Дочь самостоятельно стригет волосы, шокируя мать, и скрывает свою жизнь от семьи

Beth loved Shauna’s hair. She had cut it herself since Shauna was a toddler, when she had snipped off that first sacred curl and tucked it away into an ornate bronze trinket box that still sat on her dressing table. In the evenings, after her shower, Shauna sat on the floor between her mother’s knees while Beth brushed and brushed, humming mindlessly, before plaiting the hair in a long blonde rope down Shauna’s back. Her work was deft, precise; the braid stayed perfect all night, and every morning Shauna unpicked it to release a wave, undulating, unending. Beth’s own hair was a patchwork of grey hidden beneath decades of box dye, shade Chocolate Kiss. She kept it bob-length, sharp to the bottom of the chin, a full fringe to obscure the forehead lines she was insecure about. Once, aged 13 and newly into pop punk bands and belts with studs on them, Shauna had asked for a side fringe. Beth started crying. Shauna did not get the fringe. Shauna had never been to a hairdresser for anything, though she did like to walk by when they had the door open to catch a lungful of the smell inside; conditioner and disinfectant and hairspray and air warmed by the dryers, alluring and glamorous. The home haircuts were a secret she kept to herself. The girls in school would find out this information and suddenly her hair would be sad, babyish, worth mocking because it had cost nothing. But they were townies and idiots and didn’t know it wasn’t really about the money. It was about something else, something Shauna felt in her bones but couldn’t articulate. The only person who knew was Aoife. Aoife didn’t laugh when Shauna told her, just said wow, I must get your family to teach me some time, and Shauna said she could come visit her house during the summer, and Aoife agreed. But Aoife hadn’t answered a text since the last day of school. It was excruciating. The long, warm, mostly overcast days stretching endlessly into one another, the phone sitting silent and useless as a brick in her palm as she waited, and waited, and waited for a response. READ MORE She’d had no plans for the summer, and now it was almost over, wasted in bed or in the car with Beth. She’d spent most of it with her headphones in, the music getting louder, sadder, angrier. In the evenings she’d hog the computer, checking Aoife’s social media pages, her online status, refreshing over and over to see if she’d opened the last message Shauna had sent, getting upset when she hadn’t. The tiny square of her profile picture, a mess of blue hair, piercings and eyeliner, stayed dormant. According to her Facebook albums, Aoife had been spending a lot of the summer in Dublin with her other friends, people who went to different schools than theirs, interesting people whose mothers definitely did not cut their hair. Dozens of digital camera pictures of them sprawled under the sun on Stephen’s Green, wearing band T-shirts and drinking Starbucks, smoking cigarettes. Beth had looked over Shauna’s shoulder one evening and said thank God you’re normal, I couldn’t be dealing with all that angst around the house, and walked off shaking her head, her bob jumping around her skull. That was the evening Shauna decided to cut her hair herself. The scissors could have been used for worse. Aoife was a cutter; Shauna had seen the raised, neat lines on her forearms when they were changing for PE, dividing her skin like red biro on the page of a copy. They’d never spoken about it, but Shauna was sometimes overcome with this awful urge to ask her. Like, they’d just be sitting on their windowsill in the bottom floor bathroom of the school, eating Polos and sharing her headphones, and then Aoife’s arm would touch off hers and she’d have to bite her lip to stop the questions from pouring out. So yes, cutting her hair behind her mother’s back was bad, but at least it wasn’t permanent. Beth brought her to town in the morning to run errands, the same thing they did almost every bloody day since May. Usually Shauna opted to sit in the car and wait, so Beth was alert when she unbuckled her seat belt. “Are you coming to the credit union with me?” “Oh, no. I just wanted to look around the shops.” “Sure come with me and we can go around them together after.” “That’s okay. I wouldn’t wanna hold ya up, like.” “Not at all! I’d love to go around the shops with you. Girls morning, you and me.” The wait in the credit union was terrible. The air was hot and dead, filled