Nobody Loves a Ginger Baby by Laura Marney Read Free Book Online Page A

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 withloaded 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,