‘How do you like it?’ asks the assistant, standing back from me to look at his handiwork.
He picks up a mirror and holds it behind me with a flourish, so I can see the back of my head in the wall-mirror. There’s nothing much to see, other than my hair ends in a rigidly straight line and already starting to frizz slightly as they dry. Something else catches my eye in the mirror, a man whose shape has become familiar, pausing outside the shop, looking at it critically, tracing a faint crack in the glass with his finger.
‘Don’t you like it?’ the assistant says, worried.
‘No, it’s fine, of course I like it,’ I say, trying to smile, stealing another look at the reflection of the man outside. The assistant follows my eyes and then turns to look at the man himself. He drops the scissors, rushes outside and throws his arms around the man’s neck, almost lifting him off the ground. He really must have believed the barber was dead. The barber smiles down at him, listens patiently as words begin to pour out of the assistant’s mouth in relief. The assistant follows him into the shop, then remembers me and falls silent. In the time it takes the barber’s eyes to adjust to the darkness of the shop, I manage to untie the plastic sheet around my neck, pull it aside and step down from the high chair. My damp hair clings to the back of my shirt.
‘Leave us, will you?’ he says, and for a horrible second I think he’s talking to me until the assistant slowly takes his wallet from the counter and lopes out of the room, stealing a backwards glance at us. The barber moves towards me, lifts me under my arms and places me back onto the high chair. He swivels the chair so that I’m looking at my reflection again in the mirror. A bulb fizzes, then blows. He stands behind me and looks for a long time at me, using the mirror as our medium, perhaps afraid of what will happen if we look directly at each other, using his reflection as a decoy so he can see if I’m going to shoot at it mistakenly or lay down my arms. There is an accusation in his eyes – one that has lingered since our first night together, that I cannot dispel no matter what I say to him. He scans my face for any sign that I am searching for someone else, perhaps blurring my eyes so that the shape of his jaw changes slightly, or that his hair curls a little less. He has shaved off his beard and he rubs the fresh stubble with his hand, as if inviting me to protest, to ask him to grow another, so that the resemblance to his brother is maintained. I notice a small mole above his lip and a faint scar at the base of his chin and will myself to remember them: they are his own private markings, they are what his body alone saw fit to do to his skin. I reach up my hand without turning to look at him, using the mirror to locate the scar, and trace it with my fingertip. I have passed his test: he swivels me around to face him, kissing me as he lifts me from the chair, and I curl my legs around his hips. He carries me to the door to the backroom, nudges it open with his shoulder, and closes it again with his foot, where the darkness is complete.
Before I leave, he says he wants to show me something, and fumbles on the wall in the dark for the light switch. A bare fluorescent bulb dangles from the ceiling, starkly outlining rows and rows of shelves, extending from wall to wall like stacks in a library. At first I don’t see what’s on them, absorbed in smoothing out my skirt to rid it of creases. I look up to see him holding out a small glass jar to me, filled with something fibrous and dark, and around me on the shelves are hundreds of glass jars, all containing different shades of the same matter.
‘These are yours,’ he says. ‘I collected them from my brother’s pillow the mornings after I knew you’d climbed through the window and slept there.’
The jar is full of hairs, thick ones that I recognize immediately as my own. I take down another jar from the shelf and find it is filled with stubble and short hair, probably a week’s worth of clippings from the shop floor, swept up and bottled.
‘Good thing nobody got in here,’ he says, surveying the shelves. ‘Can you imagine what it would look like if they had?’
5 His chef’s daughter
My mother always spoke about making love in rapturous terms. She was first obliged to tell me what it was when I was five and went to find her when I heard the telephone ringing late at night. My father thought I was an intruder and jumped up naked from the couch in attack mode, and my mother quickly put on her dressing gown and steered me back to bed, promising they would explain everything in the morning and hoping I would forget all about it. At first light I arrived on their bed, woke them, and demanded an explanation. After they’d told me that they were ‘revealing their true love to each other’ I cried bitterly, thinking that I wasn’t good enough for them and they were betraying me by making another baby. My mother told me that for years afterwards she was worried I would be scarred for life by the experience of seeing my father jump up naked, ready to punch me.
