Nobody Loves a Ginger Baby (3 page)

She phones before she goes round. For the first time ever she can’t just pop round. Already their relationship has changed, but, she has to remind herself, it hasn’t changed, it has potentially ended.

He’s a bit cagey on the phone.

‘What for, Daphne?’

‘Just to talk.’

She forces herself to ignore the reluctance in his voice and after a few minutes he says she can come round. As soon as she walks into the room she understands his reluctance. This is not the time to talk.

‘Oh sorry Donnie, I didn’t realise Rangers were playing tonight. We can do this another time.

‘No no,’ he says, and he crosses to the telly. But he doesn’t turn it off or even put in a tape to video it, he merely turns the sound down.

‘Cup Winners’ Cup,’ he says.

‘What, finals?’

‘Well, no. Qualifying round…’

‘Yeah yeah,’ Daphne says quickly, not wanting to see him squirm.

‘Cup of tea?’

‘Cheers.’

He turns the volume up again, louder so he can hear it from the kitchen, and twice while making the tea, he rushes through when it seems like Rangers will score. They don’t and this vaguely satisfies Daphne. He gives her a giant mug, her hands are shaking and she’s scared she’ll spill it. Donnie brings from the fridge a bar of fruit and nut chocolate the size of an A4 envelope. Daphne jumps when he smashes it off the table to break it up. She lifts a piece but it is cold and sharp edged and she can’t eat it. She hasn’t eaten a thing all day.

‘I haven’t eaten a thing all day,’ says Donnie, popping a piece of chocolate in his mouth. He turns the TV volume down again and sits opposite her, smiling. He is waiting for her to say something.

‘Donnie, I don’t understand what this is about. We’re happy together, aren’t we? We have good times, good laughs, there’s no problem with sex or anything, is there?’

‘Yes, yes, yes and no.’

Hearing the word ‘no’ panics her and it is a second before she realises that this is actually the right answer, the answer she was looking for.

‘Well what is it then?’

‘Daphne I thought I explained all this to you last night.’

‘You haven’t explained anything! What the hell is going on, Donnie, is there someone else, is that it?’

‘Calm down. Please don’t shout at me.’

‘Sorry.’

Donnie is taking deep breaths, a sure sign that he’s stressed. He lowers his head and breathes deeply before he begins to speak.

‘You’re right.’

Daphne quickly puts down the massive cup before she drops it. Her hands don’t feel strong enough to hold it. She leans forward, desperate, terrified, to hear what he has to say.

‘It is the antidepressant. Coming off it has made me realise I’m not able to hold down a relationship. You deserve better and I have to be alone. There’s no one else, it’s not about that. My nerves are shattered, my blood pressure’s through the roof, I’m a mess.’

‘I know, baby, I’m sorry.’

His face is red, almost as red as his hair and he looks as if he might explode. Daphne wants to sit beside him, to hold him but it’s probably better just to let him get it all out.

‘I’ve come to a point where I realise that for my own health, my sanity, I have to be on my own. I have to save myself. Believe it or not I think I’m worth saving.’

‘What’s going to happen to you? I’m frightened of what you might do.’

‘Well,
que sera.
What’s for you won’t go by you, I’m a great believer in that. I’m fine, I’ll be fine if I’m left to myself.’

A wave of impotence overwhelms Daphne. Her spine is sagging trying to shore up the dead weight of her body. Her hands are limp, her arms dangle uselessly at her side, even the muscles that hold up her head are struggling. This must be what it feels like to have a stroke, she thinks. At least she still has the power of speech. And her tear ducts maintain normal function.

‘Donnie, you are the biggest and best part of my life. I don’t know what I’ll do without you. You’re my ginger baby, remember? I can’t be without you.’

Donnie makes no reply. Daphne forces her head into an upright position. The new Rangers striker, their most expensive player ever, is about to take a penalty and Donnie’s eyes are glued to the screen. He shoots, he misses, and Daphne is glad.

‘This is no use, you’re not even listening.’

Daphne gathers her bag.

‘I am listening, I heard what you said.’

