A History of Forgetting (23 page)

Alison led her to the dressing room, then continued on
to the back to get her tea. Amanda and Thi were there having their weekly conference, this time with Donna. Thi asked,‘How
many heads have you done so far, Ali?'

‘Yours, Jamie's and Roxanne's.' She filled the teapot with
water.

Amanda hooted. ‘Roxanne looks fabulous!'

‘Roxanne did that after,' said Thi, grumpily. ‘Ali's cut was great.'

‘How about Ali doing Donna's client's highlights, with
Donna supervising?' Amanda suggested.

Donna said, ‘She's not ready.'

Thi threw up her hands. ‘Of course she is!'

Alison took the steaming teapot from the microwave, assembled the tray and carried it out with Donna trailing behind.

‘Where is she?' Donna asked.

‘Up front.'

‘I thought you said she was ready.'

She set the tray down at Donna's station. ‘You said I'm not ready. She's changing.'

‘Snarky, snarky. Where are you going?'

‘Don't you have to cut her first?'

‘I cut her yesterday! We didn't have the time for the highlights!' Harrumphing, Donna went to collect her client. She came back a different, gushing person. ‘Oooh, I still like it. The highlights will give it texture. I was thinking red might be nice.' Her fingers, under the woman's hair, tilted her head at different angles.

‘Red?' she asked.

‘Well, reddish. Alison, bring the colour samples. Alison is going to help today.'

Recapping bottles, Alison happened to be right next to the sample board, so she brought it over to Donna—hair fixed in rows, all colours, the whole human spectrum bound
into single locks by plastic tabs. Donna moved her open hand around the board, as if choosing by aura, then disengaged two locks, one blond and one copper. ‘If we blend them. They
look bright against my hand, but—' She ruffled them into
her client's hair. ‘Oh, I
like
this one.' Laying the copper lock against her own bleached head, she shifted her weight to jut a teasing hip.

‘You'd go from that to that?' asked the client. ‘How daring.'

‘Listen. If I wanted to know what colour I really am, I'd have to see a baby picture. You like this combination? Good. Maybe Alison, since she's just standing there staring, wouldn't mind getting the cap and hook.'

Alison went to the back room and took the cap out of the box. It was made of a waxy-looking rubber, semi-transparent, perforated. She dusted the inside with talc and brought it to Donna's station. With the client holding the rim tight against her forehead, Donna pulled it down with a jerk, talc puffing out of the perforations, as if the woman's head were smouldering inside it.

‘Where's the hook?'

She passed it to Donna who poked it into a hole and drew
out a tuft. Across the room, a shaver came on with a buzz,
Robert's client just then bowing his head, meekly presenting the back of his neck. Through the fresco window on the back wall, she saw the nudes in their distorted poses.
First they were stripped naked, then they were shorn.
Donna, moving her wrist in expert flicks, pulled hair through the cap in a patch until the client looked almost, but not quite, shorn. She looked as if she had escaped just before the shearing was finished.

‘Here.' Donna handed the hook back to Alison. ‘Like I just did.'

It seemed absurdly the opposite of plucking a chicken. When she finished, Alison stepped back. Ghastly, the tufts poking straight out or drooping. ‘I look like I just had chemo,' said the client. ‘You know, it always amazes me how ugly I am when I'm sitting in this chair. My hair's parted in the middle and pasted down. Under these lights I'm yellow. My moustache shows. But by the time I go, I'm beautiful.'

It was something Alison had used to marvel over herself, but now she wondered if it really mattered how she wore her hair.

Donna reappeared in rubber gloves, a plastic bowl in each hand, paintbrush held in her mouth like the stem of a rose. ‘Take these,' she told Alison through bared teeth. Alison recoiled from the fumes, stood holding the bowls away from her body, head tilted back, mouth-breathing while Donna dipped into the yellow paste and began painting a broad vertical stripe on her client's head. It was not so much the actual fumes coming off the paste that bothered Alison as the idea of fumes.

