Nobody Loves a Ginger Baby (8 page)

Pierce remembers his dismay when, as soon as she came back, she began talking about their next trip as though it would be
happening
soon. She tried to buy another Hoover but the special offer had finished and was never repeated. Her kitchen cupboards became filled with unlabelled tins and cut up breakfast cereal
packets
as she enthusiastically entered competition after competition to win another trip to New York. It never happened. And then she became ill.

‘You shouldn’t have done it, Pierce son,’ she berates him. ‘That book must have cost a fortune; you can’t afford stuff like that. It’s not even my birthday or anything.’

‘Och, it was nothing, Bernie.’

It was an expensive book, even for Oxfam, and in pristine
condition
.

‘Well, that was very kind of you son, greatly appreciated, wasn’t it, Sean? Sean says greatly appreciated too. But anyway, what’s going on? Why are you phoning on a Saturday night?’

For some strange reason Daphne wakes up in a good mood. She’s had a lovely dream and lies enjoying the rare sensation of joy for a few moments before reality must inevitably kick her in the teeth. The dream reminds her of a day when she and Donnie went to the beach and she manages to extend the pleasurable sensation by re-running in her mind that perfect day.

It was that deliciously uncommon luxury, a hot day in the
Highlands
, and they had the green-blue of the water and the vast expanse of virgin sand all to themselves. Donnie was agitated because Daphne wanted to strip off there and then. Someone, somewhere, with a long-range lens, perhaps hiding in the marshy clumps of heather that stretched for miles behind them, might try to take photos of Daphne’s big white naked arse.

But he couldn’t stop her once she was in the water. Squealing like a teenager, she pulled the wet sticky costume off and swung it above her head. She jumped and dived, white arse up and over, imagining herself a mermaid. The chill of the air and the water on her naked skin excited her and excited Donnie too. The salty water didn’t inhibit her lady juice, it made it thicker, more slippery. Daphne tugged at his shorts and, reasoning that the photographer’s lens – high-powered though it may be – couldn’t record their underwater shenanigans, Donnie let her. As the shorts floated at his side Daphne fumbled between his legs and, just to scare him, pushed him from behind.

‘Up periscope!’ she laughed as his cock and belly broke the surface. As they discovered, the water supported any number of positions, some romantic, some erotic and some just plain silly. It
was a wonderful day. Daphne will never do sea sex again, she’ll never do any kind of sex again. She is old now. And her brief joy melts away.

The first leaf on the tree has opened. Actually at least six of them are open but only one is within reach of her window. The spring sunshine lights their new green like traffic lights, green for go.

Daphne loves spring. Every year she celebrates the end of winter by taking part in every spring ritual she can think of and makes up some of her own. She vigorously cleans the house and packs away her cheery red and green winter cushion covers, replacing them with lilac and pale yellow ones. On Pancake Tuesday she makes pancakes, getting the ready-mixed stuff at Asda and
ambitiously
flipping large floppy undercooked dods of batter around the kitchen. She buys daffodils and hyacinths and plants them in bright yellow plastic pots. She paints boiled eggs and gives them out to her students; she bakes hot cross buns for the staff. And every year for the past five years, she has made a ceremonial present of the first new leaf off the tree for Donnie.

This year she has done none of these things. It’s half past three in the afternoon and Daphne isn’t dressed yet. Unwashed and unconcerned for personal hygiene, she slobs around in her nightie and purple dressing gown. Spring has sprung and she’s missed it. The season has started without her.

Now he’s living the dream. Now Pierce McCormack is a bona fide editor.
Pierce McCormack,
it’ll say on the inside cover,
Editor
. He and Tam, at a business meeting over several pints, have just settled on the title
Poyumtree
. Pierce thinks this name indicates the edgy, experimental unpretentious nature of their publishing policy. Tam is to be production manager, advertising exec, circulation manager and assistant ed.

