Jonathan Lee - High Dive

‘You’re sure?’ Wendy said.

‘Yep.’

‘All?’

‘No! To here, basically, and then bleached. Or highlights. Yep, highlights. But nothing that will look ginger.’

Wendy’s features formed a grimace. She was an expert grimacer.

‘On a skinny little girl like you,’ Wendy said. ‘A girl who’s pretty in that waify sort of way …’ She took a further slurp of juice. With great caution she placed the glass down on a ledge. ‘Here’s what I’m thinking. This is the question on my mind. It’s whether you have the neck for it, Freya. Because, as your adviser, I’ve got to say a lot of light is going to be falling on that neck, is the thing, and — with your cute little features — going shorter might make you look a bit, how to say it …’

‘Boyish?’

‘Ethiopian orphan,’ Wendy said.

Freya lifted her chin and studied herself. What orphan-like qualities would a bob cut reveal? She was pale, brown-haired, brown-eyed, ordinary, but in the mirror now a starving Ethiopian stared back at her. She crossed and recrossed her legs. Barbed comments were Wendy’s brand of friendship but they could also be a kind of contagion. You walked out of there worrying about problems you probably didn’t have.

She thought about the Grand, her impending shift behind the reception desk. Her father, the Deputy General Manager, generally managed to fix it so that on Wednesdays she only had to work the afternoons. He too was a customer of Wendy Hoyt. On a quarterly basis he got his head, eyebrows and ears done, a 3-for-1 deal the barber refused to do.

‘Tell you what,’ Freya said. ‘Just the usual trim.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

The decision cast a spell: her heartbeat slowed. She felt herself relaxing back into the comfy disappointment of her life since leaving school.

‘Better safe than sorry, eh?’

‘Probably,’ Freya said.

‘Let’s get you washed, then, with that strawberry stuff you like, and you can tell me your plans for Maggie Thatcher.’

PHILIP FINCH, KNOWN to everyone but his aged mother as Moose, was driving to the hotel in his fail-safe Škoda 120, a car the colour of old chocolate gone chalky. His window was wound down so he could tap ash onto the street and blow smoke out of the side of his mouth. It was important that his daughter shouldn’t have to inhale his mistakes. She was in the passenger seat wearing her classic early-morning look: black skirt, white blouse, an elegantly expressionless corpse. Her hair had been cut yesterday. He saw no discernible difference. He told her it looked very good.

They passed the Dyke Road Park and the Booth Museum. Freya started rummaging in the glove compartment, a minor landslide of cassettes. There was a system and she was spoiling it. ‘What are you looking for?’

‘Music.’

‘We’re five minutes away, Frey.’

She yawned. Blinked. Considered the windscreen. ‘It’s hot,’ she said.

‘There’s some Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders in there. That one I played, where were we?’

She sighed.

‘You’re sighing.’

‘Nothing good has ever been produced by a Wayne, Dad.’

‘Untrue,’ he said, and fell into a long dark reverie from which he emerged with the name Wayne Sleep.

‘Who?’

‘Or …’ Where were all the other famous Waynes? ‘John Wayne.’

‘Surname,’ she said.

‘That makes him a deeper form of Wayne. His Wayneness is in the blood.’

‘Probably a stage name,’ she said. Which, now he thought of it …

He changed down another gear — these conversations were precious — and told her she shouldn’t write things off until she’d tried them.

‘Like travelling, you mean.’

‘Like university,’ he said. ‘Travelling, Frey. There’s nothing special about travelling. This right here is travelling — going to put those back, at all? You can find yourself and lose yourself in this very car, this town.’

‘Thrill a minute,’ she said, but he thought he saw the flicker of a smile.

She was eighteen years and a dozen days old. Just yesterday, it seemed to him, she’d emerged out of an awkward bespectacled adolescence — a phase in which she’d temporarily lost the ability to be appreciative, the ability to be considerate, and the ability to be apologetic, all while causing a great proliferation of opportunities for these states to be warmly deployed. He’d noticed, of late, a big upsurge in the number of masculine glances clinging to her clothes and also in the ways she didn’t need him. Seldom asked his advice any more. Knew how to deal with difficult customers. Would one way or another soon be leaving him behind. Her mood swings had settled into a dry indifference, a much narrower emotional range. At times he felt nostalgia for her earlier anger and found himself needlessly provoking her. University! Careers! When might you learn to lock the door?

With her pale skin and dark eyes and button nose, that fatal way of raising the left eyebrow in arguments, Freya was increasingly a Xerox copy of Viv, back when they’d first got together. There was an awful pregnant pathos to this: your perfect daughter becoming your then-perfect wife, slinking into a future where she’d fall prey to certain enterprising, highly sexed individuals who were suped-up versions of the once-young you. He sometimes overheard summer staff at the Grand talking in an advanced language of sexual adventure, discussing what he assumed to be new positions or techniques. The Cambodian Trombone. The Risky Painter. South-East England Double Snow-Cone. Did anyone still do missionary? The future bares its breasts and laughs, a gaudy county fair.

Truth was, Moose hadn’t had sex in a while. The one great difficulty of his job was the fact of being surrounded, at all times, by people engaged in sexual communion. Guests were having sex against walls and on hushed carpets, in storage cupboards and on sea-view balconies, in gooseneck free-standing baths and walk-in showers and probably just occasionally on beds. Forty-five. Too young, definitely, to have taken retirement from romance. But it was more of a redundancy-type situation, wasn’t it? A severance. Lust running on without opportunity, not unlike a headless chicken. People still occasionally made remarks about his appearance — remarks interpretable as compliments — but he was often too busy to follow up on such leads. He’d had only a handful of flings with women in the years since Viv had left him for a guy called Bob; Freya at that time was thirteen. Possibly he’d have to relax his no-guest rule. There was always someone lonelier than you were. He struggled sometimes to shake the idea that his early life had been all about an excess of sex and a sense of bottled potential, and that these things had, in the rich tradition of life’s droll jokes, been replaced by an absence of sex and a sense of wasted potential.

‘New skirt,’ he said.

‘No.’

‘New haircut, though.’

‘We’ve covered this,’ she said.

He flicked the indicator. Reminded himself to waterproof the passenger window. Masking tape before autumn really kicked in. They passed a Labrador walking a lightweight woman.

Frey mumbled something.

‘You’ve become a mumbler,’ he said.

‘Wendy told me to tell you hello.’

‘Did she? That’s nice. How was she then? Still dying?’

‘Yeah. Bit more each time.’

‘Good hair though.’

‘Hmm.’

‘I bumped into her in Woolworths a few weeks back. Forgot to say. Complained to me about an ingrowing toenail. I thought it might mark a new move into realism.’

‘No,’ Freya said. ‘There was no mention of toes. She was back to brain tumours and surgeries.’

‘Shame.’