Nobody Loves a Ginger Baby (5 page)

Daphne is squeezing a pineapple, feeling its bottom for ripeness, when she hears his voice. It’s not so much that she hears his voice, more that she feels it, cutting through the supermarket sounds: the mumsy music of Radio Asda, a squeaky-wheeled trolley, the hum of the refrigeration cabinets, a wheedling child, a frazzled mother. Though he’s not speaking loudly, his voice blares at her like a factory hooter. She can’t pick out the words but she can tell from the tone he’s in a good mood. Bertha, his ex-wife, his
shopping
partner, is responding to what he’s saying, she’s cracking jokes too and Donnie is laughing.

Trapped here in the fruit aisle with Donnie and Bertha
advancing
on her, like in a bad dream, Daphne wants to move but is paralysed. This is too much information, too contradictory, it doesn’t make sense and if it did, its meaning would be dreadful. They haven’t seen her so they’re not avoiding her but they don’t make it as far as pineapples. Donnie turns left into dairy goods. Bertha had headed back to tomatoes. They have split up, working as a team, buying dinner together, in exactly the same way Daphne and Donnie buy dinner. Daphne knows his next stop will be the beer aisle.

She gets there before him, her mind working faster than she can properly think through. San Miguel is on a buy-one-get-
one-free
, he’ll go for that. She’s waiting for him when he turns into the aisle. His face lights with automatic polite recognition, as if he has unexpectedly bumped into a colleague or a distant cousin but realisation makes an ugly mask of his face. He shakes his head sadly, disappointed, Daphne has somehow let him down. She
tries to speak but her brain is not working in words, it’s trying to process what she’s seeing, trying to find some interpretation that will makes this acceptable.

Bertha walks up the aisle as, Daphne remembers, she has done once before. Donnie, staring hard at Daphne, puts out a hand to curb Bertha’s progress, to protect her from Daphne. From Daphne? Then he turns and walks briskly, resisting breaking into a run, out of the shop. Bertha, bemused but apparently understanding that something is wrong, takes a passive look at Daphne and follows him.

Daphne’s knees buckle. She falls on the floor below a pyramid of Asda own brand lager. A woman stops and looks at her.

‘Are you okay, hen?’

Daphne can’t answer, the power of speech has not returned. She tries to get to her feet but the shop is revolving around her. This is embarrassing, she thinks, people will think I’m an alcoholic.

‘Just stay where you are, hen, don’t try to stand up, I’ll get
somebody
.’

But she does try to stand up. She’s not making it and then she feels an arm around her ribs lifting her from behind. She is scooped up effortlessly. It is not entirely an unpleasant feeling. This fainting sensation is infinitely preferable to the sick panic she felt a moment ago.

A spotty youth with an Asda badge that identifies him as ‘Dale’ has returned with the woman. The person who has pulled her from the floor comes round in front of her and is dusting down her jacket. It’s Pierce. This strikes Daphne as funny, funny ha ha as well as funny peculiar that he should be in the shop at this time and see this.

‘It’s okay, I know her, she’s my neighbour, I’ll get her home.’

‘Are you sure?’ says Dale, more to Daphne than Pierce.

She nods weakly. Dale obviously thinks she’s mentally deficient. Daphne doesn’t mind being mentally deficient. She allows herself to be led outside by Pierce and marched to the front of the taxi queue. Calmly and authoritatively Pierce calls through the people standing patiently, their kiddy buggies dangerously top heavy with
loaded plastic bags, saying, ‘Emergency! Coming through!’ The crowd appear to take him for an undercover store detective who has arrested a mentally deficient shoplifter. This impression is strengthened when he puts his hand on her head and firmly ducks it as she enters the cab. Apart from Pierce giving the driver the address, neither of them speaks.

