The Invisible Hair

Marguerite Bunce

Word Count 1162

To celebrate turning 21, my parents offered to pay for a bottle of Tia Maria. During the previous year, all my friends had had their 21st birthday parties: dress rehearsals for their future involving deckle-edged cards, RSVPs, Black Ties, hairdressers, and catering. It was August. My final exams were in two months. A white graduation dress was the extent of my ambition.

So here I was, in my college room, sipping alcoholic cream with Suzanne, my new friend, and her secret colostomy bag. She was excited. She was often excited. Suzanne was finding men thrilling and dragging me along with her into situations based on her very good looks. She was going to have sex for the first time. The man was much older, a bit famous, and involved with a very famous actress. He knew about the bag. He was going to be very sensitive, very cool, and very exciting. Her life was about to take off.

Whereas I, five months later, would be in an ambulance, travelling down a very long rough track through the bush, and all because of my hair – one or possibly two strands.

'O Rose thou art sick'*

No one had had any idea. Ten years and a few bouts of pain had caused less than a raised eyebrow for our desperately sought-after and chronically hungover, local doctor. Old Bill Harden and Sister Tozer, his thug of a nurse, drew crowds into the horridly named 'waiting room'. Sitting was my problem.

My father had an old truck with a bench seat. I only sat in the middle of that seat once. We'd gone into the train station to pick up my first visitor to my parents' remote 'farm'. I'd finished uni, and was now back with my parents to help them set up what became my father's folly, the misnamed Camelot. Harold, the twin brother of my first boyfriend, sat beside the window as we tipped and rocked down boulders which constituted the track back to the homestead. There was a busted spring in the seat, and I was sitting on it. The jolt barely batted my eyelid.

And then, a day or two after Harold left, the throbbing kicked in.

'The invisible hair,'

On Friday afternoon, Dr. Harden stuck his thumb into the base of my spine and looked into my eyes. 'Does that hurt?'

I met his challenge with steel. 

'Yes,' I said. 

'Do you have anything for the pain?' I asked, without having gasped or cried out. I swallowed the two piss-poor painkillers and went home, sitting, in the car, down that track, to die.

'Which grows in the night'

The weekend was a blur of fever and my mother's annoyance with my groaning. I was refusing to go to the hospital because if I wasn't already dying, they'd kill me off there. My mother, a former nurse, wanted me off her hands. She won.

'Has found out thy bed.'

Around that time, Cadbury's chocolate had an ad on television featuring a real-life 'mad scientist'. Professor Julius Sumner Miller sat at his bench with a bunsen burner and other paraphernalia. He spoke to you as you'd expect an intensely clever and renowned scientist to speak: 

'There's a glass and a half of full cream milk in every bar of Cadbury's 'dairy milk' chocolate.' 

A beaker with milk would be tilted in the air, and poured thus showing the goodness and wholesomeness inside Cadbury's chocolate. When I came out of surgery, I was told that I had contained approximately a cup or more of pus. Exact measurement was difficult because Dr. Harden would have been wearing a healthy dose of the stinking stuff. 

26 out of 100,000 people, and three times as many men as women – so the ageless statistics say – are likely to develop a pilonidal sinus before the age of forty. Pilonidal being Latin for 'nest of hairs'. Around puberty, a hair at the 'cleft in the buttocks' might take a u-turn and grow backward, extending itself well beyond natural length. I wasn't a fat man with strong dark hair, a taxi driver, or a horse rider. One of my hairs simply chose the road less travelled. It had no excuse for doing this to me.

Dr. Harden was not an animated man. He checked behind the drainage tube which was hanging out of the incision into my 'cleft' and said, in a threatening voice, that it was filling up fast. I'd need surgery. He tried explaining why, but there were always twenty patients wheezing outside his door, and he had a headache. 

My fear of death on the operation table was well-founded. I woke sick as a dog, vomiting. My mother was flushed. Were there multi-colored roses all over the place? Doctors and hospitals excited my mother. It was her war zone, and I was delivered to her, all over again. Her bundle.

'Of crimson joy:'

'Bear, dear. It was much bigger than expected, and he's taken out your coccyx.'

The surgeon's search and destroy mission went deep inside the territory...

And found the hair: 

' … I soon identified a tract and dissecting this out, it contained a hair, and it was necessary to go even wider... 

I was surprised to find that even with a good lower clearance, we came across evident tracts of sinus in the lower half. The dissection was difficult and went down to gluteus muscle on either side, and it was necessary to take the fascia over the gluteus to clear the tracts and the tracts dissected off the back of the sacrum...' 

'And his dark secret love'

He was still digging down.

He used the words 'very large defect' to describe what was left. When a wound is left open, rather than stitched up, the process of flesh growing back is called 'granulation.’ This is a slow process. When the wound is the size of no wound anyone should be able to survive. One day I took a look, using mirrors, into my very own bottomless pit. It would take a year.

'Does thy life destroy.'

For a year, I could not sit or lie on my back. For almost a year, my mother 'dressed' my wound, and once a week, I would lie in the passenger side of her tiny Honda 600, with the seat replaced by a thin mattress, drive off the cliff of our home track, to visit Sr Tozer, who would duly rip off the dressing, thus removing the final fragile layer of skin. For a year, I bent over, showing my bottom to all kinds of strangers. For the rest of the time, I went feral. Consumed by embarrassment, presumably. A year of never sitting down. And never taking off. Having missed my graduation, every other of those 'life' events eluded me. 

The hair I never saw (couldn't I keep it in a jar – like a snake?) didn't, however, destroy my life - just twisted it.

*Plucked from William Blake

Marguerite grew up in Sydney, Australia, where she published poetry in some anthologies and won a couple of prizes. When her poems became too long for traditional publication, she wrote a libretto for an opera based on a Bocaccio story from the Decameron. “The Remedy” was performed by the Sydney Metropolitan Opera company. Short films she wrote were shown at the National Film Institute in London and elsewhere. She currently lives in the south of France where she is experimenting in new forms of writing, such as the essay published here.