Wake Up Happy Every Day (22 page)

And the report they produce is thorough too. More like an academic monograph than a quote from a tradesman. Eighty closely argued pages suggesting that transplant isn’t really an option. Neither is weaving, however hand-loomed. It’s the full syrup they recommend for me. And their catalogue – as thick, as lavishly illustrated and as creamily glossy as a high-end cookbook – is there to show how follicle-support technology has changed since the days when an ageing TV presenter tried to defy time by sticking rough hexagons of roadkill fur on his bonce.

No, the hair-replacement therapy recommended for me is emphatically bespoke and undetectable. It’s a modern wonder of the world, up there with Teflon and nicotine patches. It’s stealth hair. And, like every other great leap forward of the last seventy years, it’s almost certainly a by-product of both Nazi experiments and the space race.

‘Are you sure about this, love?’ says Sarah.

Sarah’s worry is that this might be a humiliation too far for me.

‘It’s just that there’s such a stigma about wigs, isn’t there?’

And there is. It’s because hair – for men as well as for women – is about sexual display, isn’t it? I mean this is obvious. Men are such peacocks really. Even the fat sweating ones you see on the BART wearing cheap suits and comedy ties. Every man is a Samson in his own head and cutting his crowning glory is – as the writers of the Bible knew only too well – like slicing off his penis and mincing it. A bit like it anyway.

And it’s not even as if I’m totally bald now. Plenty of men my age are balder. There’s no doubt the ranks are thinning, however. My hair is a picket line where the workers, the union rank and file, are gradually being persuaded back to work while the hardcore activists – the ones that are left round the cooling brazier – grow greyer, colder, weaker. My head is a large egg in an increasingly ragged nest. If we’re not to be stopped at airports by suspicious homeland security personnel with their armoury of facial-recognition devices, then hair replacement is a necessity. I can see that.

‘I mean we don’t have to travel. We could stay here.’

‘Yeah, but what about your mum?’

‘She could come here.’

‘Yeah, she could. But she won’t.’

Back in England, Sarah’s mum came to us once in five years. And she lives in Enfield, all of two hours away. Tops. My limited research on the subject tends me towards the opinion that the average mum likes to be the visitee, rather than the visitor.

‘Let’s not think about it. Let’s just go for it,’ I say. I have got quite fatalistic by this time anyway. And people have worse things to wear. Colostomy bags, glass eyes, false legs. Compared to those kinds of accessories a wig is nothing really. No hardship at all.

Dr Don reminds me of some of the proven drawbacks of baldness. The lack of self-esteem, the absence of bald leading men in the movies, the fact that no bald man has been elected president since the dawn of the television age.

‘Not all that many women either,’ says Sarah.

Dr Don – obviously the most people-pleasing of the trio – tries to make me feel better by hinting that almost every male celeb you’ve ever heard of has been under their care at some point. Even the really young ones. He won’t name them – discretion is his watchword – but I run through a few names and he nods at all of them. Jagger? Nod. McCartney? Nod. I move forward a generation. Morrissey? Nod. Bono? Emphatic nod. I move forward another few decades of pop years. Timberlake? Nod. Forward again. The Jonas Brothers? Justin Bieber? Those insanely hirsute One Direction boys? Nod, nod and nod again.

Blimey. There’s a lot less hair around than you’d think. The world is actually a pretty bald place.

So I allow Dr Nate, Dr Valerie and Dr Don to assess my strand type and search their database of donors. When, eleven minutes later, the perfect match is found, Dr Don’s phone buzzes. He’s thrilled to tell me that my donor is a handsome Icelander called Siggi. They show us a photograph of a young bloke scowling. He looks like he could be a cop in one of those Scandinavian murder shows. He couldn’t be the killer because in Nordic noir it’s always an angry middle-aged man, usually a top civil servant, often bald, that does the killing. An interesting contrast with American cop shows where it’s a hot pneumatic blonde who kills, and with British murder stories, where it is so often an acerbic, well-preserved female member of the upper middle class what done it. A magistrate. You want to know what frightens a society: look at their TV killers.

