In her garish pink bedroom above the exclusive Piccadilly wigmaker’s, Purves & Page, my mother lay dead.
I stood over her, breathing hard, my barber’s blade dripping in one hand, a limp blood-spattered bouquet in the other.
On a small Panasonic television, Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein was shuffling around looking confused and heartbroken, music swelling ominously into every shadowy corner. The black and white blink of the feeble picture was overcome by marauding red and gold light coming through the window from the towering billboards of Piccadilly outside, pulsing red and pink into the dishevelled chamber like a heartbeat.
I watched images of a pouting statuesque beauty burst in two dimensions, frolicking inside the framed void, peering nonchalantly into the private room. Between flashes of the red swirling backdrop, I cast my eye over the nightstand, harbouring detritus of a life I knew too well: gin bottles, a candy storefront line-up of pills, Pepto-Bismol drips like candle-wax, a half-eaten pudding in a pretty bowl.
Her lace and satin pillow carried an ice pink lipstick exclamation, her body in ribbons, swaddled in a gown of baby pink silk, feather trim and shot through with multiple cigarette burns. Her tongue, rigid and stiff, a scarlet viper unfurling from a mouth on a body of forced angles and bloated organs, oozed quietly into plush rose carpet.
Over the asymmetric rigor mortis curve of mother’s slumped shoulders, the starlet in gold on the billboards of Piccadilly looked down upon us, fluttering lashes like torn silk, observing our final scene with a smile.
Six weeks earlier, I’d said a tearful goodbye to Janice, Binky and Delilah and I was bereft with grief. I felt all alone again. I’d spent a lot of time with those wonderful girls, now each of them slinked away into their new lives.
It happens all the time, in my line of work. I know the moment is coming. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.
After boxing up Delilah, a cute little toupee with lace stitching and a playful side swept fringe, I poured myself a whisky and toasted her. The lady who had ordered her had a cold voice with hard eyes, much like mother’s. I hoped playful Delilah would have a good life among the riches of high society, but I’m not convinced there would be love.
I sat with the drink a while, and pictured Delilah’s future. Parties, social gatherings, endless companionship. I was jealous.
My hairpieces seemed to have better lives than mine. I was proud of them, but was irrationally hurt that none of them stuck around. My loneliness curled around me like the severest of chignons, weighed heavy like a particularly luxuriant bouffe. I leafed through my crinkly book of designs, running a finger over the contours of their shapes, the measurement numbers, the client names. I felt like some sort of degenerate, selling my children to be paraded around for money.
I swirled the melted ice in my glass, collecting up the froth, and walked over to the front desk by the door. There is a framed picture of my mother on the wall there; Miss Primrose Page, revered B-movie star of the 1970’s, across every magazine at the time and still doing well at comic conventions and the like.
I thought about that as a I looked up at the photo. Mother in her heyday, draped across a sumptuous chaise longue, shot on classy black and white film. It was a promotional shot from her days as a horror night presenter on Channel Four. She is sneering, which is nothing unusual. Her eyes, heavy with kohl, are focused. Her neck, pale and elegant, like a swan.
Upstairs, here at Purves & Page, her throat crinkles like crepe, permanently slouched into a satin pillow, belching a booze highway. These days, those once clear eyes just swivel and roll.
The black feathers around her collarbone sprout starkly against the porcelain of her skin, as if she could just take off like a bird, like a crow. And she did, back then. Never around, really. A new man every week and my father, stalking off like an injured animal, going the same way my mother has gone now.
Her wings had been clipped by age and booze and disappointment. She was tinkling her little bell, roughly barking for me. My name is James Peter Page, but she calls me Jim or Jimmy or love or darling but it never feels like I’m her darling. She spits these terms of endearment at me like half-digested worms.
The bell tinkled again. She’ll be wanting something, perhaps pudding, or pink gin or Pepto Bismol. Pink, pink, pink. Nothing so passionate as red nor pure as white anymore, always some half arsed in-between.
I momentarily ignored her summons to enjoy the familiar hot red flash of the billboards outside. My nightly ritual. The model, all sequins and suggestive hips and flying golden hair in the shape of clashing gold sickles rendered me still, and I stood, transfixed by the image, hyperactive before my eyes. She was the beating heart of Piccadilly and I felt her pounding in my ears.
That faint tinkle of mother’s flaccid bell upstairs was entirely forgotten when the shop door bell sounded, equally timidly, but it may as well have been a fanfare.
In she walked, a vision of popping candy and warm caramel.
The girl from the billboards.
