1. Because you grow up in your mother’s salon, where every mirror holds a story, wet-haired.

2. To a child, it is a temple.

3. Smalltown temple, with a boxed-in glass front and a concrete ramp to a flimsy swing door.

4. When another customer enters, its chime rattles the chemical air.

5. Letters loopy on a golden diagonal: Salon La Chic.

6. Nickname: The Chicks.

7. The first commandment: thou shalt be beautiful. This is one you can’t keep: you have a swatch of red hair. The rest of you is made up of freckles, knee-scabs, missing teeth.

8. Because the peach-silver capes, tugged tight at the neck, swish down to the lino with a once-upon-a-time sound.

9. Because women whisper as the scissors whisper.

10. Because each skein pulls up a delicate section of scalp, as fragile as a sentence or a fingerprint.

11. It is the era of Lady Di. Soon there’ll be a wedding. Everyone wants their locks abbreviated, frosted aside with a faux-virgin flick, a heavyweight wave to fringe their coy blonde glance. More than once you watch your mother scoop somebody’s Rapunzel-length hair into one slipknot, thick as a wrist. Then hack the tail right off.

12. It takes work to cut through beauty. You have to saw a long time, at the nape.

13. Scissors sing their opposable song.

14. Mirrors light their opposable faces. Blue-haired women with shivery memories. Little girls on the spinnable chairs, twittering their ankle-sock stories. Women whose milk lets down so they have to feed the baby up under the cape, pastel booties fringed with hair. Blunted women with serviceable handbags and bifocal eyes, who request a cut to match. A tall man who dresses as a woman, with a magnificent dark nest he meshes in a net, two kiss-curls anchored either side by silver slides. The boom of his laughter when he first meets kindness, tipped back, the basin and his jaw an echo chamber. The liquid way his scalp relaxes, lets him suddenly say her own name.

15. The cartography between wet strands. Blinking. My name’s Alicia.

16. The oily unguardedness of her eyes, tilted up. Nice to meet you, your mother says, Alicia.

17. Kohl sacraments. Fairytale endings.

18. Fairytailendings of hair rayed under the spotlights, stretched out to snip, anoint, steam, lave, wrap, wind. The dazzling mechanics of the perm, the phials of solution, the black plastic roller-tower of curl rods, colour-coded. The best toys ever in the temple, like little dolls, rubber-strapped.

19. Because trickles of hair creep through the dye-caps like bleached thoughts.

20. Because the comb, if its track against the damp skull is gentle enough, might help disentangle a voice.

21. The second commandment: thou shalt be thy mother’s right-hand girl. Thou shalt hover forever at her shoulder, watch the sectioning of hair. Watch the comb peel a long wet stripe. Watch the tiny matrix of the scalp lift, in fine-print integers, pores in a pinpoint graph.

22. These are the thoughts, prickling.

23. All scalps are your scalp. You know this from your mother’s textbooks, her correspondence curl, cut, colour course. Her practising on you, deep in the pale-blue narrows of the family bathroom, pressing you tipped up, facedown, under the sting of the taps, to rinse and rinse and rinse. You choke with happiness, just to be close to her, soaked locks marbling the sink, your smile a soundless gush. Your head filled with upside-down blood, your iris on the plug.

24. If you wriggle, she chants the third commandment: a girl must suffer to be beautiful.

25. A wife must suffer to keep her husband. You’re over that sink when your mother tells you that your father is having an affair – she tells you while she is scouring your hair, while she’s scoring your scalp, while she’s twisting the rods. She tells you, and winds, and tells you and winds, and clips the end of each bolt with its rubber sucker. They knock on your head in tight eye-watering rows. She tells you and then she coats your plastic crown with squirts of caustic heat, and seals it all with a cap that pumps to your head like elasticated cloud. Under its crackly mass, you have to sit and wait.

26. Don’t cry in your molten hat. Your mother gives you a timer to hold: focus on it ticking, not the molecules slithering. These are the memories: they’re just protein. You have to sit and wait while all the bonds break.

