***Fishtail. Start with it
damp. Two sections, not three. You will get this one wrong for about a month.***
***Half-up for church. Don’t use the small pins, she’ll pull them out.***
***Two French plaits for school. Twenty minutes at first. Eight, by the time she’s five.***
She taught him. In a hospice room in the February, with a doll, and then on her own head when she still had it, and then on Pia’s, sitting up in the chair, with Mattie on the floor and the notebook open on the bed.
Forty-one styles.
And that man has done them, every one of them, for six years, and never once taken her to a salon, and got up at half five on shift days to do it before the childminder, and cried into the back of her head while he brushed it, which his nine-year-old told a corridor full of strangers because she had had
enough of listening to us.
