Of hexes & hair

14th June 1976: Fine. Visibility very good. Wind light, variable, mainly north-westerly in afternoon. 84 degrees Fahrenheit.

Read another piece of the novel-in-progress The Lazy Eye published on openDemocracy

They should let the weathermen wear short-sleeved shirts and lose their ties. It might help Jack Scott some, although his problem is having to keep predicting sunshine. He is best suited to changing weather – cold fronts, showers travelling, and what not. The first week of this heat wave he was flinging facts like frisbees – hottest summer in two hundred years – lowest rainfall since records began. But the heat has burnt away his pleasure.

English sunshine is trickier than Anansee. After 16 years of wishing for bluer skies and hotter sunshine I feel dry enough to burst into flames. I just want to stay home, sleep and suck Julie mangos straight from the fridge.

Seven, eight, nine – It used to be Mother’s job – wash Hindy’s hair, oil her scalp, massage her head and brush her first born child’s hair one hundred times as if Hindy was a Victorian princess and Mother her Lady-in-waiting. I grudged them both – Hindy for the fairy tale hair and Mother for the chance to play with it.

Twelve – Hindy is sitting on the floor; her legs are open scissors; toes pressing into the base of the smoked glass cabinet Mother left me – full of framed photos of all of we, the crystal glasses and the for best rosebud china. I sit behind Hindy on the edge of the sofa, the backs of my legs sticking to the leather, the inside of my thighs relaxed against her shoulders. I push the bristles of the silver-backed brush into her damp hairline and sweep back – fifteen.

“Shut the window. Bugs are flying in.” I wipe sweat away from my forehead with the back of my hand.

“It’s too hot to close it,” I say and keep brushing, wondering if Hindy has forgotten that bugs are two-fingers big with black shells and thick legs; not specks with clear green wings. Cher is on the telly moving her body to music, not dancing. I wouldn’t call what she’s doing dancing. Her singing is nothing to write home about either. But she’s got style; no-one can tell me different. This week she’s wearing a crocheted purple dress with cutaways where her bony shoulders stick through. I’m not one for crochet but I like the trumpet sleeves with the tips of her fingers poking out where musical notes are supposed to be. Sixteen – I wonder if the dress Gladys has started can have Cher’s sleeves added. I want to ask Hindy, but if I do, two twos Hindy will want them for her own self, even though she can wear puffed and capped if the mood takes her.

“I’m going to ask Gladys to make me Cher’s sleeves. What do you think?” asks Hindy over the whirr of the electric fan.

“They’ll be trailing in food and picking up dust all over the show.” I press the bristles so hard into her scalp they bend. I jerk her head. Eighteen.

“Ouch.”

“Sorry.” Hindy leans her head back onto my lap and looks at me with her upside down face.

“Mother used to part my hair in the centre and brush from top to bottom.”

“I never seen her do it that way.”

“Harriet, you only ever see what you want.”

“I’ll get the comb.” I pick up the ashtray Sonny and Leighton used before leaving for The Swan. In the kitchen I press the dustbin pedal down to the floor and watch the stubs fall. A dot-to-dot painting of tiny red ants is spread over the kitchen sideboard. I open a drawer and shuffle sellotape, bills and letters from the school until I find a comb.

“Tea?” I shout.

“OK.” I light the gas cooker below the kettle then I flick through the pages of yesterday’s Daily Mirror and wait for the water to boil. I lift the lid on the butter dish and look at the yellow oil slick before putting it in the fridge. Next to the crossword I gave up on earlier are the horoscopes. I’m on the cusp of Libra and Scorpio. On the 23rd of October 1946 at 23.58 Hindy was born – Libra. That much is clear. But my arrival created a commotion, so they forgot to check the clock. No matter – I choose the sign about to have the best time. When Mother died in 72 I stopped reading the zodiacs for a while out of respect, Jesus didn’t do astrology, you shouldn’t either. But I time my work to match the star sign of the person needing the help. Besides, it’s like Grandma Evadnee used to say behind Mother’s back, there were ways of knowing and doing before the missionaries and what is it with niggers and Jesus anyhow?

I hand Hindy a mug of tea and lay a side plate with a soggy slice of cake on the smallest of my nest of tables.

“Lemon Cake.” I say to her confused eyebrows.

“It’s the recipe books fault: One and a half lemons and the yolks of two eggs. What am I supposed to do with two egg whites?”

“Pack the cake in a Tupperware” says Hindy taking a second bite. “If your kids won’t eat it, mine will.”

“I never believe the amounts they tell you in baking books. You know how white people can be mean – especially to their own selves – a sprig of parsley – a slice of lemon. I always add extra.”

“Mother always said you had no eye for measurements.”

“It will let you down in the end,” we say together in Mothers voice. We start tittering, the tea in our mugs sloshing from side to side. I imagine Mother watching us with the vexed face she used when we talked over her favourite hymns during Songs of Praise. Laughter cuts me under my rib cage when I realise Hindy who is snorting like a sweaty pig, is imagining the same thing.

When I settle back into the sofa, I clamp Hindy’s shoulders between my thighs and line the tip of the comb with the centre of her nose before parting her cloud of hair. I brush down from her crown, past her right ear. Nineteen. On the telly the other Sonny and Cher are waving goodbye.

“They choose your Sonny for any match yet?” I ask. Hindy’s neck stiffens.

“Not yet.” Twenty-five.

“I been burning a red candle with his name tucked underneath.” I don’t tell her I think I’ve been burning it on the wrong day, although there’s no shame there, even Grandma Evadnee admitted candle use is a speciality that takes a life-times work to master. “You see if a job doesn’t come to meet Sonny soon.” Hindy sighs. Twenty-four.

