Thalita Human

Thalita Human was extremely disappointed by her new hairdo. She couldn’t get her face to stop being red, and she couldn’t help glancing in every window of every car, shop and house she passed and wincing at what looked like a wig sitting awkwardly on her head.

A healthy-looking, tanned young man with sun-bleached hair, who Thalita would really have rather liked having a drink with, passed her and gave her a very slight glance with his deep brown eyes. It was far too brief for any sort of communication, conscious or not, but Thalita looked down at the kerb, flustered.

Thalita had never been happy with her looks anyway, even before the haircut. Several years ago, the boy-next-door had told her she was beautiful, but he was drunk at the time and wanted to sleep with her. Later, she had asked him about it and he’d said that he’d meant that she would be beautiful, once she’d grown into her looks. Now, she doubted whether she ever would.

She was only twenty-three but she knew that she was only going to get odder-looking.

It was her skull that was the problem. That and her eyes. Her stupid, slightly-too-bulbous, annoying, slightly-too-sticky-outy, starey, eyes.

And the problem with having a weird skull is that, no matter what, no-one will ever, ever tell you exactly how it’s weird and what could possibly be done to un-weird it. And, even though she’d stood, sat and lain down in front of all sorts of different mirrors, she’d never been able to put her finger on it.

It was sort of as if it was just a little too steeply domed at the top, and sort of as if it was slightly wasted and thin at the sides and sort of as if, well, there wasn’t a word for the shape it was, but it wasn’t exactly head-shaped.

And now it had a stupid hairdo on top of it. Stupid bloody hairdresser. You don’t get thanked for trying to be interesting in this life, do you? Perhaps if it hadn’t been a gloriously sunny day, perhaps if she hadn’t had wine with lunch, perhaps if she’d remembered to retain just a tiny bit of cynicism, she wouldn’t look like she had a sodding barcode on her head.

“Oh, I don’t know. You’re the expert! Whatever you think!”

Idiot!

Highlights! These weren’t highlights! They looked like the shreds of an exploded blonde wig that she’d glued onto her scalp.

Her face, somehow, flushed hotter and redder for a moment. She looked up at the window of a Boots as she passed. “Because you’re worth it”, shouted the subtly-highlighted, seven-foot tall, pore-and-blemish-free face in the window display.

Thalita went in through the automatic doors and saw the enormous cardboard promotional display straight away. She looked at the six-and-a-half thousand identical boxes in front of her, and selected Brazen Chestnut from the Autumnal Hymns collection.

***

That evening, with the ammonia smell of public urinals all around her, Thalita carefully unwrapped the cling film from her hair, bent over the sink, and held the shower over her unusually-shaped head. A thick, dark brown liquid, like perfumed, ammonia-ridden diarrhoea, flooded her sink, staining the limescale around the plug.

She straightened up and wiped the condensation from the mirror, smearing a tiny amount of brown water onto it.

Without her glasses on, and with the steam in the air, and the water on the mirror, and her hair wet, it was hard to see exactly but there was no denying the truth of it. Thalita Human now had green highlights in her hair.

With trembling hands, she picked up the packaging. “Do not use on blonde hair” whispered a warning near the bottom of the box in a jaunty orange typeface. Thalita couldn’t hold back the tears any more. She went into the front room of her flat and opened the fridge door. There was a little more than half a bottle of white wine in there, looking frosty and cold.

When the wine was finished, she looked around for more. She knew there wasn’t any more, but she made a show of the looking, so as to persuade herself that what she was about to do was really the only option under the circumstances. After all, she could hardly go out looking like this, could she?

With eyes reddened with tears, and just enough drunkenness to think it was a good idea, Thalita Human popped the champagne cork from the bottle she’d been saving for nearly a year, just in case anything worth celebrating happened, and drank it.

***

The next morning, when she woke up, she decided that she wouldn’t be eating breakfast today. In fact, the way she felt right now …

She ran to the bathroom and threw up into the toilet. Quite a lot. After a little while, that felt like a big while, she sat back on her haunches and stroked her hair back from her…

A cold shudder ran through Thalita Human from her scalp to her knees, making her wretch again.

She remembered.

She remembered the tears, and the scissors that wouldn’t cut the way she wanted them to, and the razor, and the Tesco’s bag full of brown and green hair, so much more than she’d expected.

She stood up slowly, steadying herself on the lip of the sink, and saw a completely bald head appear with her face underneath it.

It was almost unbelievably white. There were also patches where she’d not shaved especially carefully and the little areas of stubble made it look like there were strange shadows. With her glasses off, through her slightly watery eyes, she looked, unbelieving, at what she saw.

Then she stooped, rinsed her mouth out, brushed her teeth, went back to the bedroom, put on some soft clothes that wouldn’t disturb her hung-over skin, put her glasses on and returned to the bathroom. She took a new razor from the plastic bag of new razors, stroked shampoo all over her head and started to carefully tidy up what hair remained.

And, as she did this, a curious thing happened. Thalita Human realised what had been wrong with her head all along. And it wasn’t her skull; it was her hair. Whether she’d just been unlucky enough to have a series of hairdressers who’d let her down, or perhaps she had some sort of eccentric growth pattern which made it lie irregularly and no-one had ever spotted it, she wasn’t sure.

What she was sure of was that there wasn’t a problem any more.

In fact, she thought, as she conscientiously rubbed moisturiser into her head, her whole face looked better like this. It all made sense.

***

Later, when she’d managed to eat some toast and drink most of a cup of tea, she left the house and, wearing sunglasses to save her from the worst ravages of her headache, she glanced in every car, shop and house window and thought she looked pretty hot, all things considered.

And when a rather attractive young man with fashionably dishevelled hair passed her on the pavement wearing a t-shirt advertising a band Thalita knew she wasn’t cool enough to have heard of, she smiled coquettishly, and felt ok about it.

And Thalita Human stayed bald and happy, happy and bald for ever more.