Chapter 11 Work Song
WORK SONG
MICHAEL
“Oh, Daphne, he sounds like a rotter, why on Earth are you still with him?” I asked the blonde twenty-something sitting in the chair in front of me. In the mirror, I saw her turn scarlet and duck her head.
“Keep still, love, or you’ll end up looking more like Barbara Castle than Twiggy.”
She giggled, but to her credit she did it without moving too much.
“Although that might solve the Darren problem. He is the sort to ditch me for having a bad hairdo.”
“Who has a bad hairdo? Michael, are you giving this young lady a style she does not want?” The manager of the salon, Mrs Deidre Delaney just had to walk by my station as Daphne said that.
Bloody harridan. I didn’t need this. I was already on edge because tonight was the night I was going out with Mick–Mick and all his friends.
His young friends. Why the hell had I agreed to this?
At least I’d convinced Robert to join us, so I wouldn’t be the odd one out. Hopefully, he’d behave himself.
“Miss Phillips, are you happy with Michael?” Mrs Delaney spat the words. “Or would you prefer me to fetch a more appropriate stylist to finish your cut?” Her words were not subtle, nor were they intended to be. She’d hated me from the moment she started working here.
And the feeling was mutual. I didn’t even know why we needed a manager. Tracy, the shop girl, answered the phone and wrote down all the appointments. Mrs Delaney was supposed to be in charge of the calendar, and the shifts, but we mostly organised ourselves.
The owner of the oh-so-prestigious salon I worked in believed that it looked more professional and welcoming to have a manager who wasn’t a stylist. Mrs Delaney was such an odd choice, though.
Middle-aged and with no style whatsoever.
She also held the strong conviction that men shouldn’t be women’s hairdressers.
Never mind that the most sought after ladies’ hairdressers in the world were men.
She wouldn’t be able to tell Vidal Sassoon from Gore Vidal if her life depended on it.
All she saw was the ‘indecency’ of men touching women in a public setting.
Male nurses or teachers were just as objectionable to her.
You’d think the fact that I was more likely to run off with the customer’s husbands than do anything inappropriate to the girls themselves would put her mind at ease.
But, no. Being queer just gave her a whole different reason to hate me. She was one of those that thought effeminate men like me were turning good men queer and stealing them from their respectable wives and respectable lives.
She would find any bloody reason to have a go at me. Thankfully, Daphne spoke up.
“Oh no, not at all. Michael is doing a wonderful job. He’s the only one who gets my hair just right, I’d never let anyone else cut it.”
My eyes met Daphne’s in the mirror in front of us, and I mouthed a silent “thank you.” Mrs Delaney made a noise like she was deflating and then marched off to harass one of the other stylists. Bloody battle-axe.
“Now where were we, Daph?” I resumed cutting her fine blonde hair. “Oh yes, you were about to explain to me why you keep letting Darren take you out, despite him being an awful oaf by all accounts.”
She went bright pink again but remembered to stay still.
“Well, he… he’s…”
“Go on, love, spit it out.”
“He’s a good kisser.” The words were so quiet that if I hadn’t read her lips in the mirror, I wouldn’t have caught what she said.
“Oh, Daphne, there are plenty of nice boys out there you can kiss!”
“Shhhh!” she hissed, and this time she put her face in her hands.
“Why? There’s nothing wrong with kissing. It’s not the 1800s you know.”
Bless this girl for being so embarrassed by talking about kissing. If she knew the things that I got up to on the weekend, she’d die of shock.
“If my mum knew I’d kissed a boy before we were engaged, she’d lock me in my bedroom for a week.” The fear of her terrible mother took all the colour out of her cheeks. Poor girl.
“Oh, Daphne. She sounds like a wicked woman!”
“No, Michael, you mustn’t say that.” She shook her head frantically, forcing me to yank my scissors away from her head. “She isn’t at all. She’s given me everything. She’s a good, Christian woman, that’s all. She’s just doing what she needs to do to keep me safe.”
“From boys?”
“From damnation.”
Oh Lordy. I never imagined Daphne as part of the fire and brimstone brigade. There was nothing I could do here. If this girl was that brainwashed she thought kissing more than one man in her life would send her to Hell, then half an hour in my salon wasn’t going to convince her otherwise.
For the rest of the time it took to finish her hairdo, I stuck to simple smalltalk.
I preferred the clients who liked to chat, but after our enlightening conversation about her mother, my metaphorical drawbridge had come up.
I’d assumed that with her fashionable clothes and haircut, she was forward-thinking. More fool me.
Left to its own devices, my mind wandered back to a gorgeous redhead who I should not have been thinking about. Spending more time with him was wonderful, but difficult too because my poor heart got tricked into thinking we were more than friends. I knew we never would be.
I held a mirror up to the back of Daphne’s head for her to inspect the back of the new style. I had no idea why we bothered doing this–in over twenty years of cutting hair I’d never had someone say anything but “yeah, that’s fine.”
“Yeah, that’s fine, thanks,” said Daphne. I quickly pulled off the cape that protected her clothes and used a soft brush to sweep away any stray hairs from her neck and shoulders.
“Tracy,” I called to the shop girl. “Fetch Miss Larson’s coat, will you?”
She scurried across the salon with Daphne’s lime green coat. It was still very peculiar to me that she wore the latest fashions, but still subscribed to old-fashioned ideas about sex and relationships. I supposed that was what I got for judging a book by its cover.
Just as she stepped away from the desk, the phone rang.
Bloody typical. I picked up the white receiver.
