Pia asked for her. Not him, and not me. Pia.
She said, and Mattie repeated it to me in the car park afterwards with a completely straight face: “She should see one that’s the right way round.”
Nine.
The stylist was a woman called Noor who had been briefed within an inch of her life and who was, in the event, better at it than any of us. She let Pia sit in the chair for about ten minutes first, just sitting, with the gown on, looking at herself.
And then she said: “Right. You tell me when and you tell me where.”
And Pia put her hand flat on her own collarbone and said: “Here.”
Ninety-one
centimetres came off. It took twenty minutes and it was in four plaits, because Noor did it in sections so that it would be manageable, and three of them went into a bag for a charity that makes wigs for children.
And one of them is in a box on top of the wardrobe in Mattie’s room, because a woman wrote keep the first plait for me in biro in a notebook in 2020.
Enid did not say anything the whole time. Not one word, for forty minutes.
And when it was done, and Pia turned round in the chair and looked at her, Enid Pryor — who I had been fully prepared to dislike for the rest of my life — said: “Oh, you look like your mother.”
And then she went outside and stood by the window with her back to us for quite a while.
And Pia, who I
asked, eventually, in my own kitchen, in the April — because by then the girls were in and out of each other’s houses and I had earned about half a question.
I asked her why she had waited, between the times she asked him.
June. October. November. Months apart.
And she said — nine years old, with a bowl of cereal — “because he cried in the summer one.”
Not at her. After. In the bathroom, with the tap on, which is what men of that generation do.
And she heard it, and she worked out, at eight years old, that asking her father for a haircut made him cry.
So she waited four months before she asked again. And then three weeks. And then she stopped asking, and started carrying it.
And then she stood in a corridor in front of forty parents and told the truth about him at the top
of her voice, because the one thing she would not have was people calling him a bad father.
She would protect him from us. She would not ask him a fourth time.
I have not told Mattie that last part and I have been arguing with myself about it since the April.
What I have had to take.
Here is mine, and I have been turning it over since the January.
I watched that child struggle with her hair for two years.
Two years of a plait catching on a chair back. Two years of the fist in the dining hall. I noticed it before anybody. I am, if anything, proud of noticing it, which tells you something.
And what did I do with two years of noticing?
I talked about it. To my husband. To two other mothers in a car. In a WhatsApp group, twice, including — and I
have gone back and looked — the phrase it’s bordering on neglectful.
I never once said anything to Mattie Drummond, who I have known by sight since 2022 and who has stood eleven feet from me at every school event for four years.
And when three women finally did say it out loud, in a corridor, in the worst way it could possibly have been said, in front of his child —
I stood there and said nothing then, either. And I went home and felt sick about them.
Roz said it cruelly and publicly and she should not have. But Roz said it.
I had two years and a kitchen and a child who plays with his child, and I used none of it, and then I judged the woman who did the thing I had been too polite to do.
That is not being kind. That is being comfortable and
calling it kind.
