I asked Dale whether he could try to get rid of the grey.
It was growing dark outside, and the rain against the salon’s big windows looked like ink running down a page. The traffic crawled along the blackened road beyond. The cars all had their lights on. Dale was standing behind me in the mirror, lifting long dry fistfuls of hair and then letting them fall. His eyes were moving all over my image with a devouring expression. His face was sombre and I watched it in the glass.
‘There’s nothing wrong with a few sparkles,’ he said reproachfully.
The other stylist, who was standing behind a customer at the next chair, half closed her long sleepy lids and smiled.
‘I get mine done,’ she said. ‘A lot of people do.’
‘We’re talking about a commitment,’ Dale said. ‘You have to keep coming back every six weeks. That’s a life sentence,’ he added darkly, his eyes meeting mine in the mirror. ‘I’m just saying you need to be sure.’
The other stylist looked at me sidelong with her lazy smile.
‘A lot of people don’t find that a problem,’ she said. ‘Their lives are mostly commitments anyway. At least if it makes you feel good that’s something.’
Dale asked whether my hair had ever been dyed before. The dye could accumulate, apparently, and the hair become synthetic-looking and dull. It was the accumulation rather than the colour itself that resulted in an unnatural appearance. People bought box after box of those home-dyeing kits in search of a lifelike shade, and all they were doing was making their hair look more and more like a matted wig. But that was apparently preferable to a natural touch of frost. In fact, where hair was concerned, Dale said, the fake generally seemed to be more real than the real: so long as what they saw in the mirror wasn’t the product of nature, it didn’t seem to matter to most people if their hair looked like a shopfront dummy’s. Though he did have one client, an older lady, who wore her grey hair loose all the way to her waist. Like an elder’s beard, her hair struck Dale as her wisdom: she carried herself like a queen, he said, streaming power in the form of this grey mane. He lifted my hair again in his hands, holding it aloft and then letting it drop, while we looked at each other in the mirror.
‘We’re talking about your natural authority,’ Dale said.
The woman in the next chair was reading Glamour magazine with an expressionless face, while the other stylist’s fingers worked at her intricately tinselled head, painting each strand of hair and folding it into a neat foil parcel. The stylist was diligent and careful, though her client didn’t once glance up to look.
The salon was a lofty, white, brilliantly lit room with white-painted floorboards and baroque, velvet-upholstered furniture. The tall mirrors had elaborately carved white-painted frames. The light came from three big branching chandeliers that hung from the ceiling and were duplicated in reflection all around the mirrored walls. It stood in a row of dingy shops and fast-food outlets and hardware stores. The big plate-glass shopfront sometimes rattled when a heavy vehicle passed outside.
In the mirror, Dale’s expression was unyielding. His own hair was a dark, artful mop of grey-streaked curls. He was somewhere in his mid-forties, tall and narrow, with the elegant, upright bearing of a dancer. He wore a dark, closely fitted jersey that showed the suggestion of a pot belly above his lean hips.
‘It doesn’t fool anyone, you know,’ he said. ‘It just makes it obvious that you’ve got something to hide.’
I said that seemed preferable to having what you wished hidden on public display.
‘Why?’ Dale said. ‘What’s so terrible about looking like what you are?’
I didn’t know, I said, but it was obviously something a lot of people feared.
‘You’re telling me,’ Dale said glumly. ‘A lot of people,’ he went on, ‘say it’s because what they see in the mirror doesn’t feel like them. I say to them, why doesn’t it? I say, what you need isn’t a colourwash, it’s a change of attitude. I think it’s the pressure,’ Dale said. ‘What people are frightened of,’ he said, lifting the back of my hair to look underneath, ‘is being unwanted.’
At the other end of the room the big glass door jangled open and a boy of twelve or thirteen came in out of the darkness. He left the door standing ajar and the cold wet air and roaring noise of traffic came in great gusts into the warm, lit-up salon.
‘Can you close the door, please?’ Dale called in a peevish voice.
The boy stood, frozen, a panicked expression on his face. He wore no coat, only a grey school shirt and trousers. His shirt and hair were wet from the rain. A few seconds later a woman came in after him through the open door and closed it carefully behind her. She was very tall and angular, with a broad, flat, chiselled-looking face and mahogany-coloured hair carefully cut in a bob that hung exactly at the square line of her jaw. Her big eyes moved rapidly in her mask-like face around the room. Seeing her, the boy raised his hand to plaster his own hair sideways over his forehead. She stood for a moment, alert in her soldierly wool coat as if trying to sense a danger, and then she said to the boy:
‘Go on then. Go and give them your name.’
The boy looked at her with a pleading expression. His shirt was undone at the collar and a patch of his bony chest could be seen. His arms hung by his sides, the palms opened in protest.
‘Go on,’ she said.
Dale asked whether I was ready to have my hair washed; he would go through the colour charts while I was gone, and see if he could find a match. Nothing too dark, he said; I’m thinking more browns and reds, something lighter. Even if it’s not what you naturally are, he said, I think you’ll look more real that way. He called across to the girl who was sweeping the floor that there was a customer ready to go down. She automatically stopped sweeping and leaned the broom against the wall.
‘Don’t leave it there,’ Dale said. ‘Someone might trip over it and hurt themselves.’ Again automatically, she turned around and, retrieving the broom, stood there holding it.
‘In the cupboard,’ Dale said wearily. ‘Just put it in the cupboard.’
She went away and returned empty-handed, and then came to stand beside my chair. I rose and followed her down some steps to the warm, lightless alcove where the sinks were. She fastened a nylon cape around my shoulders and then arranged a towel on the edge of the sink so that I could lean back.
‘Is that all right?’ she said.
The water came in a spray, with alternating passages of hot and cold. I closed my eyes, following the successions and returns, the displacement of one temperature by another and then its reinstatement. The girl rubbed shampoo over my head with tentative fingers. Later she tugged a comb through the hair and I waited, as though waiting for someone to untangle a mathematical problem.