A History of Forgetting (11 page)

He swung around. ‘Fatso!'

Kevin lunged for the door and as it slammed, she suddenly realized who he was. It was written all over his sneering, bully face: Kevin Milligan, Future Ruler of the World.

 

 

 

4

 

The first thing she learned working at Vitae was about history: that the present rests upon layers of the past, but is a stratum so unstable, so shot with fault lines, that now and then the
then
rears up and knocks down the
now.
Platform shoes, for example, disco, the shag. They were all back. Vitae, antiquity itself, was built on the ruins of Faye's of Kerrisdale, its sole archaeological trace the still-unrenovated back room.

Six stylists were employed besides Thi and Alison—Donna, Roxanne, Jamie, Christian, Robert and Malcolm. On average, five stylists worked on any given day; the back room held four. At any time six or more of them might be back there rubbing each other the wrong way.

Malcolm was always there between appointments, squeezing further into the corner when the claustrophobia-inducing
space filled. He would be reading—reading a book. No one else ever brought a book in.

‘Why does she only have one name?' Alison asked one day, glancing at the author's name on the cover.

‘Who?'

She pointed to the book. ‘Colette.'

He dropped it in his lap and threw his head back. It wasn't the first time she'd heard him laugh. He often chuckled to himself as he read and seemed mysteriously to keep his clients in stitches, but it was the first time that he'd laughed with a co-worker.

‘Why does Twiggy have one name?' he asked. ‘Or Miou-Miou?'

‘Who are they?' asked Alison which, inexplicably, started him laughing again.

‘You were reading something different yesterday,' she said, picking the book off his knee. ‘All the books you bring in are old.'

‘More precisely, all the authors are dead.'

‘Oh! It's in French!'

‘Do you read French?' he asked.

She looked at him sidelong, wondering if he was making fun of her. He was not above sarcasm. She had heard him tell
Jamie that Chekhov was a defenceman for the Canucks and Rambo a poet. She'd taken French at school, but retained not a syllable beyond phrases already learned from pop songs. ‘How do I pronounce “I love you”?' she asked now. ‘Correctly, I mean.'

‘Je vous aime,'
he said.

‘Je voo zem. Je voo zem.'

‘Je vous déteste,'
Malcolm told her. ‘You'll need to know
how to say that, too.'

Christian poked his head in the door. ‘Listen. Amanda just called. She's on her way. I have a plan. We are going to
revolt.'

It was over the back room. They were going to work to rule. Alison's part, as Christian explained, was quite simple: when Amanda arrived, she was to get her into the back room by any possible means.

She found Thi shampooing a hulk of a man at the sink. ‘You don't know what a kipper is?' he was asking Thi in an incredulous Scottish accent.

‘Did Christian tell you?' Thi asked Alison.

‘Yes.'

Alison hurried up to the front to be there when Amanda walked in. Donna was on the phone. When she hung up, she asked Alison, ‘Did Christian tell you?'

‘Yes.'

It was a half-hour before Amanda appeared carrying a cardboard box in her arms. ‘A new product,' she explained when Alison opened the door for her. ‘Hair
mud.
Isn't that great?' She headed for the back room. Alison was relieved it was so easy.

Walking through the salon, Amanda did not seem to notice each stylist start a little to see her, then lean forward and whisper something to the client in each chair. She didn't see how, as soon as she'd passed, they left their clients, clipped and dripping and blinking in the mirrors, while they trooped behind her. Into the back room the rowdy plebeians crowded.

Except Malcolm, who went right on working. ‘Malcolm,' Alison said. ‘Come on.'

It was not his fight. He predated them all. He was of the
ancien régime.

‘He'll be back in a minute,' Alison told his client, taking him firmly by the arm.

She squeezed into the room with the others, pushed her way back, then took a seat on the steps that descended to the alley parking lot. From there, Alison could see the perfect rounds of Amanda's breasts, her uniform cutwork lace nostrils widening defensively. ‘These are, as you observe,
intolerable
conditions,' said Christian. He was doing that nerve-racking thing with his eyes, staring her down with one, then switching. Amanda, who could not seem to adjust to a gaze so demanding and unpredictable, kept looking around at the rest of them.

‘How about new cupboards?' said Thi, clasping her ringed fingers together, entreating. ‘To clear up the clutter. Make more space.'

‘Eventually, yes. Everything in good time. Rome, after all, wasn't built in a day, ha ha.'

Everyone groaned. Their clients were waiting. As they filed back out, Christian asked, ‘Has anyone seen
Satyricon?'
and he lifted the scowling bust from his station onto a curler trolley and tore off its wig and glasses. ‘Here he is. All hail the Senator.' He rolled it once around like an invalid in a bath chair.

And so an idea was born, that they would re-enact Rome's decline and fall.

‘Weren't they always having orgies?' Jamie asked. Everyone cheered. Right there on the faux marble, they would do it. And heat larks' tongues in the microwave, steal a lion from the zoo and have it prowl the premises. Robert mentioned slaves and Donna volunteered Alison to be theirs. All day Christian exhorted stylists and clients alike to remember the fate of the Christians.

Malcolm did not participate in their fantasy. He listened and watched and, for the first time, noticed that the girl had changed. It was inevitable, of course. She was too easily influenced. He would not have been surprised if tomorrow she turned up with a nose ring.

Alison, had she heard his thoughts, would only have agreed. When she'd first started at Vitae she'd likened it to a temple and the stylists to priests, but not any more. Thi liked to hip-hop to the sink, which was not at all the way to approach an altar, and the way they dressed—weird and funky, in clothes that often looked like rags, but cost a lot more—half of them perforated by rings and studs and subcutaneously stained with ink, they would have been driven out of anywhere holy. No, with the dance music pounding continuously in the background, the banter and the jokes, it
was more like a party. A month into her apprenticeship, going to work was like getting paid to go to a party—every day, all day long, without the punitive hangover.

