a hairdresser,’ Amina said, even more shyly. ‘In my country, that’s what I do. Or did. My husband has to retrain here for engineering but there are no such requirements for hairdressing, and I know this product.’ She gazed at Julie’s hair with professional interest. ‘Colour would look good, but I don’t think all over. If you permit, I could give you highlights.’
‘I don’t think...’
‘Jules,’ Rob said, and she heard an undercurrent of steel, ‘you’d look great with red highlights.’
She’d hardly touched her ash-blonde curls for four years. She tugged them into a knot for work; when they became too unruly to control she’d gone to the cheap walk-in hairdresser near work and she’d thought no more about it.
Even before the boys died... When had she last had time to think about what her hair looked like?
When she’d met Rob she’d had auburn highlights. He’d loved them. He’d played with her curls, running his long, strong fingers through them, massaging her scalp, kissing her as the touch of his fingers through her hair sent her wild...
Even then she hadn’t arranged it herself. Her mother had organised it as a gift.
‘I bought this voucher for you, pet. I know you don’t have time for the salon but you need to make a little time for yourself.’
Her parents were overseas now, having the holiday of a lifetime. They wouldn’t be worried about her. They knew she’d be buried in her work.
They’d never imagine she’d be here. With time...
‘I don’t think...’
‘Do it, Jules,’ Rob said and she caught a note of steel in his voice. She looked at him uncertainly, and then at Amina, and she understood.
This wasn’t about her. Rob wasn’t pushing her because he wanted a wife...an ex-wife...with crimson highlights. He was pushing her because Amina needed to do something to keep her mind off her burned house and her missing husband. And she also needed to give something back.
She thought suddenly of the sympathy and kindness she’d received during the months after the boys’ deaths and she remembered thinking, more than once: I want to be the one giving sympathy. I want to give rather than take.
Amina was a refugee. She would have been needing help for years. Now, this one thing...
‘I’d love highlights,’ she confessed and Amina smiled, really smiled, for the first time since she’d met her. It was a lovely smile, and it made Danny smile too.
She glanced at Rob and his stern face had relaxed.
Better to give than receive? Sometimes not. Her eyes caught Rob’s and she knew he was thinking exactly the same thing.
He’d have been on the receiving end of sympathy too. And then she thought of all the things he’d tried to make her feel better—every way he could during those awful weeks in hospital, trying and trying, but every time she’d pushed him away.
‘Don’t get soppy on us,’ Rob said, and she blinked and he chuckled and put his arm around her and gave her a fast, hard hug. ‘Right, Amina, we need a hair salon. Danny, I need your help. A chair in the bathroom, right? One that doesn’t matter if it gets the odd red splash on it.’
He set them up, and then he disappeared. She caught a glimpse of him through the window, heading down to the creek, shovel over his shoulder.
She guessed what he’d be doing. He’d left water for wildlife, but there’d be animals too badly burned...
‘He’s a good man,’ Amina said and she turned and Amina was watching her. ‘You have a good husband.’
‘We’re not...together.’
‘Because of your babies?’
‘I...yes.’
‘It happens,’ Amina said softly. ‘Dreadful things...they tear you apart or they pull you together. The choice is yours.’
‘There’s no choice,’ she said, more harshly than she intended, but Danny was waiting in the bathroom eyeing the colouring kit with anticipation, and she could turn away and bite her lip and hope Amina didn’t sense the surge of anger and resentment that her words engendered.
Get over it... It was never said, not in so many words, but, four years on, she knew she was pretty much regarded as cool and aloof. The adjectives were no longer seen as a symptom of loss—they simply described who she was.
And who she intended to be for the rest of her life?
Thinking ahead was too hard. But Rob was gone, off to do what he could for injured wildlife, and Danny was waiting in the bathroom and Amina was watching her with a gaze that said she saw almost too much.
Do something.
Back in the office, she’d be neck-deep in contracts.
It was Christmas Day.
Okay, back home, she’d have left her brother’s place after managing to stay polite all through Christmas dinner and now she’d be back in her apartment. Neck-deep in contracts.
But now...neck-deep in hair dye?
‘Let’s get this over with,’ she muttered and Amina took a step back.
‘You don’t have to. If you don’t want...’
She caught herself. If Rob came back and found her wallowing in self-pity, with her hair the same colour and Amina left alone...
See, there was the problem. With Rob around she couldn’t wallow.
Maybe that was why she’d left him.
Maybe that was selfish. Maybe grief was selfish.
It was all too hard. She caught herself and forced a smile and then tried even harder. This time the smile was almost natural.
‘Rob is a good man,’ she conceded. ‘But he needs a nicer woman than me. A happier one.’
‘You can be happier if you try,’ Amina told her.
‘You can be happy if you have red hair,’ Danny volunteered and she grinned at his little-boy answer to the problems of the world.
‘Then give me red hair,’ she said. ‘Red hair is your mum’s gift to me for Christmas, and if there’s one thing Christmas needs it’s gifts. Are you and Luka going to watch or are you going to play with your Christmas presents?’
‘Me and Luka are going to watch,’ Danny said, and he wiggled his glove puppet. ‘And Wombat. Me and Luka and Wombat are going to watch you get happy.’
* * *
Almost as soon as they started, Julie realised that agreeing to this had been a mistake.
Putting a colour through her hair would have been a relatively easy task—simply applying the colour, leaving it to take and then washing it out again.
Amina, though, had different ideas. ‘Not flat colour,’ she said, just as flatly. ‘You want highlights, gold and crimson. You’ll look beautiful.’
Yeah, well, she might, but each highlight meant the application of colour to just a few strands of hair, then those strands wrapped in foil before Amina moved to the next strands.
It wasn’t a job Amina could do sitting down. She also didn’t intend to do a half-hearted job.
‘If I put too much hair in each foil, then you’ll have flat clumps of colour,’ she told Julie as she protested. ‘It won’t look half as good. And I want some of them strong and some diluted.’
‘But you shouldn’t be on your feet.’ She hadn’t thought this through. Amina was eight months pregnant, she’d had one hell of a time and now she was struggling.
She