Authors: Lynne Barrett-Lee
Julia Gets a Life (8 page)
I am going to reinvent myself. Not the essential core of my being, of course; it’s taken a bit of a pummelling of late, but I feel the essence of my inner self is basically sound and intact. Which is good to know, because someone at the school gate told me the other day that when her husband went off with an audio typist she felt like a used tea bag for months. (Less encouraging is the fact that people I hardly know feel impelled to come up and discuss relationship crises with me at all. But I am sure I’ll find a reassuring chapter about it in one of my books.)
No, it’s more of a packaging thing, really. My packaging has become the grooming equivalent of a tin of Sainsbury’s low sugar baked beans. And I was at school this afternoon and it struck me that almost everybody of my acquaintance has highlights in their hair. Eeeek!
I
have highlights! All my friends have highlights! The headmistress has highlights! Even the caretaker has highlights, and he’s a man. I bet if I were to compile a list of all the people I know who have highlights it would run to several A4 sheets. But, (and it’s a significant but)
Rhiannon
doesn’t
have highlights. Rhiannon has a slippery, tumbling, tumultuous cascade of coppery auburn curls. The bitch.
Unsuitable (
no longer
suitable) Accessories
Highlights
Fake Tan (Note; Moira is
orange
)
Jumpers with nautical motifs (unless on boat)
Whatever Christmas evening wear they are selling in M and S this autumn
Gold shoes
I have also made an appointment at Snip Sutton’s Style Shack and added
Hair Monthly
to my Sainsburys list. In actual fact Snip is really a bloke called Nigel Sutton who used to have the local OAP shampoo and set market covered. Until he came out.
He
doesn’t have highlights. That must mean something.
It’s hair day today. Hair today and gone tomorrow, as Eustace, my hair designer, chattily informs me. I get the impression he says that to pretty much every customer, every day. Which is fine for us, of course, but may well account for some of the more scathing glances he seems to attract from the cluster of spotty teenagers that are scattered around the salon manning brooms and towel bales and who are the hair designers of the future. I know they are this, incidentally, because while I was waiting I heard the receptionist telling a caller that if she would like to book an appointment with one of the Style Shack’s hair designers of the future, she would not only get her hair done for free (bar conditioner) but also get her photograph taken, to be inserted in the loose leaf file of attractive styles that even hair designers of the future can manage.
I must confess to a moment of negativity here. Rhiannon has exactly the kind of skinflint cum extreme vanity personality combo to have indulged in a spot of coiffing styled by hair designers of the future. She has also always striven to be considered hip and hip types never plump for anything so crassly middle class as having your hair done by a capable suburban hairdresser with a Nissan. Even if he
is
gay. I have flicked, therefore, through the mug shots. She is, alas, not there.
‘What’s it to be, then?’ Quips Eustace merrily. His hands are having sex with my hair as we speak, his long chocolate fingers darting playfully around and pummelling bits of my cranium.
I answer, pathetically (how many years since women’s suffrage?), ‘I don’t really know’ and ‘what do you think might suit me?’
‘Well, I think we need to lose this bob, my lovely. And chop into the nape.’ He ducks to inspect it. ‘And, hmm, we need height. We need height, we need volume. And colour. We need colour. We need...’
‘We need something not too expensive,’ I squeak. And, ‘oh, and I don’t want highlights anymore.’
Once we’ve established that there is no such thing as highlights any more anyway, simply woven colour fusions tailored to the client’s individual tonal profile (well, they still come out looking like highlights to me) Eustace tells me, in the manner of a hair designer very much of the present, that I’m to leave it to him and he’ll simply wow me. Then I’m shuffled off by a pubescent called Cerys and subjected to ten minutes of vigorous shampooing at the sort of sink I have seen featured on
Watchdog.
The woman concerned suffered nerve compression (or something) of the neck, which resulted in her having some sort of stroke and then total, permanent paralysis from the neck down. No wonder I’m sweating.
By the time Eustace fetches up again however, I have suffered nothing more life threatening than total migration of the mascara to the ears. I look like a cartoon of someone who has been riding on the back of a motorbike at one hundred miles per hour. I ask you - who needs life-threatening? Isn’t life unfair enough?
*
Yes, yes, yes and
yes
! I LOVE my hair! I can’t walk in a straight line for trying to see myself in shop windows. I want to hug it, comb it, brush it, rub my hands on it, run my hands through it, wash it, dry it, then look at it some more. And you know what? It makes me like my face more too. And my neck, and my boobs and my stomach and my legs - oh, well, maybe not my legs - but pretty much everything else about myself. I feel totally, utterly rejuvenated. The second thing I do when I get home (post the half hour in the mirror, deciding that 34B is actually just great and that my legs are not so much short and fat as average length and muscular and that my eyes are not sludge but khaki and that having shoulders like a squaddie are really sexy and that it doesn’t matter if there’s a kink in my nose because when I smile - and am I smiling! - it miraculously disappears) is go to the phone in my bedroom (which is
by
the mirror) and telephone my Mum to tell her about my hair. My Mum is particularly good at being prattled at. No one else I know would tolerate it.