She entered with a fun, theatrical gait, a shunt of the hips and a wonderful flap of a red velvet cape that sent a sparkle throughout the dusty old shop like a shockwave. Even the long dead moths and flies in the window jumped to life.
Broad shoulders pulled back, a regal air about the stance and the face, and with a dainty touch to the lips with a spade-like hand and a twinkle in her eyes like rhinestones on desert suede, the visitor, tall enough to sneer down her delicate nose at pretty much anyone, micro-pouted suggestively before speaking.
“Good evening, Sir,” she breathed, evenly, despite being slightly out of breath. “Are you Mr Peter Page?”
The double plosives in Peter Page blew two more tornadoes through my equilibrium. I think I nodded, creaking out sounds. I did compose myself, just about. I couldn’t recall what I said exactly, but it didn’t matter.
Here was the girl from the billboards, only deeper, realer, more tactile, more alive and so very deliciously tangible. My synapses were pinball machine high scores, and I feared I was going to have a heart attack.
I asked how I could help the young Miss.
“Miss?” said the visitor, turning to who I assumed must be her chaperone; a dumpy little thing, but anyone would be sasquatch next to this mythological creature. For only a moment she did this, as if to create an innate drama in the scene, a delicious suspense, and turning back, in mock surprise, she pointed a finger at me as if on a gameshow, “You can stay!”
I didn’t quite understand the joke. She wasn’t as young as I thought, maybe? That she was actually a Mrs? No doubt some lucky suitor had snapped her up, but she was youthful and effervescent, compared to my own creeping, mounting, stale and suffocating years. A breath of air, in this space, my space, this shop, closing in on me mercilessly like a tomb, full of the shackling trinkets and nonsense of a meaningless, co-dependent life.
“Sir, I would like to hire your services. If you can fit me in. I want you to make me a wig in the style of Miss Primrose Page – in that era.” She pointed to the photo. “Her finest, don’t you think? I mean, you may have noticed by now that I based my entire life,” she threw a hand down the length of her sequinned, snake-hipped body, “my entire schtick, upon her. It’s crazy,” she laughed a circus tune and, again, my throat seized up.
“Do I remind you of your mother?”
I raised my eyebrows and tucked my chin to such a degree that my false moustache detached itself and dangled lifelessly from my lip like a dead rodent, my stomach snapping like a trap. I wished I’d done away with the stupid postiche much earlier.
She chuckled, bringing an effete hand to her mouth in faux coyness, before calmly reaching out to fix my wayward accessory.
This should have been mortifying, but her manner was too warm and whimsical to feel shame. Though my arteries were still funnelling juggernauts, her gentle, intimate adjustments to my confounded facial roadkill was a moment of aching kindness.
“Surely you don’t require any help at all, Miss.” I beamed, gesturing towards her own locks.
Her hair was straight from the impressionist’s repertoire. Finger waves pulsed and paused in golden ratios. When she tossed her head, she was all Bacall, all Hayworth. She was that nuclear technicolour of early Hollywood. Yellow brick road and glittery shoes levels of newness and saturation. All milky coffee skin and the promise of hurricanes, good ones. She stooped to conquer, of course: she was at least two and a half feet taller than me, even in my well-worn Cuban heels.
“Can you do it, sweetheart?” A southern drawl, purposefully pronounced, laying on that molasses sugar.
The emphasis on sweetheart showcased a cute lisp, and she tilted her head forward, peering at me beneath lashes as thick and suggestive as balled up fishnets on the bedroom floor; stockings collecting opacity as they slide down to a perfect half-heart of an arched foot, iris, pupil dilating.
The pink beehive, rendered in the picture as a shade of grey, was indeed teetering, precarious. It wound itself around itself, a snake swallowing its own pink tail. Engorged, infinite. Almost a separate entity. Could I do it?
To the bold beauty standing before me, the lady pictured was her trashy cult idol. To me, this was mother; lovelorn hermit, wasting away beneath the weight of pink silk and juniper juice, Pepto Bismol and fast pudding.
I was suddenly aware then, in that silence cast between us by mother, that my visitor was examining me closely, awaiting an answer. My skin prickled hot under her gaze, and I scratched self-consciously at my overgrown, unkempt brow for some seconds, which brought me no composure at all. She was very patient, though I sensed the real force of her, out there in the world, beyond my silly stuffy wooden heads, T-clips, ventilating needles and dusty, staid hairpieces. My dead, lonely world was decaying insects on a windowsill, and she, the fizzing Coca-cola lights of Piccadilly, illuminating just how disconnected I had become.
