Nobody Loves a Ginger Baby

by Laura Marney

  ‘Daphne, nobody is going to make you do anything. And don’t worry. I can see from your records that you have no history of absence. You don’t have to convince me of your illness though I think you may have yet to convince yourself.’

  Daphne begins to cry.

  ‘I’m going to sign you off for another month. Now, can you roll your sleeve up please? I want to take your blood pressure.’

  With the tears rolling down her cheeks Daphne complies. At least the sick line is secure; her humiliation has not been for nothing.

  ‘Your blood pressure is a wee bit high. How are you feeling, I mean physically, Daphne?’

  ‘Eh,’ Daphne clears her throat, ‘okay.’

  ‘Your fingers are a bit swollen. Any swelling anywhere else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Let me see your knees.’

  Daphne hauls her voluminous coat up around her waist and clings to it as she hoists up the legs of her baggy tracksuit trousers.

  ‘Hmm, they’re a bit swollen, too. When did you last have a period?’

  Daphne thinks carefully before answering.

  ‘Now. I’ve got my period just now.’

  ‘Oh. Well, can you call the surgery when it finishes? I’d like to examine you. And I’ll need a urine sample today. Here,’ says Dr Wilson, fishing out a glass tube and handing it to her, ‘just hand it in at reception on your way out. And Daphne, don’t be so hard on yourself. We all get ill sometimes.’

  Daphne can only nod, she is scared she’ll start crying again, and Janice Dickson is out there.

  There is a queue for the toilet. A wee boy is in front of her and while she is waiting a man comes and waits behind her. Pressure. Inside, the toilet is clean and comfortable and the wee boy hasn’t peed on the seat. There are paper towels and a pump of liquid soap advertising a drug company. The soap is a lemon colour.

  The first time she does it Daphne puts in too much soap. The mixture is bright yellow and a bit frothy. Too obvious. The next time she puts a much smaller amount in and pours the water in slowly so as not to cause any bubbles. It’s perfect.

  Daphne smiles as she hands the sample tube to Janice Dickson who calls out after her, ‘Give my best to your mum when you speak to her.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Daphne, sending Janice her fiercest optical death rays, ‘you too.’

  *

  Donnie is sick. Sick and tired and baw weary although his balls have seen little action, save for the occasional lethargic wank, since he returned from Egypt. Since before Egypt, in fact, but Donnie would rather not think about Egypt. He would much rather sleep. His bed is warm and quiet and dark, he has pulled the blackout blind down, sealing the room against the harsh noise and light of the world.

  He gets up to go to work and when he comes home he makes a sandwich and a cup of tea and stands eating it in the kitchen before laying the heavy burden that is his body back in the bed. He sets his alarm for work the next day, he has to, despite getting upwards of fourteen hours of sleep a day, he wakes up tired.

  Donnie knows he should go back and see his doctor, not to show him his mosquito bite which has since completely disappeared, but for head medicine. He knows that the long sleeps are a symptom but he can’t be bothered to make an appointment and anyway he likes sleeping. He supposes he should be disappointed that he is apparently unable to function normally without antidepressants but if this is what it’s like, who wants to function normally?

  Bertha refused to sit with him on the return plane journey. He pleaded with her but she instructed the girl at the check-in desk that she was to be seated as far as possible away from this gentleman. She held their British currency and forgot to leave him money for a drink. It was a long flight. He sat with a family, in a row beside a mother and a boy of about eight years old who didn’t seem to understand that hitting air turbulence wasn’t a fun thing.

  While Bertha enjoyed one gin and tonic after another, the nearest Donnie came to a drink were the mini cans of Coke the kid next to him slurped noisily throughout the journey. During the flight, throughout several thirsty, terrifying and lonely hours, Donnie hated Bertha.

  When the plane landed she waited for him to disembark and acted as if nothing had happened. She was cheerful, more cheerful than she had been throughout the holiday, making jokes, holding his hand and kissing him, as they waited at the luggage carousel for their bags. Donnie began to think that maybe they could put the ignominy behind them, forget about it. They had left Egypt and would never return, why not leave the memories and never revisit them? He certainly could if she could. Things could be okay again. He didn’t hate her. He had given up everything to be back with her, how could he hate her?

