And Mattie Drummond said: “It’s what her mum wanted.”
Which is a sentence that ends a conversation in a primary school in this country, and which is meant to, and which Miss Arkwright told me afterwards she had accepted in about four seconds and thought about for two years.
They logged it. There is a note. There was a discussion about whether it met any threshold for anything and the answer, correctly, was no — a child with very long, extremely well-kept hair and a father who attends everything is not a safeguarding concern, and it would be
a grim country if it were.
So the school did the only thing available to it, which was to note it and watch.
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And everybody watched. That is the thing. Every adult in that building watched a nine-year-old hold her plait in her fist in the dining hall for two years, and every single one of us had a reason not to be the one who said something.
The notebook.
I need to tell you about the notebook now, because it is the whole of this.
Carys knew what was coming from about the November of 2019. She had four months.
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And in those four months, among all the other things people do, she made him a book.
An A5 notebook, hard-backed, the kind you buy in a supermarket. Forty-one hairstyles. Drawn — she was not an artist, they are wonky — with numbered steps underneath in biro.
***Fishtail. Start with it
damp. Two sections, not three. You will get this one wrong for about a month.***
Education
***Half-up for church. Don’t use the small pins, she’ll pull them out.***
***Two French plaits for school. Twenty minutes at first. Eight, by the time she’s five.***
She taught him. In a hospice room in the February, with a doll, and then on her own head when she still had it, and then on Pia’s, sitting up in the chair, with Mattie on the floor and the notebook open on the bed.
Forty-one styles.
And that man has done them, every one of them, for six years, and never once taken her to a salon, and got up at half five on shift days to do it before the childminder, and cried into the back of her head while he brushed it, which his nine-year-old told a corridor full of strangers because she had had