I was scared to look up. Her locks suspended around her cheekbones like fascinated little creatures, nodding whenever she did, retracting and approaching with her rhythms. How like Medusa – when I wasn’t turning to putty, I was turning to stone. The gushy unapologetic and emboldened twinkle of those crushed ice eyes were messing with my innards, and I hadn’t even taken elevenses yet.
I agreed, and wavered the deposit. Six weeks in her presence would be priceless. I insisted a pink slip would need filling in for audit purposes. I wanted her on my books, in my designs, on my mannequins, in my life.
She signed her name in a bold, elaborate scrawl. Her capital B was the clinging vine around my heart at double speed, like monster movie triffids. Barbara-Ann.
Beneath the aggressive joyless bark of CLIENT NAME, came the singsong, caged bird singing colourful feathers of her name…read over and over and over again now by her Mr Peter Page.
When Barbara Ann left, I was singularly breathless. I didn’t have the heart attack I thought I was destined for, but my blood was still high and I felt as sick as I felt strong. It was a curious feeling, and as I came to myself, mother’s little bell was still tinkling.
I took the stairs two steps at a time, knowing I would be subject to the glowering, tight lipped fury of making her wait.
But I hadn’t bounced up those stairs like that since I was a snake-hipped teenager.
Entering her boudoir, I was struck square in the face with an ornate pudding dish. It bounced off the bridge of my nose and my postiche slipped again.
“I nearly fractured my wrist ringing this fucking thing!”
Her words were slurred, unsurprisingly, and my eyes glazed over. I fussed half-heartedly with the prosthetic, where the tenderest of touches had been only moments ago.
No assault or violence upon me, clunky dessert bowl or otherwise, could have replaced the memory of those caresses.
“I want my pudding! But I needed my Pepto-Bismol first! You know I can’t see shit! I took a swig and now look! It’s all down my front and in my hair!”
Like a toddler left to its own devices, the ice-pink of her lipstick mixed with the oozy unguent, created a milkshake froth from hairline to collarbone. The Pepto Bismol was dripping like candle wax from the bottle, down her arm. The lengths this woman would go to for drama were obscene.
I went to fetch a cloth and began cleaning her up.
“Where were you? I heard you talking down there, about me! Who were you talking to about me?” her breath was thick with acrid gin fumes and her irises pinballed.
“We had a client come in, that’s all. She’s a fan of your work, actually.”
“Actually? Oh actually? It’s not unheard of you know. I might not have won anything, but I will always be loved!”
“Yes, I know, mother.”
“She admired my photo?”
“Yes, she did.”
“People love that photo. I look hot and sexy in that photo,” she honked.
“She asked for a wig. Wanted it to look like yours used to.”
“Used to? Used to? It still looks fucking beautiful. People would die for this hair. She would die for this hair. What was her hair like, then?”
“Blonde, you know. The usual. Nothing special. Not like yours, mother.”
“Too right. I’m not in the ground yet.” She pulled the cloth from me, and started dabbing at herself roughly, catching the spots I hadn’t and glaring at me.
“This hair, people would kill for this hair. Including your little jezebel, wanting to knock me off my throne! I’m a cult classic! And I’m ringing this bell forever, like some kind of a cunt, for my only son to, what? Chat up some floozie? Get his end away? I could’ve been dead up here! Who is she?”
Her petulance was beginning to piss me off and I no longer cared about appeasing this gargoyle.
“Nobody, mother. Like I said,” I looked anywhere but at her face.
“Nothing special.”
Six weeks later, I awoke to unholy noises and shrieking, coming from my workshop. The sound of heads rolling. I knew the sound.
The pop and clack of wooden bonces striking tile.
I clattered downstairs to find all my mannequins prostrate and bald, their wigs splayed on the floor like old mops. A mass scalping.
Mr Barney’s auburn flock of seagulls, Ms Bullock’s tidy afro, Mr Hollis’s platinum Peter Stringfellow-inspired mane, cast down like so many treasonous subjects, drowning beneath the concrete.
In another time, I would have rescued each one in turn, shaking them out. But I didn’t. I left them there to perish in the dust as I frantically eyeballed the crime scene for my precious pink darling.
My ode to Barbara-Ann had been six weeks in the making, but now, not a rosy hair to be seen.
I dove under the counters, ransacked the bins, threw everything else around in search of that candy-coloured beauty but there was just white and grey and blonde and auburn, whimpering up at me but I didn’t care one bit about them.
I sniffed the air. Gin fumes. Good gin. Butterscotch pudding.
I caught the swish of mother’s silk dressing gown disappearing through the fire escape.
