The Knot

The second week of August is the week Stuart makes his money. Everyone who has rented a cottage in Whitby comes off the beach at some point and decides they can’t be photographed looking like that.

The woman in his chair asked for two centimetres off and nothing else. Then she sat down and put her head at exactly the angle he was about to ask her for.

“Turned out nice, hasn’t it?” he said, dropping the cape over her shoulders. “They promised us rain all week.”

“It’s rained twice.”

“You’re not from round here, are you?”

“Leicester. We’re staying up near the church for a fortnight.”

He combed a section down and started at the back. Most people watch. They follow the scissors in the mirror like they’re checking his work, and they tip their head the wrong way while they do it. She looked out of the window at the harbour and kept her chin exactly where he had put it.

“Shampoo after?” he asked.

“No — no shampoo. I washed it this morning.”

She said the word the way people say a word they say forty times a day.

Halfway down the left side, the comb caught. It was a proper knot, the kind that pulls, and in thirty years every single head in that chair had jumped. Hers didn’t move at all.

Stuart put the comb down.

“You do this for a living, don’t you,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“I’m on holiday.”

“That’s not a no, though, is it.”

“No,” she said. “It isn’t.”

He turned the mirror round when the back was finished, and she looked at it properly for the first time.

“That’s a nice line,” she said. “Better than the one I do.”

Stuart brushed her neck and let it go. He’d known long before she said any of that, and not because of the shampoo — one word proves nothing. It was the knot. It was the one second in an hour when she forgot to be a customer.