FROM THE MOMENT I arrived, they loved me.
They loved my funny accent, the way I had ketchup with everything. They loved my black socks and my brown sandals; they loved my flesh-coloured money-belt, my grey wheeled suitcase with its retractable handle. Most of all though, they loved the way I sweated in the heat, the way the hot sun made the pale dome of my head glow like a light-bulb. They loved the sight of it, and when they touched it, it brought a smile to all their faces.
Within a week the mayor had installed me in an apartment on the top floor of his mansion and employed an extra cook and a housekeeper to look after me; queues formed every morning at first light outside the mansion’s tall iron gates, and throughout the day the townspeople came to touch my head. It was extraordinary, the pleasure it gave them, the way it made them smile. Little by little they began expressing their appreciation with gifts—home-made bread and custard flans, bottles of wine, sausage, cash; it wasn’t long before they began requesting my presence at important events: birthdays and retirement parties and the unveiling of a new fountain in the market square, at baby showers and at weddings. They even wanted me at their funerals to stand by the open coffin of the deceased when they came to say their good-byes. It cheered them up, they said, to be able to touch my head after kissing the body for the very last time. By the end of the summer there was hardly a single public occasion that took place without me and I—well, I had begun to feel slightly uncomfortable with the situation.
It bothered me that they thought so much of me, and while I tried to remind myself that I had never once claimed to be anyone special, I couldn’t help feeling, as the months passed and they took me ever more passionately to their hearts, that I was moving, slowly but surely, towards some kind of frightful unmasking or exposé; that each day was bringing me closer and closer to my own humiliating demise.
I decided I’d better leave, before things got out of hand.
I decided I would slip out of my apartment one night while the cook and the housekeeper and the mayor were all asleep. I would walk out of the town on the road I’d come in on and I would go to a different place—a quiet beach or a little chalet up in the mountains—somewhere I wouldn’t attract quite so much attention.
And I would have gone, I really would have. I even got as far as putting a few things in my wheeled suitcase, ready for my departure. But then the people sent me Precious and once they’d sent me Precious, I just couldn’t tear myself away.
Precious was the daughter of the cook and she arrived very early one September morning before the queues had begun to form outside. I knew at once that she had come for some important reason because she was shown up to my apartment, not in the clunky old service elevator at the back which her mother the cook and the housekeeper and all the other townspeople were made to use, but in the beautiful hand-operated Schindler elevator at the front with its fitted carpet and gilded paintwork and its twinkling chandelier.
When I opened my apartment door that morning there she was—a small, serious-looking girl with dark hair and a pale face wearing a floral cotton dress and holding a large black leather bag with a metal clasp, like an old-fashioned doctor’s. As soon as she saw me she blushed and bobbed a sort of curtsey and told me that she had come to polish my head.
Everyone, she explained, wanted it to be as bright and soft as possible and they would all be very pleased if I would allow it to be polished first thing every morning. She was very good at polishing, she said, blushing again, and had been specially chosen by the people for the job. She would come every morning and do it before the crowds came, if I was agreeable.
I looked at her.
I looked at her shy serious face, her dark eyes with their grave almost sad expression, at her small neat fingers on the stitched handle of her bag, and as I looked, I forgot the anxiety I’d begun to feel about my strange position in the town; I forgot the certainty I’d felt, just the night before, that it was time for me to get out of there; I forgot the half-packed suitcase lying open on the velvet armchair in the sitting room behind me, waiting for me to pick it up and wheel it out of the door.
‘Yes,’ I said, smiling. Of course I was agreeable.
Precious’s visits became the highlight of my days.
As soon as I opened my eyes in the mornings, I began listening out for the slow whirring progress of the Schindler elevator bringing her up. Hearing her knock at my door—seeing her there when I opened it—watching her set down her big doctor’s bag on the carved chest beneath the window and take out her pots of wax and her various creams and cloths—hearing her asking me, in her quiet way, to please take a seat so she could begin—these were the things I lived for. I looked forward to them more than anything else in the world. The rest of my days—the birthday parties, the baby showers, the weddings, the funerals—all of it passed in a dull blur, and I can honestly say that I was never happier in my whole life than when Precious was there, close to me, moving around my chair, turning away from time to time to pick up a different pot or a fresh cloth, asking me to tip my head a little to the left or a little to the right, forward or back.