Pierce herds Daphne into the building and upstairs to her flat. She lets him take her handbag, dangling like a vestigial limb from her arm, and unlock the door. He guides her in then leaves. She stands in the middle of the room with her jacket on, not knowing what to do. Pierce has left the front door open but Daphne hasn’t the power to go and close it. Pierce returns with a bottle of
Glen-farclas
malt whisky and goes to the kitchen, returning with two glasses. He pours large ones for both of them. They sit. He doesn’t tell her to sit or to drink but she knows this is what she is supposed to do. After a few hesitant sips she gulps the whisky. As soon as her glass is empty he pours her another, another big one. She takes her time a bit more with this one. Pierce has still not said a word.

Daphne is getting used to the whisky. She knocks back the remains of her glass, ready for another. But Pierce doesn’t give her anymore. He takes the bottle under his arm, like a dockworker with a tabloid newspaper or a farmer with a pig, but Pierce is neither of these. Pierce is voluntarily unemployed, a work-shy lazy dole scrounger, a hash head, a mouse murderer, a cheat. Pierce takes his bottle of whisky and says,

‘That’ll give a you good sleep.’

He walks out, closing the front door softly behind him.

Oh yeah, thinks Daphne, a few slugs of whisky, a few miserable slugs, let me get a taste for it, let me know how sweet it can be, and then take it away from me. It’s the story of her life.

The phone rings. It’s Donnie. She can’t answer it; she won’t speak to him. There’s no way he can explain this away.

It isn’t him.

It’s her mum, again.

Mum’s voice is burbling down the Australian phone wire, right now it’s being beamed through the hot dusty Australian
atmosphere
,
through Australian air space, dodging Australian planes or maybe beaming right through them, maybe beaming right through the passengers as they pass, and into space, hitting the target, a giant saucer which bounces Mum’s burbly voice to other saucers in an interstellar game of rounders till it reaches the Scottish saucer, a big tartan one, which changes the trajectory and pitches Mum down, from the dark zero gravity of the cosmos through cold damp Scottish air space and Scottish planes and Scottish passengers and streets and wires and up through the building, past Pierce’s flat, and in through the wire in the hall through to the living room into the answering machine.

‘Hello Mum.’

‘Oh, you’re there. I was beginning to think you’d fled the country. Why d’you not answer your phone, Daphne?’

‘I do. I’ve answered.’

‘Anyway, everything okay at your end?’

‘Aye. Never better.’

‘Daphne, are you drunk?’

‘No, I’m just tired.’

‘You are so, I can hear it in your voice.’

‘Yeah, I’ve had a drink but I’m tired as well, I’ve been working really hard, that’s why I wasn’t here when you phoned. It’s the end of term; you know what it’s like.

‘Well get to your bed then, hen. Just so long as you’re okay. I worry about you. You’re so far away.’

‘No,
you’re
so far away.’

‘Och well, you know what I mean. Email me Daphne, I’m on hotmail, Albert set up an account for me. I’ll send you some
pictures
of the kids tomorrow, they’re a couple of wee smashers. Albert’s here, do you want a word?’

‘No Mum, actually I’m on my way out the door, going out tonight.’

It’s another five minutes before Daphne gets her mum off the phone. She holds the empty whisky glass over her face, like an oxygen mask, breathing in the fumes.

He quite literally bumped into her. On the Underground he had been strap-hanging but stood freestyle, legs wide for balance, just for a second, to put his ticket in his pocket. In that second the train jolted and launched him into her arms.

He didn’t even have to see her face to know it was her. Her fleeting embrace, more to protect herself than to catch him, was so sweetly familiar it made him want to cry. Her perfume, no, it wasn’t even perfume, it was her smell, the smell that no other woman had, smelled like home. The atmosphere around her seemed to be vibrating, like jungle drums beating out a message that only he could understand:
yes, this is right, yes, this is right.

