Nobody Loves a Ginger Baby (4 page)

Daphne doesn’t know whether he gets the emails, he never replies.

She wonders if she’s frittering her life away.

Daphne sits alone in the canteen at lunchtime but she has no appetite. She’s bought a caramel custard but doesn’t fancy it, she swirls the yellow goo around the ribbon of caramel until the two colours merge to a shade of taupe that makes her feel sick. Magda, Jo and Carol all come in together, Carol in her signature brown. She wears tan spiky-heeled boots, chocolate velvet trousers and a chestnut-coloured low-cut top. She looks like a multi-hued jobby.

Not for the first time, Daphne wonders what age Carol is. She could be in her thirties but it’s hard to tell. Sometimes, when they’ve run out of students to slate and sit staring into their empty mugs, bracing themselves for returning to their classes, Daphne wants to ask. Instead she fishes. She initiates nostalgia chats, reminiscing about pop star heartthrobs of their youth. Magda, the oldest, talks Robbie Williams, Jo remembers Westlife but Carol keeps her own counsel on her teenage tastes. Daphne tries landmark events like the Twin Towers or the Arab Spring or, in desperation, surely she couldn’t be that old, Charles and Diana’s wedding, but Carol doesn’t bite.

Going by her figure, Carol could be a teenager. Her long legs connect effortlessly with her tight bum, her tiny waist a perfect plinth for a top shelf of big sticky-out breasts. Her hair is long and fabulous, too. Her shaped eyebrows are dark but Carol boasts that the hair on her head is not less than eight shades of blonde: Baby, Ash, Honey, Californian, Ice, Strawberry, Scandinavian and Sandy. She spends one hundred and seventy pounds every six weeks on her ‘T-bar’: about two square inches around the crown of her head and her parting. But six weeks isn’t long enough for grey to emerge, if there is any there, and this annoys Daphne.

Carol is single but very sniffy about men. She declines politely, even flirtatiously, when bald or fat or ugly men try to chat her up. But at break time, in the company of Jo and Magda and Daphne, Carol scoffs imperiously at the losers who imagined they had a chance with her. This confuses Daphne because, despite her figure and hair and clothes, Carol has a face like a bulldog licking sick off a thistle. Underneath the expensive brown patina of Clinique
makeup
, Carol’s skin is lined and saggy. Perhaps she is thirty but just not wearing well, she smokes and virtually never eats. Perhaps she’s fifty.

Based on a foolproof system, Daphne believes herself to be an excellent judge of character. On being introduced to new people she encounters one of four responses: fellow lecturers, usually of the left wing socialist type, pretend that it’s perfectly all right to be called Daphne and demonstrate this by going out of their way to use her name at every available opportunity.

‘So you teach English, Daphne? And how do you find it, Daphne? Daphne, don’t you find the students are woefully
ignorant
and immensely stupid, Daphne? Of course it’s not their fault, Daphne, it’s their background, Daphne, and lack of
funding
, and poor housing, Daphne.’

Others say nothing but with a widening of the eyes, a tilt of the head and a sad smile they communicate their sympathy, no one deserves to be named Daphne. Students are the most honest. Some of them laugh out loud. The fourth response is, ‘Oh, how unusual!/ quaint!/ pretty!/ charming!’ Carol is one of these.

Please God don’t let Carol have a date this weekend, Daphne prays. She doesn’t know if she can stop from blurting the truth if Carol asks her what she and Donnie are up to this weekend. But God isn’t listening.

‘What are you and Donnie up to this weekend?’ Carol enquires.

It’s not even as if she’s actually interested. She only asks so that she can bum about what she’s up to. She can’t ask Jo or Magda, they’re married so they only cook, clean and get school uniforms ready. This is why she picks on Daphne.

‘Staying in. We’re just going to have a quiet weekend.’

The lie comes easily. Daphne doesn’t go red or cry. It’s not a lie,
she thinks, we are going to have a quiet weekend; me in my house alone and crying and Donnie in his house alone and off his head.

‘Again? Phew, your social life is a whirl.’

‘Donnie’s tired, he’s got a big project at work, he’s been
working
late, he…’

Daphne is beginning to make things up, her face is getting red, she can feel her throat get tight.

‘You know Daphne, you’re as bad as us,’ says Jo, ‘you might as well be married with kids.’

‘I’ve got to go to a dinner party,’ moans Carol. ‘No way out of it, Cynthia’s rescheduled twice already to accommodate everyone, I have to go.’

‘It can’t be that bad, getting your dinner made for you, sitting getting drunk, don’t have to wash the dishes or anything,’ says Magda. ‘I bet the food’ll be good too.’

