Shoes and ships and milking sheds

 

Scissors from a carpet bag. Crackling, a leopard-skin coat comes off. On a wooden stool at a disadvantage I look up at the mirror. Her reflection, the same age as mine, stands behind me, aggressively sophisticated, rhubarb and custard short hair and darker roots, fingernails as sharp as the scissors, long skirts, ankle boots, jangling bangles and beads. I am in awe of her, as always, my hair limp and overlong. It's thirty years since I wore mascara and there's nowhere for my face to hide.

 

The bright glare of cold light pools on me from ceiling fitments and is answered from the mirrors. We talk about things we wouldn't in a salon: The menopause, regularly. Lodgers, sporadically, Spanish films, always. I sit on my own kitchen stool in my own shiny unkind bathroom and she cuts my hair. Trust, potential humiliation and very sharp edges - everything is in her hands. Who else ever has their fingers in my hair?

 

 

She tells me there is now a man in her life and the scissors move a little faster, then stop in mid-snip, her voice trailing. She's listening to the city sound of evening birdsong. "It always makes me think of milking."

 

She's not in my bright cold bathroom, she's not talking to the man she's met on the Internet, she's not wearing her long London fashions and she has no scissors in her hand. She's brought home the cows with sisters one and two. They are laughing and singing on low wooden stools in a dark shed, their heads pressed against the warm sides of twelve cows in Kerry. And the birds are singing like tonight, like always.