RAYMOND SENT ME AN electronic mail message at work the next week – it was very odd, seeing his name in my inbox. As I’d expected, he was semi-literate.

Hi E, hope all good with u. Got a wee favour to ask. Sammy’s son Keith has invited me to his 40th this Saturday (ended up staying late at that party BTW, it was a rite laugh). Fancy being my plus one? It’s at the golf club, there’s a buffet? No worries if not – let me no. R

A buffet. In a golf club. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. And two parties in a month! More parties than I had been to in two decades. I hit reply:

Dear Raymond,

I should be delighted to accompany you to the birthday celebration. Kind regards,

Eleanor Oliphant (Ms)

Moments later, I received a response:

Twenty-first-century communication. I fear for our nation’s standards of literacy.

I had arranged to have the afternoon off that day for my appointment at the hairdresser’s, but ate my lunch in the staffroom first as usual, with the Telegraph crossword, a tuna and sweetcorn bloomer, salt and vinegar crisps and orange juice, with bits. I must thank the musician, in due course, for introducing me to the pleasure of bits. After this delicious repast, and with a small grin of triumph at the thought of my colleagues having to remain behind at their desks for the rest of the afternoon, I took a bus into town.

Heliotrope was in a smart street in the city centre, on the ground floor of a Victorian sandstone building. It was certainly not the sort of place I’d usually frequent – loud music, aggressively fashionable staff and far too many mirrors. I imagined this might be where the musician went for

a haircut, and that made me feel slightly better about it. Perhaps one day we’d be sitting side by side in those black leather chairs, holding hands under the hairdryers.

I waited for the receptionist to finish her phone call, and stepped away from the huge vase of white and pink lilies on the counter. Their smell snagged in the back of my throat, like fur or feathers. I gagged; it wasn’t something meant for humans.

I’d forgotten how noisy hairdressers’ salons were, the constant hum of dryers and inane chat, and positioned myself in the window seat, having donned a black nylon kimono which, I was alarmed to see, was already sprinkled with short hair clippings snipped from a previous client. I quickly brushed them off.

Laura arrived, looking just as glamorous as before, and led me towards a seat in front of a terrifying row of mirrors.

‘Did you have a good time on Saturday?’ she said, fussing around with a stool until she was seated behind me at the same height. She didn’t look at me directly, but into the mirror, where she addressed my reflection; I found myself doing the same. It was strangely relaxing.

‘I did,’ I said. ‘It was a splendid evening.’

‘Dad’s doing my nut in already, staying in the spare room,’ she said, smiling, ‘and I’ve got another two weeks of it. I don’t know how I’ll cope.’ I nodded.

‘Parents can certainly be challenging, in my experience,’ I said. We exchanged a sympathetic glance.

‘Now then, what are we doing for you today?’ she said, unfastening the rubber band at the bottom of my braid and fanning it out. I stared at my reflection. My hair was mousy brown, parted in the centre, straight and not particularly thick. Human hair, doing what human hair does: growing on my head.

‘Something different,’ I said. ‘What would you suggest?’

‘How brave are you prepared to be, Eleanor?’ Laura asked. This was the correct question. I am brave. I am brave, courageous, Eleanor Oliphant.

‘Do whatever you want,’ I said. She looked delighted. ‘Colour too?’

I considered this.

‘Would it be a normal human hair colour? I don’t think I’d like pink or blue or anything like that.’

‘I’ll give you a shoulder-length, lightly layered choppy bob, with caramel and honey pieces woven through and a long sweeping fringe,’ she said. ‘How does that sound?’

‘It sounds like an incomprehensible pile of gibberish,’ I said. She laughed at my reflection, and then stopped, perhaps because I wasn’t laughing.

‘Trust me, Eleanor,’ she said earnestly. ‘It’ll be beautiful.’

‘Beautiful is not a word normally associated with my appearance,’ I said, highly sceptical. She patted my arm.

‘Just you wait,’ she said gently. ‘MILEY!’ she screeched, almost causing me to fall from my chair. ‘Come and help me mix up some colour!’

A short, chubby girl with bad skin and beautiful eyes came trotting up. Laura gave a prescription involving percentages and codes which might as well have been for gunpowder.

‘Tea? Coffee? Magazine?’ Laura said. I could scarcely believe it when I found myself, five minutes later, sipping a cappuccino and perusing the latest edition of OK! magazine. Look at me, I thought.

