My hairdresser cured my depression

I walked to the salon in fiery sunshine. Gorgeous, zaftig Elody was wearing a short satin dressing gown of silver and gold. She was alone. ‘Ça va?’ she said, helping me into the gown. ‘Black dog,’ I said. ‘What is black dog?’ she said. ‘Cafard,’ I said. ‘A black ox trod on my foot.’

I sat in the chair, removed my glasses and stared in the mirror. The straps of my black face mask made my ears stick out. And strewth, the hair. ‘Two owls and a hen, four larks and a wren,’ I said. Elody speaks no English and my French is rudimentary. ‘What?’ she said. I had a stab at translating the limerick into French. She stared at me via the mirror with rapt, sceptical attention.

‘Alors,’ she said brightly, dismissing Edward Lear and turning our deliberation to the task ahead. ‘All off,’ I said. ‘Clippers. No prisoners.’ She didn’t understand the term ‘no prisoners’ in English or French. But with Elody mutual incomprehension doesn’t matter as long as she finds you amusing or absurd enough to laugh at continuously. If there is a thought equivalent in French of the phrase ‘all joking aside’, Elody would be unaware of it. She plugged in the clippers and began striping my nut.

‘Cafard?’ she said with mock seriousness to the absurdest and most unserious of her regulars. I once told her I sometimes went for cycle rides. After that I was the fanatical cyclist. If I told her I’d been somewhere, whether to Aix-en-Provence or Australia, she would ask in all seriousness if I had cycled there. After I had expressed a mild liking for a reproduction of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting on her wall, I was the artist-cyclist.