Up until that moment he hadn’t even seen her on the train. They were only a few feet from each other but on the Underground in the morning rush hour no one looked at anyone else. Not even their ex-wives. He wouldn’t have spotted the woman that he’d worked with and dated, and slept with, and fallen in love with, and married, and bought his first car with, and developed a drinking problem with, and fought with and whose CDs he’d smashed and photos he’d ripped, the woman he’d divorced.

If he hadn’t put his ticket in his pocket at just that moment, or if he’d fallen to the left on to the fat man on the other side of the carriage, his life, and her life, and Daphne’s life, would have gone on exactly the same.

The train was so noisy it was pointless trying to speak. He mouthed the word ‘sorry’ and she nodded her acceptance. It was just as easy as that. Sorry for all the shit, the tantrums and paranoia, sorry for the ugly angry stuff, sorry for divorcing you, sorry I was
ever stupid enough to walk away, sorry.

Okay, forget it, she nodded.

She looked so much older. Fifteen years ago, on their
honeymoon
, lying in bed chatting, too tired for sex, she’d asked if he would still love her when she developed jowls like her mother and a sagging turkey neck like her TV star aunty. He said he could hardly wait, that he’d probably love her best when she was old. Then she couldn’t leave him for someone handsome; she’d have to depend on him not leaving her. Looking at her now, at 8.15am without the benefit of soft lighting or make up, there was no disguising the gravitational pull and weight of the years. And it was true; he loved her. What must she see when she looked at him?

Though he was eight years younger than Bertha, the clock was running at the same rate for everyone. He was not ageing well; he knew it. It wasn’t his fault; it wasn’t as though he didn’t try. He didn’t smoke, he tried to eat healthily and played football twice a week, but he couldn’t fight his genes. Donnie came from a long line of wasters: puny disease-prone alcoholic smokers, generations who had abused their lungs and livers and hearts. When members of his family died, from their heart attack/ stroke/ cancer – one or two of his bad boy uncles had the hat-trick – nobody paid
inheritance
tax. There was no estate to be fought over. They bestowed the only thing they had: their sorry DNA. His dad was barely fifty and fucked with the fags and drink. They were a family neither blessed with good health nor longevity. As far back as they could tell no male member had made it past their 63rd birthday. That’s why Donnie so resented the compulsory pension scheme at work; he would never live to see it.

He was mortified to be caught wearing this jacket. It was
functional
: wind and waterproof, but it was nothing to look at. Daphne hated it and called it his Postman Pat anorak. He resolved to bin it as soon as he got home that night.

Bertha wished she had written down what the spey wife said, the exact words. It was something along the lines of
I see falling, a man, the man who left your life is falling.
Bertha had thought at the time, had fervently hoped, that she was talking about Charlie, her boyfriend of the last three years who’d left for a job in Dublin. Charlie couldn’t get to Dublin quick enough. He’d only phoned twice in three months although she phoned him all the time. Bertha would have given up calling him after the first month but for what the spey wife had said. Charlie didn’t ask Bertha to come with him or invite her to visit, not even for the weekend. He seemed to like it when she called but talked less and less about what he was doing. As if it wasn’t any of her business. If Charlie ever did fall for her he quickly recovered his feet. He was not in love with her now, and Bertha doubted that he ever had been. If he didn’t already have another girlfriend he was working on it. Bertha’s hopes and memories of Charlie were dimming. As things stood, there was no way he was coming back.

But maybe the spey wife had been right after all. This, seeing Donnie like this, was pure destiny. She’d lost her purse the day before and ended up staying the night at her friend Bunty’s. If she hadn’t lost her purse, her ex-husband, a man who had left her life, would not have fallen, just as the spey wife predicted, into her arms. And his timing was perfect.

After a few glasses of wine with Bunty last night they had
discussed
it and Bertha had made up her mind that she wasn’t going to call Charlie again. She wasn’t going to call Charlie and she wasn’t going to invest any more time in men. Coming from an accounting background, Bertha realised sadly that the three years she’d spent on Charlie, at this time in her life, had a high opportunity cost.

