Nobody Loves a Ginger Baby Read Online Free PDF Page B

batter and was dipping everything in it: the lollo russo, vine-ripened cherry tomatoes, radicchio, Parmesan shavings, the lot. It tasted disgusting but this morning I found myself battering my Rice Krispies and throwing them in the chip pan, I’m obsessed, doctor, I even tried to deep-fry my mobile phone! You’ve got to help me, please.’
    ‘I know exactly what’s wrong with you.’
    ‘Oh thank God, doctor, what is it?’
    ‘You’re frittering your life away.’
    Daphne doesn’t know whether he gets the emails, he never replies.
    She wonders if she’s frittering her life away.

Chapter 4
    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