But she never told me that sex can be for fun, or for pleasure, or that it can be a tool of manipulation, or that it can be a way to mark important moments in your life that have nothing to do with the other person. I had to find all that out for myself. Who it was with the first time wasn’t important – it was all about me. I cried afterwards and he thought that he’d hurt me, but they were proud, self-indulgent tears. My mother didn’t know for years afterwards; by then her radar must already have started going haywire, because she certainly knew instinctively when I got in the car after my first kiss at a party, my cheeks burning.
I look across at my mother in her bed in the half-light from the streetlamp outside, her head lolling almost off the pillow, drooling slightly, the grooves around her mouth so deep they show even when she’s sleeping. I brushed her hair for her before she went to sleep – she likes that; it calms her and she smiles at herself in the mirror and then closes her eyes. I have been sitting in the dark, drinking, not for the oblivion most people seek but because it’s the only way I can be emotionally honest. It scares me that I feel so little sometimes, that in the face of sadness I can be so collected. The wine is a relief because it makes me feel human again, if to be human is to be sad.
Her head falls suddenly clear of the pillow, onto the mattress, and she begins to snore in her effort to get more air. I walk to the bedside and gently lift her head with two hands, surprised how light it is, full of so many things, so precious, and yet so light, and none of the things she knows were passed onto me. How tiring that you have to start from scratch with each generation when it comes to knowledge, and then by the time you’re old enough to want to ask your parents what they know, it’s too late: they’re mad, estranged or dead. We’re always
one generation away from barbarism, who said that first? I don’t recall. If I imagine having a child myself I feel exhausted at the thought of having to teach it everything I know but haven’t even put to good use yet, all these years and years of input and things so painstakingly taught and I haven’t done anything with it. I would resent its little gaping mind trying to soak up what I know, absorbing it from me against my will, unless the point of it all is to pass it on, like a baton in a relay, without doing anything fancy with it while it’s your turn to sprint. And when I think of what is in my father’s head, what kind of carnal knowledge is lodged there, I understand that wiping clean the mind is necessary for survival, for continuation of the species.
My mother didn’t feel like that about me; she really wanted to have a child. She loved teaching me things and seeing me grasp at bits of knowledge and fit them together. I was a strange little girl. I talked in tongues for the first four years of my life and my parents had someone come in to observe me; apparently he identified snippets of four different languages that I’d never been taught. I came up with strange theories and experimented with inventions: one theory I had was that fruit flies only bite an apple once, so I hammered a nail into the end of a plank and made a hole in ten apples, believing I could trick the fruit flies into thinking they had already been bitten, but all the apples rotted. I wanted to be a magician for a while, and started at a school for gifted child magicians before the age of ten. My mother encouraged me, and even my father became interested, probably thinking I would boost his own ego by being a child prodigy, but I lost interest after a few lessons, and my father had to force me to keep going, saying one day I would regret giving up. Parents put strange pressures on their children. I remember reading in the newspaper about a little girl whose parents taught her to fly an aeroplane. At age seven she attempted to be the youngest person ever to fly solo across the country; she took off from the city in the middle of a storm and crashed the plane. In interviews afterwards her parents said that she died doing what she loved.
I find it difficult to reconcile tender stories that my mother has told me about my father during my early childhood with my own later memories of his many betrayals. It was a slow process of deflation, a long, tedious, dragged-out series of small disappointments in him that at this stage in my life add up to something substantial. She said the first time they decided to let me cry through the night without feeding me they locked themselves in their bedroom, put their pillows over their heads to dull the sound of me screaming, and both cried for hours, horrified at what they felt they had to do. I have a photograph of him, shirtless and barefoot in a pair of faded jeans, holding me as a tiny baby in the crook of one arm as he vacuums with the other hand; my mother said he would put his music on as loud as it would go and dance around the house with me as he cleaned. Then there’s the memory of being in hospital to have my appendix out, and waking after the operation, still groggy, to see the doctor leaning over me, scanning my face, wearing a thick gold necklace that lay flat against her skin; I remember looking at it admiringly, liking how it didn’t move even when she bent forward. She saw me looking at it and said, ‘Your father gave it to me,’ without spite, but without apology. When she stood up I saw that my mother was standing at the door to the room, watching us wearily.
