Man at the Helm (10 page)

The summer eventually came and we at last had some warm days and were just beginning to plan our approach on Mr Phil Oliphant when suddenly, one afternoon, when the heat had shimmered above the slabs and our mother had roasted all day on her two-position recliner, a man arrived. A man not on the list, not from our village, unbidden by letter and totally out of the blue.

He was a plumber, apparently, though not the boiler-suited kind with an interest in the whys and wherefores of a leak or finding the right pipe, but in a narrow-trousered suit, tight round the backside and with gaping pockets.

Our first sight of him that late afternoon, he was standing at our five-bar gate, sun behind him, pretty much a silhouette.

‘’Scuse, love, has a dog just run in here?’ he called.

And even though a dog definitely hadn’t – or we’d have known about it from Debbie, our Labrador – our mother, shiny with Ambre Solaire, called from her lounger, ‘Come in and have a look around.’

‘What breed is it?’ I asked, wanting the facts.

‘It’s one of them spotty Dalmatians,’ he said, his eyes scouting. ‘Belongs to a woman down the road. I’ve gone in to fix her boiler, and the bugger’s run out.’

And, I thought, There’s no Dalmatian living round here.

It’s a thing any dog-loving child would know – whether or not a spotty dog lived nearby. He’d have been better off saying this mythical dog was a Collie-cross or Jack Russell. The glamorous breed choice gave him away. But no one in my family noticed
things like that – actually, Jack might have, but he’d been inside with his train track – and I kept it to myself.

Charlie Bates specialized in boilers and pest control and said the two often went hand in hand.

Of course we didn’t find the spotty dog, but Charlie Bates left his headed paper just in case we heard anything or our mother ever needed any advice on his specialist subjects. The headed paper was thin and the lettering flat and smudged. It read as follows:

Later, our mother kept tapping his printed name with her polished but natural-looking fingernail and, when she’d drunk enough but not too much, she rang him and asked him to come over and check the boiler.

‘I was wondering about fumes,’ she said, ‘you know, with the children.’

My sister and I looked at each other open-mouthed. Resentful and cross. He wasn’t on the list and had no right turning up like that. The problem was, we were to discover later, he looked like Frank Sinatra – though it must have been when Frank was gnarled and the whites of his blue eyes were bloodshot in the mornings and yellowish all day.

Charlie Bates took one look at the Potterton. ‘It’s giving out fumes left, right and all over the fucking place, love,’ he said, and he wondered how we were all still alive. He drank a glass of Bell’s and gritted his teeth on the swallow as if it disgusted him and talked her through the options (‘I take it, chuck it, get you a new one – or I walk out of your life for ever’).

‘What’s wrong with it?’ my sister asked.

He ignored her.

‘Yes, what actually
is
wrong with it?’ our mother asked.

But Charlie had no interest whatsoever in discussing the workings of anything or explaining what might be right or wrong with a thing.

‘It’s fucked, sweetheart,’ he said.

Then, the very next day (another hot one), with a tiny papery cigarette sitting on his lower lip, Charlie Bates heaved the Potterton out of its cubbyhole, walked it on its corners across the kitchen to the back door and up the ramp on to his trailer. It was like watching a handsome man dancing with a fat lady out of politeness. Still no boiler-suit. His tie loosened and his smart shirt dark at the armpits.

Then, with a whisky-laced cup of coffee inside him, banging a broom and shouting, ‘Geddout of it, you bastards,’ he chased a couple of homeless rats out of the kitchen that had apparently been nesting behind the boiler.

We all turned away, too squeamish to even look. Perhaps there were rats, perhaps not. That’s the thing, I told myself later. If you won’t look at a thing, how can you know if it’s real or not? and I vowed to hold my nerve in future.

Our mother waved her hands about at the idea of rats, screamed and tiptoed around in her stringy bikini top, slopping coffee. ‘Oh my God, Charlie,’ she said in her posh voice. And sidled up to him for a scaredy half-hug.

A replacement boiler, rather smaller with rust patches, was fitted for the price of well over one hundred pounds cash of our mother’s money. As she counted it out into his cracked fingers, she looked right at him. ‘Come to dinner, Charlie Bates,’ she said.

