Vicente Molina Foix*

The Real Hairdresser

When I started out as a homosexual, I only ever slept with hairdressers, but this wasn’t some kind of weird obsession on my part, it was just the way things were at the time, which will give you some idea how old I am. It would be a long time before there were any gay engineers, or gay councillors, sportsmen or butchers. The word ‘gay’ didn’t exist as such. Homosexuals were simply queers, and the queer crowd who frequented the same pick-up joints as me all worked with hair.

They were lovely, slender boys, bottle blonds most of them, and since highlights (or even layers) hadn’t yet come in, their blondness was a pure, uniform gold. To me – bespectacled, plump-verging-on-fat, with dark hair and dandruff – they were the very epitome of sexiness. True, I did sometimes fantasize about being stopped in the street one night by a policeman demanding to see my ID and who, instead of beating me up for not renewing it, would surrender his body to me in some homo-friendly police station; in my imagination, I also screwed the occasional baker or tram driver, but that doesn’t mean I found hairdresserly sex sad or staid. On the contrary, I liked everything about those boyfriends from the world of hair, even the permanent smell of lacquer.

I slept with both graduate and apprentice hairdressers, with one guy who claimed to have spent time in Germany studying pre-Romantic ringlet techniques, and a lad whose sole job was shampooing the customers’ hair in the barber’s on the corner. With some, I even suggested converting our one-night stand into daily love. Such relationships, however, never lasted for more than four weeks, not for lack of commitment or desire on my part, but because all the hairdressers I became involved with seemed to be suffering from some kind of identity crisis, and at bedtime they would offload their neuroses onto me, leaving me sleepless and anxious. Hair wasn’t enough for them – that was the problem – they all longed to be classical ballet dancers or models, to make it as a singer or as an interior designer to the wealthy or, at the very least, as hairdresser to various Hollywood actresses rather than to the local medusas – the local silly moos – who really didn’t deserve the care lavished on taming their wiry locks.

Then one 20th of August, Graham swayed into Madrid, scandalized to find that a capital city, famed throughout Europe for being the city that never sleeps, was unable to provide him with supper at half past midnight, even in the Gran Vía. I had left my apartment at seven that evening to go out hunting and, feeling about as arid as the city itself, I was returning home after visiting two deserted pubs, a rather drab doggers’ park, and exchanging a few fruitless glances in the street. Graham, walking along as briskly as if death were at his heels, was accompanied by an even more wasp-waisted friend, and both would have killed for a Big Mac. Graham’s left ear was pierced by a silver pin, at a time when boys in Spain had not as yet learned to pierce any body part. I stopped to look at his lovely, tortured earlobe, and my evident curiosity encouraged him to approach and ask for help in an English mingled with Italian. They had arrived on a charter flight from Luton at eleven, and room service in their three-star hotel in Plaza del Carmen had finished for the night. ‘Londras’, ‘jamburguesa’, ‘vacazzione’ and ‘mio nome Graham’ were the words that came closest to resembling Spanish. Then, wishing to explain what he did for a living, he put on his best smile, raised one hand to his hair – which was blond without a hint of forgery – and snipped at his long locks with his fingers. ‘A hairdresser?’ I asked in English. ‘Peliuquero. Mi amico e io.’

I immediately invited them back to my apartment in Campamento to dine on sliced bread and tinned pâté. After the third slice, his friend Patrick went back to their hotel to sleep. Graham and I finished off the bread – without pâté – and a bottle of white wine, and, since he had turned twenty-two the week before, he insisted on giving me twenty-two kisses, starting at my feet, commenting that he found my hairy legs terribly gitano. He got no further than my belly button, and spent the night in my bed.

Going anywhere with Graham, even in the inhospitable August heat of Madrid, was a truly sensational experience. With his blond hair caught back in a mother-of-pearl slide, his swaying six-foot-two body made still more unstable by his platform shoes, and his arms like the sails of a windmill in a hurricane – there simply were no equivalently striking, restless Spanish bodies, and, when we passed the few Madrid natives left in the city, they all turned to stare and continued to scrutinize us until we were out of sight. I sometimes think I followed him to London – where no one is ever surprised by anything – more out of shyness than love.