Three years ago she could, just, get away with going out
looking
for men. They’d called it ‘sharking expeditions’ and Bunty and Bertha had made an effective team. Not terribly successful, Bunty had yet to land a catch that didn’t wriggle off the hook after three or four dates, but they were an effective team nonetheless.

They entered a bar and swept through, checking out the talent. Where there was none, they moved on. Where there was
potential
, they positioned themselves downstream of the gents’ toilet. They drank diet alcopops with their thumbs as stoppers to avoid getting spiked. They drank too much, which helped embolden their dancing, they giggled when lads chatted them up or made jokes they didn’t get. They didn’t need to go to the toilet to discuss things, they had a code for when they wanted to escape losers, when they wanted to swap men, when one or both had pulled. But at the end of the day, after three dates or three years, they all wriggled off the hook.

Last night Bertha had decided that she was too old and too tired to resume sharking. Now, in a bar, standing shoulder to shoulder amongst girls of twenty with flawless naked legs and faces, she’d feel like a pensioner. Bunty and Bertha agreed it was time to grow old gracefully. There had been no shame in their sharking, nature dictated that men and women should find a mate and drove them to it, but nature no longer had such a hold on them.

If Bertha was honest, she’d never really liked sex anyway. She did it though, she had to, and she tried to enter into the spirit of the thing but she found all the huffing and puffing faintly preposterous. She often felt cheered up after sex, not because it had been so great, but because it would be at least a week or so until she’d have to do it again. And anyway, there were too many diseases out there, too many men who wanted it without a condom, too many with weird ideas, who wanted it more than once a week, who grabbed on to her all through the night, who snored or smelled or farted in bed.

It was time to settle down, to accept that married life was not going to be her lot. She had a career and a few good friends; she’d take up a hobby, go to night classes, make friends with her neighbours. Bunty and Bertha even discussed getting a pup, one between them, one they could share the costs and responsibilities of. Puppies were ideal for exercising and companionship and home security if you got a big one. They were tremendous icebreakers with strangers. The more wine they consumed, the more Bertha relished the idea of taking up voluntary work, something green.
They giggled as they went through the relative merits of joining a local Crimestoppers vigilante squad, or a church. Last night Bertha made up her mind that if she couldn’t get a husband she’d get
community
, and a dog. And then Donnie fell into her lap.

Pierce pours a beer, gets comfy on the couch, sparks up a joint and then dials the number. This is his one extravagance of the week, an expensive long-distance call to the island.

Ever since he can remember he has spent his summers with Aunt Bernie and Uncle Sean at their cottage on a remote island. They don’t have kids of their own. Pierce’s parents, aware of Sean and Bernie’s painful situation, used to rent him out to them as a summer holiday surrogate son. No money changed hands but the boy always came back with a new school uniform and lots and lots of clean white pants and socks. And every August when Sean reluctantly returned him to his parents, Pierce seethed for weeks. Why did he have to come back to Glasgow? Why couldn’t he stay on the island with Uncle Sean and Auntie Bernie? Even now he could never understand why Bernie made him go back when she cried so hard each time he left.

‘Bernie? How you doing?’

‘Aye, I’m fine, son, I’m fine.’

Bernie and Sean always call him son. Since he was a child, and now, as a fully grown man, whenever he visits, Bernie shows him off around the village saying, ‘ah look, I have my big boy back again,’ and Pierce pretends to be embarrassed.

‘And yourself, son, how’s the writing going?’

Bernie always tries this diversionary tactic but it never works.

‘Aye, I’m grand too, Bernie, but what did the doctor say?’

Pierce knows she doesn’t want to talk about it, she never does. He doesn’t want to talk about it either but her visit to the specialist on the mainland was this week’s big event and must be
acknowledged
. It seems callous to phone and not ask.

