Nobody Loves a Ginger Baby

by Laura Marney

  As she’s putting out the plates Pierce comes in and asks if she needs a hand with anything.

  ‘No thanks, I can just about manage.’

  Pierce turns round but instead of going back into the living room, he quietly closes the kitchen door. He shuffles from foot to foot until Daphne is forced to turn and give him her attention.

  ‘Daphne, I want to ask you something.’

  This is obviously serious. He better not try to hit on her for money. There’s no way she’s going to invest in any of his mad schemes, even if she did have the money.

  ‘Ask away.’

  ‘I’ve got two tickets for New York. You’re not working just now. You could come with me.’

  Daphne laughs.

  ‘Come with you? What for?’

  ‘For a holiday. We’ll have to change the names on the tickets but it’s only forty quid a head, I’ve looked into it, and it’s a week in a really good hotel.’

  Daphne has never been to New York. She wonders what the weather would be like at this time of year. New York would take her far away from Donnie, a different country, a different continent.

  ‘That’s mental.’

  ‘I knew you were going to say that but think about it for a minute, there’s loads of stuff we can do, we could…’

  ‘Pierce. Thanks, I really appreciate the offer but…’

  ‘Look, if it’s the money, we can sort something out, fuck it, I’ll pay your forty quid, and I’ve got spending money, enough for us both.’

  ‘It’s not the money.’

  ‘Well what is it then? Is it Tam? You and him seem awful pally.’

  ‘And? Your point is?’

  ‘My point is nothing. You’re right; nothing to do with me, but you could still come. Look, we get on well, right? We could have a great laugh, paint the town, Empire State building, Statue of Liberty, separate rooms if you want.’

  ‘Why are you asking me? There must be loads of other women you could ask.’

  ‘Of course there are, what bird wouldn’t want a free holiday in New York with me?’

  ‘Pierce, I’m not one of your birds.’

  ‘That’s not what I’m saying. I know that. I don’t want to go with a bird. I want to go with you. Please Daphne, this is really important to me. Just think about it, eh?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Aw for fuck’s sake, Daphne! Are you still pining for that loser, Donnie?’

  ‘Just shut it, Pierce, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘No, you shut it. I’m sick of this.’ Pierce is shouting. ‘So you were chucked, shit happens. Stop sitting about in your dressing gown and get a fucking life. Get over it and fucking move on. You think it’s fun living below you moaning and greeting all the time? Worse things happen, you know, people you love die, good people, and you can’t do anything about it.’

  At this outburst Daphne’s anger evaporates. She moves towards him and now he is in her arms, crying, sobbing hard on her shoulder. Daphne notices that the giggling from the living room has ceased abruptly. Tam and Carol are listening.

  ‘You’re okay, Pierce, you’ll be okay,’ she says softly.

  And he is okay. After a few minutes he pulls himself together and with a sheepish laugh he helps her carry the steaming plates of soup into the living room.

  *

  The next morning Carol phones. Daphne knows what’s coming. Carol accidentally on purpose left the exam papers with Daphne last night. She left after the soup with Tam and Pierce who were going to a poetry reading at a pub. Tam of course nagged Daphne to come too but Carol didn’t pressure her and Pierce didn’t seem to care. For the first time in a long time Daphne thinks she might have enjoyed the pub.

  ‘Daphne, I’m phoning to ask you a favour.’

  Here it comes, thinks Daphne; she’s going to ask me to finish marking the papers. She doesn’t mind, at least this way the students will get fair grades, but it means that Carol will have to come round again to pick them up.

  ‘Yeah?’

  Let her beg.

  ‘Could you mark those papers for me? You know the students much better than I do.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Oh thanks, Daphne.’

  ‘When do you want to collect them?’

  ‘Eh, well, that’s the favour I wanted to ask you. Could you get them in to college? They have to be in by the end of the week.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Carol, I’m off sick, remember?’

  ‘Yes but you could post them. I’ve spoken to Magda and she says she’ll do the paperwork and make sure the students get them back.’

  ‘But why don’t you just take them in yourself? I can have them finished by tomorrow.’

