I burst into tears. I went from not crying to full-on weeping with added snot in the one second it took to assess the damage. Boy, was there damage.
My hair was short. Really short. About as short as you can go without using clippers and instead of leaving it long and messy at the front as I’d asked her to about a gazillion times, Alice had left me with one forlorn strand of hair. I don’t know how, I don’t know why but Alice had given me a comb-over, like how baldy old men drape their one good piece of hair over their scalps and hope it will fool the world.
‘I’m sorry, Franny,’ Alice said, her hands on her face like she wanted to shield herself from the horrific vision she’d created. ‘Your hair is really weird. It doesn’t lie flat.’
‘My hair? Weird? You…’ I couldn’t speak in sentences, only sob out the odd word. Sean marched out from behind the screen holding my sodden ponytail.
‘You are in a whole world of trouble!’ he barked. Alice shrank back. ‘Look what you’ve done to her! What were you thinking? Your mum will be here in five minutes to pick up the books. She’s going to kill you.’
That was when Alice burst into tears. Not because she’d butchered my hair, but at the prospect of her mum getting all wrathful on her arse. If Sean was normally a lovely teddy bear of a man, then Tania was a Rottweiler.
‘I’m sorry,’ she sobbed to Sean. By now Chloë, Sean’s senior stylist, had come over and was staring at the back of my head.
‘I think I can see a bald spot,’ she said in a loud stage whisper.
‘You did this on purpose!’ I would have shouted but I was crying too hard. ‘You did this to sabotage me with Louis.’
‘No, I didn’t…’
‘And because I dared to maybe make some new friends.’
‘That’s not true…’ Alice was wringing her hands now. Her face was red and wet and distorted. I’d never seen her look so ugly.
‘Well, you know what? I’m going to take my new friends and keep as far away from you as possible. I never want to see or speak to you again,’ I spat and only then did I let Chloë and Sean guide me back into the chair.
It was another hour before I left the salon. I had to give up my dreams of having Edie hair and go for what Sean called a Mia Farrow. Chloë showed me pictures of a blonde actress from a sixties film called Rosemary’s Baby, who’d had very, very short hair with a very, very short fringe but she was gamine and beautiful and had adorable freckles and eyelashes. I didn’t have adorable anything. I just had a bald spot and a comb over.
Tania had arrived halfway through, stood in the doorway and said nothing. She’d simply watched as I cried in the chair while all Sean’s stylists gathered around and told me not to cry, and as Alice wept as she swept up the hair she’d cut even though it turned out that she’d never, ever, not once, cut anyone’s hair before.
‘What’s been going on?’ Tania had eventually asked and even when she shouted at Alice and grounded her until she was eighteen, it didn’t make me feel better.
Neither did the complimentary silver gel nails and the eyebrow threading or Chloë telling me to come back for free eyelash extensions. They couldn’t do them then because I was still crying and Chloë said they wouldn’t take.
By the time I got home, the wind viciously whipping against my exposed neck and ears, I was exhausted. Emotionally drained. It was all I could do to drag my feet up our path and lift my arm to put my key in the lock.
Mum was coming down the hall as I stepped through the front door. ‘I’m going to bed,’ she said defensively before I’d even opened my mouth. ‘I’m really tired, OK?’
It was then I remembered that Dad had an overnight job delivering some slate tiles to Cornwall. With him out of the house, obviously Mum had decided that she could take a break from pretending to be a fully functioning adult.
Not for the first time, I wished that she’d be my mum. Be a mum. Stop being so colossally self-involved and concerned with how she was feeling so that she could notice how I was feeling. That my eyes were red and swollen because I’d been crying for hours and that I actually had very little hair and what hair I did have was now what Sean and Chloë kept calling a pixie cut but looked more like that Katy Perry video where she joins the army and they razor off her hair.
I couldn’t help it. I started to cry again and she sighed. Not a sympathetic sigh, but an impatient sigh like she didn’t have time for my tears when she was holding it together just long enough to get up the stairs and shut herself in her bedroom.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked in a tired voice.
‘Look what Alice did to me! Look at my bloody hair!’ As I sobbed, I realised that it wasn’t just about my hair; it was about me and Alice.
When she’d picked up those scissors and started cutting, she’d cut into our friendship too. Yeah, my hair would grow back eventually (and eventually was going to take a long, long time to come) but I wasn’t sure if Alice and I would grow back. Or if I even wanted us to.
I couldn’t begin to explain that to Mum, not when she already had her foot on the bottom stair and was giving me a long, hard look.
‘Jesus, Franny,’ she said in the flat, resigned voice that I hadn’t heard for a couple of weeks and really hadn’t missed. ‘If a bad haircut is all you’ve got to cry about then you’re a really lucky girl.’
16
My plan was to never leave the house ever again. Except morning rolled round as it always did and I had no choice but to go to work.
The only hat I could find was a red and blue knitted number with a bobble on, but there was no contest between wearing a stupid hat and having stupid hair.
