Let Down Your Hair (7 page)

Only the Head of Women’s Studies was entitled to a top floor office. The rest of the staff lived on the dingier floors downstairs, where the uncarpeted corridor rang beneath the soles of my sandals. Offices on this floor didn’t have engraved gold nameplates. They had metal brackets, into which their occupants slotted pieces of cardboard or paper. Hilda had typed her name in a chilly serif font, printed it on the card and trimmed the card to fit the bracket perfectly.

My watch read 3:51. Four minutes to wait. Tucking my research proposal under one arm, I contemplated Hilda’s door. Other staff blu-tacked whimsical cartoons to their doors; Hilda had installed a pinboard and planted a neat row of green, white and violet pins along the top. Her signature colors, standing for GWV—the old suffragette slogan “Give Women the Vote”. At present there were two notices, one showing when she was available for consultation, and one detailing her appointments for the week. I was slightly troubled to note that the meeting I was about to have with her wasn’t listed.

At 3:55, I applied punctual knuckles to the door, evoking a muffled
ffff
of exasperation, and the clomp of advancing Birkenstocks. Hilda favored the clog style, in classic tan leather. In winter she wore these with lumpy socks she hand-knitted herself; in summer, she wore them barefoot, the hems of her linen pants flapping around her hairy white ankles as she cycled to the campus.

The door opened just wide enough for Hilda’s face. The outline of a bike helmet was embossed on her graying blonde hair, and the sliver of doorway above it framed a glimpse of books sorted by spine color.

“Yes?” said Hilda. Her voice implied that my knock had distracted her from something more important than me.

“Hi, Professor Ziehler.” Students were not permitted to address Hilda by her first name. “I’m here for our four o’clock meeting.”

“I have no meeting at four,” said Hilda, without referring to the timetable on her door. Hilda always remembered her appointments. Which made it all the odder that she’d forgotten mine.

“We made it last week, remember?”

The creases on Hilda’s forehead deepened into furrows. “Last week we had a meeting and you did not attend. This week we have no meeting.”

My hand sprang up to catch the closing door. “You said you’d consider supervising me,” I said hastily, “if I gave you an excellent proposal at four today.” I brandished my proposal, tantalising her with its excellence.

“I did not say at four,” said Hilda, her voice curt and immovable as a Swiss Alp. “I said
by
four. You sent no proposal, so I assumed there was no meeting.”

The proposal wavered in my hand. “But … but I thought … I did write the proposal, and … and …”

“And now you want to watch me read it? No. That is not a meeting.”

“I could give it to you now,” I said in desperation, thrusting the proposal through the closing door, “and when you—”

“When I supervise a PhD student,” said Hilda, snatching the pages from my fingers, “she emails work two, three days before we discuss it. She confirms appointments with me the day before. And she comes to every one of them on time.”

She slapped the proposal into my palm and closed the door in my face. Her Birkenstocks clomped back to her desk and I sagged against the wall.

Tailoring my proposal to Hilda’s tastes had taken a week of twelve-hour days. I’d put in references to articles she’d published, cited several of her favorite artists and writers, and attached a three-year plan with a weekly breakdown of tasks, color-coded in green, white and violet. All of which meant it would need to be completely redrafted before I could offer it to another academic.

I limped back to the office and considered the three remaining supervisors who were available. Madhu Baghel specialised in South Asia. Maybe I could watch some Bollywood films, read up on Hindu temple paintings, compare their portrayals of women. Kate Cleaver-Murray’s field was queer theory. Maybe I could read articles called
Why He Won’t Commit
and
What He REALLY Thinks Of Your Body
and study their heteronormative agenda. But either of those options would take work. Several weeks of work.

A little slug of sickness lodged in my gut. I didn’t want to spend weeks revamping my research proposal. I wanted someone who’d supervise the project I’d already proposed, with as few changes as possible. Which meant I had one choice left. I picked up Andrea’s phone, took a deep breath and dialed the extension for Fran Mackenzie.