My only difficulty was that I had no idea what she thought of me. She was always so shy and deferential in my presence—so silent and business-like in the way she went about her work—that it was impossible to tell what was going on inside her head, let alone her heart.
If I ever tried to make eye contact with her while she polished, she blushed and looked away and focused instead on whichever part of my scalp she was busy with at the time. When she was finished she packed her things away in her big bag and bobbed another of her funny little curtseys and left.
At the end of six weeks we had hardly exchanged a single word; I still had no idea what she thought of me, if she had grown even the slightest bit fond of me during our time together. For all I knew, I meant no more to her than any other object she’d been asked to polish; for all I knew I was no more important to her than a brass candlestick or a canteen of silver cutlery.
And then one day, as she was bending over me so that her cheek was quite close to mine, I saw that her eyes were full of tears.
‘Precious?’ I said softly. ‘Is there something the matter?’
At first she shook her head and continued polishing as before, but after a while her tears began to pour down over her face. She let go of her cloth and it fell from her hand onto my lap. She hung her head and chewed her lip, and then she looked up into my eyes as if she had something serious and important to say but lacked the courage to do so.
‘Precious?’ I repeated gently, but again she shook her head.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, and with that she picked up the cloth from my lap and dropped it into her big open bag and snapped it shut and left.
When the people came that morning I could hardly sit still while they filed past, laying their loaves of bread at my feet, their bottles of wine, their envelopes of cash, patiently queuing for their quick turn with my head. I found myself wriggling beneath the touch of their hands; all I could think about was Precious, and what might have happened to make her cry. I couldn’t stop thinking that it must have something to do with me—that in the course of all the silent time we’d spent together she had finally fallen in love with me but was too shy, or too constrained by the relationship between us, to be able to tell me.
I was a fool of course, but I expect you’ve gathered that already.
I expect, with all your experience of the world, that you can see how things were beginning to shape up; that you have a pretty good idea, by now, of what lay in store for me. But for the moment let me tell you that all I wanted to do then was to find Precious and tell her that I loved her too, and ask her to come with me somewhere else where we could forget about everything that had happened here, somewhere where we could both find some sort of fulfilling work and settle down and live quietly together and be happy.
When the last of the townspeople left my apartment that day, and the housekeeper had loaded the last of their offerings onto her trolley and wheeled it off to the big clanking service elevator at the back and taken it down to the storage rooms in the basement, I went to my dressing room to change: there was a wedding that evening and I had been booked to attend it; the bride, I knew, was a cousin of Precious; Precious would be there among the guests; I would find her and I would speak to her and it would, I felt sure, be the end of one life and the beginning of another.
It seems pointless now to tell you how elated I felt as I strode out that day through the tall gates of the mayor’s mansion and threaded my way through the narrow streets of the town. It seems pointless now to tell you anything other than what happened when I got to the wedding.
By the time I arrived the guests were all gathered in the yard of the bride’s house—one of those little houses that cling to the side of the hill behind the town, two tiny wrought-iron balconies on the windows of the upper floor filled with bright geraniums; a small courtyard behind with acacia trees.
I took up my position next to the groom beneath a canvas canopy that had been erected in the yard for the ceremony and looked around for Precious. I couldn’t see her anywhere. I looked at every face, craned my neck to see if she was hidden somewhere behind another person, or one of the trees. I squinted at the four small dark windows at the rear of the house to see if she was inside somewhere, and my eyes were still searching for her when the bride, dressed in a simple white frock and carrying a bouquet of lavender, appeared with her father at the back door of the house.
For one horrible moment, I thought it was Precious. My stomach lurched. I felt sick.
I blinked and looked again.