with the smell of carpet, wood polish, well-handled money. So many old people with their little burgundy books in hand, gripping the chained-up pens with knobbly joints, filling out forms with the pace of a dying snail. Shauna’s legs were aching by the time they reached the top of the queue. Then Beth started fiddling around with bags of coins she pulled from the depths of her handbag, dividing them between her book and Shauna’s. Even the teller seemed annoyed by the sheer volume of brown change Beth had produced, feeding it into the coin counting machine with a little bit of malice in her movements, sighing when she opened another bag, eventually reaching the end of what seemed endless. After the credit union, Beth made her go to the butcher’s, the hardware shop and back to the butcher’s before finally heading to the shopping centre. They looked around the clothes shops first, Beth offering to buy Shauna things like a beige cable-knit cardigan, a pink top with little green hearts printed all over it, a pair of sandals with plastic seashells stuck to the straps. Shauna politely declined all of it, instead picking up skinny jeans, a black hoodie from the men’s section, a myriad of long-sleeved T-shirts in varying neutrals. “Oh, God, it’s all a bit depressing, no? Where’s the colour, love?” So Shauna rolled her eyes and started to put the clothes back, but Beth threw out an arm. “No, no, I’ll still get them for you. If that’s what you want.” And something about the set of her chin made Shauna want to be sick with the guilt. So she reneged on the hoodie and swapped it for Beth’s cardigan, even though she knew she’d never wear it outside the house. The sick feeling stayed all the same, the queasy knowledge that she’d hurt her mother somehow, hurt her by being who she was. Finally, they made it to the chemist. Beth had a prescription to pick up for antidepressants, her little secret, but Shauna had seen the green script in the dashboard compartment of the car, looked up the names on Google when she was home alone. Beth stood in the queue with her back to the rest of the shop and, Shauna knew, hid her crossed fingers in her pocket in case she should run into anyone she knew. Shauna made a roundabout route to the hair dyes. She knew the shade she wanted off by heart. 221 Violet Punk. The girl on the box had milk bottle skin, a perfect smile, and a mop of vividly, undeniably purple hair. Her hand felt fizzy, electrified when she picked up the box. The woman at the till smiled at her, tried to make conversation. A very daring choice. She just nodded, handed over the €10 note, quickly pocketed the change and receipt before shoving the box into the bottom of her backpack like it was a kilo of heroin, or a gun. She had the zip just pulled when Beth materialised, clutching her little paper bag. “What did you buy?” “Nothing. I mean – tampons.” “What? Why would you buy tampons when there’s pads at home? What’s wrong with pads now?” “I … wanted to try them. Can we not discuss this please?” “You could have told me.” “Mother, I’m begging you.” The imaginary tampons had Shauna’s face scarlet, the embarrassment of knowing the people around them could hear every word, could hear Beth extolling the virtues of pads over sticking foreign objects in yourself before you’ve even done your Leaving Cert. She just couldn’t hold in a single thought she had, ever. She had to let Shauna know her opinion on everything that had ever happened, and if Shauna’s opinion was different, then it was because she was 16 and uninformed, inexperienced, naive. The rest of the morning was a wash. They had brunch in the shopping centre food court, a Caesar salad for one, pancakes for the other, eaten in mostly silence, punctuated by Beth’s attempts at conversation which Shauna struggled to take up, because she was still annoyed about the non-existent tampons. On the drive home she put her headphones in again, and Beth turned on the radio, the drone and babble of daytime talkshow hosts humming under the highest volume setting on Shauna’s iPod as she stared out the window at the gathering clouds, wistful and angsty as a runaway, pretending she was in a film on a bus to nowhere. Shauna helped unload the messages, tucked them away in their rightful spots in the presses, the fridge, the freezer. Beth hovered, fussed, went to say something several times and stopped, not like her. She had work that afternoon; she was a carer who visited clients in their homes, cleaning, cooking, bathing, changing. Shauna