27. Thick bottled salon air – you love it! – contrail air with a cosmetic aura, gilded vapour that slicks the back of your mouth. Air with a sheen, that gets adhered to your teeth, air you can never quite swallow. Weekday, Saturday-morning air, with a toxic tint, that you gulp in acrylic ripples, laughing, helping, loving to be your mother’s good-girl, her high-shine tight-curled kid.

28. And never forget the bead curtain. Every temple needs a bead curtain! The beads jet down, beyond the sinks, before the break room, swooping from the doorframe in a cut-glass vista of blue. Their jingle is faceted, mystical. When you spill through them, you feel ionised. You learn to part them swiftly, at hips and wrist, to set them a-tingle with a show-off pirouette, kind of hoping the clientèle (as your mother calls them) are watching you. You learn to dance through them, tip-tap, on the end of the broom, your task to sweep up the hair, which you do in a circuit of flicked figure-eights, winging up bits the women leave of themselves. Slender traces scissored away. Dustbinned through the curtain, furnaced.

29. Because the swing door and the till and the beads all chime to mark the next woman, next cut, next story.

30. Those who have no booking, but just wander in. Something has happened, and they need sterile kindness. They need the mirror to hold their world straight, just a rectangle of it, just for a while. They need to watch their head reduced to a grid, calmed into metrical portions, order scribed by the fine black tail of the comb, drawn over the mess of thoughts. Thoughts inside, in bulk and wreck, and what can they do with them but shake their head, directionless rattling that cannot make anything stop. But the Chick in the mirror is smiling. It’s her job to tenderly guide their skull – she gives the lightest taps, at nape and crown, soft thumbprints of orientation. She fans her fingertips quietly through their follicles, points which way is up. She makes a steady part in the panic, pulls a strand into the light – and the buzz in their skin starts to quiet in her compass. In the mirror, she rays out all their angles, considering, line on wet line, and the dome of their head falls quieter at the core. Her mirror lets them sit in perpendicular shine. Their hair pulled straight and wet, to quell their nerves.

31. The women all sit in the mirrors and tell. You don’t – there’s a secret commandment. In between the fastenings of your hair there’s a threshold you wear very tight so your stories can’t creep out and get to your mother. Thou shalt not upset thy mother.

32. The way the women lick their fingerpads to flick through magazines, that artful salivary swish. It’s usually executed ring finger to tongue, but there’s one customer whose page-lap is pinky-promise. She licks down, loose, on a flattened diagonal, balding one edge of her coral lipstick.

33. The way the glossies give even the silent ones something to tut about, grimly lip-whitening their scowls, to underscore their salty opinions.

34. Dome hairdryers on sci-fi swivel necks that sizzle with plastic fahrenheit. Ladies, lined-up, toasting at the brains, breezes electrifying their rollers. Dreaming of how nice life could be when their hair is refried, lilac and crisp. Cheeky shots of heat playing under their collars. Weekly smiles forklifted at the lacquered set.

35. The scratchy unison of the radio mixes with the white noise of shampoo, the hiss of rinsing. The radio, with its exquisite silvery instincts, can match a woman’s story with a tune – something fizzy for when there is gossip, or pitchy for when someone’s crush is narrated. Something featherweight for a lullaby, something to coo down to swaddles of wool and croon. Pastel music. Something old and borrowed and blue for when a woman sobs.

36. Because someone’s lover stepped in front of a train, and someone’s daughter is starving herself, and someone’s great-uncle flashed at a child, and someone brings in a swaddled pet-rodent they dress up in nineteenth-century lace and rock in their lap like the baby they never had. Because one of the hairdressers herself has a husband who regularly smashes in her face, so all the mirrors have to strain very high and very bright and very wide to explain why she still loves him.

37. Because the giggles and the exhalations and the hissing all happen in that soft place where follicles meet vertebrae.

38. Because a voice forms knots and haematomas.

39. Some teenagers are so gone that even their laughter sounds like love-notes. They’ve given boys permission to kiss their neck into Prussian blue contusions. In the mirror, their eyeliner rebels. They administer chewing gum to the very back of their elastic-banded braces, so when they talk their molars work it like an especially juicy wish.

