‘You’re walking really fast. I’m not doing fast today.’
‘There’s a Great Dane behind us. If Lafayette sees it, he’ll try to fight it.’
Two minutes of outrunning the Dane later, we’re there, wherever it is – the sign above the shop says ‘Locks Are Everything’. Petroc pushes me inside, singing ‘Ta-da!’ as I study the row of chairs and mirrors. Annoyed at him for derailing my day, I now wonder if this isn’t exactly what I need. Stillness and abstraction were my primary aims; where better to find them than a hairdressing salon, a temple of tranquillity?
Whenever I go to the hairdressers, I’m often exhausted by the inane chat – ‘Going anywhere nice on your holidays?’ – then vaguely appalled by the finished result, which inevitably leads me to over-tip out of confusion and embarrassment, but today will be different. Today, I will sit in silence, majestic like a Sphinx, while someone makes me beautiful.
‘Sasha, darling, are you free? I’ve got a challenge for you.’
Of course, Petroc knows her; he knows everyone. He’s always chatting to people in case they’d make good TV. This Sasha might make good TV but she doesn’t look like she wants to. She’s quite forbidding, and shaven-headed, which isn’t a great advert for a hairdresser, as if she attempted a self-style that went wrong, and had to start again.
Sasha looks at her watch. ‘I’ve only got half an hour before my next client.’
‘That’ll have to do. Make her look half-decent so we can go for lunch.’
She sits me down in one of the chairs and dead-eyes me in the mirror. ‘What’ll it be?’
Usually cowed by hairdressers, their superior knowledge of undercuts and feathering, I tend to resist asking for what I really want, leaving them to make the style choices for me. Gearing up to keep it simple – ‘Just a wash and blow-dry please’ – my gaze is snagged by a photo on the wall behind me. ‘That,’ I say, pointing. That’s what I really want.
For years, as long as I can remember, ever since my mother started needling about my roots, I’ve hated my hair. A really visceral, resentful loathing of my own follicles, which continually let me down. Firstly, of course, it’s grey. There are some people – striking, dramatic people – who can carry off grey hair, but I’m not one of them. I’d look like Miss Marple. I have to dye it. There’s no way I have time to spend four hours in a salon every six weeks, so it has to be a packet-job in the bathroom at home – as a result, all our tiles are flecked with Nice’n Easy Light Ash Brown. Is there a more depressing colour than ash brown? I’d love a more interesting hue, but red makes my skin look yellow, black makes my skin look dead, and blonde makes me look like a randy divorcee. Lastly though, what I really hate about my hair is its flatness. It does nothing, just dangles. Locks are everything, and I have always lamented mine’s lack of ambition – where other tresses wave or curl or spiral or bounce, mine just hang limply, like a basset hound’s ears. Of course, it’s my dad’s hair, which is why my mother despises it. In conclusion, my dream hairdo, in terms of dimension and vibrancy, is probably Marge Simpson’s, but in the meantime, the woman in the picture behind me looks pretty good. Different from me, which is key. The difference I’m feeling on the inside must be reflected externally. Time to change the DNA of my hair.
‘That,’ I say, again. That wonderful woman in the photo. She has wild, untameable ringlets sticking out in a halo around her head. Marvellous.
Petroc surveys me scornfully. ‘Seriously? It’s quite a style departure for you. Style exiting the building, in fact.’
‘That’s what I want.’ Catching Sasha’s eye in the mirror, I point at my lank, crisp thatch. ‘Can you do it?’
‘Sure.’ She shrugs. ‘But it’ll wash out.’
‘Just for today.’ I sit back, satisfied. ‘Don’t talk to me,’ I tell them. ‘Pretend I’m not here.’
So Petroc and Sasha start talking to each other as she washes my hair, about another hairdresser in the salon who Petroc dated who is now dating someone famous, which Petroc is livid about, and then I’m away, not listening any more, just drifting, as Sasha tugs and pulls with the tongs. Thoughts float across my brain like bubbles, ready to be blown away or popped. I think about my kids, safely tucked away at school, how I love school, taking care of them, for free, educating them and enriching them so that I don’t have to. I think about Robbie, in his office in Finzels Reach, managing portfolios and dealing with IP infringement or whatever it is he does. He rarely talks about work, rarely talks about anything really, except his passion for ruins, and sometimes the rugby. Unlike Petroc, who’s dated everyone, I have only had four boyfriends, and three of them were unremarkable. I was never one of those girls who went for the dangerous type; never understood the attraction. I didn’t go for dangerous anything. There was already enough to worry about without aligning yourself to romantic peril. And then another bubble sails past that looks like a suspect package, and I pop it quickly before it can open or explode, but it’s followed by another – the emailed guest list resurfacing, names, names, names – and I start to get hot again, like I was in the office earlier, but it’s probably just the curling tongs, which have a lot of work to do, and with a bit of slow and even breathing I’m all right again, and bubble-free.
When Sasha finally steps back, I refocus and study my reflection. It’s very, very curly.
‘I look amazing.’
Petroc wrinkles his nose. ‘You look weird. No offence to Sash.’
‘I look like Lady Marian in Robin Hood Prince of Thieves.’
‘But less attractive,’ notes Petroc, scrupulously.
‘It’ll wash out,’ repeats Sasha, as she whips off my robe.
