Pia came to us on a Saturday in the January because Mattie had a shift, and at about four o’clock the two of them were on the landing with a hairbrush and I heard Pia say, very matter-of-factly, “you have to do it in sections from the bottom or it pulls.”
Nine years old, teaching my daughter the technique for managing her own hair.
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And when
he came at six I made him a cup of tea and I said the thing I had been rehearsing since the concert, which was: “Mattie. Can I ask you about her hair, and will you let me get it wrong?”
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He sat at my kitchen table for two hours.
And about ninety minutes in, he went out to the van and came back with the notebook, because I had asked what the promise actually was and he wanted to show me the styles rather than say it.
He put it on the table and turned it to a page near the front, the two French plaits, and talked me through it like a man showing you an engine.
And I sat there with my hand on the cover and I said, because I am nosy and because I am a reader and because I could not help it:
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“Is
there more at the back?”
And he said no. Forty-one, and then it stops.
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The last page.
It does not stop.
There are five blank pages after the forty-first style. Five. And then there is one more page with writing on it.
He had never turned past the blanks.
Six years. He had that notebook in a drawer in the kitchen and in the van and on the bed in a hospice room, and he had gone to it four hundred times for a style, and he had never once gone past the end of the styles, because why would you.
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I found it in my kitchen on the eleventh of January because I flicked to the back of a book the way people do.
And I sat there with it open and I could not speak, and he said “what,” and I turned it round.
What it said.
I
am going to put down the part that matters. The rest is hers and his.
