The Hairmare

My hair has grown to catastrophic lengths. Not in a long, flowing Rapunzel-esque sort of way either. Nothing remotely glamorous. No mysterious woodland enchantress energy. No windswept goddess nonsense. No. It’s mushroomed outwards. Expanded aggressively. Colonised space. Become less “hair” and more like something the council should be monitoring. And it’s wreaking havoc. It gets trapped in car doors. Caught beneath chair legs. Wrapped around my ankles like it’s actively trying to assassinate me. I’m fairly certain it’s carrying its own wildlife. This morning, I don’t wake to my alarm. I wake to birdsong. Actual bloody birdsong. For one blissful, disorientating moment, I think perhaps I’ve died peacefully in my sleep and ascended to some woodland paradise. Then something pecks my scalp. I open one eye to discover a tiny brown bird nestled comfortably near the crown of my head, chirping enthusiastically like it’s announcing the dawn to the forest creatures. “Oh for fuck’s sake.” It flutters deeper into my hair. I stagger out of bed anyway, dragging half the duvet with me because apparently my hair has swallowed that too. Halfway down the stairs, I nearly go arse-over-tit after stepping directly onto one enormous hairy tendril sprawled across the stairs like roadkill with intent. That seals it indefinitely. It needs to get gone. Immediately. So naturally, I ask my mum to cut it. Because why would I willingly subject myself to the fluorescent horror of salon lighting, where women called Chloe ask if I’ve “got anything nice planned today” while silently assessing me as a person via the condition of my roots? When I can simply let my mother attack my scalp with almost-blunt kitchen scissors like she’s pruning a hedge? My own personal hairdresser. “I can’t cut your hair right now,” Mum says breezily over tea. “You’ll have to wait until I’m back from my holiday.” I stare at her. “Your… what?” “Holiday.” I’m sorry, did I just hear my mother say holiday? My mum hasn’t ventured outside Britain since the early eighties. She loves this country with frightening emotional sincerity. So much so, she genuinely doesn’t see the point in leaving it. “Best country in the world,” she always says moments before launching into a lengthy defence of the royals. Royal shmoyals. I don’t care for them. But Mum is British to the marrow. She’s that snail clinging stubbornly to the rock from that children’s book I used to read to the boys. Immovable. Damp. Perfectly content beneath permanent cloud cover. And yet now she’s standing in the hallway beside a suitcase almost the size of herself. The thing looks ancient, like it hoarding hard-boiled sweets from 1974 and unresolved grief. “You’re really going?” “Well I’m hardly gonna wait for death in a retail park, am I?” she says. Fair enough. So now I’m at the airport, waving her off while my hair drags behind me across Terminal 2 like a haunted bridal train. “Where are you going—?” I ask. But she’s already marching through departures, her arthritic suitcase squeaking mournfully behind her. Strangely, I feel happy for her. Too much Britain probably isn’t good for anybody. Eventually, the damp gets into your spirit. There’s only so much drizzle, beige food and passive aggression the human soul can absorb before it starts leaking out through the ears. Unfortunately, this leaves me with a very BIG problem. The Hairmare. And it’s already causing commotion. Security pulled me aside earlier because they thought I was smuggling drugs inside it. One woman spent twenty minutes waving scanning equipment around my head, while another whispered, “Could be trafficking exotic animals.” At one point a sniffer dog sat behind me and simply looked overwhelmed. Which, honestly, I couldn’t entirely blame it for. Then a homeless chap mistook the lower half for a sleeping bag and started making himself comfortable inside it. I had to politely ask him to jog on. He looked genuinely hurt. That’s when I hear it. Scottish vocals drifting through the stale airport air. I’d know that voice across five terminals. My Scottish pal, Lee. Technically more of a pal-of-a-pal. The kind of person I only really see at BBQs every few years where someone inevitably burns sausages while he stands nearby looking immaculate. Because Lee always dresses to impress. Always. Even now he looks like he’s on his way to a fashion shoot nobody told the rest of us about. Camel coat. Expensive boots. Silver rings. Cream roll neck. Not a single hair out of place. Which, given my current situation, feels borderline smug. Lee squints at the travelling nature reserve attached to my head. “…Jesus Christ.” “I know.” “I thought that was a coat behind ye.” A tiny beak emerges briefly near my temple. He blinks. “Did I just see a wee bird?” I nod solemnly. “That’s Birdy,” I say. “My morning alarm.” “Mate… ye