Short Story: Hair

Short Story: Hair

She'd always had a thing about hair, both her own and other people's. So of course, in a different way had her mother, which is probably where her obsession, as her mother disapprovingly called it, had stemmed from.

The mother's own obsession – more of an idée fixe, really – was that it was bad for hair to be washed more than once a fortnight. Quite what was the source of this myth, or the likely result, remained unchallenged and obscure; would it fall out, change colour, grow faster, more slowly? Anna never dared ask. She only knew that this piece of parental wisdom – in its true sense, an old wife's tale – dominated, directed and to an extent damaged her teenage years.

She was blessed, according to the mother, with 'oily' hair, which had 'a nice curl'. 'Greasy and frizzy,' she muttered through clenched teeth, pulling a comb harshly through it in a desperate and futile attempt to reduce the kink. No straighteners then; this was the age of perms, of curlers and rollers, when three-quarters of the female population of Britain went to bed looking like hedgehogs and spent restless nights tossing on a pillow of small spiky rocks. Maybe, before the age of the Pill, this was also an effective way of keeping the birthrate down.

But it was the once-a-fortnight rule that caused the most havoc in her social life. Every invitation caused an instant calculation – will it be within three, four at the most, days of the wash? If not, she would sigh, make an excuse, pretend to be ill on the day. Once, caught by a particularly tempting offer of a day's outing to the Dorset coast with a set of friends she really liked, she had accepted – and then realised that it would be right between washes. She decided she would go nevertheless, hiding her flat, lank hair under a scarf, tied peasant-style at the back of the neck in the way that was trendy at the time. (Headscarves, knotted under the chin, were only just going out of fashion – though The Queen didn't seem to have noticed.) All went well, the scarf resisting the gusty rain squalls that threw themselves in the walkers' faces, until they stopped in a pub on the way home, took a table near a huge open fire, and everyone else peeled off their coats and any hats or scarves they were wearing. Anna, red in the face, sweat pricking her neck, clung fiercely to hers as the temperature rose, resisting all the jokey attempts of her friends to make her disrobe.

Miserable, she resolved never to go out again on the ten greasy days.

“Why on earth didn't you defy your mother and just wash your hair whenever you wanted to?” asked her bemused boyfriend several years later when she told the story.

“Well, somehow one didn't,” she replied lamely. But later wondered why.

Thus the obsession grew. She noticed hair, envied it on some, derided it on others. She revelled in the adult freedom of being able to do what she wanted with it, when and wherever she pleased – though, like everyone else, she too was bugged by maddening, inexplicable bad hair days. She had loved the hair of her children, so silkily touchable, so smellable, and mourned its passing from blond to mouse – and, in the case of her daughters, from mouse to purple, orange or streaked as they did whatever teenagers needed to do to their hair at the time. And enjoyed, maybe a touch ruefully, their freedom to do so.

As a grandmother, she marvelled at the ability of her hardly-teenage granddaughters to transform themselves by changing their hair, the shape of their faces, their very personality, it seemed, as they dyed and straightened and cut and plucked to conform to the image of the moment. Remembering her own teenage agonies, she repressed the slight stirring of unease induced by such excessive narcissism, and said nothing.

Now, with time on her hands in this period of enforced idleness, Anna started to think more objectively about hair – about its place down the ages and its significance in the strange customs and habits of human beings.

To some extent, she thought, hair defines us. Can you imagine Jesus as a skinhead, Lady Di with a perm, Kojak with hair? Of course, hairstyles are governed by fashion, as well as by individual taste – and the quantity/quality of hair that comes with one's genes. Strolling through the National Portrait Gallery, one is often struck by a very 'modern' face peering out from a concoction of hair, whether real or false. Take away the hairdo and you have Uncle Jim or your next-door neighbour.

Thinking once more of her mother – her ghost never far away when the subject of hair came up – Anna recalled how she had judged people, men that is, by the length of their hair. Not just their character, but their achievements, their place in the world. One day Colin Davis, previously a hero, was dismissed as a conductor because he had allowed his hair to grow half an inch over his collar. (She never lived to see Simon Rattle's electrically frizzy halo, alas.) Politicians were given the vote according to their hair length. Once, exasperated with the illogicality of this value system, Anna was bold enough to ask, 'So what about Jesus, then?' Ruffled, her mother replied, 'That's different, he wasn't English – and it was the old days.'

Women use their hair in many ways as a come-on, Anna reflected. Hair can be tossed, twitched, coiled around the finger, tucked behind the ear; it can be hidden behind (Lady Di again, those hurt yet magnetic eyes stalking the world from beneath her beautiful blond fringe) or brazenly exploited in the sexual game. Men on the other hand, particularly rebellious young ones, use it to make a statement, to show which club they belong to: the DA (duck's arse, or more politely, anatomy) sported by Teddy Boys, the Mohican, the skinhead, dreadlocks.