40. They date skinny conquerors, truants in lowered rides, lads in studied punk jeans whose mums lend them hair gel but even so their mohawks flop.

41. Boys deliver girls as far as the door chime. Boys scuff the asphalt outside when time’s up, in a sulk. They light up, they pace, they puff long signals. They glare in the window, their Adam’s apple making a point. The girls exhibit a particular giggle that can dial up to hairline frequency. Cool boys who smoke won’t wait forever.

42. Mirrors are veils between one woman and the next, her story waiting in the glass for its turn. Scissors know where to flick the light, how to slow for a split-end epiphany.

43. Somedays a little dark nun comes in. Religion is when you lie back with your neck in the black aisle of the basin. If you are blessed they will get the temperature of the halo just right. There are angels who test it on their wrists. It comes down like a shower of mercy.

44. Each cup of instant you deliver to a customer comes back with an epilogue of lipstick. Oily, coral, a personal crescent of skin. Even the women whose lips are almost colourless return a cup pigmented with a private sip. In the backroom sink, it is also your task to scrub the rims of this last whisper. You think of story as a thing that comes in cupfuls, that steams a secret from the quietest and most surprising mouth.

45. Because particles of strangers fill the air like beautiful dust.

46. Because the dust spreads through mirrors to infinity.

47. Because she loves him and loves him and loves him, the hairdresser whose husband beats her. And he beats her and beats her and beats her, and in between he drops into the salon, a beautiful man, an utterly gilded one, in shorts and singlet and steel-toed boots, thick tread with a gait that means business, and logo’d cap that cannot quell his soap-opera hair, its tawny corrugations high impact on all the women who sit and flutter and simper and squiggle on their vinyl chairs, who sometimes try to look (faintly) disapproving, but – it turns out – can’t resist him, the grin he flashes around like a gift, his tough guy charm as he offers the old girls cheek, with a lavish wink on the punchline (just for them), the sweet-spot of tan on the stocky stride of his thighs, and under his crew neck a habitat of muscle, all forearmed glamour and godforsaken sexiness. And doesn’t he bring in treats? Doesn’t he slap, top-speed, through the ting-tinging door, that nearly busts itself, shrilling on its hinges, isn’t he gorgeous at the jam-packed thumb-joints, waving the truly hugest bunch of flowers, an absolute gaggle of petals, swinging it round at all the women, a quick-draw calamitous spasm of colour, such a garlanded outburst of romance as none of them have ever witnessed. Gestures like that don’t show up in their lives, especially not in the vice-like grip of a big-built man magnificent with sweat, who somehow also knows how to nuzzle his sweetheart, roughly, just the baritone to murmur on her collarbone, when he can catch her alone at the counter, reconnect with take-charge tenderness. Softened and hangdog, let me make it up to you, but still sure-footed, a man who knows his effect on her, and the room. A man with resources, an undaunted man, an out-and-out man’s man who knows how to woo: whoever heard of such a thing? Fresh from a hard day’s work still ready to spoil a girl, and not just bellow for his supper. So the women are an orchestra of chuckles, in the end. A supporting cast of go-ahead, kiss-and-make-up. How are they to deal with the bare handsome fact of him, the raw essentials of what he does to a girl’s pulse? One of the old ducks shakes her head, with its ridges of set-curl nicely roasted. ‘We’re all at the mercy of nature,’ is how she sums up.

48. And you get the job of slowly unwinding the blooms out of their plastic wrap. And trying to assemble their stems, unribboned, down in the lodging of the vase, a wire-looped grip that fits in the base and looks just like a knuckleduster. A bunch of flowers that paints a thousand bruises when you close your eyes.

49. The mirrors are an index. Because these are the mirrors that also held her face when he’d swung straight through it. When she’d done something – looked at him sideways or misplaced a smile when he’d had a proper gutful, but she didn’t pick it up in time, the knife-edge tone of the room, didn’t read the clues, didn’t sense he was getting to the brink. And shouldn’t a woman, a girlfriend, fiancée no less, shouldn’t she be able to read those kinds of signals? Off a man she loves, a man whose word she hangs on. A man whom every other self-respecting woman in town wants. There are ways to learn. And if not, there are ways to sidestep. Thou shalt curtsy, barter, flatter, placate, cry, curl.