We were together for the entire ten days of his Spanish vacation (spent, because of me, wholly in Madrid; they didn’t even bother with the weekend in Sitges they had booked and paid for), while poor Patrick, being both ugly and very picky, had no luck at all; he liked fat men twice his age, and all the gay discotheques we visited were packed full of handsome, willowy younger guys. Patrick wanted ‘a real man’ and, under the influence of several potent Spanish gin-and-tonics, he would announce this on the dance floor in a shrill, hysterical voice, to the complete indifference of the gorgeous guys dancing alongside him, every one of whom was doubtless a hairdresser.

Because of the heat and because we always fucked at night, Graham and I tended to get up late, although I did manage to take them both to the Prado and, one Sunday at noon, to the Museo Lázaro Galdiano, so that they could view English art in a Spanish context. They whizzed round the room containing Goya’s black paintings in one minute and sixteen seconds, a record worthy of that well-known British book of extraordinary feats. Not that Graham was necessarily uncultivated (he knew by heart whole paragraphs by the Brontë sisters, all three of them, because they, like his mother, were from Yorkshire, and he loved Italian opera, preferably in translation); he was simply very impatient. Convinced that he would die young, like all the men in his family, he felt that spending more than a quarter of an hour in a Spanish museum subtracted too much time from the brief sum of a life under sentence of death.

He declared the Egyptian temple of Debod ‘very authentic’ (his father, a mercenary in the Middle East, had taken him to Cairo once, where the rosy-cheeked boy’s doubtless already equivocal beauty had provoked looks, desires and even bids in the bazaar). However, a Madrid family picnicking in Christian fashion near the temple were offended by Graham’s undulating gait, by his skin-tight T-shirt with the cropped sleeves, and by the hint of make-up on his naturally long-lashed eyes. Realizing that I was Spanish, they directed their rancorous looks at me from the bench where they sat, passing round meat pasties and a Thermos, as if they blamed me for the outrageous effeminacy of that foreign import.

On the 1st of September, Graham went back to London, to his elegant ladies’ hairdressing salon in Mayfair, and I, having nothing to lose, decided not to lose him. I was thirty-four years old, the ideal age for committing an adolescent folly. I left the one thing that bound me to practical life, the private classes I gave in history, Spanish and (in theory) English, and, two weeks later, went to join him. My train arrived in Victoria Station at the busiest time for him at the salon, and so he couldn’t come to meet me himself, but Patrick came instead. Since his return from Spain, he had met the love of his life in the English countryside, in the form of a dairy industrialist who weighed in at more than two hundred pounds and was, so Patrick told me, equally loaded with dosh.

Graham lived in Kentish Town in an apartment that was small but replete with furniture in a cacophony of styles, with drapes, wall lights, hand-painted wallpaper, exotic rugs, antimacassars on all the chairbacks and runners on the side tables. Patrick had to rush off to see his fat rich boyfriend and left me alone among that superabundance of objects, like an interloper in Ali Baba’s shopping mall. Graham arrived at eight o’clock that night, laden with flowers and Harrods bags.

The unmistakable sound of his platform shoes on the stairs, the clink of keys, his face concealed behind packages plastered with ribbons and brand names, my lone scuffed, fake-leather suitcase in the hallway; this was the first time we had seen each other on English soil. Would he still be the beautiful blond androgyne who had so astonished us in Madrid? Would I still be his romantic idea of a Spanish gypsy? That first look was fraught with danger. He lowered the tower of packages slightly, revealing his eyebrows. I took a few steps towards him, to make myself more visible. Eyes, skin.

That look seemed to last for ever, with me, the poor, empty-handed southerner, and Graham peering out from behind the finest products Knightsbridge could offer. Suddenly everything fell to the floor. Among the beribboned packages and bags and my fake-leather suitcase, our two bodies met in the hallway, incapable of resisting the headlong impulse to embrace, once we had both assured ourselves that I was the same swarthy madrileño and he was my angel of ambiguity.