Fran’s office was less than half the size of the one I shared with Andrea. The furniture was on wheels, so it could be pushed aside to access the floor-to-ceiling shelves on every wall. Many of the offices on this floor felt cluttered, but Fran’s looked organized and chic. She’d even found space for a watercolor on either side of the window and a small potted plant on her desk.

“Sage,” said Fran. Her expression was cool and watchful, like a fox guarding its den. “You’re looking for someone to supervise your PhD research.”

In the eight years since Fran was ousted from our house, I’d had countless conversations with Andrea about her. Fran was our straw woman, our personal symbol of the decay of modern feminism. We’d sneered at her male apologist attitudes. We’d rolled our eyes at her irresponsible parenting. We’d engaged in hours of baleful speculation about Freya. The symbolic Fran was so potent in my head that the presence of the real Fran was deeply unsettling. Especially when I was asking her to supervise my PhD.

“I—yes.”

I had the uneasy feeling that she could see into my head and read every sneer and eyeroll Andrea and I had ever exchanged. The symbolic Fran might have bristled and refused to consider supervising her enemy’s granddaughter; the real one was far too professional for that.

I handed Fran my proposal and averted my eyes as she read. Apart from her laptop, there were only two things on her desk. One was a pot plant, a fern with pale green tendrils curling over the sides of its terracotta pot. The other was a framed photograph of a smiling young woman holding up a graduation certificate. A second or two later I recognized the woman as Freya.

Inside my head, Freya was frozen on our doorstep at fifteen, defiant in her mini-skirt and heels—the outfit that had ended Andrea’s friendship with Fran, and launched a thousand dark predictions about Freya’s future. Looking at the twenty-something Freya, in black pants and top, I struggled to reconcile her with the troubled teenager of my conversations with Andrea. She looked calm and happy. And proud. As Fran must have been, to keep a picture of her daughter’s graduation day on her almost-empty desk. My throat tightened.

I crushed the thought of proud mothers underfoot and looked out the window. From this floor, the Studio 3 skylight was a stripe of metal just above the tiles. Had I been assigned a shared office on this floor, like other PhD students, Ryan and I would never have met.

Fran was leafing through my proposal with a raised eyebrow that told me subterfuge was useless. “You wrote this for Hilda, didn’t you?”

I hung my head. “I could scale down the focus on classical art, if it helps,” I said in sheepish tones. “Compare drawings of life models in present-day art classes with pictures of fashion models in ads.”

Fran mulled this over, tapping the desk with her pen. My fingernails bit deeper and deeper into the arms of her chair. If Fran wouldn’t supervise me, it was back to Hindu temple paintings or articles called
Flirt Your Way To The Top
.

“It needs theory and tightening,” she said at last, “but it’s interesting. And your personal link to the industry will help.”

I froze. “Personal link?” I said in a shrill voice. Did Fran mean Ryan? Did she
know?

“Your mother. I don’t know if Emmeline’s still modeling herself, but she must know people in the fashion industry. Have you talked to her about your project?”

I felt a strange falling sensation, as if the floor was disintegrating beneath me. I heard a voice answering Fran’s question, but it sounded like someone else. “I didn’t even know my mother was a fashion model. I was a baby when she walked out, and I haven’t heard from her since.”

Several minutes passed before I registered that Fran was saying my name, at first gently, then loudly, loud enough to reach the part of me that was still there to hear. I lifted my face.

Fran was standing beside me, her own face oddly flushed. “Are you OK?”

I nodded.

“Then let me say something strictly off the record. Something that’s your family business, and none of mine. I haven’t seen Emmeline for years, but I know her, and I know she wouldn’t have left you behind without trying to contact you.”

I realized then that she was flushed because she was angry. Not at me, but
for
me, angry at how I’d been treated. “Then why haven’t I heard from her?”