‘I’ll never wash it again,’ I assure her, as I pay her thirty pounds. She looks completely indifferent, and I think I might be in love with her. Petroc drags me away, just as I’m wondering whether to book in another appointment at the weekend to get my head shaved just like hers.
‘Lunch,’ he says.
‘Aren’t you supposed to be meeting that Astral1 commissioner?’ Astral1 is a new channel with big ambitions and entirely unrealistic ideas about budgets.
Petroc smiles, hugging Lafayette, who snarls. ‘He cancelled! When it came to it, he couldn’t face trekking over to Bristol. The advantage of being out in the sticks!’
‘Did you tell Vince?’
‘Of course not. I’m going to tell him it went really well and that I got some excellent intel.’
Originally, I imagined I would have lunch on my own, because I didn’t want anyone seeing how quickly and inelegantly I can cram a burrito into my mouth, but I guess if I’m going to dine with anyone, it may as well be Petroc, who I’m fond of despite his terrible lockdown life choices. Not only did he get Lafayette, but he decided he’d had enough of the city and bought a derelict church in Batheaston that’s been a total headache – he should have stayed in his lovely Georgian flat in Montpelier. However, he’s certainly the most likeable of my fellow executive producers at Red Eye. Better than Oswald, the other exec, who’s bone-idle, bullies underlings and yet somehow has a bonus package that would pay for an evil trader’s house in Clifton.
‘I want to go to Little Donkey.’ Bristol is full of lovely little cafés and restaurants, and today is a day to take advantage of them.
‘You’re so unsophisticated.’
I toss my ringlets. ‘I actually like food. Come on, it’s not far. We can discuss your imaginary Astral1 meeting en route.’
He takes my arm, then releases it as Lafayette snaps in outrage. ‘Lead the way.’
10
Petroc and I go way back – seven years, to be precise. I got my job at Red Eye aged thirty-nine, working on a new commission they’d just secured called Massive House, Micro House. The idea was that you’d take people who lived in huge houses, and people who lived in tiny houses and . . . swap them. I have no idea why. At least, I suppose the people who owned the huge houses would return home appreciating the extra space, but what was in it for the tiny house owners? It made no sense but I guess it was just a way of repackaging property porn. Anyway, it was a six-ep series, they wanted me to oversee it and it was my first executive producer role so I would probably have said yes even if it was called Murder House, Morgue House.
I spent the majority of pre-production trying to make sure most of the properties were in the West Country so I didn’t have to travel far. Vince kept putting his oar in because he wanted a Scottish laird to swap his Highland castle for a grotty Tottenham bedsit and I regularly had to explain his own format to him: the small houses weren’t necessarily shit, they were just small. We’d found a gorgeous beach-hut in Dorset that I wanted to move into myself.
Red Eye seemed pretty similar to many of the other production companies I’d worked at – a load of overpaid cynical white people at the top, and a smaller, more diverse team of underpaid minions doing the actual grind. As an executive producer, you’d think I was near the top, but in fact I’m more upper-middle. There are endless echelons of MDs and CEOs, CFOs and presidents and global heads and elusive chairmen of parent corporations above me, and what unites them is that they love meetings. They live for meetings. The more obscure the point of the meeting, the better. Utterly pointless is by far the best. I’ve lost count of the number of ‘catch-ups’ I’ve been invited to, where the subject line of the email was something like ‘Redefining Group Collective Strategy in the Post-Linear Era’. I’d be assured attendance was obligatory, sit through three hours of a PowerPoint presentation full of pie charts, and come out to discover that my entire production had fallen apart in my absence, requiring major firefighting to rescue it. Just as I’d finished picking up the pieces, another email would arrive: ‘Understanding the Creative Process through Team Building’. Frequently, I’d find myself invited to two different meetings at the same time – when I asked Imogen, Vince’s PA and general office assistant, what we were expected to do in these circumstances, she simply reorganized them so they were back-to-back. I’d often spend six hours of my day watching PowerPoint slides, and then hustle out to do my actual job. It made me so mad I wanted to scream.
But, of course, I didn’t scream. I just got on with it, staying late, starting early, bringing in doughnuts for everyone to curry favour. Massive House, Micro House got made; it managed nearly two million viewers which everyone thought was pretty good; the Guardian said it was ‘televisual baby purée’, which made Vince spit until Petroc reminded him that all publicity is good publicity. The channel recommissioned the series and Vince asked me to stay on to make it, which was a tacit admission that I’d done a good job.
However, second time round, he said that since it was an ‘up-and-running show’ I’d have more time on my hands, so he was giving me responsibility for his development team, a motley crew of misfits who’d been mismanaged for months. Development teams are the engine room of a TV company, responsible for coming up with the ideas for shows that the producers then make. It’s a very specific skill, and driving a team like that is a full-time job. I already had a full-time job producing shows and didn’t have time to come up with them too. But Vince said it like he was conferring a huge honour on me, so rather than refuse point-blank, I said thank you. Now I essentially had two roles, but since Vince didn’t believe in remunerating his staff adequately, I was never offered a salary increase or any other kind of perk. And since I was chronically incapable of standing up for myself, once again I just had to get on with it. My window intruder dream started up again which, on top of everything else, made me constantly teary, exhausted and on edge.
