‘Hi Kate,’ Jody called out, her shoulders tensing beneath Amy’s hands.
‘You get the note?’ Kate asked Amy, ignoring Jody’s presence entirely.
Amy nodded shortly, turning back to study Jody’s hair in the mirror again.
‘And?’
‘Later.’
‘But—’
‘I think Jody looks gorgeous with the blonde streaks, Kate. Was there any reason you suggested red?’
Kate strode to the back of the salon to store her handbag before reappearing, her stilettos clicking over the floor as she tied her apron. ‘The streaks are boring.’
‘Boring?’ Amy asked tightly.
‘Well, yeah.’ Kate shrugged defensively.
‘I don’t think they’re boring. Are you really,
really
sure you want to change your colour, sweetie?’ Amy turned back to Jody.
Jody gave Kate a look of pure adoration. ‘Definitely.’
Amy scrunched down the urge to have a good yell, knowing full well the only reason Kate had suggested the change was because she was manipulating Jody to prop up her own ego. Not for the first time did Amy think her employee should come with a warning label.
‘Alright,’ she said reluctantly. ‘Kate, I know you’d love to take care of Jody, so I won’t get in the way.’ She shot Jody a soft smile and patted her back. ‘It was marvellous to see you, sweetie, but I have to go next door for my first appointment. We’ll catch up soon, alright?’
‘Yeah, sure, Amy,’ Jody replied happily.
Amy didn’t even bother to wait for Kate’s response. Instead, she purposefully strode into the barbershop and made a call to post an advertisement in the
West Australian
’s employment pages while outrage still zinged through her system.
She was so caught up brooding, she almost didn’t hear the knock on the barbershop door moments later.
She peered out and saw Keith, a fireman from the local station, waiting with a grin, pointing at the locked door. He was one of her regulars and only ever came in for a haircut when his wife threatened to divorce him or his superiors threatened to fire him. Castigating herself all over again for not having things together, Amy forced yet another smile and began her day in earnest.
It turned out to be a truly hectic day that didn’t stop until a quarter to six that evening. Finally waving off the last of her customers, Amy limped into Gentlemen Prefer Blondes expecting to find it empty after Roslynn had ducked her head into the barber shop fifteen minutes prior to say goodbye. Instead, she found Kate sitting in one of the salon chairs, reading a magazine.
‘Amy, can we talk?’ Kate asked as Amy walked past her with a tray full of dishes, setting it down next to the small sink at the rear of the shop.
Amy paused, mentally braced herself, then turned to face her employee.
For the first time in her recollection, Kate looked vulnerable. Her mascara was smudged, her lipstick faded and she had dark shadows under her eyes.
Amy squashed the feeling of sympathy that immediately came to the fore. She was a lady who well and truly understood the importance of outward appearances and in any other circumstance would have gently hinted that Kate’s façade was a little cracked, but this wasn’t one of those days.
‘Yeah. We do need to talk.’ She turned back to the sink and began running hot water. ‘Or more to the point,
I
need to talk to
you
. Could you clarify something for me, Kate?’
‘Yeah. What?’
‘Why does Mel always leave every time you two fight? Why not you?’ She didn’t bother looking up when Kate didn’t immediately reply. She was done with worrying about how her words affected other people in this particular instance.
‘Why d’you ask?’ Kate’s voice had an edge to it. It was the same edge she always got at the first hint of criticism, no matter how gentle.
Kate’s over-defensiveness had always grated on Amy but this time, for the first time, she felt the need to react. No more being nice and making excuses for someone else’s crappy behaviour. She’d had enough. One look at Jody’s hopeful, infatuated expression this morning, the expression of a good lady, a kind lady, wanting a bit of love in return and being strung along, had been the final straw.
‘Because your job depends on it,’ she said calmly.
‘What?’ Kate exclaimed. ‘What do you mean my job depends on it? I wasn’t the one who quit. Mel quit! Not me!’
‘And apparently Jody needed a different hair colour too, even though it looked horrible when you finished.’ Amy submerged her hands in soapy water, rubbing a plate so hard she was vaguely worried it would break.
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
She finally turned around. ‘Everything.’