Dr Nate tells us the process. ‘Siggi will be visited at home in Akureyri and given a diet sheet and a lifestyle focus to ensure his own hair stays in the most robust state possible as it grows.’

‘Absolutely tip-top condition,’ says Dr Valerie.

‘And he’ll be regularly monitored,’ says Dr Don.

‘When his hair has reached the required length he will be carefully shorn . . .’

‘And then the tresses will be vacuum-packed . . .’

‘And couriered over to San Francisco . . .’

‘Where our team of specialists will work on it . . .’

‘It’s a kind of farming basically,’ I say.

‘Organic though . . .’

‘More or less free range . . .’ Dr Valerie and Dr Don are smiling. Dr Nate isn’t. You can tell he sees all this kind of talk as essentially frivolous. And he makes sure the others don’t interrupt any more. He quells them with a look and a stiff, chopping hand gesture and delivers the rest of the spiel in a steady monotone. When he’s finished I explain it back to him, just to make sure I’ve got it.

‘So, I remain linked to the donor as long as I keep paying the standing orders?’

‘Yes, the payments ensure that Siggi remains a donor just for you.’

Out in Akureyri Siggi Einarsson gets on with living, his hair under contract to me alone. I wonder what he does for a job.

‘I think he’s a teacher. All our donors are of the highest quality,’ says Dr Don.

‘Trustworthy and respectable members of the community,’ adds Dr Valerie.

‘So maybe not a teacher then. You read the news, right?’

Nate just curls his lip. It’s the hair that matters – who cares about the donor’s lifestyle. He’s obviously a loser or he wouldn’t be selling his own body parts. Even minor ones like hair. Dr Nate doesn’t have time for banter.

In any case the quality of the hair isn’t the main thing for Dr Nate. He is all about scalp visibility and he gets almost animated as he explains how chip-controlled micro wizardry ensures that Siggi’s hair is punched strand by strand into a layer of polyurethane as thin and as malleable as skin itself, thus allowing for a truly realistic look and feel. Someone – a lover, Dr Val suggests with a twinkle – could pat, ruffle, tug, stroke, pull my new hair and not realise it was all Siggi’s cast-offs. I could have my hair washed, shampooed, blow-dried and set, all undetected. I could safely have an Indian head massage. In fact I could have a proper rolling in the dirt street-fight. Urchins and muggers could pull out handfuls and the young guttersnipes would never twig my secret. I could have my hair examined forensically for nits and still not be outed. In fact the nits themselves would be fooled and make themselves right at home.

‘OK, Doctor,’ I say. ‘I get it. It’s a damn good wig.’

‘The best,’ says Dr Nate.

Next to him Dr Valerie and Dr Don smile and produce the paperwork for me to sign.

‘You’ll need three, of course,’ says Dr Nate.

‘At least,’ says Dr Val.

‘So people think your hair is growing,’ says Dr Don.

‘And you must always have them professionally fitted.’ Dr Nate getting the last word, like he got the first word. I bet Dr Val and Dr Don have some splendid bitching sessions about him. Of course they do. He’s so clearly the talent. They must hate him. Admin always wants to murder talent.

The hair takes far less time to sort than the suit. I hope it wasn’t too much of a shock for Siggi, I hope he didn’t have an air-guitar competition he needed his hair for. For some reason I’m really sure Siggi is a full-on head-banging mosher. Teacher or not. Anyhow, a couple of weeks later and I’m sitting in front of a mirror trying to get used to this new bloke, this movie star, staring back at me. Dr Nate, Dr Valerie and Dr Don coo and purr and want to take photographs for their website, which we won’t allow them obviously.

I think Dr Nate is about to argue. Dr Nate is the artist of the three, the visionary. He is proud of his craft and, like any artist, any craftsman, he wants to show the world. Dr Valerie and Dr Don, on the other hand, are understanding of my position.

‘Discretion . . .’ begins Dr Valerie.

‘Is our watchword,’ finishes Dr Don.

Dr Nate sighs, and to cheer him up I say, ‘Damn fine work. Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.’ And, finally, he smiles. Which means the others smile too.

