“That’s not the point. Look at her. She carries it around like a rucksack.”
And then the second one started. “You can see she’s uncomfortable. That’s not devotion any more, that’s something else.”
And the third one, quieter, but we all heard it: “Maybe you’re the one who can’t let go of something, and she’s the one paying for it.”
That was when he straightened up.
And that was when we saw that she had come back and was standing behind us.
She came through the middle of us and put herself in front of her father.
“Don’t talk to my dad like that.”
And then, quieter, so that the ones at the front heard it and the ones at the back leaned in:
“He cries when he brushes it. I asked him to cut it, and he said we have to
wait until I’m seventeen.”
And that was the first time any of us saw that man falter.
The seventeen.
I am going to explain the seventeen, because it took me until the January to understand it and it is not what any of us in that corridor assumed.
Pia’s mother was called Carys. She died in the March of 2020. Pia was three.
And when Carys Drummond was seventeen, her own mother cut her hair off.
Not a trim. Off, at the jaw, at the kitchen table, with the kitchen scissors, as a punishment, after a row about a boy.
Carys told Mattie that story once, in about 2012, lying on a sofa, the way you tell somebody things in the first year.
She was twenty-three when she told it and she was still furious about it at twenty-three, and she said one sentence that he has repeated to me
twice, word for word, which tells you what it has been doing in his head for six years.
She said: “It wasn’t the hair. It was that she could just do it.”
And in the last months of her life, Carys made him promise about Pia’s.
And what he has been holding, for six years, since the March of 2020, is this: nobody cuts it until she’s old enough to decide.
And at some point in that first terrible year — he cannot tell you when, and I believe him — his head supplied a number.
Seventeen. The age Carys was.
Nobody said seventeen. Carys never said seventeen.
A man of thirty-two with a three-year-old and a funeral and a mortgage took the only story he had about hair and made it into a rule, because a rule is something you can hold on to at four in the morning and a
judgement is not.
And the school, which I want to deal with before anybody asks, because everybody asks.
