A girl at school used to pick her split ends, deadheading each frayed length so that by the end of Chemistry her desk would be a graveyard of keratin. I could never look away, so absorbed in her ritual that each time she pincered a shaft between forefinger and thumb, I could almost feel the strand fracturing as it was severed from the rest of the hair, the scalp, the head, the body.

My hair was different from hers, which was dyed and dry and tied in a ponytail that would have felt like a bird’s nest in the palm of my hand. It was my best feature. I heard this, repeatedly, from a young age, and came to accept it as fact. The rest of my face was an imperfect assembly, too big, too small, too flat, too prominent.

God had given me hair with the molecular structure of a liquid, crashing on my shoulders like a wave of black then settling into a pool, rippling and sighing, subject to an invisible wind. I always knew it was alive, never more so than when it was touched.

One teacher liked to twist my twin bunches, fastened around his index fingers. This set off a chain reaction, a series of involuntary movements that radiated from my bones. First a flicker under my left eye, then my nose, then between my shoulder blades. I would count, one, two, three, before releasing myself, skipping around the corner and stopping, frantic. I’d hold the bunches, running my hands from band to tip, band to tip.

It grew and grew and grew, coiling around my neck in my sleep. It might kill me one day. Mother forbade me from cutting it, occasionally trimming the ends when it started to brush my hip bones while she bathed it.

A decade later, I wore it piled on my head, cumbersome and solid as a loaf of sourdough. My neck ached permanently. I was once sitting in a cinema when a passing woman stopped and held it lovingly, as though it had just come out of the oven. I could feel the imprint of her mittens for the entire film.

A decade after that, he asked me to let it down. Just once. I relented, releasing bobby pins that had probably been embedded for months or years. He wrapped his hand around one half like a boxer applying tape, gently feeling its weight. The next time he wasn’t so careful, unleashing a foot of plait through his palm before yanking me backwards.

I left one night when he went to buy milk, taking my handbag but nothing else. He would only miss my hair, which had become embedded with the smoke of his body. Wandering the streets, I actually thought about wading into a fountain like a kind of baptism, leaving it cleansed of evil, sopping and heavy like a newborn calf sliding down my spine. Instead, I fell asleep outside a hairdresser’s.

I staggered to my feet as someone raised the shutters of the next-door shop, righting myself just as a man arrived.

“Are you my first customer? Sorry, train,” he said, holding a croissant between his teeth as he unlocked the door.

I nodded.

He put a synthetic cape around my shoulders and ushered me into a chair. “May I?”

I nodded again.

He unravelled the first plait as though he was extracting a baby from its blanket, sending a dull ache thudding across my scalp as he led me like a lamb to a washing station. My hair must have filled the sink, turning its porcelain bowl into a writhing black mass, but he didn’t say anything as he shampooed my head, letting the pads of his fingers linger near the nape of my neck and crown.

I didn’t look in the mirror while he was cutting. I was standing up, his scissors going snip, snip, snip. Chunks of hair fell to the floor, spreading around my feet like splashes of ink. I could feel the blade near my ear, my head suddenly able to move, quickly, without dragging anything behind it. I looked up.

Whatever. It was mine. It was theirs. And now it’s gone.