And me? I said nothing at all. Again. For the fourth time in two years.
What I did in the January.
Our girls are friendly. That is the only reason I had a door at all.
Pia came to us on a Saturday in the January because Mattie had a shift, and at about four o’clock the two of them were on the landing with a hairbrush and I heard Pia say, very matter-of-factly, “you have to do it in sections from the bottom or it pulls.”
Nine years old, teaching my daughter the technique for managing her own hair.
And when he came at six I made him a cup of tea and I said the thing I had been rehearsing since the concert, which was: “Mattie. Can I ask you about her hair, and will you let me get it wrong?”
He sat at my kitchen table for two hours.
And about ninety minutes in, he went out to the van and came back with the notebook, because I had asked what the promise actually was and he wanted to show me the styles rather than say it.
He put it on the table and turned it to a page near the front, the two French plaits, and talked me through it like a man showing you an engine.
And I sat there with my hand on the cover and I said, because I am nosy and because I am a reader and because I could not help it:
“Is there more at the back?”
And he said no. Forty-one, and then it stops.
The last page.
It does not stop.
There are five blank pages after the forty-first style. Five. And then there is one more page with writing on it.
He had never turned past the blanks.
Six years. He had that notebook in a drawer in the kitchen and in the van and on the bed in a hospice room, and he had gone to it four hundred times for a style, and he had never once gone past the end of the styles, because why would you.
I found it in my kitchen on the eleventh of January because I flicked to the back of a book the way people do.
And I sat there with it open and I could not speak, and he said “what,” and I turned it round.
What it said.
I am going to put down the part that matters. The rest is hers and his.
***Mattie — about her hair.***
***Don’t let anybody cut it who isn’t her. Not my mother, not your sister, not a school, not a nurse. Nobody gets to do to her what was done to me.***
***But listen. The point was never the hair. The point was that nobody asked me.***
***So: the day she asks you herself — properly, and then again on a different day, so you know it’s not a mood — it’s hers. Whatever age she is. Take her somewhere nice and let her sit in the big chair and choose.***
***And keep the first plait for me.***
***I’m sorry I’m making you do this on your own. You’ll be better at it than you think. You’re already better at it than you think.***
Whatever age she is.
The day she asks you herself.
She had asked him. She had asked him in the summer, and again in the October, and again, apparently, on a Tuesday in November, which was the one that made him cry in the bathroom and which his daughter knows about and which he did not know she knew about.
Three times.
The instruction was in a drawer in his kitchen, five blank pages past where he had stopped looking, for six years.
What he did.
He did not say anything for a long time.
And then he asked me, and this is the sentence I will keep for the rest of my life, whether I thought it counted if he had not read it.
Whether the promise he had kept for six years was the wrong promise, and whether that meant he had broken the right one every day since the summer.
I said: Mattie, she left you a set of instructions and you followed all forty-one. You missed a postscript. That is not a betrayal, that is a hardback notebook.
And he said: “She asked me in the summer. In the garden. And I said when you’re seventeen and she said okay and went and got her bike out.”
And then he put his head in his hands at my kitchen table and said the thing that I think is the actual middle of all of this:
“She said okay and went and got her bike out. She’s been carrying it round since June because I told her a number.”
The seventh of February.
They went to a salon in Brackenmere called Jonquil’s on a Saturday morning and I was there, because Pia asked me to be, which I will admit floored me.
There were four of us: Mattie, Pia, me, and Enid.
Enid Pryor is Carys’s mother. She is sixty-six. She is the woman who cut a seventeen-year-old’s hair off at a kitchen table in 2006, and she and Mattie had not been in a room together since the funeral.
Pia asked for her. Not him, and not me. Pia.
She said, and Mattie repeated it to me in the car park afterwards with a completely straight face: “She should see one that’s the right way round.”
Nine.
The stylist was a woman called Noor who had been briefed within an inch of her life and who was, in the event, better at it than any of us. She let Pia sit in the chair for about ten minutes first, just sitting, with the gown on, looking at herself.
And then she said: “Right. You tell me when and you tell me where.”
And Pia put her hand flat on her own collarbone and said: “Here.”
Ninety-one centimetres came off. It took twenty minutes and it was in four plaits, because Noor did it in sections so that it would be manageable, and three of them went into a bag for a charity that makes wigs for children.
And one of them is in a box on top of the wardrobe in Mattie’s room, because a woman wrote keep the first plait for me in biro in a notebook in 2020.
Enid did not say anything the whole time. Not one word, for forty minutes.
And when it was done, and Pia turned round in the chair and looked at her, Enid Pryor — who I had been fully prepared to dislike for the rest of my life — said: “Oh, you look like your mother.”
And then she went outside and stood by the window with her back to us for quite a while.
And Pia, who I asked, eventually, in my own kitchen, in the April — because by then the girls were in and out of each other’s houses and I had earned about half a question.
I asked her why she had waited, between the times she asked him.
June. October. November. Months apart.
And she said — nine years old, with a bowl of cereal — “because he cried in the summer one.”
Not at her. After. In the bathroom, with the tap on, which is what men of that generation do.
And she heard it, and she worked out, at eight years old, that asking her father for a haircut made him cry.
So she waited four months before she asked again. And then three weeks. And then she stopped asking, and started carrying it.
And then she stood in a corridor in front of forty parents and told the truth about him at the top of her voice, because the one thing she would not have was people calling him a bad father.
She would protect him from us. She would not ask him a fourth time.
I have not told Mattie that last part and I have been arguing with myself about it since the April.
FULL STORY on the next page.