There’s another photograph, of the three of us going for a hike and I’m packed into the top of his rucksack and he’s looking up at me and laughing. And there’s the time he took me to the ballet, many years later, and then disappeared backstage to woo one of the dancers when it was over, telling me to wait for him in the foyer, which was full of faded red velvet drapes and upholstery, an attempt at decadence that had failed – bits of it had rubbed right through on the couch, leaving it looking like a diseased dog’s coat. As the foyer emptied, the smells of people out for the night (heady perfume, hairspray, soap, mints) faded, leaving behind the damp odour of cigarettes and wine. In boredom, I put my hand down the side of the couch, beneath the cushions, and found a piece of brittle chocolate, a silver coin minted ten years earlier, and an earring studded with stones that shone too brightly not to be fake.
Eventually there was nobody left but me on the couch and a man at the bar, bundled up in a coat and scarf so that his age wasn’t apparent – men’s faces always look older than their bodies because of cold winds and countless shaves and sports injuries and sunburn. He made eye contact with me and then joined me on the couch. He’d been to see the ballet on his own, he said, because he was in the city on business and leaving the next day. I was unused to male attention then, especially an older man’s attention, and I liked how a vein on his temple throbbed when he laughed and how his eyes creased as he talked, and I remember thinking that he would never know how wrinkled his face was because he wouldn’t talk to himself in the mirror. I wondered what my face looked like while I was talking. The cleaners began to collect glasses from around us as we spoke. Somebody dropped one on the tiles around the bar and then noisily swept up the shards. A woman began to vacuum directly at our feet and he laughed and suggested we go somewhere more comfortable – to his hotel, just down the block. He didn’t ask whom I was waiting for so I didn’t tell him. He helped me with my coat and stood aside to let me walk out of the rotating door first. It was snowing outside, the kind of snow that’s like flour, fine and dry, and he held my hand as we crossed the road.
My father didn’t hide the evidence of his conquests – in fact, he documented them in a photo album that was kept on a shelf in my parents’ bedroom, hoarding them like a trophy hunter adorning his mantelpiece with severed heads. I discovered it one day when I was too young to know what it was, and scribbled with a green crayon on the inside of the cover, but I must have sensed somehow that it would be inappropriate to scribble on the photographs themselves. I would occasionally bring it with me to bed, thinking it was a storybook, and demand that my reluctant father tell me the stories before I went to sleep. Later on, when I began to grasp what it was, it fascinated me differently and I searched for more evidence of the secret lives my parents lived as individuals. In a box with my birth certificate and fading diplomas I found a stack of old love letters they’d written to each other, including something about lying on the bed in the afternoon sunlight and marvelling at each other’s bodies, and references to what they’d done the night before. My mother walked into the bedroom while I was reading them and I went bright red and started to cry from the double embarrassment of having read these details and then being discovered doing it. She comforted me and I lied about my tears, saying I was crying because I didn’t know if I would ever love anybody like that. She didn’t pay the letters much
attention – she wasn’t nostalgic or sentimental about them – she simply looked at them like long-buried artefacts that have become obsolete, much the same way that she looked at ancient coins in museum display cases.
She would drag me around to museums on school holidays to get new ideas for coin designs. She was Secretary of the Treasury for most of her career, and one of her favourite tasks was working with the State Mint and Bureau of Engraving and Printing to decide on new coin and note designs every five years. It always sounded like a thankless job to me, but she found pleasure in small details, and if you think about it, a brand-new coin or stiffly fresh banknote is a symbol of a state’s confidence and power. You hold it in your hand, so shiny or so uncrinkled it looks worthless, and you feel you’re holding the evidence that the state is healthy, in order, legitimate. It pleased her to think that each new batch of coins or notes would change hands millions of times, would fuel the economy, would drive human endeavour. She saw the State’s currency as the catalyst of all activity in the country and always wished she could track a note to see how many times it was used and reused and for what purposes; often she would examine notes from her purse as if she were hoping to recognize them – the dirtier they were, the better she felt she’d done her job.
I leave the armchair, put the empty wine bottles in the sink and slowly find my way to the bed next to my mother’s in the dark. I lie on my side in the bed – I can’t sleep on my back – with my right arm cupping my left breast. That’s how he lies behind me, my lover, when he feels tender towards me, which is not often. I strain my ears to hear my mother’s laboured breathing and the sadness overwhelms me again: I think of lying in my bed as a small child, unable to sleep when my parents had dinner guests because I knew I couldn’t call them if I had a nightmare. I could hear them laughing and talking and the music on in the background, and I would lie there rigidly, crying, feeling desperately lonely and helpless and distant from them, even though they were in the next room.