She zips up her fleece and leans forward, about to stand.

‘I’m the biggest and best part of your life. I’m your ginger baby, of course I remember. You can’t be without me. But Daphne, you have to be. It’s for the best.’

‘Who’s best?’

‘Your best. I’m no good for you, you can do a lot better than me.’

‘Please Donnie, don’t do this, please.’

Daphne’s tear ducts are working at full capacity now,
punctuating
her speech with sobs.

‘No Daphne, it’s over.’

‘But Donnie, I’m fri-fri-frightened.’

‘Please don’t make this any harder for me. And don’t contact me; don’t pressure me. The way I’m feeling, anything could happen.’

They sit in silence for a while, both watching the football until it is half time.

‘I’ve made up a box of your stuff, your pants and perfume and that. It’s in the hall, I’ll just get it.’

Daphne is still awake at three am. When she looks at the clock again it’s twenty past four, then ten past six, then it’s time to get up. She considers phoning in sick but she has a class assessment today. Even though she’s doused them in milk her cornflakes still look razor sharp, they’ll cut her mouth to ribbons. The thought makes her taste blood at the back of her throat so she pours them down the toilet. The cornflakes separate and appear to swim through the cloudy milky water like sperm in semen. It turns her stomach. She can only take tea. She’s living on tea and pints of water; she needs it to replace the tears and hot sweats.

The phone rings while Daphne is in the shower. He will have woken up alone and realised in the cold light of day, the mistake he’s making. He’ll want to speak to her before she goes to work, no doubt he’ll be all clingy and insecure. Daphne puts one soapy foot on the floor and curls her toes to stop from slipping on the tiles. Her feet make loud frantic slapping noises as she rushes out of the bathroom. She has to reach it before the machine kicks in. He won’t speak to the machine.

It’s too late the machine has started. Daphne’s recorded voice, unaware of the urgency of the situation, goes through its usual spiel with a careless audacity that now sounds rude. Dripping shampoo is giving her white sideburns and she grabs a tea towel and wipes them in a smooth movement while striding naked up the hall.

It’s her mum. Not Donnie. He hasn’t changed his mind, Daphne remains chucked.

Her mum is prattling: how hot Australia is, what a nightmare the flight was, how she’s settling in, how grown up Albert’s children
have become, how disappointed she is to have missed Daphne, how much this call is costing, inconsequentialities. Daphne, soap sliding down her leg, doesn’t pick up.

At work she avoids her colleagues by taking tea breaks when she knows they’ll be in class. In the afternoon the assessment goes well. All the students receive remediation but that’s normal. One lad, Gerry argues because she has marked him down for his spelling.

‘Gerry,
their
is possessive, belonging to them: the stadium
belongs
to Glasgow Celtic. It is their stadium.
There
is location, a place: that place there. The way to remember it is it’s spelt like where.’

An old song pops into her head, a song her mum used to sing when she and Albert were kids, before Dad died, before the rest of the family left for Australia without her, before she was chucked. Daphne, suddenly a bit light-headed, is finding it difficult to
concentrate
, and somehow it doesn’t really matter. She begins to sing the old song.

The class beg her to sing it again. She refuses. One or two of the older students know the words and begin to sing, those who don’t, wanting in on the action, hum along. Gerry goes out on to the stairwell and sings as loud as he can. The whole college must be able to hear him; the Head of Department must be able to hear him, the Principal too, probably. He is laughing madly and Daphne wonders if she hasn’t let it go too far.

‘It’s his methadone,’ explains Thomas, ‘he gets his script at twelve o’clock, it makes him mental for a while.’

Daphne wonders: she isn’t on methadone; she isn’t on
antidepressants
, why does she feel mental?

The mental feeling dissipates on the way home; Daphne is so
exhausted
she can’t be bothered with Asda tonight. She’s too tired for food anyway. She’s expecting Donnie to be at the door of her building on the front steps waiting for her with a sheepish smile that says, ‘what was I thinking?’

He’s not.