50. And if not – there is a range of cosmetics, that pan across a ripple of mirrors. A palette of wonders with a flip-top lid, a top-brand trove of palliative glitters. They come in with the shampoo rep, who pushes them as a lucrative sideline. There are pastes to mix and dot and triple-blend on the jaw with a thick consoling smudge. There are wands to dust across the shadows, like a delicate pestle in starlight. There are ways to frost and mask. There are tactics, tips. What girl doesn’t benefit from schooling in the fine arts of offsetting a backhand? Thou shalt angle the mirror: there are ways to wear your hair.

51. Because who can judge? Alicia doesn’t judge, when she comes in newly decorated herself – a late-night tribute paid last Friday in the piss-laced gravel of the carpark, a casual reminder of how the wind blows in the pub, unpredictable, hair-trigger. A girl has to navigate it. A girl has to knock back a round or two of banter, and pay up, fair’s fair, when it’s her shout. But that’s no bloody guarantee she won’t be met with a greeting out the rear of the garden bar, later, no pledge that offence might not suddenly be taken at the state of her, the gall of her halter, the mocking pitch of her beehive, some glint off her rhinestone belt that gets a bit much. Who can wager? Some macho nerve just gets struck. Alicia is not one to make a scene. Alicia understands what’s good for her. She offers the mirror a beautiful chin to take it on.

52. In the waiting room – which isn’t a waiting room, just a stretch of lino with a bamboo screen and a cane-glass table fanned with latest magazines – you can sit cross-legged and scissor out a million Lady Di’s, kaleidoscope her into scrapbooks. Label her with capitals, halo her with creamy glitter-glue. Soon there’ll be a wedding. You can paste her in place and play with a panorama of veils.

53. The daughter who is starving herself used to be a beauty queen. You visit her with your mum, up a jagged metal driveway that doesn’t like the grill of the car. There’s a room that has too much sunlight-turned-brown by carpet you follow in eye-rolling swirls, and blinds that hang in squeaky caramel strips under a velvety overhang. The dining table goes on forever in mahogany. You’re given a luncheon-meat sandwich and a tumbler of Raro to swill it down, turned to chunky pink pith. The starving girl won’t come out of her bedroom, so her mother tap-tap-taps at the tabletop, issuing a non-stop smile for her visitors that jumpily disagrees with her knuckles. There are goblets and ribbons on pleats, there are gold-coated trophies and trinkets, and you chew your food commemoratively, looking at photos of the daughter when her ballgown glided into First and her swimsuit glowed on a plinth and the satin pulley of the Miss Waikato sash had more than bone to swing from and the platinum deadweight of the tiara could be poked on a skull her stick-neck wasn’t too sick to prop up after your mother spritzed a million volts into her hair, superhold, with special salon sponsorship. When you’ve wiped your mouth and said please may I be excused, you get a tour of the house as far as the starved girl, who is a strange arrangement of something that must have been hiding very deep inside Miss North Island, something that must have gotten yanked into view when her rose-scented muscles got too thin, something ribbed like the secrets braced into a bodice nobody was built to breathe in, whose skin is as lank as a swimsuit left overnight in a chlorinated bag of plastic sweat. Her lungs sound drawstring and her head rotates slowly, with twitches. Your mother very gently styles her hair, using the wide-tooth comb that won’t lift more tufts away with it. Chat is a good thing to have at full speed in the sour-smelling room. The starving girl looks at the five-pointed tremor of her hand, which your mother has managed to lacquer and no one speaks of the punnet of bile that sits on the nightstand beside the New Testament.

54. The fourth (or fifth) commandment: thou shalt not get under the hairdressers’ feet. So you’re allowed to walk from the salon-up alone, and from the salon-down. The salon-down is past the man-you’re-allowed-to-talk-to who owns the Menswear store, and into the fish-n-chip shop for a deep-fried newsprint pouch which will salt your yawns. The salon-up is into the library, where you sit knee-socked on the carpet tiles and use your thighs to work the covers of the heavyweight books whose hardbacks know everything.

