Free Making Marion by Beth Moran

through the buttons until I was one click away from sending the message. In the end, so fed up with myself I could have screamed, I pressed “send”. Heart racing, I turned the phone off, darted over to the nearest bin and chucked it in.
    A text message. I am not pretending this was in any way the right or decent thing to do. I was hot with shame as I huddled in my car, waiting for the port official to wave me up the ramp onto the boat. Harriet would tell me that it was exactly what he deserved. What would cause her to bristle with annoyance is not that I used such a cowardly means of communication, but that the message itself was a total cop out. After twenty-three drafts, my spineless message said: “NEED A BREAK.” (A break from what? Our relationship? My job? Ballydown?) “WILL CALL WHEN SORTED.” Which could be, let’s face it, never.
    I cried as I drove up onto the ferry. I was still crying when I ate my complimentary jacket potato at my table for one in the restaurant. I sobbed through brushing my teeth and putting on my pyjamas. I snivelled and blubbered as I crawled under the covers of the bunk bed. Not because my mother didn’t say goodbye. Nor because I had walked out on the man who had been my boyfriend since I was seventeen. Or because I may never see my hometown again. I cried because I was finally here. And the shame and fear, theguilt, the pain and the great big giant piles of broken mess had come too. Because they were me. This was when I started to pray. Oh God, do not let me be this person any more.
    I stopped crying, wiped my nose and went to sleep.

F riday afternoon I was sitting in reception when a lavender Volkswagen camper van pulled into the car park, completed a three-point turn at breakneck speed and reversed under a large chestnut tree at the back of the park. It was Ada and May. They came every Friday to sweeten, style and spruce up the women (and men) of the Peace and Pigs. Valerie told me they had both celebrated their seventy-ninth birthday earlier that year. (Did I know that the Kray twins were born the very same year?) In expecting blue rinses and tightly curled perms, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
    A queue formed while Ada set up the simple chalkboard sign next to the van: “Hair £10 Hands £8”.
    Women of all ages brought folding camp chairs and settled down to wait. Ada slid open the front of the van so that she could work in the sunshine. May set up her manicure and nail bar under the shade of the chestnut. I took a bottle of water and positioned myself on the bench outside reception. Technically, I was still manning the desk but this way I could see the action. A fifty-something woman came first. She lowered herself into the lavender leather chair, took off her sunhat and shook out her long, thick, deep bronze tresses. She spread them carefully around her shoulders, gently patting her scalp.
    â€œJust a trim please, Ada, to tidy up the loose ends.”
    â€œYes, dear.” Ada, whose own soft white hair was cut in a snazzy layered bob, moved behind her customer. I could see no mirrors on show in the van at all.
    â€œWhat’s your name?”
    â€œCatherine.”
    â€œCatherine. Did you know it means ‘pure’? I knew a Catherine once. She was anything but! We skated together on the canals in Amsterdam…” As Ada began to spin a spellbinding tale of New Year’s Eve in Europe, filled with fireworks and appelflappen, all-night dances and dodging randy dukes, she took a lustrous handful of Catherine’s hair, her crowning glory, and chopped it off. About three inches were left still attached to Catherine’s head. Ada expertly flicked the severed lock behind her, out of sight, and carried on, snipping and chattering while her customer, totally unaware of the growing mound of cuttings, closed her eyes blissfully and sank deeper into the chair.
    Less than fifteen minutes later, Ada finished the story