Allison’s Headline (Part 2)

Previously…

When I arrived at work the next morning, the newsroom behaved almost exactly as badly as I expected.

For three seconds after I walked in, nobody spoke.

It was not as if I had come in bald. I had not even come in with the sort of severe crop that might make men start wondering whether the country itself was in decline. My hair was still soft, still feminine, still plainly hair. But it was no longer the long dark curtain they were used to. It sat close now, a short rounded crop of dark brunette curls, thick and springing around my head, with a little curly fringe touching my forehead and the sides shaped neatly around my ears.

To me, it felt enormous.

To them, apparently, it required comment.

Brian looked up first.

“Christ, Allison. What happened?”

“A hairdresser happened.”

“You paid for that?”

Janey appeared behind him as if summoned by insult. Her honey-brown feathered hair flicked softly away from her face, and her pale blue-grey eyes had that sharp, entertained look she got whenever a man had been foolish enough to speak within range.

“She’s had a haircut, Brian. Not a bereavement.”

A few people laughed. I hung up my coat slowly, pretending my stomach had not tightened.

Brian kept looking.

“You looked better before.”

It landed.

Of course it did.

I wish it had not, but wanting to be immune to people is not the same thing as being immune.

I rolled paper into the typewriter.

“You’re not important enough for me to grow it back.”

That got a small sound from Janey. A laugh bitten in half.

Mr Ellison passed by, glanced once at my head, then said, “Copy by eleven, Wade.”

Which, from him, was almost a blessing.

Life did not become instantly different. That would be a lie. I still had deadlines, still had bad coffee, still argued for better assignments, still lost umbrellas. But I moved differently with short hair. I noticed it most in doorways, for some reason. With my neck less hidden and my face no longer softened by a fall of hair, I entered rooms more directly. I did not have to arrange myself before speaking.

The crop took getting used to.

In the mornings I would still reach for the brush, then remember there was almost nothing to brush. My hand would go too far behind my shoulder, searching for weight that had gone. Instead, I would touch the back of my neck and feel the little shaped curls sitting there, soft and springing under my fingers.

For the first few days, I kept checking mirrors.

Shop windows. Pub glass. The dim reflection in the black square of the office window after dark. I told myself it was vanity, but it was not quite that. It was more like checking whether the decision had stayed made.

It had.

The curls looked different in every sort of weather. In dry air, they sat neatly, almost politely. In rain, they lifted and loosened. In the heat of the newsroom, they went slightly wild around my forehead, as if the hair had ideas of its own.

Janey liked that best.

“You look less arranged,” she said one afternoon, sitting on the corner of my desk and eating a biscuit she had not asked for.

“Thank you?”

“It’s a compliment. Before, your hair looked as if it had been briefed.”

“My hair was better prepared than most of the men in this office.”

“Still is.”

Brian looked over. “I heard that.”

“You were meant to,” Janey said.

——

Kevin rang two nights after the pub.

I was in my flat, getting ready for an early night, when the phone rang.

I picked up the phone and answered, trying not to sound as if I had been waiting for it.

“Allison Wade.”

“It’s Kevin Ellery.”

“I remember.”

“That’s good. I’d have had to start again otherwise.”

“With the bad line you avoided?”

“I’ve improved it since.”

“That seems unlikely.”

He laughed, and I found myself smiling before I had decided to.

He asked if I wanted to go out the following Thursday. I said I might. He asked what might depended on. I said the state of local government, the weather, and whether he sounded too pleased with himself by then.

“I’ll try to sound miserable.”

“That would be new.”

“You don’t know me well enough to say that.”

“I’m a journalist. I make bold claims with limited evidence.”

“That explains newspapers.”

“It explains men too.”

There was a pause on the line. Not awkward. Interested.

Then he said, “Thursday?”

I said yes.

—-

We went to a small Italian place with red tablecloths and candles stuck into bottles. The wine tasted better after the second glass. Kevin arrived only four minutes late and looked so pleased with himself that I warned him not to make lateness seem like an achievement.

He looked like he belonged to the decade in a way that should have made me suspicious. Dark brown hair, centre-parted and feathered, brushing his ears and collar. A neat yet-faint moustache that he had clearly decided might made him look older and more serious. Camel coat, open shirt collar, the sort of easy face men got praised for without having to deserve it. He was handsome, which I had expected, but he was not as obvious as I had feared.

