Nobody Loves a Ginger Baby (18 page)

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 the 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, bricked 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.

The dark-haired beauty is disappointed, sex with a Puce is not all that. She’s had better. But she is kind and allows him to stay in a cupboard under the sink and feeds him bacon rinds and
scrapings
from the porridge pot. The cupboard is damp and smelly and cramped, even for his tiny dimensions, but it is safe from the harmful rays of the sun and the murdering Dark Hairs. The stunted puce man comforts himself by singing songs of his lost homeland underground. These songs sound, to the ear of the dark-haired beauty, like wailing and grunting, and after a time she tires of it.

One night another freshly escaped puce person, a female, hears his plangent cries and comes to rescue him. As he mounts her in
the confined space of the cupboard under the sink he weeps with joy to once more feel beneath him pendulous breasts and
turkey-skinned
neck.

The lovers leave the house of the dark-haired beauty and travel throughout the night to where they hope to re-enter the
underground
. In darkness their blindness is an advantage and they move swiftly and easily. But they cannot find the entrance.

As the sun rises the first rays spread an unfamiliar feeling of warmth across the puce people’s crinkly-skinned backs. It is a strange sensation to them, one of relaxation. As the sun climbs in the sky they cover themselves as best they can against the
increasingly
uncomfortable heat. Soon blisters appear on their thin puce skin, at first small and itchy but soon large and plasma-filled, swelling and popping as they scuttle blindly for shelter. They howl and grunt as their bodies run with seeping sores. Although they cannot see the sun burning through their transparent skin they feel and smell their organs cook and their innards boil. With dreadful screams they die under a vapid Scottish sun.

When the dark-haired beauty realises that the stunted puce man is gone she is relieved. No longer will she have to endure his groaning grunting singing. But although he is gone he has left something behind.

The dark-haired beauty is delivered of a baby, a daughter.
Thankfully
the child is normal, healthy, and within a year has thick coils of golden hair. The child has a quick wit and a lively intelligence and is loved by all who know her. Word spreads and, never having seen such a thing before, people come from far and wide to see the golden child.