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Dean Parkin

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The Hairdresser's Boyfriend

The hairdresser's boyfriend was an older man.
she used to perm his wife's hair, trimming his
while it set, more fashionably than old Brucie
in Crown Street he had explained, but didn't mention
the touch of her fingers, the red nail varnish
or the gap between the buttons in the hills of her shirt.

He started to make his own appointments,
lost his parting and the attempt at a comb over,
shorter and swept back at first, then forward
with a fringe grasping the top of his forehead.
She made the most of what he had
and she was sympathetic, knew the best angles

to hold the mirror, took longer with each appointment
as his hair got shorter
and shorter
until there was nothing left to do
except drop the scissors and comb
and let her fingers work alone all over him.

Envious of the idea of her comb straying
over another man's scalp, now he hated her job,
was teased by the pictures in her window,
those guys with white brick smiles and too much hair;
but it was a bald man she would leave him for, younger too.
"A slaphead?" he had said, but she'd had enough

of his hair and its cultivation and the rest:
the nose hair, the eyebrow trims, and the ones
that grew in his ears and crawled out of his neck.
"I've still got what matters," he told her, slamming
the phone down and reaching for the yellow pages,
thumbing for the category: hairdressers, ladies'.

 

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