Sixteen Shades of Crazy. Rachel Trezise

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       8

      The phone at the reception desk was ringing but Rhiannon didn’t move to answer it. She was looking at herself in the giant mirror, staring at the dark fuzz on her top lip. She hadn’t been to the beautician for weeks, not since she’d asked the girl behind the counter, the skinny one with a ski-slope nose, how to go about getting rid of dull skin. Rhiannon’s face was a dingy, grey colour, like a cup of Marc’s mother’s coffee, nasty German stuff from Lidl. Eat more fruit, the girl had said, eat more bloody fruit. Fuck that. Rhiannon didn’t have time to muck around with fruit. She wanted Botox, a chemical peel or something. There was a chrome fruit basket on the shelf, full of fresh green apples. She’d only put it there to complement the colour scheme. She didn’t like apples. They were something she hadn’t grown up with. The only things she’d eaten as a kid came in watery tomato sauce – baked beans, baked beans and sausage, out of a bloody tin. She didn’t know what apples tasted like. Cider probably. She was going to get a new beautician.

      ‘Ouch!’ the woman sitting in front of her said.

      ‘Sorry, love,’ Rhiannon said. She pulled the tongs away from the woman’s head and a ginger ringlet jumped out, the scalp underneath glowing red. ‘I din’t hurt ewe, did I?’

      Rhiannon didn’t like doing weddings, and this fat woman was a bride. She was from a party of six from the Dinham Estate, all of them wearing chunky gold sovereign rings on their manky, tobacco-stained fingers. It was a wonder they could afford to come here. Rhiannon charged through the nose, but the scum from up there always found a way, nicked money off their parole officers or something. They were all desperate to look like somebody else, would spend their last quid on trying to buy a new identity, something Rhiannon understood perfectly well. She’d spent most of her life wishing her arse was skinny, wishing her skin was white, wishing her hair was straight. From the age of eleven she’d spent her evenings at her uncle’s kitchen table sharing her auntie’s homework from the local Christmas trimming factory, dipping baubles in a vat of glitter. For every hundred she got 1p. She was saving to go to the salon on City Road in Cardiff. It was the only place in Wales with ammonia strong enough to relax her Afro-Caribbean kink. The customers worshipped the woman who ran it, treated her like a priestess; practically curtsied when they gave her a massive tip. With Rhiannon’s head for business it didn’t take long for her to realize that sort of power was worth a fortune.

      She’d been a hairdresser for nineteen years and she took pride in her work. She’d only ever had one complaint, from Kylie Beynon, a stroppy little bitch from the top of Gwendolyn Street. She’d sent a solicitor’s letter to the salon, demanding compensation for a couple of hair extensions that had supposedly fallen out. As if. Five hundred quid she wanted. Rhiannon rang the Williams twins; a couple of smackheads from the estate. They’d do anything for a bag of ten. She told them to hand-deliver the letter back to Kylie with a can of petrol and a lighter. They were only supposed to warn her off, burn the letter up in front of her face. Kylie was washing her porch carpet with flammable shampoo. The useless pair of twats dropped the letter on the floor and the whole bloody house went up. Cut a long story, the ambulance rushed Kylie to Morriston with third-degree burns and the twins swapped life in nick for the address of their drug dealer. Kylie’s still wearing a bloody wig. The best form of defence is attack.

      Rhiannon checked the woman’s blister. It wasn’t anything special. ‘Ewe’ll be OK now,’ she said, giving her fat shoulder a little squeeze. ‘A bit sore, I’ll just get somethin’ to soothe it for ewe.’

      On the other side of the salon, Kelly had tipped tea over the maid of honour. She was a big, no-nonsense peroxide blonde, sitting with her legs wide open, steam rising out of her jogging-bottoms. Lesbian probably. Kelly was on the floor, wiping the tiles with a worn tea towel. Rhiannon kicked her with the toe of her black Mary Jane’s. ‘Clean it up!’ she said. ‘And get the lady another cup.’ Bloody teenagers; all they fucking did was hang around looking young, smoking Lambert & bloody Butler, sending text messages to their pre-pubescent boyfriends. Rhiannon only put up with Kelly because Kelly was too young for the minimum wage; she gave her fifty quid on a Friday and told her to fuck off if she didn’t like it.

      Rhiannon noticed a toddler in the corner, drawing on her leather appointment book with a chewed crayon. She crouched down beside her and said, ‘Ewer a pretty likkle thing. What’s ewer name ’en?’ While it was looking for its voice, Rhiannon yanked the book out of its hands.

      It instantly started screaming, spit running down its chin, snot dribbling out of its nose. Rhiannon turned on her heel and eyed her customers. ‘Tired is she?’ she said, trying to trick one of them into claiming it. None of them bloody moved. Rhiannon hated kids, didn’t understand why anyone would want to replicate their wretched lives; take all the things they despised about themselves and give it to someone else to despise all over again, especially the inbreds from the estate. But those are the ones who multiplied fastest. It was one mistake that she was never going to make. Businesswoman she was. ‘Do ewe want some council pop, sweetie?’ she said, turning back to the kid.

      ‘Give her some Coke,’ Kelly said, leaning over Rhiannon’s shoulder.

      ‘We haven’t got any Coke!’ Rhiannon said. She was fucked if she was going to start giving Coca-Cola away to the losers from the estate; it was over a quid a bloody bottle. ‘Make urgh stop crying,’ she said, nudging Kelly in her flat 15-year-old tit. She went back to the fat woman and daubed a dollop of Vaseline on her head. ‘Are ewe nervous about tyin’ the knot ’en, love?’ she said as she replaced the cap. ‘I would be. I’d be shittin’ my bloody kecks.’

      ‘No.’ The woman shook her head. ‘It’s only a vow-renewal ceremony. I’ve been married for seventeen years. Are you still married? You’re not wearing your ring.’

      Rhiannon bit down on the hairgrip in her mouth. ‘I ain’t bloody married,’ she said. But she was married, to a chartered surveyor from Barry Island. She’d met him there in 1984, in a pub called the Pelican. She’d been sitting in the beer garden on her own, wearing a Kiss-Me-Quick hat, drinking tap water because the boyfriend who she’d gone on the day trip with, some fucking no-mark from the estate, had run away with her purse. A fella in a cream suit cut through her blurred vision, approaching her with two glasses of sparkling wine, a pink handkerchief in his breast pocket. He looked like some bloody film star. Bob Stone his name was. They got hitched a fortnight later. But nobody else knew that. And she was up shit creek without a paddle if Marc ever found out. He’d asked her to marry him again, since Ellie and Andy had announced their date, said it was about time she made a commitment to him, said he fancied a double wedding with his brother. As fuckin’ if. The last thing she’d do was share her wedding day with that couple of Muppets, even if she could get married. The woman was grinning at her through the mirror and there was a tattoo on her bottom gum, beneath her sunken teeth. ‘DEB’, it said. Rhiannon vaguely remembered a Deborah, a girl who had babysat for her a few times when her father went to Wormwood for the post office job. ‘Ooh told ewe that?’ Rhiannon said.

      ‘Your mother told me,’ she said. ‘I saw her last week in the chemist in Penmaes. I asked her if you were still hairdressing. She said she hadn’t seen you since you got married when you were twenty.’