Then came the singing.
I peered around the door frame. Mother was slumped on the metal stairs, looking out over Piccadilly. That familiar nervous wobble of her head after a skinful. Her hair, a lustrous and gushing geyser, despite the booze pickled scalp.
In her hand, Barbara Ann’s custom-made crowning glory.
“Mother?”
She didn’t turn, just took the bottle to her mouth in an aggressive swig before holding up the piece, worn over one hand.
“Although I know I never stood a chance,” she warbled.
She held the piece next to her face. The quality of the likeness was really so excellent, I lost my balance for a second.
“Here comes the jackpot question in advance…”
Another swig.
“…do you love her more than me, Jimmy?”
“What?”
She turned then, and her face in the early morning was an apparition. She rarely left her room. Her hair was fuzzy with flyaways, all the rolling around delirious from constant boozing and sobering up. She looked like one of my mannequins under an unnecessarily high wattage. Whitewashed, with a shakily drawn mouth, as if by a particularly sad child.
Gesturing with one be-wigged hand, she asked me, “Looks just like mine, doesn’t it? Did I get any thanks? No. Or the fee? No. I bet you waived that. This hairstyle is my trademark, love, you can’t just bandy it about to all and sundry.”
She waved the bottle of Hendricks around like an award. If anything, my wealth had kept her in the good stuff. No supermarket knockoffs for my Primrose Page. An iconic gin bottle for an iconic drunkard.
I reached for the hairpiece, as gently and non-threateningly as I could, as if approaching a wild animal. The fire escape was situated above bins and piss streaked streets. If mother lurched suddenly, and mother was always lurching suddenly, that could be the fate of my beloved.
“Take long, did it? Very nice work. Like a little angel. Your little angel now, isn’t she? Do you think she would float like a little angel?” she laughed. “Shame if I just…”
She motioned as if to throw it over and I stopped breathing, but I knew to act like it was nothing. She has nothing to gain if it doesn’t hurt me.
She snorted at me and my eyes like saucers, a dead giveaway. Inspecting the piece with wildly unfocused eyes, stroking its shining panels and tucks, her mouth drew tighter and I knew a nasty barb was coming.
“Who ordered this?”
“Just some performer.”
“A performer? Asked for this exact style? She pretending to be me?”
“No, she’s just a fan. Of Primrose Page.”
At this, mother softened, carefully played her fingers over the smooth pink curves.
“Actress?”
“Sort of.”
“Sort of? Stripper then? Or porn star? I know how much you like those.”
“Mother, I…”
She held the hairpiece in her hands. It looked like a little pink newborn. She began to cry.
“My son whoring his own mother out for a couple of lousy quid.”
I could see things might take a nasty turn, so I started sweet talking.
“Aren’t you flattered someone wanted to dress as you? The iconic, the beautiful, the inimitable…” I was laying it on thicker than her lipstick. “…Miss Primrose Page?”
She softened. I merely bared teeth. She visibly relaxed, and I reached for the delicate toupee, but her eyes suddenly hardened, blackened.
“But I saw who it was. I know what she does.”
“What?”
“The billboard…girl.”
“So?”
“Is my legacy, my memory, going to be made a mockery of, my darling, by a man in a dress?”
“Does it matter?”
She gathered the edges of her dressing gown between the remaining fingers of her gin clutching hand, lurching to stand up, shaking the wig like an unresponsive infant.
The unfocused eyes came at me, tiny and black, with all the coordination and bluster of a tranquilised rhino.
“Yes, my darling. It fucking well does,” she said, foisting the wig practically up my nose.
“If this is going to be paraded around on the head of a freak,”
She turned to launch, and super slow motion was activated. Instinctively, my head drew back in one broad motion, my nostrils flared, my lungs filled, all in the same moment that turned out to be my one opportunity to seize the wig back into my grasp.
“Then its better off in the fucking gutter where they all belong!”
My nostril hairs made one final merciless twitch and I sneezed.
As the snot and gristle from inside my nose exploded into the frosty air like a firework, the beautiful pink piece flew, a fledgling bird, gracelessly plummeting down, through the air, into the grotty urine-soaked gutter beneath.
My own airborne mucus had punctuated its departure, and I despised myself and my stupid reflexes.
The gorgeous creation landed unceremoniously in a fetid flop just in front of Dimpy’s Fags, Foods and Non-Foods, before being run over by an early morning DPD van.
Possessed by grief, I grabbed mother by her turkey throat and sent her the same way.
Her descent was a ribbon of glimmering silk and pink fluff, croaking out some dry-throated reptilian non-sequitur, before landing noiselessly into a big red Biffa bin.
