After they parted, seeing all the beautiful perfumed young women floating around the city with places to go to and things to do made her feel weary. There she was, with her grimy heavy boots, wandering through streets of designer stores where people would go if they had a big win at one of the casinos. She glanced in a shop window and discovered that it had Newsweek magazines. It was the first time she had seen something in English in a long, long time. She entered and sat down to read, but despite this sudden small jackpot of words nothing seemed to register. She read an article on the death of the book, while four male hairdressers with ridiculously trendy hairstyles like hedgehogs milled around her in a squeezed-up circle.
Twice in the past she had decided to lop her hair off, but to no avail. The first time, in Footscray, Veronica the Vietnamese hairdresser would not do it for her.
‘How you want?’ she asked.
‘All off.’ She pointed to her ear.
‘No, no good, you look like boy!’
Veronica just trimmed the ends and charged her twelve dollars. Then decided that it was too much and gave her back five.
The second time, on her way to the hairdresser again, this time in Richmond, an earnest ground-level window cleaner stopped her in her tracks and told her how lovely it was. Vanity stopped her from going any further. There was something vestal about long hair, since the girls who wore ao dais and saris to their friends’ weddings had it. Funny how people inadvertently conspired through sheer kindness to make her into someone she thought she was not.
‘We thought you were Vietnamese,’ one of the four hipster hairdressers told her. ‘Only Vietnamese girls have hair this long.’ Their job in this glamorous city was to erase any sign that you had just come off a boat.
They tied back her hair.
She read about how the book was dying in its rectangular tree incarnation.
They began to braid it.
She turned the page and looked at pictures of electronic books.
Then they lopped it off.
She closed the magazine and looked in the mirror.
Afterwards, they wrapped it up in cling-wrap for her, so it became a macabre thing she had to carry around all afternoon. She couldn’t go home to Elder Auntie and Elder Uncle yet. They thought she was going out with friends, not that she was passing time alone in malls, lost, clutching a cling-wrapped wad of hair in one pocket.
The first time she went to the loo, she realised she did not have to think about whether her hair was up or down. It had been the first thing she would think about before she sat. When you had hair that long, you did not want to take its ends on a crappy swimming expedition.
She sat in a plastic chair in a mall café and gulped down some murky brown soft drink. Halfway through, she felt a choking sensation. That lump in her throat was like a golf ball. She wiped her eyes with a sleeve. She no longer cared how emotional she got in public. It must confirm everyone’s suspicions of her being a straight-off-the-boat. She didn’t care.
‘I don’t think I will ever see him again,’ she wrote in her notebook. Funny that in an era of mass global communication and email and Skype and all the rest of it, a person could still make such resolutions. This was the end. No longer would she see his handwriting tumbling down white sheets, sometimes sprawled, sometimes the characters curled and spooned into one another.
*
When she returned to the apartment, it was already past midnight. Her uncle and auntie were still awake. They weren’t waiting up for her, they reassured her; they were just insomniacs who stayed up watching television.
‘Wah!’ they exclaimed happily. ‘You look so modern now, and so much younger!’
At night the sleeplessness caused her to make strange shapes in her solitary bed. One knee up and the other straight out, one arm draped over her neck, eyes wide like a traffic conductor who hadn’t seen the car coming in time. Or she would try to sleep with her arms folded behind her head, both knees towards her chest like a sunbather afraid of shallow-swimming sharks. Or arms and legs bent in tight towards the torso – praying mantis wedged between a car and its tyre with nothing more to pray for except that the car would stop. Her world was peopled with attachments and yet she was afraid of being alone. The world was spinning too fast. Stop! she wanted to yell, Stop the world, I want to get off for a bit. Have a little rest and then step back on.