  ‘Right,’ said Bertha on her return from the long queue at the ladies’ toilet, ‘I’ve phoned Mum and told her we’ll be over, she’s made us our dinner.’

  ‘What, now? We have to go to see your mum now? We haven’t even cleared immigration yet.’

  ‘I know, I know, it’s a nuisance, if it was up to me I’d go home first and get out of this hideous T-shirt, but she knows the problems we’ve had and she’s worried. There’s something at her house that I need to pick up, toiletries and stuff. And anyway, we have to go, she’s cooked.’

  ‘She knows the problems we’ve had?’

  Donnie knew exactly how Gertie would react to the problems they’d had and how those problems will be portrayed. Gertie will eat this up and sook the bones dry. In her unstinting desire to belittle Donnie his mother in law will embroider the events, working the outlines into shimmering broad tapestries. She’ll turn his every little mistake into a powerful legend: How Donnie Mistook The Tour Guide For A Terrorist, How Donnie Exposed His Cock In The Temple, The Strange Tale Of Donnie’s Grossly Inflamed Anus, How Donnie Broke The Air Conditioning And Ruined Bertha’s Holiday. And last of all, best of all, the story the grandchildren will crowd round her to hear at family gatherings: the hilarious When Donnie Had Spiders Up His Arse.

  ‘Bertha, I’m not feeling well,’ Donnie said sadly as he kissed her goodbye. ‘I have to go home.’

  He could see Bertha was confused. Gertie had cooked, they had been summoned, and here was Donnie refusing to attend. He was openly defying a Gertie edict.

  Sleep. It’s like getting really, really drunk without the expense, subsequent embarrassment, or shocking hangover. When Donnie is asleep he doesn’t feel scared, or sexually frustrated, or a failure. The problem is that after more than a week of long sleeps, Donnie can sleep no more.

  Instead he notices how grubby the kitchen has become. Also it occurs to him that he hasn’t yet emptied his suitcase. At 4.30 a.m., after he has cleaned the house from top to bottom, he finds the leaf. He is scrubbing the back of the door and notices that on the underside of the metal box he has fitted to prevent the neds from torching his flat, a rotting piece of vegetation protrudes. He unscrews the box from the wall and finds two halves of the now dried out leaf. He knows instantly what it is, where it has come from and what it means.

  Chapter 26

  Pierce is having a shit time of it. Now that his arm is better the guy from the buroo is back on his case again. It will take every ounce of Pierce’s imagination and creativity to avoid employment now. It would be less exhausting to just take a fucking job but he refuses to give in to the guy’s bully-boy tactics. Pierce’s attitude to paid employment is simple. It’s like, for example, parachuting: he just doesn’t want to do it. Some people like that kind of thing and good luck to them. It’s still a free country and if Pierce wants to sign on he will continue to do so.

  He hasn’t been able to answer the phone for weeks. It could be the guy from the buroo chasing him up, asking him why he’s not out job-hunting, or worse, it could be Carol. She got the holiday of a lifetime for free and shagged him till his baws were empty, what more does she want from him?

  Tam is always practising with the band and has all but given up on Poyumtree. Pierce would replace him but he can’t find anyone who’ll take th
e job. He’s asked just about everyone who comes to his various creative writing and poetry groups if they’re interested, but none of them are. Oh yeah, they all want him to publish their stuff in the magazine but they won’t lift a finger to get it off the ground. He has a good mind just to bloody well do it himself.

  Daphne has taken the huff. He had got into the habit of going up there for soup. Fair enough, his arm is better now but it was after all her fault he had a gammy arm in the first place. On reflection maybe he should had chipped in something for the cost of the soup but if she wanted money she had only to ask. How much did a wee plate of home-made soup cost for fuck’s sake?

  She’s avoiding him. He chapped up three or four times but she blanked him. Three times now when he’s been coming up the stairs after the pub he’s heard her above him on the stair. She waits until he goes into his flat before she comes down. She’s fucking weird anyway. Who the fuck goes out to the shops at that time of night? And what is with that stupid big coat she wears all the time? She was well out of order that night she threw them out but she hasn’t even acknowledged that she was wrong, far less apologise.