No. It wasn’t her. Her cousin was rather like her, that was all—small and dark, with the same neat hands and feet; the same shy expression in her downcast eyes. Slowly she began, this cousin, to approach me on her father’s arm, and the relief I’d felt on realising that she wasn’t Precious turned quickly to impatience and irritation as she placed her small palms on top of my scalp and I watched the inevitable broad smile spread across her face. My head felt waxy and unpleasantly warm. I braced myself for the bridegroom’s hand as it too came down, big and sweaty, like a hot heavy flannel, a half-cooked pancake. I told myself to be patient as he also began to smile; I told myself it didn’t matter if my skin had begun to crawl the way it had earlier that day when Precious had left and all the townspeople had come. I told myself that it didn’t matter if I felt as if I couldn’t bear for another second to stand between the two of them with their hands on my head, that it didn’t matter if I knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that I didn’t want to do this any more, because very soon, it would all be over. I would find Precious and we would leave. I gritted my teeth and looked at the ground, repeating to myself that it would all be finished very soon. I took several deep breaths. One, two, three, and at last managed to achieve a kind of calm, a feeling of patient expectation—a sort of quiet, thrilled excitement at the thought of everything I had to look forward to—and then, quite suddenly and quite without warning, the shouting began.
I felt the sticky palms of the bride and groom stiffen with surprise, and when I raised my eyes there, in the crowded courtyard, was Precious, and she was shouting.
She was standing at the back near the house on what looked like an empty champagne box. In one hand, she held a glass of wine and my first thought was that she seemed rather drunk. She was swaying slightly from side to side, splashing wine on the shoulders of the guests around her. Her speech was slurred, and it was difficult, at first, to make out what she was saying. The crowd too had started to murmur which made it even harder to hear her but after a little while, as they listened more closely to what she was saying, their voices began to die away and I could distinguish her words clearly. She was talking about me. She was talking about my head.
How come, she was shouting, she always felt so miserable when she was touching it?
How was it, that in all the hours she’d spent in the plush apartment of the mayor’s mansion, bent over my head, touching it non-stop, it had never once brought a smile to her face?
How was it that in all those weeks she’d been schlepping that huge leather bag up and down in the fancy gold elevator she’d never once gone away any more cheerful than when she’d arrived?
Surely, she shouted, if my head was so marvellous, then she, of all people, would be feeling a bit happier by now?
A silence had fallen over the courtyard. All the guests had turned to look at me; I felt all their eyes upon me.
Precious lowered her voice and I heard her say to them, wasn’t I actually just a dull Englishman with no hair? A lonely tourist with tea-cup ears and poppy-out eyes?
Wasn’t I actually just a nothing, a nobody, a useless piece of rubbish, a complete and utter waste of all their time?
I swallowed.
I whispered her name.
I stretched out my hand towards her but she didn’t move, she just stared at me, and then one of her uncles stepped forward and picked up a rock from the dusty ground of the garden and threw it at her—a swift hard blow that caught her in the throat and sent her flying off her little box like a skittle, or a coconut, and then all the other guests began to close in around her, pushing and jostling and hurling everything they had, handbags and wedding gifts and glasses of wine and bottles of champagne, branches snapped from the acacia trees and poles torn out from under the canvas bridal canopy, more rocks from the dusty ground, and when at last they had finished and dispersed there was almost nothing left of her—a single shoe, a tattered strip of fabric from her cotton dress, some scraps of ragged flesh and splintered bone.
In my dreams I save her.
In my dreams I have seen what’s coming and know how to prevent it. In my dreams I am quicker and stronger than they are—I do not stand there in the garden like a frozen lump, shocked and terrified and appalled.
In my dreams I do not have a new girl who comes to polish my head—in my dreams the mayor does not come with her in the early mornings to unlock my door; he does not stay to keep an eye on things when the people arrive with their gifts. He does not drive me himself to whatever functions are on in the afternoon and evening, he does not return with me to lock up my apartment for the night, he does not post his beefy guards beside both elevators, front and back, he does not tell me that I must never think of trying to leave them. He does not remind me that I am dear to them, that they love me and cannot live without me—that outside beyond the tall iron gates of his mansion, armed bands roam the countryside, hunting down anyone who dares to insult the name of The Bald One.