For the first six months, I lived a contented life as hairdresser’s consort, although I did not entirely waste my time. Apart from doing the housework (I may have been a complete slob in my Madrid home, but I kept Graham’s apartment spotless, with all its bits and pieces dusted, polished, brushed, perfumed and in their designated places), I enrolled in some English conversation classes. I also visited the museums for which Graham had neither the time nor the interest, and, on some Saturdays, he would drag me off to see Italian operas sung in English, which I could barely understand. He would sing whole arias to me afterwards, in an excellent singing voice, and explain Puccini’s plots, Puccini being his favourite; he preferred operas with sad endings. However, he barely mentioned the refined Mayfair salon where he worked – out of natural professional discretion.

I didn’t want to live at his expense and suggested looking for a job so that I could earn some money, but the idea irritated him. He earned quite enough for both of us (‘or is it that you need more pocket money?’) and I was his man, his guest, his gypsy fantasy. To cut short this vulgar conversation, he took from the bag that he wore slung across his shoulder a present he had bought for me: two records of operas ‘loqueados’ (his translation of ‘located’ perhaps?) in Spain: Carmen and The Barber of Seville. Before playing them for me, though, he took a few lengths of fabric and some combs and created for me, right there in the living room, the Andalusia of his dreams.

Then came the London winter, as harsh as any winter you’ll have seen in films: the inevitable raincoat, the electric fire that devoured the coins we kept feeding it, the uninterrupted melody of the rain. I had finally managed to persuade Graham to allow me to contribute to the conjugal coffers by giving a few Spanish lessons to English families wishing to spend the summer on the Costa del Sol with the benefit of a little vocabulary. Shivering and swathed in scarves, I spoke to them of the warming qualities of sangria, about the bullring in Ronda, and added a few invented attractions of my own.

On the last Sunday of every month, Graham used to get dressed up as a girl and take me to the competitions held at the civic centre in Notting Hill Gate, where the men were more genuinely womanly than the women. Drag balls they were called, not to be confused with drag queens, a later invention and, at least in their Spanish version, coarsely folkloric. Heavily made up and with his eyebrows plucked, wearing a dark wig caught back in a net (in deference to me, he often dressed up as a Goya ma-ha, as he pronounced it, bravely grappling with the Spanish ‘jota’), Graham was always rewarded with one of the top prizes and with the leering admiration of the men who went to the ball in search of the eternal feminine in other men.

Stilettos in hand and mascara singeing his eyes charcoal black, Graham always liked to play the man in bed when we returned home from one of those drag balls. And, with a few more whiskies than usual inside him, he would allow himself the odd xenophobic joke: I was the invincible Spanish Armada and he the hard cliffs of Dover. I let him break through the Spanish ranks without a patriotic flicker.

On one such Sunday, Patrick came to the ball with us (he was going to open his own salon in Brighton, paid for by the dairy industrialist), together with his milky boyfriend (who had evidently piled on the pounds since living in married bliss) and two young hairdressers hired for the new business; all four were done up as pop stars. Patrick was supposed to be Barbra Streisand, but failed to convince, despite a ghastly false nose. His plump boyfriend was Shirley Bassey, bursting out of a leather miniskirt decorated with buckles and straps. The youngest of the young men, barefoot and trailing puppet strings, was Sandie Shaw, and the other a bewildering mixture of David Bowie, Lulu and himself. They all looked extremely vulgar and overdone beside Graham, who, that night, was authentically Carmen (Bizet’s not Mérimée’s). While those four caricatures of queens took to the floor and danced (very badly) to the music of Tina Turner, Graham sat beside me, the very embodiment of duende. What a difference between those servile slaves to women’s hair and my boyfriend, I thought at home that night, while the cigar-maker was screwing her Don José.

