The Fall Girl (10 page)

She thinks I'm lazy, doesn't like my tone of voice, the way my hair hangs over my eyes, how I slouch in the armchair. I get her back by answering her questions in monosyllables.

‘How was school today?' ‘Fine.'

‘Any news?' ‘No.'

‘Did you get your essay back?' ‘Yes.'

‘How did you do?' ‘Fine.'

‘What grade did you get?' ‘C.'

‘That's no great shakes, is it?' I shrug.

Sometimes, for pure badness, I pretend not to hear her.

‘Are you deaf ?' she screeches, red face, red neck. I'm getting on her nerves.

The showdown – it's only a matter of time.

‘What you need to do,' Lesley says, ‘is to make one, big, bold statement. Leave your mother in no doubt as to who's in control of your life.'

‘But how?'

‘Your hair,' she says decisively. ‘It says everything about a person.'

Lesley's older sister Sandra is training to be a hairdresser. She's always looking for models to practise on. I'll get a new hairstyle, free of charge.

‘But when and where?'

‘Just come to my house after school tomorrow; it's Sandra's day off.'

‘What will I tell my mother?'

‘Nothing. That's the whole point, Frances. Just do what you want to do. No explanations.'

‘Oh God! I can just see her standing at the front door waiting to see me arrive home off the school bus and me not on it. She'll have a scabby babby.'

‘Let her.'

Lesley's other two friends agree with her – my mother is in for one fucking rude awakening.

‘How will I get home?'

‘My brother will give you a lift on his motorbike.'

‘Oh Jesus, Lesley –'

‘Ah, come on, Frances. Do you want to be a pushover all your life? Or do you want to show your sad freak of a mother who's boss?'

‘Yeah, you're right; I'll do it.'

All I can face the following morning is a cup of tea. My mother asks me if there's something wrong with the porridge and I assure her that it's fine; it's just that I have a queasy stomach.

‘Do you want to stay at home from school?'

Of all the bloody days to show some compassion.

I think of my bed, how I could crawl in under the blankets and forget the whole daft idea. That would be so easy, so defeatist, so typical me.

‘No, it's OK. I'll be grand.'

After school, on the way up the hill to the housing estate where Lesley lives, the boys behind us hurry to catch up with her. They flock around her like kids around a magician. Although it's mid-October, her legs are still sallow from the summer. They don't go blue and blotchy in the cold like mine would were they not hidden under my calf-length skirt.

At Lesley's house, we drop our school bags inside the kitchen door. I get only a glimpse of her mother, who is standing with her back to us leaning over the sink, making choking sounds as if she's trying to catch her breath.

‘Is she all right?' I ask Lesley, following her upstairs.

‘Who?'

‘Your mother.'

‘Why? What's wrong with her?'

‘She's gagging.'

‘Ah, it's just her asthma; she'll be grand.'

I don't know if her mother even realizes that Lesley is home with a friend in tow; they haven't spoken. If only my mother would pay me so little attention. An unshaven man emerges from the bathroom at the top of the stairs, doing up his fly. There are others in the house too; I can hear a TV on downstairs and chatter coming from behind one of the bedroom doors.

‘Lesley, get your arse down here and pick up your school bag before I break me friggin' neck on it,' her mother roars hoarsely.

‘No such fucking luck,' the man mutters.

‘Coming, Mammy.' Lesley runs downstairs, leaving me alone on the landing with the man. There's a smell of drink off him. When he leers at me, I say hello, looking down at my feet. I'm glad my legs are covered now. He staggers and holds on to the top of the banister.

‘Who's your one?' he asks Lesley, who's on her way back up the stairs.

‘Get lost, Daddy.' She brushes past him and pushes me ahead of her into a bedroom.

Fifteen minutes later, I'm sitting on a chair in front of a cluttered dressing-table – wet hair, puce face. Compared to Sandra, Lesley's eighteen-year-old sister, who is combing out my hair, I feel like a drip. Her jeans are so tight, her bum looks like a pear-shaped balloon on stilts. Her purple T-shirt is ripped in several places, showing a black string vest underneath. My stomach tightens at the thought of my hair ending up anything like hers – short, black and spiky with a plum-coloured, slanted fringe covering one eye. I don't know if I love it or hate it; only that it scares me. She rolls up a stick of gum and pops it into her mouth. After trying out a left, a right, a centre and a zigzag parting in my hair, she combs it all back,
stares at my reflection in the mirror and sighs, as if to say that it doesn't matter what she does, I'll still end up with the same unfortunate face.

