The last days of a Smith

"Have I cut your hair before?" she asked her fumbling client; he
wriggled his shoulders so that the porcelain felt comfortably numbing
against his neck.

"Once," he mumbled.

She gently pushed his head further into the basin and started the water
running. His hair collapsed in her hands, melted into limp coils - the
basin became a rockpool of ghostly laceworm. Some water splashed in his
eyes, and stung.

"Oh!" she squeaked. "Sorry!"

He was offered a towel and held it up to the blinking, buzzing organ.
He tried to be polite.

"Not a problem."

She lathered in the shampoo, rinsed, conditioned, rinsed... The
sensations were sharp, and in quick succession. Then she rubbed the
famous, now bedraggled coiff, unhooked him from the sink and helped him
to a chair facing a five foot high mirror.

It had been a long time since he'd seen himself so complete, and here,
with his hair reduced to a matted sheepskin rug, and the black gown
that engulfed him like a poncho, he mistook himself for Bella Legosi.
Appropriately, he had been feeling like one of the undead for several
years now. Perhaps decades.

The hair stylist reappeared behind him with steel comb and scissors;
"Now," she said, "what would you like doing to it?"

She looked morbidly pale herself - the condition not helped by the
spotlights, which leant the salon the atmosphere of a surgery. The
tools glinted in her bony hands.

"Well..." he purred. "My usual, if possible - that is, long sideburns
and - "

"Oh well yes sorry," she said, as the question had been perfectly
stupid or concerned an embarrassing disease.

"No need to apologise," he told her. "In truth, I could've wanted
anything - short, back and sides. Skinhead, perhaps. It's never too
late to for a leopard to change."

She laughed, and made a quick snip - then another - then trapped her
tongue between her teeth and squinted, so as to judge the effect of her
attacks. He watched it all in the mirror, and grinned.

The grin shocked him. Not the act itself, but the mimicry of his Legosi
doppleganger - the kinks at the corners of his mouth were so pronounced
that he looked as if he were expressing phlegmy disapproval.

"I think I heard one of your songs on the radio just yesterday,"
chirruped the stylist, attending to his mane as if her scissors were
calipers and her comb a surgical torch. "Thought you might be making a
comeback."

"In many ways," he said, "I never really went away."

"Well, I suppose not. I don't really follow the scene."

He was taken aback - Legosi exercised his lower lip and made a face
like a trout.

"I'm sure you must be more in tune with fashion than me," he
said.

She laughed again - and the trout gaped a little because - well - for
once, he hadn't meant it as a hoke. Not like that.

She combed his flaccid quiff forward and it obscured an eye - the trout
at once became the wind-grazed face of a Greek god - features worn,
skin puckered - Gods galore, how he loathed his metamorphic head!

"Are you asleep?" she asked, for a moment later he had closed his eyes
tightly.

Grunt! He went, meaning to query the sense behind this question, but
sounding just like he had been woken from a dream about deckchairs and
sunhats.

"I don't sleep very well these days," he said, and she tittered again,
then took a swirl of gel between her hands and mopped it onto his
quiff. As it was pulled back from his eye (now both eyes had been
assaulted, he thought with a grump,) she stroked and preened it into
the shape that had glossed magazines and television performances for
years. Perhaps decades.

It looked ridiculous, sprouting from the crown of an old hermit. Still,
she attended to it as if it were a young sunflower emerging from a soil
bed. He tried to look cynical and cool - and everything else they said
he still was - but the mirror only presented him with a lopsided
hovell, whose roof was caving in and who crumpled all the more under
the weight of that cigarette white quiff.