Now she’s hoping for a letter through her door, or a message on the answering machine and she’s fumbling for her keys as she approaches. As she rummages in her bag a flying mouse narrowly misses entering her handbag and lands on the step beside her. This has no immediate effect on Daphne. She continues groping for her keys and only when she has them does she bend down to examine what the flying thing really is.

It really is a mouse, a flying mouse that appears to be critically injured. It is lying on its back with its legs jerking forward as though it might jump to its feet like a breakdancer. On its left side there is blood and some innards. Daphne screams.

A head pokes out of a window above.

There is a whispered shout of, ‘Sorry!’ Identifying the head as Daphne’s downstairs neighbour Pierce, Daphne screams and screams.

‘Shhh, I’m coming down.’

When the door opens Daphne lashes out and catches Pierce squarely on the jaw with her fist. The shock runs up her arm like electricity and the pain in her knuckles is excruciating. She is too weak to put up much resistance when Pierce grabs her arms and pins them at her side. Daphne is relieved she is unable to land another punch but she is no calmer.

‘Oh my God. Daphne, I’m so sorry.’

‘You sick bastard!’ she screams into his face, spittle flying. ‘What the fuck are you doing? What have you done to this mouse? It’s only a wee defenceless thing. Look at it! Why are you torturing it?’

Daphne’s crying is loud and uncontrollable. She cries so hard she begins to hiccup and she finds she’s unable to stop crying and hiccupping. For the first time since she was a child, she has worked herself into a frenzy of crying.

The world has gone mad, her crazy boyfriend has chucked her; her crazy neighbour has chucked a mouse out of his window. She sang a song today about a mouse and now there is a mouse on the stair. She has a quick squint at the mouse’s feet to see if it has clogs on but it doesn’t, thank God. The mouse is writhing in agony, with its insides out, clearly dying, slowly, in hideous pain, there on the stair right there.

‘Come in off the street, Daphne, please, I can explain. C’mon up the stairs.’

Pierce tries to haul Daphne into the tenement building but she resists by collapsing; now he has to hold her up or she’ll fall.

Pierce is a big man, broad-chested, wide-faced. Daphne knows he fancies himself as a handsome man but she has always
considered
him to be just beyond handsome. Only just; perhaps a centimetre. It hardly matters in his big broad body but it is in the fine detail that she notices it: his nose is about a centimetre too wide, his hands a centimetre too pudgy. As she sags in his arms she notices that he stinks into the bargain, a sour smell of stale roll-up cigarettes and cabbage and lager and sex and hashish. It’s teatime but he’s unshaven and looks as though he’s just got out of bed. He’s trying to pull her away from the mouse.

‘I can’t leave him. I have to help him.’

She’s wailing now.

‘Okay, we won’t leave him, I’ll bring him in, but let’s get upstairs.’

Pierce slowly lets go of his grip on Daphne, still with his arms around her in case she falls. He bends down and gently picks up the mouse. Blood is dripping between his fingers.

‘Don’t hurt him, please.’

‘It’s okay,’ Pierce is whispering, ‘he’s all right.’

Daphne tries not to look as he lifts the mouse. She wishes she hadn’t seen Pierce, with his too fat fingers, trying to discreetly tuck the mouse’s entrails back in.

Daphne follows Pierce into his flat, this is an emergency, his flat is nearest and the door is open. Pierce lifts a green woolly jumper off the back of the couch and wraps the mouse in it. She is surprised to find that despite his hashhead lifestyle and body odour, his flat is beautiful.

‘That’ll keep him nice and warm, it’s the best thing for shock. We’ll see if he’ll maybe take a wee saucer of milk. He’ll be right as rain, wait and see, he’ll be skiddling about the place in no time.’

‘Why did you throw a mouse out of the window, Pierce, why? What goes on in that sick head of yours? You are scary man,
fucking
scary.’

‘I didn’t throw it out the window, it must have jumped!’

‘Oh please!’

‘I’m telling you, look!’

Pierce lays the mouse down on top of the coffee table wrapped in the jumper like a baby in swaddling clothes and drags Daphne to the open window. There on the outside ledge is a Perspex box.

