Hairpiece
In the summer of 1982, I come home to Edinburgh from university wearing Doc Martens a size too small, thick black eyeliner and my boyfriend’s coat. I spend the week’s wages from my holiday job in a second-hand bookshop getting a bright red streak put in my hair. I strut home from the hairdresser feeling like Chrissie Hynde’s sister. When I open the front door, Dad is waiting for me in the hall.
‘What the bloody hell have you done to your hair?’
My punk bravado evaporates and my cheeks flame.
‘I like it! It looks cool.’ I protest
But Dad’s not having it.
‘It looks nothing of the sort. You can go back down there right now and tell them to fix it.’
Staring at the carpet I mutter as loudly as I dare.
‘Calm down. It’s my damn hair. ‘
Then I spin round and stomp up the stairs before he can see me cry.
I don’t go back to the hairdressers, but I do get straight in the shower and rub at the vivid red of the streak. Over the summer the colour fades but my father snorts every time he sees me. I leave for university a week before the start of term.
*
Almost forty years later, a routine mammogram reveals a clump of pre-cancerous cells known as DCIS (ductal carcinoma in situ) in my right breast. Surgery is swiftly followed by a course of radiotherapy. Covid restrictions mean that a dose normally spread over three weeks is zapped into my breast in five days. Three months after this my hair starts to fall out. ‘Radiotherapy does not cause hair loss,’ the Macmillan website informs me. And yet my hairs clog the shower drain, rub off on the pillowcase and come away in tufts if I touch my scalp. No-one can tell me why this is happening.
I examine every reason my hair could have for leaving. Did I take it for granted or stress it out, eat too few vegetables or drink too much wine? What early signs did I miss of the breakdown of our relationship? I don’t recognise the thick, strong curls, inherited from my grandmother in these spidery wisps floating out into the world. I photograph my head constantly as if my phone camera might reveal clues invisible to the human eye. But zooming in on these pictures only shows spreading patches of barren, bumpy scalp like satellite images of an alien planet.
Two photos taken a month apart show sticky clumps of wet brown hair next to everyday objects for scale – in the first a two-pence piece, in the second a pen. This forensic evidence proves only that my hair is falling out both dramatically and painfully slowly.
My camera roll is a grim gallery of selfies taken from the back. I am haunted by one in which my scalp, pink, spotty and bald emerges on my pale neck from the frill-collar of a white blouse. I look like a chicken drumstick at a buffet.
As a gardener I know that pruning encourages growth but I can’t risk a buzzcut. What if these wisps are the last hair I ever have? At fifty eight I can’t style out a bald head like Sinead O’Connor or Jada Pinkett Smith, so I choose camouflage. Wide headbands and artfully knotted scarves give way to floral cotton scrub caps bought on Etsy. In aiming for cool emergency room nurse I hit cockney cleaning lady from West End Musical. In this city where women cover their heads for many reasons and strangers never make eye contact, this bizarre look passes for normal. Then I meet a friend of a friend for a walk at a crowded station. She greets me with a piercing, “Look at you, Cancer survivor!” and a bearhug. I shrivel.
The less hair I have the more of my life it takes up. I tug at it in my diary.
My hair feels like sometimes it grows and sometimes it doesn’t. Stop, start. Rallying and then retreating into my scalp. This feels like a punishment for my careless assumption that it would always be there and be part of who I am. Some days I feel like I’m losing the fight to exist, to matter.
*
When I was seven, I had a Tressy doll. Tressy was like Barbie but with a secret. Turn the knob on her back one way and a long strand of golden hair would unfurl from the middle of her head, turn it back and the hair retreated into her scalp. Tressy’s ‘secret strand’ could be curled, pinned or plaited using the tiny accessories provided. But hairstyling didn’t interest me; I wanted to know how long her hair could grow. So, I cut it off and robbed Tressy of her superpower. Stuck with a Mohican and naked, except for one shoe, she soon joined the lost socks under my bed.
*
After university I move to London and go back to dyeing my hair. I sit in the window of a salon while a bored teenager yanks strands of hair through holes in a pink rubber cap with a hook, making my eyes water. My reflection in the winter-darkened glass predicts the chicken drumstick look of 2022. Soon I graduate to foils, a less painful but more expensive way to achieve the sun kissed highlights I long for. Tinfoil strips pleated around my head rustle when I walk from the chair to the washbasin giving David Bowie backing dancer vibes. When I suggest giving up this expensive habit and returning to the mousey brown hair I was born with, a series of chatty stylists purse their lips and mutter darkly. From twenty-two to fifty-seven I spend a ton of money trying to look like someone else. During the two years my hair falls out I spend as much again trying to look like me.