During those early days of spring I was so in love with Graham that I began to imagine a far better career for him. I spent many hours alone, either at home or engaging in some high-grade tourism in the City, having set myself the task of visiting all of the Baroque churches built by Wren, the architect of St Paul’s (I left the great cathedral itself until the final day), and, during that time, my brain never ceased toiling away at finding a better future for my boyfriend. ‘Graham may be a hairdresser, but he could just as easily be a sculptor or a set designer. And he’s so witty, with that dry, mordant sense of humour of his, not unlike Oscar Wilde’s. He makes being a pansy – so offensive to the middle classes of Madrid – into a kind of Expressionist statement. If Susan Sontag were to meet him, she’d know what “camp” really meant. Graham is far too brilliant to spend his days building castles in the air out of backcombed hair.’

‘You’re an artist, Graham, and you’re wasting your talents on those empty-headed women.’

‘An artist? Well, yes, I am. You should see my clients when I’ve finished with them. They’re transformed, beautiful, happy. After I’ve done their hair, their husbands probably treat them like princesses – at least for one night.’

‘But it’s so ephemeral, Graham. With your exquisite taste and instinct, it seems a positive sin to …’

‘Speaking of sin, why don’t you and I go and do a little sinning right now, Es-ca-meel-yo?’

That was how he eluded my first attempt at artistic evangelizing, with the taurine call of sex, which I never refuse. However, a few days later, I returned to the fray.

‘Graham, why don’t you study design at the Royal College, the birthplace of pop art?’

‘Become a student – now? When I’m earning good money at the salon and am as happy as Larry among what you call those “empty-headed women” – and with you of course. Honestly.’

I brought him information about some courses in landscape gardening that the ICA was putting on; I mentioned Robert Wilson’s next show, for which he was auditioning young men who were at ease with their bodies – ‘like you,’ I said – and Graham listened respectfully, meekly, but, when I had finished dangling these temptations before him, he came over and kissed me.

‘Silly boy.’

Graham forgave this intrusion into his life, and, to prove it, he tried to dazzle and daze me with kisses, as he had that first night in Madrid; this time, he gave me thirty-five, to celebrate my recent birthday. He could even create works of art on my skin with his kisses.

That year, summer in London was bizarre in the extreme. In the middle of June, cars driving into the city on the motorways coming from the Midlands had snow on them, and a week later, on the 23rd, St John’s Night, there was a heatwave and the English were going completely crazy. In London’s parks and gardens, there was not a single clothed torso to be seen, and the maddest of the mad plunged into public fountains or into the Serpentine, where some drowned. Graham only succumbed to the madness for one Sunday, but after his day-at-the-beach on the grass of a local cemetery his skin was bright red, and he had a third-degree burn on his forehead. In July, the northern climate took its revenge, because it rained for days on end and the temperature plummeted twenty degrees.

I didn’t know what to do, aside from sweating profusely and catching cold after cold. I think all those drastic changes in the weather caused me to let myself go physically too. Fewer showers, less shampoo, large amounts of ice cream and Coca-Cola. Sometimes, I would look in the mirror and notice a few extra pounds padding out my trousers – fat, not money. At other times, I looked like some pale Nordic ghost.

This conspiracy of the elements, however, did not divert me from my attempts to rescue a genius like Graham from the underworld of unruly female British heads of hair. Several months before, in a second-hand bookshop, I had bought a lavishly illustrated catalogue of work by the Pre-Raphaelites, to whose simultaneously Christian and effeminate paintings I had felt so drawn in the Tate Gallery. One sultry day, which ended in a hailstorm, I sought it out in the pile of books I had been accumulating in one corner of our bedroom, and that night, when Graham arrived home, exhausted, from the salon, I was waiting for him with the book open on my lap like a loaded gun, cocked and ready.

I let him have a shower and poured two glasses of the white wine he liked to drink before supper. Once he had sat down on the floral sofa in his bathrobe, with cigarette and wine glass in hand, I began my attack.

‘Look at this book, Graham.’

‘Ah, Rossetti. Yes, it’s odd how those very unhomosexual Pre-Raphaelites painted the most homosexual pictures ever.’

‘Look at those women. Those heads. That hair.’

‘Yes, I know, they’re gorgeous.’

‘Is that all you see?’

