Hilary Fannin: Mouse-brown? Who pays for mouse-brown?

‘Been anywhere nice?”

“Eh . . . no.”

“Greece? The Med? You wouldn’t know what to be doing with yourself these days. Dubai? Would you be bothered?”

“Eh . . . I hadn’t really given it much thought.”

“We’re doing Trinidad and Tobago. Still, you never know. Is that water too hot for you?”

“No. No, I’m fine. It’s fine, thank you.”

I was having the colour rinsed off my roots. (And yes, the water was too hot. The water is always too hot, scalding in fact, but the alternative is brain-freeze cold, and I’m bad enough without cryogenically freezing the interior of my cranium.)

I’d just spent a soporific 40 minutes sheathed in a black plastic cape, with a band of cotton wool wrapped around my forehead and a bowlful of purple gunk slapped on top of my noggin.

There’s something utterly passive about having your colour done. You sit in front of a salon mirror while your colour develops, and you stare at your naked face, wondering about the etymology of the word dewlap, and listening to other people’s telephone conversations.

“No, you did not tell me that she was coming,” hissed the tanned woman in the next chair along (who was undergoing some pretty intensive highlighting) into her very smart smartphone.

“No. No, you certainly did not,” she spat, her mahogany-toned index finger jammed into her free ear to drown out the persistent strains of Michael Bublé.

Natural look

I was thinking, while the pungent chemical mucilage attempted to imitate the colour I was born with (mouse-brown), how entirely mad it was to sit here, next to some angry, sculpted woman, spending more money than I can reasonably afford, trying to look natural.

At least that splenetic dame in the next chair was having her peroxide neat; that icy, bronzed gal was holding a one-way ticket to blondesville. A far cheaper way to achieve a natural look would be to allow my damn hair to mulch into the greeny greyishness it seems to favour.

Hell, I could go the whole hog, scrape the slap off my boat race and spend my hard-earned cash on beetroot smoothies, kelp cookies and a pair of flip-flops made from a recycled milk float. Mouse-brown? Who pays for mouse-brown?

“How’s that colour for you?” asked the boy with the spacers and the tongue stud, who had guided me from the tilting basin back to my berth in front of the mirror and was “combing me out”.

“Lovely,” I lied.

“Magazine?” he asked, weighing me down with bumper editions of summer fashion magazines, displaying the kind of garments you’d only consider if you were 6ft 2in and 22.

Pink or puce

At 22 (and 5ft 2in), I was dyeing my hair cerise-pink over a heavily stained bath in a rented mock-Tudor house on a damp estate in a suburb of Cork city. The bottles of dye were called Crazy Colour, and, regardless of the promise on the label, they left the hair pink, puce or, well, pink.

I used to buy the dye in the arcade on Patrick Street, or “Pana”, as we jackeen blow-ins delighted in saying in an unconvincing Cork accent. “Paaa-naaa.” Oh, such hysterical wags we were in our sullied youth.

Along with the funky hair juice, the establishment also traded in Pierrot dolls, which practically constituted a national plague in the 1980s. Those spooky, silky dolls seemed to embody angst and yearning (and, some might argue, lousy taste), but man, they were hiding behind every bedroom door I visited that decade.

The shop also sold framed sayings, those adages that people hang in their downstairs toilets to illustrate the quirky nature of their households. You know the kind of thing: “Live. Laugh. Love!” or “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution!” We were young and impressionable, and we thought a funky maxim a day would keep suburbia at bay.

“Fabulous,” said my Trinidad-and- Tobago-vacationing stylist, shimmying over with the hairdryer, the one who had flayed the scalp off me over the boiling basin. “So natural.”

“Yes,” I murmured. “So . . . natural.”

“Going anywhere nice this year, or did I ask you that already?” she asked.

I looked at her reflection in the glass, her electric-blue fringe, the ridge of her black mohawk, which ran from crown to nape.

“I’m taking a trip down memory lane,” I said.

She looked at me with sympathy, although it might simply have been utter confusion.

“Next time,” I said quietly, while my neighbour sighed deeply into her mobile, “could I . . . could you maybe make it pink?”