sat and fiddled with her phone at the table while Beth pottered around, searching for her work lanyard, running a brush through her hair, swigging the mouthwash she kept at the kitchen sink before spitting it neatly into the plughole. “You’re a good girl. Love you. See you this evening.” And she kissed Shauna on the head, dry lips pressing against the bare scalp of her parting, before leaving. Shauna waited to hear her car speed up on the road before legging it to the bathroom. She had watched the YouTube videos, the DIY spiky cuts, the angles and the movements. She was confident. She was terrified. She wished Aoife would answer her texts. That last day of school, sitting together alone in the middle of a cluster of pine trees, hollowed out at the belly for the smokers to hide in, not touching, one headphone each, only the thin white wire connecting them. The song was slow, acoustic, about wanting to get out of this town. Aoife moved to swing her leg across the tree bough they shared, and her knees knocked off Shauna’s, and Shauna was overcome, again, with the urge to ask: why? Aoife smiled, self-conscious, unlike her. She was the most extroverted person Shauna knew. She was loud, and funny, and told people to fuck off when they tried to pick on her. Told them to fuck off when they picked on Shauna too. For practically the whole of fifth year, every lunch break and free class, they’d been sequestering themselves on windowsills, in alcoves, under trees, away from all the idiots, the well-adjusted girls with extensions and tans and GAA boyfriends. Aoife’s knee against hers. The soft hardness of it. She was looking Shauna dead in the eye. Shauna leant forward. She closed her eyes and kissed Aoife, gently, ChapStick lips and butterfly breaths. Shauna’s hair ran down as far as her hip. It was downy, virgin, untouched by colour or heat. The sporadic summer sun had brought her up blonder as it always did, gave her an aura. She gripped the scissors tight, headphones in. Her heart was in her mouth. She thought about her mother and hesitated. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. A child stared back, peeping out from behind a curtain. She held up a lock, slipped it between the blades, and cut. The wrap of hair drifted to the floor like a feather, stopping to rest beside the toe of her shoe; a soft, dead thing. The new ends, blunt, sat straight and odd below her collarbone, a mosaic with a tile pried out. She cut again, and again and again, more strands swooping down the length of her, peppering the ceramic of the sink, gathering across the cuffs of her jeans, the toes of her runners. She kept going until it was all the one length, or as close to it as she could manage. She had never noticed how heavy all that hair was. The sheer pull of it. She shook her head, side to side, felt weightless, unaccustomed to the lightness, the lack. She ran her fingers through it and they snapped together at the cliff edge ends. She took the thinning scissors and razed the dense bluntness until it was spiky, sharp, ran them over her new fringe until it looked like Aoife’s, a great big swoop of hair that hung down over her left eye. When it was done, she bent down with the dustpan and brush and swept it all up, great big swathes of hair, gobs of it, like Rapunzel was scalped. Tried and failed not to look at it as she tipped it all into the kitchen bin. There was a sudden burst of remorse, rue. She’d never done anything like this in her life. She was a good girl. If she could’ve taken it out and stuck it back on, she would have. Maybe. She mixed up the dye, 221 Violet Punk shook into activation in its small plastic bottle, the smell of ammonia stinging her nose. She held the bottle above the split in her hair, nozzle downwards. And held it. And held. And put it down again. And picked it up again. And cursed at herself in the mirror. She was so wrapped up in bullying herself to just squeeze the bloody dye out of the bloody bottle that she never heard the car. Beth was home, standing there at the bathroom door, agape with a handful of hair from the bin. She took it all in, eyes following Shauna’s hand as it moved the dye bottle behind her back, illicit as a cigarette. Shauna went to say sorry, I’m so sorry, but nothing came out. Her mother just stared and stared. An aeon passed, the two of them there, frozen, the few steps between them impossible to breach. And then the hand that didn’t hold the hair came out and reached for the bottle. Shauna surrendered