It can also be used to symbolise power and prestige, realised Anna, warming to her subject – judges' wigs an obvious example, so incongruously maintained to this day. She remembered a book that she had loved as a child, with pictures of African tribesmen sporting amazingly elaborate coiffeurs that defined their position within a hierarchical society. In the eighteenth century, women's hairstyles reached a peak of rococo detail and extravagance, though it was hard to see where the hair ended and the headdresses began. Height was the aim, one-upmanship made literal. In the 1960s, British women teased, back-combed and lacquered their hair into candyfloss beehives, mostly for fun and fashion rather than in the pursuit of power. But twenty years later, Margaret Thatcher's carefully coiffed hair – it was said that she got up an hour earlier every day so that it could be arranged – formed a helmet as impregnable as the tin one of her forebear Boadiccea.

Anna, who had never been well-off, was always amazed by the amounts of time and money that people, women especially, were prepared to devote to their hair. The rococo ladies, for example, would spend the entire day, almost every day, having their elaborate hairdos prepared for the evening's entertainment. Girls will happily sit for half a day or more while their hair is worked into a myriad beautiful tiny plaits, often interwoven with beads – an African style adopted by the West. And hairdressers all over the world charge inordinate sums of money for the bleaching, tinting, streaking, straightening and curling that will make women feel better about themselves – till next week. Smiling, Anna recalled her own initiation into the mysteries of the hairdressing salon. Having been persuaded (by her mother, of course) to book into a rather smart one that had just opened in her hometown, fitted out with all the latest gear, she felt self-conscious as she walked down the aisle of hairdryers looking like Rock Drill sculptures, out of which peered the critical eyes of the chrysalid forms within. Reaching the row of basins at the end, each with a hollowed out piece at the front, she hesitated, kneeled on one of the swivel chairs, and stuck her head through the hollow. She could still hear the ripple of stifled laughter as she extricated herself, sat down, and leaned back . . .

Drowsing – Anna did a lot of that these days – there came to her images of other, non-human hair. The flowing, slightly wavy, impossibly long dark fall over the curved neck of that Arabian stallion 'dancing' in a Spanish arena. The dense, fluffy, slightly oily undercoat of her dog, so different from the glossy topcoat, so efficient a weather-proofer. The almost circular whorls of a donkey's coat, normally flat and sleek, curled up like tiny saucers to catch the rain. Or the golden 'pelt' of a field of barley as the wind sweeps across it, a hand stroking the earth's coat. What variety, what ingenuity, what beauty in these natural phenomena. How easy, in one's own preoccupation, to miss them.

Strange, she reflected, that animals have 'coats' and we have hair. Strange too that 'hair' is plural whereas 'hairs' are singular. What a lot of hairs it takes to make hair. What was that quote from St Matthew's gospel? 'The very hairs of your head are all numbered' – which she, as a private sort of child, had found vaguely unsettling. And always hovering, the unimaginable statistic of tons of human hair salvaged – or should that be savaged? – during the Holocaust.

Shaking herself away from this horror, Anna let her thoughts roam round the subject of baldness. She conjured up the different ways in which this predominantly male affliction had been treated down the ages, from tonsured monk to bewigged nobleman to the dead-cat toupee, and more recently the 'No.1 all over, mate, right?' The latter not flattering, unless you had the sort of face, like Gandhi, that nothing could detract from. She thought of an uncle and his sad efforts at that most derided (and now dated) of all disguises attempted by men suffering from baldness, the comb-over: so easily wreckable in a strong wind, so instantly recognisable – fooling only the daily plasterer himself.

Female baldness? Rumour had it that Elizabeth I was as bald as the proverbial coot, but since everyone wore wigs that unashamedly looked like wigs then, did it really matter? And now, in the clever 21st century, cleverly made wigs that didn't look like wigs were available to anyone who could afford them. Where did the hair come from, she wondered idly.

From her own observations Anna had concluded that most women, young ones anyway, shared a common hair envy. If yours was rod straight and black, you yearned for blond waves; if it was thin, you wanted 'bulk', if it was bushy, you had it thinned. Etcetera. She remembered how, returning as a child from a year's stay in Ireland where she had been allowed to run wild and her hair had grown down her back, it had been cut short – and with it her freedom. After a working life of sensibly short hair, she had reverted in her later years to being long-haired, and free again.

Raising herself cautiously in the hospital bed, she groped for the mirror. (Mirrors, for women, used so often as a way of understanding themselves, getting to know themselves, trying to see themselves as others saw them perhaps – rather than, as commonly perceived by men, from vanity.) Who then was this woman with the pained but still lively eyes, this face lined and defined by the joys and struggles of a life not shirked? This head with no hair. She managed a laugh – at herself, at life, at Fate's latest cut. Well, she'd fought before and would fight again now. She and her hair weren't done for yet.