cannae be carrying wildlife through customs.” “You need to cut it.” “You need tae burn it.” I rummage through my bag for Mum’s kitchen scissors. Gone. “Ah shit,” I groan. “She must’ve taken them with her.” “Aye, well,” Lee says, “Probably got flagged as a weapon.” Salvation arrives in the form of a nearby Superdrug. Lee and I march through the aisles on a mission. Or at least he marches. I sort of drag six feet of sentient hair behind me like an ex I can’t get rid of. Eventually we find the scissors hanging beside the hair clips and scrunchies. At least a dozen of them. “Thank God,” I sigh, grabbing one. Only the second I touch them, they slip from my fingers. They clatter onto the floor. Gone. Not under the shelf. Not behind anything. Just… vanished. I blink. “What?” I grab another pair. Slip. Drop. Gone. Again. Gone. Again. Gone. Until every single pair has disappeared into thin air. Lee slowly removes his tinted glasses. “I dinnae think God wants ye tae get this haircut.” He studies my hair thoughtfully before twisting the entire monstrous mass of hair into one gigantic bun atop my head. The sheer weight nearly snaps my neck sideways. “There,” he says proudly. “Very editorial.” “I’ll make it work,” I mutter unconvincingly. “I’m watching a band later,” Lee says. “Ye should come.” He passes me a crumpled pamphlet. HOT CHIP — 9PM — THE HAIRY BEAVER — £5 ENTRY The Hairy Beaver. A pub, before your gutter minds wander. Honestly, for £5 in this economy, it would be criminal not to go. The only catch is we have to take three buses to get there. Three. As if one bus journey doesn’t feel like a punishment for past sins. I don’t do public transport. Well… there was that one unfortunate occasion where I got trapped beside someone who reeled off their entire life story and I became so emotionally exhausted I missed my stop entirely. I hate buses. The smeared windows that look either licked by overstimulated children or jizzed on by lonely strangers. The smell of damp coats and stale arse trapped permanently in the upholstery. Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with humanity while strangers aerosolise their germs directly into your aura. Not my cup of tea, as the Brits say. And yet here I am anyway. Sitting in a freezing bus shelter waiting for the third and apparently mythical final bus. Night has fallen. My arse has fused permanently to the plastic seat. The gigantic bun on my head sways ominously every time the wind changes direction, as though it’s calculating ways to decapitate me. I should have gone home hours ago. Hot Chip are alright, I suppose, if you’ve consumed enough alcohol to temporarily lower your standards, but this journey feels less like travel and more like hell on wheels. Meanwhile Lee is practically vibrating beside me. “I’m buzzin,” he says. “Cannae wait tae see ma favourite band.” And so we wait. And wait. And wait. Until eventually I say quietly, “The bus isn’t coming, is it?” Lee stares out into the empty road. “Nah,” he sighs. “I dinnae think it is, mate.” The excitement drains out of him at once. Something about that hits me harder than it should. The haircut never happened. Mum’s vanished abroad. The evening has simply folded in on itself like wet cardboard. Even Lee’s little pamphlet has gone limp with disappointment. Some days simply collapse under the weight of their own disappointment. The night grows colder around us. So I slowly unravel the massive bun atop my head and let the hair spill down around me in thick heavy waves. Then — Clink. A pair of scissors lands beside my foot. Then another. Clink. Another. Another. Silver scissors begin raining endlessly from my hair onto the pavement. Dozens of them. Shining little metal corpses. Every missing pair from Superdrug tumbling out in shining metallic cascades like my scalp has become some kind of cursed haberdashery portal. Neither of us speaks. The pile keeps growing. And in that strange exhausted silence, watching all those lost scissors spill from the very thing they were supposed to fix, I suddenly understand something about life. Maybe some problems don’t trap the solution. Maybe they consume it. You carry things too long. Sadness. Exhaustion. Tiny humiliations. Quiet disappointments. All the small things that don’t seem serious enough to ruin you individually. All the things you keep promising yourself you’ll sort out later. You wrap them neatly. Balance them carefully. Pretend they aren’t getting heavier. And somewhere along the way, the very things meant to save you vanish into the mess too. The final pair drops softly onto the pavement. Clink. Lee stares at the mountain of scissors. Then at me. Then at the endless hair pooled around the bus shelter like an oil spill. “Ah knew a lassie once who swallowed her feelings.” He gestures toward the scissors. “But this feels a wee excessive.”