Short story · 3 min read ·
The Hairdresser of Marlow
A hairdresser in Marlow cuts the hair of every customer who comes into her salon at dusk, and in each case the new growth comes through a different colour from the one the customer was born with, and each new colour matches a stranger who has died in the town that year.
Ines Pollard ran the only hairdressing salon in Marlow that stayed open after six. Her customers were mostly farmers' wives and office workers who could not get in during the day, and she had a rule that she would cut anyone who came in before the lights went off at the end of the street. She had the reputation of being quick, careful and kind. She did not ask about people's private lives. She simply cut their hair and sent them out feeling a little lighter.
In the autumn a new customer came in at dusk, a tall thin man with grey eyes and an overcoat that smelled of wet earth. He sat in the chair and said he wanted it trimmed, nothing fancy. Ines combed out his hair, which was dark and heavy and cut close at the nape, and began.
When she finished, the man looked in the mirror and smiled. Then he put his hand to his head and said, puzzled, that it felt warm.
Ines looked at the back of his neck, where a few strands of hair had grown out in the last hour, too fast for the time, and saw that they were white. Not grey, not silver. White as bleached flax. The man did not seem to notice. He thanked her and paid and went out into the dark, and as the door closed she saw that the white hairs had spread across the back of his head in a neat band, as if the colour had been poured in from above.
The next morning, the Marlow Gazette ran the death notice of a man named Edwin Grail, who had drowned in the reservoir the night before. His photograph was in the paper. His hair, in the grainy black and white, was pale and thin, but the colour could be guessed from the way the light caught it. White as bleached flax.
Ines did not believe in coincidences. She began to keep a note of each customer who came in after dusk, the colour of their hair when they sat down, and the colour of the new growth she saw on their necks the next morning. Every time she cut a customer's hair in the evening, a new strand came through by dawn in a colour that did not match their own. And every time, within a day or two, the newspaper printed a death notice for someone in the town whose hair had been that exact colour.
Autumn became winter. The salon was busy. Ines cut the hair of a schoolteacher who had a dark red mane and whose new growth came through the colour of old brick. Two days later the town mourned the headmistress, who had been struck by a car on the bypass. She cut the hair of a builder with thick grey curls, and by morning there was a silver streak above his ear, and the next week his widow came in with the same silver in her own hair, and said he had been buried in the tweed suit she had chosen for him.
Ines stopped cutting hair after dusk. She put a card in the window and told her regulars she was closing early. But on a sharp January evening, a man came to the door in the rain. He was thin, with grey eyes and an overcoat that smelled of earth, and he did not come in. He stood on the step, quite patient, and held up a small, dark, old-fashioned comb.
"Just the trim," he said. "Nothing fancy."
Ines looked past him, into the empty street. Somewhere down by the reservoir, very faint, the bell of the church was ringing for a death. She did not open the door. But she found, looking into the glass, that her own reflection had grown a fine white thread at the crown of her head, very fine and very straight, and the colour was the exact shade of the comb in the stranger's hand.