Scissors Sisters & Manic Panics

In any job there is a surprise element, and hairdressing (or barbering) is no exception. The entrant should be able to demonstrate that they are well prepared for the unpredictable, surprising and exceptional.

Guideline 5: Thames Gateway Junior Apprentice Hairdresser (or Barber) of the Year Award

It was Friday night, and Friday nights in my family are traditionally spent at Aunt Lilah and Uncle Zé’s place, with Mum and Billy of course, and my Great Aunty Rita, who travels down from Ilford on the number 25 bus. We eat a smorgasbord of Uncle’s Filipino faves and my Great Aunty Rita’s finest Jewish delicacies. Uncle’s cuisine basically worships every part of a pig you can possibly eat and Great Aunty Rita has an absolute ban on pig products, being that she’s kosher, but she likes to pickle everything in sight: cucumbers, cabbage, herring, beetroot . . . If you sit still long enough she’ll pickle you. Of course, Great Aunty Rita is more my family than Uncle is – I mean she’s blood – but somehow I haven’t inherited the pickle gene so I tend to go for the pig-product end of the table. And both sides of the family fry everything that isn’t a pickle. No wonder we never have guests.

Except that this evening we’d invited Abe. It was Mum’s idea and it was a bad one in so many ways. Yet, strictly speaking, Abe is my family, so why shouldn’t he come to Friday night dinner?

Great Aunty Rita simply cannot get her head around Abe. As far as she’s concerned he’s connected to our family by an unmentionable substance that she’d rather not have to think about, together with an act of extreme insanity that her niece Angela (that’s my mum) committed some seventeen years ago when she decided to have a child on her own. To be fair to Great Aunty Rita, she has never had any problem with the product of what she considers to be this unholy and unnatural union, i.e. me. And I guess that this is something to be grateful for, but whenever Abe is mentioned she gets an odd look on her face. It’s a look that says, If anybody even mentions the words ‘sperm donor’ I may spontaneously combust. So by and large we don’t. I mean, why would we? Does Aunt Lilah continually mention the night that she and Uncle Zé conceived my cousin Billy? No, thank God, because otherwise we would all lose our dinners, pickles and all.

Great Aunty Rita has met Abe once before. On my sixteenth birthday this year we broke the habit of a lifetime and went out for a meal. Not at Aunty and Uncle’s place. We went out in town. To a restaurant. Like normal people. But in the whole year we’ve known him, Abe has never been to Friday night dinner, so he’s never had the full-on Family-From-Hell Nightmare Experience. I’d wanted to save him from it until the time felt right, because in the beginning I needed Abe to be separate from my actual family, somehow. I wanted Abe to be mine and nobody else’s. Even Mum had done her best to stay out of things between me and Abe. A couple of times she’d stood chatting in the kitchen with Sarah for hours while Abe and I bonded. And we had walked Abe’s Labrador Daisy together three times – just the two of us. We even worked on Abe’s amazing garden one day. I was getting into the habit of being quite outdoorsy when I went to Bough Beeches.

My actual family are completely indoor people. And they are so loud, so dominating, so opinionated, that I sort of wanted to be sure that Abe and I knew each other at least a bit before letting my family loose on him. I mean, he might run away and never come back – and who could blame him really?

So anyway, there they all were when I walked in that evening: Mum, Great Aunty Rita, Uncle Zé, Aunt Lilah, Billy and Abe. I’d been home after school and got changed and then I’d decided to put a colour through my hair – partly because I wanted a new look for when I went into that cool-looking salon the next day to ask for a job, and partly because I hoped it would wind up Aunt Lilah. I had of course thought about boycotting Friday night dinner altogether, being that I was so pissed off at Aunty for firing me, and of course at the exact same time I was full of insecurity that she might have been right to do so. But I knew I was going to have to face her eventually and Mum had already invited Abe, and so I did Revenge Hair (a do that is sooo good your enemy will admit defeat) and used Goldfinger from SFX. I just put one streak in right at the front. It looked completely genius.

‘We’re all waiting for you – what happened to your hair?’ said Aunt Lilah as I sashayed to the table like the room was a giant runway at the grand final of the Thames Gateway Junior Apprentice Hairdresser (or Barber) of the Year Award.

‘It’s totally natural,’ I said, deadpan. ‘I woke up and there it was.’

‘Looks good,’ said Abe.

I went over and gave him a hug and then gave Great Aunty Rita a hug too.

‘How’s my favourite great-niece?’ said Great Aunty Rita – it’s what she always says. I’m her only great-niece, but it does crack her up every time she says it.

‘I’m good,’ I said and sat down at the table.