I started leafing swiftly through the book, showing him the reproductions I had chosen beforehand: Rossetti and Burne-Jones’s dangerous women with their long, curly hair, either dark or as red as a fruit.

‘You …’

‘I …’

‘You could do this. Instead of spending your time combing out tangled mops of hair, you could be making paintings of women.’

‘But I can’t paint, sweetheart.’

‘You painted that lovely wallpaper in the hall and the ceiling in our bedroom.’

‘Yes, but I was copying a design from a magazine. I don’t have any ideas of my own. I’ve just got a bit of a knack for making women’s hair look nice.’

Then it began to hail outside, and Graham revealed a jumpy side to his nature I had never seen before, nervously stubbing out his cigarette, dropping his glass and spilling most of the wine on the Indian rug, before coming over to snuggle up to me. Fear made him seem more like a little boy or like a little girl and more precious too. He refused to look out of the windows and stuck his head under my sweater. The hail stopped and was followed by another sort of storm, with lightning falling close by and twice causing a localized power cut. This time, the English fleet did not leave port, while the Spanish Armada valiantly withstood the elements. I kept these thoughts to myself, however, so as not to make him feel still more intimidated.

In the last week of July, Graham turned twenty-three, and our apartment filled up with friends, most of them hairdressers (some with their consorts, although none as foreign as me). It was a party which, like the storm, called for lightning conductors, because, once English queers get some booze inside them, they give off sparks and flashes, especially if they’re synchronized. Despite the physical havoc wrought by the summer, I think two of the guests, retired Welsh manicurists, rather fancied me, but the person I was most attracted to was still Graham. There were more-handsome boys than him, with better bodies, but none had his conversation, his exquisite fingers, his elegant, gravity-defying way of walking. Although he was clearly tipsy, he remained in charge of the party until the end, and, when he noticed that some of his guests were starting to leave after a particularly inept rendition of ‘Cabaret’ given by Patrick, his lacteal boyfriend and their two chubby rustic friends (drawn to the city by the recent successes achieved by certain other plump bodies), Graham immediately launched into some popular songs from Yorkshire, the land of his mother. The effect was quite miraculous. Gnarled and ancient queens shed tears on the rugs, and I, despite my drunken state, felt indignant to hear that great lyrical voice being wasted in the name of haute coiffure. I can’t remember now when or how the party ended.

The following day, I was woken by a thunderclap in a dream storm and opened my eyes to find Graham standing there holding a glass of orange juice, and the midday sun streaming in through the bedroom window. I sat up in bed, drank half a glass, gave him a sloppy kiss full of orange pulp, and went back to sleep. My second awakening on that Sunday was equally electric, and the explosion came from close by. I opened my eyes. The room was filled now by the light of a cloudy day, and Graham was sitting beside me in bed, staring at my head.

‘Oh, Graham, it’s you. You gave me such a fright.’

‘You’re losing your hair, my love.’

‘Losing it?’

‘Your hair is falling out.’

That present continuous tense had a threatening tone to it and, when I sat up, I immediately put my hand to my head, but my fingers found no hair in the actual act of falling.

‘It’s the weather we’ve been having. One day I’m sweating and the next I’m having to pull on a woolly hat before I leave the house, so as not to freeze. That and the drink. We’ve been drinking too much …’

‘This is something different, love. It’s alopecia.’

I knew the word, of course, but when I heard him pronounce it like that, alopissia, full of sibilant esses, it sounded less like a seborrhoeic disorder and more like a sinuous reptile lurking beneath the pillow. That night, I had my first nightmare: a plague of alopecias, centipedes and other slimy creatures were licking my hair, coating it with a poison for which there was no antidote.

Graham finally began to take up my suggestions, although not in order to follow the lofty, creative, pictorial path I had traced for him. He broadened his horizons, but without abandoning those wealthy, empty-headed Mayfair women. He arrived home from work laden down with specialist books borrowed from the local library, having enrolled in a weekly evening class entitled ‘Psychism and cultural custom in male hair loss’ given by some American expert on Ayurvedic medicine. I didn’t know what ‘Ayurvedic’ meant and had to look it up in the Encyclopaedia Britannica at the same library that had supplied him with the books. It had something to do with legendary Hindu kings and gods, and I was deeply troubled by the number of snakes that appeared in the accompanying illustrations and symbols. Graham, however, returned from each Ayurvedic evening more convinced than ever of the truth of this curative principle.

