Transit(15)

Next door to us Sammy was running her fingers through the boy’s dark, unruly hair, feeling its texture and its length, while his eyes looked sideways in alarm. His hands gripped the chrome armrests of his chair. She swept the hair first to one side then the other, looking closely at him in the mirror, then picked up her comb and made a neat parting down the middle. The boy looked immediately anxious and Sammy laughed.

‘I’ll leave it like that, shall I?’ she said. ‘Don’t panic, only joking. It’s just so that I can get it the same length on both sides. You don’t want to go around with your hair all different lengths, do you?’

The boy looked away again silently.

‘What’s it called,’ Dale said, ‘when you have one of those bloody great blinding flashes of insight that changes the way you look at things?’

I said I wasn’t sure: a few different words sprang to mind.

Dale twitched his paintbrush irritably.

‘It’s something to do with a road,’ he said.

Road to Damascus, I said.

‘I had a road-to-Damascus moment,’ he said. ‘Last New Year’s Eve, of all times. I bloody hate New Year. That was part of it, realising that I bloody hated New Year’s Eve.’

A group of them had been at his flat, he said. They were getting ready to go out and he starting thinking about the fact that he hated it, and thinking that everyone else probably hated it too but that no one was prepared to say so. When everyone had their coats on, he announced that he’d decided to stay at home.

‘I just suddenly couldn’t be bothered,’ he said.

Why not, I said.

For a long time he didn’t reply, painting the strands of hair one after another until I thought he either hadn’t heard my question or was choosing to ignore it.

‘I was sitting there on my sofa,’ he said, ‘and it just suddenly happened.’

He stirred the paintbrush in the dish, coating each side again carefully with the brown paste.

‘It was this bloke,’ he said. ‘I didn’t really know him. He was sitting there doing lines that he’d laid out all neatly for himself on the coffee table. I suddenly just felt really sorry for him. I don’t know what it was about him,’ Dale said. ‘He’d lost all his hair, poor bastard.’

He unclipped a new section and began to paint it. I watched the way he distributed the paste all along the strand in even strokes. He started at the root but became more meticulous the further away from it he got, as though he had learned to resist the temptation to concentrate his labours there at the beginning.

‘He had this funny pudgy little face,’ Dale said, pausing with his paintbrush in the air. ‘It must have been the combination of the baldness and the funny face that did it. I thought, that bloke looks like a baby. What’s a baby doing sitting on my sofa shoving coke up his nose? And once I’d started seeing it that way I couldn’t stop. Suddenly they all started looking like that. It was a bit like being on acid,’ he said, dipping his paintbrush again in the dish, ‘if I can cast my mind back that far.’

Sammy had started gingerly snipping the boy’s hair with a pair of scissors.

‘What sort of things are you into, then?’ she asked him.

He gave a little shrug, the secretive smile on his lips.

‘Football?’ she said. ‘Or the what’s-it-called – the Xbox. All you boys are into those, aren’t you? Do you play Xbox with your friends?’

The boy shrugged again.

Everyone obviously thought he was completely mad, Dale went on, for staying at home while all of them went off clubbing. He had had to pretend he was ill. Once upon a time it would have terrified him, the prospect of spending New Year’s Eve alone, but on this occasion he couldn’t get rid of them fast enough. He suddenly felt he’d seen through it, seen through them all. What he’d realised in his Damascene moment was that the people in his sitting room – himself included – weren’t adults: they were children in overgrown bodies.

‘And I don’t mean,’ he said, ‘to be patronising when I say that.’

‘My little girl’s about your age,’ Sammy was saying to the boy in the next chair. ‘You’re what, eleven, twelve?’

The boy did not reply.

‘You look about the same age as her,’ Sammy said. ‘With her and her friends it’s all make-up and boys now. You’d think they’re a bit young to be starting all that, wouldn’t you? But you can’t stop them. The problem with girls,’ she went on, ‘is they don’t have as many hobbies as boys. They don’t have as many things to do. They sit around talking while the boys are out playing football. You wouldn’t believe,’ she said, ‘how complicated their relationships are already. It’s all that talking: if they were outside running around they wouldn’t have time for all the politics.’ She moved around the back of his chair, still snipping. ‘Girls can be quite nasty, can’t they?’

The boy glanced over at the woman he had come in with. She had put down her phone and was now sitting reading her book.

‘That your mum?’ Sammy said.

The boy nodded.

‘She must find you quiet,’ Sammy said. ‘My daughter never shuts up. Can you hold your head still, please?’ she added, pausing with the scissors in mid-air. ‘I can’t cut it if you keep moving your head. No,’ she went on, ‘she never stops talking, my daughter. She’s yakking all day from morning to night, on the phone to her friends.’