Nobody Loves a Ginger Baby (24 page)

He nearly trips over her. A woman hunched against a tree. This is trouble, foul play, and makes Pierce’s heart hammer in his chest. He puts his hand on her shoulder.

‘Are you all right, love?’

A stupid question, she’s alone in the woods at night slumped against a tree, she’s obviously not all right, but it is not until he sees her face in the light of the moon that he realises that the woman is Daphne. She has been stripped naked from the waist down, there is blood on her legs, she is woozy and doesn’t seem to recognise him. She’s been… the taste of sick rises in Pierce’s throat.

‘You’re okay, Daphne, you’re okay, I’ve got you.’

Pierce leans down and hugs her. She clings to him, shivering and sobbing. She is saying something, mumbling into his shoulder.

‘I’m sorry’, she says.

She is pulling her jumper down over her knees to cover her nakedness. It’s a warm night but she is shivering. She’s in shock. He pulls away from her, pulls his jacket off and wraps it around her and as he holds her he feels her warm wetness, she’s bleeding. He has to get help, get an ambulance. He wants to shout for help, run and phone an ambulance but he’s scared to leave her, he can’t leave her here alone again. He doesn’t know what to do. He sees the bundle of her blood-soaked trousers beside her and reaches across her to them. He has to get her dressed and get her out of here, get help. The weight of the trousers surprises him, there is something on them. Then he sees what it is but it makes no sense. Tiny, naked, blood-streaked.

It is a dead baby.

‘Daphne?’

She only lifts her head and nods. A tear drips off the end of her nose. He recoils from the corpse, pulling Daphne close to him, away from the dreadful sight.

‘Oh my God.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she says again, ‘Donnie, I’m so sorry.’

Donnie she calls him. Pierce is amazed and guilty that he can be so stung by such a triviality at this moment. With Daphne
resisting
he gently but firmly untangles himself. She’s sobbing and hugging her knees as he gets to his feet and walks around her. Now that his brain understands what has happened, he wants a closer look at the foetus.

It’s a perfectly formed little person, a baby girl, not frightening to look at, just really, really sad. The moonlight throws leaf
shadows
across its pale and motionless body. Poor wee thing, dead in a city park, a pair of stained jogging trousers for a crib. Tenderly he touches its poor little dirty face, wiping blood and mucus from its cheeks. Poor wee soul. Poor Daphne.

As he rests his hand on the tiny white chest, the baby’s arms and legs spasm as if it has been electrocuted. The tiny body
jackknifes
and it coughs. It is alive. It was dead and now it’s alive. He touched it and it came to life.

Now he has it in his arms. It has stopped moving again. He puts his finger in and scrapes out a blob of something from the tiny warm mouth. It’s still not moving or breathing and Pierce can’t see what else to do. A mixture of instinct and what he’s seen on telly tells him to smack the baby’s bottom. She’s slippy; he’s scared he’ll drop her and kill her before she gets a chance to take her first breath. Carefully, trying not to damage her, he locks his fingers between her centimetre-sized ankles and lifts her.

Silhouetted against the full moon, before he has a chance to smack her, she fills her lungs and howls. It is surprisingly loud. In a small patch of forest in the middle of the city the baby girl’s angry bawling bounces off the trees and brings her mother to her senses.

Three years later.

Daphne has been up and down this aisle three or four times and still she can’t decide what to have for tea. It took her a long time to set foot inside Asda again. Even months after the funeral she still felt creepy in the shop. But she’s over all that now; that was a lifetime away. Asda feels good again, it’s the highlight of Daphne’s boring day.

She picks up a tin of pink salmon, running through recipes in her head, pasta maybe, but the metallic taste floods her mouth again and reluctantly she replaces the tin on the shelf. She turns back to the trolley. Where is she? The wee one has disappeared. She shoves as fast as she can, dodging other trolleys, hurrying to the end of the aisle. Puffed out with the effort of her dash, Daphne rests her belly on the trolley handle and stretches out her spine. It’s okay, Holly Louise is here, she’s fine, she’s standing waiting for Daphne holding her dad’s hand while they both admire the Easter eggs.

