She peers at her watch and then at me in the mirror. “I sink so. Hell-see-er. Come.” She ushers me over to the sinks, snapping on a pair of latex gloves like a rebuke.
—
Back at the mirror, she sets to work, making frequent, brusque corrections to the position of my head. Meanwhile, a few stations down, another stylist and her charge animatedly compare notes on a series of implausible common passions: martial arts, Ethiopian food, a Bulgarian electronica festival. When it turns out they share a favorite book — an obscure-sounding Scottish novella from the eighties — it’s only fear of fanning the flames of Giulia’s ire that stops me looking around for hidden cameras, to check I’m not the subject of some cosmic, highbrow gotcha.
The magazine I was offered hasn’t arrived, and after a brutal stretch of silence, I ask in desperation, “Busy afternoon?” to distract from the moonlike pull of my reflection.
“Yes. Please, down,” she says, pushing my skull forward so all I can see is the soft indignity of white middle flesh oozing through my bunched shirt.
I look up in surprise when not much later she sets down the scissors and reaches for the hair dryer.
“You’ve finished already?”
“Yes. So. Do you normally blow it a-dry?” she asks.
“Oh, no, I don’t normally bother.”
Until I was twelve or so, my mother insisted on drying my hair for me, convinced some indeterminate Olden Day malady would carry me off if she didn’t. No doubt the stories we read together at bedtime, about kindhearted invalid children doomed to die tragic deaths in dark winters didn’t help. But when puberty hit, I found myself on the lookout for low-risk, high-impact ways to rebel and — too proud to let things slide at school, too scared for cigarettes or boys — I seized upon our morning hair-drying ritual. I would storm off to school with soaking shoulders, slamming the door against my mother’s bitter protestations.
“I sought so.” Giulia puts a hand on my shoulder, and her face next to mine. “But the heat and the movement? For you, it’s good. Even just-a fast blast. To make it less…” She affects an expression suggesting flatness, limpness, despair, with impressive eloquence. “It make it better. More…”
“Thicker?” I suggest.
“Alive!” she cries happily over the hair dryer’s roar.
Perspective
Hurrying past my old office building, I can’t help myself looking in the window. Geri and Jonathan are crowded round a phone receiver, gesticulating excitedly. The office has been decorated for Christmas—how is it December already? — with the usual lopsided artificial tree garlanded in colored lights and way too much tinsel. On the windowpanes I note a new touch, white tissue-paper snowflakes and red tissue-paper letters stuck on to spell out “ho, ho, ho”—though to anyone on the outside, like me, it reads, “oh, oh, oh.”
The most wonderful time
Luke and I return home at nine p.m. on Christmas Day, from the flat his family have been renting nearby. I’m exhausted from non-stop eating and small talk: Luke was called in to work for several hours before dinner, and I kept up a bright stream of chatter in his absence, hoping it wouldn’t become apparent to anyone else that without him there, I was effectively gate-crashing some strangers’ sacred Christmas traditions.
In our living room, we sink into the sofa and I pull on my gift from Luke’s mother: a pair of novelty pig slippers, which make an oinking sound when you press the snouts.
“Hard to know how to take these,” I say. “They’re so clearly not your mum’s style. Is this how she sees me?” I paddle the pigs up and down.
“I really wouldn’t overthink it if I were you,” says Luke; but then, he got an iPad mini.
—
At around ten p.m., I get a phone call from my father. The line is crackly and barely audible.
“Ship to shore! Ship to shore!” he keeps repeating, clearly possessed by the festive spirit. My mother is conveniently engaged in the final round of a heated charades tournament along with some of their table companions.
“It’s her turn right now, so she can’t speak,” he says.
“Literally!” Grandma crows in the background, then screams, “THE EXORCIST!” several times before the line goes dead.
Lights out
“I loved spending Christmas with you,” says Luke, wrapping himself around me.
“I had a great day.”
“Hope you didn’t miss your parents too much.”
I think of them and Grandma out on the dark sea, listing gently in their cabin beds.
Compromise
“We always do what you want to do,” I say. It’s late afternoon on New Year’s Eve. Fanned out on the duvet is a selection of DVDs, all with subtitles, from some best-ever list Luke is making us work through.
“Yes, we do always do what you want to do,” Luke says.
“Simply not true. I do loads of things now that I never did before you.”
“For example?”
“Watch boring films. Foreign! Sorry, I meant foreign. Watch foreign films — I never used to do that.”
“Anything else?” he asks.
“Leave parties early.”
“Anything good? Any positive things?” he says, climbing on top of me, bracing his knees to my sides.
“Eat more veg? That’s a good thing. And wrestling. Before you, I hardly wrestled at all.” I grab his wrists and attempt to topple him, but we both know that’s not going to happen.
“Do we have to go to this thing tonight?” he says. We’re supposed to be going to a New Year’s Eve party with my school friends in a bar charging twenty pounds for entry alone. “Can’t we stay in and hang out instead?”
“Only if I get to choose what we watch.”
“Done!” he says, rolling off me, triumphant.
I get up to draw the curtains on what’s left of the day, and like outlaws lying low in a scuzzy motel, we crawl back under the covers to watch Sister Act, followed by Sister Act 2.
Make yourself heard
Behind the bus stop, one of the local eccentrics hammers on the shuttered door of a closed-up shop with an actual hammer. As always, he wears his silver lamé suit: a relic of a future that never came to pass (or — to be absolutely fair to him — a future that hasn’t happened yet).
“It’s the only way,” he explains, shouting above the terrific noise of his own making. “It’s the only way they’ll answer me, you see.”
Wednesday
I spend the morning planning an elaborate meal for Luke, composed of recipes from five different websites.
At the meat counter, I take a ticket and wait for my number to appear on the digital screen. I’m about to step forward when I feel a tug on my elbow.
“May I go next?” says a small, anxious woman in a beige raincoat and thick glasses, which magnify her eyes adorably. She shows me with shaking hands a screwed-up ticket saying, “47.” The screen is displaying 79. “I must have missed mine.”
“Know the feeling,” I say, stepping to one side as she places her order for a single lamb’s heart.
—
“So, what have you been up to today?” Luke asks through a mouthful of Slow-cooked Pulled Pork and Super Zingy Slaw, breaking off a chunk of the Best Jalapeño Cornbread to mop up what’s left of the sauce from the Mac ’n’ Cheese With All the Bells ’n’ Whistles.