Pierce is sick of knockbacks from wanks who graduated from posh English universities and don’t get what he’s about. Or they do get what he’s about and it scares them. Either way, he isn’t one
of their clique and they refuse to publish him. But
Poyumtree
will. No more email submissions to slush piles that never get read, no more expensive photocopying, mailing and fruitlessly waiting, no more sipping vinegar wine at shitey readings, pretending to laugh at the obscure literary jokes made by hairy-faced, elbow-patched, Arts Council-funded wanks. They’ll schmooze
him
now.

Except he’s not sure how he’s going to fit it all in. Pierce
McCormack
is a busy man. He’s not one for lying in bed wasting the day, usually he’s up for at least nine or half nine but by the time he faffs about the house it’s time to go to the gym. He freely acknowledges himself to be a man of poetry, intellect, dreams, ideas and
philosophy
but this shouldn’t and doesn’t, preclude the corporeal. In the gym he loves the feeling of circumspectly, successfully, returning the weight to the bar, the sweet, relaxing, muscle tiredness. Through all the sweating and grunting he knows the tears in the muscles will repair and get bigger, make him stronger. And anyway, he enjoys sweating and grunting. It’s a good way to work up a thirst.

He likes all kinds of sweat, for instance the sweat that breaks out on his top lip and forehead with a good vindaloo contrasting with the freezing fizz of the lager in his throat. He loves the gulab jamin and ice cream and coffee and After Eight mints. Pierce’s dad has retired and, for the price of his company, the old man often meets him and treats him to a businessman’s lunch at the Indian.

Sometimes, as Pierce rarely cooks, he just buys a big healthy bag of fruit, but more often than not he’ll be so hungry by the time he leaves the pub that he’ll need a Big Mac or a sausage supper. That’s why he has to go to the gym. What with the curries and the big Macs and the pints, if he didn’t train, he’d have to cart his belly around in a wheelbarrow.

The other kind of sweat Pierce likes is the kind to be had from a right good sex sesh. Because he has such a hairy chest he sweats a lot in the act of making love to a lady. But it’s not only on his head that he’s losing hair. With a bit of energetic
up and down
he sheds hair like nobody’s business. The girl he shagged the other night ended up with almost as much chest hair as he had. She looked like Tarzan by the time they were finished. She was nice, she said
she liked muscles on a man and a hairy chest and she never
mentioned
the bald patch. It’s a pity she was married. Pierce started a piece about her. He’s working on a collection of romantic poems, writing one for every girl he humps. It’s called
For all the Girls I’ve Loved Before
. He thinks it’s a pretty good title but he can’t help thinking that he’s heard it somewhere else. It could be
Poyumtree’
s inaugural publication. But he needs time to write.

Pierce has always to guard his RAT time, his reading and thinking time; so many demands are made upon him. He’s always scooshing about like a burst hose. He feels duty bound to attend readings and book launches, even where there are few networking opportunities there is usually free drink and ladies to be pulled. If it’s not business meetings with Tam or lunch with his dad, it’s Wednesday night Poets and Pints, or Thursday afternoon reading group or the gym or the fucking buroo.

The buroo is getting to be real nuisance. Not content with him signing on every bloody week, now they want him to attend some stupid Restart interview. They’re threatening to stop his money and he’s running out of strategies. It was okay when Miss McLaren was in charge of his case. She’d haul him in at some ungodly hour in the morning for one of her wee chats but he’d show her some phoney job applications along with a haiku he’d written for her and she was quite happy. And quite fit for a woman of fifty. He would have given her one but Pierce feared it would spoil their
professional
relationship. As it turned out, he missed his chance because Miss McLaren was transferred. Now he has some hairy-arsed hot shot with the unshakeable belief that everyone is employable. The guy actually had the cheek to ask Pierce if he was embarrassed to be living off the state. Pierce replied that the state would have no problem living off him when the time came; taking fifty per cent of his income in taxes once his book was published.