I ran down the metal stairs, noticing as I descended how my baggy laces threw themselves back and forth stupidly like kid’s shoes, the metal steps pounding flimsy and unstable beneath them.
The pink curls and untethered locks that hadn’t been fatally driven into the tarmac waved limply in the breeze, as if saying goodbye. I peeled the remnants of the corpse off the road and held her.
Streaked with the filth and loneliness of London’s streets by some overzealous driver, hellbent on whisking whatever production line rubbish some depressed shopping addicted Kensington housewife had ordered with a couple of Chardonnay enhanced clicks in the small, desperate hours.
I felt the loss as keenly as I did for my budgie, Boobie, from when I was seven. Another mother-related death – slow suffocation beneath dehydrated flanks.
It was not just the weeks spent sewing, stitching, threading, measuring as I do with all my wigs. But this one – this one held a promise I had not felt in a long time. There was love threaded through every single hair. A future of warm embraces stacked up as a I tucked one lock inside another. Pins established security, fixative ensured a lasting, satisfying finish.
It held the promise of falling into the safe, calm waters of her eyes, and limitless caresses to my wayward upper lip. A future that wasn’t shrill servant bells, angry slaps of Angel Delight thrown in temper, nor jets of tepid Pepto Bismol spat out in defiance.
Some life outside of Purves & Page existed thirty feet high, where a benevolent demi-goddess guarded me over Piccadilly, even when the billboards had all stopped watching.
My chance to place this sumptuous, complex candyfloss crown upon Barbara-Ann’s gorgeous cranium had been snatched from me, lost amidst the callous tyre tread of a disreputable parcel delivery van outside an even more disreputable corner shop.
Primrose Page may be unlovable and wicked, but not me.
Not Mr Peter Page.
“There is another way, Mr Peter Page.”
I startled and turned around but no one was there. A passing pair of still-drunk lads snickered something about the wig being lovely but ‘you ain’t got the face for it mate’.
“You have a perfectly good replacement over there.”
The wig. Weakened and warped but speaking to me.
Dulcet tones with a southern twang. Barbara-Ann. So familiar, cosy. Like a home for which I had longed, for at least six weeks.
“See? Right over there. Hanging out of that bin.”
I looked up at the big red Biffa bin. One of her feet was sticking up. It still had a feather mule on it which I found surprising.
I turned back to look at the wig. It looked blurry at the edges, undulating in soft focus like a mirage. I knew what the wig was asking of me. I placed her up to my ear.
“Right there. You’ve got your lovely little barber’s blade, don’t you honey? Always nice and sharp, because you’re a consummate professional!”
“Yes, but…”
“You don’t even have to do any work, my love. You did the threading, the pressing, the weaving. You don’t even need a foundation lace.”
I was surprised at her technical knowledge of wigs, but shrugged. Barbara-Ann was, of course, a woman of the world.
“That’s a living, breathing, beautiful piece right there. Yes, right there! On your dear mother’s head. It has its own blood supply and everything. So fresh!”
I watched the Hendricks bottle roll across the step mother had been sitting on. It clanked down the step.
“Don’t worry about the booze, Peter.”
I turned my face to look at the wig more closely, an action that made absolutely no sense but I felt compelled to look it in the eye.
“Booze is a natural preservative, see? Go on now, scoot, do it while you’re still nice and pissed off with her, like the passionate man I know you are. Ooh wee I’m waiting for you, Peter. I have always been waiting for you…”
I nodded as masculinely as I could and puffed out my chest.
This wig knew what it was damned well talking about.
Resolved, I pulled mother’s broken bird-like body out of the bin, and threw her over my shoulder, avoiding looking at her face. I approached the fire escape, taking two stairs at a time, handling the satisfyingly heavy weight of my freshly stropped barber’s razor in my pocket, the way men in love handle a newly acquired engagement ring box, constantly checking it’s still there, waiting to find the perfect time to announce it.
Standing inside the rhythmic heartbeat colours of mother’s bedroom, I held the flapping wet fresh pink bloom scalp so carefully in my right hand like a bouquet. Dewy as rose petals, pooling themselves around my feet. A gargantuan, flatscreen Barbara-Ann blew me a kiss through the window for what I’d done for love, and I knew then I’d found the right moment.
NADIA MARTIN IS CURRENTLY UNDERTAKING THE CREATIVE WRITING MA AT BIRKBECK, HAVING RECEIVED THE BA WITH FIRST CLASS HONOURS. SHE LIVES IN LONDON’S EAST END.