‘Och, the usual, a lot of gobbledegook. He’s increased my
medication
, as if I’ve not got enough bloody medicine to take. Honest to God, Pierce, I’m on more pills than Elvis!’

This makes both of them laugh. As usual she’s kept it light but it’s what she’s not saying that quickly sobers Pierce. If there were any good news she would have told him.

‘I tell you what though; getting a hurl in that air ambulance was brilliant. The whole pub turned out to see the helicopter landing on the beach.’

‘Did they let Sean go with you?’

‘Oh aye, there’s no show without Punch. Your Uncle Sean won’t let me off the island without him, he’s scared I’ll run away with a big black man!’

‘Well, I can understand that, I wouldn’t put it past you,
Bernadette
.’

‘Oh you, you cheeky monkey, you’re not too big for a slap, you know.’

Aye, but I’m too far away, you’ll need to scramble your helicopter to get me. Unless you want me to come over,’ Pierce says. He says it ever week, always dressed up in a jokey way.

‘Och, don’t be silly, I’ve told you, wait till I’m better and come over in the good weather.’

He knows why she won’t let him come: Sean has told him that she’s embarrassed by her illness, her weight loss, her lack of energy. She’s bad tempered and doesn’t want him to see her like this, she’s irritated by her incapacity, annoyed about everyone fretting, angry in the face of their sympathy, guilty that Sean and Pierce feel so helpless. He’s promised Sean that he won’t put any pressure on her; he’ll let her deal with it her own way. Pierce knows all this but it still stings, and he just wants to see her.

‘You just stay there and get on with the writing.’

‘I am, I’m getting on great with it, Bernie.’

‘Good for you, son. Don’t let that guy in the job centre, what do you call him again?’

‘Eh, I don’t know Bernie, Employment Advisor?’

‘No, I mean his name. What was it again?’

She addresses the question to Pierce but Sean also likes to take part in these weekly conference calls. Pierce can hear him behind her, probably in his chair facing away from her: eyes glued to the telly, ears glued to their conversation. He’s mumbling something.

‘That’s it, Hugh Jorgen. Where did he get a name like that, is he a foreigner?’

‘I’m not sure.’

Pierce can’t hear but he can visualise Sean sniggering at his little prank.

‘Anyway, don’t let that Mr Jorgen push you into some dead-end job, you’re an artist, Pierce, sooner or later they’ll recognise that, your time is coming, I can see that from your work.’

A flush of pride and gratitude suffuses Pierce when he hears this. Bernie and Sean are the only people in his family, the only people he knows, who refer to his
work
.

‘But I’m still waiting for the rest of that book you were writing, what happened? And don’t bother telling me it’s in the post.’

‘No, no, I’m cracking on with that now. I’ll send it over the minute it’s finished. I’ve been a bit busy this week. Some people have been talking to me about a new magazine, they want me as the editor.’

‘See? What did I tell you? Sean, they’ve asked him to be an editor on a magazine!’

‘Bloody brilliant,’ says a voice strained through the telly noise.

That’s bloody brilliant your uncle says,’ Bernie tells him
unnecessarily
. ‘Now, let’s get down to business, young man, have you got yourself a nice girlfriend yet?’

Tactical error, thinks Pierce, shouldn’t have mentioned the editor job.

‘I’ve a lot of nice girlfriends, Bernie.’

‘I’m not talking about those women you pick up, what d’you call them?’

Pierce hears Sean make a muffled contribution.

‘Slappers. I’m not talking about them, surely you’ve had your fill of them by now Pierce, have you not?’

‘Aye, thanks, I can’t complain. I had fifteen slappers up here last
night. Well, to tell you the truth, two of them weren’t fully
qualified
, they were just wee slapperettes.’

‘I don’t want to know what goes on!’ Bernie squeals in mock disgust.

‘Ripping my clothes off they were, they couldn’t get enough of me.’

‘Well I hope they formed an orderly queue. And was any of them wife material?’