As he turns the corner into the street Pierce is preoccupied with how he can get this guy off his case and get on with the work of being a poet. He has a Restart appointment with him tomorrow morning. It’s not going to be easy, the guy is a fucking terrier. Then he sees Daphne, her purple goonie cracking in the sharp spring
wind. At first he thinks she must be washing the windows, she always does mad things at this time of year. He stops and watches her for a moment. She’s just sitting there. There’s no sign of
cleaning
; she hasn’t got a cloth or water or anything. Then it dawns on him. Oh no, the stupid depressive cow is trying to top herself.

‘Daphne!’

She looks up but only gives him one of her ‘you’re-shit-
on-my
-shoe’ stares.

‘Daphne, stop!’

She doesn’t even look at him this time. Ah fuck her, he thinks, but it only lasts a second. He can’t bear the idea of Daphne, of anyone, splattered all over the pavement.

He takes the stairs two at a time. His heart is pumping, he’s buzzing with excitement. Pierce has been waiting all his life for this moment, the moment when he saves someone’s life. She’s not really going to kill herself. He’s going to talk her down. Pierce is the best man for the job. He, better than anyone, can explain to her how beautiful life is. As a poet he does it every day.

This is going to be all over the papers.
POET RESCUES
SUICIDE
. ‘Pierce’s poetry saved my life’ says local woman.
They’ll be queuing up to offer him a publishing deal. He’ll need an agent, a London agent. It’s a pity Daphne doesn’t smoke because he could give her a fag and when she leans in for a light he could grab her and pull her to safety.

He rattles her letter box and immediately sees that this is stupid, she’s on the window ledge, she’s hardly likely to answer the door. He’ll have to break it down. He rams his shoulder into the door. It’s fucking sore and the door doesn’t give an inch. The hot flush of excitement is quickly cooling to fear. What if he’s too late? That selfish cow better wait. He steps back along the corridor and takes a run at it, bracing himself for the pain. He rushes at the door with all the energy and life force that Daphne is about to squander.

The door opens. But Pierce’s energy and life force is
irresistible
. It carries him on, past Daphne, along the hall until it meets an immoveable object, the inside wall. The pain in his shoulder makes him shake from the inside out. Pierce slides down the wall whimpering as Daphne stands over him.

‘Pierce, what the hell are you doing? Are you drunk?’

Pierce can’t reply. He’d like to reply, he’s like to tell the fucking bitch… but he can’t, the pain in his shoulder is demanding all of his attention.

‘Are you okay?’

Obviously he’s not fucking okay. He’s lying in her hallway in
excruciating
agony but it’s just like Daphne to ask a question like that.

‘Can you stand? Here, let me help you.’

Help from Daphne is the last thing Pierce wants. Not only has she spoiled his chances of a publishing deal, now she’s made him break his shoulder.

‘Have you hurt yourself?’

Duh! He thinks.

‘Hmmm,’ he nods.

‘You need to sit down, your face is chalk white. Come into the living room.’

Stand up, sit down
, the bitch is torturing him, but he lets her lead him into the living room. When he goes to sit down a new even sorer pain starts up. He has to go to the hospital.

‘Daphne, phone an ambulance,’ he whispers hoarsely, he can’t feel or move his right arm.

‘Pierce…’

‘I’ve broken my fucking shoulder. Would you please just phone an ambulance?’

‘Really? You’ve broken your shoulder?’

Pierce means to just say ‘yeah’ manfully, but he’s nodding his head and it’s coming out like a baby’s cry.

‘Oh for God’s sake! What the hell were you playing at, running in here like a madman?’

This is too much. Indignation gives Pierce his voice back.

‘What the hell was I playing at? What the fucking hell were
you
playing at, Miss Hanging Off The Windowsill? Miss
Melodrama
? Miss I’ve Been Chucked And Life’s Not Worth Living? Miss, Miss…!’

‘I
was not
hanging off the windowsill! I was sitting on it. And I most certainly
was not
trying to kill myself; I can’t believe you thought that.’

They sit in silence for a moment, Pierce wanting only that she’ll make the call. He doesn’t give a shit anymore what she was doing.

‘No, actually, sorry. I can. Yes, I suppose someone who’s been a bit fed up, sitting on a window ledge, it might look bad, but honestly, I was only trying to get a leaf from the tree, that’s all I was doing.’