‘What? Me, here, dinner, when?’ he said.

And she said, ‘Whenever, tonight, tomorrow, or we could go out.’

And with us three watching, they held each other’s eye and made an arrangement to dine at Wong’s the following Friday.

‘Wong’s, then. I’ll pick you up,’ he said, and my sister and I looked at each other again. And that was that. It would probably go wrong at Wong’s or beyond, but he was definitely a little blob of happiness at least, if not more.

A few days before the date at Wong’s we drove into town. Our mother had to go to Steiner’s on Horsefair Street to have her hair looked at and possibly trimmed. She always liked to see Geraldo at Steiner’s, him being by far the best stylist in the whole of Leicester and the East Midlands. He’d won awards for his methods and results. He did men and women and didn’t prefer one over the other except that he loved the kind of long hair you most often saw on women. If ever Geraldo were unavailable our mother would try another day. Steiner’s had an appointment system, but our mother wasn’t the appointment type when it came to her hair. Or anything much.

An appointment with Geraldo was more than just a trim, even if you were only having a trim. And that was all our mother ever had – an inch and a half off the ends. We often went to Horsefair Street with her because there were other things to do in the vicinity such as go to the dentist or the shoe shop or the theatre. And we loved to watch Geraldo trim our mother’s hair, so it suited us.

Geraldo would start by brushing her hair vigorously with his eyes closed and then he’d throw handfuls of it up into the air as if it were money he’d just found unexpectedly in a chest in a cave on a beach and then he’d pick up a single strand, and he’d look at it, turning it over and over and up to the light, and rub
it between his fingers, listen to it and smell it, and then he’d ask her how she was, how her love life was, how we were and ask her how her menstruation was and was she drinking plenty of wine and she’d laugh and say she drank whisky and he’d tut at her with his finger.

Our mother liked Geraldo because he loved long hair like hers – long hair on a pretty, thin face with no make-up. Basically straight but with a slight wave to it on the ends. Geraldo didn’t only love long hair, he
respected
long hair. He had long hair himself and had it parted very far to the left so that the fringe came over his brow in a straight line and looked like a skull wrap.

Anyway, that day, just before the date with Charlie, we were at Steiner’s and our mother was in Geraldo’s chair for a trim, and he had asked her how she was and thrown the hair about and all of a sudden he put down his comb and said he needed a moment before he commenced the cutting, and he went away into a back room for some minutes while our mother had a cup of coffee.

‘What’s wrong with Geraldo?’ I asked her.

‘He’s just sensitive,’ she said.

The receptionist butted in. ‘Geraldo knows your mother’s hair intimately and something he’s seen today has bothered him,’ she said, and she passed us a packet of digestives which were very dry without a drink with them but no drink was offered.

Our mother became agitated at this uninvited intervention from the receptionist.

‘What do you mean? What has he seen?’ she asked.

‘It could be anything – it might be a sign of dehydration or split ends,’ said the receptionist, looking at her own fingernails.

‘You don’t think he’s seen grey, do you?’ said our mother, and she leant forward and peered at the hair in her reflection.

Then Geraldo came back.

‘Geraldo,’ our mother began, ‘what’s the matter? What have you seen?’

‘I want to cut you a feather cut,’ he said and, as if he’d said something much worse, he hid his face behind his hands and peered through his fingers, waiting for a response.

‘No!’ our mother said very quickly, then, ‘No, I can’t, my hair is my trademark, it’s all I’ve got. It’s all I’ve got except for my plays. It’s the thing I love most in the world apart from the Indian tea boxes my father brought back from Ceylon, and I don’t even know where they are.’

Geraldo sat down on the floor in front of her salon chair and bridged his fingers. He was Italian and that’s the Italian way of saying, ‘Stop being silly’.

‘If a woman has something and it’s all she has and she protects it and cherishes it and her life is going nowhere,’ said Geraldo, getting louder, ‘then she must throw away that thing. Chuck it away. It is my belief that the thing, this beautiful long hair, is holding you back and you cannot go forward and find peace until you have cut it off.’

My sister and I were very interested in this line of reasoning and were pleased to see that she softened a bit. Her head went slightly to the side, which showed she was at least listening.

‘What does a feather cut actually look like?’ she asked.