‘Please Daddy, please!’ begs Holly Louise, pointing to the giant Kinder eggs on the display.

Daphne sighs; she spent fifteen minutes this morning putting Holly Louise’s hair up in a princess bun because she insisted on wearing her new Barbie clasps. Now she’s pulled the clasps out and her golden curly hair is falling in untidy ringlets over her face.

‘Well, we better ask Mummy,’ says Daddy.

‘Pierce, no more, you’ve already bought her enough sweets,’ says Daphne firmly.

‘Och, but these ones have a toy inside; they’re educational.’

‘Look how dear they are!’ Daphne protests. ‘We can’t afford it.’

Daphne turns and heads towards the fruit and veg aisle. Pierce and Holly Louise trail behind her, the toddler dragging her feet and whining. Daphne has a moment’s hesitation when she almost gives in before her hesitation hardens to resentment. Why is she always the one who has to say no? He spoils Holly Louise, but he won’t be able to for much longer, not once there’s another wee one howling for attention. The new baby is going to change the dynamics, thinks Daphne with some satisfaction.

Pierce has a great talent for spending money, particularly when it comes to Holly Louise but he’s still not very good at earning it. Unlike his pal Tam, who’s now living a rock star lifestyle in America, Pierce is still waiting for the royalties to come in from his first book even though it came out nearly two years ago. His editor, Daisy, says that despite superlative reviews a first book is rarely a
money-spinner
. She has high hopes for this next one. So does Daphne.

She has nagged and wheedled him to get a proper job but he continues to resist. He needs time to write, he insists. And, he freely admits, he’d rather spend this time with Holly Louise before she has to go to school, she’s growing up so fast, he says, he wants to savour it. Pierce revels in all the kiddie stuff: breakfast at 6am, the swing park, teaching her to swim, days out at the beach, bath time, bedtime stories. But they need money more than ever now. Daphne’s maternity pay will only last a few months after the baby is born and then one of them will have to work.

Unlike her last one, this is a planned pregnancy. Planned like a military operation, by Pierce. He wants this baby as a playmate for Holly Louise. He doesn’t want her growing up an only child. And there is something else, something neither of them has ever acknowledged. He wants this baby because it will be his. Daphne, although constantly worried about money, had agreed. She knows Pierce is right, it’ll be nice for Holly Louise to have a brother, nice for all of them.

More often than not, Daphne likes being a mum but a lot of her time is wasted being annoyed with Pierce, who every year gets a little fatter and balder and lazier. She never expected life to turn out like this.

She only agreed to marry him for Holly Louise’s sake, and
because
he was desperate for her to wear that huge diamond ring. It was a low-key affair. Mum came back from Australia, thrilled to meet her granddaughter. Pierce’s Uncle Sean was the best man.

‘It’s a grand thing to see two young people so in love,’ said Sean.

Daphne had to look away. Sean came to visit the following Christmas and helped Daphne wash up after dinner.

‘It’s a grand thing to see two young people making a life together,’ he said into the basin, ‘even if it isn’t perfect, I suppose there’s a lot of everyday joy to be had.’

At the fruit and veg aisle Daphne sees something she can work with, a large bunch of leeks. They look fresh and green and
wholesome
.

‘Is it soup again, Daffers?’

‘Uh huh. Got a problem with that?’

‘No, no, you fire in, love.’

‘Cheers,’ says Daphne cheerlessly as she weighs out the leeks in the hanging scales.

‘We had
soup
yesterday,’ Pierce says in an exaggerated fairy tale way to Holly Louise, ‘And
soup
the day before that.’

The little girl is holding her daddy’s arm with both of hers and jumping as high as she can every time he says it.

‘And
soup
tonight,’ Pierce continues.

‘And soup tomorrow!’ Holly Louise shouts in joy.

Daphne stops putting the leeks in the poly bag. This isn’t fair; they are ganging up on her again.

‘Look, if you don’t want it, you only have to say so. I can’t find anything I want, I’ve been round the whole shop and everything makes me feel queasy.’

‘Everything but soup?’

‘Yeah,’ she laughs, realising how ridiculous this sounds, ‘
Everything
but soup.’