  ‘Well, I would but I’m off to New York! Pierce is taking me, he asked me last night, it’s mad, isn’t it?’

  Daphne surprises herself by laughing.

  ‘I know, it’s great, isn’t it? He’s getting the tickets sorted out today and we’re leaving tomorrow. By the way, I’m really sorry about you and Donnie breaking up.’

  *

  Spring has sprung. The leaf, which a few weeks ago was out of reach, is now knocking insistently on Daphne’s window. She answers its call, opening the window and harvesting it. It is a lime leaf, a perfectly shaped heart, emerald bright on the tree. Now that it lies quietly on her kitchen table it is richer, darker without the light behind it, more serious. Daphne wishes she could stick it back on the tree. But she can’t and now that she has taken it, what will she do with it?

  She takes the long way home from the deli. This way is at least two miles longer and goes past Donnie’s flat. It’s nice to get a bit of a walk after being stuck in the house all day. She passes on the opposite side of the street looking up at his dark windows. This is what she expected. It’s 3.30 a.m. and Donnie has to get up for work in the morning. After one more reconnaissance walk past, she climbs the stairs noiselessly and waits for a few seconds outside his door.

  The leaf, which she has carried carefully in a reinforced envelope, she now takes out. It sits on her open palm and with her other hand she gently lifts the letterbox and slides the leaf through the door. She can’t see it but she knows that it is floating down on to the carpet ready to greet him in the morning.

  As she makes her way home she begins to feel much better about the whole thing. All day long she has been nervous. It looks bad she admits: a woman spurned, clandestinely putting garden refuse through a letter box in the middle of the night. But it only requires that two people understand the gesture.

  The problem with the Asda incident is that it left no room for arbitration. Donnie’s cowardice is a given and must be worked around. What if, after the Asda exposition and Donnie’s inglorious retreat from the shop, Donnie wants to see Daphne but hasn’t the courage to approach? What if he thinks, as might be a logical assumption, that she hates him and never wants to see him again? She doesn’t know whether she hates him or not but she knows she must see him again. They have to talk. They have to talk and, by necessity, it must be Daphne who provides the opportunity. The time has come to put pride and cowardice away, they have things to sort out.

  She can’t phone, he probably wouldn’t answer and even if he did she can’t trust herself not to sound angry. She can’t write, the last letter she wrote was from a position of ignorance and therefore invalid, any other letters would be the same. The leaf says everything.

  Daphne feels relieved. It is the right thing to do, she is sure of it.

  Chapter 24

  ‘Well how was it?’ asks Tam. ‘The Big Apple, must have been brilliant, eh?’

  Pierce gives an enigmatic smile.

  ‘Oh ho ho! The Big Apple!’ he replies.

  New York was fantastic, wonderful, the best place Pierce’s ever been. He couldn’t get enough of it, didn’t want to come home.

  ‘You are one lucky boy, a holiday like that and a bird like Carol with you, must have been unbelievable.’

  ‘Oh
ho ho! Unbelievable!’ Pierce replies again as if to confirm Tam’s assumptions. His smile remains enigmatic. It is not his innate sense of gentlemanly conduct that prevents him from telling Tam the truth of the matter; it is more a question of losing face with his young admirer.

  The truth of the matter is that although Pierce did not want to leave New York, he was enormously relieved to be shot of Carol. When, after a passionate and very public kiss at the airport, Carol climbed into her taxi, a rush of euphoric glee enveloped Pierce and he laughed until he almost cried, so glad was he that he would never have to shag the woman again.

  The holiday had started promisingly enough. The day before he left he attended his Restart interview and, on the strength of having his arm in plaster, was excused taking part in the programme. Next stop was the hospital where they judged his arm to be well enough to have the plaster removed. The timing could not have been more perfect. Even Carol, unusually for a woman, turned up in good time to check in. Apart from her having what appeared to be fifteen stone of hand luggage, ‘It’s only my make-up,’ she giggled, which Pierce was expected to lug around the airport, things were going pretty well. They had a few pre-flight drinks in the bar just to get them in the mood. On the plane Pierce went to the toilet and when he came back she was sitting with a bottle of champagne and two glasses

  ‘Oh, it’s just like blind date!’ she squealed.