‘A leaf from the tree?’

‘Yeah, I do it every year, I pick the first leaf and give… er, I … That’s why you were banging the door, you were trying to save me.’

Pierce nods. Now she gets it, now she’ll phone.

‘Oh God, I’m so sorry, Pierce.’

Daphne comes towards him and takes his head in her hands. Pierce has never noticed before what nice bouncy tits Daphne has. He’s sure she never had them before, he would have noticed. Despite her purple goonie he has a great view from this angle.

‘Just phone, Daphne, please? And get me the strongest
painkillers
you’ve got.’

‘Pierce, I feel really awful about this. That was a wonderful thing you tried to do, even if you did get the wrong end of the stick. I’m so sorry you’re hurt and I really, really, appreciate you trying to help.’

Pierce nods, accepting her thanks graciously. She really does have a lovely pair.

‘But they’re not going to send an ambulance, not for a broken shoulder. That’s classed as a non-emergency.’

‘I’ve broken my shoulder! I’m in pain here!’

‘I know you are Pierce and I’m really sorry.’

‘This
is
an emergency, I need pain relief and I need it now.’

‘The hospital won’t see it like that. Look, I’ll phone a taxi, I’ll pay for it. I’m very grateful for what you tried to do. You can’t take anything, not even an aspirin, they might have to operate if the fracture is complicated. They have to see you first. And…

‘And? And what?’

Pierce gives an involuntary shiver.

‘I think you should brush you teeth.’

‘Eh?’

‘If they smell the drink off you they’ll assume the worst and leave you waiting. I know, I’ve heard this story a hundred times from my students, trust me.’

Pierce has gone quiet. Really he would like to cry. They might have to operate. And they’re going to make him wait just because he’s had a few pints. They’ll treat him like he’s a jakey and have no respect and do a shoddy job or let students practise on him. They might put metal pins in him. If things go wrong anything could happen. He can’t move it now, what if he loses the use of it? He’ll be left with a useless withered thing. Disability might raise his poetry profile but for fuck’s sake! Really he would like to cry.

‘Will you come with me, Daphne?’

Daphne is at the window every time she hears a car pull up. Pierce has been gone four hours. She feels guilty about not going with him but she wasn’t dressed. Dressed or not, it was the least she could have done for the poor guy. In between running to the window she makes a pot of camomile tea. Normally this relaxes her but with every sip a wave of self-loathing breaks over her and makes her back sticky with sweat.

The leaf is too far out of reach anyway. But even if she could reach it, what would she do with it? Take it to Donnie? And that would make everything alright? She should have gone with Pierce to the hospital; she owes him. Pierce, stupid and irritating as he is, rescued her in Asda and broke his shoulder thinking he was saving her from suicide.

On the windowsill she
had
thought about suicide. But only for a moment, less than a moment, a fraction of a millisecond. From a sitting position it would be easy just to slide forward a bit, lift her
bum, until her weight carried her off the ledge and down, flying through the air. It would be a short flight. Three seconds max, she reckoned, before impact.

It would be a messy business, her body burst like a melon. She wouldn’t make a pretty corpse but this appealed to Daphne’s sense of the dramatic: all the more sickening for Donnie to look upon. She wouldn’t oblige as a beautiful Ophelia, she’d make for him an ugly distorted thing, a pile of slimy cartilaginous muck, no longer recognisably human.

With such extensive damage putrefaction would be all the quicker, but this wasn’t a bad thing. Apart from a bit of theatre at the funeral Daphne didn’t want to hang around in earthly form. Compared with her constant exhausting state of anxiety the Big Sleep was an attractive option.

But then there was no guarantee that he would show up at the funeral. And if he did, would he bring the wife? Surely not, that would be the final insult. Apart from in Asda she had never even met the woman, never been introduced. And anyway, even if he didn’t bring her she’d certainly comfort him when he came home. It might bring them closer together. She’d kiss him and reassure him that he mustn’t blame himself. Once he’d shed a few tears and she’d made him a nice cup of tea they’d realise that perhaps it was for the best. Poor Daphne was obviously crazy.

