The Matisse Stories

If he had not left her so long to contemplate her wet face, it might not have happened.On either side of her mysteries were being enacted. On the left, a head was crammed into a pink nylon bag, something between a bank-robber’s stocking and a monstrous Dutch cap. A young Chinese man was peacefully teasing threads of hair through the meshes of this with a tug and a flick, a tug and a flick. The effect was one of startling hideous pink baldness, tufted here and there. On her right, an anxious plump girl was rolling another girl’s thick locks into snaky sausages of aluminium foil. There was a thrum of distant drums through the loudspeakers, a clash and crash of what sounded like shaken chains. It is all nonsense, she thought, I should go home, I can’t, I am wet. They stared transfixed at their respective ugliness.He came back, and took up the scissors, listlessly enough.‘How much did you want off?’ he said casually. ‘You’ve got a lot of broken ends. It’s deteriorating, you haven’t fed it while I’ve been away.’‘Not too much off, I want to look natural, I…’‘I’ve been talking to my girlfriend. I’ve decided. I shan’t go back any more to my wife. I can’t bear it.’‘She’s too angry?’‘She’s let herself go. It’s her own fault. She’s let herself go altogether. She’s let her ankles get fat, they swell over her shoes, it disgusts me, it’s impossible for me.’‘That happens to people. Fluid absorption …’She did not look down at her own ankles. He had her by the short hairs at the nape of her neck.‘Lucian,’ said the plump girl, plaintively, ‘can you just take a look here at this perm, I can’t seem to get the hang of this.’‘You’d better be careful,’ said Lucian, ‘or Madam’ll go green and fry and you’ll be in deep trouble. Why don’t you just come and finish off Madam here—you don’t mind, do you, dear? Deirdre is very good with your sort of hair, very tactful, I’m training her myself—I’d better take a look at this perm. It’s a new method we’re just trying out, we’ve had a few problems, you see how it is…’Deirdre was an elicitor, but Susannah would not speak. Vaguely, far away, she heard the anxious little voice. ‘Do you have children, dear, have you far to go home, how formal do you like it, do you want backcombing … ?’ Susannah stared stony, thinking about Lucian’s wife’s ankles. Because her own ankles rubbed her shoes, her sympathies had to be with this unknown and ill-presented woman. She remembered with sudden total clarity a day when, Suzie then, not Susannah, she had made love all day to an Italian student on a course in Perugia. She remembered her own little round rosy breasts, her own long legs stretched over the side of the single bed, the hot, the wet, his shoulders, the clash of skulls as they tried to mix themselves completely. They had reached a point when neither of them could move, they had loved each other so much, they had tried to get up to get water, for they were dying of thirst, they were soaked with sweat and dry-mouthed, and they collapsed back upon the bed, naked skin on naked skin, unable to rise. What was this to anyone now? Rage rose in her, for the fat-ankled woman, like a red flood, up from her thighs across her chest, up her neck, it must flare like a flag in her face, but how to tell in this daft cruel grey light? Deirdre was rolling up curls, piling them up, who would have thought the old woman had so much hair on her head? Sausages and snail-shells, grape-clusters and twining coils. She could only see dimly, for the red flood was like a curtain at the back of her eyes, but she knew what she saw. The Japanese say demons of another world approach us through mirrors as fish rise through water, and, bubble-eyed and trailing fins, a fat demon swam towards her, turret-crowned, snake-crowned, her mother fresh from the dryer in all her embarrassing irreality.‘There,’ said Deirdre. ‘That’s nice. I’ll just get a mirror.’‘It isn’t nice,’ said Susannah. ‘It’s hideous.’There was a hush in the salon. Deirdre turned a terrified gaze on Lucian.‘She did it better than I do, dear,’ he said. ‘She gave it a bit of lift. That’s what they all want, these days. I think you look really nice.’‘It’s horrible,’ said Susannah. ‘I look like a middle-aged woman with a hair-do.

’She could see them all looking at each other, sharing the knowledge that this was exactly what she was.‘Not natural,’ she said.‘I’ll get Deirdre to tone it down,’ said Lucian.Susannah picked up a bottle, full of gel. She brought it down, heavily, on the grey glass shelf, which cracked.‘I don’t want it toned down, I want,’ she began, and stared mesmerised at the crack, which was smeared with gel.‘I want my real hair back,’ Susannah cried, and thumped harder, shattering both shelf and bottle.‘Now, dear, I’m sorry,’ said Lucian in a tone of sweet reason. She could see several of him, advancing on her; he was standing in a corner and was reflected from wall to wall, a cohort of slender, trousered swordsmen, waving the bright scissors like weapons.‘Keep away,’ she said. ‘Get off. Keep back.’‘Calm yourself,’ said Lucian.Susannah seized a small cylindrical pot and threw it at one of his emanations. It burst with a satisfying crash and one whole mirror became a spider-web of cracks, from which fell, tinkling, a little heap of crystal nuggets. In front of Susannah was a whole row of such bombs or grenades. She lobbed them all around her. Some of the cracks made a kind of strained singing noise, some were explosive. She whirled a container of hairpins about her head and scattered it like a nailbomb. She tore dryers from their sockets and sprayed the puce punk with sweet-smelling foam. She broke basins with brushes and tripped the young Chinese male, who was the only one not apparently petrified, with a hissing trolley, swaying dangerously and scattering puffs of cotton-wool and rattling trails of clips and tags. She silenced the blatter of the music with a well-aimed imitation alabaster pot of Juvenescence Emulsion, which dripped into the cassette which whirred more and more slowly in a thickening morass of blush-coloured cream.When she had finished—and she went on, she kept going, until there was nothing else to hurl, for she was already afraid of what must happen when she had finished—there was complete human silence in the salon. There were strange, harshly musical sounds all round. A bowl rocking on a glass shelf. A pair of scissors, dancing on a hook, their frenzy diminishing. Uneven spasmodic falls of glass, like musical hailstones on shelves and floors. A susurration of hairpins on paper. A slow creaking of damaged panes. Her own hands were bleeding. Lucian advanced crunching over the shining silt, and dabbed at them with a towel. He too was bloodied—specks on his shirt, a fine dash on his brow, nothing substantial. It was a strange empty battlefield, full of glittering fragments and sweet-smelling rivulets and puddles of venous-blue and fuchsia-red unguents, patches of crimson-streaked foam and odd intense spills of orange henna or cobalt and copper.‘I’d better go,’ she said, turning blindly with her bleeding hands, still in her uncouth maroon drapery.‘Deirdre’ll make you a cup of coffee,’ said Lucían. ‘You’d better sit down and take a breather.’He took a neck brush and swept a chair for her. She stared, irresolute.‘Go on. We all feel like that, sometimes. Most of us don’t dare. Sit down.’They all gathered round, the young, making soothing, chirruping noises, putting out hands with vague patting, calming gestures.‘I’ll send you a cheque.’‘The insurance’ll pay. Don’t worry. It’s insured. You’ve done me a good turn in a way. It wasn’t quite right, the colours. I might do something different. Or collect the insurance and give up. Me and my girlfriend are thinking of setting up a stall in the Antique Hypermarket. Costume jewellery. Thirties and forties kitsch. She has sources. I can collect the insurance and have a go. I’ve had enough of this. I’ll tell you something, I’ve often felt like smashing it all up myself, just to get out of it—like a great glass cage it is—and go out into the real world. So you mustn’t worry, dear.’