‘Excuse me,' she said, abruptly setting the bowls down.

She bolted for the bathroom where the door was ajar, went in without knocking, burst in, then gasped and turned away—but would never unsee it because already it was in her portfolio of horror: Roxanne in the mirror squeezing pus from her bottom lip. With her mass of fecund and trailing hair, she had used to look like a hanging plant on a pole; now that she had shaved her head, she looked just like the pole. Mouth open as she prodded, her cheeks sunk in. Her eyes shifting listlessly towards Alison seemed over-large now in their shaded sockets. She seemed to see Alison from the bottom of a pit.

‘You should go to the hospital,' Alison said.

‘I know,' Roxanne replied dully, poking at the lip. ‘It won't heal up no matter what I do.'

Alison backed out of the room. She turned and headed through the gallery to find Jamie, because after Christian he was the closest to Roxanne. They were supposed to love each other. Donna was just then lowering the hairdryer onto her client's head. What could possibly have been the harm in that, but how it descended on the head, how the head fitted, and knowing, too, that a current ran through, made Alison shudder. In the dance track, she heard whips. Robert was raising
his scissors, tips ceiling-ward, to free his wrist from a constricting cuff. Scissor points and blades, straight razors: oh, the things in that room that cut. Also, Malcolm must have been working with the curling iron because Alison thought
she could smell burning hair. There was hair all over the floor. This was how it started. Then it filled the room.

She about-faced and went to get the broom.

Maybe nothing was the matter with Roxanne. Nobody else had mentioned they were worried. Maybe she was just skinny and Alison perverse. She had been on her way to get Jamie, who seemed to be out, running an errand on his break, when she got distracted. She decided not to say anything.

She went to the back room where Malcolm sat with her book open in his lap. ‘Where did you find it?' she asked. ‘I was looking for it earlier.'

‘It was tucked beside the dryer.'

‘The dryer? How did it get there?'

Without replying, he turned a page. Then Thi came in and told Alison, ‘Pour me a coffee, too.' She'd been in an erratically bad mood for a long time—either up and down throughout the day or fixing on one particular person, seemingly at random, to be angry with. Last week Donna had told Alison that Thi was trying to decide whether or not to quit. It was painful news to Alison, first because Thi had not confided in her and, second, because Alison did not think she could stay herself if they lost Thi, too.

She handed Thi the mug, Thi immediately slamming it down on the counter, sloshing coffee. It must have been too hot, Alison thought. Then she saw Thi glaring at Malcolm. Thi rushing at him. Malcolm raised the book as a shield, but Thi took hold of it, wrenching it away. Cowering, Malcolm brought his hands up to stop the book from coming down on his head.

Instead, Thi swung around to Alison and told her in a near-shriek, ‘Why do you keep bringing this here? We feel bad enough already without having to look at these awful pictures!' She marched to the door, opened it and hurled the book. From where Alison was standing, she could see the pages flapping, the book a huge bird with nightmare plumage dropping from the sky then landing with a foreboding thud on the hood of Jamie's car. She saw the licence plate beginning ADD. A vanity plate, Christian had called it. Attention Deficit Disorder
368
.

Thi slammed the door and jabbed a ringed finger at Alison. ‘Don't you dare go and get it. Do you hear me? Don't you bring it here any more.'

She left the room in a flurry, Alison staring after her and hoping this incident wouldn't be the one to finally incite Thi to quit. Strangely, Alison herself was momentarily relieved to have the oppressive book off the premises. Without that reminder, perhaps she, too, could start to get on with life. Of course, she didn't really believe anything would be different, any more than she believed the book was to blame. Once again, she found herself in tears. ‘Why are we turning against each other?' she asked. ‘When Christian was here, we were so happy.'

A hand on her arm, Malcolm guided her over to the bench. She sat and he brought a box of tissues and placed it carefully in her lap.