It was very hard to sit at my sewing machine and not spill tears over a pile of shirts that needed buttons sewn on. Only the fact that I was sitting in the window and Rajesh was working that day (Mr and Mrs Chatterjee had gone to a wedding and he’d threatened to leave home if he had to spend all weekend at his auntie’s house in Walsall) kept me dry-eyed.
Raj spent two hours trying to get me to lose the hat. Even made me coffee though I would’ve sworn he didn’t know how to operate a kettle, but I refused to take it off, even though dry-cleaning shops are hot, stuffy places and I was tempting heatstroke by lunchtime.
I did tell him why I was wearing a hat and if misery loved company then Raj was the perfect companion for someone who never wanted anything to do with Alice Jenkins ever again.
‘She’s a bitch, innit,’ he said when I’d finished my sorry tale of hair loss and betrayal.
‘Total bitch,’ I agreed. I didn’t feel a single pang of disloyalty. Not one.
‘Is one thing to break someone’s heart, but to do that to her best friend’s hair is not right.’ Raj was meant to be putting dry-cleaned clothes in plastic garment bags but he was too busy shaking his head. Actually there was something I’d always wondered but never asked about before, and now I didn’t owe Alice one itty bitty little morsel of girl solidarity.
‘So, Raj, was it you who wrote Alice Jenkins Is The Worst Girlfriend In The World in the Burger King loos?’
He pulled down his baseball cap so I couldn’t see his eyes. ‘Like I’d give her that satisfaction,’ he mumbled. Then he became very interested in getting busy with the garment bags and I kind of had my answer. One thing to call out your ex-girlfriend, quite another for your ex-girlfriend to adopt it as her Twitter bio and get her best friend to spell it out in sequins on a T-shirt because she was so proud of the accolade. ‘Anyway, you’re better off without her, Franny, ’cause girl you fly and she be dragging you down, yo.’
I did feel dragged down, like I was in a hole that I couldn’t climb out from. I now had some understanding of why my mum took to her bed so frequently. That was where I was heading as soon as I got home. There was no way I was going to The Wow Halloween party, even though theoretically with Alice grounded I had free access to Louis all night. I was deluding myself if I ever thought he’d go for me, not when he had Thee Desperadettes as his own personal
entourage and I had my shit hair.
Sorry 2 let U down but not coming out 2nite, I texted Dora and Sage.
I refused to be drawn on the details of my no-show. They’d find out on Monday, if I decided to get out of bed and go to college and if I decided to forgo my woolly hat, which was highly unlikely.
I was all set for a top night moping under my duvet. I had Steel Magnolias and Beaches on the Sky planner because Mum watched them over and over again. I had loads of corn-based snacks and Polish chocolate from the 59p shop and I had a bottle of Lambrini that had been at the back of the fridge since last Christmas.
Even my mum had realised the Halloween party was kind of a big deal and expressed surprise that I wasn’t going. ‘I think I’m coming down with something,’ I insisted when she and Dad, who’d got in from Cornwall at the same time as I arrived home, wanted to know why I wasn’t heading straight for the bathroom. Normally I needed at least three hours’ prep to get ready for a Saturday night.
Going to bed yesterday had obviously done her a world of good because she even put a hand on my forehead to check my temperature in a maternal gesture, which didn’t come naturally to her. ‘You do feel a bit hot but that’s no surprise if you will wear that hat indoors.’ She folded her arms and tried to look sympathetic. ‘Tania called and told me what happened at the salon yesterday. Said to give her a ring and fix a time to come in for the eyelash extensions.’
‘I’m never setting foot in that place ever again,’ I muttered.
Dad, who was watching the football highlights in the lounge, shouted, ‘It’s only hair, kid. You’ll look back on this in a couple of years and laugh about it.’ That only went to show how little he understood.
‘Have you spoken to Alice?’ Mum asked and I hadn’t because after I’d been getting texts from her every five minutes saying that she was sorry and wanted to make it up to me, Raj had shown me how to download this app so I could block her number from my BlackBerry.
‘No! Stop asking me questions. I don’t feel well. I’m going to bed. I’m not home if anyone calls or comes round,’ I snapped and Dad told me not to use that tone of voice but whatever, I was halfway up the stairs by then.
I was lying on my bed in my leopard-print onesie watching Beaches and not even able to choke down any corn-based snacks when there was a gentle tap at the door.
‘I told you that I didn’t want to be disturbed,’ I bellowed, not that either of my parents ever listened to a single word that came out of my mouth, because the door slowly opened and then, to my horror, Sage and Dora were in my room.
Corn-based snacks flew everywhere as I yanked the quilt over my bare head. ‘What the hell! Get out!’
‘I’m not getting out,’ Sage said. ‘And you are not bailing on us. Have you any idea how much my new blonde wig cost me?’
I did feel a bit guilty about that but not enough to come out from under my duvet. I was also embarrassed that I had a Cath Kidston-style duvet cover that wasn’t actually Cath Kidston but a poor imitation from BHS.
‘Oh come on, Franny B. We have vodka and a choice of mixers and I bought the silver spray we talked about,’ Dora said cajolingly. ‘Your mum said you had hair issues but once you’ve got a metric arse ton of silver spray on it, who’s going to notice?’
