‘Then I got taken hostage in Iran,’ said the lady sitting next to me in the hairdresser’s as she was having her hair crimped.
‘Really?’ said the hairdresser, who had the flat irons on her hair and was making her look like an 1980s pop star. ‘And how was that?’
He was obviously stuck in hairdresser mode, and having not heard what she had said, perhaps, was ploughing on regardless, assuming the chatter was about her holiday.
‘I’m sorry, what do you mean?’ said the lady who had been admiring herself in the mirror as he worked and now turned her head a little to look round at this carefree, handsome man in his mid-forties who was crimping her.
The hairdresser must then have rerun the tape in his head and realised what she had said, and what he had said in reply. ‘Er, I mean, was that a good hostage experience or…?’
‘A good hostage experience?’ said the woman, incredulous. Crikey, I thought, for I was sat right next to her in this tiny salon in a quaint Surrey village, which was really quite cosy and cheerful on a dark evening, or it had been up until now.
You, sir, should win the award for the bravest response to a totally irretrievable situation
I was waiting for my long, tangled hair to be cut and tamed, and was watching fascinated as the stylist gave this other customer’s hair more body by crimping only the underneath layers, in fact.
It was intriguing, but not half so intriguing as the story she was telling him about her life and times, in a very loud voice, seemingly happy for me to hear. I was trying to read Hello!, but this was better by far. I was taking it all in, but I don’t think the hairdresser was.
Aside from chirping the odd ‘Oh lovely’, as she described her past adventures, he was obviously not noticing that the thing was taking a sinister turn and so by the time she was in Tehran becoming caught up in one of the worst mass hostage crises in history he had lost the thread and ended up asking if she had had a good hostage experience.
‘I mean,’ he stammered, trying to style it out, ‘were those particular hostage takers nice hostage takers or…’
‘No, they weren’t nice at all,’ said the lady. ‘You can read about it if you look it up.’
‘Oh dear,’ said the hairdresser, and to be fair to him, he could have backed off but he leaned in and said: ‘Still, it’s what you make of these things, isn’t it? I mean, I know people who’ve been through all sorts and make the best of it and then there’s other people have a bad reaction and, well, they’re not quite right in the first place, are they?’
I thought: you, sir, should win the award for the bravest response to a totally irretrievable situation.
Partly, he was helped by the fact that he had nearly finished and she was in raptures about the effect he had wrought on her barnet. When he finished crimping, she declared herself ecstatic with her new look.
He took off her gown, divested her of her money, bade her farewell and turned his attention to me. I had never been to him before. This was our first encounter. I was, at this point, speechless.
Barely had he set off with his scissors when he started telling me about his recent heart attack. ‘So there I was, lying in a ward full of all these other men who had just had heart attacks and I thought, something’s wrong here and you know what I told them, I said this is all because of that…’
I said: ‘Can I just stop you there? I’m not someone you want to go down this route with. If you get me started on this, I mean, if you get my hopes up that you’re really up for this, then I am not going to be responsible for what I say. So don’t wind me up and let me go if you’re not absolutely sure you want to have this conversation no holds barred, as it were.’
‘Oh, you can say what you like in here. Oh yes, it all happens in here. Doesn’t it, Chantelle?’ And he turned to the shampoo girl who confirmed that it did all happen.
But he had only just got me warmed up when a posh-looking man and his wife came in for the man to have a trim, and overhearing me in full flow, the woman shouted: ‘I don’t want to hear this!’
I looked to the hairdresser for reassurance but he was blank. ‘I told you this would happen. But I need this haircut. So I’m just going to shut up like the hostage and let you get it done.’
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