Page 1 of Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon
APRIL 1986
Bob Hawke is Prime Minister of Australia. Paul Keating is his Treasurer. John Howard is the Opposition Leader.
Police Academy 3: Back in Trainingis riding high at the box office.
British journalist John McCarthy is kidnapped in Beirut.
An accident at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the Soviet Union claims several lives and pollutes the surrounding areas.
CHAPTER ONE
‘Pet, hand me those scissors, will you?’ Trudy takes the cigarette out of her mouth and, with her other hand, takes the scissors from Evie, who has already whirled back to her client, who’s sitting there with wet hair over her face, awaiting a fringe.
Stephanie, her name is. Came in saying she wanted a haircut like The Princess of Wales has and Evie tried to tell her that Diana has really thick hair that layers nicely whereas Stephanie has fine hair that won’t sit the same way, but Stephanie insisted.
At that point Trudy stopped paying attention. She’s seen it all before. In thirty-odd years of running the Seaside Salon she’s had clients requesting all sorts, and usually whatever it is can’t be done. Being a hairdresser means being an expert in managing unreasonable expectations while still trying to make the woman look beautiful. Because that’s all they want, isn’t it? To look beautiful. So that someone can notice them and give them a little lift in their day.
Trudy always hopes the salon itself will give her clients a lift in their days. When she opened it – a few decades ago now – she decked it out in peach: peach walls, peach benches, cream accents. She considered calling the salon Peaches and Cream, but her father advised against it. ‘What if one day you wake up and want to change the décor?’ he said. It was a reasonable question. And, sure enough, one day she decided it needed a change. In fact, she changes the décor of the salon about once a decade. In 1984 the walls became orange and the benches pink. Some might say it’s a lurid colour scheme – and, true, thedecorator thought Cyndi Lauper was the acme of style – but the clients love it.
‘Ooh, Trudy,’ one of them said the other day. ‘I smile just thinking about this place. The bright colours make me happy.’
So, yes, Trudy gives her ladies a lift in their days, and that lifts her in turn. Even if sometimes she has to not so much lift them up as put them in their place.
Last week one of her regulars came in saying she wanted to look like that Krystle Carrington inDynasty. Silly show. And, yes, Trudy watches it. Entertainment is a priority these days.
‘You can’t do that look, pet,’ Trudy told her. ‘You need more length on the sides and you just don’t have it.’
Did the client listen? No. So Trudy did her best. That’s all a person can ever do, isn’t it? She put some streaks in the client’s hair and layered on top and flicked the fringe out to the side, and the client was happy even though Trudy told her she’d need to spend an hour with a blow dryer at home to get the same effect. For all she knows the lady is wandering around the local shopping centre looking like a half-done Krystle Carrington and thinking she’s the best thing since sliced bread. And why shouldn’t she? Why shouldn’t they all?
Trudy sighs as she starts trimming her client’s hair. The woman is loud – she’s new, and not local, which they know because she keeps saying she’s up fromSydney, and don’t they know thatSydneyis justso busyand it’sso nicebeing in quiet little Terrigal on the Central Coast for a few days instead. She probably thinks she’s paying them a compliment but somehow those statements end up sounding like the person is looking down their nose at poor old Terrigal. If another person wants to take it that way, of course.
Trudy isn’t offended. As her Laurie liked to say, everyone is entitled to their opinion.
It’s been two years since he said anything like that. Or anything at all.
Two years since she lost the man who had been by her side, supporting her as she ran this little hairdressing salon by the sea. Originally it was called Trudy’s – after she abandoned Peaches and Cream – and it was Laurie who suggested she change it to Seaside Salon. He thought it was reassuring – like a good memory, he told her.
She wished she could say she had only good memories of him but he was so sick in those last months that she has to work hard not to think of him thin and sallow as his body tried and failed to combat the cancer that snuck up on him. On them both. It’s a cruelty, she reckons, to have your mind full of images of the man you love at his worst. With time, she hopes, the shock of his illness and what she saw, what she felt, will wear off and she’ll be left with thoughts only of his big smile and his bushy eyebrows and that uneven shave he always had.
They used to go walking on the beach after she closed the salon for the day. That’s a good memory. Every time she smells the salt air she thinks of him; she’s been smelling it since she was a child, yet it reminds her of Laurie more than anything.
Some might say, then, that she’s torturing herself by working so close to the ocean. She wouldn’t change it, though; wouldn’t leave it, even if it causes her pain. Who would? Terrigal is a glorious spot and she knows she’s lucky that her father helped her buy this building in Church Street – one road back from the beach – in the 1950s, at a time when the place comprised not much more than a few fibro shacks and a dozen fishermen.
It’s come a long way, this village she has known and loved all her life. For so long it was a well-kept secret, then the Sydney people found out about it and started coming here for their weekends and their school holidays. Now the population of Terrigal is like the tide, always coming in and going out, andshe’s used to it. Likes it, in fact, because the incoming tide brings more clients and some of them return each holiday, and she likes that too, the consistent inconsistency of it. The way they’re happy to see her. It makes her feel useful. There’s still a place for her in this world even without Laurie in it. Even if there are days when she wonders what she’s going to do with herself.
‘We’re out of Nescafé,’ Evie mutters in Trudy’s direction.
Trudy snaps back to attention. Someone wants a coffee, obviously. Probably Stephanie.
‘There’s a tin of International Roast in there,’ Trudy mutters back, but obviously too loudly, because Stephanie makes a face that is visible even above the smoke coming from the cigarette she holds. Trudy lets the clients smoke in the salon because she’s not about to give it up herself – losing Laurie was one thing, losing cigarettes would be one insult too many in a lifetime – and she can see from Stephanie’s choice of slender cigarette and request for Diana hair that she fancies herself a classy lady and International Roast just won’t do. Trudy understands, but sometimes circumstances warrant a compromise.
Evie makes a face as well. ‘Really?’
‘It’s that or Bushells. Take your pick.’
Since her other hairdresser, Jane, left, it’s been only Trudy and Evie in the salon, and when they both have clients there’s no one available to run out for more Blend 43.
Jane was with her for ten years. Her best cutter, she was. Jane could take a lady with dead-straight hair and turn her into a Charlie’s Angel with some artful layering – and a regular blow-dry, of course. Trudy thought of Jane as the daughter she never had. They confided in each other. Right up until the day Jane resigned, saying she needed to take a break.
