The baby proved he had his full complement of Rafferty genes because this time he sucked the laced milk with a true toper's enthusiasm. Five minutes' later, congratulating himself on his babysitting skills, a blissfully peaceful Rafferty, thankfully, with an even more blissfully sleeping baby in his arms, slumped back on the settee. Game, set and match to me, I think, he told the now sleep-smiling baby triumphantly.
Rafferty decided he deserved something soothing even more than the baby did. And after two large ones he was feeling pleasantly relaxed. Wary of carrying the baby upstairs to his cot in case the jarring disturbed him, Rafferty eased him into the carrycot and put him in the dark and quiet of the kitchen before he sneaked on tiptoe back to the living room. He turned the volume down before turning on the TV and was just in time to catch the beginning of the film on Channel Five.
He settled down to watch, but after twenty minutes, he concluded the film wasn't one of their better offerings and decided that his rumbling stomach was more deserving of attention.
A chip butty was in order, he thought as he crept into the darkened kitchen. He didn't want to put on the light and so disturb the mercifully sleeping baby, but he needed to find the chip pan. He lit the gas and, using the illumination this provided, he looked around his sister's small kitchen for the chip pan; he found it on a high shelf above the cooker.
He dragged a stool out from under the kitchen table, climbed up and reached for the pan. It was only as he tugged at the chip pan that he realised something was lodged on top of it, which his tugging at the chip pan sent flying.
Fearing a clatter that would awaken the sleeping baby, Rafferty essayed a pirouette, à le Rudolph Nureyev in his heyday. Alas – not being a Nureyev, heyday or otherwise – he not only missed the flying pan lid, but managed – with the fear uppermost in his mind of landing on the sleeping baby – to somehow twist his body in mid-air and land chest-first on the still-burning gas ring.
Smouldering, with the smell of burnt hair and roasted flesh wafting up his nostrils, Rafferty winced and turned off the gas. After checking that, by some miracle, the baby still slept, he rushed upstairs and, for the second time that evening, washed off the damage under his sister's shower.
It was only after the sting of the burns on his chest began to wane under the cold water that the uneasy certainty struck him that the shirt he had earlier so cavalierly borrowed from Frank's wardrobe had been his brother-in-law's favourite. Now, between burn holes and baby shit, it was completely ruined.
As Rafferty dried himself, put his clothes back on and borrowed another shirt from his brother-in-law's fast diminishing wardrobe, he wondered what excuse he could come up with for the burnt offerings that constituted Frank's favourite shirt.
It was only much later than evening as he heard the key in the door and knew that his sister, Frank and Gemma had returned, that he realised coming up with a believable excuse for the funeral pyre he had made of Frank's best shirt was beyond him. It would be better for his brother-in-law to think the shirt had made one of those mysterious bids for freedom to which laundry was prone, he thought, as he stuffed it to the bottom of the carrier bag beneath his New Man baby-sitting book of wisdom.
Gemma, all starry-eyed and even more in love with the lead singer of the boy band suffered a rush back to reality when Rafferty told her the baby was sound asleep in the kitchen.
‘Oh, Uncle Joe,’ she complained, as Rafferty's acrobatically gained and heroic burns stung afresh and unsung. ‘Why didn't you put him to bed?’
‘I was frightened of disturbing him once I'd got him off,’ he defensively explained.
Gemma pulled a face. ‘That means I'll have to do it. I bet he'll wake up and not go off again.’
'Don't be so ungrateful, Gemma,' Maggie admonished her pouting daughter. 'Your uncle Joe was good enough to baby-sit so you could go out. I think you should be thanking him rather than moaning at him.'
Rafferty, whose offer to baby-sit had sprung from the far from selfless ulterior motive of getting back in Abra's good books, flushed a bit at this. Fortunately, neither Gemma nor Maggie suspected this. Even more fortunately, the whiskey proved its worth and the young Rambo or whatever Gemma decided to call him didn't stir when Gemma picked him up and took him upstairs to his cot. The boys had long since gone to bed..
‘Isn't it about time you decided on a name for the child?’ Rafferty asked when Gemma came back downstairs, a few minutes' later.