I had expected someone louder. More polished. A man used to being watched, and therefore too aware of his own outline. He had some of that, of course. Footballers did not move through rooms entirely by accident. But he listened more than he needed to. He asked about the paper and remembered names. He was vain about his legs and embarrassed by his handwriting. He explained football with cutlery, moving the salt and pepper around the table until I told him the vinegar had better positional sense than half his defence.

He laughed with his whole face.

That helped.

He never said he preferred me before.

That helped more.

Other people did, in small ways. My mother asked whether I had been upset. A woman in a shop told me it was a big change, in the careful tone people used when they meant they preferred you before. Brian told me twice that long hair would come back into fashion, as if I had cut mine off due to a national shortage.

Kevin treated the short brunette curls as if they were simply part of the woman he had met.

Until, on our fourth date, he admitted more.

We were back at the Italian, because he had decided it was ours after two visits and I had not objected quickly enough. I had worn a cream blouse, gold hoops and a brown skirt. My cropped curls had softened slightly in the damp air, little pieces moving around my forehead.

Kevin had been talking about a match and moving the salt and pepper around like players when he stopped suddenly.

“What?” I said.

“I’m trying to decide whether to say something stupid.”

“Always a promising start.”

He smiled, but there was colour in his face. He reached across the table, then stopped just short of one curl near my temple.

“I like short hair,” he said.

I looked at him.

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“Enough that I’m making a mess of telling you.”

I should have made a joke immediately. Instead I sat with the sentence for a moment. I had spent most of my life being told what men liked. Long hair. Softness. Not too much mouth. Not too much ambition. Not too much of anything that might make them feel plain.

But Kevin looked almost embarrassed by his own confession, which made it harder to dismiss.

“So that’s why you came over that night?”

“No,” he said quickly. “I came over because you looked like you might say something interesting. The hair didn’t hurt.”

“That sounds rehearsed.”

“It is. I practised yesterday.”

I laughed then.

He touched the curl lightly, waiting half a second first, and I let him. His fingers were careful. That mattered too.

“I like it because you like it,” he said. “You move differently.”

That shut me up, because he was right.

Later, after he walked me home and kissed me beneath the weak light outside my flat, I stood alone in my room and touched the curls. I pushed them back. Forward. Lifted them away from my ears. I looked at the nape, still short enough to thrill me.

I liked short hair.

Not just because Kevin liked it. Not just because Vivienne had shown me the possibility. Not just because Marianne had made it beautiful.

I liked it.

And the moment I admitted that, I may have wanted more

Not another trim. Not a tidy-up.

Something shorter. Sharper.

——

Over the next few months, the idea of going shorter grew.

At first I thought pixie, because that was the quickest word for it. But what I really wanted was harder to name. Something cropped and definite through the ears and front, but not too neat. Something with texture. Something with a little insolence at the back of the neck. A short shape that still looked as if it had somewhere to go.

At first, I thought only of the cut.

Then, over time, the idea of changing my colour grew.

It was raining at lunch, the sort of thin Manchester rain that did not look like much until it had soaked your collar and made a fool of your shoes. I had gone out for a sandwich and came back by way of a record shop near Deansgate, not because I needed anything, but because I had always believed a person could lose ten minutes properly in front of a record shop window.

There was an album sleeve propped near the front, half-hidden between imported records and a handwritten card for new arrivals. I did not know the singer. A woman in profile, pale background, cropped hair the colour of copper lit from underneath.

Not red exactly.

Not orange exactly.

Something warmer and clearer than both.

Her hair sat close to her head, short enough to show the shape of her skull, but with a suggestion of length left at the back, as if the cut had been pared forward and then allowed one small refusal. The picture was simple: face, neck, hair, colour. Nothing extra. Nothing apologising for itself.

I stood there longer than I meant to.

It was not the haircut exactly. Hers was flatter, more graphic, made for a square of cardboard and a shop window. But it gave me something I had not had before: a shape in my head. A colour with a purpose. The feeling that short hair did not have to behave as if it were waiting to grow back.

By the time I walked back to the office, rain on my coat collar and my cropped curls lifting around my forehead, I had started thinking about orange-copper.

Not polite copper.

Not nearly-brown auburn.

Something warmer.

Something chosen.

For three days I told myself I was being ridiculous.

On the fourth, I rang Marianne.

“Marianne’s.”

“It’s Allison Wade.”

A pause. “My revolution.”

“I need an appointment.”

“I can fit you in at the weekend. Is that ok?”

“Yes.”

“What are we doing with your hair?” She asked

I looked across the newsroom at Brian dropping ash onto his own notes.

“Short,” I said. “Really short.”

