Kadian Journal by Thomas Harding
Author:Thomas Harding [Thomas Harding]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2014-07-02T16:00:00+00:00
PART III
KADIAN LOVED TO tease.
He teased me about my cooking. ‘Have you ever cooked before?’ he would ask when I presented him with some burnt or underdone concoction I’d painstakingly prepared. He liked to tease me about my driving. ‘You are ten miles over the speed limit, Dad.’ And he liked to tease me about my telephone skills. ‘Dad, you won’t get anywhere if you’re rude to the customer service reps.’
Most of all he liked to tease me about my hair.
My hair had started thinning in my early thirties. At first, I didn’t think it was anything to worry about. All the men in our family had receding hairlines, or ‘high foreheads’, as we liked to call it. Deb didn’t notice, or if she did, she didn’t comment on it. But sometime in my early forties, when Kadian was around eleven, he started calling it to my, and then, soon after, everyone else’s attention.
‘Do you want to know their names?’ he would ask total strangers. ‘This one,’ he said, pointing to a small patch of hairlessness at the top of my head, ‘is called Larry.’ The person would laugh, inevitably. ‘This one,’ he would say, moving his fingers lower, ‘is called Mary. Mary is married to Larry.’ More chuckles. ‘And this one,’ he was now near the back of my head, ‘is Jerry, their son.’
The truth, and I only acknowledged this when I was alone, looking in the mirror, was that I was rapidly going bald. Not an acceptable, all-over, symmetrical crescent-shape baldness, this was more like mange: spotty and random.
The best solution was to shave the whole thing off. Which I did, one morning, while the kids were still asleep. It’s not an easy thing, to shave one’s head. It requires different movements – side-to-side, front-to-back, back-to-front, over-and-under – you need both hands, and you need a lot of soap or shaving cream. In the end I looked like a very badly shorn sheep.
Deb suggested I used some of her Nair product to obtain that shiny Mr Clean look. I applied a palmful of pinkish goop to my head, rubbed it in, rinsed my hands and went downstairs for breakfast. Job done.
The kids were shocked at first, but by that afternoon, they were excitedly showing off my sparkly scalp to anyone who cared to look. That night, as we were going to bed, I told Deb that my head was feeling rather hot. ‘It’s probably razor burn,’ she suggested. Probably.
At around three in the morning I woke in a panic, my head on fire. What was going on? I ran to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. My scalp was bright red. This couldn’t be razor burn. Fumbling around under the sink I looked for the Nair bottle. I read the directions: ‘Rinse after ten minutes.’ Shrieking, I ran into the shower and rinsed it off.
When I told Kadian what had happened in the morning he roared with laughter. And for the next few days he had a great time commenting on my pink head, since now he had another thing to tease me about.
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