After lunch a woman came along, cast a critical eye over what Theres was wearing, then disappeared and came back with a shimmering silver number which she ordered Theres to put on in the changing room. This too went well. The woman had picked up on the title of the song and found something that was a cross between a spacesuit and a ball gown. It didn’t particularly suit Theres. She wasn’t bothered in the slightest.
One hour before the recording they were told to go along to make-up. After being directed up various flights of stairs and along corridors, they came to a large room with eight empty hairdresser’s chairs. A young woman with seriously teased blonde hair was sitting reading a magazine, while a big black woman of about Jerry’s age was sweeping underneath the chairs.
The blonde woman stood up as they came in, welcomed Theres without looking at her and held out her hand. When Theres made no move to take it, Jerry shook it instead. Her hand was cold and slender, and she had lots of bracelets around her wrists. She was wearing a very low-cut top that emphasised a pair of unnaturally globular breasts; Jerry assumed he ought to find her attractive, but he didn’t.
Theres sat down in the chair and when Jerry went and stood next to her, the woman pointed to an ordinary chair at the far end of the room and said, ‘It would be fantastic if you could go and sit over there.’ When Jerry hesitated, she said, ‘Or outside would be brilliant too.’
Jerry lumbered over to the chair and perched on the edge. He had a bad feeling, and he wanted to be ready. The woman slipped a black hairdresser’s cape around Theres’ shoulders as she sat staring at her own reflection. Silence. The only sound was the whisper of the broom across the floor.
Jerry glanced towards the sound. The woman who was cleaning had a broad, dark brown face and coal-black curly hair caught up in a bun at the back of her neck. She must have weighed ninety kilos, and everything about her was big and round and soft; you might have thought she had been put there purely as an effective contrast to the make-up girl’s blonde rigidity.
The cleaner seemed to become aware that he was looking at her; she turned towards him and fired off a smile that was impossible to resist. Jerry felt like an idiot as the corners of his mouth curled upwards without any help from him, and he had to stare at the floor. Then he caught sight of himself in a mirror, and the smile died away.
Not much to write home about.
He looked like a superannuated teenager. He had made a special effort for the occasion and combed his hair back and up into some kind of rockabilly style, and with the bushy sideburns he could never quite bring himself to shave off, he looked like an Elvis well past his prime. His puffy face, the dark circles under his eyes, the nose that seemed to get bigger every year. The fact that someone had given this face a smile was a major event.
He saw a flash of silver in the mirror, then everything happened very quickly. The make-up girl had obviously decided that Theres’ face didn’t need any major input, and instead had turned her attention to her hair. It was long, blonde, and slightly wavy.
When Jerry saw the flash of silver, the make-up girl had already grabbed hold of Theres’ hair with one hand, and in the other she was holding a pair of scissors that flashed for a second before she moved them down towards the girl’s neck. If Jerry had seen what was going to happen, he could have prevented it. But his attention had wavered for a short while, and now it was too late.
Theres growled and hurled herself to one side, which made the chair spin around with some speed. The footrest hit the make-up girl’s shins. She gasped with pain and fell backwards. In a second Theres was out of the chair and on her, snatching the scissors out of her hand.
It all happened so fast. Jerry had barely got out of his chair by the time Theres raised the scissors in order to stab the make-up girl in the face. Fortunately there was someone quicker than him. As Theres raised her arm, a dark hand grabbed hold of her wrist. With a single movement the cleaner lifted Theres and plonked her back in the chair as she said, ‘Hey girl! You mad or something?’
She took the scissors off Theres and threw them back on the make-up table. Then she stood there with her hands on Theres’ shoulders as Jerry hurried over. The expression on Theres’ face was something completely new. There was fear, but also sheer amazement. Her jaw had dropped and her blue eyes were wide open.
‘Thanks,’ Jerry said to the cleaner. ‘I mean…thank you very much.’
‘That’s OK,’ the cleaner said with a strong American accent. ‘What’s the girl’s problem?’ She squeezed Theres’ shoulders. ‘Hey there! What’s your problem? You seem pretty nervous!’ Theres didn’t move; she simply stared in the mirror at the creature towering behind her.
The make-up girl got up from the floor, her legs trembling.
‘What the fuck…’ she said. ‘This is crazy, I don’t have to put up with this.’ She had started to cry, and the streaky mascara gave her a ghost-like appearance. She pointed at Theres and sobbed, ‘She’s off her head, she shouldn’t be here, she shouldn’t be anywhere, she needs locking up…’
She staggered out, presumably to report to a higher authority. The cleaner spun the chair around so that Theres was facing her, and tried without success to catch her eye.
‘Hey girl,’ said the cleaner. ‘You’re so pretty. You shouldn’t be so angry. Come on, let’s get you looking even better.’
She lifted up Theres’ hair, and Theres allowed it to happen. She plugged in the curling tongs and started to wind strands of hair around it; Theres simply kept on staring. After a couple of minutes Theres turned her head in Jerry’s direction and asked the question that explained her incomprehensible acceptance of the fact that someone was touching her. She asked, ‘Is that a human being?’
Jerry blushed and started stammering out an answer, but the cleaner just laughed and said, ‘Where have you been for the last hundred years, girl?’ as she carried on doing Theres’ hair.
‘I’m really sorry,’ said Jerry. ‘She’s not really used to…being out like this.’
‘You must live in a weird place-where do you live?’
‘Err, Svedmyra.’
‘Svedmyra? Is that the name of the place? Don’t you have any black folk in Svedmyra?’
‘I think it’s mostly…old Swedes.’
The cleaner shook her head and started rubbing mousse into Theres’ scalp. Jerry was inexpressibly grateful for her intervention and would have liked to inform Theres that yes, this was a human being, and probably a good one. But if the prerequisite for her tolerance was that she regarded the cleaner as something else, then it would be best if things continued as they were.
Naturally Theres had seen black people before, but Jerry hadn’t realised how she regarded them, because she had never asked. Perhaps the cleaner’s strong accent also contributed to the fact that Theres saw her as some kind of alien creature.
‘Excuse me,’ said Jerry, ‘but what’s your name?’
The cleaner wiped the mousse on her overall and held out her hand. ‘Paris.’ She pronounced it perris. ‘And you?’
‘Jerry. Is that…perris as in the city?’
‘Yes. My sister’s called Venice.’
Jerry tried to come up with some witticism about whether they had a brother called London, but it just sounded stupid, and before he managed to think of something else to say, the make-up girl was back with a man trailing behind her.
The man had a pass on a cord around his neck. He was in his thirties, and looked as if he hadn’t slept for a week. When the girl started going on about what had happened, his eyebrows went up and the outer corners of his eyes went down in an expression that said: Here we go again. Presumably a complaint from the make-up girl wasn’t a unique occurrence.