And all to remedy the invasion of alopecias and other hair-eating things gnawing away at my dark Spanish thatch (although, personally, I didn’t think my hairline was receding as much as he said), with my head as the experimental desk on which Graham carried out his capillary studies, applying to my (continually falling) greasy hair state-of-the-art lotions and organic serums, which he massaged into my scalp with the artistry so prized by the grandes dames of Mayfair. One day, he asked if he could try out an unguent made from aloe vera and tangerine recommended by the Ayurvedic expert as a way of preventing trichomycosis, an illness to which, given my ethnic origins, I was apparently more than usually prone. (In English ‘trichomycosis’ sounded even worse than alopissia, evoking not so much insects and small reptiles as murderous bacteria ending in -osis: tuberculosis, salmonellosis, brucellosis, phimosis. Terrifying, ominous words.) The sticky, evil-smelling unguent had to be left on for two hours in order to work its way into the roots of my hair. I let him rub it into my scalp and, in the process of being plastered with this orange substance, I caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror and realized that I resembled nothing so much as a kind of Pre-Raphaelite madonna fatale.

By late October, Graham had become an intellectual of the hair world, and the English families to whom I gave conversation classes had dispensed with my services until the following summer. Ever since Graham had arrived home from his evening class declaring that we could not continue our normal sexual activities, life in our Kentish Town apartment had been run according to the strict rules of medicine and chastity. I needed to calm my male hormones, he said, and to retain as much semen as possible, because, as the Ayurvedic doctor had demonstrated so graphically in class, excessive arousal and consequent seminal spillages dry up the follicles that nourish the hair. My hair, in this case.

‘It’s just a temporary preventive measure, my darling.’

Now, without sex, I’m worse than I am without hair, but there was no way I could make Graham shift from his scientific doctrine. We would sit on the floral sofa and he would caress me and allow me to touch him up within the confines of his underpants, but, as soon as my rebellious manhood began to loom large inside my trousers, he would call a halt to the game and suggest a massage – of the head.

‘Look at my comb, Graham. Not a single hair. It’s stopped falling out.’

‘That’s because of the treatment, which is precisely why we must continue. I want you to be as strong and handsome as a matador.’

Meanwhile, Patrick, in his empty Brighton salon, had been abandoned by his boyfriend, who, following acupuncture treatment, had lost a miraculous amount of weight and promptly hooked up with a Cambridge undergraduate, who was better-looking, younger and even blonder than Patrick. Graham, who was seriously considering taking a part-time course in trichology, spoke to his friend – only partly to console him – about opening a hair clinic together. London was starting to get suffocatingly Christmassy, and we had spent six whole frigid weeks in bed.

Graham was still very much in love with me, although he was more concerned about my hair than my desires. I was still very much in love with him, but I missed that other Graham: the señorita of the Notting Hill drag balls, who deployed his wrists – made more flexible with the application of a few gin-and-tonics – to send out a crazy code of nautical signals that would lure me later into sweet shipwreck in our bed. He lost the art of applying make-up and, one night, even donned some reading glasses to read his medical books. One Saturday, we went to Patrick’s birthday party, but it was such a glum, tense affair that Graham drank in order to keep his friend company in his distress. When we got home, his mouth was still full of scientific talk, but as soon as we reached the bedroom door, lust put paid to science.

‘Oh screw the green pomade! There’s no treatment today! Who cares if your hair is falling out!’

He started getting undressed and then began undressing me. But nothing happened. Was it lack of practice or the clothes he was wearing? His hair was as long and truly golden as ever, as it had been on our first night in Madrid, but, in keeping with the funereal mood at poor Patrick’s party, he was wearing it caught back in a rather unkempt ponytail, secured by an elastic band; and no lacquer. His heavy flannel trousers sagged over his feet, no platform heels this time, and he had on some intellectual-looking glasses that consisted solely of prescription lenses without even the adornment of metal frames.