‘Oh yes, I suppose so,’ says Carol in the bored voice she uses when she’s bumming. ‘She’s doing salmon. Caught it herself on one of these corporate days out with clients, she’s a manager with the Royal Bank. It weighs eighteen pounds apparently, some kind of company record. She’s an excellent cook but she’s had it in the freezer three weeks now. If she doesn’t cook it this weekend it’ll go off. I’ve no choice, I have to go.’

‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do Carol,’ says Jo kindly. They all know that Carol never does anything she doesn’t want to do.

‘Oh no but I have to, Cynthia’s got a bad leg.’

‘Sorry?’

‘One leg shorter than the other,’ Carol lowers her voice and patiently explains, ‘she was born that way, she’s handicapped. I couldn’t possibly refuse her invitation.’

‘Carol, she’s a bank manager with the strength to land an
eighteen
-pound salmon, she’ll take it on the chin if you cancel. Don’t be so bloody patronising, I thought you said she was a friend?’ says Daphne.

‘Oh! No doubt you’d tell her to stop bothering you with her gimpy leg and her rotten stinking fish but I’m not like you, Daphne.
And besides, it wouldn’t just be Cynthia I was letting down, she’s set me up with one of her friends.’

‘Aha! So now we come to the real reason why you’re going!’ says Magda, jumping in to the fray.

‘He’s a vet. Gerald, his name is.’

‘Where does he practice? Daphne could bring him her flying mice.’

‘Cynthia says he’s based in an abattoir.’

‘Oh, so he doesn’t do dogs and stuff, then?’ asks Jo, slightly disappointed.

‘No, not in an abattoir,’ explains Magda, who is a vegetarian, ‘he won’t do puppies or fluffy kittens. It’s a manky slaughterhouse where the animals are pissing and shitting themselves, knowing they’re about to be murdered.’

‘Magda, stop,’ says Daphne, ‘I’m feeling a bit rough.’

‘Where they queue to be murdered by a bolt through the brain and have their guts ripped out.’

‘Please,’ begs Daphne, ‘I’m going to heave.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ counters Carol, laughing, ‘he’s not a
murderer
, he’s a vet. Vets look after animals, he’s in Disease Control.’

‘Carol,’ says Magda, ‘wise up. Gerald’s job is to separate the terrified pissing shitting
healthy
animals from the terrified pissing shitting
diseased
ones.’

‘Still and all,’ says Jo, obviously impressed, ‘a vet.’

Another early morning phone call, another slippery dash from the shower, but this time Daphne gets there before the machine and something makes her hold back. It’s her mother; she was right to hesitate. Once again Mum is bright and breezy, chattering about her new home with Daphne’s big brother, Albee, and his wife and kids. Albert has converted his basement into her granny flat. She has her own kitchen and bathroom, her own air conditioning, which is just as well because she wouldn’t last ten minutes without
it, her own television although God knows she hasn’t had a chance to watch it she’s so busy with the kids and anyway Australian TV is so full of swearing, even the adverts, can Daphne believe that they actually allow swearing on the adverts?

Daphne smiles, she’s been so busy missing Donnie she hasn’t thought about missing Mum. She’s going to have to speak to her, but not now. She’ll wait until Donnie is well again, until they’re back together. Then she can laugh and gossip with Mum.

Daphne wakes the next morning in a hurry. It’s only quarter past four but she braces herself and puts the light on. Now she knows what she must do. She can’t believe it hasn’t occurred to her before now. While she was half dozing, running over and over again in her mind everything that has happened, something Donnie said hit her like an anvil.
You deserve better.

The significance of these words stir in Daphne a wave of pity for Donnie. He has spent his life unloved. He once told her that at school he was small, freckly, specky, smelly, bugsy, but worst of all, red-haired. A ginger nut, a carrot heid, a Bunsen burner, a ginguy. Nobody loves a ginger baby, he said, that’s why she gave him the nickname.

It’s so obvious to her now. The antidepressants have, for years, masked Donnie’s total lack of self-worth. You deserve better, that’s what he said.

She begins a letter.

At twenty past eight the letter is finally finished. She’s going to be late for work but it’ll be worth it. In the departmental office she smiles at the secretaries. She sets exercises for her class to do and while they’re busy she re-reads it. She’s not one hundred per cent sure about the last line, is it too possessive? Perhaps she should go with something a bit chirpier:
Catch yae Versace!
Or
See yah, wouldn’t want to be yah!

At the postbox, after she has kissed the envelope, her heart is pumping and her spine feels like jelly as her fingers enter the mouth of the box and then, no going back, lets it drop inside. Immediately
she feels better, a stout sense of having done the right thing. In years to come they’ll laugh about this. All she can do now is wait.

