Little Web

I hold the scissors in my right hand and consider the acumen: six of my own haircuts over roughly three years. Here in the engineering, there is a co-existence of sharpness and bluntness in the blades’ stainless steel and the matte-blue plastic grip, keeping them together. As I hold them in the full clutch of my hand, I watch the tendons close to the knuckles shake vibrantly, and they shake like tectonic plates in an earthquake: magnitude 4.0. My fingers are becoming prematurely arthritic and this cannot be hidden, I know. What I do know is what cannot be hidden can hide. The cuttings fall from my hair like scraps of bark and they cover the grey flannel towel resting on my shoulders. They look pretty. The front quarters where I’ve chopped are perfect. When my fingers slick down the tracks of the wet-clung hair they stop at the same time. These chops are the best of my effort and slices awkwardly made, at an odd upside-down degree angle, into the sections at the back of my head, will do. All in all, I make sure the dead ends are cut out. Uneven bits can be tied-up with a scrunchie, and wore with a herringbone scarf folded over into a triangle and then turned over again to cover the rest of the problem when I go out into the world.

This bedsit is tiny and sparse but I have it. I have this pearled pink sink, this lump of mirror (no sealed edge), and the stellar black mold on the ceiling. It’s really a middle-sized room that was converted by the elderly lady who belongs to the Georgian-style building but it does have a door, a wardrobe, a kitchenette, and—my luxury—a double-bed I can just about afford. It costs me ten more a week, but what harm. When I am done, I wash the scissors’ blades and put them down between the snout-nosed taps and unsheathe the towel from my pale shoulders, shaking the stickier of the clippings into the wire basket beneath the sink. My shoulders are looking a bit bare and bony these days, don’t you think? Always after hair time, I have a cheap can of beer. I go to my canvas bag, sunk in folds on the floor beside my bed, and rummage it out along with my smokes. My hair frizzes with the high humidity lately here in the city. I take one big slug out of the can, and push the mouth of the window wide to let the smoke out. Its contrails cloud the air and disappear. They are a lot more interesting, geometrically, these days with my hand stuttering around the filter so I make them dance, stopping a few seconds later.

Shite. I somehow missed the window and the quarter-to-the end smoke fell into the pool of water collected in the window’s thin frame. I flicked under it, chucked the drag to the street, two floors below. A smudge of dank green residue from my finger stained my jeans, and I could see it clearly in the rectangular bulb-lit mirror where the vertical shape of my body looked slant and warped at a height in these skinny blues. Drainpipes. I just made myself laugh. Anyways, when the long drips from the ends of my hair catch on the exposed intersection of my collarbones and my throat, the drops are translucent. They make my skin look surprisingly dewy like those slices of watermelon where they’ve been fixed-up with super glue so they look really good in the final photographs for lip-stain or lip-juice ads, in those high fash mags, under hot studio lights. The ‘neon rouge’ on my toenails at least pops-out most from my reflection, and I think my breasts look a little larger than usual, at that angle. The hot drippings turn cool on my skin when the succession of micro-exothermic reactions happen, which I like.

I stand on the chair listening to a shower of rain fall harder. An echo crowds into the quiet bedsit from a woman running in heeled boots on tarmacadam. Finger painting more dabs of residue from the frame into my jeans, I make them into the shape of a heart, and wonder where the lady might be off to. My laptop stays on the pillow on the cold side of my bed. Lifting up the laptop’s face, its harsh light beams the flat. As the system wakes, the sprawled-out magazine beside me finds new attention in the square of digital blue hovering above it. The headline of an advice column declares ‘Experiment!’ in acrid green lettering which jumps off the glossy black body of the page. The block shapes of the font look like the same ones the U.S. government used in syphilis posters from the Thirties; this I’d seen in the same magazine. When the blue circle stops rotating, I open up MUSIC and hit shuffle. Next, I search for my bookmarked folder: SKIN. A list of saved articles and sites come at me in one big menu that shortens and hides the articles that can’t fit the screen. I have to organise them ahead of the appointment tomorrow and read them all tonight. I start to open tabs. Most of them are from direct questions I typed into SEARCH. I found other people asking the same stuff in forums for OCDs and scratchers. Some user tried to make a pun out of a name for a forum I’d read a year go. They called it ‘Itchy & Scratchy’ after The Simpsons but the humour had really stung me that day. Anyways, that’s what I call myself now: ‘OCD’, although I know it’s not healthy to self-diagnose.

