someone for the way they’re sweeping?
‘For the fifteenth time, Sadie, sweep the floor from left to right.’
‘I am.’
‘No, you’re the wrong way round – from left to right facing the back door. That’s the way the floor tilts. If you go the other way it’s uphill and the draft comes under the door and blows the hair all over the salon again.’
‘Yeah, it does do that actually. It blows all over the salon,’ repeated Tiffany, who’s so dumb that it’s like the wheel’s spinning but the hamster’s dead.
Tiffany’s the junior stylist who Aunt Lilah employs solely so that she has someone to bitch and complain at all the other days of the week when I’m not there. Saturday is Tiffany’s day off from Aunt Lilah’s bitching and she spends it repeating whatever Aunt Lilah’s just said to me.
‘Left to right.’
‘Yes, Aunty.’
‘Yeah, you gotta do it left to right.’
‘Thanks, Tiffany.’
And it went on from there as usual.
‘That’s the wrong mug.’
‘The wrong brush.’
‘The wrong setting on the drier.’
‘The wrong rollers.’
‘The wrong sized pot.’
‘The wrong gown.’
Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.
‘Sorry, Aunty.’
‘Yeah, it is wrong actually.’
‘Whateva, Tiffany.’
It’s not like I wasn’t grateful to Aunty and all for making me Girl Saturday in her salon. Hair is, after all, my ‘thing’. I was doing Level 1 Hairdressing at college one day per week, plus I was taking things to the next level in World of Hairdressing by entering the Thames Gateway Junior Apprentice Hairdresser (or Barber) of the Year Award – and all this on top of going to school. It was hard work, but I’m not lying when I say that I was loving it. I was flying! Except for Saturdays, when I was in Aunty’s shop and I was not flying at all. I was stuck on the runway with no prospect whatsoever of a take-off.
At three thirty that Saturday Mrs Nellist came in for her cut-and-colour while Aunty and Tiffany were out the back having a coffee and a Kit Kat, leaving me to sweep up from left to right as you’re facing the back door, and that’s kind of where everything got really ugly.
It was the hairstyle that Mrs Nellist never knew she wanted. That’s all it was about. I don’t know why everyone had to go so completely hysterical about it, but that’s my family for you.
I think it was maybe the colour. In a certain light I’ll admit that when she came out from under the dryer, Mrs Nellist’s hair did look a little bit pink. I swear to God on a stack of Holy Bibles that it was not intentional. I’d tried out the tiniest smidgen of one of the new Manic Panic shades I’d been wanting to use for the longest time. Manic Panic do dayglo colours – like Fuschia Shock, Vampire Red and Electric Lemon. None of Aunt Lilah’s customers would ever be up for any of those, being that they’re all over thirty-five years of age and say things like, ‘Oooh, I’m going to really be daring and go a shade lighter’ or ‘I want something radical: two millimetres off the top. It’s going to be a whole new me.’
I don’t know why Aunty had even bought the Manic Panic range. I think she got overwhelmed at the Hair Show and thought she was running a completely different kind of salon, with interesting customers wanting to try out new looks and styles – which is the kind of salon I’d like to run one day. Anyway, in Aunt Lilah’s salon I was banned from even suggesting Manic Panic in case it induced a heart attack or something, but this colour was called Pearly Queen, so it sounded like it was going to blend beautifully with Mrs Nellist’s white curls – just pep them up a teensy bit. Plus Mrs Nellist was well up for it.
‘I think it sounds nice, Sadie love,’ she said when I suggested we try a new colour. ‘I’m a secret smoker, y’know, and sometimes I think it makes me hair go a little bit yellow.’
Glamorous world, hairdressing. I’d had a Saturday job for twelve weeks in Aunt Lilah’s shop and so far I’d seen dandruff, nits, seborrhoeic dermatitis (which is like mega-dandruff) and alopecia (this woman was literally bald on one side – it was like a nightmare).
So anyway, back to Mrs Nellist and her Colour by Nicotine. Secret smoker? Who was she kidding? I don’t think I’ve ever seen Mrs Nellist without a ciggie in her hand. Even when she comes in the salon she has to nip out from under the dryer for a fly fag in the back garden.
So I did Pearly Queen because Mrs Nellist seemed enthusiastic, and I partly blame the ceiling in Aunt Lilah’s salon for the result. It’s a sort of blancmange pink, so with hindsight I think it was just the newly dyed glossy whiteness of Mrs Nellist’s hair reflecting the ceiling colour that made everyone get a bit over-excited. I wish I’d pointed that out at the time. But what with Aunt Lilah shouting at me and turning on all the water jets and offering to rinse and strip the hair down for Mrs Nellist, and Tiffany repeating whatever Aunt Lilah had just said, it was kind of hard to think, let alone speak.
Tiffany, who is like living proof that evolution can go in reverse, made Mrs Nellist four cups of tea in a row, which made her go jittery, and she had to take one of her pills and they spilled all over the floor, and then I had to pick them up and count them and I kept coming out with different totals, which made her a bit upset. So then we had to calm her down with a camomile infusion which she said smelled of wee and made her feel even weirder. Aunt Lilah resorted to brandy then and this seemed to do the trick.
All the while Aunt Lilah was hissing and stage whispering at me over the water jets. Mrs Nellist is very deaf so you don’t actually have to hiss, and it was just annoying and unnecessary.
‘And you’ve cut it too short, Sadie. She likes it jaw-length – jaw-length! It’s barely past her ears!’
‘But it suits her – she has such a little face, she can wear it short,’ I said, which is true actually cos Mrs Nellist does look like a pixie, with a little pointy chin and a bony schnozz.
‘Yes! But she doesn’t want it short. She wants it jaw-length! You have to give the customers what they want.’
‘How do you know she wants it jaw-length? She never said.’
This was true as well. I’d kept right on trimming while Aunty and Tiffany were in the back garden chomping through the Kit Kats and Mrs Nellist was saying, ‘Yes, lovely dear. That’s lovely.’ She never once said, ‘Stop!’
‘Because she always wants it jaw-length!’ continued Aunt Lilah, who was now manically whisking powder bleach and peroxide in a bowl like Gordon bloody Ramsay on Ritalin. ‘Mrs Nellist has been coming to me for fourteen years and she has always had her hair JAW-LENGTH!’
You see, this is where Aunt Lilah and I fundamentally differ. As anyone who’s heard my philosophy on haironomics will know, I firmly believe that you don’t just give the customer the style they think they want or the style they’ve always had – because often they don’t have a clue. You give them the style they never knew they wanted. It’s like magic. It’s like you can read their minds. I know this because I’ve tried it out on Mum, on my cousin Billy and on my boyfriend Tony – and with 100 per cent success, though I say so myself. I’d really like to try it out on Abe now that we’re getting to know one another. Abe is my biological dad, who Billy and I tracked down last year. Unlike the rest of my family (Mum, Aunt Lilah, Uncle Zé, Great Aunty Rita) Abe actually listens to me. He is also undoubtedly in need of a decent haircut and I think I could be the person to give it to him. I truly believe that I can ‘channel’ hairstyles like psychics can read minds.
Personally I think that Mrs Nellist liked the hairstyle I gave her. She did