Lesley is sitting on the windowsill, feet resting on the bed, singing along to Queen's ‘Bohemian Rhapsody' and playing drums with two rulers, battering them off the windowpane, the wooden sill, her knees, her loafers. I recognize the song because I've heard some of my classmates sing it between lessons. An older boy sticks his head in the door and asks the girls if they have any spare smokes.

‘Fuck off, Keith,' Lesley shouts.

I can't believe a house can be so noisy and so rude. It's worse than the school bus.

‘Can you perm her hair like mine?'

‘I haven't the right gear with me, Lesley.'

‘So what are you going to try out?'

‘I was thinking maybe … Suzie Quatro. What do
you
think?' Sandra asks, tapping my shoulder.

‘Me?'

‘No, the cat's mother. Yes, of course you; it's
your
hair.'

‘Go for it, Frances, definitely; it'll be cool.'

‘OK.' I haven't a clue what I'm going for, or who Suzie Quatro is, but I do know that if she impresses Sandra and Lesley, then she'll do for me.

When I see big chunks of hair falling to the floor, I close my eyes and visualize my mother sitting at the kitchen table staring into a crystal ball like the witch in
The Wizard of Oz
, her fingernails scratching the smooth glass and her squawking ‘No, no, no.'

Go scissors go: snip snip snip.

I hear Lesley jumping off the bed and changing the tape. The sisters sing along to a song I haven't heard before. At the
end of every line the male singer shouts, in a husky voice,
cocaine
. Although I still have my eyes shut, I'm aware that Sandra is dancing to the beat – I'm getting sporadic digs in the shoulder from her jerking hips.

When Lesley tells me to, I open my eyes to find that she has her nightdress draped across the dressing-table mirror. It's blue, with a big Bugs Bunny on it. ‘Bugs will unveil the new you,' she says, ‘whenever Sandra's finished.'

‘I hear your mother's a bit of a fucking fruit-cake,' Sandra says, pushing the chewing-gum out with her tongue and blowing a bubble that touches the tip of her nose before it cracks and splatters on her lips like glue.

‘Yeah.'

‘So how do you think she'll react when you arrive home two hours late and looking like Suzie Quatro?'

‘She'll go spare.'

‘Here, Lesley.' Sandra hands her a plastic bowlful of gold-coloured powder. ‘Mix that with a cupful of water.' Then she looks at me. ‘So what's your mother's fucking problem?'

‘Dunno.'

‘Lesley says she won't even let you watch
Top of the Pops
.'

‘No.'

‘The bitch. She sounds like a right pain in the hole. Why don't you just tell her to fuck off ?'

‘I couldn't. She'd make my life hell.'

‘Are you allowed out to discos?'

‘No.'

‘You poor cow. The youth club?'

‘No.'

She shakes her head. I'm enjoying the sympathy.

‘What about the pictures?'

‘No.'

‘Bloody 'ell! You're living like a flamin' prisoner. I don't know how you stick it; I'd go mental, me.'

I love her accent. It's more English than Lesley's. She sounds like someone from
Coronation Street
.

All the attention is making me feel like a true teenager, a victim of injustice, with comrades who support my cause.

‘See me and my mother,' she says, snapping her middle finger down on her index finger, ‘we're like that.'

‘It's well for you.'

‘Mmm, I suppose. I couldn't imagine it being any other way.' She lowers her compressed bum on the edge of the bed, stares at my reflection with her black-lined, exposed eye and sighs. ‘I feel kinda sorry for you.'

‘Thanks.'

‘Our Lesley's right: you do need rescuing. She's always been a sucker for a sad case has our kid.'

Lesley returns with the plastic bowl, and Sandra, who has now finished cutting, picks up lumps of the gooey mixture and starts massaging it into my scalp. It looks and smells like cow dung.

‘Don't look so worried,' Lesley says, ‘it's only henna. It'll make your hair red. Not carrot red; sexy red.'

