Beauty hurts. Don’t let anyone tell you different. Hair is usually not so bad. It’s the paying part that kills. I was laid out for weeks. My back still hurts from the surgery. I have phantom kidney pain, they tell me. I wonder who has my kidney now? It’s a man, probably, with high blood pressure and diabetes. Maybe my absent kidney hurts me every time he considers eating a cheeseburger?
I’m glad it’s done, though. I’ll spend my credit on ludicrously robust, tousled bed-hair, and then botox, so I never have to look like I’ve had a deep, face-contorting thought. Maybe a tiny brow-lift somewhere in my thirties. Totally new boobs when I turn forty. Not bigger, just back where they were. Laser my rear-end every twelve months after that. Eventually I’ll have to forfeit a cornea to keep that up.
Have you ever noticed that celebrities have universally good hair? Even when the paparazzi catch them on the street with no make-up on, buying takeaway cappuccinos and they are looking all hunted and irritated and fraught? It might be stuffed under a baseball cap, and scruffy, but it’s still long and thick, and not endsy. Of course, they have proper money to spend on it. They don’t have to apply for credit the way that we normal people do. But still …
My hair is endsy and thin. When it’s clean it has a speed hump in the middle, as if I have been wearing it in a pony- tail. And my bed-hair isn’t tousled and sexy. It clings to my neck, seaweed-style, as though I’m recovering from a near-drowning incident.
I know you’re thinking, It’s just hair. But hair is a big deal. Being a person with shocking hair, I’ve spent quite a long time pondering it, and I have a theory.
Here’s what I think – attractiveness in most species has to do with whether you’re going to be a good breeder, right? So when a guy looks at an hourglass-shaped girl, the caveman part of his brain is going, My, those broad hips will readily pass a giant infant cranium. Those hefty bosoms will provide abundant sustenance to my sons! I will mate with her!
And hair is a sign that you’re a good breeder too. When hair is glossy and thick and long, it’s like a record growing out of your head of how healthy you have been over the last few years. It’s a big flag saying that you’ve got robust immune function. Or, on the other hand, your crap hair says that you’re sickly and weak, and while you might pop out a little feeble one, you’re going to be a burden.
I’m not talking about the big sensible part of your brain that says, No, no, I seek a partner who is my intellectual equal, who will share proportionally in the housework. I’m as guilty as the next human of clocking a colossal set of lattisimus dorsi and thinking, just in that first millisecond, in the cavegirl part of my brain, Drool, those lats are going to catch and carry home a substantial beast that will provide plenteous protein during my child-bearing. I will make him aware of the broadness of my pelvis right this minute. I mean, who doesn’t? Those people are liars! Or they just are not in touch with their cavepeople brains.
How is it, then, that celebrities have universally long, glossy hair when, as a sample population, they have a higher than average chance of having an (insert illegal substance here) habit? Addictions are not generally consistent with bristling good health.
I have found out the secret. They wear another lady’s hair. Yes, that’s right!
Anyone can do it, if you have money or credit. Every normal person has to apply for credit eventually, if you want to look any good. So I applied. I decided on a kidney, because I’ve got another one, right? They were able to book in my nephrectomy straight away, but the booking at the salon took ages.
Finally I’m in the specialist salon. They do weaves, braids or dreads, injectables and fillers too, while you wait.
My stylist is called Casey. She could be eighteen or thirty-five. I can’t tell, because she has that mineral make-up matte thing going on. I love the way that looks, but it’s hard to get the measure of a person that way. I have always wondered if the craggy, crinkly contours our faces make when we think deeply about things make the real shape that we are. If we ever allowed ourselves to get old, our faces would be a montage of all the most intense thoughts we had. What would that look like?
But we don’t do that. Why would we, when we can iron it all out, stretch the skin across our bones like canvas over a frame? Then we find a graphic that matches who we think we would like to be, and we ink that on our hide.
Casey has a frangipani on the inside of her wrist. She’s summer, and sweetness.
The girl in the chair across the room has faith on the back of her neck.
Faith.
Like, all faith? Pfft!
If I use some of my credit for a tattoo, I would want it to be words. Something I believe. Something I don’t want to forget, and something that makes me glow up from the inside every time I look at it, but I’m not sure what I believe that much yet.
Maybe I should choose doubt? That’s unlikely to escape me at any point, is it?
There are a hundred words that are more specific than faith. Fidelity. Constance. Promise. Courage. Zeal.
How can you sum up what you want everyone else to know about you in one word?
Faith? What does that mean? Unless her name is Faith and she has a short-term memory thing, in which case she should have put it on her forehead, or on the back of her hand.
Why has she put a tattoo where she can’t see it?
Do you know what I should get tattooed on my neck? ‘Apathy is like … whatever.’ But would it be funny forever? No. Because it doesn’t define me. In some respects I’m quite driven. Determined enough to have a nephrectomy for credit.
I catch the tattoo girl’s eye in the mirror.
‘Why have you got faith written on the back of your neck?’
She starts to answer, but the stylist next to me turns on the blow-dryer, and I can see her mouth moving, but I don’t know what she’s saying, so I just nod until she stops, and then check my phone for messages. There are none, but I squint intently and flick and tap as if I am super popular, and a little put out by the amount of correspondence I have to attend to during my me-time.