‘Suppose so. If I'd had a girl I was set on calling her Britney or Beyonce,’ she said. ‘But as it's a boy, I'm thinking of Ciaran or Damon.’
Rafferty bit back the grimace. But he couldn't restrain the thought – as if being a fatherless ginger nut wasn't enough for the poor little tyke without saddling him with some boy band member's nancified name.
Wary of encouraging her to dig her heels in, Rafferty said, ‘Of course, it's up to you, sweetheart, but think about a few years down the line when that singer's been bounced out of the charts by the latest pop sensation. Do you really want your son to be left with the name of a pop has-been?’
Gemma's expression exuded uncertainty; clearly, between the desire to chastise her uncle for speaking such a heresy about her faultless hero and her new mother's desire to do the best for her son, she was undecided which way to jump.
Rafferty thought a gentle push towards the latter option was odds-on favourite.
He tried a careless laugh. ‘I remember I was at school with a boy named Elvis Jones. He was the dullest stick you ever met. Couldn't dance or sing to save his life and went bald in his 20s. He became an accountant. Not a very successful one. I mean, can there be many people prepared to place their financial well-being in the hands of an accountant called Elvis?
‘No one knows how their kid's going to turn out or what they might become. I always think it's doing a kid a kindness to stick to names that have stood the test of time.’
‘Like Joseph, you mean?’ Gemma asked dryly.
Relieved to see that, for all her new burdens, his young niece retained the capacity to tease, he agreed. ‘Joseph's certainly stood the test of time. So take your time, Gemma, but choose like a wise parent.’
He thought of Jane Ogilvie and her resentment of the name that had brought years of playground teasing. It provided him with fresh ammunition.
‘If you don't want your son resenting you and your choice into middle age and beyond, just remember Elvis the unsuccessful accountant. Imagine what he must have thought of his parents.’
Feeling he'd done a good evening's duties on both the babysitting and Dutch Uncle fronts, Rafferty said his good nights, left his car where it was till the morning and walked home.
Rafferty
rubbed his chin then swept his fingers up to his forehead. As the burns on his chest still stung and looking for reasons to be cheerful, he admitted it felt good to be himself again.after the demands of his last case. No more raspy whiskers. No more No 1 haircut. Currently, thanks to the previous evening's babysitting stint, he was also, not so happily, free of the manly chest hair that Abra had so admired. Still, it was a relief to have put aside his late father's old prescription spectacles.
Yes, he thought. It felt good to be – more or less – his old self again. Now, if only he and Abra could get back to how they had been…
The speed of the deterioration in their relationship had left him bewildered until his Ma took pity on him. She rang him at work just before he left the station and invited – no, insisted – he take a detour to her house before he went home.
Puzzled, but resigned, Rafferty, who didn't feel up to falling out with the other main woman in his life, decided that eating one of his Ma's home-cooked dinners was an easier option than refusing her invitation.
Only, when he arrived at his Ma's home, he wasn't met by the looked-forward-to waft of appetising aromas. He followed his ma through to the kitchen and glanced at the oven light as she filled the kettle – nothing. He checked the dial – ditto. Reluctantly, he concluded that if something was cooking, it certainly wasn't dinner, which had to be a first for ma, who always practically force-fed her visitors. Even if you said no thanks, she always kept on until you agreed to a sandwich at least.
Scenting trouble rather than a nice casserole with rhubarb crumble and custard to follow, Rafferty asked plaintively, ‘So, what's up, Ma? Is your plumbing playing up again? Have you got a leaky stopcock you want me to fix?’
‘It's not me with the leaky stopcock, from what I've observed, Joseph,’ his ma replied as she thumped the kettle on the gas ring and lit it.
Rafferty wasn't a detective for nothing. The thumped kettle, the use of his full given name and the comment about ‘leaks’ and ‘cocks’, provided clues in plenty, even for an Inspector Clouseau.
With justification, suspecting where the conversation was heading, he prevaricated. ‘What are you on about, Ma?’
‘Joseph. I wasn't born yesterday, so don't carry on as if I was.’
