A fringe I didn’t want

My reaction when the hairdresser hacked too far into my fringe probably says more about me than I’m comfortable to admit. But here goes: “Just a little tidy up at the front,” I’d said to the slightly overmade-up hairdresser who offered me tea, which was brought over by a junior.

I was paying for highlights – a quarter head. There’re a couple of greys, and as a mildly OCD female with a hoovering compulsion, I tend to notice these things. But as my fledgling copywriter salary mainly gets eaten up by childcare, I can’t afford them too often. So I tend to space my cuts and colour. So, yes, alright, I was asking the hairdresser a favour. It’s been falling out a bit recently, my hair. I think stress. But when I explained this pre-foils, she happily agreed to “tip the ends.”

She was in the middle of another cut when the cute gay boy with green hair who had shampooed me in a slightly sensual way, pulled her over to attend to the front of my hair. She snipped. He blew, she reprimanding him for using the hairbrush because it was “only a rough dry.” He kept using it surrupticiously. Maybe he wasn’t gay. Anyway, I diverge.

Maybe it would have been okay if he’d been allowed to round it all off with his hairbrush, but she kept looking over at him, and I know he felt uncomfortable. So by the time he’d finished, my hair was looking flat, and the “tipped’ sidesweep I normally wear to hide my “erudite” forehead and encroaching frown lines had a messy hack of layers that looked like a bunch of split ends had been fag burnt at about eyebrow level.

“Oh dear”, I said in a middle-class way to the green-haired potentially ungay boyman who may or may not have been flirting with me, calculating to myself how long it had taken to grow since the last ham-fisted hairdresser had taken a chunk out of it, “I’m not sure about the front.” Green hair looked nervous. “I get stylist,” he says, smiling apologetically while the tip he’d been angling for vanished from reach. She wandered back over. “Hmm,” she says, “I just take leetle more off.” She grabs a fist full of fringe and snaps wildly.

“No no, please stop,” I utter miserably, “I think you’ve taken too much off. Uh…uh, I’m not sure I like it.” I look about helplessly, wanting to be rescued. I was by now, barely holding back my tears.

A bear comes over who’s cut my hair before, and with solemn eyes sees into my soul the 563 days I’ve wearily spent growing it out. “Don’ worry. I feex it,” he growled. They were, all of them, from Euroland. He snips calmly, I regain my breath, struggling to reconcile myself to my new look, which makes me look like an aged12 year old. Not quite Jimmy Kranky, but getting there. I hastily wave my credit card and gulp as £50.00 pounds is debited to pay for hair that is the colour I used to have for free, complete with a grease mopper I never wanted.

Luckily, Tom is there, waiting for me in the car, in the snow. I am smoking furiously as Jonah and Ava wave merrily from the back windscreen. I puff. Tom winds the window down. He gives me a sympathetic look. I growl. “There’s no point shouting at Dad ’bout it,” pipes Jonah logically from the back seat. I take a deep breath.

We head home, making myself feel sick looking the passenger mirror as we round Sunday-emptied streets at speed, huffing and pulling on a fringe I hope will grow an inch by sheer force alone. I stalk upstairs and slam the door like a teenager. Jonah comes in, with n’er a glance at me and spits his chewing gum in my shiny vanity table bin. I bite my tongue, still looking in the mirror. And so the day unravels.