And Mum would have to come back from Australia. She couldn’t afford that kind of expense, she’d only just gone. And Albee, he’d probably come with her, he’d want to support Mum. She’d be gutted; she’d blame herself. Mum would think that because she went to live in Australia with Albee’s young family that Daphne’s suicide was her fault. And the death of a child, an only daughter, especially by suicide, would be a terrible thing to live with.

Daphne might not have anything to live for but she had
something
to live with. Something keeping her wrath warm. She just had to wait. If it meant she had to be alone and miserable, then she could do it; Daphne was tough. Some of her students, members of Alcoholics Anonymous, had a saying for when things weren’t going well:
this too shall pass.
This was going to pass; nature would have
to run its course. And then anything could happen, life was full of opportunities. That’s why when Daphne heard Pierce banging and demanding to be let in she got off the windowsill and opened the door.

Daphne can’t believe how chirpy he is. When he got out of the taxi he looked up and waved, gave her the thumbs up with his good arm. The other one was in plaster. He really had broken his shoulder.

She stood at her front door and called to him and, happy as a sandboy, he passed his own door and came up to meet her.

‘Right, get the kettle on, Daffers, wounded man in need of a cuppa. Not unless you’ve any of that quality whisky left?’

‘I think you’re better off with tea, Pierce. You were an awful long time, what happened?’

‘Well as you can see, I’m up to my neck in plaster.’

‘Is it sore?’

‘What d’you think? Fractured humerus, nasty.’

‘What did you tell them? I hope you didn’t say you were
rescuing
me from suicide.’

‘Well I had to tell them something. I wasn’t going to be treated like a jakey. Don’t worry, I didn’t mention your name.’

‘Cheers.’

‘Actually the nurses were really nice, and dead chuffed that I
managed
to talk you down. I’m a hero. No wonder they call them angels, they couldn’t do enough for me. There’s something about a
handsome
man in plaster that seems to bring out the mother in them.’

Pierce gingerly eases himself into a chair and puts his feet on the coffee table. Daphne says nothing but goes to the kitchen and makes tea. By the time she comes back he has worked out the remote control for the telly and is watching a re-run of
The Sweeney.

‘Be a love and stick two sugars in that for me, would you?’

Daphne is putting the sugars in while Pierce leans over
awkwardly
to reach the biscuits. She gave him a twenty for the taxi, the
only money she had in her purse. There and back would have cost him eight quid tops but he hasn’t mentioned giving her change.

‘Unfit for work, I’m afraid. All I can do is rest it.’

‘Well, that’ll be a wee change for you.’

‘Now Daphne, no need for sarcasm. I’m quite looking forward to seeing that git’s face at the Restart interview tomorrow.’

‘How long will you be in plaster?’

‘Who knows? Months anyway. I’ve to go back in three weeks and they’ll look at it.’

Daphne has the sinking feeling that she is going to be lumbered with him, that he’ll milk this for as long as he possibly can.

‘Totally starving, man. Being a hero gives a man an appetite. Any scran in the house?’

‘By scran I take it you mean food?’

‘You’ve got it Daphne, food, sustenance. A wee steak or maybe a chop, my body needs protein and calcium and stuff to repair, I need fed.’

‘All I’ve got is soup.’

‘Homemade or tinned?’

‘Homemade.’

‘Mmmm, lovely. Haven’t had real soup for ages, bring it on, Daffers. Oh but, see before you do, I’ve got to pee, I don’t know how I’ll manage, you wouldn’t mind…’

Pierce levers himself out of the chair and stands in front of her, his crotch at Daphne’s eye level. He seems to be waiting for her to unfasten his zip.

‘What’s wrong with your other hand?’

‘It’s just that it’s a bit awkward.’

‘Take a flying fuck to yourself, Pierce. I’ll give you soup but there’s no way I’m touching your fly.’

Pierce shrugs and turns towards the toilet. ‘Worth a try.’