Marianne gave a low laugh. “I’m already excited about this.”

I did not tell Kevin, who by then, I was courting regularly enough. I did not want him thinking he had steered me, and I did not want to ask myself whether he had. By Friday night, I knew the truth well enough. He had not put the wanting there. He had simply made it harder to deny.

——

On Saturday morning I wore a cream blouse with a paisley collar, gold hoops, and the brown coat that had seen too many versions of me to complain.

Marianne looked immaculate when I arrived, which was almost irritating. Her blonde hair was shaped into a smooth rounded pageboy, glossy and precise, the soft fringe curving neatly across her forehead and the ends tucked under as if they had been persuaded rather than set. She had the calm face of a woman who could look at another woman’s panic and turn it into a plan. That morning she wore a cream blouse with amber flowers, a camel sleeveless waistcoat, and gold earrings that caught the salon light when she turned her head.

She looked at my dark cropped curls and nodded as if she had expected me.

“Am I glad to see you.”

“You are?”

“I’ve been doing perms all morning,” she said quietly, as not to upset only of the ladies sat under the hoods. “So I’ve been looking forward to actually cutting hair.”

I walked through and sat down in Marianne’s chair.

“So then, how short are we going today?
“Very.” I said confidently, yet vague.

“Ears?” Marianne asked.

“Out.”

“Nape?”

“Short,” I said. Then I hesitated. “But not too finished.”

Her eyebrows lifted slightly.

“Go on.” She said, placing the cape around me.

“I don’t want a polite pixie. I want it close. Clean. But with a little shape left at the back. Just a hint.”

Marianne smiled.

“A little mullet-crop.”

I looked at her. “Is that dreadful?”

“No,” she said. “It’s good that you know the difference.”

“Between what and what?”

“Between short because you are being tidy, and short because you actually want a shape.”

That pleased me more than it should have.

“Top?” she asked.

“Soft. Textured. Forward, a little.”

“Colour?”

“Orange-copper,” I said. “I think.”

“You think?”

I looked at the trolley beside her, at the combs laid in a row, at the little bowl waiting for tint.

“I saw an album sleeve in a shop window,” I said. “A woman with short hair. Copper-orange, almost. Not natural, but not silly either.”

Marianne’s eyes moved over my face, then my hair, then back again.

“Ah,” she said. “So not brown pretending to be copper.”

“No.”

“And not orange for the sake of being noticed.”

“No.”

She went to the colour drawer and lifted two swatches, holding them near my cheek. One was softer, beautiful but almost too well-behaved. The other had more heat in it, copper with a clear orange light running through the middle.

“This one,” she said.

I looked at it.

“It’s brighter than I imagined.”

“That’s why it will work. If we cut it this short and keep the colour too careful, it will turn respectable too quickly.”

“And if we don’t?”

She smiled. “Then it will look chosen.”

I looked at her smooth blonde pageboy, every line of it exact, every tucked-under end in its place.

“You’re enjoying this,” I said.

“I enjoy when women stop asking for halfway.”

I looked back at the warmer swatch.

“That one.”

Marianne smiled. “There she is.”

The curls fell in small pieces this time, not the long dramatic lengths of before. Marianne cut close around my ears, shaped the sides cleanly, and took the softness down until the crop became something sharper. The little dark curls dropped onto the cape like commas.

It did not feel like the first cut.

That made it stranger.

The first time, I had been losing a thing everyone knew. This time, I was choosing between versions of myself. The crop was already short. It already suited me. Nobody could say I had not changed enough. That was what made the second cut feel less like escape and more like appetite.

Marianne worked carefully around my ears. I watched them become fully exposed, no soft pieces left to pretend otherwise. She cropped the front forward into a short fringe, broken and soft rather than blunt. She kept the top textured, close but not flat, with enough length to move under her fingers. Then she came to the back.

She did not cut around the nape as short. Instead she took a small amount off, leaving the extra length at the centre and just behind the ears — not enough to call it a tail, not enough to make it precious, just enough to shift the whole cut away from sweetness and into something more direct.

I felt my mouth lift.

“You like that,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Then came the colour.

Marianne mixed it in a little bowl with the concentration of someone preparing a potion. The tint looked darker there, almost brown in the bowl, but when she lifted the brush I could see the warmth through it. She painted it through the short hair in small, certain strokes, turning my head with the lightest pressure of her fingertips.

The salon smelled of tint, hairspray and old wood. Rain tapped lightly against the window. A woman under the dryer kept glancing over her magazine. I pretended not to notice, which fooled no one.

