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.
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.***
