Transit(16)

While she spoke the boy was moving his eyes up and down and from side to side though his head remained motionless, as if he were having an eye test.

‘It’s all about your friends at your age, isn’t it?’ Sammy said.

By now it was completely dark outside. Inside the salon all the lights were on. There was music playing, and the droning sound of passing traffic could be faintly heard from the street. There was a great bank of glass shelves against one wall where hair products stood for sale in pristine rows, and when a lorry passed too close outside it shuddered slightly and the jars and bottles rattled in their places. The room had become a dazzling chamber of reflecting surfaces while the world outside became opaque. Everywhere you looked, there was only the reflection of what was already there. Often I had walked past the salon in the dark and had glanced in through the windows. From the darkness of the street it was almost like a theatre, with the characters moving around in the bright light of the stage.

After that episode, Dale said, he had had a period in which every time he saw someone he knew or spoke to them – and increasingly with people he didn’t know, with clients or strangers in the street – he was literally plagued by this sense of them as children in adults’ bodies. He saw it in their gestures and mannerisms, in their competitiveness, their anxiety, their anger and joy, most of all in their needs, both physical and emotional: even the people he knew who were in stable partnerships – relationships he had once envied for their companionship and intimacy – now looked to him like no more than best friends in the playground. For weeks he went around in a sort of fog of pity for the human race, ‘like some bloke from the Middle Ages wandering about in sackcloth ringing a bell.’ It was quite disabling, he said: some days he actually felt physically weak, and could barely drag himself to the salon. People assumed he was depressed, ‘and maybe I was,’ Dale said, ‘but I knew I was doing something I had to do, I was going somewhere, and I wasn’t going back if it bloody killed me.’ At the end of it he felt empty, purified, like he’d had a massive mental clear-out. Thinking back to that New Year’s Eve, what he’d felt was that there had been something enormous in the room that everyone else was pretending wasn’t there.

I asked him what it was.

He was squatting down behind me by now painting the hair at the back so I couldn’t see his face. After a while he stood up, reappearing in the mirror with the plastic dish in one hand and the paintbrush in the other.

‘Fear,’ he said. ‘And I thought, I’m not running away from it. I’m going to stay right here until it’s gone.’ He scrutinised the painted hair from all sides, like an artist examining a finished canvas. ‘It shouldn’t be long now,’ he said. ‘We’ll leave it to settle in for a bit.’

He just had to go and make a quick call, if I would excuse him. He had his nephew staying with him at the moment; he ought to let him know that his plans for this evening had changed and that he’d be home after all.

‘With any luck,’ Dale said, ‘he might even have found it in himself to cook something.’

I asked where his nephew had come from and he said Scotland.

‘And not one of the trendy bits,’ he said. ‘For some reason my sister keeps herself in the arse-end of nowhere.’ He’d been there once or twice to visit her, and it was only forty-eight hours before he was seriously considering talking to the sheep.

The nephew was a funny fellow, Dale said: everyone had decided he was autistic or Asperger’s or whatever it is people call you these days when you’re not like everyone else. He’d left school with no qualifications: when Dale went up to visit he was unemployed and sitting throwing rocks down the hill into the quarry for amusement.

‘He’s changed a bit since then, fortunately. The other night he even asked me whether I’d used fresh herbs in the pasta sauce, or “just” –’ Dale made the inverted commas with his fingers – ‘the dried ones.’

I asked how the boy had ended up coming to London, and Dale said it was after a conversation he’d had with his sister. She told him the boy had started saying disturbing things to her, that he felt he was living in the wrong body or living in the wrong person or something like that.

‘He doesn’t say a word in months,’ Dale said, ‘and then he suddenly comes out with that. She didn’t know what to make of it. She asked me what I thought it meant. I said I’m a hairdresser,’ he said, ‘not a psychologist.’ He picked at a few stray strands on my head. ‘But obviously I had a hunch. I told him if he could pack a bag and get himself on a train, he could stay with me in London. I said to him, I’m not looking for company: I like my life just the way it is. I’ve got a nice flat and a nice business and I want to keep them that way. You’d have to do your share, I said, and I’m not putting someone up who doesn’t work, because I’m not a bloody charity. But you’d have your freedom, I said, and London’s a big place. If you can’t find what you’re looking for there, you won’t find it anywhere. And a week later,’ Dale said, ‘the doorbell rings and there he is.’

He hadn’t been entirely surprised, he admitted: his sister had tipped him off a couple of days earlier, just so he’d have time to hide anything she might not approve of. And for those two days, he did find himself having some second thoughts. He wandered around the rooms of his flat, noticing their cleanliness and order; he savoured the peace of the place, his freedom to come and go as he liked, to return home after work and find it all just as he had left it. ‘The idea,’ he said, ‘of having someone always there, someone I had to talk to and clean up after, someone I would basically have responsibility for, because at sixteen you’re really still a child and this one had never been outside a tiny Scottish village in his life: well, you get my drift,’ Dale said. ‘I thought, I must be insane, giving all this up.’