The next day she skips the Asda run in case he phones. It was a first class stamp so he should have received it. The day after that she also comes straight home, he’ll definitely have got it by now. The day after that she does just quickly nip into Asda because she’s run out of milk but she’s home in no time. The day after that is Saturday so if he doesn’t phone by lunchtime he’s not going to phone. On Sunday afternoon she phones him.

She can picture him lying in the bedroom with the blinds down. As she listens to the impotent
bring bring
of the unanswered phone, in her imagination she is in bed beside him, running her hand across his brow, brushing his hair from his face.

On Sunday night he phones her back.

‘Daphne, you phoned me.’

‘Yes, I…’

‘I know it was you. Don’t try and deny it. I checked 1471.’

‘What d’you mean, Donnie?’

‘Why did you phone me? What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing’s wrong, well, other than the fact that we’re apart. Did you get my letter?’

‘What letter?’

‘I sent you a letter. I posted it a couple of days ago. You should have got it by now.’

‘I haven’t opened any mail. Those neds found out it was me who squirted them with piss. They put a lit newspaper through my letter box.’

‘Oh my God Donnie, that’s terrible! Are you okay?’

‘Well it’s doing nothing for my nerves. But it’ll take more than a couple of neds to torch me. I’ve fitted a metal box on this side of the letter box. They can’t do any damage, the paper just burns itself out.’

Daphne had warned him there would be repercussions from the Super Soaker incident. She told him it would make him a target but now is not the time to say so. This kind of behaviour is all part of his illness, classic Donnie siege mentality.

‘Well, the letter is probably in there.’

‘You promised me you wouldn’t contact me.’

‘But Donnie, it doesn’t …’

‘Daphne, don’t pressure me. I’ve told you, I don’t know what could happen.’

‘I won’t pressure you, baby.’

‘You’d better not come round here, stalking me or becoming some sort of bunny boiler. I’ll get the police to you, don’t make me have to do that.’

‘Donnie. Calm down, pet. Just read the letter, eh? That’s all I wanted to say, just read it. And phone me when you’re feeling better. I miss you.’

‘Daphne, I’m not going to read it, you can’t make me.’

‘I’m not trying to make you, I just wanted to…’

‘And anyway, if they haven’t burnt it by now, I’m going to shred it. You think you know it all Daphne but you don’t, you just don’t know.’

‘I know, baby, I mean that I don’t know, of course I don’t, but it’s okay Donnie honestly, take your time. I won’t come round and I won’t phone you I promise.’

‘No, because I’ll get the police! I mean it.’

Daphne knows she can’t cry or respond to the threat; it will only intensify his hysteria.

‘Just get well, Donnie. I love you.’

But he has already hung up.

No matter how she looks at it, whatever spin she puts on it, the phone call did not go well. The thing about getting the police was shocking and under normal circumstances would be a horrible wounding thing to say but it’s the mention of the shredder which is the most upsetting. He’ll shred everything, shredding till his fingers bleed, feverishly shoving through her handmade valentine cards with the glued-on stars and tissue paper, the funny rhymes she made up, the photos, all their photos. He’ll slice their life into thin strips of rubbish for vermin to nest in.

Daphne is very good. Of course she worries constantly, but there really is nothing she can do. She’s angry and frustrated and
frightened
but mostly she’s lonely without him. It’s hard but she often reminds herself that if it’s this hard for her, how tough must it be for him? Paranoid, miserable, suffering alone. But if he can hack it so can she. At least in their separate pain they’re sharing the experience. Daphne doesn’t care how long it takes for him to get better, she’ll wait. At least when he gets better he’ll realise how much she loves him. She’ll have proved without a doubt her love and loyalty even unto letter-shredding and police-calling. He’ll see that despite everything she has waited for him, she hasn’t taken up with other men. Although she worries that he might have topped himself she resists the impulse to phone or call round; for two weeks she is really good. Then she sees him in Asda.

Her first instinct is to hide because he’ll think that she’s
stalking
him, that she’s become a bunny boiler after all. But then, this is the Partick Asda, the Asda he refuses to set foot inside for fear for bumping into his ex-wife, there’s no way he can accuse her of stalking him in here. He is coming towards her. He looks a changed man, the separation really has done him the world of good, he looks relaxed and he’s smiling as he walks towards her. And now he’s laughing, he hasn’t seen Daphne yet so who is he laughing with? Oh yes, now Daphne sees, he’s laughing with his ex-wife. He’s shopping and laughing with the woman he supposedly hasn’t spoken to in six years.