*
Hair loss is worse for me than breast cancer treatment. Without hair I feel every drop of rain and each cold breeze as an assault. This sudden vulnerability sends me scurrying down the sad burrows of the internet. I come back up with the postcode of an office suite in central London.
The professional trichologist has a full head of hair and white teeth. He also has a degree in English, a career as a jobbing actor and a suspended sentence for tax fraud. He is highly rated on Trustpilot by his clients some of whom have been working with him for years. After my forty-five-minute free consultation, I leave his office with a diagnosis of ‘Extremely Severe Ongoing Telogen Effluvium,’ which is trichologist for unexplained hair loss, and a smart box of tiny glass bottles. These contain herbal-based aqueous solution, which I am instructed to apply to my scalp every second day. I know this is not how hair growth works, but I surrender my credit card and flee in tears. This ninety day supply of snake oil costs £450, and the trichologist warns that it might take 14 months before I see results. I do the maths on the bus and cancel the follow up appointment as soon as I get home. I show my husband the receipt and collapse into a soggy mess of hot shame.
The trichologist is a betting man and all gamblers win some of the time. Hair cycles are slow and in many people without underlying health issues, hair regrows in roughly a year, with or without the application of aqueous solutions. It’s a coin toss as to whether I am one of these people, but I’m so bored of floral scrub caps.
*
Growing up in Scotland in the 1970s I knew nothing of the rich culture of wigs and hairpieces that are central to black female experience or of the sheitel worn by Orthodox Jewish women. Wigs were a musical hall joke, a lazy trope of the embarrassing comedy show like women with big boobs, or limp wristed shop assistants.
There is nothing embarrassing about the elegant black woman who opens the door of the Wig Clinic to me and my daughter one Saturday morning. I have brought K. with me because I don’t trust myself not to make another expensive mistake. I show the wig stylist a photo of me with hair and admit that I have no tolerance or time for elaborate hair styling. She nods and recommends a nylon rather than a natural wig. This woman has known me for less than ten minutes and already realises that I can’t be trusted to look after human hair. She leaves the room and comes back carrying four shoeboxes. Inside each is a long-haired guinea pig – blonde, brown, copper and peppery grey. K’s eyes widen in shock, but she quickly composes her features and flashes me a reassuring smile.
The wig is a palaver to put on. First, I stretch a wig cap that appears to be made of old tights over my scalp to cover what’s left of my own hair. Then I tip my head forward and pull the wig back and down with the two side tabs to keep it level. This takes practice. Five millimetres off centre and it’s a comedy cliché. After fifteen minutes my daughter declares me fit to appear in public. When I catch my reflection in a shop window I smile in recognition.
Worn right, the wig looks freshly styled and natural enough to pass for my own hair. Soaking in its weekly bath of expensive shampoo it turns back into a guinea pig and stretched to dry on a polystyrene head it sends our puppy into paroxysms of terrified barking until we hide it in a wardrobe. Wearing just the wig cap in any morning mirror I look like a pantomime dame. And once, after I notice confused glances from my colleagues, I realise that I have tucked the arms of my sunglasses under the side flaps. Soon I forget I’m wearing it. But when spring warms to summer I pull it off after work with the same relief that I kick off my office shoes.
Soon my eyebrows, thick and dark like my father’s, start to disappear. I remember a cheap puzzle where the object was to drag iron filings around with a magnetic stylus to paint hair on the face of a bald man under the plastic cover. When you moved the stylus away, all the iron filings fell off into the base, leaving the face expressionless. I pick eyebrow hairs out of the basin and worry about my eyelashes.
Around this time I dream I had two babies born the same day but not twins. They are just starting to crawl when one of them goes missing. My friend Lucy finds the missing baby under a chest of drawers but when she hands her back to me her skin is completely white. At first, I think she is covered in nappy cream so I ask Lucy for a bowl of water and a cloth. But when I go to wipe her face, I discover that the white is not cream but ice crystals and that her eyes are closed. Lucy then reminds me that neither of the babies are real and that everyone has been indulging me in pretending they were. After this I go to visit Dad, who did not die in 2013 but instead moved to a commune in the North of Scotland where he is, although slightly demented, still working as a GP. He is pleased to see me and is sympathetic about the babies.
I wake up crying and wondering what advice Dad would give me about my hair. I don’t think he would have approved of what I do next.
One lunchtime in early summer I stand in an alleyway in East London outside a discreet, grey-painted shop. My knock is answered by a tiny woman in her early forties with a froth of curly brown hair. An elderly Jack Russell fusses around her ankles. The room she welcomes me into is bare apart from an antique desk and two chairs. The low wooden ceilings sag with ghosts.
