Alas today is one of my inferior days. Well all this month actually, because the BB ego started its downhill skid the day I decided to give my hair a colour rinse.
One of the problems of moving to new surroundings is the difficulty of finding the right hairdresser. In England it was all so easy. I just placed my head in the hands of Roy, the laughing cheek-patter, and, lo and behold, I went home honey gold and curly wurly. Or pale ash and silky tendrilled. Or even tawny amber and ‘My dear – you are brave!’
But what do you do, new to a foreign city, to get the message across that yes, you know you look like a frizzy old mum at the moment but that’s why you’re here? To get it changed!
It isn’t easy trying to explain that while you know the tipped-forward-pudding-basin look seems to be all the go among the young smart set, it hardly does a thing for a lantern jaw. And no, I’m not ready for the dippy-wave-blue-rinse favoured by the more mature, either.
‘You wanna look like Farrah Fawcett-Majors?’ screams a bendy little lad with absolutely no hips at all.
‘You say this photo was taken less than a year ago? You’re kidding me!’ scoffs another sensitive young thing.
‘You do mean you used to be blonde?’ says an older, more matter-of-fact soul in a big department store. ‘Right – let’s see what we can do for you then.’ This sounds like maybe I’m on the right track at last until a couple of appointments later she says: ‘Well of course it goes that bright yellow colour in the sun dear. You’ll just have to keep your head covered, won’t you?’
Which is why I am wandering, disconsolately daffodil, down the aisles of our friendly neighbourhood drug store when suddenly a label catches my eye. ‘Light Ash Brown’ it says. And there is a picture of a gorgeous girl with enviably carefree bone structure, swishing back a great swathe of the exact gleaming colour I have always yearned for.
Armed with ringer-timer and rubber gloves I plunge into the bathroom and start reading the small print.
Twenty minutes or so later I sidle downstairs raven black. Well no. Raven suggests some sort of sheen. My hair leans more towards unravelled soot-black knitting wool. The family actually stop watching television as this pathetic, not to say sinister, apparition floats glumly from mirror to mirror. ‘Would you like a cup of tea, Mum?’ says one child. Umprompted. So I know it isn’t just a trick of the light.
‘Here Mum, have my chair,’ says the other one. Now I know how weird I must look. David, wide eyed and pale, seems bereft of words.
Blundering back upstairs I read the instruction through again, feverishly. It seems I should have let the daffodil grow out before starting again. Some sort of chemical clash has apparently taken place among my follicles. ‘This rinse should last through approximately six shampooings,’ I read.
By midnight – nine shampooings later – my head feels strangely cool and weightless. I can see my scalp, all pink and tingly and ultra-clean, gleaming away through the undergrowth. But my hair is still irretrievably matt-black. So are my hands. The gloves gave way under the pressure of my wildly clawing fingers hours ago.
Next morning in the office my bright and chatty co-worker looks up and stops talking – for the first time since I started there. ‘My dear,’ she breathes with a certain amount of awe. ‘It – er – looks quite nice really,’ she adds swiftly. But I can actually see a great big, desperately suppressed, shuddering wave of laughter come bursting up out of her shaking frame. Thank heavens it is mid-winter and I can clap my knitted hat back down over my brow. Right down. It doesn’t suit me this way – as anyone else with a strong jawline will know – but better this than the electrified frizzy black hair that lurks beneath.
With so much attention going to my head, I forget the state of my hands until, delivering a written message to an ex-colleague on my way home from work, I see that my boss has written on the envelope: ‘For delivery – by (dark stained) hand.’ For two weeks I do without tea, coffee and lunch breaks in the staff canteen, or indeed any bareheaded encounters with anyone anywhere, preferring to cower at my, mercifully fairly private, desk and then dive down the back stairs at home-time.
Every night I scuttle in through our front door, straight up to the bathroom, hat off, head in basin. The family arrive home with stories about how their friend’s Mum’s hair went a funny shade of purple. Or how it all fell out one day and grew back chequered. So I know the good news is getting around. I keep telling myself that these stories are well meant and that things aren’t as bad as that time Auntie B’s hair turned green. But for me, they are.
When I tell you that when I absolutely have to make a hat-less social appearance, I even try shaking a whole tin of talcum powder into it in the hope that I will at least look old and grey and normal, you will see how desperately, unnaturally, exceedingly black it still is. And not just black. Repeated washings have reduced it to the consistency of a startled, mangy cat.
The world is getting used, now, to this strange, sidling creature, whose melancholy eyes peer beadily out from between jutting jaw and clamped-down woolly hat. Oh well, I tell myself repeatedly, with many a deep, despondent sigh, no doubt I shall look back on all this and laugh about it one of these days. But not yet. Definitely not yet.