“You’re quiet,” Marianne said.

“I’m concentrating.”

“On what?”

“Not changing my mind.”

She smiled. “You already have. That is usually the problem.”

“What is?”

“Waiting for the rest of yourself to catch up.”

I sat with that while she finished the colour.

When Marianne rinsed me and brought me back to the chair, the towel came away and I saw flashes of orange-copper before I understood the shape.

She dried it with her fingers, not a brush. Lifted the top. Smoothed the sides. Pinched a little texture into the fringe. Then, at the back, she let that slight longer flick sit where it wanted, enough to show itself without asking permission.

When she finished, I looked at myself and forgot to breathe.

The cut was not a pixie in the tidy sense of the word.

It was shorter and stranger than that. A very short orange-copper crop, close through the sides and clean around the ears, with a softly textured top pushed forward and a broken little fringe across my forehead. At the nape there was the faintest suggestion of extra length — a small, definite flick that made the shape feel less decorative, more unisex, more sure of itself. In some lights it was copper; in others there was a bright orange edge running through it, like the album sleeve in the record shop window, only softer, warmer, more mine.

My face looked clearer, almost startling. The colour made my eyes brighter and my skin warmer. Marianne had been right. The cut and the colour belonged to each other.

It was feminine, but not obedient.

Beautiful, but not decorative.

Sharpened.

“Oh,” I whispered.

Marianne smiled. “That one sounded different.”

“It is different.”

I loved it immediately.

Then I was frightened by how much I loved it.

——

Outside, the air touched places my hair had hidden even after the first cut. Around my ears. Along the back of my neck. The little close line at the nape, and then that slight soft flick just below it. I walked slowly past the shops and felt the orange-copper catch in every window.

This time I did go home first.

Not because I wanted to hide.

Because I wanted five minutes alone with her.

The woman in the mirror looked more awake than I felt. She had my eyes, my earrings, my mouth, my blouse. But she did not look as if she had happened by accident. The crop was too definite for that. Too clear. Too particular.

I turned my head one way, then the other. The shape held. No curtain moved with me. No dark curls softened the edges of my face. My ears were just there, shameless and ordinary. The top sat forward in soft textured pieces. And at the back, that tiny extra length changed everything. It kept the cut from being prim. It gave it a line I wanted to touch again and again.

I thought of the album sleeve.

The woman in the window had been flat paper. A pose. A suggestion.

This was my own neck, my own ears, my own hair catching the light when I moved.

I laughed once, quietly.

Then I changed my lipstick.

—-

That evening I met Kevin outside the cinema. The street was wet and shining, the marquee warm above the entrance, people gathering in coats, smoke and breath lifting into the cold. My orange-copper crop caught the light every time I moved.

Kevin saw me and stopped.

I enjoyed that more than I should have.

“Well?” I said when I reached him.

He looked at my hair, then at my face. His own dark feathered hair was damp at the ends from the weather.

“You did it.”

“I did.”

“That’s very short.”

“Yes.”

“And very orange.”

“Orange-copper,” I said.

He smiled. “I stand corrected.”

“Your powers of observation are why you’re beloved by crowds.”

But he was still looking, and I knew why. The front was short enough to expose my whole face; the ears were cleanly out; and when I turned my head, the faint flick at the back made the shape feel even shorter everywhere else.

“You didn’t do it because of me,” he said.

It was not a question.

That was why I liked him.

“No,” I said. “I did it because of me.”

“Good.”

“Good?”

“Very good.”

Then, because he was still a man and occasionally an idiot, he added, “I wondered if you might.”

I stared at him. “You wondered?”

He winced. “Wrong phrase.”

“Yes.”

“I mean…” He searched for it. “You looked like you weren’t finished yet.”

That softened me, though I tried not to show it.

“I’m not finished.”

“I know.”

“If I ever think you’re steering me, I’ll stop coming near you.”

He nodded. “Fair.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.”

“And if I grow it, cut it, dye it green, or shave the whole bloody lot off one day, that will be my business first.”

His eyes widened slightly at shave, which nearly made me laugh.

“Your business first,” he said.

Only then did he kiss me.

Inside, the cinema was warm and dim and smelled of damp coats, cigarettes and sweet popcorn. We watched The Man Who Fell to Earth, though watched is too simple a word for what I did. I sat there with my orange-copper crop still strange above my ears, watching the screen fill with colour and silence and beautiful, impossible faces, and thought of the album sleeve in the record shop window.

That had been flat paper.

This was different.