Fran’s face darkened. “I don’t know, but I have a tip for you. I wouldn’t assume that Andrea’s told you everything about Emmeline. Or that everything Andrea’s told you about Emmeline is true.”

I left Fran’s office and stumbled for the lift through the avalanche of students pouring from Seminar Room 4, my mind a tangled blank.

I began asking Andrea about Emmeline when I was four years old. Her answers were fact sheets, framed and hung in my memory, pictures around which I’d built my life. And now Fran had torn them off the wall and thrown them overboard.

My feet kept on walking, down flights of stairs, through shadows cast by red-brick buildings, out iron gates into the street, where brick gave way to glass, and the shadows turned into people, flowing around me like a sea of faceless statues until an automatic door in front of me disgorged a thirty-something woman with a pram.

I jerked to a stop. The woman looked tired, and there were milky stains on her T-shirt. In the pram, batting at a dangling stuffed elephant, was her baby, dressed in pink, with a halo of wispy blonde hair. Hair even lighter than mine. Emmeline would be in her thirties by now. Had she pushed me around in a pram, before she left? Did she string toys above my cot, and coo when I threw up on her top?

“Excuse me,” said the woman, with a tight, weary smile.

Belatedly realizing I was standing in her way, I stepped toward the closing glass doors. The doors opened again, revealing the inside of a post office.

The world came back into focus. Andrea and I still lived in the house where Emmeline grew up. I always checked the mail. If Emmeline had posted me anything in the last twenty-two years I would have found it. We received very little mail, because Andrea made a lot of enemies in her work, and didn’t like to publicise our address. Just about everything went to her pigeonhole at the office.

I did an abrupt U-turn, my feet stomping the question into the pavement:
Had Emmeline ever sent me letters?
Maybe she had, and Andrea had thrown them out. Or hidden them in a filing cabinet, like the one at home where she kept the only photographs I’d seen of my mother.

Andrea didn’t like photographs. Where her colleagues put up pictures of their children and pets, she put up certificates and famous feminist quotes. I didn’t even know she had photos of Emmeline until I was seven or so. Tired of telling me what my mother looked like, she’d unlocked her filing cabinet and produced three photos. A pigtailed pre-school Emmeline on a swing, her smile missing one front tooth. A serious Emmeline at ten, with Andrea’s eyes glaring from a dainty, heart-shaped face. And the most recent one, of Emmeline at sixteen, a fortnight before she walked out.

Andrea said I could keep these, and locked the filing cabinet again. I’d wanted to know if there were more photos of Emmeline in there, but I didn’t dare ask. For a year or two, I kept the pictures in the top drawer of the dresser by my bed, so I could look at them before I fell asleep. Later, when I grew old enough for an adult-sized wallet, I took out the picture of Emmeline at sixteen and slipped it between the dollar bills.

The door to the office was ajar. Inside, Andrea was scowling over a stack of essays, reading glasses perched like a bird of prey on her nose. In Fran’s room, in the streets, the idea that Andrea had prevented my mother from contacting me had seemed probable and appalling. Here, in the office, it seemed ludicrous and far-fetched.

Andrea, lying to me? Andrea, hiding mail from my mother? Far more likely that this was Fran avenging herself on Andrea. For the Freya incident, for their disagreements about feminism, for the professorship Andrea had given to someone else.

Andrea looked up from her essays. “I hear you’ve found a supervisor,” she said, in a curt voice that made me nervous.

“Yes,” I said, sidling into the room. “I just thought that Fran would be … that she was …”

“The only person left after Hilda turned you down?”

My conscience squirmed. Everyone knew about Andrea’s feud with Fran. When the word got around that Fran was supervising my PhD, all of Women’s Studies would be abuzz. “Is she … Is that going to be a problem for you?”

Andrea picked up her pen. “It’s your PhD, Sage.” She scored an angry black line across the essay she was marking and turned the page with a flick.

I watched her deleting, considering, scrawling notes in margins, every cell of me screaming with the need to
know
. Andrea never talked about Emmeline. It was always me who brought the subject up, asking questions, wanting photographs, wringing information from Andrea’s reluctant mouth.

