Fran Landsman
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An extract from Britannia Terrace
CURL UP AND DYE
“Flowers didn’t use to scare me.”
May Snelgrove’s watery eyes reflected the pink of the nylon gown that Shirley tied at her neck.
“The next time anyone buys me flowers, I won’t be there to smell them.”
“What’s brought all this on then?” Shirley asked, with the concern she showed all her clients.
“It’s the lady at number twenty-six,” May explained.
“Enid? You don’t mean Enid Garbutter?
“They told me at the post office.”
“Oh, that’s terrible.” Shirley held her curler trolley for support. “My goodness – I only gave her a ‘hint of copper’ the other day.”
“The postman said he’d seen an ambulance…I saw her just out there a few weeks ago.” May peered through the salon window as if she might catch sight of her again. Britannia Terrace was deserted. “I was worried about her then because she was acting a bit strange. She was always a bit stand-offish, so I thought there was something wrong when she said she was doing the cha-cha in the street. That’s not normal behaviour though, is it? She must have had something pressing on her brain like Mrs. Greenhalgh.”
“That was tragic,” Shirley recalled. “ She thought she was speaking a foreign language. Dutch wasn’t it?”
“What was it they said she died of?”
Shirley went to the shampoo cupboard. In the drawer below lay a black hardback notebook. Here she recorded the deaths of clients – when, where, of what. She’d noticed in the past that people tended to argue about the facts. They’d swear blind that Mrs. Suchabody was sixty-five when she passed on, when in fact she was eighty-two. Shirley decided to resolve the problem and write the details down of everyone who died. Now they could chat about them freely with no chance of discrepancy. She looked up Joyce Greenhalgh under the J’s, and announced the date and the cause of death – cerebral infarct. They didn’t know yet what had caused Enid’s death – but they surely would before the day was out.
Shirley inscribed Enid’s name under E in the book and respectfully placed it back in the drawer.
“I’ll fill in the details as and when,” she said. “Now, what’s it to be for you today? A little trim?”
“Just the set,” May said as she settled herself into a chair and lowered her head back. “I’m not feeling quite right today myself.”
The salon was not where one would expect to find the centre of the universe. Indeed countless people walked past the sixties-style shop front every day and saw only – a hairdressers.
For Shirley’s loyal clients, however, it was indeed less a beauty parlour and more a humanitarian refugee centre with a blow dry thrown in for good measure. It might sound ridiculous, but for those for whom life had little left to offer, Shirley’s Salon was a salvation.