“Hair Today, how can I help you?” I cringed as I spoke the awful name of the salon.
The caller wanted to book an appointment, so I told them to ring back in ten minutes to book in with Tracy.
Looking around to check for Mrs Delaney, I snuck outside for a quick ciggy break.
Leaning against the back wall of the shop, I inhaled the smoke and mulled on what had just happened.
Finding out that Daphne–who I got on well with and who seemed young and trendy–was deeply religious had thrown me a bit. It reminded me that I had to keep my guard up, even in a place like the salon where I felt safe.
I inhabited several worlds, and they were all kept separate from each other. It wasn’t as bad for me as it was for some men, but I still liked to draw a line between my work life, home life, and social life.
All the girls who worked in the salon were well aware of my preferences for male company, though only a couple talked openly about it. I had no doubt they thought it rather cosmopolitan and chic to have a queer friend. I was a fashion accessory like their Mary Quant tights and hoop earrings.
But the clients were a different kettle of fish. I couldn’t go assuming that everyone whose hair I cut knew what I was, or would be comfortable with me if they did.
Working in a female-dominated job like hairdressing also allowed people to make certain assumptions.
Women’s fashion was the same. Everyone I worked with was a woman, so I didn’t have to suffer abuse from macho men who found me threatening.
The husbands and boyfriends of my customers found it reassuring that the fella touching their wives and girlfriends was bent as a nine bob note.
Not that they acknowledged my existence when they picked up or dropped off their girlfriends.
God forbid they say hello to me; they might catch it!
While I was usually safe at work, I had to stay on my toes. If I said the wrong thing or looked at the wrong person in the wrong way, my comfortable work life could come crashing down around me. I never brought my boyfriends by, or talked about what I did on the weekends.
Anyone who allowed themselves a minute to think about it, would work out that I “wasn’t the marrying kind.
” Even the old dears who came into the salon had an idea–they never asked me about women or girlfriends.
In my work life, people just ignored the big pink elephant in the room, and we carried on as normal.
But Daphne hadn’t realised. I couldn’t imagine for one moment that a girl who thought she’d go to Hell for kissing boys would accept someone like me. And if she passed the information on to her terrifying mother, we’d have the old Bill round knocking on the door.
It felt like change was starting to happen in that regard.
Don’t get me wrong, men like me were far from accepted in society on the whole.
It was still illegal for heaven’s sake, though the tide seemed to be changing there as well.
For ten years, a bunch of old straight men had sat in a room and tried to determine whether the private sex lives of grown adults were anybody else’s business.
It was ridiculous when you thought about it. How much time and money had been wasted to answer that question? A question that seemed incredibly simple if you’d asked me. But they didn’t ask me, did they? Or any other gay man. Of course they didn’t. It’s all about us, but all without us.
And we were all waiting with baited breath to see if a bunch of politicians and aristocrats would have the good grace to decide whether or not we had the right to love freely without fear of persecution.
Meanwhile, people like Kenneth Williams and Lesley Philips were all over the television and radio these days, being the acceptable face of queer.
Round The Horne even had Julian and Sandy speaking in Polari and throwing innuendo and euphemisms all over the place.
They were still figures of fun, but they weren’t hated or vilified.
Lightly mocked yes, but as though they were in on the joke. I tried to embody the same attitude.
If I mocked my own feminine voice and flamboyant hand gestures before someone else did, then it didn’t hurt as much. Or that was the idea. There was something non-threatening about men like me as well. If I amped up the campness, then men could imagine me as weak–easy to overpower.
It could still be incredibly dangerous to be as overt as I was in the wrong situation.
Even I knew how to tone it down, or butch it up when I needed to.
If I walked past a building site, I’d consciously remove the wiggle from my walk.
I wouldn’t look down, but I never made eye contact with them either.
I tended to do the same on public transport or walking anywhere I didn’t know well. Just for safety.
But my job did afford a bit of protection.
There were some professions where it was just known there would be fairies knocking around, and that was okay, to some extent.
Theatre, for example, was a safe environment for us.
All the makeup and dancing was a bit queer to start with, so people could allow us to exist there.
In fact, straight men in the theatre got lumped in with the rest of us and assumed to be queer anyway.
I felt a bit bad for them. They got the insults and the treatment we did, but didn’t even get a decent blow job out of it.
I wondered what it was like for Mick. His job wasn’t one of those that offered protection.
Manual labour was not a place we were expected or allowed.
I knew he worked for his dad’s company. Did they know?
Did they know and not speak about it? Or maybe they pretended not to know. Or maybe they didn’t know at all.
When I first met Mick at the club, he’d been a bit nervous, but after a couple of drinks, he’d loosened up a bit.
Loosened up a lot, if he ended up going to bed with Damian.
My stomach churned. I fucking hated that Mick had shagged Damian.
Since he’d told me in my flat, I’d done my best not to think about it.
The worse thing about it was that he probably viewed our night together as just like the one he’d shared with Damian; when for me, it was the best night of my life.
Tonight was going to be so difficult. I hadn’t been around him with anyone else since that night.
Nothing changed for him, but everything had changed for me.
I should never have slept with him. I should have known it would make things so much more difficult for me.
It was too late to ring him and tell him I wasn’t coming, and I couldn’t just not turn up.
I’d just have to bloody well deal with it.
I stubbed out the cigarette that I’d smoked down to the filter and thought about having another before going back in, but with Mrs Delaney on the warpath, it was best not to tempt fate. “Once more unto the breach,” and all that.