She came through the middle of us and put herself in front of her father.
Backpacks
“Don’t talk to my dad like that.”
And then, quieter, so that the ones at the front heard it and the ones at the back leaned in:
“He cries when he brushes it. I asked him to cut it, and he said we have to
wait until I’m seventeen.”
And that was the first time any of us saw that man falter.
Enroll in Classes
The seventeen.
I am going to explain the seventeen, because it took me until the January to understand it and it is not what any of us in that corridor assumed.
Pia’s mother was called Carys. She died in the March of 2020. Pia was three.
And when Carys Drummond was seventeen, her own mother cut her hair off.
Not a trim. Off, at the jaw, at the kitchen table, with the kitchen scissors, as a punishment, after a row about a boy.
Style Your Hair
Carys told Mattie that story once, in about 2012, lying on a sofa, the way you tell somebody things in the first year.
She was twenty-three when she told it and she was still furious about it at twenty-three, and she said one sentence that he has repeated to me
twice, word for word, which tells you what it has been doing in his head for six years.
She said: “It wasn’t the hair. It was that she could just do it.”
Education
And in the last months of her life, Carys made him promise about Pia’s.
And what he has been holding, for six years, since the March of 2020, is this: nobody cuts it until she’s old enough to decide.
And at some point in that first terrible year — he cannot tell you when, and I believe him — his head supplied a number.
Seventeen. The age Carys was.
Nobody said seventeen. Carys never said seventeen.
Hair Care
A man of thirty-two with a three-year-old and a funeral and a mortgage took the only story he had about hair and made it into a rule, because a rule is something you can hold on to at four in the morning and a
judgement is not.
And the school, which I want to deal with before anybody asks, because everybody asks.
They did notice. Miss Arkwright raised it in the October of 2024, at a parents’ evening, in the gentlest possible terms — something about PE and swimming and whether a shorter style might make life easier.
