Sunshine on a Monday

I celebrated my penultimate day of freedom with a late night’s reading and a later morning’s rising before scuttling bath-damp and bleary eyed to the hairdresser just in time to take up the chair for 9 o’clock.

As a hairdresser, Shelly suits me perfectly. She never chastises me for split ends, does not look at me as if I’m deranged for not using straighteners, doesn’t try to persuade me into a different hair style than the one I’ve chosen, and, best and most prized of all, doesn’t mind if I don’t engage in conversation beyond the perfunctory sentences necessary to be certain that we’re both heading towards the same hirsute goal. I take off my glasses as I sit in her chair and the world and my brain swim out of focus for the next two and half hours as she goes about her professional ministrations of foils, colours and sharp sharp scissors.

She hands me a batch of magazines to read whilst the colours are taking and disappears to tend to the set of a fragile looking curly white-haired woman at an adjacent mirror. I’d meant to bring with my book with me, carry on where I’d left off last night, but I forgot in my rush and I’m grateful for the magazines. I don’t read women’s magazines often; somehow at some time in the long past I just lost the habit. The selection she’s given me are enthralling entertaining in a slightly voyeuristic manner, relaying as they do stories of wedding day punch ups, lost children and faithless lovers. I feel quite breathless at the intrigue of it all and am sorry when I’m called to the sink to be rinsed off and shampooed by the salon’s junior. But her hands are deliciously firm on my scalp and the warm water and massaging of my head send me near to the edge of a trance.

Back once more to the chair and Shelly snips and shapes expertly with her scissors. The short fine hairs slide down the black nylon gown and collect in my lap and I wonder fleetingly if a skilled person could spin this into a yarn and knit something with it. But I cannot knit and I’d feel foolish asking, so I look in the mirror when Shelly asks me to and thank her for doing a great job. When I go to put my glasses on, I find that the unguent she’s used has stuck some of my hair to my face and I have to peel it away to allow the arms of my specs access to the top of my ears.

My sister has sent me strict instructions to call into the bakery on the way past to buy a fresh cream Belgian bun, and I add to this a selection of cakes to take home for Roo, my mother and niece. The greengrocer next door has a special offer on blood oranges. I buy sixteen of them, and two pounds of tomatoes, to even out the weight from the bag full of cakes in more ways than one. Roo’s alarm clock is peeping when I get to the house and I call up the stairs to her as I have done for as long as I can remember. She calls back and shuffles into the shower in her dressing gown. I listen to the water gurgling down the pipes as she washes and smile with pleasure that she’s home for a few weeks.

We’ve arranged to meet them at the Neptune Café at 12.30 and they are waiting for us when we arrive. Tracey, the café’s owner, has placed an extra chair at the table set for four so that the five of us can sit together. Roo sits next to her Grandma on one side, my sister next to her toddler daughter on the other, and I sit in between my wonderful family of girls on the spare chair at the end of the table.

It’s two o’clock by the time we’ve finished eating and the sun is bright on our faces as we make our way back to my little house. Milky coffees with sugar, tea, cakes and biscuits accompany an afternoon of chatting and laughing. The dog is wary of the toddler, squashes himself next to my legs in an attempt to look invisible. My niece is inevitably drawn to him as a moth to a flame, and the two three year olds advance and retreat from each other in an elaborately choreographed inter-species quadrille. She climbs the stairs to use the bathroom and comes back down naked in the way of toddlers the world over. It takes bribery and fuzzy felts to make her put her clothes back on.

The sun is till shining when they leave and I sit outside smoking a cigarette and drinking a cup of tea. Tomorrow will be my last day of leisure before starting my new job on Wednesday and I hope to spend it outside once more in a last day’s work in the garden before it’s ready for planting. I hope the sun will come out for me again whilst I do so. Whether or not it does I know I’ll enjoy the day.