The thing is, it is beautiful. I’d never realised how much I’d hated losing my hair. I mean, I never did anything with it. Short back and sides as a kid, a bit spiky in the late seventies, a bit of Sun In in the 1980s. And that’s it. And my hair loss started early as if, depressed by my lack of any sign of tonsorial development, my hair lost interest in our partnership and began to leave the building.

Not like Russell’s. When he was a first-year student at the Poly his hair was long and spiked and black on top and the sides and blond with blue streaks at the back. Combine that with his very skinny, very white face with its long sharp nose, and he looked like a parrot. He looked ludicrous, but this was the era of ludicrous. Ludicrous ruled. It was the time of The Cure and The Bunnymen, of Kajagoogoo and A Flock of Seagulls. A time when hair was often worn vertical and Krazy Kolor was big. A time when fashion caught Psitticosis. When all the cool cats wanted to look like parrots.

Later, after uni, Russell seemed to travel back through all the ages of hair, moving from this parrot-gothic, through short punky hedgehog spines, to a brief flirtation with a Beatley moptop, then skipping back further towards rockabilly quiffs and flat-tops, before ending up with an artfully tousled grown-out crop suggestive of special ops forces in World War Two. The raffish look of one of the original SAS officers maybe, and that’s how he was wearing it on the day he died and so it’s what I have now too.

Thanks to the miracles of modern technology, the artistry of the three doctors and the sacrifice of Siggi of Iceland, my hair is back and better than it ever was. As I tease and twist it in the mirror, I can practically feel my testosterone count rising. Yes it’s fake, yes it’s absolutely, entirely inauthentic, but what does that mean, really? It means it’s even better than the real thing. Nearly everything good in this world is fake and inauthentic. And nearly everything truly horrible is natural. Microwaves good, smallpox bad. Music good, earthquakes a bit shit. Fake hair good, baldness crap.

Scarlett comes over. Tentatively, she pushes her hand through my new rug. Then she pulls. Then she tugs. Hard.

‘Ow,’ I say. ‘Ow, ow, ow.’

‘Ow,’ she says back. Out loud. This is a game she knows and likes. And then she laughs and almost, but not quite, manages to clap her hands. And then she says a whole sentence. Well, almost. ‘Oh, my actual god,’ she says.

Twenty-four

CATHERINE

What, Catherine wonders, would life have been like if she’d stayed working in the library? She’d liked it there at first. The Hildreth branch library where she’d worked was small and always packed.

People think that libraries are quiet places, but they’re not. They’re full all day every day with people looking for jobs, updating their CVs, or just sitting about flicking through the magazines while their children run around tagging each other between the stacks. Sometimes people even glance at the books. A library is the last public space where you can just sit and be without someone insisting you buy a flat white cappucino and a blueberry muffin.

She had quickly got to know all the regulars. Mr Stooks who read a western a day and whose wife read the same number of Mills and Boons. Catherine liked to imagine them side by side in bed, him galloping across the prairie closing in on the bad man in the black hat, while next to him but in another universe his wife swooned in the arms of a swarthy polo player.

Who else? Jade Feasey, all of eighteen, who looked like a right slapper with her microskirts and make-up, but quietly went through all the books relating to starting your own business. Mrs Denby who kept a goat in her garden. Mr Eagleton who was a
Janes Fighting Ships
obsessive and knew everything about the world’s navies. You wanted to avoid getting in a conversation with him. Mr Plantagenet who smelt of pot noodles. Mrs Welsummer who smelt of turds.

It was in the library in Hildreth that Catherine had come across her first writers’ group, not that she’d wanted to join one then. They’d frightened her a bit with their air of barely concealed competition. They would go into the little meeting room on a Wednesday night like poker players trying to look relaxed in the face of a big pot. They would smile and talk about houses, holidays, schools and grandchildren on the way in but there was the giveaway stiffness that betrayed how nervous and keyed-up they were. Catherine saw the same thing years later in soldiers before they went on patrol. The same little tells. For the squaddies the conversation was fanny and football but the tells were the same, the same tension running down the neck and across the shoulders. The same little twitches.