Transit(13)

In the mirror, Dale’s expression was unyielding. His own hair was a dark, artful mop of grey-streaked curls. He was somewhere in his mid-forties, tall and narrow, with the elegant, upright bearing of a dancer. He wore a dark, closely fitted jersey that showed the suggestion of a pot belly above his lean hips.

‘It doesn’t fool anyone, you know,’ he said. ‘It just makes it obvious that you’ve got something to hide.’

I said that seemed preferable to having what you wished hidden on public display.

‘Why?’ Dale said. ‘What’s so terrible about looking like what you are?’

I didn’t know, I said, but it was obviously something a lot of people feared.

‘You’re telling me,’ Dale said glumly. ‘A lot of people,’ he went on, ‘say it’s because what they see in the mirror doesn’t feel like them. I say to them, why doesn’t it? I say, what you need isn’t a colourwash, it’s a change of attitude. I think it’s the pressure,’ Dale said. ‘What people are frightened of,’ he said, lifting the back of my hair to look underneath, ‘is being unwanted.’

At the other end of the room the big glass door jangled open and a boy of twelve or thirteen came in out of the darkness. He left the door standing ajar and the cold wet air and roaring noise of traffic came in great gusts into the warm, lit-up salon.

‘Can you close the door, please?’ Dale called in a peevish voice.

The boy stood, frozen, a panicked expression on his face. He wore no coat, only a grey school shirt and trousers. His shirt and hair were wet from the rain. A few seconds later a woman came in after him through the open door and closed it carefully behind her. She was very tall and angular, with a broad, flat, chiselled-looking face and mahogany-coloured hair carefully cut in a bob that hung exactly at the square line of her jaw. Her big eyes moved rapidly in her mask-like face around the room. Seeing her, the boy raised his hand to plaster his own hair sideways over his forehead. She stood for a moment, alert in her soldierly wool coat as if trying to sense a danger, and then she said to the boy:

‘Go on then. Go and give them your name.’

The boy looked at her with a pleading expression. His shirt was undone at the collar and a patch of his bony chest could be seen. His arms hung by his sides, the palms opened in protest.

‘Go on,’ she said.

Dale asked whether I was ready to have my hair washed; he would go through the colour charts while I was gone, and see if he could find a match. Nothing too dark, he said; I’m thinking more browns and reds, something lighter. Even if it’s not what you naturally are, he said, I think you’ll look more real that way. He called across to the girl who was sweeping the floor that there was a customer ready to go down. She automatically stopped sweeping and leaned the broom against the wall.

‘Don’t leave it there,’ Dale said. ‘Someone might trip over it and hurt themselves.’ Again automatically, she turned around and, retrieving the broom, stood there holding it.

‘In the cupboard,’ Dale said wearily. ‘Just put it in the cupboard.’

She went away and returned empty-handed, and then came to stand beside my chair. I rose and followed her down some steps to the warm, lightless alcove where the sinks were. She fastened a nylon cape around my shoulders and then arranged a towel on the edge of the sink so that I could lean back.

‘Is that all right?’ she said.

The water came in a spray, with alternating passages of hot and cold. I closed my eyes, following the successions and returns, the displacement of one temperature by another and then its reinstatement. The girl rubbed shampoo over my head with tentative fingers. Later she tugged a comb through the hair and I waited, as though waiting for someone to untangle a mathematical problem.

‘There you are,’ she said finally, stepping back from the sink.

I thanked her and returned to the salon, where Dale was absorbedly mixing a paste with a small paintbrush in a pink plastic dish. The boy was now sitting in the chair next to mine, and the Glamour-reading woman had withdrawn, her hair still in its foil parcels, to the sofa by the window, where she continued to turn the pages expressionlessly one after another. Next to her sat the woman who had come in with the boy. She was tapping at the screen of her mobile phone; a book lay open across her knees. The other stylist was leaning with her elbow on the reception desk, a cup of coffee beside her, talking to the receptionist.

‘Sammy,’ Dale called to her, ‘your client’s waiting.’

Sammy exchanged a few more remarks with the receptionist and then ambled back to the chair.

‘So,’ she said, putting her hands on the boy’s shoulders so that he involuntarily flinched. ‘What’s it going to be, then?’

‘Do you ever get the feeling,’ Dale said to me, ‘that if you weren’t there to make things happen, it would all just go tits-up?’

I said it seemed to me that just as often the reverse was true: people could become more capable when the person they relied on to tell them what to do wasn’t there.

‘I must be doing something wrong then,’ Dale said. ‘This lot couldn’t run a bath without my help.’

He picked up one of a set of silver clips and fastened it to a section of my hair. The dye would need to stay in for at least half an hour, he said: he hoped I wasn’t in a hurry. He took a second clip and isolated another section. I watched his face in the mirror as he worked. He took a third clip and held it between his lips while he separated one strand of hair from another.