This was my collar against the back of my neck. My earrings touching air. Kevin’s sleeve brushing mine. The slight flick at the nape brushing the top of my collar whenever I moved. A room full of strangers all staring in the same direction while I sat there feeling newly unfamiliar to myself.

Kevin leaned close at one point and whispered, “Do you understand this?”

“Not entirely.”

“Good. Thought it was just me.”

I smiled without looking away.

The film made me feel odd in a way I liked. Not happy. Not sad. Just aware. My bare neck. My cropped hair. The faint lift of the top where Marianne’s fingers had shaped it. The colour catching whatever light the screen gave it.

For the first time all week, the change did not feel like something I was still trying to catch up with.

It felt like something that had caught up with me.

When we came out, the streets seemed louder than before. Buses, pub doors, wet pavements, laughter, arguments, the place carrying on as if nothing had happened.

But something had happened.

Something small and enormous, all at once.

Kevin offered me his arm as if we had been married forty years.

“Well?” he said. “Did you enjoy it?”

“I think so.”

“That sounds uncertain.”

“Some things are better uncertain.”

He looked at me, at the bright little orange-copper shape of my hair, the exposed ears, the collar of my coat turned up against the cold.

Without any more words, we kissed. A kiss that was long and showed me exactly how he felt.

——

By the time Kevin and I became more serious, neither of us had much room for romance in the neat, storybook sense. He trained, travelled, played, recovered, and trained again. I chased interviews, argued for better assignments, typed until my fingers ached, and became very good at changing clothes in the office lavatory before meeting him somewhere after dark.

It should have been difficult.

It was difficult, I suppose.

There were missed dinners, telephone calls cut short, and evenings where we sat opposite each other too tired to be charming. But there was something good in it too. Neither of us had the time to swallow the other whole.

I liked that.

I liked him too. Properly, by then. Not in the silly, breathless way I had expected liking a footballer to feel, but in a way that was much more inconvenient. I liked the crease between his eyebrows when he was trying not to lose his temper. I liked that he could fill a room and still look relieved when I arrived. I even got used to the moustache he was still trying to grow, though I told him this only once and immediately regretted the encouragement.

Kevin’s world was louder than mine in some ways and quieter in others. Louder on Saturdays, when men shouted themselves hoarse in the stands and the streets seemed to rearrange themselves around a ball. Quieter in the private parts: the way he came round after a bad match and said almost nothing; the way he sat on the edge of the bed nursing his legs from where he’d been kicked in matches; the way he looked at his own name in the paper and pretended he had not.

My world was all noise pretending to be work. The newsroom still smelled of ink, cigarettes and damp wool. The radiators clanked like they were being paid by the complaint. Typewriters hammered all day, and if you didn’t shout your copy across the room someone else would shout over it. Mr Ellison stalked from desk to desk with a pencil behind one ear and the air of a man personally offended by adjectives.

Brian still worked two desks over, still smoked too much, still believed a woman’s silence was an invitation to fill it.

But something had changed.

Or rather, I had.

The orange-copper crop settled in, though settled is not quite the word. It never behaved quietly. If I slept badly, it told people. If I walked through rain, it sprang up around my crown while the slight length at the nape clung damply to my neck. If I tried too hard with it, it punished me. But if I ran my fingers through it and left it alone, it looked exactly right.

I loved it.

I loved the bareness at my ears, the neatness through the sides, the little flick at the back, the way my face seemed to arrive before anything else. I loved the small shock of earrings against short hair, the sudden importance of my jaw, the way a collar could frame my neck instead of fighting a curtain of hair. I liked that the wind could not ruin it entirely. I liked that rain no longer felt like a personal enemy, merely a nuisance with ambition.

Even the newsroom had grown used to it.

Janey said the cut had changed my walk.

“You don’t come into a room anymore,” she told me one Friday, leaning against my desk with a biscuit in one hand and my copy in the other. Her honey-brown layers flicked softly at her cheekbones, and her sharp blue-grey eyes moved over my hair with open approval. “You arrive, with confidence.”

I pretended not to enjoy that.

Once I had cut my long hair, people didn’t understand me. Some liked it. Some didn’t. Some treated it as evidence of politics I had never claimed. A man from accounts asked if I had become a feminist, as if that were something that happened when your ears came out.

I told him I had been one for years and that the hair was merely catching up.

The orange-copper crop made me feel quick. Quick in the mind, quick in the mouth, quick to leave when I wanted to.

I thought, foolishly, that I had finished that particular argument with myself.

 

To be continued…