I listen out for our kids in the bedroom – all in one bed – top and tailing. I think of being in bed with Leighton pressing against, inside me. And then I remember the narrow beds of our girlhood, one always made up, smooth with a blue counterpane and a single pillow. The other with the two of we, coiled together, two snails in one shell, me behind – hidden.

“I picked up a little extra when I did my shopping – just a few bits you might need. The bags are in the kitchen.”

Hindy strokes my knee as if it is part of her. Thirty.

Hindy is purring. Her head is hot and heavy against the top of my thighs. I part her hair once, then again, when I see a bald spot I didn’t notice two weeks ago. I flatten the hair to the sides of her head and stare at a circle of scalp. Missing hair the size of a new ten pence piece. A nursery rhyme comes to me. There was an old woman who swallowed a fl y. I wonder why…and the old woman keeps on swallowing insects and animals. Is like I swallowed a bird and it’s in my throat trying to raise its wings over and over. I start checking Hindy’s head, pulling apart hair with my hands. Searching. I’m angry at myself, the granddaughter of a woman who could walk into a room and tell a stranger the number of their house and how many children they had, not knowing. I flip her head forward into her chest. She sleeps on. At the base of her neck are eight purple and yellow marks. Two across and four down. This time I know the answer. I almost laugh, because even damage is charmed by my sister, turning orderly and rainbow beautiful on meeting her. The bird presses in its wings and darts to the centre of my chest.

I am eight or so, Grandma Evadnee is turning me pretty with seventy-two plaits, five yellow ribbons, a lick of La India and four bursts of eye-smarting Afro Sheen. She hands me a ball of my dead hair to put in the toilet as usual, but after six flushes it is still floating on the surface. I can’t wait to pop style on Hindy but I’m not allowed out to play until the hair is gone. I am sobbing, waiting for the cistern to fill up again when Grandma Evadnee bursts in. She pulls the chain. We watch the hair whirl and disappear obediently. Grabbing my wet jaw with a hard greasy hand that presses onto my back teeth she locks me into her gaze. Do you know how easy it would be to hex somebody with that much hair? They can go in the swamp to some tree or other and bore a hole and put your hair in there and put a plug back in that tree. And you’ll go crazy. Or they can throw your hair in running water and your mind will wander on just like the hair is wandering on in the stream. And not even a black hen buried alive can help you.

The heat catches me. You could believe someone had a watering can above my head the way sweat is trickling down my face. I try and line up my thoughts before the heat turns me fool-fool. I slow down my breathing and the fluttering in my chest stills to a flicker.

Sonny has Leighton down as an ‘under-manners man.’ He must believe I wearing Leighton’s hair in the toes of my shoes. Having no brothers and a dead Father does us no favours. If Daddy was alive he’d have snapped Sonny’s neck like a big old wishbone. Men need other men around to hold their dark side down. England isn’t helping. Back home the elders would’ve put their mouths on him ‘til it reached his ears and the shame might’ve kept his hands by their sides. Don’t dance abroad if you can’t dance at home. I see Sonny dancing. His strong thighs almost level with the floor, the palms of his hands waving in the air. Sonny is in London gyrating.

Careful. Leighton says there are policemen who keep a mattress in the back of their van so they can beat-up their prisoners without bruising. That takes planning – attention to detail. If Sonny were a policeman he’d remember the mattress every time. I prefer rage. I understand it – a blood red sheet thrown over my head, blinding me and when the sheet is removed terrible things have happened. It’s not as if I haven’t wanted to beat her myself. Slap her into next week. Whack behind her knock knees with a baseball bat and watch her concertina to the floor. But it wasn’t allowed – not even by the people who made her and had the right, in this family they’ll be no whippings or beatings. We’re not carrying on where they left off. The bird in my chest spreads its wings full span.

I sit pulling long angel hairs until the brush is picked clean. On my way to the toilet I roll weightless hair between my palms the way I’ve seen my Mother and both Grandmas do all my life. The ball gets smaller and tighter, darkening to the colour of banana bread. I hear Grandma Evadnee. Flush it away, all kinds of hexing starts with the hair from your head. But for the first time ever I disobey her. The bird is bashing against my heart, trying to escape. A few loose feathers stick in my throat when I think of going against Grandma Evadnee who always had a long reach and could, no doubt it, even from the other side, grab my neck-back.

I tuck the hair into my bra. In the kitchen I look for an empty jar to seal the hair away from the air when I remember the ashtray. I press the pedal on the dustbin and mess up my hand searching for a cigarette stub. I find a long dog-end tipped with black cherry lipstick. I consider wasting a few spoonfuls of apricot jam so I can use the jar, but settle on a tupperware dish. I wrap the fag-end in foil and drop the hair in a freezer bag and knot the top. I lock them in the plastic container, squeezing the air out. I might need a picture, but it’s difficult to think of any with just her alone. Beautiful people don’t get much alone-time what with the everyday people always wanting to be close to them. As I seal the edges closed I remember the left over passport photographs she took last week. Keep the ingredients fresh. You know how newly picked herbs have more power; more strength. Whatever way I go I’ll need good quality lodestone – for pulling towards. (There is no sense in skimping on a drawing force), but most of what is called for is here. And being prepared brings peace, like looking at your rum-soaked dried fruits in October and knowing poverty or supermarket shortages can’t catch you. All the ingredients for your Christmas cake are in sight and when the time is right it will be baked.

The bird stops flapping. The feathers are smoothed down but I can feel its heart beating so I know it isn’t dead.