it immediately, almost relieved to be caught, ready to be admonished as long as it meant the silence was broken. Her mother turned and left without a word. She came back carrying a kitchen chair. “Sit.” And Shauna did, heart hammering under the ratty towel she’d draped across her shoulders. “Give me them gloves.” Shauna took off the gloves that came free with the dye, crinkly opaque plastic, loose at the knuckles. She handed them to her mother, who pulled them on. In the mirror, they made eye contact, Beth’s face unreadable, Shauna’s as pale and pukey as someone with motion sickness trapped in the back of a car. Beth shook the dye bottle, sighed, and started to squeeze it on to Shauna’s head in furrows, lines of purple dissecting the blonde like a field ploughed neon. The dye was cold as Beth massaged it into her scalp, rubbing it down the lengths. Shauna said the first thing she could think of and regretted it immediately. “Why are you home early?” “Phil had visitors coming. She asked me to leave.” “Oh.” Beth pinned up her hair in one thick furl, took a baby wipe from under the sink and wiped her neck, her ears, the rim of skin that kissed her hairline. She threw the wipe and gloves in the bin and sat on the lid of the toilet, sighing. “You could have told me.” “Could I?” Beth considered this. Pictured her daughter’s perfect, perfect hair, the nightly brushing and plaiting, the little princess sit of her on the floor of the livingroom in the glow of the television. Sick to her stomach at the sight of the hair in the bin when she went to throw away the wrapper of the secret chocolate bar she’d milled in the car on the way home. Her mouth turned down at the corners. “Oh, Shauna. Your lovely hair.” The rinse was silent save for the sound of the water as it ran over Shauna’s scalp and spattered into the bath, violet-tinged, the colour of rare sweets, of perfume bottles. The luxuriant smell of the special conditioner that came with the dye, pearlescent. Shauna looked in the base of the bath with fascination as her mother’s hands worked the dye off her scalp, methodically and gently wrung it out of her. In the mirror, she was someone else again. Still a girl, less girlish. Beth motioned for Shauna to sit once more and produced her comb, her hairdryer, her straightener. Her hands shook a bit as she worked, not used to it. Shauna’s face in the mirror was so like her own had been, once. Sixteen and hopeful that a bad cut and a box dye could change her whole life. Maybe it would. When she was done, her daughter asked her: “Do you like it?” “Do you?” Shauna hesitated, and then nodded. “Then so do I.” That night, sitting blankly in the livingroom, all the lights off save for the TV playing some crime show dross she wasn’t paying attention to, Beth was alone. She could hear Shauna on the phone to someone. Excited voices and a plan to meet in town next week. Beth remembered the time Shauna asked her for a fringe, and with chagrin remembered crying, how quick her daughter had reneged. She was a good girl. Too good. It was only a haircut. Hair grows back. The lock she saved from the bin was still in the back pocket of her work trousers. The child was an enigma to her and always had been. Her hair was insane and Beth hated it, truthfully, feelings aside. The colour was a sore thumb and the cut was like something from the top of a Troll Doll. Not something she ever thought her daughter would opt for. Or was it? Did she know her at all? The clothes earlier that day. The angry music she beat into her ears at all times. That girl with the blue hair, Aoife was it? She’d poked through their messages on the computer when Shauna was in the toilet once. All very innocent. But still, not a version of her daughter she was privy to. Is this just what it meant, to raise a girl to womanhood? Accepting that there were inner worlds of Shauna’s that she could never touch, never see into. As she brooded on all the things she would never know about her daughter, Shauna appeared in the livingroom, new cardigan on, hands pulled up into the sleeves, a hairbrush dangling from one. She sat without speaking in front of Beth’s knees and passed her the brush. She watched the crime show dross and Beth watched the brush as she pulled it through what was left of her daughter’s hair, slow and smooth, over and over, knots untangling in the dark. Caragh Maxwell is the author of Sugartown (Oneworld, 2025), which was shortlisted for Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards.