The Men in her Life

Chapter 1

    ‘How’s the man in your life?’ Holly’s stylist enquired.
    He always asked, and she never could remember what she had told him the last time. Had she invented someone, or had there actually been a man in the picture who she thought might still be around by her next appointment? Each time she promised herself she would write down what she had said as soon as she left the salon, but somehow the relief of breathing fresh air after the farty smell of perm always made her forget. Some people had the kind of relationship with their hairdresser which allowed them to talk about a sporadic affair with a married lover. She wondered whether to mention it, to have something to fill the frozen, expectant silence but decided against. Danny was always telling her that he was a bit psychic. So he should bloody well know how the man in her life was, she thought, or perhaps he was just testing her.
    ‘No-one special at the moment,’ she heard herself saying, with the unspoken implication that there were plenty of not-special-enough queuing for the opportunity, but the feigned nonchalance came out sounding slightly forlorn. She wondered how it was that she could be perfectly at ease telling the head of a Hollywood studio to piss off with his offer of a hundred thousand dollars for a script one moment, yet reduced to a panicking wreck of insecurity by a simple question from a man she paid to cut her hair just half an hour later.
    Danny grasped a handful of her curls and stared at them with a kind of suppressed despair. Holly’s hair was uncompromisingly ginger. Sometimes people tried to describe it as flame, or auburn, and that always made her feel worse about it, as if ginger was such a terrible colour you couldn’t even mention it. She had the same sinking feeling when told she didn’t look her age. That wasn’t meant to start until you were old. And thirty-five was not old. Was it?
    ‘Right, let’s get you washed.’ Danny thumped her briskly on the shoulder.
    Holly loved having her hair washed. She closed her eyes as the pretty male assistant’s thumbs dug hard into her scalp and decided that if she ever became really rich she would have her hair washed and her head massaged every day. She would book an appointment each morning before work, or after work, or both, if she were really rich. If she were really rich, her mind began to apply logic to the fantasy, it would probably be more sensible to have the masseur on call throughout the day: a quick massage at noon to clear her mind before an important lunch, a quick massage in the afternoon just as the West Coast was waking up. If she were that rich, she might even get herself a massage table and a speakerphone and negotiate while being massaged, like sleazy movie moguls did in the movies. Was it just in the movies, or did they do that in real life too? Was the studio boss she had just spoken to lying on a white towel as he made his offer, the folds of his skin shining with aromatherapy oil? The thought made her slightly nauseous. In her mind she cancelled the massage table.
    ‘Voted yet?’ Danny asked her, scissors scrunching through her hair.
    ‘I was there when the polling station opened,’ she said, ‘what about you?’
    ‘I’m not very political.’
    ‘That in itself is a political statement,’ Holly began to say, then stopped herself, sensing that her hair would be the loser in any argument.
    ‘What are we going to do today?’ Danny sighed audibly.
    ‘Just a trim,’ she replied meekly.
    Holly’s hair was shoulder-length and so curly that there came a point, once every six weeks or so, where it changed from bob to explosion overnight. Danny was always urging her to have it short, but she resisted, mainly, she now realized, because instinctively she didn’t trust him, and she finally understood why. He must be a Tory. People who said they weren’t very political always were.
    ‘Touch of the Jane Ashers.’ Robert Preston gave his uninvited opinion when Holly returned to the office.
    ‘Is that a compliment?’ Holly wanted to know.
    ‘Not sure,’ Robert walked a circle around her in the small kitchen. ‘I’m told some men find her sexy because they dream of ruffling those sleek feathers, but you’re a bit ruffled already.’
    ‘Charming.’
    In every job she’d ever had, Holly had made a best friend at work. At the local Odeon, where she’d been an usherette on Saturdays, it was the box-office lady who wore a bright blond wig