55. Everything except why somebody’s great-uncle who likes to expose himself comes into the salon, where he also likes to arrange his penis under the cape then twitch it aside. Hey presto, slyly, as his short-back-n-sides is combed and cut, a purple surprise for your mother – who doesn’t react, just delicately tries to flutter the fabric back, recloak it. But no, hey presto, a rustle, and it’s open-aired again, violet, looming in her sightline. A dance of swishes that goes on a ridiculous while. Everything except why a roomful of women – two armed with scissors – stay silent, keep grinning, do nothing.

56. Nothing, except later, inform the man from the Menswear store what has occurred. The man from Menswear has ‘a glint in his eye’ for The Chicks, as your mother says, and he’s only too keen to swoop down Main Street to their rescue if the flasher tries to strike again. The Chicks come up with a code to alert each other if there’s a reprisal: Has Priscilla booked in for her permanent? is shorthand for slip out the back and get the Menswear man. It is the era for cufflinked men in walkshorts to play vigilante. It is the era for old-fashioned smalltown justice to get delivered, dust-up style. For good reliable heroes like the Menswear man to seek his reward from one of The Chicks.

57. It might not be your mother, but you do visit that house, where the Menswear man lives with his wife. And it turns out his daughter is dying and beautiful too, except that she isn’t trying – she has a disease which is powdering her bones, so the doctors keep dipping her in plaster. The plaster on the day that you visit is a white slab moulded down both of her legs and up to her ribs as high as her almost-there breasts, which are tucked out the top in a smiley-face T-shirt. She could win beauty pageants too, except that the swimsuit section would show her scars, which are under the plaster in long mauve forks, deep coiled tracks of criss-cross keloid. The plaster is fitted with metal keys that reach down into her biscuity bones and her mother has to wind them once each day, to coax the bones to mesh right. The winding is accompanied by screaming – because the girl in the smiley-face T-shirt is brave but she is still a girl. The day you visit she wears cool sunglasses and lies on a ward-bed wheeled to the lounge and the sun pours light onto her sarcophagus turned blue from the outdoor pool she can’t swim in. The ranchslider is open so your chitchat tastes like chlorine. The only water she gets is when your mother spritzes her hair pre-trim, taking extra care not to dampen the plaster. There’s a pony out there she can’t ride, which slopes to the fence and windmills its tail in a spray of playful pony helloing. She says you can go out and pat its mane, but you don’t. It doesn’t feel nice to have legs that work. It doesn’t feel kind to know what her father is up to afterhours with a Chick at the salon, while she’s crying marrow and her mother is very obediently turning the keys.

58. But you are apprenticed to mirrors, and mirrors can listen and listen and listen. Late night Fridays in the salon, you can listen till you fall asleep. A scientific fragrance ascends. The appliances are doing their singing lessons. Your mother binds and feathers and tints, she glides the lino in heels and teases and crops. The timer dings when the rods are cooked, and into the sink she unravels their clattering quota. Under the hair in dreams the faces can change and mouths wear all the wrong voices.

59. The lady with the possum-baby swaddles her in a papoose of lace. She freezes big-eyed in christening gowns and makes starry gestures with claws in slow-motion. The Chicks thinks the woman slips her drugs. The possum-baby dozes in her tranquilised fur, and sometimes plays dead in her colonial linens. If she’s awake and your mother’s not looking, the woman might wink at you and let her lap from her teacup.

60. Once each week the old girls troop in to get their flat grey cuts reanimated. Their sets have died on their heads in wilted hoods, crunchy but deflated. Their crowns of power-hold spray have lapsed, their undersides specked with pillow-sweat. While their curlers are cranked into place they like to have something to huff about – something new-fangled, or would-you-believe-it, or shameless, or honestly-what-is-the-fuss. If your mother suggests a fresh style they wave her away with not-likely scoffs. Their chins of pink gooseflesh cluck against high-neck frocks, and broil as the driers bond their curls. They sometimes bring interim slippers in, to pop on while they’re processing. They pay and leave with as much of a smile as a hairnet can winch their faces into. They like nostalgia baked directly back onto their skulls.