‘It’s a humane mousetrap. I got it at the hardware shop. It was bloody expensive, I could have just got the old wooden type of mousetrap but I didn’t want the mouse breaking its back or its leg or whatever. You bait the trap and when the mouse goes in the door comes down behind it without harming it, see? Like that.’

‘Why is it on the window ledge?’

‘Because the fucking stupid mouse…’

Daphne pulls her head back as though she’s been assaulted.

‘Sorry, sorry, I’m sorry, right? The poor wee mouse walked into the trap the minute I baited it. It usually just comes out at night. You’re supposed to take it at least three miles away to release it,
otherwise
it finds its way back, but I was knackered, I’d been out all night.’

‘Yes, out all night,’ says Daphne. She leaves Pierce at the window and turns to nursing the mouse. He has stopped kicking his legs. She can feel his wee heartbeat in her hand.

‘Well, I was tired. Too tired to get up and walk three miles. But that box is small, I was worried the mouse would run out of air in that wee confined space. I didn’t want it to suffocate. But I couldn’t let it out again, could I? He might wise up and not go near the trap again. Mice learn fast, that’s why they use them in behavioural science.’

‘You are so full of shit.’

‘So I put it on the window ledge. I thought if I opened the hatch it would let the mouse breathe and I would know where to get it when I was ready. How was I to know it would fucking jump!

‘You’re so incompetent you can’t even be trusted with a wee mouse.’

‘Well, Doctor Fucking Doolittle, what would you have done then, eh?’

‘I would have got off my arse and took it three miles away instead of forcing it into a suicide attempt!’

The good thing about the shouting is that at least Daphne has stopped crying. ‘Right, okay, you didn’t mean it, there’s no point in arguing. We need to get him to a vet, right now,’ she says.

‘Where is the nearest vet?’ says Pierce, scrabbling around under the phone table, ‘I’ll look it up. Vending machines, vermin control, should have phoned them in the first place, veterinary supplies, right, here is it, veterinary surgeons. Looks like the nearest one is Partick.’

But the mouse’s breakdancing days are over. Daphne has already gently placed the green woolly jumper on the coffee table and once more started to cry. It’s no longer loud hysterical howling. It is a quiet submissive weeping that lasts a very long time.

Donnie hasn’t put a letter through her door and there are no
messages
on her answering machine. But she must keep her distance, play it cool, let him come out of it in his own time.

He’s coming off the pills too quickly. His noradrenaline and
dopamine levels are probably all messed up, she’s been reading up on it, he probably isn’t producing enough serotonin yet. The important thing is not to upset him, he said it himself and Daphne thinks about it constantly:
anything could happen
. Daphne doesn’t want anything to happen. She emails him every day, jokes off the Internet, to keep his pecker up. What harm can it do?

She can’t sleep. The T-shirt she wears in bed is Donnie’s and smells of him. The sheets smell of him. From his pillows stuffed with a hot water bottle she makes a Donnie stand-in and cuddles it tight. She spends her night staring at the ceiling, wondering what he’s doing right now. How is he coping without her to wash his hair? And what about his twizzley bits? He can’t shave them himself.

No one at college suspects a thing. She laughs and jokes with her colleagues whenever she can’t avoid them; she marks essays, arguing with her students and her boss over the grades. Except to work and to Asda, she stops going out. She wanders round Asda on her way home, not buying anything. She lets the machine take her calls and doesn’t return them.

The smell of Donnie eventually fades. Now the bed only smells of Daphne’s nights alone; of sweat and oily hair and toe jam and lady juice and unwashed bum. It’s so pungent that sometimes she emerges from under the covers gasping for breath. But it’s comforting.

It’ll blow over, she thinks. He’s never gone as far as chucking her before, that’s a shocker, but she knows it’s only the medication, or lack of it. Four years ago, before he started the antidepressants, Donnie sometimes spent the entire weekend in bed, sad and
nervous
, saying she should leave him, that he was no good for her. Daphne’s response was not to leave but to climb in beside him until he relaxed and fell asleep. He always recovered. This
chucking
her and having to be alone carry-on is just a new variation on his old black weekends.