Nobody Loves a Ginger Baby Read Online Free PDF Page A

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