‘Thank you.' She sniffed, surprised he hadn't fled.

Instead, he stood there, mothball-scented and visibly distressed, clasping his hands. Very tentatively, he reached out to pat her head.

 

In Malcolm's apartment, the phone kept ringing. Every day, morning and evening, it shrilled at him, but he would not pick it up in case it was the police with some new horror to communicate. When it rang that afternoon, he only answered because he thought it was going to be the girl. She had seemed so upset earlier at work and he had comforted her.

‘Mr. Firth?' It was a woman's voice, middle-aged, so not the girl. ‘I've been trying to get a hold of you.'

‘Who is this?' he asked, suspiciously.

She said a name entirely unfamiliar to Malcolm. Just as he was about to hang up, she added, ‘from Denis' ward.' Nurse Health. Nurse Health was calling him. Immediately, he pictured her standing high on the ledge of the medical arts building, holding a telephone.

Nurse Health was the kind and probably Sapphic one, the one always encouraging him to join their little support group. She wanted him to sit in a circle with family of the other patients and share his pain while everyone squirmed and looked away. Nonetheless, he appreciated her concern.

‘Were you away?' she asked.

‘Pardon me?'

‘Away. You haven't been in since Christmas and we've been trying to get in touch with you.'

Oh, Christ.
Malcolm closed his eyes.
What now?

‘Mr. Firth? Are you there?'

‘Yes,' he choked.

‘Is someone at your door?'

‘What?'

‘I hear knocking.'

He was thudding his head against the wall. He stopped. ‘No one's knocking.'

‘Are you all right, Mr. Firth? You used to come every day. We haven't seen you in such a long time.'

‘How is everyone?' he asked in a faltering voice.

‘You mean Denis?'

‘How are Mrs. Mikaluk and Mrs. Paxton? How is Mrs.
Ross?'

‘Mrs. Ross passed away.'

Stunned at first, then he began silently to weep. He saw her standing there, accused, confused, while Denis screeched. Probably she was an Anglican, but no one screamed ‘Anglican!'
with such venom. Oh, Christ. Was that what had killed her?

‘Mr. Stavros, too. Denis—'

‘I don't want to hear what he's done!'

‘He hasn't done anything, Mr. Firth. He's ill with this flu that's going around. It hits them hard when they're old. Denis is in the hospital. Do you want to see him?'

‘I can't.' At last the dam had broken. He came unstuck.

He was sobbing. ‘I can't. I can't. I must hang up.'

‘I'm going to call tomorrow, Mr. Firth,' he heard as he lowered the receiver.

He had to negotiate the maze of furniture to get over to the bed. Lying there, curled up, he wept—not like a baby, like
a beast. Bellowing, he tore at the sheets, pounded his head against the headboard, roared. He heard himself and knew they could probably hear him, too, in the bookstore underneath. Paging through their bestsellers, they would be look
ing up in consternation at the ceiling.

Mercifully, he fell asleep. The room was dark when he woke.
He sensed first by the air, hot and offensive gusts of it, that he
was not alone in the destroyed bedclothes. Grace
had come to
comfort him. For a second Malcolm stared at her tucked up in his arms, blinking back at him with sympathy and goo. He marvelled, considering all he had put her through.

It was his habit now during walkies, when the ladies had gone home, to have a little sport with Grace and the doggie biscuit. He'd whistle and, seeing the bone-shaped treat in his hand, she'd scurry over and begin prancing at his feet, as if she could not remember what had happened yesterday or the day before, or was she that optimistic? He would pretend to throw it, but really slide it down his sleeve. Off she'd dash, searching, searching, and coming back just as eager. After three or four rounds of this, Malcolm would grow bored. He'd call her over and, to her delight, lift her and carry her over to the garbage can. Usually he wouldn't deign to touch her except to fasten
her leash or tie up her hairs, but under his arm she could
better see him toss the biscuit into the garbage along with the plastic bag of shit.