Page 11 of Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon

CHAPTER TEN

‘Um …’ Josie bites her bottom lip and looks around for the comb Trudy has just asked her for. Twice.

Now Trudy is jerking her head in the direction of the wheelie-tray thing that is on the other side of the salon.

Seriously, Josie is starting to think Trudy is laying traps for her, putting the tools she asks for all over the place so Josie has to find them.

Like a treasure hunt with no treasure, just the reward of combing someone’s hair.

Josie scurries over to the tray only to find three combs of different sizes but the same colour: tortoiseshell. That’s confusing. Oh, and the teeth are different on one comb compared to the next. How is she meant to know which comb Trudy wants?

Wait. Something’s coming back to her: Trudy said the other day that combs need to match hair. Which Josie knows because she learnt it at tech but everything’s great in theory till you’re looking at someone’s wet hair and trying to work out if it’s fine or thick. Or neither.

The other day there was a lady in who Trudy told her was forty-five.

Then Josie said something about her being old and Trudy looked upset.

Whoops. Anyway, the lady’s hair was thinning.

Josie had learnt about that too. Something to do with menopause.

Which is not something Josie thinks she needs to worry about, except here was the lady with the menopause hair and Josie didn’t know whether the fact it was thinning meant it was fine hair, or could menopause hair still be thick?

It’s that sort of thing that confuses her when she’s trying to choose a comb.

‘Josie,’ Trudy says.

Josie goes back to biting her lip. ‘Oh.’ She picks up the comb she thinks is right and carries it to Trudy, who raises her eyebrows. Josie can almost feel Evie raising hers too. She doesn’t think Evie likes her because she barely speaks to her.

The other day some bloke called Sam turned up to talk to Trudy about a job and Evie hardly drew breath speaking to him.

Yeah, the guy was good-looking – handsome, maybe?

It was funny, because he was tall and dark-haired like the leading men are in the movies Josie likes except she didn’t fancy him.

He seemed really nice and he was interested in talking to Evie – or maybe Evie was interested in talking to him – and if a man like that had spoken to her a year or so ago Josie wouldn’t have known what to say to him, because handsome men never speak to her, but these days she doesn’t worry about them so much.

Maybe it’s because of the men she’s met while she’s been practising her hairdressing.

A lot of men. A lot of women too. She’s kind of immune to a good-looking guy now because no matter what he looks like he can turn out to be boring when you’ve got your hands on his head for an hour.

‘ Josie! ’

Oh no. She’s drifted off again. That happens sometimes – she gets into her own head. Her mother says that: You’re in your own head. Josie isn’t quite sure what it means because when she drifts off she feels like she’s everywhere but in her own head.

She picks another comb and takes it over to Trudy, who peers down then gives her a single nod, so she guesses it’s the right comb.

‘Now you can prep the colour,’ Trudy says. ‘My cards out the back have the details for everyone’s colours. Look for the one marked “Felicity”.’

‘Oh – all right,’ Josie says meekly, then she turns and heads for the back room, which is where the colours are kept as well as their handbags and the fridge and the towels. And all the spare stuff. Trudy likes to have things on hand so they never run out.

The gowns for the clients all hang in a little cupboard in the salon.

The first day Josie went looking for them out the back – everything else was out there, so she thought they must be there too – and the others were busy chatting so she didn’t want to ask where they were.

She felt like an idiot searching through the back room and not finding them.

Which is how she used to feel at school, trying to spell a word she didn’t know, and she’d try to work it out – she’d try really hard – but the teachers never cared about that.

All they cared about was that she got it wrong.

Trudy isn’t like her teachers, though. Once Josie found the gown – and the search probably only took a couple of minutes, although it seemed much longer – and put it on the client, Trudy smiled and winked at her and didn’t say anything, although Josie was sure Trudy knew she’d had trouble finding it.

Still, today she feels pretty stupid, trying to figure out which comb is which, and now she’s looking at the card for Felicity and at the colours on the shelves and worrying about mixing the colour for this client.

If you get a colour wrong it can be a disaster.

Really. Once during a class another student put a colour on someone and it turned out so bad.

It was meant to be brown and it went orange on this woman, and oh god the woman was very upset.

So Josie takes her time to study the card then check the colours on the shelves and match them to what Trudy has written up.