  It wasn’t until they were getting off the plane and Pierce was tapped firmly on the shoulder by the chief trolley dolly that he realised she hadn’t paid for it. It took a largish dent out of his spending money but he didn’t really mind, Carol was a classy bird and the way things were going he was guaranteed his hole. Not that he was expecting anything; he told her he could arrange separate rooms. ‘I don’t think that’ll be necessary,’ she said, all kittenish.

  They were no sooner in the room than she ripped the clothes off him. Literally. His good Marco Polo shirt that he’d travelled in had three buttons missing and a torn breast pocket.

  ‘Hang on love, we’ve got all week.’

  But she was like an animal. She started with the little mewling noises that some women make which developed into a full-on lioness’s roar. She wriggled and panted and groaned like some kind of porn star. Pierce was at first certain that she must be taking the piss and, just for a laugh, joined in with the exaggerated grunting. But she wasn’t kidding and his response only spurred her on. Her face, not the prettiest at the best of times, became a frightening mask of lust, contorting into an ugly rictus when she came. And she came a lot. Over and over and over again. Now he knew she was taking the piss.

  After, as she lay legs akimbo with her knickers at her knees, she had not even been able to wait until he had removed her clothes, he noticed that she had a thin paper liner inside her pants. Why did women wear those things? What was that all about?

  After sex, while he was still in the toilet dabbing himself dry, Carol ordered another bottle of champagne from room service. This would have to be hit on the head. To be fair, he may have given her the wrong impression when he told her that he was managing editor of Poyumtree. Now he was forced to explain that the publishing house was a relatively new venture and still in the development phase, the investment phase, the non-profit-making phase. It was embarrassing but he simply didn’t have that kind of money. She took it pretty well, although Pierce did note at the time that, rather than pay for the champers herself, she quickly got back on the blower to room service and cancelled it. They got cans of Coke from a slot machine along the hallway and drank the duty-free vodka.

  Pierce was enjoying a dope-free week. He had been too scared to bring any into the country and too scared to ask anyone. It occurred to him that it had probably been years now since he had a whole week off the hash but abstinence certainly agreed with him as he now woke up with a long-forgotten sensation: vitality. He resolved when he went home to knock it on the head. He wasn’t a teenager anymore.

  New York City was phenomenal. Every morning Pierce was up at the crack of dawn ready to spend the day seeing sights. Carol was not so enthusiastic. It was usually nearer lunch before she could be winkled out of bed. To Pierce everything was so new and exciting and yet so familiar. Practically every time he turned a corner there would be another view, little changed since the first time, of many times, that he saw it in Bernie’s dog-eared photo album. For Sean’s sake, Pierce took photos of everything and tried to get Carol in as many as possible.

  Her sexual exuberance had not waned as Pierce had hoped it might. She was constantly all over him. He couldn’t even eat in peace. Carol would be giggling and groping him under the table regardless of where they were or who could see them. For all she had a posh accent, Pierce began to discover that Carol had little class.

  Of course he pretended to enjoy it, but all the fake porn-star grunting was becoming very wearisome. He was baw weary. The rough animalistic sex did not give way to a more relaxed and gentle approach, if anything she became hungrier. Pierce began to wake up feeling afraid. That was half the reason he got up and out so early, if he didn’t she would surely jump on him again and she was wearing his cock down to a frayed stump.

  It wasn’t just the sex. There were other things. For starters, Carol didn’t have much of a sense of humour. She laughed all right, she laughed a lot. But it was usually at him. She laughed at the way he danced, she laughed at the few lines of poetry he had spontaneously come up with in Central Park. Once, when he rather vigorously blew his nose and a wee bit of paper hanky got stuck on his nostril, she screamed with laughter. It wasn’t that fucking funny. Pierce liked to think of himself as the kind of guy who didn’t take himself too seriously but Carol laughed at him once too often.

