a rubbish bin area round the back of Bogdan’s takeaway where I can dispose of it.
As I open the door, though, I’m distracted from the smell of the cheese by the fact that there’s an enormous builder’s bum on the landing.
Attached to an enormous builder, that is: a man in low-slung paint-spattered jeans and – slightly unusually – a fuchsia-pink T-shirt, kneeling on the landing with his head in the bathroom doorway, fiddling with the plumbing at the back of the bidet.
He turns round when he hears me (or, more likely, when he smells me).
‘Good morning,’ he says, in a heavy Russian (Moldovan?) accent. ‘Am Bogdan.’
‘You’re not Bogdan.’
Because Bogdan is fiftyish, and moustachioed, and more than just a little sinister. Whereas this bloke is twentyish, and clean-shaven, and looks as if he wouldn’t say boo to a goose. As well as the whole fuchsia T-shirt thing, which sets him apart from the besuited Bogdan in more ways than one.
‘Bogdan is my father.’
‘Ohhhhhh … so you’re Bogdan, Son of Bogdan,’ I say, aware that I’m talking like one of the space crew from The Time Guardians when they encounter yet another episode’s worth of aliens.
‘Am Bogdan, Son of Bogdan,’ he agrees. ‘Am here for finishing off bathroom. Have fitted extracting fan. Will be putting up mirror’ – he nods at a full-length mirror, propped against the wall beside him – ‘on back of door. Right now am fixing bidet.’
‘Right. The thing is, um, Bogdan, that I don’t really need the bidet fixing. What I’d really, really like – and I have already mentioned this to your father, in fact – is for the partition wall in my flat to be taken down.’
‘Am not able to do this,’ he says, with a mournful shake of the head. ‘Am however happy,’ he adds (which is interesting as he doesn’t look ‘happy’ to be doing anything at all) ‘to be looking at problem with drain.’
‘I don’t think there is a problem with drain.’
‘Then what is smell?’
‘Oh, that!’ I wave the cheese bag at him. ‘I stupidly left some cheese out overnight, and … shit, sorry!’
My waving arm has caught the full-length mirror by the corner, tipping it sideways for a moment, until Bogdan, Son of Bogdan, with surprisingly lightning reflexes for one so large, shoves out a hand to stop it.
Which is when I get a look at my reflection.
‘Oh, my God!’
I put a hand to my hair.
My unevenly cropped hair, with a fringe at the front.
‘Something is wrong?’ Bogdan asks.
‘Yes! My hair!’
‘Is looking bit strange, is true.’
‘That’s not what I—’
‘As if you are madwoman. Who is cutting own hair. With breadknife.’
Bogdan’s (slightly brutal) opinion of my appearance is the least of my concerns.
Because it’s all coming back to me now … Audrey Hepburn appearing in my flat last night, before my very eyes … all that stuff with the Nespresso machine … me losing it a bit when I couldn’t find the pods … Audrey Hepburn suggesting a haircut …
But it was all a hallucination. I mean, I know that.
Which means that not only did I vividly imagine an evening in with Audrey Hepburn last night, but at some point during the course of this hallucination, I set about my own head with a pair of scissors.
Or, if Bogdan Son of Bogdan’s opinion is to be trusted, a breadknife.
Either way, it doesn’t sound the safest thing I’ve ever done.
And might just mean that the ‘madwoman’ description isn’t far off, after all.
‘Are you needing to be getting that?’
‘What?’
He’s pointing into the flat, where – I’ve just heard it, too – my phone is ringing.
‘Oh, yes … I suppose …’ I stumble back inside the flat and pick up the phone without checking who’s calling. Which is a huge mistake, because it’s my mother.
‘Libby?’
‘Mum, hi … look, this isn’t a very good time, actually.’
‘What the hell is going on?’
The even-more-than-usually-hectoring tone of her voice makes me think, for a moment, that she must somehow know about everything that’s gone on in (and to) my head in the last twelve hours.
‘I don’t know, Mum …’ My voice wobbles. I put a hand to my hair and pull fretfully at the disastrous fringe. ‘I guess it has to be the stress of the move, and what happened at work yesterday …’
‘What happened at work yesterday?’
So she doesn’t know. Well, right now, when I’m feeling this shaky, is not the time to tell her.
‘Right now is not the time to tell me,’ she snaps, as though she’s implanted some sort of device into my iPhone that allows her to read my mind (she couldn’t have done, could she?). ‘Are you on your way, at least?’
‘On my way …?’
‘To my flat! Have you forgotten what day it is?’
I have to rack my brains here … it’s June, so it can’t be her birthday … or Cass’s birthday …
‘Cass’s big night! The Made Man’s Hundred Hottest party! Aren’t you going to come and help get her ready?’
I sink into the smelly Chesterfield, where I’d rather spend every single minute of today rather than subject myself to Mum. Even the excitement of Cass’s Big Night won’t be enough to distract from the hysteria that will ensue when I show up, with my hair looking like this, to break the news about my unceremonious sacking.
‘The thing is, Mum, I’m not feeling all that well.’
‘So take a painkiller.’
‘It’s not pain, really, so much as something … viral.’ Yes! The perfect solution. I cough, loudly. ‘And obviously I can’t possibly risk giving anything to Cass, not before her big night.’
‘Rubbish. If it’s a virus it’ll take twenty-four hours for her to catch it,’ Mum says, briskly (and without, as far as I can see, the slightest bit of medical knowledge to back up this view). ‘Now, get a move on and get over here. We need someone to pop and get some lu
nch, and Cass’s dress needs picking up …’
‘Well, can’t you do all of that?’
‘Liberty!’ she hisses into the phone. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You know I need to stay with her while she has her extensions done, otherwise she’ll get carried away and end up looking like Lindsay Lohan on a bad hair day.’
‘Better that than a hobbit,’ I mutter.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Just get here,’ Mum says. ‘Now.’ And hangs up.
‘I am able to be fixing for you.’
Bogdan Son of Bogdan is hovering in the doorway. (I think he’d have come in, but there might not actually be room for him in the flat.)
‘It’s all right, Bogdan. I’ve got to go out. I’ll worry about the partition wall later.’
‘Am talking about hair. I am able to be fixing.’
I grab my grey hoodie from the heap it’s in on the floor and pull it on. ‘Thanks, Bogdan, but I only got into this mess in the first place because I didn’t wait for a professional to sort it out.’
‘Am professional.’ He reaches round into his back pocket, the one displaying the builder’s bum a few moments ago, and pulls out a little black leather case. This he opens to display a couple of pairs of shiny silver scissors and a small comb. ‘Please,’ he adds, in a low voice, ‘do not be telling father.’
‘That you … er … carry a little grooming kit wherever you go?’
‘That am trainee in hair salon. Evenings and weekends. In West End. Am good enough for West End. Also, West End is further from Colliers Wood. Is safer,’ he adds, meaningfully, and in a way that suggests he’s just as intimidated by Bogdan Senior as I am. Then he puts his huge head on one side and studies me for a moment. ‘Cannot be promising miracle,’ he says. ‘But can certainly be making look less like brush from toilet.’
I suppose I don’t really have anything else to lose.
A bit more hair, is all. But frankly even a Number One buzz-cut all over might be less of a disaster than my self-imposed do. At least it would look like a deliberate style statement, and not like I’ve gone loopy and set about myself with the breadknife.
A Night In With Audrey Hepburn Page 8
