One
Given even the most tenuous of opportunities, Ollie Rocke’s mother had the habit of reminiscing about the blond curls that her youngest son sported on his head as a baby.
“He looked like a little cherub. None of my others had hair like that. You should have seen it.”
When Ollie was a child, it was impossible to hear this as anything other than the overspill of maternal pride. It was clear in the tender way that the words left her mouth and the doting look she would give to him that she still thought her son was just as beautiful as he was when she cradled him in his arms all those years ago.
As he reached his teenage years, these compliments – always worded the same way as if they were read straight from a script, to the extent that one of Ollie’s older brothers would use it as a stock phrase when he was doing an unflattering but humorous impression of her – took on another edge, whether intentional or not. With his hair thin and quite evidently receding for everyone to see at an unfortunately young age, her continued recollection of his cherubic blond curls suddenly sounded considerably more defensive. They seemed to remonstrate that it wasn’t always this way, that Ollie had, at one time of his life at least, hair worthy of envy. It was still clear in the tender way that the words left her mouth and the doting look she would give to him that she loved him no less and found him just as beautiful as he was when she cradled him in his arms all those years ago.
Ollie never said anything back if he was in the company of those being treated to the nostalgic harping of Louise Rocke. Partly because it was embarrassing, but also because it wasn’t wholly true. The very first photos of Ollie as a tiny being did show him with blond hair, but to say that it curled would be an exaggeration. Like most babies, he had a light layer of downy hair covering his oversized head. Perhaps it fuzzed up from the friction of his mother’s clothes as she cuddled him tight or wisped with the warmth of her breath as she sang quiet lullabies down into his ear, but it certainly did not curl.
It didn’t stay blond for long, either. At some point in his early youth, his hair changed to the colour that it remained to this day – a rich, chestnut brown, which was similar to that of Nick and Michael, his two older brothers. His mum was never adventurous with her children’s hair and before they reached an age at which they had earned the independence to dictate their own style, all three had the same unremarkable but unobjectionable short-back-and-side cut, rendered identical by the fact that each had theirs cut in the same sitting by one of her close friends, who would set up a station in the family kitchen and attempt the difficult task of keeping three energetic boys stationary long enough to complete the job. Once they were all shorn and the kitchen floor was strewn with strands of chocolate hair, his mum would get her own hair attended to afterwards. Occasionally, this involved dying it the same shade as her children’s, although this was just one of many colours she experimented with over the years.
Ollie’s father, Ian, could afford no such personal transformations. He was bald and had been for as long as Ollie could remember. Photographic evidence showed that his dad had committed to this look early on in his life and had shaved – or rather, asked Louise to do it for him – what was left of his thatch down to mere millimetres at the first signs of thinning, even at a time when he possibly still had enough left to style it out. Further bouts of rapid hair loss vindicated this decisive action and nobody really noticed the speckles of washed-out brown follicles slowly disappearing to reveal more of the bare skin underneath, the shade of his pate gradually lightening over the years and only perceptible when pictures taken years apart were compared side-by-side. He wasn’t particularly fazed by this fact of life. Rather the opposite, in fact – he would joke about it quite openly, whether it was while slopping large quantities of sun cream over the top of his head while on the beach and doing an impression of a geriatric or asking Louise to go over his shoulders while she had the razor out for his weekly trim. “I bet you’re glad you married me, aren’t you?” he would guffaw. She, also, saw the funny side.
It was one such throwaway aside that forced Ollie to acknowledge the genetic implications of his father’s follicular shortcomings. While Ollie’s eldest brother, Nick, was getting ready in front of the living room mirror ahead of a night out with friends – some of whom would be female if the overgenerous helpings of hair product being applied haphazardly were anything to go by – his dad wandered into the room on his way into the kitchen, stopping briefly only to run a hand through his son’s crude stylings and say “enjoy it while you can, lad!”, before letting out a hearty belly laugh that continued long after he had reached the fridge. Ollie, who was present in the room watching the television during this prank, found his brother’s humiliation equally funny in the immediate aftermath. However, it was short-lived and as he looked back to the television, Ollie could still distinctly remember how he suddenly zoned out from whatever was happening on screen as the connection between his father’s baldness and his own future hairline played out in his thought process for the first time. As a twelve-year-old boy, he had previously had no reason to imagine that the full crop of hair on his head would ever do anything as outlandish as fall out, but his father’s ominous jibe made the young boy acknowledge that, sometime during his lifetime, it might well happen.
