Scissors Sisters & Manic Panics. Ellie Phillips

was odd. And, I realised, it was potentially sort of wonderful too . . .

      On his way out later that evening, Abe said, ‘I sent Marie my phone number – I’m hoping she’ll call me.’ He stooped so that his face was level with mine. ‘Would you like me to mention you? It’s up to you. I don’t have to, if you’re not ready for it . . .’

      He put his hand on mine and I could see that both were shaking slightly. His hand; my hand. We were nervous. It was like we were both full of energy and it had nowhere to go.

      ‘No . . . Yeah . . . Sure. Mention me to her. Tell her I exist. Give her my details if you like – she might want to call me or visit or something. I mean, we could get to know one another. I wonder what she looks like. I wonder what her hair’s like . . .’ And then I laughed because I knew I sounded ridiculous.

      ‘You’re a prize loon!’ said Abe. ‘If she calls I’ll tell her you asked after her hair.’

      Sometimes I just loved having a donor parent. You wouldn’t get moments like this if you were conceived by a regular mum and a regular dad in a regular kind of set-up. You had other stuff of course – like maybe a dad who you got to know over loads of years and who you could look at pretty much every day of your life and know that you got your nose from him, or the way you lifted your eyebrows or your natural talent at fractions. But you didn’t have moments where you finally found the provider of 50 per cent of your DNA spiral, or discovered a half-sister called Marie totally out of nowhere.

      I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep that night. I went home and sat on my bed and stared into my embarrassing kiddy Snow White mirror for the longest time, imagining what Marie’s face might be like, her eyes, her hair.

      Of course, I always have to imagine the hair. I accuse my cousin Billy of being a guitar geek, or a computer nerd, but the sad fact is that I’m a hair geek. Really they need to put me and Billy in a lab and isolate that geek gene.

      I don’t even know if I can explain it, but hair to me is like this giant puzzle – like a labyrinth or something that you have to solve. You see it and you think, Yuh-uh, I am going to figure out how this works. And then you get your fingers into it and sometimes it feels totally different from how you imagined it would feel, and it has this whole life of its own – like it knows what it’s going to do – and sometimes it defies you with its curl or its porosity. But the thing is, you don’t know how hair is going to work until you’re in it and you don’t know how you’re going to be with the hair until you’re doing it. And that pretty much sums up my life too.

      I’ve been obsessed with hair forever – since I got my first Girls World Style Head, which was from Uncle’s cousin Moss (the one who buys and sells on eBay for a living). The Style Head was a talking one from the Philippines and it said, ‘Hello, ang pangalan ko ay Minnie!’ when you switched it on.

      I didn’t really mind that the head spoke Tagalog, or that it was called Minnie, but what did matter to me was that it was blonde, which was a different colour to the redhead pictured on the box. And red was the colour I wanted. But instead of being devastated, I sneaked into Aunty’s salon and did a red dye-job on the Styling Head. You know, I did pretty good for a six-year-old, even if I say so myself, and I’ve never looked back since. It’s what made me the hair geek I am today. That and my DNA.

      So now, when I was about to acquire a half-sister, I thought about Marie’s hair and I wondered if it resembled my growing-out Cleopatra bob, or if it was like Abe’s shaggy mess of curls that he had refused to let me loose on so far. (To be frank, Abe is a bit of a hippy. He could carry a buzz-cut. I think it would really improve his whole look.) Or maybe Marie wasn’t like either of us – she might just be like the bits that connected us. There weren’t many, granted. We had the shaky hand thing obviously, and we had similar round eyes, but people said that there was another subtle similarity too.

      ‘There’s something else about you and Abe that’s the same,’ Mum says. ‘You don’t look alike, but there’s an expression, or it’s how you hold yourselves. There’s something that makes me know you’re related.’

      Would Marie have that something too?