Josie may have trouble reading but she knows how to match words, because she recognises shapes.

She also doesn’t have a problem with numbers.

Maths was her favourite subject, but also the source of some stick from her teachers, because they’d say she didn’t jumble up her numbers, therefore they didn’t believe her when she said her words were jumbled up.

Yeah, school was hard. She’s glad it’s over.

Once she mixes the colour she delivers it to Trudy, feeling a little sick in case it goes wrong but also kind of fine because she just knows Trudy would fix it if there were something amiss. Trudy just has that air about her.

‘Would you like to take your lunch break now?’ Trudy says to her.

‘Okay!’ Josie says, and it’s such a relief because now she doesn’t have to watch the colour going on and by the time she’s back from lunch the client will probably have had her hair shampooed and any problems will have been handled by Trudy.

From the back room Josie picks up her handbag and her sandwich.

Devon and tomato sauce – she liked having it at school and there’s no sense changing something you like.

And she doesn’t have it every day. Some days it’s Vegemite and lettuce – trying to be healthy.

Her mum tells her to eat more vegetables but the meals at home are full of vegies, so why should her lunch be?

Each day she’s gone to a new spot for lunch.

Once she walked all the way to the Skillion and she didn’t realise how long it took her, so she was late getting back.

All Trudy said was, ‘Maybe wear a watch next time, pet.’ Josie was given a Swatch last Christmas by her parents, and she managed to lose it so doesn’t even have a watch to wear.

There’s a clock in the salon so she doesn’t need one there, and one on the outside of Terrigal Surf Life Saving Club, so since that Skillion day she’s stayed within sight of the club and used that clock to mark time.

That’s why she plonks herself down on a seat not far from the club, underneath one of the pine trees. There’s seagull poo – she guesses it’s from seagulls, she has no actual proof – on one side so she takes the other side and opens up her sandwich wrapper.

It’s nice there. Peaceful. Her brain races a lot – she has all these thoughts, and worries, and things she wants to say, but she thinks they’ll sound stupid if they leave her mouth so she keeps them all inside, which makes her brain feel crowded.

In the past only listening to music or watching a movie made it better but now she finds that looking at the water calms it down too.

If she just sits and watches the waves while she eats her sandwich, time passes and she doesn’t worry about anything.

Funny how you can get all the way to being an adult and find out something like that.

Funny how upset you can be that you didn’t find it out when you were younger. Maybe it would have helped.

Water drips near her feet and she looks up to see a tall guy in one of those short-sleeved wetsuits, holding a surfboard.

He has blond hair that’s kind of going every which way, and zinc cream on his nose.

He’s cute. And her immediate thought is that she’s in his way, which is ridiculous because she’s on a seat that is literally cemented to the ground so she can hardly have got in anyone’s way.

‘Hi,’ he says.

Now some drops of water land on her skin, but she doesn’t mind.

‘Hi.’ She has to squint a little to look at him.

‘You work at the salon,’ he says.

She frowns, because she can’t remember seeing him there. ‘Um … yeah.’

He nods. ‘I take my nan there on Monday mornings. I don’t go in. But I saw you this week. Looked like you were working there.’

‘I’m an apprentice,’ she says.

‘Oh yeah?’ He tosses his head the way boys do when they’ve been underwater, as if they’re dogs shaking off a bath. ‘Me too.’

‘Where?’

‘Mechanic’s.’ He jerks his chin in the direction of the shops. ‘A coupla streets back.’

Now it’s her turn to nod.

‘Name’s Brett.’

‘Josie.’

He grins; his teeth are white and his smile is electric and she can’t help smiling back.

‘That’s such a pretty name,’ he says. ‘For a pretty girl.’

Her smile drops because she’s so surprised – he’s calling her pretty? Her cheeks feel hot and she looks down.

‘Anyway, better get going.’ He dips the front of his board as if he’s bowing to her. ‘See ya, Josie.’

‘Bye,’ she says meekly, looking after him as he walks away, only to see him turn around and wave.

The rest of her sandwich sits uneaten in its Glad Wrap because there is something in her stomach that makes her not want to eat any more. Nerves, maybe? Or excitement. Both. Neither. Who knows. Who cares! A cute boy called her pretty.