  Sean is on the mend now, thank God, and has asked him several times about the ring. The ring is becoming a heavy load. Pierce has pulled loads of women at the disco since then; he has even abstained from shagging the better-looking ones to see if they turn out to be The Girlfriend. The ones he thinks have potential make excuses when he phones them again. It seems they’re only interested in a one-night shag. Pierce begins to think that the after-pub disco is not the place to find Miss Right.

  He owes it to Sean, and more especially to Bernie, to find a good woman, a woman worthy of wearing Bernie’s ring. There aren’t many of them to the pound, and certainly not at the afterpub disco. When he thinks about it, as he does a lot, Pierce likens himself to Frodo Baggins. For Bernie and for Sean, for honour, Pierce must fulfil his quest. The ring must find its rightful place. That’s why he signs up for speed dating.

  Pierce isn’t embarrassed about doing it. It’s not as if he’s desperate, it’s not as if he can’t pull. His pulling power is beyond question but, like a Tolkien character, his powers are considerably weakened beyond the realm of the after-pub disco. Other forces are at work.

  As he goes in, a matronly lady in her fifties, who introduces herself as Megan, meets him. He is relieved to discover that Megan is the organiser and not a potential date. She takes his money and talks him through the speed dating procedure, asking him does he have any questions and imploring him not to be nervous.

  The event is held in the cavernous unheated function room of a local hotel. The venue is too big and although there is the full complement of ten men and ten women, Pierce has the feeling of having arrived too early, before the cool people have got there. For the money Megan is charging he might have expected a three-course dinner and a four-piece band but there is only one free introductory glass of champagne. Pierce knocks it back and gets a pint in.

  He is pleasantly surprised at the quality of talent. He had expected that some or most of the women would have something wrong with them but in fact they are all quite young and fresh. There are a few stunning looking girls and no absolute dogs. There is not one of them that he wouldn’t shag.

  The competition is a pushover too: specky geeks in sports jackets, nervous Normans hanging about at the back of the hall, crowding together for safety as if they were at a school disco. This is going to be a scoosh. In all modesty, Pierce is the best looking man here.

  He has seven minutes with each girl and despite his natural advantage he surprises himself by being a bit nervous with the first one. She’s gorgeous, Louise her name is, small and curvy but gorgeous eyes and a cute button nose. Louise puts her hand on his and tells him just to relax and enjoy it; she’s a veteran of these do’s. Her touching him like this, so warm and friendly, strikes at Pierce’s heart and he thinks he’s falling in love with Louise but all too soon the seven minutes are up. Pierce is concentrating hard on remembering names; he doesn’t want to sign up for the wrong women. There is Phyllis: blonde, beautiful, quietly spoken; Lucy: redhead, likes hash, a potential soulmate; Alison: small, sassy, communist; Zoe: intellectual with fabulous lips and cleavage; Colette: slim, blonde and beautiful; Laura: too tall; Monica: dark, childlike, lovely; Elena: posh and gorgeous; and one rather exotic piece called Carmen: voluptuous with attitude.

  After the third or fourth he is beginning to get the hang of it. He notices when he says, ‘Hi, I’m Pierce, I’m a poet,’ that the light goes out in their eyes so he has amended this to, ‘Hi, I’m Pierce, I’m in publishing.’ But the girls are not easily duped. In seven minutes they probe every aspect of his life. By way of an experiment he tells two of them that he is a double-glazing salesman. This is warmly received and not entirely untrue. He did once take a job in double-glazing when he was forced off the buroo but he only lasted two weeks.

  After the last date, finishing with the less impressive Laura: too tall, baggy-eyed, Pierce signs up for the girls he wants to see again. He picks his top five, the cream of the crop: Louise, Colette, Zoe, Monica and Carmen. He doesn’t want to be greedy.

  There is much giggling as the girls fill out their forms and Pierce takes the opportunity to nip outside for a fag. Things happen faster than he expects and while he is outside some of them are leaving. Two of the guys, sports jacket lads, are smiling broadly and Pierce has a moment’s worry that Louise has picked one of them. He nips his fag and hurries back inside. Pierce had hoped there would be more time after the formal dates but all speed-daters have received their form by now and are gathering their coats. His form is returned to him and he quickly scans it for the girls’ names. Louise’s name is not there. No girls’ names are there.