I have to sit with a towel on my head for twenty minutes until the colour takes. Sandra goes downstairs for the cup of tea she says she's gasping for. Lesley and I share a cigarette. She's not at all bothered about the fact that her mother is padding across the landing and could easily walk in on us. We use the cap of the hairspray can for an ashtray. When we're finished, she grabs my hand, pulls me up off the chair and climbs on to the bed, dragging me after her.

‘I just love this song,' she says, bouncing on the mattress. ‘It's this one's hairstyle you're gonna have.'

‘Which one's?'

‘Her singing – Suzie Quarto.'

‘Oh.'

She bends down to the tape-recorder on the bedside locker and turns up the volume. Shaking her head, she pretends to be playing a guitar as she sings along to ‘If You Can't Give Me Love'.

I try to pick up the lyrics: the chorus is easy.

‘Dance.'

‘I can't.'

She bumps into me and makes me stagger. ‘Go on.'

I start leaping about on the bed, the towel unravelling and falling on to the bedspread. Lesley thrusts herself in front of a poster above the headboard of a man with make-up called Bowie, pushing her breasts into his face and wiggling her bum. I turn my blushing face to the door and carry on dancing. The next thing I know, she pounces on me, knocking me down and falling on top of me in a fit of giggling. Raising her head, she looks into my eyes, her curly strands dangling and tickling my face. For a second I think that she might kiss me and I'm not quite sure if I want her to or not.

‘You can rinse out her hair now, Lesley,' Sandra roars up the stairs, and it's just as well she does, because my face feels hot and sweaty and, anyway, I don't know how to kiss.

In the bathroom, I kneel down and hang my head over the side of the bath. I'm thinking about what Lesley told me shortly after I'd started palling around with her again – that the other girls in our year reckoned that myself and Kat Mulcahy were a pair of lezzies. Then she explained to me what lezzies were and I thought it was disgusting and said, ‘No way.'

I felt gutted that anyone would say that about me and Kat Mulcahy. But me and Lesley?

I can't deny, even to myself, that I love her. I think about her first thing in the morning and last thing at night. During school, I count the minutes to the lunch breaks when I can spend some time with her, and after lunch I count them again until I can meet up with her at four o'clock. Sometimes she sits on the wall outside the main doors and waits for me, her legs swinging. Secretly, I'm prouder than a pop star's girlfriend that she has chosen me over all her other fans, and I can't help wondering if they envy me, hoping that they do. Jesus, what if I am a lezzy? What would Lesley say?

She pours jugs of cool water over my head, her nimble fingers working their way through the strands until the water runs clear. Towel-drying my hair, she reassures me that the colour is nothing short of fucking gorgeous.

Sandra's hands have no mercy as she blow-dries my hair, lifting, tugging and back-combing until my eyes sting from the sheer effort of trying not to cry. She finishes off by massaging a handful of gel into the roots, then sprays my entire head, face included, until I can taste the hair lacquer on the tip of my tongue.

‘I'd give my right tit,' Lesley says, ‘to be a fly on the wall when you get home.'

‘I'd give my left one,' Sandra says, resting her hip on the dressing-table and pointing her comb at me, ‘to give your loola mother a piece of my mind.'

‘And I …' I start but change my mind.

‘What?' Lesley says.

‘Ah, nothing.'

‘Go on, spit it out,' Sandra says.

‘And I'd give both of mine to swap mothers, watch
Top of the Pops
and go dancing in the Ulster Arms.'

There's silence as I look from Sandra to Lesley to Sandra,
and smile. Then, one after another, our jaws balloon like toads' throats and we burst out laughing.

Sandra is trying to say something, but she isn't able to get the words out. ‘At least …' she says several times but can't get any further.

I laugh so hard, my stomach hurts. I wish that every pain could feel this good. We pull tissue after tissue from the box on the dressing-table and when the box is empty, we wipe our tears on our sleeves.

‘At least …'

I have to stop looking at them and pretend that I'm on my way home and about to face my horrified mother.

‘At least …'

Lesley rips a page from one of her copybooks and hands it to Sandra with an eyeliner pencil. Sandra starts writing, snorting and gasping for breath.