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lunch, I made myself go out for my usual afternoon cigarette and hang around until Miranda appeared although I could see Mr Roberts gesturing from inside the shop. Although it was Mr Roberts’s shop and I’d only been working there for a week by that time, I already knew he didn’t like face-to-face customers. They might ask him something he didn’t know the answer to but, as he said, it was water off a duck’s back for me. Apparently he’d never known anyone who knew less than I did.
We were like those weather-house couples, Miranda and I, that afternoon. As soon as she popped out of her door, I went back into mine to put Mr Roberts out of his misery, but not before I managed to say, as casually as I could:
‘Do you really think so then?’
‘What?’
‘I should thin my hair?’
‘Definitely. Come in to the salon on Wednesday. It’s model night.’
After that first time, the Wednesday model night, turned out so disastrously, Miranda promised to work on my image a bit more gradually.
I had been worried she might give up on me when I lost my nerve in the middle of all those other women and ran out of the salon halfway through with the soapsuds still in my hair, so when she came up to me in the street the following morning and asked me for a light, I was going to explain about how it got too much hearing all those women’s voices, the words floating around me, clinging to me. I was even going to tell her about the biology teacher and what had happened but before I could say anything, she cut me off. She suggested that maybe the next time we should do it more privately. To take it easy. To change more slowly. As if it really could be that simple. As if there was nothing more to say.
So after that, I started going across the road to Miranda’s most nights after I finished work, and she’d put on a selection of sad echoey ballads. They filled up the empty salon and would make us feel all full up and weepy too. We’d smoke our cigarettes in that warm muggy atmosphere, spinning round on the seats and flicking our ash into the basins as the street darkened outside. There was a female smell in the air: the chemical tartness of hairspray, a garden of roses and lilies from the shampoos and underneath it, a dampness from the dying bouquets left just a day too long on the reception desk. While she leafed through magazines and read out horrific stories to me, I’d look in the mirror and try to see myself as Miranda did.
‘See her.’ She pointed out a photograph of an ordinary looking middle-aged woman smiling for the camera. ‘Attacked in broad daylight by a man with a sharpened broom handle who split her stomach from throat to bum, she was. Can’t do housework now. Says sweeping brings back nasty memories. There’s pictures of the scar too. Want to look?’
And in between murders and misery, she’d show me photographs of beautiful women she would say I was the spitting image of if only I would agree to let her transform me.
‘You’re stunning,’ she said. ‘I’d kill for your eyes.’
That was how we talked to each other, Miranda and I. As if we were practising for one of those Sunday afternoon black and white films mum always used to watch. ‘I’d die with joy if I could have your nose,’ I lied. ‘It’s like Doris Day. It’s sweet. If your nose was a person it would wear a frilly apron.’
‘Oh but your ears. They’d wear black berets with diamond studs on them. There’s something decidedly glamorous about your ears.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘And your cheeks. They’re the Kylie Minogue of cheeks. So, so, so. . .cheeky.’
I peered in the mirror, trying to read something more into the outline of my face than just that. An outline. What was it that Miranda could see?
‘We should go out one time,’ she said, ‘to the cinema or something.’
‘Or to the pub?’ I suggested.
‘I don’t think so,’ she laughed. ‘Nasty loud places. No, we’ll find a nice romantic comedy. Something jolly, that’s the ticket.’
Neither of us had boyfriends when we first met.
We would talk about men though, but always in that ‘oh aren’t they hopeless’ way other women did. I’d talk about Mr Roberts, but I didn’t tell Miranda everything. To make her laugh I’d ham it up about how he got me to go up the stepladder to fetch down boxes from the top shelf. Miranda and I grimaced at each other when I demonstrated the way he’d hold on to my legs when I was up there, and how he said he did it because he was scared I might topple over but we both knew he was fibbing.
‘I’m not surprised though,’ Miranda said. ‘Your calf muscles are perfect. You should insure your legs. I’ve never seen such romantic legs.’
‘Oh you,’ I cooed. This was something I’d learnt to do from Miranda. Cooing, and saying: ‘Oh you.’
When I got back to my room though, I couldn’t resist lifting up my skirts and having a quick look at my legs in the mirror. I turned this way and that, trying to see the romance Miranda must have read there. I flexed my legs, letting my fingers trail over where muscles should be. I shut my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see the dimples of fat. I couldn’t stop thinking about how Mr Roberts always said he liked a girl you could get hold of.
I sat on my bed later and watched the few passers-by in the street below as I ate my supper. I sipped my packet soup from my mug, pretending it was home-made and that I couldn’t taste the chemicals of the mix. The doughnuts I picked delicately one by one from their box, licking my lips to catch the sugar from round my mouth. The last one I had to force down but I didn’t want there to be any gaps in my body left unfilled.
It was so quiet. Blissfully, eerily quiet, in my little upstairs room. When it was time to sleep, I lay down and placed my hands in the form of a cross on my chest. The only sound was the occasional echo of footsteps which drifted up from the street. Some running, others dawdling. Everyone going home, I thought.
‘How did you meet?’ This was the first thing Miranda asked when I told her about Tim.
We were in the salon. Miranda was putting my hair up into a high pleat. I could feel her fingernails scrape against my scalp as she twisted strands into shape.
I couldn’t get the words out. All I’d told her so far was that I had a boyfriend called Tim, but now I kept giggling. I hid behind my hand as I tried to answer Miranda.
I’d had a hard time even just saying ‘boyfriend’. It didn’t feel right. Not next to Tim. Somehow Tim and Boyfriend weren’t two words that went naturally together. So by the time I’d finally managed to say it all in just the one sentence she was suspicious. That’s why her question wasn’t just throat-clearing. She really wanted to know.
I spun the back of the empty hairdressing chair next to me so I wouldn’t have to look at Miranda’s face in the mirror. In the background Miss Otis was busy regretting how she wasn’t going to be able, after all, to make lunch.
‘In the park,’ I said. Round and round the chair spun.
‘What are you reading?’ Tim had asked, and I showed him the second-hand romance I’d just picked up from the charity shop. I didn’t let him judge my reading habits from the pale pink cover though. I told him how I was getting through Proust but the books were too heavy to carry around. The novels I read outside were lighter. Not just in weight. They helped me keep my concentration keen for the main task. I was determined to get through the whole of French literature by the time I was thirty, I said. That gave me years, I added. I wanted to get that in quickly. Because of my size, and because I’m still wearing the clothes my father bought me, most people think I’m a lot older than I am. This has worked in my favour recently, but there was something nice about wanting to be young again. I felt a lightness inside.
‘The main task,’ Tim repeated. ‘You’re keeping your concentration