This didn’t make it any less upsetting when his father’s threat manifested itself, although much of the horror was down to the premature age at which the decline started. It was hard to pinpoint exactly when it began, but by his second year of sixth form college, the mirror’s reflection could no longer hide the truth – his hair was retreating. Not at a catastrophic rate, but it was the very existence of two inescapable patches of extended forehead that wounded Ollie. He knew that this was only the beginning and soon, he would be longing for the amount of hair he currently had. As soon as he noticed the first signs, he became glued to his own reflection, pressing his forehead up against the glass of a shaving mirror he had bought from the pharmacy to see if he could notice any further degradation in the previous hour since he had last checked, as well as arranging a complex set-up utilising the front-facing camera on his phone to see if the coverage on his crown was decreasing as well. Reassured that it wasn’t, he would instead revert to the front, count the last rung of follicles on his forehead and become upset when the numbers didn’t match up, taking it as an indication of further irrecoverable loss rather than a sign of how difficult the task he had assigned himself was.
Ollie wasn’t quite as gung ho as his father had been at the sight of early hair loss because he was almost certain that it would draw unnecessary attention to the problem. That being said, he still made modifications to mitigate the merciless beginnings of male pattern baldness. Instead of shaving it all off, he began to grow it out longer for the first time. Not excessively so, but shaggier than the staple Rocke style. By the time it reached a couple of inches, he was pleased that the increased length disguised the trouble areas, although he knew the style didn’t really suit him. His mum said it made him look like a scruff and the post-pubescent propensity for grease to accumulate was only one reason why. However, he weathered the criticism.
In addition to this change, he also introduced a caffeine shampoo that promised to ‘wake up dormant hair roots’ into his daily routine, although he wouldn’t leave it in the communal area of his family shower for fear of discovery. Instead, he would bring the bottle in with him every time he washed, before taking it back out underneath his towel if he suspected he would be intercepted at any point and then hiding it in his bedroom where he was sure his mother would never pry (covered with a sock inside an old pair of football boots and stored within a shoe box underneath his bed). He had quickly become accustomed to the glacial speed at which hair loss occurred, so couldn’t say for certain if the shampoo, which was expensive for a sixth-form college student who only worked weekend hours at an Indian restaurant in town, was fulfilling its promises. Still, he couldn’t afford the alternatives – starting a course of the minoxidil or finasteride treatments he had researched online – so for that moment in time, it was his only choice.
During his first year of studying Business Management at Manchester Metropolitan University, things took a turn for the worse. The strips of skin on either side of his forehead were making steady gains in the battle of attrition against his hairline and the longer style was no longer an effective defence mechanism. Though the signs had been there from the start, he reluctantly accepted that this deceptive foray only drew attention to the thinness of his hair and it only took a gust of wind or an unfortunate positioning of his fringe to reveal areas of his head that he would rather not. So, taking inspiration from the readiness of his dad and reassurance from the fact that he was meeting the wishes of his mum, he marched to a barbershop located close to campus and asked for a short back and sides.
Twenty minutes and thirteen pounds later, Ollie left the premises a new man. His immediate reaction upon seeing his face reflected back in parked cars’ windows as he walked back to his halls was that he looked...well, good. His mum had been right about his long hair and the reverse back to his default cut made his face look slimmer, healthier and – though he wouldn’t have considered himself a vain man – better-looking. Yes, his faltering hairline was exposed to the world and its judgements, but he pictured himself as one of the small cabal of male actors celebrated by the balding community for their ability to exude sex appeal while rocking limited locks.
This confidence wasn’t permanent, however. Indeed Ollie’s feelings about the drastic haircut and his public acknowledgement of being an openly bald – or balding – man were capricious, to say the least. On some days, it barely crossed his mind and he was able to go about his daily life without thinking once about what was happening above his eyebrows. On others, however, it was the complete opposite. He was convinced that anybody engaging in conversation with him was covertly sneaking a glance at his hairline and successfully hiding their repulsion, which made him skittish and nervous; whomever he was talking to would sometimes notice this, which, in a particularly vicious cycle, would make Ollie even more skittish and nervous. There were days when he would skip seminars and evenings when he would pass on parties and social gatherings, instead opting to sit alone in his room and play on his games console. He would convince himself that he didn’t have the personality to pull off being a bald man. He wasn’t a natural-born joker, self-deprecating or a charmer, all traits that his dad embodied by the bucketful. Instead, he was sure that his deeply held desire for a little more hair on his head and his anger at the sheer injustice of it all could be seen in his expression and actions by everybody in the vicinity – they would be more comfortable without me there, he reasoned.
