PB piece

(Another Port Brokeferry piece... this one set in the hairdressers... remember it is called 'Christine Cuts Hair'.)

EVELYN AND MORAG READ THE LOVE NOTES OF LACHLAN DAVIE

Evelyn tries to catch Morag’s eye. There’s something she wants Morag to notice. As if it cannot be true unless Morag sees it too. She clears her throat, as Blair the postman sometimes does, as if she is about to say something important. She hopes that Morag will look up from cutting Lillian Carey’s hair.

Instead, it is Christine who looks up, and that is not what Evelyn wants. She fusses over the arrangement of shampoo bottles on the shelf beside her. Sets the scissors and hairbrushes straight, the combs and silver clips. Then she checks in the mirror to see if Christine is still looking or if she has bent her head over the bookings in the diary again.

‘It’s turned out nice,’ says Lillian Carey.

‘It has that,’ says Morag pausing to look out of the shop front window at the day. Mad Martin on the other side of the glass picks a cigarette end out of the gutter and slips it into his top pocket. Morag shakes her head and sets to once more with her comb and her scissors.

Evelyn sees again what she wants Morag to see. There, at the nape of Christine’s neck. Just beneath the hair. Writing, in black ink. She knows it could not have been written by Christine herself, not even with a mirror balanced to show herself in another mirror. Evelyn cannot see the words, not all of them. But she thinks she sees a name there. One that she recognises. That is what she wants Morag to see. Her seeing it would confirm it.

‘Can I get you a tea or a coffee, Mrs Carey?’ says Evelyn, leaning in close, one hand on Morag’s back, gently tapping against her as if she was sending a secret message in morse code.

‘Tea would be lovely, dear. Thank you.’

Morag looks at Evelyn in the mirror. Follows the nod of Evelyn’s head and sees what Evelyn sees: the writing on Christine’s neck. She looks back at Evelyn, one eyebrow raised and a smile on her lips.

Then Morag moves towards the reception desk where Christine sits. She pretends to be looking over Christine’s shoulder at the list of names in the book. She is really looking more closely at the words of Lachlan Davie, written onto Christine’s skin. ‘Lachlan lies with Christine’ is what she reads. Then the words fold out of sight below her collar. A high collar today, Morag notes. All the buttons done up as though she is hiding something. Christine is writing in the book and there at the cuff of Christine’s long-sleeved blouse Morag sees other words on the skin, not so easily read, but recognisably the same hand at work.

Later, after Lillian Carey has gone, and Christine has just ‘popped out’ they laugh fit to burst at the thought of Lachlan Davie writing drunken messages all over Christine’s body. They speculate, too, on what he would write across her tits and down into her pants. They laugh most at that.