The seventh of February.
They went to a salon in Brackenmere called Jonquil’s on a Saturday morning and I was there, because Pia asked me to be, which I will admit floored me.
There were four of us: Mattie, Pia, me, and Enid.
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Enid Pryor is Carys’s mother.
She is sixty-six. She is the woman who cut a seventeen-year-old’s hair off at a kitchen table in 2006, and she and Mattie had not been in a room together since the funeral.
Pia asked for her. Not him, and not me. Pia.
She said, and Mattie repeated it to me in the car park afterwards with a completely straight face: “She should see one that’s the right way round.”
Nine.
The stylist was a woman called Noor who had been briefed within an inch of her life and who was, in the event, better at it than any of us. She let Pia sit in the chair for about ten minutes first, just sitting, with the gown on, looking at herself.
And then she said: “Right. You tell me when and you tell me where.”
And Pia put her hand flat on her own collarbone and said: “Here.”
Ninety-one
centimetres came off. It took twenty minutes and it was in four plaits, because Noor did it in sections so that it would be manageable, and three of them went into a bag for a charity that makes wigs for children.
And one of them is in a box on top of the wardrobe in Mattie’s room, because a woman wrote keep the first plait for me in biro in a notebook in 2020.
Enid did not say anything the whole time. Not one word, for forty minutes.
And when it was done, and Pia turned round in the chair and looked at her, Enid Pryor — who I had been fully prepared to dislike for the rest of my life — said: “Oh, you look like your mother.”
And then she went outside and stood by the window with her back to us for quite a while.
And Pia, who I
asked, eventually, in my own kitchen, in the April — because by then the girls were in and out of each other’s houses and I had earned about half a question.
I asked her why she had waited, between the times she asked him.
Education