His ma pulled two mugs off their hooks, placed them on a tray on the cheap, blue Formica table, took a bottle of milk from the fridge and decanted it in to a small cream jug, before she turned to face him.
‘Unless I've misread the signs – which I doubt, since I've carried six babies to term – your Abra's pregnant.’
Rafferty opened his mouth to deny it. But as he realised that denial was futile, he shut it again.
‘Well might you make like a stranded fish. What were you thinking of?’ she asked as the kettle boiled and she warmed the teapot. ‘Surely, at your age, you've learned about contraception?’
Although staunch in her Catholic faith, contraception was one of those subjects on which his ma's path diverged from the Pope's; but then she had never been one unthinkingly to follow his lead in everything. He was a man, after all, was her reasoning, so even he couldn't be right all the time. And on this particular subject, he was a man of no experience whatever. As she had frequently had occasion to remark, when Rafferty and his five siblings had been young and were being particularly troublesome, if she had had more than the rhythm method and the ‘No’ word to rely on, several little Raffertys wouldn't have been born at all.
He was about to explain about Abra's gastric attack, but his ma cut off his explanation.
‘So – are we to have another illegitimate baby in the family?’ she asked, as, under her breath, she added, ‘As if young Gemma's boy isn't one illegitimate child too far.’
Rafferty gained a brief respite while the tea making distracted her. He made use of the time to think furiously. Unfortunately, the ten seconds required for tea making was never going to be long enough for him to come up with worthy self-defence measures.
She thrust the tea tray at him. ‘You can take that through. I'll bring the pot.’
Rafferty did as ordered. No biscuits, he noticed. He must really be in his ma's bad books. And seeing as his ma had shown she was au fait with his ‘secret’, he supposed he might as well come clean. Honesty might gain him a few brownie points.
So when they had sat down in ma's living room, Rafferty said, ‘All right. I admit it. Abra thinks she might be pregnant. But it's not my fault-'
His ma nearly choked on her tea at this statement. Kitty Rafferty – who had a flexible mind on legal matters – wasn't nearly so elastic in matters moral and had never, as he knew from previous experience, been one to lightly permit denial of responsibility.
And as she thumped her mug down on the side table, she demanded tartly, ‘So whose fault is it, then? God's? The Archangel Gabriel's? What exactly are you trying to say, Joseph? That it's going to be a second virgin birth? Or that the baby's not yours?’
‘Neither. Of course, neither.’
‘I suppose I must be thankful for small mercies.’
‘All I'm saying,’ he explained when he finally managed to put forward his excuse, ‘is that Abra suffered a gastric attack shortly before we-'
‘Yes, thank you, Joseph. I don't need the eldest of my six children explaining to me how babies are made.’ She sighed and shook her head. ‘Surely you knew the pill's not to be relied on when the woman's stomach's upset?’ which – as Abra's suspected pregnancy provided its own answer – didn't require further substantiation from Rafferty
He brought in his reserves. ‘Anyway, I'm not even sure there is a baby.’
He explained about Abra's refusal to take a pregnancy test.
His ma's expression told him she suspected he had handled the conversation with all the finesse of a drunken Irishman. But as he'd had a few drinks that lunchtime and was Irish on both sides, that was scarcely his fault.
‘Pregnancy tests – didn't need such things in my young day.’ Tentatively – as if she feared more choking revelations – his ma took another sip of her tea. ‘A woman should know her own body – that's far more reliable than any pregnancy test. Anyway, you can take it from me, my lad, Abra is expecting. She had all the signs when I saw her last week; nearly two months along, if I'm any judge.'
With that forward thrust of her chin that Rafferty recognised of old, together with the determined glint in her eye, she demanded, 'So what are you going to do about it?’
As Rafferty recalled that his ma had been balked of a family wedding when young Wayne Newson, Gemma's ex-boyfriend and the father of her new son, had refused to do the decent thing, he couldn't help but wonder if he was about to be ‘persuaded’ into the second shotgun wedding of his life. Not that he would be sorry, if so. Unlike his first shotgun marriage, he would marry Abra and gladly. The only difficulties would be getting Abra to listen to, never mind accept, his proposal and then turn up for the ceremony…