As expected, Kate didn’t appear the least bit repentant. In fact, she was looking at Amy as if she’d grown a second head, a pair of horns and a tail. ‘In all the time you’ve worked here, have you ever seen me, or Mel for that matter, let a customer walk out of here looking like Jody did today?’
Kate looked baffled. ‘I’m not following you.’
Amy sighed. ‘I know you’re not, because you don’t get it. I hope Jody gets it though. I hope she’s got a good friend who’ll tell her she looked better before and I
really
hope she’ll trust me enough to come back and let me change her hair back when I call her and tell her she’s won a free cut and colour next week.’
Kate just stared at her.
It was no use. Amy took her hands out of the water and dried them on her apron. ‘Kate, you’re a brilliant, talented hair stylist, God knows how I’m going to replace you, but this can’t go on. I can’t deal with your need for drama and I have a feeling your friends won’t be able to for much longer, either. I’m letting you go.’
She watched Kate absorb her words. It was like witnessing someone being punched in the stomach in slow motion.
‘
What?
’
Amy desperately wanted to turn back to doing the dishes so she didn’t have to face Kate’s upset, but didn’t. Although she was really angry, furious even, with both Kate and with herself for not fixing things sooner, she didn’t want to trivialise what was happening.
‘I’ll pay you out for the rest of the month,’ Amy said, her voice soft. ‘But I think it would be better if you took the time off. I think you should know I’ll be calling Mel tonight and offering her her job back.’
‘
Mel?
’ Kate shrieked. ‘She quit!’
‘Because you didn’t give her the choice, did you? What was she going to do? Come back in here this morning to watch you putting on a performance with Jody? That’s why you lined Jody up to come in today, wasn’t it? Just in case Mel wanted to keep her job.’ Amy knew she was right when Kate opened her mouth to say something and shut it again with a snap.
She squashed down the urge to say more, to rail at Kate for manipulating someone who deeply cared for her into repeatedly quitting her job, making sacrifices for her and looking foolish, just as Kate had left Jody looking foolish today.
Kate would have to learn that you could only push people so far before they pushed back and right now, as hard as it was, Amy was the person who had to do it.
She braced her shoulders and waited for Kate to say something, to begin the inevitable tantrum that usually accompanied a challenge to her status quo. It wasn’t long coming and it was just as ballistic as Amy had been dreading.
‘You fucking bitch!’ Kate began a long tirade against Amy’s faults, her failure as an employer, her taste in décor, clothes, friends. She even stooped so low as to rant about Gerald, who chose that moment to finally recognise his name, woofing quietly when it was yelled at full volume accompanied by a tirade of unrepeatable insults. The more Kate yelled, ranted and raved, the calmer Amy grew.
For years–forever–she’d done anything she could to divert or avoid angry confrontations completely, but she refused to back down now. She owed it to Jody, she owed it to Mel and she owed it to herself. She should have done this years ago.
She skirted around her hysterical ex-employee, picked up a broom and began sweeping the salon in long purposeful strokes until Kate finally found the sense to calm down, collect her things and storm out. Amy didn’t bother asking for her key just now. She’d sort all that out later.
The minute Kate left, Amy set aside the broom, sank down on the floor next to Gerald and gave him a pat. When her composure was restored, she retrieved her phone to hire herself back a brilliant hairstylist. She had a gut feeling that if she convinced Mel to come back, this time she’d be here to stay.
Ben was living in a blur of grey as ideas and inspiration sleeted by him in the form of tiny black words, thousands of them, all surrounded by a haze of white noise. The first night after his return from his weekend with Amy, he’d woken up with the opening line of his new travel book and hadn’t moved from his computer other than to order take-out, drink, shower and answer the call of nature for days, maybe weeks.
The phone rang a few times, probably more than he noticed, but he ignored it. Anyone who knew him would understand, eventually.
The only person he thought to call was Amy. Every morning he woke up with a picture of her in his mind, then the ideas would come again and he told himself he’d call her after he got the next chapter written, and then the next. He’d never had the words come this strongly and he had a furiously frantic feeling that if he didn’t get them all down at once and in order, they’d disappear and he’d never be this lucky again.
