big plastic curlers, which vibrated in the blast of hot air aimed at her skull. She was vibrating too, with the adrenaline of looking Lee’s mistress in the face, of boldly subjecting herself to the other woman’s hands and the chemicals she had slathered on her scalp. But Sylvia had not pulled too hard as she combed. She had not left the lye in too long so that the hair would fall out in clumps later. Sylvia had been calm and deft and professional. Relax, her fingers had said. Relax, the cool rinse had murmured.
Sylvia and her girls were now clustered around a veiled woman who had just come in and sent a little girl outside to play with the boys – their boys. The scratches in the dryer shield made it hard to see them, as did the sweat rolling from her temples into her eyes, but it looked to Thandi as if the salon girls were unwrapping a mummy, the customer’s shawls unscrolling and wafting to the floor. Thandi’s vision began to water.
She gave up, slumping in the chair and closing her eyes. She suddenly felt exhausted. Asking her son about his father had been excruciating enough. Joseph was the only one who knew where Lee went when he was not at work. But still. The shame she had felt, stooping to bully her boy with questions, forcing him to betray his father – and the rage, too, at Joseph’s sullen complicity, his disloyalty – something in her relationship with her son had…SLAM!
Thandi opened her eyes and caught the back of someone running out through the front door. She couldn’t discern more from within the buzzing cocoon of the dryer. The salon girls didn’t seem bothered – they had already turned back to the new customer with scissors in their hands. Sylvia ignored it, too, going about her business, chatting with her partner – was her name Loveness? – who was counting cash at the counter. Standing beside her pretty dark-skinned friend, Sylvia looked washed out. Thandi judged her for bleaching her skin with Ambi but she had to admit that Sylvia was otherwise lovely, with high cheekbones and big eyes and a natural waist. Her impassive beauty had thrown Thandi off.
She had wanted to shame Sylvia simply by coming here with the unspoken truth etched all over her face: I know. I know all about you. But now that the thrill of confrontation was over, now that the salon had turned indifferently to the next customer, Thandi felt that she had just exposed herself to more humiliation. The hairdryer was like a machine of self-mortification. The noisy swarm of heat around her head was her own fear, her own anger made external, a ring of hell, accompanied by the smell of sulphur and…
Smoke? Thandi’s eyes sprang open. Swirling clouds of it were flooding the room. Coughing, she tried to pry the helmet off her head but it was locked in place. She slithered down in her seat until she could manoeuvre herself out from under it, accidentally knocking hair curlers loose in the process, sending them spiralling down. She jumped up and scanned the room. It was empty of people but filled with the racket of the dryer and a chaos of smoke.
She quickly traced it to a socket in the wall where the hairdryer and a broken electric fan were plugged in. The two cords were steaming and sparking. She grabbed a hand towel, wrapped it around her hand, and yanked at both: the dryer cord came out and it sputtered to a stop but the fan cord ripped out from the machine instead of the wall. Still plugged into the outlet, the torn end of the cord sizzled over the floor like a serpent with a lightning tongue. She leapt away from it and stepped into something soft – a pile of white hair on the floor. She stared down at it in a daze. It was as if the tangled skeins of smoke in the room had frozen in place.
Just then she heard a commotion – or rather two. One came from behind the curtain at the back of the salon, the other from its entrance. The curtain parted and Sylvia staggered in with a little Indian girl in her arms, trailed by her son, her workers and the girl’s quailing gogo, the customer from before, who now had a shorn head. At the same time, the front door swung open and Lee and