19

Curl up and Dye

At home, Maggie was always messing about with her hair. She’d had it mulberry, ash blonde, raven wing and copper. She’d had highlights, lowlights and a pixie crop. She’d had three different types of perm, one of which I’d been persuaded to do for her – which meant a fraught August afternoon in her bedroom with three dozen vicious plastic curlers, the instruction leaflet in eight different languages unfolded on the bed, and a bottle of ammonia solution that made our eyes water. The perm dropped after two weeks, but Maggie wasn’t fazed. Every month she bought a magazine called ‘Your Hair’ filled with dozens of photographs of models, some made-up like extras from a David Bowie video, eyes crazed with space-age make-up. Maggie could study the magazine for hours the way old men could study racing form. But she didn’t always back a winner. There was the asymmetric fringe, for example. ‘Get them to do it with the lights on next time,’ said her mum. Paula didn’t go a bundle on what she called ‘Tarting yourself about’.

Post-Tony I couldn’t be bothered with my hair, and at the camp it was enough effort just to get it washed, so most of the time it stayed under my hat, curled up like a failing creature. But during a brief spell of December sunshine, it had emerged into the light.

Barbel sat knitting something intricate using multi-coloured wool when she paused to consider me, a finger of yarn poised beside her needle. ‘Tessa, in your hair you need some fun.’

I put a hand to my head.

‘What about beads?’ she suggested.

Barbel had learned to braid hair during her travels and could make expertly beaded plaits. She’d already transformed three other women, including Di, who was now walking around with a head full of grey corn rows, like a lady from Barbados.

‘We could give you a barnet like mine?’ Sam suggested.

‘I don’t… I’m not…’

She laughed. ‘All right Tess, I’m only yanking your chain.’

‘But she could have blonde like you?’ said Barbel, laying down her knitting. ‘I think you make a special blonde, really.’ Her voice was going more up and down, a sure sign of excitement.

‘You know what they say,’ said Sam, ‘blondes have more fun.’ Sam’s idea of fun involved hurling herself at the police.

I wasn’t sure. ‘You mean bleach it?’

‘Like Blondie,’ said Barbel, getting off her hay bale to crouch in front of me, like an artist envisaging her new creation. ‘It will be brilliant. With your skin so fair.’

‘I’ve got a new box of bleach,’ Sam offered.

‘But you’ll need it for your Mohican,’ I said.

‘No, I’m thinking of shaving it off, I’ve had it like this since the squat, and that was two years ago,’ she said, brushing a palm along her stripe of hair. ‘Tell you what, let’s do it together, you dye yours and I’ll shave mine.’

I’d never had the courage to do anything drastic to my hair, but then again, I’d never had the courage to live in a community of women protesting against nuclear weapons. Next to Barbel and Sam I felt ordinary; this would be a way to align myself.

‘It change your inside when you change your outside,’ said Barbel.

I pictured myself with a shock of ice-blonde hair like a militant Blondie. Maybe I could get hold of a black eyeliner too.

For the sake of privacy, we’d decamped to the patch of ground outside Sam’s bender. I didn’t want loopy Vicky turning up and going on about animal testing. She’d spent a lot of time picketing pharmaceutical companies and got a violent glint in her eye when she talked about scientists and what they did with their pipettes. Wearing rubber gloves, Barbel painted my head with a white cream, which smelled even stronger than perming solution. In forty minutes I’d be Blondie. But the solution had only been on for ten and a terrible burning sensation was already creeping into my scalp.

I wriggled on the garden chair.

‘It’s got to hurt a little, like this you know it’s working my lovely.’ Barbel had picked up my lovely from a Bristol woman and it was a favourite endearment.

‘No pain, no gain,’ said Sam. ‘Always gets you a bit. Chemicals.’

With a pair of questionable scissors, Barbel had snipped off Sam’s mohican and was now engaged in shaving her head with a disposable razor so that, shorn raggedly, she resembled an Irish girl I’d seen in the newspaper, her head shaved in punishment for fraternizing with a British soldier. I fidgeted for another two minutes while the burning intensified. Generally, I was quite good with pain and not a complainer, but this was something new, dozens of molten needles were piercing my scalp. After another minute the sensation was too excruciating to bear. ‘Please,’ I said, standing up. ‘It hurts, it really hurts.’

