House of Diamonds - part 1

[the aim of this exercise for my creative writing class was to write the opening page for a story entitled House of Diamonds]

The House of Diamonds is the unintelligent name Uncle Cecile’s wife gave to her hairdressing parlour. When questioned as to the origin of the name, she answered that the stroke of her round brush made hair shine like a diamond. In our 8th year of existence, we spent many a summer afternoon in the back room of the House of Diamonds, mixing shampoo for blonde hair, with shampoo for red hair, and greasy hair. Marc had even developed his favourite mix - one part grey, two parts dry and three parts damaged - which, when mixed with water frothed and bubbled into a green foam that gave off a heady melon smell.

We’d reached the consensus that Aunt Marnie could economise on air freshener by placing pyrex bowls of our concoction in corners of the shop. In fact, we never asked for her opinion on the matter and volunteered to save the salon from its sure demise and spread our fragrance.

Adele was Marnie’s most frequent customer. She was gifted with a very large head covered in an alarming mop of hair for Auntie to plough through four days a week. Along with her bobbing hair and swinging bottom, Adele brought fear to this beauty establishment. She was at once its reputation and its disgrace. She was blessed with a loud, big voice and language of questionable appeal. She could often be overheard at tea parties bellowing the virtues of The House of Diamonds, then whispering its downfall. We were never quite able to pick up the full extent of the dismissal but in our net were words such as cheap products, bad lighting, unusual room scent…

Cousin Marc and I had many hobbies to our name; but the one that would most certainly assure our ascent to fame was our radio show. Based in Kent, we fancied ourselves as great regional voices blessed with a slight estuary tang. Not content with our natural talent, we practiced regional accents, ever striving to expand our repertoire. Marc specialized in dialects from “up north” and Essex in which he gave the news and the weather, while I had a special knack for the romantic West Country flat vowels and slow talking which told short stories and special bulletins of eventful significance.

It was therefore on a fine afternoon, c 1966, that Marc and I sat down to record our daily installment of House of Diamond radio news. I can just remember the room as it stood back then, still and lifeless like in the faded photograph I keep on my mantle-piece today. The rays of setting sun, shredded by the aluminium blinds, cut strange shapes on Marc’s ever growing nose. I sat on the dusty carpet, rocked by the vibrations of Adele’s heavy footsteps in the room next door. The radio was giving off static, reminiscent of the grind of the curtain at the Royal Oak Theatre down the road. The prevailing silence was not unusual for this establishment, and neither was the garbage-like smell. As Adele launched into yet another chapter of the house of spirits in which she truly believed she lived, Marc struck the switch on the recorder and, in his most accurate Lancashire accent yet, announced:
“This is Marc Pillow coming to you live from the House of Diamonds. In today’s headlines, we have an armed burglary at a jewellery shop”.