She told this to Billy who asked her who was who.

‘What do you mean?'

‘There's a wallflower at every party. A hostess. A guy who throws up in the rec room.'

‘Okay,' said Alison. ‘Malcolm is the chaperone.' Always at the party but never celebrating, watching instead from behind the cover of a book.
Disapproving.
She did an imitation of him for Billy, crossing her legs and turning down the corners of her mouth. Her chin, tucked in, doubled.

‘And Jamie's the lady's man. He's the only man interested in ladies. Donna's the vamp. Robert's the quiet one in the corner. Roxanne and Thi are the girls giggling in the bathroom, but Thi's the hostess, too. Amanda's the unwelcome guest.'

‘Who are you?' asked Billy.

Alison didn't know yet.

‘You have to come out with us for a drink after work, Billy,' she told him. ‘You have to meet everybody.'

‘I'm not sure I want to.'

Billy was conservative, except in bed, a guy's guy. She hadn't told him the half of it—that Robert's partner had AIDS, that Roxanne was seemingly held together by cotter-pin piercings,
that Christian's hair was garishly dyed the innocent colour of a duckling. She hadn't told him anything about Christian.

 

He was the life of their party, their indefatigable impresario. ‘Quick! Get me a fag!' he would bray to the smokers on the back steps. Not only had he spontaneously organized the revolt in the back room, but for Thi's birthday he assembled them all in the alley and armed Thi with a bottle of Baby Duck, a reference to his hair. Twenty paces off, he stood with a towel over his head. How it resembled a lampshade! Thi fired the plastic cork and when it struck his chest, he pretended to crumple, while, cheering, they passed around the erupting bottle. An
impractical
joker was Christian, so elaborate and time-consuming were his antics.

If he was particularly pleased, he would take his embarrassed client by the hand and parade her from chair to chair. ‘Is she beautiful, or is she beautiful? Am I good, or am I good?' Excellent, Alison thought.

Over lunch, always in the deli, though there were cafés up and down the avenue, he would play his favourite game, which was to put on an expression of delighted surprise as he waved to a passing stranger. The passer-by, his victim, would casually wave back, then stop in his tracks, stop and peer in at Christian. Sometimes he would visibly start. Always the easily read question on his face, ‘Do I know you?' would change to, ‘What
happened
to you?' Christian, behind the glass, seemed to bask masochistically in these reactions. He wanted people to look at him and squirm. As the stranger stalked away, Christian would blow a kiss.

‘His name is
Karl,'
he told her one afternoon after flummoxing a passing businessman.

‘Whose?'

He gestured to the counter where the deli man was making their sandwiches. ‘I heard someone call him that. Do you think it's
Carl
with a “C” or
Karl
with a “K?”'

Alison sighed. ‘I have no idea.'

‘I hope it's a “C”. My name starts with “C”. But this is a deli. A
German
deli. Karl in German is with a “
K
.”
Do me a favour?'

‘What?' asked Ali.

‘Ask who cuts his hair.'

When she went to get the sandwiches, she said, ‘It's Karl, right?'

‘That's right.'

‘I'm Ali and that's Christian. We work next door.'

‘Yes, I know. I see you every morning, flying past my window.'

Perhaps she was looking at him too hard, studying him, trying to see what Christian saw. She didn't care for his nose; puggish, it didn't seem full-grown. Under his cap, his hair was fine and straight, the colour of wet sand. Probably in the summer he metamorphosed to blond.

‘Who cuts your hair?' she asked.

‘Maybe you'd like to?'

‘I'm not a stylist yet!' she told him and, blushing, took the sandwiches and hurried back to Christian at the table.

‘What did he say?'

She wasn't about to tell him, so she blurted the first thing that came to mind. ‘His mother.'

‘His mother!' Christian wailed. ‘How can I compete with that?'

She felt fortunate in having Billy. Other than Thi, who was happily married, no one else at Vitae seemed to be in a satisfying relationship. Robert had John, yes, but John was dying, so how could they be happy?

Alison actually knew John better now than she knew Robert. A couple of afternoons each week he would come and sit in the reception area and read the magazines. He no longer worked, he told her, but was collecting a disability pension.

‘Were you a hairdresser as well?' she asked.

‘We're not all hairdressers,' he said. ‘We can do other
things, too.'

Embarrassed, she tried to stammer something, but couldn't think of what to say. She'd only presumed he was a hairdresser
by how he kept coming in week after week.

Then he winked. ‘We can dance and arrange flowers. We can't be beat as interior decorators.'

‘So what did you use to do?'

‘I'm an engineer. But one with
flair.'

Later, he told her why he came, why he always sat in the same place on the sofa, right next to the kneeling Venus. It gave him the vantage of looking through the columns to Robert's station. John came in to watch Robert. For hours at a time, he only pretended to be reading the magazines.

‘Watching Robert,' he told her, ‘is more interesting than engineering.'

Christian was sweet on the unattainable deli man, straighter than the arrow stuck in his heart. Donna was seeing one of her clients—the gargantuan Scotsman who had asked her what a kipper was. ‘Isn't that cute?' she had told everyone. ‘It was, like, a skill-testing question.' Malcolm, Alison couldn't imagine with a love life, though some days she wondered if he wasn't courting
all his clients at once. They were old, yet half of them seemed to regress to girlhood when they saw Malcolm coming out of the back room to greet them.