“Is my birth certificate at home somewhere?” I asked, in my most casual voice. Birth certificates had details about the child’s parents. Their dates of birth. Their occupations.

Her pen froze mid-word. “Why?”

I put on a grave, studious expression. “I’m hoping to interview high school girls about body image, so I need ID for a police check.”

For a second I thought I saw something odd in Andrea’s face. Then she turned, unlocked one of her filing cabinets, and slid out a hanging file labeled P-Z. The plastic tab attached to it was angled away, and I couldn’t read what it said.

Andrea flipped through the file with her usual briskness. “Here.” She handed me a sheet of pale blue paper. I took it, but my gaze stayed on the file. What else was in there? Before I could ask, she replaced the file, locked the cabinet with a clunk and gathered up the notes for her five o’clock lecture.

“What time will you be home tonight?” she asked, opening the door. There was an odd expression—a sort of wary stiffness—on her face.

“Six or so,” I said.

“See you then.”

It was only twenty to five, but her receding footsteps sounded hurried, as though she was running late.

The sheet in my hand was printed with a grid and headed “Birth Certificate (amended)”.
Why amended?
I wondered, but my eyes had already locked on the first box in the grid, which contained my place and date of birth, and my name:
RAMPION, Sage
. The second box contained
RAMPION, Emmeline
. Her occupation was listed as
student
. The third contained the details of the father who’d returned to Helsinki before I was born.
VIRTANEN, Matti
.
Occupation: Fashion photographer. Age: 36.
Twenty years older than my mother. My stomach twisted like someone was wringing a wet towel inside me.

Without details, my father had been hardly more than a sperm donor. A faceless commuter in a business suit, maybe, who seduced the teenage casual and went home to lie to his wife. As a fashion photographer, he had a face, and a scheme. He was a predator, a pedophile, who’d lured a teenage model to his bed. And he was my
father
.

My skin began to itch, as if I could feel his DNA crawling through my flesh. Matti had been married when I was conceived. Maybe he had children, other children, with his wife back in Finland. Maybe Emmeline had had more children since I was born. I was twenty-two years old and I didn’t even know if I had brothers or sisters. All I had was Andrea, and the little she’d told me. And whatever she’d hidden in the bottom drawer of her filing cabinet.

The key to my own filing cabinet wouldn’t turn in her lock, and none of the others would fit. After a failed experiment with a paperclip, I sneaked downstairs to Seminar Room 4 and peered through the window in the door. The room was filled with students taking notes in books and laptops. All were women, aged from late teens to middle age. Andrea was pacing and gesticulating at the front of the room, and beside her on the table, mere feet from the door, sat her keys.

A burst of commercial music erupted through the glass. In the far corner of the seminar room, a student jumped and scrabbled frantically through her bag for the offending phone. Andrea advanced toward her, rigid with anger. As she began a rant on the rudeness of leaving phones on in class, I slipped through the door, swiped the keys and sprinted for the stairs.

I opened the office door, my eardrums thumping with fear and guilt. The filing cabinets stood either side of Andrea’s desk, brass keyholes trained on me like guns. I fumbled my way to a matching brass key, stabbed the left keyhole, and turned it with a satisfying
clunk
.

A third of the way through P-Z, I unearthed a slender file labeled
RAMPION, Sage
. I opened it, and the first page was the same blue as my birth certificate. The heading at the top read
Change of Name by Deed Poll
.

My stomach plunged like a stone through cold water. The name I’d used all my life was printed halfway down the page under
New Name
. Above it, in a box headed
Former Name
with my place and date of birth, was
VIRTANEN, Sadie Melissa
.

The contents of the file slithered to the floor. Letters, records, all labeled with the names of my parents and the name of someone listed as their daughter, who shared my birthplace and birthday. It was like looking into a mirror and seeing a stranger. Or seeing no one there at all.