We were in the bedroom by then, and Graham kissed me and repeatedly stroked my timid cock; he even hummed the ‘Habanera’ from Carmen, but to no avail. I tried to rise to the occasion, but failed abjectly, like a bullfighter quailing before the bull. He did all he could. Soft lights, the warm air of a hairdryer, which he wielded like a gun, to steal my soul away. But that didn’t work either. On the one night when I was allowed to let my hair down, I couldn’t get it up.

Fucking had never failed us before in our relationship. It was our recruiting flag in the amorous war between two contrary powers, which is what love always is. In bed, we signed no treaties and were oblivious to time or frontiers. Or, indeed, fatigue. Sexual appetite had brought us together for a one-night stand, which had then turned into a holiday romance and, finally, had made a stable English couple of us. Then came love, which is different for everyone. Unusually, though, love did not put an end to the desire to fuck, not until Graham imposed that Ayurvedic prohibition. My failure to perform that night had the effect of a lethal delayed-action bomb.

Christmas was already unbreathably thick with lights and carols in Oxford Street, and I invented a familiar duty: a family. I had no mother (dead) or father (partnered up with a woman I loathed) or siblings (never born), but at Christmas any tie can bind, and like a good, sentimentally dutiful Englishman, Graham fully understood, even suggesting giving me a home-made Christmas pudding to take back to my nearest and dearest.

I returned to Madrid, with my receding hairline having receded no further, with my apartment in Campamento looking an utter tip, and with no celebrations at all. I phoned a few friends, who invited me to a couple of New Year’s Eve parties, but what I really wanted was to lie in bed pondering what was the sexiest profession for a man and running my fingers through my hair. I never went back to Kentish Town, although I do sometimes feel a twinge of nostalgia for that encouraging hairdryer and the crazy maritime signals of Graham’s hands.

‘Have you never been back?’

‘Never, but Graham and I write to each other, and I’m very fond of him. A year later, he met another Spaniard who was living in London, a bank clerk, younger than him and fair-haired, from Almería. They’re still together. Without me there, Graham has probably lost his scientific curiosity and abandoned his experiments. He’s now co-owner, with Patrick, of a small unisex salon, where he does the hair and Patrick does the manicures. Afterwards, I lurched from one boy to another, and, while I’ve had boyfriends who did the most sophisticated and dangerous of jobs, I’ve never realized my dream of fucking a policeman. Until …’

‘… until you met me last night at the disco.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And?’

‘Well, that’s it really. I think I’ve told you almost my entire life story. I didn’t bore you, did I? And here I am.’

‘Naked.’

‘And you really like me? You have no idea how old I am, of course. And then there are all the things I have too much or too little of …’

‘You mean this … and this? I love it.’

Julio was the handsomest boy at the disco last night and has just turned twenty-two. He has blond highlights in his naturally dark hair, a stud in each ear and beneath his lower lip, and he dresses in a half-male, half-female way. He likes, or so I think he said, minimalist art, Wagner operas and the contemporary Spanish novel. And now he’s happily nibbling at the rolls of fat around my waist and stroking my head, which is now definitively hairless.

‘I find the billiard-ball look a real turn-on.’

‘You like bald men?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘You haven’t told me yet what you do for a living.’

‘That’s a long story too.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Now?’

‘Why not?’

‘Wouldn’t you rather have another fuck?’

‘Of course, Julio. In a while.’

‘I’m dying to lick your bald head.’

‘First, tell me the story.’

‘Well, I’ve just graduated in classics, but what I’d really like to be, and you’re going to love this, because it has nothing whatsoever to do with my degree … have you noticed my hands, by the way?’

‘Kiss me!’

‘What? Now? I thought you wanted me to …’

‘I’d rather you kissed me. I’m suddenly in the mood. Do you really like bald heads?’

‘I told you I did, and it’s true.’

‘Well, it’s all yours. Kiss it. You can tell me your story later. Another day perhaps.’