Page 50 of Finding Love at the Magical Curiosity Shop
He’s following a map on his phone, and we cut through a couple of small streets full of touristy souvenir shops, cafés with gorgeous smells wafting out, and galleries displaying the paintings of local artists, until we come to a quaint shop with a pink and white striped awning and images of models with fancy hairdos on the windows.
‘A hairdresser?’ Ava looks between the two of us and then gasps as understanding dawns on her. ‘A hairdresser! Oh my God! Are you letting me dye my hair like Mickey’s?’
‘If you want to. You’ve got an appointment at 10a.m.’
‘Daaaaaad! You’re the best!’ She throws her arms around him so hard that she nearly knocks them both into the road. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you!’
When she releases him, she jumps on me for a hug too. ‘Thank yoooou, Mickey! I don’t know what you did to persuade him, but you’re also thebest!’ The last word is squealed at a pitch that, somewhere out in the Irish Sea, has got several dolphins turned around and wondering if their sonar is on the blink.
She rushes inside and drags us both in with her, and Ren goes to talk to the receptionist. Ava is going through their dye selection when he comes back.
‘Do you want to go up to the council place and start looking?’ he says to me. ‘There’s no point in us both wasting a couple of hours here when we’ve only got until Monday.’
‘I want Mickey to stay!’ Ava speaks before I’ve had a chance to answer. ‘Canyougo to look through the archives and we’ll stay here? You’ll only sit there and moan constantly and tell them not to do it too bright!’
Ren laughs. ‘All right, fair point. If that’s what you want…’ He double-checks it’s okay with me, and then goes to pay upfront, with instructions to call him if we need anything, and waves as he leaves.
We’re the only customers and a hairdresser comes to take Ava to a chair, shows her colour charts of the shade each dye is likely to go on her brown hair, and she chooses one, has a trim, and then we have to wait for an hour for the dye to take effect with her hair wrapped in a plastic cap.
‘Best day ever!’ Ava declares as we sit in the waiting area, leafing through the selection of glossy magazines. ‘Thank you so much for whatever you did. I’m going to have purple hair because of you. You definitely have Fairy Godmother magic powers!’
I giggle at her childlike innocence. ‘Believe it or not, it was nothing to do with me. He must’ve booked that appointment before we even woke up this morning.’
‘Yeah, but you loosen him up. You make him see another point of view. That, and he thinks about you so much that he forgets to think about the evils of dyed hair.’
It’s a sweet, over-simplified point, but I get a little thrill at where she’s coming from – the idea thatIam somehow responsible for loosening Ren up and that he spends so much time thinking about me.
After the hairdresser has washed the dye out, straightened and blow-dried Ava’s new Cadbury-purple hair, she’s over the moon and keeps stroking it and twirling it round her fingers. It’s nearly lunchtime when we step outside and the August sun is high in the Welsh blue sky.
‘Hear me out,’ I suggest. ‘We could go straight up to the archives and see how your dad’s getting on, or wecouldget ice cream and go for a walk on the beach and?—’
‘You had me at ice cream! He won’t even miss us! We can just tell him the dye takes hours to work and he’ll never know!’
There’s an ice cream van on the seafront, selling the most obscenely gigantic 99s with two flakes, drizzled with strawberryandchocolate sauce, and I get us one each, and we kick our shoes off and skip down onto the sand. The tide is coming in and families under umbrellas and behind windbreakers are gradually moving their way up the beach, but Ava and I head down to the water’s edge and paddle along the shallow lapping waves.
‘Thanks for this, Mickey.’ She holds up the ice cream, and then waves her shoes towards the general area. ‘Dad would never have done anything like this without you, and he’dneverlet me eat an ice cream this size before lunch!’
I laugh. ‘Maybe we should downplay quite how huge it is when we see him…’
‘He won’t mind, really. You’re the best thing to ever happen to him!’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that. He’s… um… well, he’s been pretty good for me too. You can’t deny my shop looks a lot better because of his input.’
‘Yeah, but ourlifelooks a lot better because of your input.’
My heart is melting faster than my ice cream in the summer sun, and I nudge my arm against hers gently, because we’ve both got ice creams in one hand and shoes in the other so a proper hug is unfeasible.
‘He likes you. So much,’ Ava continues, licking dripping ice cream off her cornet. ‘He’s so different with you. More like the old dad he used to be. I hadn’t realised how much Mum had broken him. She criticised him all the time, and he changed because of it, and she still complained about him, but then he wasn’t himself any more. And you’ve mended him. You like him just as he is, and you told him that, and it changed something inside him for the better.’
Who knew it was possible to tear up while eating the world’s biggest ice cream? I sniffle and turn away, pretending to be fascinated by the coiled castings of a sandworm while I get my emotions under control.
‘It’s really easy to feel unloved sometimes, and to take it personally if someone doesn’t stay,’ I say carefully, aware that they’re both struggling with the way Ava’s mother abandoned them. ‘It can make you feel like you’re not good enough or like you did something wrong, when really it’s the other person who was wrong to do what they did, and it can be really hard to reframe it as being a problem with that person and not with you… you understand that, right?’
Ava nods, the cornet forgotten in her hand.
‘And the greatest thing in the world is to be loved for exactly who you are. To know someone wouldn’t change any aspect of you. And in a strange way, maybe that’s part of why your dad wouldn’t let you get your hair dyed and doesn’t always want you to do grown-up things – because he loves you exactly as you are, and he’s worried that you’re going to change and grow up and stop loving him too.’
‘Everyone has to grow up, except Peter Pan.’