One thing that was in short supply was sympathy. Of course, he had never expected it from his elder brothers, who had, up until that stage at least, managed to avoid the familial affliction. After Ollie moved out of the family home to go to university, he saw his siblings less regularly and they used this infrequency to rib their little brother with the utmost efficiency, never failing to mention how far his forehead had migrated northwards since they had last met. Ollie didn’t mind this so much. It was part of the Rocke brotherly code to rib and belittle one another at any possible opportunity. He had enough ammunition to retaliate accordingly (Nick: beer belly, Michael: marginally smaller in height than his two younger siblings) and eagerly anticipated the delicious schadenfreude that would arise on the date when one of them, or preferably both, began to display signs of their father’s inheritance.
Neither could he blame his mum for not offering a comforting word or two. It was a male issue, which made it all the more painful that his dad never once acknowledged the beginning of his youngest son’s hair loss. He had two working eyes, Ollie thought, so he could obviously see what was going on and what lay ahead for him. He presumed that his dad must have had the same crisis of confidence that he was battling through, even if only momentarily, so why didn’t he say anything? He wasn’t expecting much: just something along the lines of “don’t worry son, it seems bad but it’s not the end of the world.” It wasn’t as if he was an unemotional man, either. Ollie had seen his dad cry on multiple occasions, even being set off by a segment on Countryfile covering lambing season. In the absence of any paternal compassion, Ollie got it into his head that he was somehow letting his dad down. He knew it sounded silly, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that nobody wanted a bald son, let alone one that didn’t even get to enjoy two decades with a reliable hairline.
Too embarrassed to bring his worries up to anybody close to him, Ollie internalised the problem and carried the heavy weight around with him wherever he went. He had become a man totally at the whim of his hairline.
Two
“Alright, Rocko!”
“It’s been a while, lad.”
“Pint of lager, if you’re asking.”
“I bet you’re glad Crewe are winning again.”
“This is Nicole, my new missus.”
The familiar greetings and pleasantries from his old school friends as he sat down to join them for an evening of drinking in The Eaglet were simply blissful to Ollie’s ears. There was something very comforting about slipping back into this old world – the same faces, the same stories, the same jokes. Sitting around a corner table already teeming with empty glasses, with additional chairs stolen from elsewhere in the pub to squeeze as many people in as possible, were:
*Liam Richards – The most gifted footballer on their school team. Had trials at Stoke City, although he never progressed. The last time Ollie had spoken to him, he was seriously considering training to be an electrician.
*Mark Lloyd – A gifted impressionist with an underappreciated skill to accurately mimic the voice of teachers he hadn’t heard speak in at least half a decade. He worked at JD Sports in the town centre.
*Nicole – Introduced to Ollie as Mark’s new girlfriend. The immediate impression he got of her was that she was small, pretty and shy.
*Jack O’Connors – Nicknamed Conny, Ollie was constantly surprised at the rate that his friend’s muscles had grown in the past few months. Today, he was wearing a white t-shirt that was visibly straining to contain a pair of tattooed biceps underneath. When he wasn’t around, his friends would debate whether this impressive progress was down to a diligent training schedule or the use of steroids. When he was around, they would do no such thing.
*Dan Talbot – Along with Ollie, one of the only other members of their friendship group who had decided to go to university. Both intelligent and hard-working, he was in his final year studying history at Warwick. Any unresolved point of knowledge that came up in debates within the group was directed to him for confirmation, regardless if the subject had any link to his specialism.
*Lewis Baker – Somebody who had been spending a lot of time on the more unpleasant edges of the internet and expressing some views on social media that shocked Ollie in their vitriolic hatred and intolerance towards certain groups, especially as in-person, Lewis was always cordial, generous and surprisingly well-read on certain subjects.
*Adam Heathcote – While Ollie had been at university, Adam had been travelling around Europe training to be a ski instructor. After being away for such a long time, it appeared Adam was back in Crewe for good, still living with his parents and similarly undecided on his next move as Ollie was.