With a toddler’s passion Holly Louise lunges forward and wrestles her mother’s legs. Daphne gently peels her off and enjoys the unspeakable pleasure of one of Holly Louise’s soft and chubby little hands in hers. Holly Louise giggles triumphantly
when Pierce accepts her other hand. They all know what must happen next.

‘Swing!’ cries Holly Louise.

They look at each other, sigh, nod, and on a silent count of three pull her up by the arms.

‘Well then,
soup
it is my dear!
Soup
it is,’ shouts Pierce, with their ginger baby swinging joyfully between them.

THE END 

L
AURA
M
ARNEY EXPLAINS THE INSPIRATION FOR THIS NOVEL.
You know these people you see in your doctor’s surgery waiting room? You know the ones: a suit with a briefcase, free Post-its and a smarmy line in patter? They’re obviously not patients, they’re too smiley, so they must be ‘medical reps’: sales representatives
hawking
drugs to your GP during her coffee break. I used to do that.

I answered an advert for Medical Sales Representatives. They sought graduates in biological science, nursing and chemistry, pharmacology degrees or doctorates. I had a biology ‘A’ level. Beyond that I knew nothing whatsoever about science, but I was desperate. I was a penniless single parent of two bright-eyed
kiddies
and it was November; I needed money for Christmas presents. I reckoned that if I could tell whatever lies were required to get the job, by the time the company trained me, realised how useless I was and then fired me, they’d have to pay me a month’s salary – enough to ensure that Santa would come to our house. I called the recruitment line and blagged an interview.

On my first day I left the price tag on my M and S suit tucked inside. That way I could return it and get my money back as soon as they fired me. A young woman was training us new recruits on the antidepressant we were to sell to GPs. Her sales graph looked none too healthy, it had nosedived, but she was optimistic.

‘As you can see we’ve not yet been able to maximise our sales of this excellent product, but as it’s now winter we believe things will begin to change. After the Christmas holidays the general public will have nothing to look forward to except their credit card bills and more miserable weather,’ she said chirpily, ‘so the good news is, we anticipate increased demand for our antidepressants.’

I realised then what a snakepit I had fallen into.

The more I talked to friends, the more it seemed that everyone and their granny were on antidepressants, not just folk with actual clinical depression. What had gone wrong in our society that so many seemingly ordinary people were having to numb their pain?
Were the drug companies exploiting our misery? Or did we feel entitled to be happy all the time? Was not being constantly happy making us miserable? Why were we thinking antidepressant and not pro-joy? This fascinated me and I resolved to write a story around this theme. I wanted to help people stop being dependent on chemical happiness, and I’d be more effective working on the inside. Hah! The drug company who employed me would
unwittingly
sponsor their own downfall!

As I began the novel, Daphne’s neighbour Pierce was a minor character, a bit of local colour. I modelled him on an unemployed but charming poet I knew. He was fun to write, and his sweary voice was one of the loudest in my cast. I named him Pierce, meaning ‘rock’. I felt poor old Daphne needed someone to be her rock, and so his role took on even greater significance. Obviously another word for pierce is penetrate, something that Pierce was particularly fond of doing to ladies. It tickled me to make his name a verb
describing
his favourite activity. I confess that as he developed and showed himself to be a compassionate if hapless individual, I fell a little in love with Pierce.

The ending was supposed to be so much darker too. I never told my editor this, sparing her delicate sensitivities, but the episode in the park was going to have a much grizzlier outcome. Except that when I came to write it, I couldn’t do it. I’m too nice, that’s my problem. As I approached Donnie’s denouement I noticed that my writing had slowed down to a few hundred words a day. I was dreading the moment when Donnie, well, you know. And if it was hard to do it to Donnie, how could I do it to an innocent?

In the end, not only had I fallen in love with Pierce, but despite the shortcomings of pathetic Daphne and selfish Donnie and
everyone
else, I found it hard to hurt them. Once I had finished the novel I saw that what I had produced was not what I had originally intended to write at all. What began as an over-optimistic plan to bring down the pharmaceutical industry became a story about people who were selfish and fragile and pathetic and foolish. A lot like me, and maybe a little bit like you, too.