Casey hands me the weft. She’s letting me hold it while she starts the plait that will hold it in place on my head. It’s probably about seventy centimetres long. It’s thicker than mine – strong and shiny.
I ask Casey where it comes from.
‘Poor people,’ she says.
‘Why?’ I ask.
‘It has to be virgin hair,’ Casey explains. ‘Not hair from virgins – hair that hasn’t been coloured or permed before. Rich people don’t have virgin hair.’
I picture my hair donor to be about seventeen. There’s a toddler squatting on the floor, engrossed in some game, and a baby on her lap. She’s in a hut. She’s brushing her beautiful waist-length hair, and then she painstakingly plucks each strand out of the brush. With her callused hands she weaves the strands one at a time into the cotton thread that will bind them before sale. She ties the rest of her hair into a knot on her head, and then she carries her babies out into the fields to pick vegetables. From a distance, the wealthy farmer who employs her measures the width of her hips with a calculating eye.
‘Sometimes they cut off their hair in a religious ceremony to show their devotion.’
Now I see an altar. And the girls lined up, on their knees, heads bowed, their beautiful long hair brushing against their shoulderblades. There’s a priest holding some kind of ceremonial shears. All the hair goes into a basket, ready to be sanitised and have the colour stripped from it.
But at least it’s not a kidney, right? I mean, hair will grow back.
I rub my finger along the braid. It’s tight and feels like a scar.
‘Do they know where it goes?’ I ask.
Casey doesn’t answer.
While Casey works I look across the hallway where some ladies are using their credit for manicures. As if you would waste it on that! Nails I can do myself.
Casey reaches forward, takes my weft, and I give it up reluctantly. She must have been a good prospect, my hair donor. She’s called Anala, or Ananya, or Anushka. It’s an A name anyway.
Casey’s weaving Ananya’s hair into my hair. She’s using a needle and thread, binding me to her. Then she’s finished and she’s off to the little secret back room where they make up the colours.
Is it lying, having Ananya’s hair entwined with mine? Is it wrong to fool someone else’s caveman brain? Does my seaweed straggle tell the world that I am a burden, and is it true?
You know the weird thing? We put on our faces each day, that make our eyes look bigger, and our lips juicier, and it’s all lies, but then we get mad when Mr Colossal-Lattisimus-Dorsi doesn’t love us for who we are. Or even Mr Borrowed-Kidney-Cheeseburger-Eater.
But have you ever tried not doing it? Have you ever gone out in trackies, with no hair and make-up? You go invisible. Eyes just slide over you as if you were never there. You could totally commit felonies. You could line up at the check-out of a supermarket on Christmas Eve, hold up the place, and make your getaway on a motorised scooter you have stolen from an octogenarian on the way out. Still no one would pick you in a line-up. It’s the bits we add to ourselves that make us memorable.
I know there are some naturally beautiful people, but I mean in real life. When was the last time you saw a genuinely striking unaugmented individual, in person, in your neighbourhood, during the day? Were you drunk?
I’m not talking about people who are naturally beautiful as a package of attributes. There are heaps of those. I’m not talking about little kids either. I mean a grown person who stirs your caveperson from twenty metres away, when you are sober, and before you know that they are generous, or funny, or artistic – someone who is not spending their credit being waxed, collagened and lasered, and lunge-walking backwards to the organic market to buy quinoa, coconut water and goji berries.
They are mythical creatures. They are bunyips. You’ve never come across a bunyip? This is my point.
But if you ever did see a bunyip, you’d go all cra-cra and gobsmacked, and extreme, like you’d been just a tiny bit tasered.
Do you think that’s why the celebrities look hunted and irritated and fraught when they get caught in the wild? Because there is a very high chance that any second they are going to be accosted by some caveperson who’s going to scream, and wet their pants, and thrash around, and maybe assault them? I would probably take cocaine and have all of the panic syringed off my face too, under those circumstances.
Real beauty is rare. It kind of runs the world, and we want it. We could go mad trying to make it happen. People do, and not just women.
I stroke Ananya’s hair. It’s stupendously long. It looks great already. It brushes against the small of my back. Faith smiles at me in the mirror. I think of asking her again about her tattoo, but I just don’t care that much.
I think about asking her what she gave for credit, but we don’t talk about that. Not in here.
Casey comes back and starts painting my scalp with the cold, thick purple chemicals that will make me and my weft the same colour. Dab, dab, dab. It has that funny astringent ammonia smell. Not virgin hair any more. Slutty, coloured hair now.
Casey rinses off my hair with scalding water in long strokes. She rubs at the binding scar. She dries my hair. It takes a long time, because Ananya’s hair is so thick and healthy and hydrated. Then she burns it into long, uncontrived ringlets. I’m tousled in a non-drowned way. It looks hotter than I had imagined. Even my own cavegirl brain is impressed.
She swipes my credit card casually, as though she doesn’t know how I earned it, and I’m wondering if the woman being exploited here is me.
Then Ananya’s hair and I flounce past the nail place. Flounce, flounce. I catch my reflection in a shop that sells soaps, candles and hand lotions. Who’s that woman with the great hair? Wait, that’s us! I give my hair a tug. It’s very secure. I hope Ananya got paid. I hope she has access to goji berries and coconut water, so her hair grows fast and she doesn’t have to marry the farmer.
But then, it’s just hair, right? It’s not a kidney.