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House of Knaves is tucked away behind a humble shopfront in Chinatown. I retrace my steps from a few hours ago and dodge the local pedestrian traffic. Merchants and customers in baggy garments and rubbah slippahs push trolleys backwards and forwards from illegally parked trucks. Just a few doors past the muu-muu factory I knock on an unmarked blue door.
When it opens, the interior swallows me up and I’m standing in a Roman ruin.
Concealed lights illuminate fading frescoes and crumbling pillars. Vines crawl through niches, and faux mosaics lie unfinished at my feet. On the back wall a trompe l’oeil window overlooks a virtual courtyard where the Mediterranean sun always shines. Derek prepared me for Jerome’s creative masterpiece but now that I’m here a strange emotion is rising in my throat. A kind of longing I’ve never felt before. It’s making me wander about like a blind person touching things.
Jerome must be used to this reaction. He leaves me to explore for a while before guiding me to a large mirror fragment opposite a real chair.
“What are we having?” He throws a cape over my shoulders. “A new look, Derek said.” He grabs my fringe and flips it back so we’re both staring at my bare forehead. “Like this.”
I flinch. “What? No fringe?”
“You’ve got the face for it. Look.”
But when my naked face looks back at me, the woman from the mirror flashes through my mind. What was it about her eyes that’s haunting me? But I’m hallucinating. The face in the mirror is my own.
“With these bangs,” Jerome is saying, “you’re stuck with half your face covered.”
“But I’ve always had a fringe.”
“Always is a word we shun in hairdressing. Along with never.”
“I wouldn’t feel like...myself.”
He smirks, turning his expression from sleepy to cheeky. “Which self is that then?”
I try for an eye-roll but the man in the mirror is immune to nuance. “The self I’ve been for thirty-four years. Me.”
“Since the womb then. Born with bangs firmly in place like a birthmark.” He winks. “And ever since you’ve been hiding, hiding, hiding. A fawn peering through the foliage. After thirty-four years, Selkie, it’s time...to grow up.”
This must have come from Derek. Because as a psychologist Jerome doesn’t look the part. Mouse-brown hair falls to his waist like a bridal veil, and his jeans and shirt-tails make him look like a folk singer stranded in the seventies.
Without further discussion he sprays my hair with water and picks up his scissors. Then in one slice of the blades a good six inches disappears off the back of my hair. What?
“First we bring the two lengths closer together,” he says.
I shut my eyes but in my mind I can see my precious locks poking out between Jerome’s bare toes. Tiny tears leak down my cheeks as he trims each straight black strand into a textured edge that tickles the base of my neck. Then he starts on the fringe. Snip, snip, snip.
When he’s done, he rubs something sticky through it, then waits. But it’s a while before I can open my eyes and face the woman in the mirror. Another woman with a fierce-eyed look. This one has a fringe but it’s feathered back to almost nothing and continues right across her head in a crazy headdress. Behind her ears, textured strands poke out, and when Jerome holds up the hand-mirror there’s something untamed about the way her hair flies out from the back of her head. The woman looks nothing like me. For a start she’s...wilder.
“Magic,” Jerome says.
The woman stares back as if she’s desperate to bring us together. Meanwhile I’m freaking out about whether there’s room for both of us inside my skin.
Jerome removes the cape and brushes my neck with a hand-broom. He hands me a pot of product and says, “On the house.”
In a kind of stupor I navigate towards the door between the racks of frocks. Jerome markets his creations to big guys who can’t buy their frocks from women’s stores – not the right size or shape and not nearly enough bling. As the feathers and flounces rustle against my pencil skirt I understand what’s happened. Jerome’s given me a haircut as outrageous as one of his frocks.
Outside, I remind myself it’s just a haircut, a fresh new look to match my fresh new life. But my hair is thick and without its usual weight I’m light-headed. This is what it feels like to come out into the open. Jerome was right about that – there’s nowhere to hide.
As if to confirm it, my phone chirps with a text from Andrew. If you keep ignoring me, I can play dirty.
In desperate need of comfort food, I walk to the Pearl and find it empty. That’s unusual. And as I step inside it feels like I’ve entered some kind of time warp – a strange space separated from the hubbub just outside. The shadows feel heavy with portent and the ceiling fans slice the air like they’re stirring treacle. I try to shake it off but the sensation remains.
Suzi comes out from the kitchen, blinks at me, blinks again, puts her hand over her mouth, turns and runs back through the curtain. As if she’s seen a ghost.
I turn around to see if anyone’s come in behind me but there’s no-one there. It must be my hair. I know it’s different, but is it...alarming?
“It’s me,” I call, my voice echoing off the concrete floor. “Selkie.”
Silence. As if she was never there, but the curtain of plastic strips is moving.
“I just want the special,” I say, feeling uneasy.
Now Suzi is peeping out. “Eugene not here.”
I try grinning but she isn’t grinning back. “You can cook it, can’t you?”
It’s a moment before she answers. “I cook.” She sounds relieved, as if I might be here for some other reason.