Barbel frowned, the Bic razor still in her hand. ‘Truly? It’s hurting so bad?’

‘Yes. Please,’ I was lurching around, ‘get it off!’

‘I haven’t filled the water basin yet,’ said Sam.

The acid pain flowered into one all-encompassing bloom of agony, and I couldn’t wait for them to help me, I galloped frantically across the mud with my head on fire. ‘Help!’ I shouted, slipping, falling onto the knee which was already scabbed from the bike ride, getting up again and running towards the main fire. ‘Help!’

Nobody was there, only two startled visitors clutching an M&S bag.

‘Are the bailiffs coming?’ asked one as I charged past them towards the kitchen, scrambling for the water canister, bending over, trying to heave its mighty weight above my head. It was too awkward.

‘Help!’ I called, struggling.

‘Give it here,’ said a familiar voice. I stood bent over, the weight of the canister lifted as a hand guided me to a patch of clear ground and then suddenly, blessedly, the ice-cold water crashed onto my head. I squealed with pained relief.

‘Stay still,’ the voice instructed. The water kept sloshing. When there was no more I touched my scalp gingerly through wet hair, afraid it would come away, and straightened up. There, regarding me with undisguised disapproval, stood Angela, the empty canister at her feet.

‘Thank you,’ I said with a shiver. The shoulders of my jumper were splattered wet. She eyed me sternly and walked away without comment, leaving me stupid and sodden, fingering my tender scalp. I was still standing like that when, out of breath, Barbel arrived clutching half a bottle of R Whites lemonade which she was presumably intending to pour over my head.

‘Poor lovely,’ she said, her eyes large with concern.

I could still feel the after-burn of the acid charring my skin. I reached out for the bottle and took a vivifying swig. I had new sympathy for victims of the bomb.

*

Three hours later my head was still throbbing. As it dried, my hair had turned an unusual shade of greenish orange, the scalp tightening into a bumpy planet of blisters. Jean said I needed calamine lotion, but nobody had any.

A mass of dark blue sky was overlaid with shreds of papery cloud, a collage which drifted and changed, breaking apart to let through pale gold from the vanishing sun. I’d never known how purely enormous the outdoors felt at night. I’d seen photographs of the napalm in Vietnam, the sky shivered and turned dusty yellow, but the sky recovered. It was hard to think what would happen to the sky if a nuclear missile blasted through it. This is something I might have felt moved to talk about if it weren’t for the fact I was sitting at the fire beside Angela. For the last few minutes, since Di had left us to witness by the A339 with her placard, I’d been hoping someone else would turn up to diffuse the atmosphere, but no one had. Di always went at commuter time to remind the world we were here. Now and then there’d be toots of support from passing motorists, but these were countered by abuse. One regular rolled down the window of his BMW and shouted ‘Go home dykes!’ or ‘Get a job!’ or ‘Communists!’ depending on his mood.

Angela was absorbing a paperback of indiscernible subject matter. The last time I’d asked what she was reading she’d told me it was an account of the Mau Mau uprising. I’d nodded and added Mau Mau to the list in my exercise book.

Another painful minute passed. Since the incident with the bike and the morning’s capers with the bleach, I’d noticed Angela resume the coolness she’d displayed towards me when I’d first arrived.

‘I might go and write a letter,’ I said, preparing to make a break for freedom. She marked her page with an Embrace the Base flyer and closed the book.

‘Have you got a minute?’ Obviously I had a minute, I had thousands of them queuing up like empty buses. ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

Talk to me? Angela never wanted to talk to me. What she wanted to do was not talk to me, and she succeeded in this daily. She removed her glasses and rubbed the lenses with the cuffs of her flannel shirt. ‘I wanted to ask you…’ she replaced them, ‘what you’re doing here?’