Everyone tucked into the Friday night spread. I glanced over at Abe. He looked slightly bewildered by the offerings in front of him, but manfully piled his plate with pickled cabbage, pickled beetroot, tsitsaron (bits of pork), gefilte fish (fried fish balls), fried potato latkes (patties) and lumpia (fried spring rolls). I felt like offering him an indigestion tablet too. He’d suffer for it all later.

Conversation lurched around the table – if you could call it conversation. ‘Conversation’ implies that there is a talker and a listener. But nobody in my family is a listener and everybody is a gabber. Mum talked about her clients, who were suffering from something called ‘the downturn in retail’, Billy was sick of revising for his mocks, something had happened to Uncle Zé in the Cash and Carry, and Great Aunty Rita had been knocked out of this year’s League of Ilford Jewish Women Spring Bridge Tournament. Aunt Lilah had something to contribute on just about every topic (surprise surprise). She is the original yakasaurus and loves nothing more than the sound of her own voice. She was thinking of getting a new floor put down in the bathroom.

‘I’d like a stripe,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘with a sort of pink fleck. Like he had on that detective programme you were watching the other night, Zé.’

Uncle Zé said nothing.

‘What was it called?’

‘What?’ said Uncle.

‘That programme with the head in the bag. What was it called?’

‘You mean Blood Bath?’ said Uncle.

‘Eughh,’ said Mum. ‘Could we talk about this after tea perhaps, sis?’

‘No, but the flooring, Angela – it was lovely, wasn’t it, Zé?’

‘What?’

‘The flooring on that programme. Y’know, the bit where they came in and the head was in the bag . . .’

‘Lilah, I don’t know what you’re talking about, my love,’ said Uncle. ‘I wasn’t looking at the flooring; I was looking at the head in the bag. How come you were looking at the flooring?’

‘It sounds gross, Mum,’ said Billy. ‘Like Serial Killer Interiors.’

‘Oh, all right then,’ said Aunt Lilah. ‘Just forget it.’

She looked crushed for a moment. Like her family didn’t appreciate her sensitivity and attention to detail or something.

‘How about you, Abe?’ said Mum changing the subject. ‘Did you have a good week?’

‘Actually I had a letter from someone,’ Abe said. He folded his serviette neatly in his lap and glanced up at me.

‘Oh yes?’ said Mum.

‘Someone who I believe is my daughter,’ said Abe. Then paused and corrected himself. ‘Someone who I believe is another daughter.’

6

The Geek Gene

Excellent communication skills in hairdressing (or barbering) are vital to ensure good relations with colleagues and clients. The entrant must be able to show that they are a good communicator in order to be considered for the award.

Guideline 6: Thames Gateway Junior Apprentice Hairdresser (or Barber) of the Year Award

There was a sort of stunned silence, during which time my heart did a tsukahara-double-twist-with-crash-landing in my chest. In case you don’t know, that’s like a really complex vault that gymnasts do in the Olympics. But this wasn’t gymnastics. This was a potential sister.

‘What did he say?’ boomed Great Aunty Rita after a few seconds. She’s a bit deaf and her voice has a tendency to sound a bit like the foghorn on the Woolwich ferry.

Nobody responded. We all just sat there. I could feel my face going very hot and I wondered if I was about to pass out. After all, I – Sadie Nathanson, only child – had just found out that I might have a sister. I gripped the table, trying not to swoon into my plate of mostly pig products. I am not joking. This sometimes happens to me.

‘Well, my word,’ said Mum eventually. ‘That puts all our news to shame. This is huge.’

‘It’s big,’ said Abe.

‘What is?’ said Great Aunty Rita.

‘Abe might have another child, Rita,’ said Aunt Lilah.

‘Good grief,’ said Aunty Rita, ‘that was quick.’

Nobody knew quite what to do with that comment and so we all carried on like it hadn’t happened.

‘It turns out that this Marie – her name’s Marie by the way,’ continued Abe. ‘Well, Marie’s dad died last year and then she found out that he wasn’t her natural father after all. Then her Mum got out all the papers with my details on it from the sperm donor website . . .’

I was quite sure that Great Aunty Rita flinched when Abe said the words ‘sperm donor’, but maybe her hearing aid was just giving her feedback.

‘. . . and she’s not so far away,’ Abe continued, oblivious to Aunty Rita. ‘Canterbury, I think she said in her letter – I must have read it three times! But it’s so hard to take in . . . even after Sadie getting in touch last year!’

