Zara.
Oh I love Zara, she says and goes into a long and elaborate story of how she found a dress she wanted and she waited and waited for it in the sale, hiding it in different points of the shop so that her size wouldn’t be found, and she got it for fifty per cent off she exclaims, with such joy even the comatose woman beside us at the sink and the blonde beauty trapped in her trance start laughing. Because when my mother tells a story, she tells the entire room a story.
I think of that as my opening line of her eulogy. It may have taken us so long to reunite but when we did our relationship was so intense on many levels, and so moving that Fergal and the kids ask me to speak for them all. She loved us, her daughter would say, but really you were the special one, and so I would take to the altar and begin. The long-lost daughter, found and cherished. When my mother told a story she told the whole room a story, and everyone would laugh with fondness, take tissues from purses and wipe their eyes because, yes, that’s so true, her daughter Allegra has hit the nail on the head, they all knew that about Carmencita and loved her for it and it took her eldest daughter to point it out.
But she’s alive and she’s here. She runs the water gently over my hair and asks if the temperature is okay. It takes a while for my scalp to feel it through my thick hair and as if reading my mind she says, My goodness, all of this beautiful hair, we may need a bigger basin.
Like Charlotte’s hair, the blonde beauty says, and her voice is nothing like I thought it’d be. It’s deep and husky.
Yes yes, like Charlotte, that’s my daughter, my mother says. My heart pounds and splits at the same time because you see I am her daughter and she doesn’t know and how I wish she’d be speaking proudly of my hair as she does of Charlotte’s. I think of us gathering among her friends, us sharing the story of how we met, the humour of the parking ticket drama, and everyone would laugh, like we’re ladies in some Victorian parlour taking tea. And my mother would say, But it was when I saw her hair, touched her hair, felt her hair, that I knew she was mine. And the ladies would ahhh and press the corners of their monogrammed handkerchiefs to their moist eyes and fan their faces before reaching for a cucumber-and-crab finger sandwich from the bottom layer of the afternoon tea tray.
Her fingers are in my hair now, they gently guide the water away from my forehead and face in a scooping motion so relaxing that my core stops rattling and finally normalises. I close my eyes and sink into the chair.
Is there a particular shampoo you’d like to use, she asks and I shake my head no.
I’ll let you decide, I say with a smile.
She holds out the bottle before me. For dry, thick hair, coarse. I’m sure you don’t need to wash every day, too much work with the blow-drying, so this conditions and … off she goes. She knows my hair, my mother. She could have told me these things as I was growing up, tips and guidance on hair products, packing them into my case as I headed off to boarding school, or would I not have gone to boarding school if she was around. Everything would have been different. I feel a lump in my throat, a little emotional at what I’ve missed out on. What both of us have missed out on, what I’m experiencing now at her hands and she doesn’t even know it. Pops gave me baths, always entertained me with bath toys. I loved bathtime and then as I got older he ran baths and left the room for me to get in, feeling it inappropriate for a dad with a daughter, while he sat outside or nearby, talking to me, asking me to sing just so he knew I hadn’t drowned.
And then of course I started showering myself. At five years old at boarding school. Charlotte’s age, or maybe she’s older. But I’m guessing her mother still washes her hair for her, runs her hands through her hair lovingly as she’s doing now, massaging my scalp. More lovingly, I suppose. Pops would use a cup to scoop the bathwater and pour it over my head. Shampoo my hair roughly with heavy hands and thick fingers, shampoo and water going in my eyes, everything stinging. I hated that bit, it stressed him. He’d do it as quickly as he could, get it over with, wipe my stinging eyes and tears, and then he let me play.
She washes the shampoo out and massages in the conditioner, a long explanation of what that will do to my hair. I feel like I’m falling as she massages my temples, my scalp, my headache not gone but throbbing beneath her fingers, and I wonder if she can feel my head vibrate in her hands. She tells me about treatments that will help my beautiful hair, and I take it all in, every single word, commit it to memory as she tells me so I can add in a conversation sometime, My mam told me to use … Just like other people say without thinking about it. A sentence I’ve never said before in my life.