‘Ready?’ Laura asked. Her hand, warm and soft, brushed against the back of my neck as she took the hank and heft of my hair and twisted it into a rope behind me. The slow noise of the scissors slicing through it was like the sound of embers shifting in a fire; tinkly, dangerous. It was over in a moment. Laura held the hair aloft, a triumphant Delilah.

‘I’ll cut it properly after the colour’s done,’ she said. ‘We just need a level playing field at this stage.’ Because I was sitting motionless, it didn’t feel any different. She dropped the hair on the floor where it lay like a dead animal. A skinny boy, who looked like he’d rather be doing almost anything else, was sweeping up very, very slowly, and nudged my hair creature into his dustpan with a long-handled brush. I watched his progress round the salon in the mirror. What happened to all the hair afterwards? The thought of a day’s or a week’s worth bundled into a bin bag, the smell of it and the soft, marshmallowy pillowing of it inside, made me feel slightly queasy.

Laura approached wheeling a trolley, then proceeded to daub various thick pastes onto selected strands of my hair, alternating between bowls. After each section of gunk was applied, she folded the painted hair into squares of tinfoil. It was a fascinating procedure. After thirty minutes,

she left me sitting with a foil head and a red face, then returned pushing a hot lamp on a stand, which she placed behind me.

‘Twenty minutes and you’ll be done,’ she said.

She brought me more magazines, but the pleasure had waned – I had quickly tired of celebrity gossip, and it seemed that the salon didn’t take Which? or BBC History, much to my disappointment. A thought kept nudging me, and I ignored it. Me, brushing someone else’s hair? Yes. Someone smaller than me, sitting on a chair while I stood behind and combed out the tangles, trying my best to be gentle. She hated the snags and tugs. Thoughts of this type – vague, mysterious, unsettling – were precisely the sort that vodka was good for obliterating, but unfortunately I’d only been offered a choice of tea or coffee. I wondered why hair salons didn’t provide anything stronger. A change of style can be stressful, after all, and it’s hard to relax in such a noisy, bright environment. It would probably encourage customers to give bigger tips too. Tipsy equals tips, I thought, and laughed silently.

When the buzzer sounded on the heat lamp, the colour-mixing girl came over and led me to the ‘backwash’, which was, by any other name, a sink. I allowed the tinfoil to be unwrapped from my hair. She ran warm water through it, and then shampooed it clean. Her fingers were firm and deft, and I marvelled at the generosity of those humans who performed intimate services for others. I hadn’t had anyone else wash my hair since as far back as I could remember. I suppose Mummy must have washed it for me when I was an infant, but it was hard to imagine her performing any tender ministrations of this type.

After the shampoo was rinsed away, the girl performed a ‘shiatsu head massage’. I have never known such bliss. She kneaded my scalp with firm tenderness and precision, and I felt the hairs stand up on my forearms, then a bolt of electricity run down my spine. It ended about nine hours before I would have liked it to.

‘You had a lot of tension in your scalp,’ she said sagaciously, while she rinsed out the conditioning cream. I had no idea how to respond, and opted for a smile, which serves me well on most occasions (not if it’s something to do with death or illness, though – I know that now).

Back in the same chair, my shorter, coloured hair combed out, Laura returned with her sharp scissors.

‘You can’t see the colour properly when it’s wet,’ she said. ‘Just you wait!’

In the end, the cutting only took ten minutes or so. I admired her dexterity and the confidence with which she undertook the task. The drying took much longer, with considerable and elaborate hairbrush action. I read my magazine, electing, at her prompting, not to look up until the styling was finished. The dryer was switched off, chemicals were sprayed, lengths and angles were examined and a few additional snips undertaken here and there. I heard Laura’s laugh of delight.

‘Look, Eleanor!’ she said.

I raised my head from Marie Claire’s in-depth report into female genital mutilation. My reflection showed a much younger woman, a confident woman with glossy hair that brushed her shoulders and a fringe that swept across her face and sat just over her scarred cheek. Me? I turned to the right and then to the left. I looked in the hand mirror Laura was holding behind my head so that I could see the back, smooth and sleek. I swallowed hard.

‘You’ve made me shiny, Laura,’ I said. I tried to stop it, but a little tear ran down the side of my nose. I wiped it away with the back of my hand before it could dampen the ends of my new hair. ‘Thank you for making me shiny.’