‘Well!’ said Mum, and she reached under the table and squeezed my hand. I couldn’t work out if this was meant to be a comforting gesture or if she was clinging on to me for support. She’s like that, my mum. Overemotional. Hysteria is my family’s default position.

‘Well, what d’you think about that, Sadie? Turns out you’ve got more family out there!’ said Mum.

I could see tears behind her smiling eyes. Please don’t cry, I thought. And then I looked at Aunt Lilah and thought, Please don’t say anything annoying.

‘Sadie – what do you think?’ said Abe.

‘Amazing,’ I whispered, because it was truly amazing. ‘Maybe I might get to meet her one day. Did she send a photo? I mean, do you know what she looks like?’

‘No,’ said Abe, ‘it was just a letter.’ I tried to picture a sister.

‘Right now she doesn’t know she has a half-sister. She’s sixteen years old – exactly the same as you – and up until last week she thought her dad was her . . . Dad.’ Abe looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘Odd what parents don’t tell their kids, isn’t it?’

It was odd. And, I realised, it was potentially sort of wonderful too . . .

On his way out later that evening, Abe said, ‘I sent Marie my phone number – I’m hoping she’ll call me.’ He stooped so that his face was level with mine. ‘Would you like me to mention you? It’s up to you. I don’t have to, if you’re not ready for it . . .’

He put his hand on mine and I could see that both were shaking slightly. His hand; my hand. We were nervous. It was like we were both full of energy and it had nowhere to go.

‘No . . . Yeah . . . Sure. Mention me to her. Tell her I exist. Give her my details if you like – she might want to call me or visit or something. I mean, we could get to know one another. I wonder what she looks like. I wonder what her hair’s like . . .’ And then I laughed because I knew I sounded ridiculous.

‘You’re a prize loon!’ said Abe. ‘If she calls I’ll tell her you asked after her hair.’

Sometimes I just loved having a donor parent. You wouldn’t get moments like this if you were conceived by a regular mum and a regular dad in a regular kind of set-up. You had other stuff of course – like maybe a dad who you got to know over loads of years and who you could look at pretty much every day of your life and know that you got your nose from him, or the way you lifted your eyebrows or your natural talent at fractions. But you didn’t have moments where you finally found the provider of 50 per cent of your DNA spiral, or discovered a half-sister called Marie totally out of nowhere.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep that night. I went home and sat on my bed and stared into my embarrassing kiddy Snow White mirror for the longest time, imagining what Marie’s face might be like, her eyes, her hair.

Of course, I always have to imagine the hair. I accuse my cousin Billy of being a guitar geek, or a computer nerd, but the sad fact is that I’m a hair geek. Really they need to put me and Billy in a lab and isolate that geek gene.

I don’t even know if I can explain it, but hair to me is like this giant puzzle – like a labyrinth or something that you have to solve. You see it and you think, Yuh-uh, I am going to figure out how this works. And then you get your fingers into it and sometimes it feels totally different from how you imagined it would feel, and it has this whole life of its own – like it knows what it’s going to do – and sometimes it defies you with its curl or its porosity. But the thing is, you don’t know how hair is going to work until you’re in it and you don’t know how you’re going to be with the hair until you’re doing it. And that pretty much sums up my life too.

I’ve been obsessed with hair forever – since I got my first Girls World Style Head, which was from Uncle’s cousin Moss (the one who buys and sells on eBay for a living). The Style Head was a talking one from the Philippines and it said, ‘Hello, ang pangalan ko ay Minnie!’ when you switched it on.

I didn’t really mind that the head spoke Tagalog, or that it was called Minnie, but what did matter to me was that it was blonde, which was a different colour to the redhead pictured on the box. And red was the colour I wanted. But instead of being devastated, I sneaked into Aunty’s salon and did a red dye-job on the Styling Head. You know, I did pretty good for a six-year-old, even if I say so myself, and I’ve never looked back since. It’s what made me the hair geek I am today. That and my DNA.

So now, when I was about to acquire a half-sister, I thought about Marie’s hair and I wondered if it resembled my growing-out Cleopatra bob, or if it was like Abe’s shaggy mess of curls that he had refused to let me loose on so far. (To be frank, Abe is a bit of a hippy. He could carry a buzz-cut. I think it would really improve his whole look.) Or maybe Marie wasn’t like either of us – she might just be like the bits that connected us. There weren’t many, granted. We had the shaky hand thing obviously, and we had similar round eyes, but people said that there was another subtle similarity too.

‘There’s something else about you and Abe that’s the same,’ Mum says. ‘You don’t look alike, but there’s an expression, or it’s how you hold yourselves. There’s something that makes me know you’re related.’

Would Marie have that something too?

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