Geraldo leapt to his feet, swung her round to face the mirror and held up parts of her hair. He angled her face to look in different ways.

‘So, Eliza-
beth
, it’s choppy like this and razored and spunky and it’s saying, “Hey, here I am!”’ and he laughed and she laughed and we laughed at the thought of our mother’s hair saying, ‘Hey, here I am!’

She was about to agree to it, and had begun to say, ‘Oh, all
right, then,’ when Geraldo showed her some pictures of people with the feather cut.

‘Look how smart, how cheeky, how now!’ said Geraldo, pointing to whoever it was in the pictures.

And then she said, ‘Oh, I don’t know, Geraldo. It sounds terribly nice and I understand the theory behind it, but I think I need time to consider it. Maybe next time?’ she said.

‘Yeah, sure,’ he said. And he swung her round and got started on the one and a half inch trim. I picked up the feather cut pictures. They were all of the same man from
Monty Python
.

At home later, we saw her looking at herself in the glass a few times and holding up bits of hair. Then she took a pill and went to sleep.

The next day she told us of a dream she’d had. A bird had flown down and started pecking at some seedlings and the seedlings had grown very suddenly and become bigger than the bird. She saw it as a sign that we should go back to Steiner’s and see Geraldo about the feather cut. She rang and made an appointment, which was most unlike her and showed just how imperative the feather cut suddenly was.

‘What do you think, Lizzie?’ our mother asked.

‘About what?’ I asked back.

‘The feather cut,’ she said.

‘Oh, I think it looks very modern and nice,’ I lied.

‘Do you like it?’ she said.

‘Yes, definitely,’ I said, ‘I love it.’

We went into town again and left the car near Victoria Park, and on the walk down we called in at the museum and threw coins into the fishpond and looked at the giraffe and the mummies. We called in at the printer’s for the new headed writing paper and cards that our mother had ordered months before and hadn’t had the heart to collect. The printer was a bit cross about
it and asked what she thought the shop would look like if everybody left it six months before collecting their order.

‘I’m sorry, I just haven’t had the heart,’ she said, in a wispy voice that seemed to take the wind out of the man’s sails, and he apologized for sounding unkind. I took note of the technique and thought we could have added the printer to the list of men if only he wasn’t situated fifteen miles from our home.

Then we went to Steiner’s to see Geraldo. My sister and I were worried and excited at the same time (both of us, both things) about the pending feather cut. Worried because we’d seen how ridiculous the
Monty Python
man had looked with it and yet excited because it was something new and worrying.

‘OK,’ said our mother, ‘let’s see how this style looks, then.’

And to my shock, I was ushered into Geraldo’s chair. Although I was horrified, I felt I could hardly object, having been so positive about it when our mother had asked me earlier, and anyway I was speechless.

‘Such a clever, clever idea,’ said Geraldo, laughing, ‘to try it out on the kid first.’

I was gowned up and shampooed and, before I knew it, Geraldo was chopping into my hair with some kind of razor-comb. I felt the blade slicing and from the corners of my eyes saw great chunks of hair falling to the floor. I glanced at my sister. I saw a look of deep concern on her face, as if watching a disaster in slow motion and powerless to stop it.

It didn’t take more than a few minutes. Our mother stood by the chair and held her hand over her mouth for the duration.

‘
Ta-da!
’ said Geraldo as he unveiled me. He spritzed me with some hairspray and preened me a bit, then said, ‘So, whadayou think, Eliza-
beth
?’

‘Oh my God!’ she said. ‘No, I couldn’t possibly have that done to me.’

I looked very different, startlingly so, and ultra-stylish with the feather cut. But I was ten and lived in a small village and stylishness didn’t get me anywhere. I looked like a grown man from a pop group – Rod Stewart or someone of that ilk – whereas before I’d looked like the author Anaïs Nin with her prim Edwardian face.

At playtime the next day at school a boy said I looked like a hairy ape with my new hair. I didn’t look anything like a hairy ape but I knew what he was getting at, and I wondered dismally what Miranda Longlady was going to make of it. What clever description she’d come up with. And then, feeling worried about that, I remembered Bufo the frog puppet and that she hadn’t given him back, and I felt angry instead, which was better.