Tired by the dense descriptions, I close the tabs and leave the music playing out of the laptop’s dark light, take the last gulp of the can, scrunch it up and throw it at the bin, missing it. I click-off the polo-shaped orange lamp beside my bed. My hair has dried fully from my shower earlier. My pillow is warm against me. The skin is tight but clean again. It smells of cheap vanilla and rose. My hands have been washed out with soap. The idle hours in this flat are rabid, and the hours of scratching no longer just surface pink patches on my skin. They come out as red-raw and blisters, blood aquatints under fingernails. I bring my hands up under my chin like planks of plywood, and look towards the street-side wall. I think about the homeless guy who lies on the bench near my flat. His hands are so dark from exposure, they look like dirt, and maybe they are. I set light to my favourite daydream: a blink-click carousel-slide of scenes superimposing the black backdrop provided by the box window. There is a smiling face in the mirror of a hairdresser; a drink in the pub down the road; the back piece of a diamante necklace playing off Victorian-style gas lamps. An afternoon in a hairdresser is an extra-special scene as my teeth beam in the flashy mirror while asking for what I want, ‘—pixie crop—like the woman in Breathless.’ The male hairdresser’s hands sink more into my neck. They make the towel get closer and hotter on my shoulders. He thinks it will work with my cheekbones.

Tell you more? The woman in the salon breathes in a lush-life of Shea butter shampoos and vaporising hairsprays. She enjoys every minute of the treatment and closes her eyes while he works on her hair. She says, ‘I’m sorry’ and he takes sympathy.‘It’s alright, sweetheart, we’ve all been there.’ And the guy will pull his fingers through the new short strands as he cuts off all the broken and split parts. His fingers will descend the fresh-to-the-world skin from her hairline to the peak of her collarbone.

My buzzer belts and shakes me so bad I knock my elbow off the locker as I bolt upright from the pillow. What time is it? I look at the light outside. Still early enough, I guess. It goes again so I throw on a hoodie and run over to the intercom, rubbing my funny bone.

‘Hello?’ No one answers back.

‘Hello?’ The speaker hisses.

‘Hi! Sorry, my finger slipped off the button. I’m checking the voting registrar—can I check that you’re registered, please?’

‘Um, yeah. Sorry, I was asleep.’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry to wake you. Y’know it’s very important, pet, to be registered. Are you eighteen? You sound very young, if you don’t mind me saying—’

‘No, no – it’s fine. I’m twenty-one. I’ll buzz you up. Second door on the left as you come up the stairs.’

Her voice sounds the same age as mine, which is strange, and she’s up the stairs quick. I hear her footsteps approach and the step at the top of the landing heave. I run over to the sink and wash my hands again. I pull my hood around my shoulders and spray on some deodorant. Little jolts rise up through me. There hasn’t been a person inside my flat for two months. What could I say? What can I say? That day, sitting beside my mother in the car, should have been the utterance of a need for medical intervention. It was going home from school—eighteen years of age, repeat examinations—when my biology and my environment found each other on the tip of my index finger. An itch bloomed out of nowhere on my neck and a scale let loose under my nail’s intrusion. It was like a slate off the roof of a house. I saw it on my school jumper; it was a little white web. ‘Mum, I think there’s something wrong with me,’ was stuck in my throat too often. Pillowcases had to be turned over during the week and washed on Saturdays while Dad was in bed and Mum dropped my sister to swimming. With my long hair laced over my knees and my spine bent forwards, I was in a lullaby. Sometimes, in the heat of deep scratching, the same sound bite rang back in my head: You are a failure, Trish, a failure.

The lady is exceptional looking. She has blonde hair just like a Hitchcock woman, a red vest top on, with a pair of jeans, green ballet flats and holds a clipboard, a pen and a set of keys between her arms and chest. I notice a Volkswagen key ring. She knows how to drive. She is about three years older than I am but she carries herself like a woman in her thirties. I am glad I washed my hair. I let her in and go bright red as I realise the empty, squashed can is strewn right beside the door. I slide it across the floor with my foot and sneak it under the wardrobe.

‘Sorry. I was being a bit lazy.’ She just smiles politely at me.

‘No worries, pet.’ She glances around. Her accent is more northern than mine. I have no chair except the one by the sink. I grab it and wipe the loose strands of cut hair off it.

‘Here, sit down. I’ll sit on the edge of the bed.’

She sits down without a bother and looks at home, ‘Lovely building, this.’

‘Thanks.’ I look at her and smile. A car goes through a puddle outside. Its splashing sifts in through the window. I forgot about my music in the rush. It is on low but I can hear ‘Thunderstruck’ come on and I want to die of embarrassment. She continues her task.

‘So. What’s your name, dear?’

‘Trisha—sorry, Patricia—Grant.’

She scans down the list on her lap and her eyes come across my name.

‘Ah, this is you? Apt. B, Park House, 6 Cedar Street?’

‘Yes. That’s correct.’

‘Second time to vote?’

She smiles again at me the way the woman in the welfare office does when I go in for my employment meeting.