But this is the Pearl, a humble noodle bar in Chinatown. Unless they’re doing the I Ching on the side. I imagine Eugene’s round solemn face reading horoscopes. By contrast, Suzi is rake thin and a bit skittish.
I take a seat, and after some hissing and scraping from the kitchen she slips back still looking spooked. She refuses to make eye contact as she shoves a container across the counter.
“But I want to eat here,” I say.
“Eugene back later,” she says. “You talk him.”
Then she’s gone again, but as I retrieve the takeaway she’s peering back through the curtain like – Jerome’s words come back to me – a fawn peering through the foliage. It must be catching, because after leaving the money on the counter I back out, strangely reluctant to turn my back on her. Her eyes are bright as if she’s taken something. She’s never been like this before.
***
When I get home I drench my hair, trying to take control, but the cut defies any taming. A lump of Jerome’s product – slime green and labelled ‘seaweed’ – only makes it worse. In desperation I decide to go for a run. To shake off Suzi’s odd behaviour and the feeling that my hair is no longer my own.
I’m not much of a runner and I always avoid the beachfront and the track around Diamond Head. Instead there’s a path along the Ala Wai Canal. As I pound the pavement outriggers paddle beside me – giant beetles stroking the mirrored surface – and the feeling of longing returns. It stays with me all the way back to the flat.
I’m trudging up the stairs when Wanda overtakes me on her long legs. She’s wearing the usual – crop-top, cut-offs and toe-capped boots.
“Carrying the cares of the world?” she asks. “It’s easier if you leave them at the bottom.”
“Just tired, but I’m glad to see you.”
“Well, I’m just going to eat and run, not do any bonding.”
We laugh as we take off our shoes and go inside.
“I like your hair,” she says.
It’s a better reaction than Suzi’s. “Why?”
“It’s...dangerous.”
Like her own. Barely longer than stubble and always swathed in a coloured sweatband, her haircut leaves her face totally uncovered. I decide not to tell her it was Jerome who was the dangerous one, leaving me to feel confused and angry. Or to live up to it.
***
After a dreamless sleep I stumble into the bathroom where the cabinet mirror makes me jump. I’ve been dreading the return of the woman, but my own face is scary enough. My hair has always been straight and black, but this morning there are silver threads. Has the shock sent me grey overnight?
The headless Doris can’t sympathise and we don’t have a full-length mirror to show how incongruous it looks. It’s ironic that I green-bagged my wardrobe before I left Sydney to create a ‘boardroom look’ – two identical suits, so there’s one to wear and one at the cleaners – never dreaming that a hair stylist could demolish it in one mad cutting spree.
At the bus stop Coral is dazzling in a fresh muu-muu – tangerine and black. She beams and makes a scissors sign with her hand. But when I get off downtown I catch glimpses in windows of my new style statement – ‘boardroom banshee’ – and reach the coffee cart in a state of near despair. As I cringe under the shade sail, wishing I’d borrowed Doris’s hat, I decide to reject my usual skinny decaf in favour of a triple shot with extra cream.
Curtis, the barista, raises his eyebrow but he’s too polite to probe. Then he looks at me as if he’s seeing me for the first time.
“Funky.” He hands me my mug.
“Spiky, you mean. To match my personality transplant.”
When Derek arrives at the office suspiciously early he pulls me out of my chair and spins me around in a ridiculous pirouette.
“Now I’m as dizzy as I look,” I complain.
“Trust Jerome to make a statement. It makes you look...”
“What?” If he says quirky, I may have to kill him.
“Quirky.”
He ducks before I can pick up a missile.
“What do you really think, DD? And be polite. At the moment I just feel...violated.”
“OK. Here’s the truth.” He stands back and takes a deep breath. “It’s wild. So it makes you look...more like yourself.”
He’s definitely in league with Jerome. “Like I’ve been someone else all these years?”
“Someone...called Elkie?”
This is what I get for spilling my secrets to Derek. Selkie is the name my mother gave me. Just one of her extraordinary ideas, according to Stella – naming me after a fairytale, calling me a mermaid, which became a family joke with my mounting aquaphobia. But after a showdown with Stella when I was sixteen – a huge clash that left me reeling – she renamed me Elkie. Just like that. From that moment on she refused to call me Selkie. Andrew was new on the scene and thought Elkie was sexier, and suddenly I was someone else.
When I tried for the green card I used the name on my birth certificate. I still remember how rebellious it felt to change it back. An act of defiance that matched my dream of escape. Everyone in Hawaii calls me Selkie. My real name.
“OK,” I say to Derek. “A crazy coif to match my nutty name. But it makes this business suit look...pompous. I may have to resort to a muu-muu.” And move into a bus shelter.
There’s plenty of work to distract me as I toil away at Goals for Gold. At day’s end, I even feel satisfied as Derek and I leave the building together. He’s busy tonight so we part on the street, but as he walks towards the parking basement I get the feeling I’m not alone. There are plenty of people about, leaving office towers, spilling out of bars, promenading in Aloha shirts in the tropical dusk, but this feels more like a shadow.
I look over my left shoulder, thinking I see something out of the corner of my eye.
But it’s just the space where my hair used to be.