I didn’t understand. ‘Cruise missiles,’ I said, ‘the same as you.’

But she didn’t seem to have heard and continued in the same deliberate tone, ‘Because this isn’t somewhere to come when you’ve got nowhere else.’

What did that mean? Weren’t we all equal? No hierarchy? I remembered what one woman had told me at the fireside, how she loved the camp for its egalitarian spirit, the freedom, the sharing, the trust.

‘Women have made sacrifices to be here,’ said Angela.

‘I know that.’

‘Do you?’

‘Yes.’ I had a twinge. Had she somehow got hold of my exercise book, leafed through and seen a few of the early entries about Tony? But in truth I couldn’t imagine Angela doing something like that, and anyway the entries about him had dwindled. He’d be in London now, living his new life. Privately I’d imagined a few scenarios in which we’d bump into each other at a CND rally – I’d be standing on a platform making a rousing speech beside Rori and he’d come up afterwards. We’d exchange pleasantries. Can I give you a ring? He’d ask, his eyes full of longing. I’d smile and lay a hand on his arm. I’m sorry Tony, there’s too much to do.

Angela was still staring at me through her round glasses as if I might have something to add, but when nothing came she unstrapped the canvas bag at her feet and removed a newspaper.

‘What’s that?’ I said. But it looked horribly familiar: The Berkshire Chronicle.

‘Take a look.’

My heart pumped as I paged frowningly through the paper, pretending not to know what I was going to find and still hoping by some miracle it wouldn’t be there. But it was. ‘TENKO WITH MUD’ ran the headline in the centre pages and underneath a photograph of a journalist with the byline April McCarthy. It had been an offhand comment, a joke to lighten the mood when we’d first started talking in Rori’s bender, but plastered across the centre pages it didn’t seem very funny. In the newsagents I’d only glanced the headline and a quote, but now it was difficult to resist the urge to read on, even with Angela peering at me. I skimmed the print, my eyes falling on my name.

‘One such woman is Tessa, who escaped what she called an eye-wateringly boring job and a broken relationship…’ Broken relationship? I didn’t say that ‘…to come and live at the camp. When I ask about the conditions she described it as…’ and then the Tenko remark, along with a few choice details about lavatory arrangements, the difficulty of getting water, baths and so on. Oh God. The article was mainly taken up with information I’d given her. Barely a sentence from Jean or Rori had made it in.

‘She’s twisted it. When I said that thing about Tenko, it was a joke. I didn’t mean, I wasn’t saying…’ My scalp prickled.

‘What were you saying?’ asked Angela, who knew I had no defence.

In one of the birch trees a couple of birds began twittering an early evening conversation.

‘You won’t show it to the others, will you?’

‘Why would I?’ she replied in her flat voice. ‘Hardly a morale booster is it?’ She blinked at me. ‘So, to repeat the question, why are you here?’

I didn’t know what to say. ‘Because it’s right.’

‘Right for you? Or right for everyone else who’s dedicated? If we’re going to achieve our objectives we need structure. Rori and myself and Jean are working out a strategy. To put it bluntly, your presence is a distraction.’

‘Who put you in charge?’ My voice sounded strained, but Angela’s stayed level.

‘No one put me in charge.’

‘Every woman has a right to be here.’

Angela held my eye.

‘This is a serious endeavour. We might use subversion, but we’re not here for a laugh.’

‘I care about this,’ I waved my hand to include the benders, the pram loaded with firewood, the Welsh dresser, the bent kettle.

‘If you really want to further our efforts you could do one simple thing.’

‘What?’

Angela blinked. ‘Go home.’

I opened my mouth to speak again but nothing came out. On the second try I found some words. ‘Is this about the bike?’

‘No.’

‘Because that was an accident.’

She sighed. ‘I understand. But it’s one of the accidents that wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t here.’ The fire snapped. She didn’t like me being close to Rori, that was it. When she spoke again, her tone was weary. ‘You’re not cut out for this. Look at yourself. You could get involved at grass roots if you wanted. But I’d advise you to know your limits. After the protest on Sunday we’ve got more work to do. Serious work. You’re a hindrance.’