‘Yes. It will be,’ I say.

I ask her where she got the ring because it is gorgeous. It is a long piece of silver that covers half her index finger.

‘Oh! This? Em, let me think, pet… I think it was one of those high-street shops. It was so cheap but looks lovely.’

‘Yeah, it looks great,’ I agree.

She looks up again from her clipboard and says, ‘Thanks, pet.’ She looks at me directly for the first time since she came in. She hesitates to say something. Instead, she smiles again and stands up. Her keys knock off the metal clip as she reaches out to shake my hand.

‘You have a lovely evening now. I got you ticked for the register. Do make sure you get out to the polling station next month—your polling card will come in the post soon.’

‘Are you a civil servant?’ It gushes out my mouth.

‘Sorry?’ Her pupils dilate.

‘Are you a civil servant?’ I have taken her back a little.

The floor gets her gaze and she looks up from it,

‘Yes. Yes, I am.’

My cheeks are hot with panic.

‘Cool. You’re really good with people for someone who’s a—’

I cut myself off before I say something I will regret.

Her face is flushed with colour too. She thanks me saying she really means it. I tell her no one else is in the building this evening. I didn’t hear anyone come in earlier and Mrs. Wallace’s car isn’t on the street. She waves a goofy goodbye while she turns around and heads down the stairs. The wave brings out her real age I think and I feel like we are the same for a moment. I close the door behind me and walk over to the window, have a cigarette and climb back onto my bed and start to cry violently.

The summer before Final Year, on a day off from my part-time job, on a rare day of sun in this part of the world, and twenty-nine degree heat, I was reading a magazine in my bedroom. I could hear my father clanging plates and dropping cutlery in the kitchen. He was mumbling to himself, from what I could deduct from the noise and cursing, had been a disastrous night shift for him. Mum and my sister were in town getting milk, the newspaper and a selection of ham, coleslaw, beetroot and potato salad for our dinner. My bedroom door was parallel to my parents’ room and I had it open to allow the breeze pass through the house. I could hear him stepping out to discharge the dishwater into the hedge behind the back wall and come back in. His runners irked the freshly mopped tiles. He kicked the door closed, it slammed loud, and he stomped down the long hallway to his room. I could feel the fear rise up in me. My muscles tensed around the magazine’s covers and I hoped he would pass by and go straight into his room to sleep. I was not perfect in his eyes and never would be, you see. A week before, ‘I dunno’ had slipped out of my mouth after he asked about an open-day on colleges, and I’d wanted to grab it back immediately—dress it up differently. His voice went booming above the radio song, announcing a final statement of foreclosure on our relationship. I become a task of a daughter in his life. That was almost four years ago. He turned around to his room, slamming the door and drew the set of curtains, their rails squeaking. I lay back holding the magazine over my face, inhaling the ink’s smell, wanting the words to fall out of their articles, up my nose and fill in the distortion between my temples. I heard Mum’s car pull over the gravel in the driveway and park at the gable of the house. I got up and drew my curtains. My sister came bounding down the hallway, new-kitten and sugar-high, rattling on my door beneath the handle she couldn’t reach yet. ‘Come get you some lunch, Tisha’, and I rolled onto my side, shouting back, ‘Tell Mum I’ve got a headache and I’m going to sleep.’ My sister had trouble with her pronouncing her ‘r’.

I hadn’t noticed the music playing at all for the last twenty minutes I’d been so busy pulling my hair. I sit up and look at the pillow. Singular brunette strands are wormed all over it. The patch of skin I hurt burns bad. I worry it will become infected this time, and I’ll be exposed, out in the open. The streetlights come on. Their dewy orange is in the mirror and on the ceiling. I suck on my fingertips in the dark. I taste the iron. I’m too lazy to get up and wash my hand. I place them back under my chin and close my eyes again feeling little throbs of blood drain into the pillowcase. I assemble the appointment with the doctor in my head, wondering if I should just cancel it. Blue-tacked above my sink is a graphic I tore out of a magazine article when I was nineteen. The lines are thick and harsh black but the designer filled their centres with elongated swirls of magenta, teal and sun yellow. I appreciate this kind of human being. The circles sweep, descend, ascend, turn in and turn out. I concentrate on them. I rub the salt crusts that have formed from the tears off my eyelashes. The nape of my neck must heal, I decide so I grab a tube of paraffin-based lotion that’s been on my bedside locker for months; I bought it in a fit of reformation along with the nail polish that’s on my toenails. The cap has dust on it. I wipe it with the sleeve of my hoodie, pull off the strip of teethed red plastic that seals it, squeeze out a blob of the bright white emollient into my hand, and start dabbing white dots onto my neck with my fingertips. It is cool, instant relief.