Читать книгу Scissors Sisters & Manic Panics - Ellie Phillips - Страница 10

In any job there is a surprise element, and hairdressing (or barbering) is no exception. The entrant should be able to demonstrate that they are well prepared for the unpredictable, surprising and exceptional.

Guideline 5: Thames Gateway Junior Apprentice Hairdresser (or Barber) of the Year Award

It was Friday night, and Friday nights in my family are traditionally spent at Aunt Lilah and Uncle Zé’s place, with Mum and Billy of course, and my Great Aunty Rita, who travels down from Ilford on the number 25 bus. We eat a smorgasbord of Uncle’s Filipino faves and my Great Aunty Rita’s finest Jewish delicacies. Uncle’s cuisine basically worships every part of a pig you can possibly eat and Great Aunty Rita has an absolute ban on pig products, being that she’s kosher, but she likes to pickle everything in sight: cucumbers, cabbage, herring, beetroot . . . If you sit still long enough she’ll pickle you. Of course, Great Aunty Rita is more my family than Uncle is – I mean she’s blood – but somehow I haven’t inherited the pickle gene so I tend to go for the pig-product end of the table. And both sides of the family fry everything that isn’t a pickle. No wonder we never have guests.

Except that this evening we’d invited Abe. It was Mum’s idea and it was a bad one in so many ways. Yet, strictly speaking, Abe is my family, so why shouldn’t he come to Friday night dinner?

Great Aunty Rita simply cannot get her head around Abe. As far as she’s concerned he’s connected to our family by an unmentionable substance that she’d rather not have to think about, together with an act of extreme insanity that her niece Angela (that’s my mum) committed some seventeen years ago when she decided to have a child on her own. To be fair to Great Aunty Rita, she has never had any problem with the product of what she considers to be this unholy and unnatural union, i.e. me. And I guess that this is something to be grateful for, but whenever Abe is mentioned she gets an odd look on her face. It’s a look that says, If anybody even mentions the words ‘sperm donor’ I may spontaneously combust. So by and large we don’t. I mean, why would we? Does Aunt Lilah continually mention the night that she and Uncle Zé conceived my cousin Billy? No, thank God, because otherwise we would all lose our dinners, pickles and all.

Great Aunty Rita has met Abe once before. On my sixteenth birthday this year we broke the habit of a lifetime and went out for a meal. Not at Aunty and Uncle’s place. We went out in town. To a restaurant. Like normal people. But in the whole year we’ve known him, Abe has never been to Friday night dinner, so he’s never had the full-on Family-From-Hell Nightmare Experience. I’d wanted to save him from it until the time felt right, because in the beginning I needed Abe to be separate from my actual family, somehow. I wanted Abe to be mine and nobody else’s. Even Mum had done her best to stay out of things between me and Abe. A couple of times she’d stood chatting in the kitchen with Sarah for hours while Abe and I bonded. And we had walked Abe’s Labrador Daisy together three times – just the two of us. We even worked on Abe’s amazing garden one day. I was getting into the habit of being quite outdoorsy when I went to Bough Beeches.

My actual family are completely indoor people. And they are so loud, so dominating, so opinionated, that I sort of wanted to be sure that Abe and I knew each other at least a bit before letting my family loose on him. I mean, he might run away and never come back – and who could blame him really?

So anyway, there they all were when I walked in that evening: Mum, Great Aunty Rita, Uncle Zé, Aunt Lilah, Billy and Abe. I’d been home after school and got changed and then I’d decided to put a colour through my hair – partly because I wanted a new look for when I went into that cool-looking salon the next day to ask for a job, and partly because I hoped it would wind up Aunt Lilah. I had of course thought about boycotting Friday night dinner altogether, being that I was so pissed off at Aunty for firing me, and of course at the exact same time I was full of insecurity that she might have been right to do so. But I knew I was going to have to face her eventually and Mum had already invited Abe, and so I did Revenge Hair (a do that is sooo good your enemy will admit defeat) and used Goldfinger from SFX. I just put one streak in right at the front. It looked completely genius.

‘We’re all waiting for you – what happened to your hair?’ said Aunt Lilah as I sashayed to the table like the room was a giant runway at the grand final of the Thames Gateway Junior Apprentice Hairdresser (or Barber) of the Year Award.

‘It’s totally natural,’ I said, deadpan. ‘I woke up and there it was.’

‘Looks good,’ said Abe.

I went over and gave him a hug and then gave Great Aunty Rita a hug too.

‘How’s my favourite great-niece?’ said Great Aunty Rita – it’s what she always says. I’m her only great-niece, but it does crack her up every time she says it.

‘I’m good,’ I said and sat down at the table.

Everyone tucked into the Friday night spread. I glanced over at Abe. He looked slightly bewildered by the offerings in front of him, but manfully piled his plate with pickled cabbage, pickled beetroot, tsitsaron (bits of pork), gefilte fish (fried fish balls), fried potato latkes (patties) and lumpia (fried spring rolls). I felt like offering him an indigestion tablet too. He’d suffer for it all later.

Conversation lurched around the table – if you could call it conversation. ‘Conversation’ implies that there is a talker and a listener. But nobody in my family is a listener and everybody is a gabber. Mum talked about her clients, who were suffering from something called ‘the downturn in retail’, Billy was sick of revising for his mocks, something had happened to Uncle Zé in the Cash and Carry, and Great Aunty Rita had been knocked out of this year’s League of Ilford Jewish Women Spring Bridge Tournament. Aunt Lilah had something to contribute on just about every topic (surprise surprise). She is the original yakasaurus and loves nothing more than the sound of her own voice. She was thinking of getting a new floor put down in the bathroom.

‘I’d like a stripe,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘with a sort of pink fleck. Like he had on that detective programme you were watching the other night, Zé.’

Uncle Zé said nothing.

‘What was it called?’

‘What?’ said Uncle.

‘That programme with the head in the bag. What was it called?’

‘You mean Blood Bath?’ said Uncle.

‘Eughh,’ said Mum. ‘Could we talk about this after tea perhaps, sis?’

‘No, but the flooring, Angela – it was lovely, wasn’t it, Zé?’

‘What?’

‘The flooring on that programme. Y’know, the bit where they came in and the head was in the bag . . .’

‘Lilah, I don’t know what you’re talking about, my love,’ said Uncle. ‘I wasn’t looking at the flooring; I was looking at the head in the bag. How come you were looking at the flooring?’

‘It sounds gross, Mum,’ said Billy. ‘Like Serial Killer Interiors.’

‘Oh, all right then,’ said Aunt Lilah. ‘Just forget it.’

She looked crushed for a moment. Like her family didn’t appreciate her sensitivity and attention to detail or something.

‘How about you, Abe?’ said Mum changing the subject. ‘Did you have a good week?’

‘Actually I had a letter from someone,’ Abe said. He folded his serviette neatly in his lap and glanced up at me.

‘Oh yes?’ said Mum.

‘Someone who I believe is my daughter,’ said Abe. Then paused and corrected himself. ‘Someone who I believe is another daughter.’