‘Guess what?’
‘What, dear?’
‘I’ve had all my hair cut off and it looks absolutely brilliant. I can’t imagine why I didn’t do this years ago (I can’t help but imagine that perhaps Richard wouldn’t have had sex with Rhiannon De Laney if I’d done this years ago - but that’s
so
silly). And I’ve had it coloured, a sort of coppery goldy colour with sort of blondy tips, and sort of spiked up at the top and it’s all fluffy and tendrilly on my neck - but like, bristly, you know? And it looks so...so, well...I know! Sort of like Meg Ryan’s but a bit more, sort of...well, funky.’
‘Meg Ryan. Wasn’t she that drunk woman? Or was she a doctor? What
was
it I’ve seen her in?’
‘Oh, both, I think. But she’d better watch out if she comes to Cardiff. Julia Potter is on the scene now. Oh, I just can’t tell you how pleased I am with it. Isn’t it funny how your hair can change the whole shape of your face?’
‘It is, dear. And I’m very pleased. It’s nice to hear you sounding so jolly. Does Richard like it?’
‘Mum! We’re separated! I don’t
care
what Richard thinks about it.’ Of course I do. Or do I? Of course I do.
‘Of course you do. Anyway,
you
like it and that’s the main thing, isn’t it?’
It isn’t the main thing at all, of course.
The main thing, as everyone will tell you, is that everyone else likes it. And that Richard, particularly, likes it very, very much.
What a sad, sad woman I am. I know Richard doesn’t even
care
about hair. So it wouldn’t matter to him how I did my hair even if we were still together. And I know that, given that it was
I
who dumped him, there is no necessity for him to even have an opinion. But, God, I hope he likes it.
I’m not brave enough to let him see it when he comes to pick up Max and Emma (they are off to his flat for tea) so I say my goodbyes from the downstairs loo. Since then, though, I am becoming steadily more excited at the prospect of presenting myself, siren-like, on the doorstep; an item of almost unbearable sexual magnetism which he can no longer have.
But he catches me out by coming in through the back door when he brings them home again. I have my dressing gown on and my hand in the Pringles.
His eyebrows beetle alarmingly as he scans me. Then he finally speaks.
‘Good God,’ he says.
Max sniggers. Max, how could you?
‘See?’ he says, pointing (who’d have a son?). ‘Ha, ha, ha. What did I tell you? She looks just like a pineapple, doesn’t she?’
Three days later, a parcel arrives in the post.
My mother has sent me a small, misshapen
some
thing - the latest fruit, no doubt, of her creative muse. (My mother thinks she is the doyen of the Croydon Seniors Pottery Workshop, despite being, to my admittedly untutored eye, absolutely non-talented in three dimensional art. As a body, however, they are in receipt of a sizeable chunk of council funding and must therefore, I suppose, admit all-comers, or else. And I must be grateful - if ousted she may well turn her attention to dried floral arrangements. Which really doesn’t bear thinking about.)
There is a note. It says;
Just a little something for your used tea bags. And don’t worry about your hair. I’m sure Richard will come to love it. And remember - hair grows
.
One of us is in denial here.
But it isn’t me.
One of the most liberating things about not having a Husband in residence is that it obviates the need to consult someone less artistic and enlightened than oneself concerning matters of taste. For the first time since blu-tacking every male under twenty to my room in a hall of residence, I am going to have free rein in colour scheming and soft furnishings. That I have no money is almost entirely irrelevant. Everyone knows that it’s possible to completely transform your environment with little more than a couple of cans of inexpensive emulsion and some remnants of fabric (I have an old net curtain that I can dip-dye). Most important tool though is a skinny rib T-shirt in which to encourage builders merchants to hack appropriately sized hunks from fashionable stone and hard landscaping type items, which apparently never cost more than fifty pence.
The watch word with living space, as with one’s person, is attention to detail, and careful accessorising.
Accessories (Lifestyle) I now need
Gerbera daisies (real/silk - depending on season)
Test tubes (plus rack)
Terracotta Pots/Urns
A Smoothie maker
A Vauxhall Corsa*
*Query replace by eco-friendly
Prius
.
Of course, there’s always a touch of insecurity about accessories, especially if you pick up most of your tips from the pile of magazines in the Time Of Your Life Photo Studio waiting area. At least two of them have pre-decimalisation cover prices. I really must make a committed effort to making my lifestyle a bit more
now
. Though I will not, naturally, start putting flan dishes of pebbles on my coffee table, or assorted novelty bottles filled with coloured water on my kitchen windowsill, like
she
does.