by Pauline Holdstock
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A lock of black hair. A lock of shining black, a water drop about to fall from its tip. Camilla leaned forward and flipped the rest of her hair into view. All of it black and darkly gleaming. She could not get out of the shower fast enough, slipped and caught her ankle on the aluminum sill—fuck—but forgot the pain as soon as she was at the mirror. She turned and tilted her head. She rubbed at her hair with a towel and then she shook it out and gazed.
But let’s leave her there to enjoy her moment, for if you want to hear the story of Camilla Pinto, we really should start at the beginning, at the office party. The annual bash—or “bang,” as her daughter Carson liked to insist—marked Camilla’s sad awakening: she had begun the ghastly slide into the ghostly grey ranks of the invisible. Poor thing! See her there at the bar, where she’s been standing for a full twenty minutes waiting to order—order herself—a martini. It was Derek from IT who came to her rescue. He leaned toward her and said in that mock–James Bond voice of his, Personally, I find it helps if you wave money. And he demonstrated with a crisp twenty folded vertically and pinched between thumb and fist, his arm raised like the Statue of Liberty.
She followed his advice (he wasn’t offering to buy) and, sure enough, the barman arrived, prompt and attentive as a gun dog. But then he came back with the order and—There you go, dear, he said. Dear.
Next morning, lying alone in her king-size bed without so much as a hangover, Camilla made up her mind. She took a vow. No more blind barmen for Camilla Pinto. She would put an end to it. Enough. Camilla Pinto was not about to fade away. In the vast lonely wastes of her bed, she planned her campaign: boost her hours at the gym, go back on the diet, have a few tanning sessions—yeah, yeah, Carson, fake and bake. My body not yours, all right?—and deal with her hair.
Feeling a little more optimistic, she got up and took inventory in front of the mirror. Hair: well, yes, cobwebby, no other word for it—but easy to fix. Legs: fantastic—from a certain angle. Boobs: still up there. Eyes: fine—not so great in the morning, but then no one around to see. Ha ha ha. Skin . . . Skin unhappy, overworked, needing—no, apparently already having—a good lie down. But no. No need to go gently. There was Botox. She’d fight every inch.
That day, she went on every website she could find for salves and lotions, pills and potions, balms, serums, and semen. Yes, camel semen if you must know. From Egypt. Camel semen from Egypt, asses’ milk from Morocco, and birch-bud capsules from Germany. Harvested at dawn during the spring equinox. She maxed out her credit card.
And we have already seen the result. Camilla three weeks later, suddenly transformed. Camilla (scrambling to get out of the shower stall) transformed into (fuck) a raven-haired beauty. Fabulous.
Good, isn’t it? she answered when Carson—the lovely, dreadlocked, perforated Carson—asked what she was using. Camilla tried to sound nonchalant, but the truth was her ankle still stung.
Better than the usual sick mouse, said Carson. What is it?
Restor-A-Shine. It’s new.
Chemical dreams, Mom. Rape the planet daily, why don’t you?
Camilla didn’t bite. Nature Girl, anyway, was out the door and away in her rusty Honda. Polluting the planet, Camilla could have pointed out, but she was busy drying her hair.
Compliments at the office came thick and silky all day. Fortified by success, Camilla decided to step up her campaign and go on a more serious offensive. She booked herself in for a peel. Meanwhile, that night, she stood in front of the mirror again. She could do this.
Lips pulled away from clenched teeth, and mouth foaming rabidly from tooth whitener, she assembled her troops, arranging pots and jars and tubes in formation on the counter. They seduced her anew with their gold-rimmed lids, their mad promise. She dipped and smeared and patted for an hour, rinsed her burning mouth.
Next she did the ninety-minute facial workout from Knockyearsoff.com, followed by twenty minutes of something called ZenSerenity that she’d read about in the TV Guide. Then she added another layer of the wincingly expensive Cellregen Pinguescence and transported her embalmed face to bed.
And that special exhortation from the website? Would she remember it? Yes. No puffy pillows! she reminded herself. She folded a towel flat and lay down without disturbing her capital-S Serenity.
As the days went by, the compliments at work heated up. Female colleagues began to ask questions. What is it you’re using? Do you mind my asking? Camilla didn’t mind. I go to Portinari’s, she said, when they asked about her hair. She didn’t tell them she no longer had to ask for colour. And she couldn’t possibly enumerate everything she used on her skin. Soap, she lied. It’s really good.
Something, anyway, was really good. And something behind Camilla’s navel woke up. Her whole scalp tingled with awareness of it. She would smile every time she passed a mirror. The exercises were working too. It made her smile even more.
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about the author
PAULINE HOLDSTOCK is an internationally published fiction writer and essayist. She is the author of Beyond Measure, shortlisted for several prizes including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Giller Prize, and winner of the Ethel Wilson Prize for fiction. Her latest novel, Into the Heart of the Country, was longlisted for the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize. She lives on Vancouver Island.
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“Hers is the kind of prose you get lost in.”
— National Post on The Hunter and the Wild Girl
“Holdstock’s writing manages to be both heartbreakingly poetic and densely detailed ... sad passages, ghostlike recollections, written almost from the vantage point of the present, establish the book as a great work of fiction.”
— The Globe and Mail on Into the Heart of the Country, longlisted for the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize
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— The Globe and Mail on Beyond Measure, finalist for the 2004 Giller Prize and the 2004 Commonwealth Writers' Prize
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