Transit(12)

‘It doesn’t look so bad from this side, does it?’ the builder said. ‘You’d almost never know.’

He stood there, wheezing, his hands on his hips. He said he’d just had a job cancelled, so if I wanted he could put a couple of guys here straight away. Otherwise we were probably talking about Christmas. He gave me his ballpark figure, which was exactly half what the other builders had quoted. For a while his screwed-up eyes travelled up and down the facade, as though looking for something they might have missed, some sign or clue of what was to come. They settled above the front door, where a curious feature was moulded into the white plaster, a human face. All the houses had them: each face was different, some female and some male; their eyes looked down slightly, as though interrogating the person standing at the threshold. The house next door had a woman with maidenly braids wound elaborately around her head; mine had a white plaster man, with thick eyebrows and a jutting forehead and a long pointed beard. There was, or so I told myself, something paternalistic and Zeus-like about him. He looked down from above, like the bearded figure of God in a religious painting looking down on the mêlée below.

The builder told me the guys would arrive promptly at eight o’clock on Monday. I should pack away anything I didn’t want ruined. With any luck, we’d set the place to rights in a matter of weeks. He looked down at the basement, where dirty net curtains hung in the squat window. The sound of the dog barking came faintly from inside.

‘There’s no fixing that, though,’ he said.

He asked whether I’d be able to find alternative accommodation at such short notice. The place would be a building site for a while: there would be a lot of dust and mess, especially at the beginning. I said I wasn’t sure what I would do, but my sons could probably go and stay with their father. His screwed-up eyes moved to my face.

‘He lives nearby then, does he?’ he said.

If the children were sorted, he went on, then we could probably manage. Everyone’s anxiety levels would be that much lower. He could leave one of the bedrooms till last: when everything else was finished, I could move into another room while that last room was being done. He opened the door of his van and got in. I saw the cab was full of empty cardboard coffee cups and discarded food packaging and scraps of paper. Like I said, the builder said ruefully, the job involves a lot of driving. Sometimes he was in his van the whole day and ate all three meals there. You end up sitting in your own leavings, he said, shaking his head. He started the engine and shut the door and then wound down the window while he was pulling away.

‘Eight o’clock Monday,’ he said.





I asked Dale whether he could try to get rid of the grey.

It was growing dark outside, and the rain against the salon’s big windows looked like ink running down a page. The traffic crawled along the blackened road beyond. The cars all had their lights on. Dale was standing behind me in the mirror, lifting long dry fistfuls of hair and then letting them fall. His eyes were moving all over my image with a devouring expression. His face was sombre and I watched it in the glass.

‘There’s nothing wrong with a few sparkles,’ he said reproachfully.

The other stylist, who was standing behind a customer at the next chair, half closed her long sleepy lids and smiled.

‘I get mine done,’ she said. ‘A lot of people do.’

‘We’re talking about a commitment,’ Dale said. ‘You have to keep coming back every six weeks. That’s a life sentence,’ he added darkly, his eyes meeting mine in the mirror. ‘I’m just saying you need to be sure.’

The other stylist looked at me sidelong with her lazy smile.

‘A lot of people don’t find that a problem,’ she said. ‘Their lives are mostly commitments anyway. At least if it makes you feel good that’s something.’

Dale asked whether my hair had ever been dyed before. The dye could accumulate, apparently, and the hair become synthetic-looking and dull. It was the accumulation rather than the colour itself that resulted in an unnatural appearance. People bought box after box of those home-dyeing kits in search of a lifelike shade, and all they were doing was making their hair look more and more like a matted wig. But that was apparently preferable to a natural touch of frost. In fact, where hair was concerned, Dale said, the fake generally seemed to be more real than the real: so long as what they saw in the mirror wasn’t the product of nature, it didn’t seem to matter to most people if their hair looked like a shopfront dummy’s. Though he did have one client, an older lady, who wore her grey hair loose all the way to her waist. Like an elder’s beard, her hair struck Dale as her wisdom: she carried herself like a queen, he said, streaming power in the form of this grey mane. He lifted my hair again in his hands, holding it aloft and then letting it drop, while we looked at each other in the mirror.

‘We’re talking about your natural authority,’ Dale said.

The woman in the next chair was reading Glamour magazine with an expressionless face, while the other stylist’s fingers worked at her intricately tinselled head, painting each strand of hair and folding it into a neat foil parcel. The stylist was diligent and careful, though her client didn’t once glance up to look.

The salon was a lofty, white, brilliantly lit room with white-painted floorboards and baroque, velvet-upholstered furniture. The tall mirrors had elaborately carved white-painted frames. The light came from three big branching chandeliers that hung from the ceiling and were duplicated in reflection all around the mirrored walls. It stood in a row of dingy shops and fast-food outlets and hardware stores. The big plate-glass shopfront sometimes rattled when a heavy vehicle passed outside.