Nicola Barker - The Yips

‘Do a Mia Farrow. You’ve got the perfect shaped face for a shorter cut. Good cheekbones. Strong jaw. If we just …’

‘Take it all off?’

Sheila’s eyes widen.

Valentine drops the hair and takes a hasty step back. ‘I mean not if you’re —’

‘Why the hell not?’ Sheila interrupts, with a grin.

‘It’s a big decision.’ Valentine’s cheeks redden again.

‘Blow it!’ Sheila chuckles. ‘Let’s live dangerously. It’s only hair . Let’s take it all off! What do I care?!’

‘Maybe think about it for a while,’ Valentine cautions (alarmed by how readily Sheila is now embracing the idea). ‘I could put the kettle on …’

‘Nope. The decision’s made.’ Sheila won’t be gainsaid. ‘Go grab your scissors. Let’s do this! It’ll be fun!’

She pauses. ‘I mean so long as it isn’t too much trouble …’

‘Not at all!’

Valentine takes hold of Sheila’s hair again. ‘We’ll need to be quite brutal. I may have to get Dad’s clippers out to add some definition around the nape and the ear …’

‘It’ll always grow.’ Sheila shrugs, gung-ho.

‘Okay.’ Valentine drops the hair, her mind racing. ‘Okay …’ she repeats, blankly. ‘Good. Right. Well you’d better follow me through to the kitchen, then.’

She grabs Nessa’s hand and they walk down the hallway together, past the studio and into the rear section of the house.

The kitchen is a cheerful, well-lit room with a wooden, enamel-topped kitchen table standing square in the middle of a worn but period-appropriate linoleum floor.

‘Wow!’ Sheila appraises the beige and green cabinets, impressed. ‘I’ve not laid eyes on anything like these in a while. What are they? Painted tin or painted enamel?’

‘Uh … I’m not really sure — enamel, I should imagine.’

Valentine is lifting a cat off a red rocking chair and then placing Nessa on to it, with her doll for company and a picture book. Nessa hunkers down, obligingly.

Sheila touches the curtains, wistfully (they’re in an old, white cotton, printed with little red apples). ‘Isn’t it funny how something as insignificant as a piece of old curtain material can call back so many memories? Be so redolent of another period?’

‘Dad loved this kitchen,’ Valentine murmurs, opening a drawer in a slightly battered red and white dresser in search of her dad’s clippers. ‘Poor Mum wasn’t quite so taken with it, though.’

‘Is your mum at home today?’ Sheila wonders.

‘You just missed her.’ Valentine locates the clippers and places them on the table. ‘She’s popped into town with one of her old friends from … from before …’ Valentine falters, unsure how much Sheila knows of her personal history.

‘Before the accident.’ Sheila nods, unabashed.

‘Yeah. A couple of her old pals still help out sometimes. Take her on day trips and stuff. They’re very good with her — very patient.’

Valentine unwinds the black, electric cord from around the body of the clippers and then pushes the plug into a socket located low in the wall. She straightens up. ‘We’ll need to wet your hair before the cut. I’ll grab a couple of spare towels from the airing cupboard.’

She disappears for a brief interlude.

Sheila, meanwhile, has a fond chuckle at the red and white bread box and matching sugar, salt, tea and coffee canisters. She runs her fingers over the small, glass knobs on the cabinets then inspects the wide collection of period enamel-ware on the rack above the dresser.

‘You tend to forget how incredibly satisfying really good design can be,’ she volunteers as Valentine returns to the room clutching a couple of clean towels, ‘how enriching to the soul it is just being surrounded by lovely things — seeing them and using them, touching them …’

‘Mum and Noel think it’s like living in a museum’ — Valentine places the towels on to the draining-board and plugs up the sink — ‘but I’ve always loved it.’ She pauses, smiling dreamily. ‘I guess it’s a hangover from my dad.’ She shrugs, the smile fading. ‘We definitely had our issues, but a passion for forties design was one of the few things we really shared. We’d spend half our lives at loggerheads and the other half hunting for special pieces together at car-booters and jumble sales.’

‘That’s good, though, surely?’ Sheila avers. ‘Healthy.’

‘I suppose so,’ Valentine muses, turning on the taps, ‘although sometimes I feel kind of smothered by them — you know, all these … these things — by the need to protect them, preserve them, against Mum and Nessa and Noel. Then I feel guilty, like I’m being really selfish.’

‘Must be quite confusing,’ Sheila sympathizes.

Valentine gazes at Sheila, frowning. ‘Yeah …’ She nods, tucking some hair behind her ear and then lightly touching the same hand to her throat (where the blotching has now faded a little). ‘They just don’t seem to understand that it’s the only positive way I have of engaging with Dad now he’s gone. There’s so much other stuff left over, so much bad stuff, all these feelings of … well … I dunno …’ she trails off.

‘Abandonment,’ Sheila contributes.

‘I can hardly blame him for dying of a heart attack!’ Valentine grins, lopsidedly. ‘It’s weird, though,’ she continues, frowning, suddenly thoughtful, ‘because I was always the one who argued with him — about pretty much anything and everything — but now it’s like I’ve taken over the dad role. I’m constantly getting it in the neck for trying to preserve … for being the only real grown-up …’ She scowls. ‘It’s like I hate him and I’ve become him — the controlling one, the bully. I dunno. It’s really, really strange.’

‘There’s always the tattooing,’ Sheila volunteers, ‘that’s his real legacy to you, surely?’

‘Yeah’ — Valentine nods — ‘although I was hardly the world’s most enthusiastic apprentice. And he always really hated my experimental work.’

‘You’d be appalled if you saw the state of the rectory.’ Sheila shakes her head, forlornly. ‘It’s just a horrible mess — a celebration of all the worst kinds of design. An awful mish-mash of the seventies and the eighties. Full of old, inherited pieces nobody else’d give house-room to … All these heavy, dark sideboards and grim, collapsing bookshelves.’

Valentine beckons her over to the kitchen sink which has slowly filled up with warm water, then drapes one of the towels around her shoulders. ‘Hold this in place to protect your clothes.’

She grabs an apron from a peg on the back of the door and covers her dress with it, tying it into a neat bow at the back.

‘It’s life’s subtle, little niceties — these fine, almost honest aesthetic details …’ — Sheila sweeps out her arm, majestically — ‘which are so easy to lose touch with when you’re drawn to a so-called “higher calling”.’

She breaks off, slightly embarrassed. ‘I know it sounds pretentious, but it’s so easy to become brutalized by the all-consuming make-do-and-mend world of the C of E …’ She scowls. ‘It’s recently started to dawn on me what a great pity it is — what a waste, how dangerous it is, even — to close down that side of yourself. To turn away from external beauty as a kind of necessary function of self-realization. It shouldn’t ever need to be a question of either/or.’

‘Although maybe it’s quite nice — quite refreshing — to just ditch all the trivial stuff,’ Valentine muses, her mind turning to Milah, ‘and focus solely on the renunciation part.’

Sheila bends forward over the sink.

‘But is it just trivial?’ she argues. ‘Don’t people create art, celebrate beauty — in whatever medium: words, sounds, clothes or images — as a way of describing the indescribable, a way of engaging with a higher realm, a spiritual realm, even? There are some paintings — some poems — which seem to speak directly to the soul.’