Dora had a point, but mostly she had vodka. ‘It looks awful. I have a bald spot.’
They both pretended they couldn’t hear me with my voice muffled by the duvet and I knew for certain that Sage would drag me bodily out of bed. I took a deep sigh and shucked off the duvet. ‘Honestly, would you want to go out in public with this?’ I pointed at my head.
To their credit, neither of them pretended that I was making a fuss about nothing.
‘That Alice girl did this to you?’ Sage asked and she pulled a face that encapsulated exactly what she thought of that Alice girl and it wasn’t anything good. ‘You need to get some new friends.’
‘You have got a bald spot,’ Dora announced sympathetically. ‘But it doesn’t look so bad from the front. You look gamine.’
‘I’m meant to look like Mia Farrow,’ I told them. ‘I Googled her. She married two really old blokes and adopted loads of kids from different countries way before Angelina Jolie did.’
‘You have cheekbones. When you have cheekbones you can get away with anything,’ Sage said, peering critically at my face. ‘And you’ve had your eyebrows done and they look amazing. When my mum gets her eyebrows done, she says it’s as good as having a facelift.’
They coaxed and flattered and bullied me in an effort to get me out of bed. ‘Between the four of us we’ve spent loads of time and money getting our outfits together and so you have to stop being so lame.’
By then I was almost at the end of my first vodka and Red Bull and the world was looking like a slightly better place, but only slightly better. Sage drew herself up so she was suddenly taller and fiercer and pointed a finger at the leopard-print onesied heap that was me. ‘It’s at times like this that you have to ask yourself what would Edie Sedgwick have done if she’d suffered some kind of style malfunction,’ she said sternly.
‘If it was later Edie, she’d have done a huge amount of drugs and attempted suicide,’ I said grumpily because this was not the time to summon the spirit of Edie.
‘Yeah, and if it was early Edie, she’d have styled it out bigtime,’ Sage rapped back. ‘Like, like… like that time she broke her leg and she went clubbing with a whopping great plaster cast and crutches and took to the dance floor and worked it.’
‘Really? Did she?’ Dora looked very impressed. ‘She sounds awesome. I need to Google her.’
‘I’ll lend you my Edie biography as long as you promise to give it back,’ I told her.
Sage was right. Edie wouldn’t moulder in bed because of a bad haircut. I was behaving more like my mother and that could never, ever happen. I jumped off my bed. ‘Right. OK. I’m up. Let’s make this happen.’
We made it happen. I showered and got dressed in the stretchy silver T-shirt dress I’d made, black opaque tights and the kitten heels I’d bought in Morecambe, which I’d spray-painted silver.
Then while Dora was working on my hair, adding mousse to make it look thicker and give it texture then applying the silver spray, Sage helped me with my make-up. We painted two thick stripes of black eyeliner over each eye and then applied not one set of false eyelashes, but two. I felt like I needed a hoist to blink because my eyelids were so weighed down, but I was happy to suffer when my eyes looked so fantastic.
Staring back at me from the mirror was a slinky silver sprite of a girl who’d stepped from another time and place. I looked like I should be frozen and photographed in black and white and pinned to a Pinterest board. I was the past and the future and actually, yeah, maybe I needed to go easy on the vodka and Red Bull.
‘Well, I think I’ll do,’ I said, stepping back from the mirror. ‘Thanks for helping me out and you two… you’re looking pretty fine, ladies.’
Sage was wearing a tight white trouser suit, black shirt and black fedora over a long blonde wig with a fringe. She could have stepped out of the pages of a 1969 edition of US Vogue and Dora, well, she didn’t look much like Ultra Violet, she just looked like a more purply version of herself but she’d made the effort.
I knew then that Sage and Dora were my friends. Not people who were friendly to me when Alice wasn’t around but people who liked me for me, even though they’d witnessed the part of me that could be an absolute mardy bitch.
‘We all look amazing,’ Sage said with satisfaction. ‘We are going to walk into this so-called Wow Club and rule the school.’
17
I’m not sure that we ruled the school, or that I’d ever want to become supreme monarch of anywhere as crap as The Wow, but when the five of us strutted in, everyone turned to look.
We’d picked up Paul and Matthew at the Red Lion en route. They both looked the part in tight jeans, black leather jackets and shades. Matthew had borrowed one
of my stripy T-shirts and we’d found a really bad grey wig in a charity shop. Andy Warhol had been known for wearing really bad wigs so it was fate or something. I just hoped that my hair didn’t look like a bad wig too, but I got the feeling that Sage and Dora would smack me if I mentioned my hair again.
It felt weird to sit at my usual table without Alice, but Sage was a Wow virgin so I was busy pointing out who everyone was, from Mark the mad dancer to Thee Desperadettes to Louis. Thee Desperadoes weren’t playing but Louis was there, because where else would he be?
‘Oh, so that’s him,’ Sage said doubtfully. ‘I thought he’d be much… Well, that he’d be, y’know…’
‘What? You can’t deny that he’s foxy.’ She couldn’t deny it, but then I didn’t want her to agree with me too much.