I said, lifting my fingers to the red skin above my eyes.
‘Don’t touch it, the redness will go down. Now, what we doing with your hair?’
‘I was thinking this one,’ I said, pointing at a photo of a brunette model with shiny waves of hair that fell to below her shoulders and flicked up at the ends. ‘Be the star of the show with this sleek and ultra-glamorous look,’ it said ambitiously underneath the picture. The style was called ‘Big ’n’ bold, but I couldn’t bring myself to say that out loud, even to Jaz.
‘Big ’n’ bold? Mmm.’ She stood back and squinted at me. ‘You trust me, right?’
‘Yesssss,’ I said slowly.
‘Fine.’
‘What are you going to do?’ I asked with a note of panic.
‘Nothing to worry about; just sit back while I wash it and tell you all about George.’
‘Who’s George?’
‘The man from the shop that day, the day of the petition.’
‘Oh my God,’ I said, sitting up and turning round. ‘You emailed him?’
‘Lie back, please.’
I rested my head on the basin and Jaz turned on the shower head.
‘Is that temperature all right?’ she asked, as a jet of hot water scorched my scalp.
‘Yup, fine,’ I replied. Has anyone in the history of hairdressing replied otherwise to that question? ‘But can you tell me what’s happened?’
Jaz took a deep breath. ‘So, I didn’t email him that day because I thought it would be too keen, you know? I left it until Monday and then emailed and asked if he’d lost his pen.’
‘He didn’t leave a pen.’
‘I know – head back a bit – it was just an excuse. I said someone had left their pen and was it his, and he said it wasn’t.’
‘Then what?’
‘Then I said thank you again for signing the petition, and I hoped things were all right with him and Maya’s mum.’
‘You didn’t!’
‘What’s wrong with that?’ she screeched over the noise of the water. ‘I was just being nice. And we had a few more emails and now we’re going to take the kids to the playground.’
‘When?’
‘Next weekend, I think. He said he’s a bit busy with work but he’d let me know.’
We fell silent as she scrubbed, rinsed, repeated, then wrapped my head in a turban and ushered me to yet another chair. She pinned my damp hair into sections, and handed me a plastic keyring of nail colours before snapping her fingers at the reception desk.
‘Skyla, hun, can you get going on my friend’s toes? It’s not going to be a quick job.’
‘Thanks,’ I mumbled, looking down at the keyring. They had moronic names too but Boudoir Nights, a cherry-coloured varnish, was the closest to my shoes.
Skyla was a small woman with a shaved head, who pulled up a stool and started hacking at my toenails, poor thing, while Jaz snipped around my face. I tried to avoid looking at myself in the mirror. Nobody ever looked worse than in the harsh light of a hairdressing mirror.
‘You nervous about tonight?’ she asked.
I was more nervous about the metal blades slashing around my ears but I didn’t want to be unsupportive.
‘Kind of. But I’ve got the dress and Mia’s lent me some shoes.’
‘Will you send me pics?’
‘Course.’
Then the roar of the dryer put a stop to any talking and I sat flicking through a bad magazine, trying to concentrate on the story of a woman who claimed her dog was psychic.
‘Ta-daaaaaa,’ Jaz said finally, having flicked off the dryer.
I glanced up in the mirror and shook my head from side to side so my hair caught the light. It was like a L’Oréal advert; the frizzy dullness had gone and, running my fingers through it, my hair felt soft and smooth. She’d snipped away so my hair was layered towards the ends and it looked thicker. Together with my new eyebrows and cherry-coloured toes, I felt more like the sort of woman who could wear that red dress.
‘Happy?’ Jaz asked.
I nodded with a bashful grin. ‘It’s perfect, thank you.’
I tried to pay but both Jaz and Carlo refused. The only problem was I didn’t have any flip-flops, so I walked back to the shop in a pair of sticky, disposable orange flip-flops.
Eugene gasped and clapped both hands to his chest when I walked back in. ‘It’s like an episode of Ugly Betty!’
‘Just the reaction I wanted.’
‘Your hair!’
‘Shhhhhh. Can we not make it a big deal?’
‘Why not? You look ravishing.’
Another bashful smile. ‘Actually?’ Nobody had ever described me as ‘ravishing’ before. Ruby was the hot one.