I felt my face start to burn I was kind of grateful for the surrounding gloom.
‘Cool,’ the woman replied. ‘Take a seat.’ She waved me over to one of the black leather chairs facing jagged-edged mirrors on the wall. Steve sat down on a black leather sofa by the door, propping his guitar case next to him.
‘Hello.’ A male hairdresser appeared from the back of the shop. Like the woman he was dressed from head to toe in skin-tight black leather. He was also wearing some kind of cowboy holster slung across his narrow hips – but instead of a gun it held a pair of scissors and lots of different combs. He held out his thin, pale hand to shake Steve’s. ‘I’m Wayne. Can I help you?’
Steve shook his head. ‘No thanks, man, I’m just here to watch,’ and he nodded over in my direction.
‘I’m Raven,’ the woman said to my reflection in the mirror.
‘I’m Cl– Cherokee,’ I replied, and the thermostat in my face cranked up a couple more notches.
‘Wow, what a cool name,’ Raven said, starting to play with my hair the way hairdressers always do at the start of an appointment. ‘How come you’re called that?’
I felt a surge of panic. I didn’t have a clue.
‘Cos her great-grandmother was a Cherokee Indian,’ Steve called over. ‘From the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina.’
‘Wow!’ Raven replied and I thought in unison. ‘That’s so cool!’ Raven looked back at my hair. ‘So what kind of style are you after, Cherokee?’
I looked back at her in the mirror and it felt as if my heart was singing. I could practically see little crotchets and quavers floating up my throat and out of my mouth. I had a great-grandmother who was a Cherokee Indian. From an awesome-sounding place called the Great Smoky Mountains. In North Carolina.
Suddenly anything seemed possible.
‘Could you cut it so that one side is long and kind of hangs down over my face and the other side is really short?’
Raven went and got a magazine from a rack over by Steve. Then she flicked through it until she got to a picture of a model with exactly the same hairstyle as the vanilla-ice-cream-hair girl from the market.
‘Like that?’ she asked.
I nodded and smiled. ‘Yes, please.’
While Raven washed my hair, Wayne started talking to Steve about music and by the time she’d finished Steve had got his guitar out and was strumming it absently.
‘Do you know any Rolling Stones?’ Wayne asked.
Steve let out a snort of laughter. ‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’
I felt another tug inside of me. Could making puns about the Pope be another thing we had in common, like our dimples? Maybe my Cherokee great-grandmother had made them too, while sitting around the totem pole beneath the Great Smoky Mountains. I pictured an Indian chief in full headdress sitting cross-legged next to a beautiful squaw and asking her, ‘Would you like a tote on this peace pipe, Cherokee’s great-grandma?’ And the beautiful woman smiling back at him before grabbing the pipe and saying, ‘Is the Pope a Catholic, Big Chief White Bear?’
The glint of Raven’s scissors snapped me from my daydream and I felt a sudden wave of panic.
‘Would it be OK if –’ I broke off.
‘If what?’ Raven asked.
‘If I turned round, so I’m not facing the mirror.’ I could barely look at her I felt so embarrassed.
Raven stared at me blankly for a moment, then her face broke into a smile. ‘Oh, I get it,’ she exclaimed. ‘So it’ll be like one of those makeover shows on the telly and you’ll only see the before and after. Cool!’
I nodded and breathed a sigh of relief. As long as she didn’t realise I was too much of a chicken to watch what she was doing, it didn’t matter what she thought.
Over on the sofa Steve started singing softly.
‘Oh, I love this one!’ Wayne exclaimed.
‘Me too,’ Raven said, swivelling my chair round so I was facing into the shop.
As she started snipping away at my hair I decided to try and lose myself in the song to stop myself from panicking, which wasn’t difficult as it was really beautiful. I didn’t want to embarrass myself by asking what it was called, but I figured out from the chorus that it must have been ‘Wild Horses’. As I watched Steve playing, the voice in my head went all serious and newsreader-ish. He is your dad. That man is your dad. Your name is Cherokee. Your great-grandmother was a Cherokee Indian. That is why you look nothing like the rest of your family. But you do look like your dad. And you probably look like your great-grandmother too. And that is your dad. That man playing the guitar and singing so amazingly. Oh my fricking God!
The song came to an end and Wayne burst into applause. I couldn’t help clapping too and even Raven stopped snipping for a few seconds to join in. Then I looked down at the floor by my chair. It was covered in dark hair. My dark hair – and judging from the amount, pretty much all of it. Holy crap! Mum’s face popped into my head, the two lines between her eyebrows that always remind me of a claw-print, deep with rage. What was she going to say when I got back home? But then I remembered all the lies she’d been telling me all these years. She’d have no right to be angry at me. Not after what she had done.
‘You got any requests, Cherokee?’ Steve asked, tightening the strings on his guitar.
‘Oh – er –’ I wondered if he knew any Screaming Death. Everything he’d played so far had been pretty old-school.
‘No, wait up, I know.’ Steve strummed a few chords and then began to sing. ‘Happy birthday to you, Happy birthday to you –’
‘Oh my God! Is it your birthday?’ Raven exclaimed.
I nodded, trying really hard to stop a stupid grin splitting my face in two.
‘Wow! That’s so cool!’ She and Wayne joined in the singing and I felt like my heart might burst with embarrassed joy.
Afterwards Steve and Wayne started talking about Stevie Wonder and Raven bent forwards so close I could smell her minty breath. ‘Your dad is so cool!’ she whispered.
‘But how –’ I was going to ask how she knew Steve was my dad, but I stopped myself just in time. She had automatically assumed it, which meant that I must look as if I belonged with him. But before I had time for that fact to sink in Raven had turned on a set of clippers. I sat, frozen rigid as she worked away, the clippers buzzing at the side of my head like a swarm of angry wasps. After what seemed like ten years she turned them off and picked up a hairdryer. I felt a surge of relief – at least there was still some hair left to dry! And then it was done.
Raven put the hairdryer in its holder and stood back, looking at me as if I were an exhibit in an art gallery. ‘Wow!’ she said. ‘Cool!’
Steve put his guitar down and he and Wayne walked over to join her.
‘Awesome!’