In the basement I sink into a squashy sofa and the therapist disappears to make tea while I leaf through a large album crammed with photos of some of the happiest people I have ever seen, sporting eyebrows, buzzcuts and five o’clock shadows.
‘Are these all your clients?’ I ask unnecessarily as she hands me a steaming mug of something herbal.
She beams.
‘My job is to help my clients feel themselves again. I want them to leave here feeling that they have one less thing to worry about.’
I breathe out.
Microblading is the most popular form of eyebrow enhancement. A stencil is used to mark the shape, and a thin blade creates a series of cuts which can leave the area red and sore for several weeks. What D. does is less invasive and bespoke. It is a form of tattooing she calls ‘permanent make up.’ First, she carefully matches the dye she is using to the colour of my few remaining brow hairs. Then, using a fine hand tool and a magnifying mirror she traces the outline of my natural brow line injecting colour in a series of delicate hair like strokes just under the surface of my skin. It stings but doesn’t hurt.
As she works D. tells me about the woman who came to her for a nipple enhancement after breast reconstruction and the Algerian man with Alopecia Totalis who spent a whole weekend getting a buzz cut and a five o’clock shadow to give him confidence on his wedding day.
D. grew up in the house which is now her clinic. The family lived upstairs while her father, who had emigrated from Greece in the 1950s, ran a barber’s shop on the ground floor. She describes sweeping up hair on Saturday mornings while East End gangsters and policemen sat side by side waiting for her father to give them his signature wet shave with an open razor.
After two full hours, I emerge into the afternoon sunshine and I do feel like myself again. But I know this is an illusion.
*
Alopecia is considered a condition of the scalp, so if you want a medical opinion, you need a dermatologist. I feel a perverse thrill as I yank the wig from my head to reveal my shiny alien skull to the doctor. But she has seen it all before. She prescribes a hefty dose of steroids, some anti-nausea tables and industrial doses of Vitamin C. I make the mistake of counting how many steroid tablets are in the course - 226 - a drawerful. Jangly, tired and irritable, I start to feel like a car whose teenage driver is stamping on the accelerator and then the brake in quick succession. I put on weight everywhere. My face is a pale round moon with red-rimmed eyes like the cartoon face of a sumo wrestler on an instant noodle packet.
After a month of this my patience is the only thin thing about me. When I ask the dermatologist if I should try acupuncture she says, it ‘can’t hurt.’ This turns out not to be true.
Dr X is kindly, professional and speaks in such heavily accented English I can’t understand a word he says. I am looking for treatment not diagnosis, so this scarcely matters. I lay my bald head on the small cushion, close my eyes and try to pinpoint where each needle enters my skin. Some I can hardly feel, some produce a sharp, shocking sting, and occasionally one draws blood. I only discover this when Dr X gleefully shows me a cotton wool pad spotted with red where he has removed a needle. The point between my eyes is always painful, I know this must be a significant meridian in Chinese medicine but I experience it as the epicentre of my worries. As I lie on the hard bed listening to tinny Chinese music, I can feel the needles semaphoring currents of energy down into my feet. On some days it is relaxing to just lie there and on others I feel trapped and anxious, like Gulliver, pinned flat on my back by invisible forces. I can’t predict as I climb up onto the bed whether today my body will experience comfort or panic at this latest breach of its boundaries.
I am tired of these invasions of my skin and of my sense of self. Poison has been zapped into my pores. I have rubbed snake oil on my scalp, swallowed medicine that messes with my head and my metabolism and spent a fortune on faking it as a woman with hair and eyebrows. I have wasted days on the internet and pages of my journal, worrying away at a problem I cannot explain or control.
And then, eighteen months after my hair falls out, I write this in my diary.
Today my daughter found some baby hairs growing on the top of my head. I think I can feel them, but I’m scared to touch in case they retreat into my scalp. I can’t believe how happy this makes me.
My hair returns as slowly as it left, and it grows back as patches of pure white. Its reappearance is as much a mystery as its disappearance and it is four months before I brave the hairdresser. After my first haircut in two years, I take a selfie in the toilet. My bright white crop, backlit by the LED lighting seems to float above my head like an angel hairpiece coming into land. This snowy buzzcut symbolises a rite of passage as surely as did my rebellious red stripe – only this time I am channelling Annie Lennox whose voice is richer in her sixties than it was at twenty one.
-Sally McEnallay
Sally McEnallay was born in Scotland and now lives in London. She has worked in booked publishing, as a landscape gardener and now does marketing for an environmentally friendly film lighting company. She has been writing all her life but has only recently started to take her writing seriously and is still nervous about asking others to do so. She is excited by the potential of memoir to unlock connections between women's ordinary experiences. You will find her outside walking her spaniel or curled up in a corner with a good book that she wishes she had written.