Writing for Fun
October 2017
Secrets - Jeanette Rothwell
The telephone rang, making Jane jump. She crossed the room to answer it and was taken aback to hear her dear friend’s voice. They hadn’t seen each other for about a year but had spoken on the telephone a few times. Her friend, Barbara, lived in Scotland now and was planning to visit London, where Jane lived.
Barbara wanted to meet up for lunch with Jane during her visit and they agreed a date, time and place. Jane put the phone down and looked up at the mirror which was fixed over the telephone table. The lingering smile on her face was swiftly wiped away as she looked at her appearance.
Over the year since she had last seen her friend, she had lost weight but, more importantly, she had also lost a lot of her hair. Her once thick brown shiny locks had been replaced with thin wispy hair, streaked with grey.
During that horrible year, she had suffered some medical problems which had meant having to take some potent drugs. She had been warned about possible side effects, one of them being the thinning of her hair. She was in fact recovering well with the excellent treatment she had received and was assured her hair problem would improve but in the meantime her confidence in herself and her looks had taken a tumble and the thought of meeting her very dear but rather outspoken friend filled her with dread.
Jane worked in a bakery behind the counter and most of the time she wore a rather fetching white trilby hat and white hairnet for hygiene purposes, so the staff there would not have noticed her gradual hair loss.
On her next day off, she walked down the high street and, taking a deep breath, she walked into a wig shop. The service she received in there was superb. The hairdresser found a wig that almost completely matched her original hair colour. It was then placed on her head while the hairdresser snipped and combed it until she was happy that it looked very much like her usual pre-hair loss style. She walked out of the shop, her bank balance somewhat decreased but with a spring in her step, catching sight of her image in the shop window, which boosted her confidence.
The day of the scheduled meeting arrived. The wig, a new dress and some careful make-up helped her to look forward to the proposed lunch. On the bus ride to the restaurant she sat on the top deck which she always preferred to do. As soon as she sat down somebody sat by her. She gave a swift sideways glance and saw a pleasant looking young man, smartly dressed, smiling at her.
‘Are you going far?’ he asked.
‘N-no-no, just a few more stops,’ she answered. The young man tried several times to start a conversation but she wasn’t really in the mood to be sociable so he took the hint and buried himself in his newspaper while she stared unseeingly out of the window. He stood up to let her off the bus, still smiling.
Her friend greeted her enthusiastically and they had a lovely lunch, catching up on each other’s lives but Jane didn’t mention her illness and, if her friend guessed her secret, i.e. the wig, she tactfully didn’t say anything and, after doing a bit of window shopping in the high street together, they parted vowing to see each other again soon.
Jane waited for her bus and when it appeared she again climbed up to the top deck and sat by a window. Almost immediately she felt somebody sit beside her. It was the same young man.
‘Hello there, we meet again,’ he said.
As the euphoria of her meeting with her friend was still with her, she smiled at him and said, ‘Small world.’
‘Even smaller than you know,’ he replied. My office is opposite the bakery where you work and I’ve seen you many times in the morning going in there and sometimes I see you leave. I’ve often wanted to speak to you. I hope you don’t mind me speaking to you now. When I saw you on this bus I thought it was a golden opportunity to get to know you.’
She was astounded at this coincidence and then realised that he must know her secret. If he had seen her going to and from work, he knew what she looked like without the wig. Putting that to one side, she continued to engage in the conversation with him. He seemed to be a genuinely nice person and when he asked if she would have dinner with him the following evening, she agreed.
His last words to her when she got off the bus were, ‘It’s a nice wig but you don’t need it. You’re pretty enough without it’.
She blushed as she said, ‘Good bye.’
The following evening her secret, the wig, was left on its stand on the dressing table and she stepped out with more confidence than she had felt for a long time.