  As usual, as soon as they’d returned to the hotel after sightseeing all day, Carol wanted a shag. He had managed to persuade her that there really was no need to rip the shirt from his back. He didn’t have that many good shirts and he was quite happy to remove it. But she liked the rough stuff and insisted that he pull and haul her about like a sack of potatoes, it excited her.

  Afterwards, as usual, he was sent along the corridor to the machine to get two cans of cold Coke. There he had to stand in a queue while a group of other British tourists fiddled about putting the wrong money in the machine. He showed them how to use it, but as he made his way back to the room he heard the tourists giggle and inexplicably this made him feel uncomfortable. He was becoming paranoid, he decided. This was until Carol saw him and fell on the bed in paroxysms of hysterical laughter pointing at Pierce’s feet.

  Even before he looked he knew what it must be. Now he came to think of it, he’d been aware of a slight adhesion to the carpet as he made his way back to the room. His worst fears were confirmed when, after a big breath, he looked down. Yes, indeed, he did have Carol’s panty liner stuck to his shoe.

  *

  Carol has popped round and brought a bottle of wine. She has not been invited but Daphne doesn’t turn her away. Carol knows now about Donnie and she will no doubt be full of girlie platitudes such as que sera, there’s plenty more fish in the sea, you’re too good for him, I never liked him anyway etc. Daphne doesn’t mind that kind of talk tonight.

  Donnie did not phone the next morning, or afternoon or evening or night. He’s not going to phone. Fair play. The olive branch, or in this case the lime leaf, has been extended but not accepted or even acknowledged. Fuck him. He’s had his chance and he’s blown it, thinks Daphne, I never liked him anyway.

  But Carol only wants to talk about Carol. And Pierce.

  ‘Oh and he wrote me this really sweet poem when we were in Central Park. He’s so talented. I don’t remember how it goes but it was really sweet. He’s crazy about me. And when we went to Times Square, which really isn’t all that by the way, I wore my Versace, the brown one I got in Harvey Nicks, you’ve seen it haven’t you? You haven’t? Oh it’s absolutely gorgeous.’

  The conversation or monologue, for this is what it is, continues
in this vein for some time with Carol giving a blow-by-blow, outfit-by-brown-designer-outfit, account of the week in New York. Her boasting does not surprise Daphne but she is surprised by how besotted Carol appears to be with Pierce. Daphne had assumed that it was a relationship of mutual convenience. When she spoke to Pierce yesterday over a lunchtime bowl of soup his New York stories were far more muted. Certainly he did not mention this love affair Carol is describing, but then why would he? After all, it’s none of Daphne’s business.

  ‘God, he was all over me. Never gave me a moment’s peace. But you know, it’s weird to be back and not be with him 24/7. I actually miss him, can you believe it?’

  Daphne can’t believe it. This is a new departure for Carol, she has always treated them mean in order to keep them keen.

  ‘Where is he tonight then, Carol, has he got one of his poetry things on?’

  ‘Oh!’ A rich dark laugh ripples out of Carol. ‘No doubt!’

  *

  Pierce has arranged to meet Tam for a business meeting. Their Poyumtree project has been neglected over the past few weeks but now Pierce is bursting with ideas for it. He has been busy; first there was Sean and Bernie and then the New York trip. Tam has apparently not been idle either.

  Last night when Pierce phoned, Tam was unavailable. He was busy, under instruction from the new manager of the band, to re-write one of his songs for an audition they have with a record company. The new manager wants Tam to ‘joosh it up a bit’, make it more accessible. Tam’s soul has already been bought and sold and he doesn’t even know it, thinks Pierce sadly.

  ‘What we need is a competition,’ says Pierce, after the pints have been bought and the meeting has begun in earnest.

  ‘What kind of competition?’ asks Tam, supping tentatively at his Guinness.

  ‘A fucking plumbing competition you numpty, what do you think? It’s a poetry magazine, isn’t it? A poetry competition. Charge an entry fee. I’ve always thought that must be a right good scam. Advertise it widely, charge a fiver per entry, we’ll make a fortune. Plough it back into the magazine, obviously, once we’ve taken our personal expenses…’