Ross wasn’t going to be happy. This wasn’t a travel book, not in the usual sense, certainly. It was something completely different. Autobiographical even.
Without even realising it at first, he’d found himself including anecdotes from his childhood in boarding school, about his awkward relationship with his parents in chapters that only passingly mentioned his relocation to Australia. In fact, other than mentioning a certain little blonde as the source of his inspiration, his manuscript took a direction that was entirely and extremely personal.
There was no structure in his work to speak of, but an insane hunch told Ben he was writing his best stuff yet and he didn’t want to stop. He could edit it all later and get rid of the bits that bared too much of his soul.
Despite his public persona, he’d always been an intensely private man and this would be rolling over and exposing his belly to the press for a disembowelling. At the moment he didn’t care. It took him a little over two weeks to finish his first draft and when he finally came up for air it was with a gasp.
Amy.
When he reached for his phone, the battery was flat. How long had it been like that? He shook his head. Couldn’t be that long. It wasn’t until he charged it up and saw the date, along with eighty-three missed calls, that he realised how much of a hideous faux pas he’d committed. It was one thing to be incommunicado for a week, quite another to be off the radar for two.
Some time during the sleep-deprived haze of the past seventeen days, he’d forgotten that the woman in his head wasn’t the woman who inspired him so completely, who he was so eager to talk to, see, smell, touch, right now.
That
woman, the real Amy, probably wasn’t too happy about his absence from her life for so long without a word. Damn.
Bracing himself for an onslaught of abuse, Ben procrastinated enough to have a shower and a shave, run a pair of clippers over his head and make himself something more substantial than a bowl of cereal to eat before he gave her a call.
‘Hello? Ben?’
‘Forgive me?’ he asked, then winced at the ice-cold silence that greeted him for the next few seconds.
‘No,’ she said softly after a while. ‘Not yet. Where have you been?’
‘Here.’ Normally good with words, he didn’t really have any at the ready right now. ‘I, ah . . . I was writing and I lost track of time.’
‘For over two weeks?’
‘It’s embarrassing, really. If it helps, I thought to call you, I thought of you every day but I know that’s probably not much of a defence. I don’t know how to make it up to you.’
‘Neither do I,’ Amy replied in a tone that Ben couldn’t decipher. He resisted the urge to punch himself. ‘Why didn’t you call me back? Or answer the door when I came by?’
‘My phone was flat and I genuinely didn’t hear the bell.’ He grimaced at the poor excuse, vaguely remembering his door bell ringing at some time or another. ‘I didn’t realise so much time had gone by. It’s never hit me like this. The ideas came and I got so busy . . .’ His words trailed off into silence. It was a silence Amy didn’t help him fill. ‘If it makes you feel any better, I didn’t call
anyone
back. My editor wants to cut my throat, my agent wants my liver and my PA, who’s a vegetarian pacifist, wants to chop me up into tiny little bits.’
His words hung in the air for an excruciating minute before he heard Amy take a deep breath.
‘So you were writing the whole time?’
‘
Yes
. I completely, utterly lost track of the time. Please forgive me. I assure you, I promise you, it wasn’t intentional and I mean it. I really did think of you. Every day.’ Ben had never grovelled in his life but he was doing it now. He knew that leaving it two weeks without a by-your-leave after their holiday was nigh on lynching material. He just prayed she’d find clemency.
There was a further silence during which all he could hear was the sound of his own pounding heart and some miscellaneous blurred background noise on the other end of the phone.
‘You’re lucky, you know.’
‘Am I?’ He held his breath.
‘My best friend’s an artist. I’m used to her. She gets distracted, too.’
Ben exhaled in a rush while making a note to buy every painting in Myf’s next exhibition. ‘Thank God.’
‘But never for this long.’ Amy fell silent again. There was none of the usual bubble in her tone and that genuinely worried him.
He didn’t quite know what to say. She wasn’t giving him anything to work with. It was excruciating staying quiet and waiting for her to talk again, but he had a feeling he could quite easily put his foot in it and didn’t want to risk it.
‘Did you really lose track of time or were you lying?’