ON THE RUN

By the end of the year Larry Garraghan will be bald, hairless. He doesn't have cancer, he doesn't have alopecia, he doesn't even, at thirty five and to the amazement of his dentist, have any fillings. He's not particularly stressed apart from when he thinks about his hair. It's more political than that: the maternal gene asserting itself over the father's. Despite the proud tufts on his father's aging head, her DNA was getting in there early, beating him to it, leaving their only son as bald as a post.

Each morning when he wakes up and goes to the bathroom for a pee he looks in the mirrored cupboard which hangs above the toilet. His hairline guiltily cringes back at him while his forehead beams out a bright Good Morning. Larry scowls. The widows peak seems sharper than before, more beak-like retreating to extreme points on his ever-visible crown.

If he lived in New World America, when driving wagons and fighting off Indians were your only problems, he wonders, would the American Indians find his molting scalp worthy of a trophy? Might they be slightly disappointed? Might they throw it back at him laughing or worse keep it in the shadows of the teepee tucked embarrassingly away behind all the others? Whatever happened to less is more?

Lucky that Larry’s on/off girlfriend Suzy is on hand to reassure him that no, his hairline is exactly how he left it when he went to sleep yesterday. He has a fine head of hair. When Larry does the measure with his index finger from eyebrow to innermost edge she grows impatient.
“Stop driving yourself crazy! You’re paranoid and you’re making me late for work. There are people out there,” she jabs at the window, “with real problems!” It’s true, Suzy is a paramedic and, as she often tells him, the difference between 9 o’clock and 9.15 could be the difference between life and death for some people.

“Honestly!” She softens and strokes his temple, “it’s just your mind playing tricks on you.” But Larry has slumped into a despondent gloom. When Suzy asks him if he’ll join her and The Team tonight for drinks at The Fallback he shrugs moodily. “Fine!” she says and grabs her keys.
“Could you -?” he says quickly holding out the camera with pleading eyes. She sighs and then snatches it off him as he dutifully bows his head like a monk in prayer.

He looks at the photo and flicks back a few days to compare it to the previous ones. “Did you do it with the flash?” he asks, but the door slams and she is gone. Larry anxiously zooms in on the evidence, there is definitely a thinning circle appearing slowly on his head, like an alien crop formation. He thinks of running after Suzy to show her – or just texting her, that he’d been right all along. Maybe he would send the picture as an email. With the subject heading "Tonsure." That was it! The word bubbled out into his brain the “ton” sound slowly filling out across his tongue, spreading out across his head.

Although Larry could never fully comprehend this, there was at that very moment a cosmic realisation between body and mind. For what Suzy doesn’t know and what Larry is belatedly beginning to suspect is that Larry’s forehead is conspiring in a revolution against him: It has finally asserted it’s dominance, and is indeed in the process of carrying out a programme of displacement and deracination against the offending bristles with which it has shared a home for the past 35 years. One by one the hairs on Larry’s head are packing up. They’ve had their orders and are systematically ripping up their roots, clearing out the follicles and launching themselves kamikaze-style off the top of Larry’s head. As they flutter down around Larry’s shoulders catching on his jumper here, landing briefly on an eyelash there they dream of a better life before sinking sadly into sleep.

Behind them, with a determination and a force rarely seen in Larry's mother, Grace, saved only for the Mother's Race at Sports Day, the shiny progress of Larry’s pate continues unstoppable. A kind of vicarious vengeance on Larry's father for two and a half decades of philandering. It's not always obvious, and of course sometimes it is, but there is a strong karmic relationship between hair loss and fidelity.