When I was about eight years old I had a really bad haircut. I’ve had several more in the intervening 26 years, but this one was particularly bad. So bad, in fact, that my sisters teased me, as only sisters can, that I looked like one of the characters off Diff’rent Strokes. Not Arnold. Or even Willis. It wasn’t quite that bad. But Sam. Remember him?
And yes, that does look remarkably similar to the hair cut I sported at the time. In my defence I was more interested in rollerskating, playing netball and collecting Garfield paraphenalia than I was in hair fashions. And yet my sisters took to calling me Sam (quite rightfully too) and thereby instilled in me a lifelong fear of bad haircuts.
So when I realised a week or so ago that my hair wasn’t, as I had hoped, going to last another two months until it was back in the trusty hands of my long term hairdresser Hayley, you might appreciate why I felt a certain amount of trepidation about getting my hair cut in a small Portuguese town where the majority of the inhabitants sport perms, blade one crew cuts or salt-water dreadlocks.
Not wanting to leave it totally to chance, I decided to ask at reception for a recommendation. The girl who was on at the time is really lovely, though speaks very little English.
‘Can you recommend a hairdresser nearby?’ I asked.
She looked at me blankly. I realised I was going to have to employ my best sign language techniques, so I grabbed my pony tail with one hand and made a scissor motion with the other hand, pretending to chop off the ends, saying ‘Cut? Cut?’
‘Ah! Cut!’ she said, finally cottoning on.
‘Yes! Si!’ I nodded encouragingly, watching as she fished out a pair of scissors from amongst the pens in the cup on the desk, held them up, looked at me and said ‘Me cut? Cut hair, yes?’
Err, no.
Anyway, she finally figured out that I wanted a professional to cut my hair, as adept as her scissor skills might be. She even pulled out her mobile phone to look up the number of her own hairdresser, and as she wrote down the number and drew a map for me, I tried not to stare at her hair which reminded me suspiciously of brown fairy floss.
Armed with the map and my Portuguese phrasebook, I headed off to the other side of Sagres, practicing how to say STOP and NO. From the outside, the salon looked like a proper salon, the type with a qualified hairdresser at least. When I opened the door I was relieved to find there was lots of professional equipment around, even if it was all in muted tones of pink and grey. I tried to ignore the seemingly large number of flies, as if this was some sort of butcher shop, as well as the fact that the hairdresser spoke even less English than my friend from the hotel.
I did, however, feel a little unnerved by the 20 sets of eyes that were staring at me. Perhaps if they had been the eyes of other customers, I would have felt a little more confident – the same way you feel about eating at a Chinese restaurant full of Chinese people – but no. These were not people. They were hairdressing dummies (a bit like this one on the left), strategically positioned all around the salon, each displaying a haircut that could only have been delivered by the deft hands of a five year old bearing blunt paper scissors.
Still, I sat down. I figured that at the very worst, if it was a complete disaster, I could just hide away for the next 12 months under the guise of being a tortured, reclusive writer. Come to think of it, I’m convinced that’s why Emily Dickinson stayed inside for all those years. That really is quite a bad haircut.
I did some complex sign language to indicate how much to cut off (fingers about one inch apart), and then closed my eyes so as to avoid the stare of the dummy sitting between me and the mirror who had a strange hairy black helmet on. I hoped the hairdresser had not placed her there for inspiration. I was the only customer, and since the usual hairdresser/client banter about the weather/my love life/what I’m doing for Christmas was not an option with the language barrier, we sat in silence bar the noise of the flies, a couple of dogs barking on the street, and the sound of her chopping my hair off in a way that could only be described as vigorous.
When she finally unclipped my fluorescent pink cape to indicate the cut was complete, I was quite rapturous to find that, although it was a fair bit shorter than requested, I wasn’t bald, nor did I appear to have a helmet on or look like any known sitcom stars, child or otherwise. I could have hugged her really, for averting what I was sure was going to be the biggest hair disaster known to man-kind since Sam and I took on the bowl cut in 1984.
Now that’s what I call $18 well spent.
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