61. Is it nostalgia that takes the Chick with the black eyes back to her fiancé again? And again? You move her out, in a heist of shrieks, a trip-up cardboard getaway, a slapping of possessions, haphazard into suitcases, a dragging up paths, in hysteric zigzagging, a screeching away in sudden cars. You hide her out for weeks. You feed her crushed face soft foods, spooning tears into her warm plates of mash. You and your mother answer her phone calls – when he pleads, when he hounds, when he pledges to end you, when he howls, when he says that he’ll hunt her down and put a bullet in her and their kid too. And you’re meant to like the kid, because he’s pre-school, but he’s already mean-eyed, with mucus somehow always on his face, a thick green ore. And his play with his plastic tub of cars is a study in recidivist crashing, an eerie convoy ending loop by exploded loop on your lounge carpet.

62. Other than blowing up his Matchbox victims, all he wants is his daddy back.

63. You pass your mother the perming papers, tearing them off a little tablet, a book of soft white leaves that you can see the fibres in. Neat and translucent, without any words. Your mother applies them like little bits of bandage.

64. What a little boy does when he wants his daddy is to hide his new puppy away in the garage, and he takes a coil of tape to seal up her box, but it’s not enough, so he starts on her fur, and he makes one column of her front legs, and one of her back, then her body, and lastly her eyes, ears, mouth. He masks them out in thick tight circles. He doubles, quadruples, so he can’t hear her whimpers. He winds and winds and winds.

65. Your mother folds the delicate papers around the tip of each dark frond, and that origami done she rolls the rod down, on tension, and caps it, in the wetness.

66. Because there is a dinner to celebrate her moving back in, a duck he took down with his twelve gauge. And somehow all the shot ends up on your plate. You spit it out, back teeth jarred, chime after chime.

67. Because the creases of each heavy library book fill up with scissored dust.

68. Because she searches her face for itself in the mirror, checks the blood for spaces she’s left in, touching what she’s got to show for herself in the sprawl of contusion, the mound. And how do you explain the maw he leaves, how hyperbolic it is? How do you describe her dabbing, ring-fingered, to collage along her tenderised jaw, to angle the black wand in around the fixture of each lash poked out her eye’s thick welt. The staggering concentration of it, painting over his handiwork. The way she binds the ribs he’s booted in, to face the next day’s clientè

69. Because her two-tier make-up case pulls open at the silver cleats, an angel-jointed version of the tool-chest that rides on the back of his ute, contents clanging like murder weapons.

70. Do you think the women will intervene? Do you think this is paradise?

71. Because she jokes, at least she’ll lose weight.

72. The girl who is starving, the girl who is crumbling, may never be able to fall in love. Will you?

73. Fear is when he draws a thread around your milk tooth, a tooth so loose it’s ridiculous and all the Chicks tease you, waiting for it to pop. But when he comes close with the noose there are parts of your body that know why she won’t leave him. His smile binds your mouth to the door and swings it shut. Your tooth flies out like a final chime.

74. Because you black-out Lady Di’s eyes. You biro in dark ribs. Spiral in breakages.

75. Where do the facts go? Watch and learn. You can break them up at the molecules. You can stop them bonding – it’s chemical. Look at them, vacating her face, reversing along each smashed blood vessel.

76. Because someone’s lover gets a beautiful cut. Then walks it, point blank, down to the train station.

77. Because even when a woman takes the chair in silence, the nape of her neck has something to say.

78. Because under the skin there are capillaries, near invisible, frailer than hair, and one day, when you’re loved by a man, they’ll rise up within you, flash across the surface.

79. Keep your hair long. It hides everything. Soon there’ll be a wedding.

‘why your hair is long & your stories short’ by Tracey Slaughter won the 2024 Calibre Essay Prize. Calibre is worth a total of $10,000, of which the winner receives $5,000, the runner-up $3,000, and third place $2,000. The Calibre Essay Prize was established in 2007 and is now one of the world’s leading prizes for a new non-fiction essay. The judges’ report is available on our website.

ABR gratefully acknowledges the long-standing support of Patrons Peter McLennan and Mary-Ruth Sindrey.