‘Hindrance?’ Despite my best efforts, the word came out with a wobble.

‘Oh don’t get emotional,’ she said, leaning back.

‘Why not? What about those keening women, they’re allowed to get emotional.’

‘There’s a place for them. They’re angry. We need them.’

‘Who are you to say what we need?’

‘I’m trying to put this before you so you can understand the facts.’

‘I’m not stupid, you don’t need to patronise me.’

Angela met my eyes. ‘You can go crying to Rori about it if you like, but I’m not interested in schoolgirl games. I’m here for a reason.’

‘So am I.’

She took the paper from my lap and folded it into her bag.

‘Doesn’t look like it.’

I got up then and walked away from the fire. Choked with frustration, I headed for the trees, glad to be alone in their cover, weaving through them until the pale outline of Rori’s bath appeared. I sat down on its curved edge and took deep breaths, the enamel cold under my jeans.

If only I hadn’t spouted off to that journalist. But she’d seemed so nice. I needed to calm down. Breathe. But the more I tried the harder it became. The achy lump in my throat wobbled up and down like a ballcock, forcing hot water to prickle at the rims of my eyes until finally it was spilling down my cheeks. Damn. Once it started it would be difficult to stop, I’d have to rub my eyes, which would go red and bleary and everyone would know I’d been crying, and Angela would know too. I struggled for a few minutes until Mum’s voice said Let it all out.

The woods smelled mulchy and green and only moonlight directed me as I wandered deeper into the trees, hidden and protected in the glimmering dark. Since that first morning, when I’d staggered into them and found Rori lying in her bath, the trees were my safety, they afforded privacy and comfort, a huddle of slender giant women, always there to gather round. Were trees female? The moon was female, I knew that. The sea was female. But trees? Perhaps they were gender neutral. Angela would know. Bloody Angela. She was no angel, in fact the prospect of her arriving on a cloud, probably holding a clipboard, would be enough to finish anyone off in their hour of need. I should tell Rori what she was really like, petty and controlling, but then Rori might say something and Angela would see I’d acted like a schoolgirl by telling tales, and she’d be right.

At the camp everyone talked about peace. Since coming here I’d remembered the song we sang in junior infants with Miss McClusky, all of us joining hands and singing in our lispy voices, ‘Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me.’ It was a nice sentiment, but living it wasn’t so easy. Peace demanded all your energy. Peace was exhausting. It’s true, I’d been an idiot with the bike and the hair and the Berkshire Chronicle, but Angela didn’t know everything, she didn’t know I’d been trying. She didn’t know about my exercise book, the sentences I’d lifted whole and recorded in case I needed them, ‘…no prospect of justified collateral damage… the boundaries of proportionality stretched out of all recognition.’ Things she’d said about human rights and The Fawcett Society.

The birch went all the way to the fence. I kept walking and paused as the trees became denser, taking a deep breath, preparing to turn back to the fire. But a sound stopped me. There it was again. Whispering. I took a step forwards. This time a giggle, which seemed familiar. Another step.

The branches formed a stiff web, and I strained to see into the black pool which contained the voices. Two people, one leaning against a tree, the other pressed in close. Kissing. A hand stencilled by moonlight on the bark. I moved towards another tree to see if my suspicions were correct and what I saw made me step back. The two figures entwined against the tree were shadowy but still discernable. I stood without moving, watching as the bodies twisted thigh to thigh. I edged sideways and lost my footing. ‘Shh,’ said a voice, ‘did you hear something?’

‘It’s nothing, come here.’ A deeper voice.

‘Wait.’ Silence again. I stood rigid, the breath catching in my ribs, hardly able to make sense of what I saw.

‘You’re spooking yourself,’ said the deep voice. ‘It’s a wood, stuff lives here. Come on, less talking.’

And in a teasing voice which made me think of a movie starlet, ‘Whatever you say.’

There was no doubt it was Rori’s voice. She lay down out of sight, twining a long leg around her partner, who lay on top of her and released a low anticipatory groan. Then all I could see was black.