  ‘Megan, I don’t know if I’m looking at this right, I can’t see the girls’ names.’

  ‘Yes, this is your first time, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. How do I find out what girls have picked me?’

  ‘I’m afraid they haven’t, Pierce. But please don’t worry about it. It happens, you’re new. Sometimes it takes a while to get into your stride.’

  ‘No girls picked me?’

  Megan nods sympathetically.

  ‘The right girl is out there for you. You just have to find her. The thing to do is not to give up,’ Megan says as she squeezes Pierce’s shoulder. ‘You should come again next week. If you pay in advance for the next four dates I can offer you a discount.’

  *

  ‘The good news is it was a stillbirth.’ Sick. Sick sick sick. Why are people so down on red hair? Daphne doesn’t know. She has tried to find out, she has consulted her best friend and oracle, the Internet, her only friend now that she has blown out Pierce and his entourage. But it’s all bad news.

  Redheads are more susceptible to sunburn, insect bites, wrinkling and skin cancer. It’s hardly surprisingly then that they’re bad tempered and sexually brutal. As if that wasn’t enough of a cross to bear they are also considered unlucky and untrustworthy. Judas was a redhead, a ginger minge, a fire crotch. In Corsica if you pass one in the street the custom is to spit and turn around. The Egyptians regarded the colour so unlucky that they had a ceremony in which they burned redheaded maidens alive ‘to wipe out the tint’. Alive. But there is one ray of hope on the horizon. Despite red hair, or the genetic loss of function of MC1R having been around for a hundred thousand years, numbers are falling. People don’t fancy redheads, don’t mate with them and so fewer blighted red-haired kiddies are born.

  In the wee small hours, after she’s done the deli run and footered on the Internet for an hour, Daphne goes to bed but cannot sleep. She begins thinking again about what a terrible raw deal poor old redheads get.

  What is more surprising to her is that, given their terrible reputation, red-haired people have not yet been rounded up and shot. Perhaps this tribe of uncouth ugly people should be locked in an abandoned warehouse, isolated from decent dark-haired society. Or better, bric
ked up in a ghetto, or even better: sent underground, they don’t need sunlight anyway; it’s bad for them.

  There they can take out their bad temper and sexual brutality on each other. Used to only raging and grunting at each other, language is eventually lost. In the darkness their pale weak eyesight becomes vestigial, sight reduced to an angry red haze. In these difficult circumstances courtship becomes unfeasible and they begin to indiscriminately mount each other. The offspring of these bestial couplings have skin and hair that gets redder and redder with each generation until babies are born puce. Lack of sunlight makes their white translucent skin transparent, their blood vessels and organs visible to the sighted.

  A few attempt to escape to the light. Stories, told through a series of grunts and tongue clicks, have been handed down through the generations of life ‘above’, but those who leave never return and those who are left behind have no hard evidence of the existence of ‘above’.

  Blind, dumb and grotesque, those who escape are quickly killed or captured and held in tinted glass cases as curios. A small minority of enlightened dark-haired humans try to help the captured puce people. Under cover of darkness they smash the glass cases and set them free. The puce people want only to return underground where it is safe and sex is freely available but they are ill-equipped and when dawn breaks they die in the pale warmth of the morning sun.

  However, one does survive.

  When the glass case is smashed the puce people run, overjoyed to be free at last, choosing death or glory over a life of captivity. Not all of them are brave. One puce male, the most stunted of them, is scared to leave the security of the glass case and lies quivering in the darkest corner. The dark-haired liberators are unsure of what to do with him, fearing he is a turncoat and may betray them to the authorities. The liberators feel that they must kill the stunted puce man if he will not escape but one of them, a beautiful dark-haired woman, offers to hide him. In truth she is not motivated by altruism but by the old legends she has heard of the sexual perversity of the puce people. She takes him home and after many patient hours of trying to tempt him with Kit Kat biscuits, he slowly, timidly, after tentatively sniffing her arse, is coaxed to mount her. He grunts and drools as he fumbles blindly on her. He pulls her hair and slaps her arse and his spittle drips down her back.