Under One Sky

Chapter 7

7

MARCH 2018, TROMS?, NORWAY

Cecilie stamps the snow off her boots and wipes her feet on the coarse mat.

‘Do you have a spare half-hour?’ she asks her friend Morten.

‘I’m hardly busy,’ he replies, pushing frameless spectacles up his nose, then beckoning Cecilie in with a jaunty wave.

Morten has only had one customer all morning, which means the salon is spick and span: not a hair on the floor, every horizontal wooden panel on the wall cleaned to perfection (not that you can tell; they’re meant to look artfully distressed), sparkling smear-free mirrors, and the aroma of fresh coffee wafting through from the room at the back. Morten is always happy to see his boyfriend’s twin sister, as if she were his own, although Cecilie rarely has cause to go into a hair salon.

‘You want a chat or a haircut?’ Morten laughs, already heading towards the back kitchen to make another round of coffee, so they can sit down for a gossip.

‘A haircut actually.’

Morten stops in his tracks and pivots around conspiratorially. ‘ Really?’ His mouth hangs open, revealing the gap between his two front teeth. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Sure.’

‘Had I better call Espen?’

Cecilie removes her long grey feather-down jacket as if she’s about to go into battle and slings it onto a hairdresser’s stool.

‘He might micromanage everything at the i-Scand, but my brother doesn’t have to approve my haircuts. Besides, he’s disapproved of these for years,’ Cecilie says, tugging on a ragged end of a long blonde dreadlock as she looks into the mirror.

Morten pulls his braces up over his checked shirt, making him look like a friendly garden gnome, as he readies himself for the task at hand.

‘Take a seat,’ he says, ushering Cecilie into his favourite chair, the one closest to the windows that look out onto the small high street.

Cecilie slinks into the square-shaped seat of the brown leather chair and looks at her face. For someone with such delicate features, with fingers that can pluck a harp like an angel, Cecilie is quite ungainly, and she slumps forward to look at her reflection, her DM boots anchoring her to the well-swept floor. Morten lifts ends of rope before they can entwine themselves into Cecilie’s jumper, the seat, the ground.

‘It’s a big deal, Cecilie. I’d have to get rid of all this length. Your hair would be almost as short as mine,’ he says, smoothing his hands across the light brown fluff that caresses his dome.

‘Take them off, short is good,’ she says determinedly. ‘I just want them gone.’

Morten looks at Cecilie’s reflection in the mirror and they lock eyes. He wants to ask if it’s about The Mexican, but he recognises that obstinacy in those dragonfly green irises. He sees it every time he and Espen have an argument, so he decides not to push his luck. Anyway, it’s academic. Cecilie wants a haircut, so he will give her a haircut.

‘OK, well I have no bookings until 3p.m. and Nils is in Oslo for a few days, so the salon is ours. Let me get you that coffee first. Milky, ja ?’ Morten walks to the kitchen and lets out a chuckle. ‘Espen won’t believe it! Your mother neither.’

But it’s neither Espen nor her mother who Cecilie thinks of as she looks in the mirror and stares at her reflection. The mirror frames Cecilie’s face perfectly. Blonde twists cascade past cheekbones that rise like the two curves of a love heart and tumble past her chin. Her eyes are several shades lighter than her jumper, a colour unique to Cecilie and Espen, and it’s a colour Morten is mesmerised by. ‘You must be the only two people on the planet with this eye colour,’ he often marvels. Brother and sister blush when Morten says it: thick lashes sweep down in unison as Cecilie and Espen wonder what their father’s eyes were like. They can’t remember.

Cecilie’s otherworldly beauty doesn’t need reinforcement, and she rarely bothers but for a flick of eyeliner above feline eyes, parallel to the arch of the dark-blonde brows that reach out to her temples. Looking at her face in the mirror for so long makes Cecilie see herself through the eyes of Hector Herrera, and she rises out of her body, out of her chair, and flutters across the timeline of her life. From above, she sees Hector pacing a room, remembering what he said to her the first time they saw each other’s faces. Then she slides a tiny bit further back and looks down on the library, at the time they first found each other.