The Big Read: Cutting it fine

It was Ami who first told me, but I didn't believe him. He sent a text saying, "Peter's leaving."

I thought he was being a ninny, a scaremonger, a panicking Cassandra.

"Peter's not going anywhere," I replied. "Peter is forever."

I'm not a Buddhist but if I were to be anything that's what I'd be, and Buddhism teaches that mental suffering is rooted in the fear of change. Nothing is permanent and we can either accept that or struggle against it, and suffering comes from the struggle. "If you love something, set it free," say the Buddhists, "because it's going anyway."

I think for the most part that's true, but I'm only a man and some change is too hard to accept. For half my life Peter has been the most important man in it. My relationship with him has outlasted my relationship with any human being who doesn't share my DNA. I met him 20 years ago when he was young and I was younger and I had given up all hope of happiness.

Peter ran a hairdressing salon on Long Street and I walked in one day in 1994 during a lunch hour and without much expectation. I have always had bad hair. My hair is like the ungovernable faction of a Third-World revolutionary party. Even under discipline it is sullen and mutinous; left unregulated it would commit atrocities and alienate international opinion. My school days were difficult and isolated, partly because of me but mostly due to my hair. I grew up in a place and a time when floppy quiffs were fashionable, but no matter what is done to it, my hair will not flop. It crouched belligerently. It bunched and corrugated. It had an inhospitable density like the atmosphere of Venus.

When I entered Peter's parlour on that slatey, rainy Cape afternoon I was resigned to a life on the margins. Baldness or headgear or decapitation was the only way forward for me. But Peter sat me in his chair and placed his fingers on my head and he was not daunted. Peter understands hair. He is the hair whisperer. When I left it was into crystal sunshine. The walk back up Long Street took forever because at each store window I had to stop to stare in wonder at my reflection. I felt like a boy with no face who an hour ago was told that modern science has invented artificial faces, and then was given one.

From that day, for 20 years, Peter has cut my hair. For many of those years I lived elsewhere, but that didn't stop me. I flew down every six weeks and brought bottles of Portuguese cava which we drank while Peter saved my life again and again with his scissors. Once it was the end of the year and all the flights to Cape Town were booked so I drove down the long wastes of the N1. It was the last day before Peter's Christmas holiday and I had the last appointment. I left before dawn and came through the Karoo in a dusty swirl of speeding fines but at the Huguenot Tunnel there was a traffic jam and I wasn't going to make it. If Peter left the studio it would be February before I could see him again. It is the only time I have ever resorted to tears on a business call.

Once, a little more than 10 years ago, I went through a spell of not being able to afford to fly down to Cape Town so I grew my hair long. It was a terrible, barbarous, barberless miscalculation; I have destroyed all the photographs.

Peter has had children in the time we've been together, and one of them has finished school already. I have cheated on him only three or four times, and only while away, but each time I regretted it and he forgave me.

I had my last cut last week, in a cold Cape winter storm. Ordinarily I read a magazine or we talk about football, even though I don't watch football, but this time we spoke about him. Where is he going? For what starry climes is he abandoning us? Los Angeles? Edinburgh? But Peter isn't going anywhere. He's been cutting for two decades and more, and he needs time to think about life and what makes him happy. At the end of the month he'll take a long walk in the mountains, and see what happens next.

But what will you do? How will you make money? Aren't you afraid? Peter shrugged. Sometimes when you start walking, he said, the path opens for you.

And then I stopped thinking about my hair and started thinking about my life. It might just be that Peter has saved me one more time.