Fireworks: Cosy fables for the moderately curious or mildly inquisitive

Red Beryl

When Beryl was born, she was born red.

It was quite a scare at first. Beryl was a typical baby in every other way, in that she had ten fingers, ten toes, two eyes, two ears, a mouth and a nose - two things down the side and one thing down the middle sort of thing - except that she was red. Not red like a can of Heinz tomato soup, but just on the sunburnt side of pink. Her parents, Gareth and Charlie, were heartbroken at first, but the doctors couldn’t find anything actually wrong with Beryl. Given that she was an otherwise perfectly healthy baby and one with a cheery disposition at that, her parents quickly came to the conclusion that her red skin was something they shouldn’t be too worried about - nothing more insidious than a birth mark, albeit covering her entire body.

As you’d expect, showing off their newborn baby for the first time to family and friends was a tricky affair. Gareth felt it was his duty to mention Beryl’s unusual skin tone by way of introductory caveat - a dispensation if you will so that people were at least prepared for something slightly out of the ordinary, and would hopefully not make too loud a gasp or other such intake of breath when they peered into her carry-cot. Most people showed measured understanding, after all, babies often have blemishes or birthmarks which can fade with time. Many would slightly tilt their head and give a knowing ‘look’ - a look that said ‘I understand what you’re going through’. Dressed in a standard issue baby grow, with a neat embroidered donkey on the front (Charlie had a fondness for donkeys), only Beryl’s face and hands were visible, and by some degrees, her red complexion could have been a weird sort of birthmark, albeit a big one. But under-neath her cute all-in-one, Beryl was red all over, something that her parents and grandparents alike still needed time to get used to, come bath time or a nappy change.

The reactions of those outside of pre-prepared friends and family on seeing Beryl were more unedited (and more audible). Taking her out for walks in her shiny new pram, anyone who caught a glimpse of Beryl’s red face would often point and stare. Some would offer a consoling sort of face. Others (who clearly had no proximity boundaries) would even lean in to her pram to get a closer look. And then there were some odious types, who would utter a mean comment, usually loud enough for whoever was pushing Beryl along to hear. This started to upset her mother. It wasn’t long before Charlie sought help.

One of her friends (from the Zumba class she attended at her local gym) worked as a hair and makeup artist on adverts and television dramas. She was an expert both in quaffing quiffs for soap opera stars, but also conjuring prosthetic lacerations for grim crime shows. Charlie wondered if there was any makeup that could ameliorate Beryl’s unusual skin colour? Gareth, who, that day, happened to be present at the after-class tea and cake refreshment break (he was making use of one of Charlie’s free day passes the gym often gave her and had just been in for a swim), chipped in that he’d read about skin bleaches used by darker skinned Indian girls to give themselves a paler complexion. He’d also read that some of the creams often caused burns to the skin. Gareth and Charlie didn’t want anything that would directly act on Beryl’s skin (or change it in any permanent way), they just wanted something to use as a cover-up, something that would allow them to take Beryl out and about, without drawing stares (or comments). The makeup lady, Katherine (though she preferred to be called Kate), knew exactly what they needed - special baby makeup. At first, Gareth was dismissive - makeup for babies? He had no idea such a makeup range existed, and guffawed at the notion of people putting makeup on their babies. While Gareth continued in his ‘you’re pulling my leg’ slash ‘that sounds like some serious middle-class nonsense’ tone, Kate explained (calmly and without rolling her eyes) that acting babies placed under bright studio lights often needed makeup, just as much as their grown-up counterparts. Ah yes, Gareth could see that now. He refrained from any further incredulity.

By pure coincidence, Kate said she’d had to buy some just the other day, for use on a baby during the filming of an advert for baby wipes. The baby’s skin needed to be slightly ‘colour corrected’, as it was showing up a bit green and sickly beneath the harsh studio lights. Kate offered to get some for Charlie and Gareth to help adjust Beryl’s skin tone and drop it round.

As time went on, the application of the baby makeup became second nature, slapped on after morning bath and washed off again at evening bath. This wasn’t something they could buy off the shelf and Charlie (via Kate) managed to get it specially imported from a Hollywood makeup supplier based in Beverly Hills. Fortunately, Beryl didn’t seem to mind being plastered in makeup every morning (hands and face only of course, just the bits that were visible to any peering strangers), and with the makeup applied, Beryl’s skin colour now looked like any other typical baby - no prying eyes would be any the wiser. Charlie regained her confidence and was now much happier taking her daughter out, often to the local supermarket, or for a turn round the local park where they would feed the ducks.

Although Beryl was a very happy soul, possibly more so than your average baby, there were obviously times when she’d cry. As she got older, it was when the tears came that her parents started to notice something strange. It wasn’t with every whimper and yell - when she was hungry, the tears soon stopped when picked up and offered the boob or a bottle. But when she started crawling around and then got frustrated by something (as mobile babies and toddling toddlers often do, such as a brick she couldn’t reach or a dinosaur that wouldn’t stand up by itself), her parents noticed something quite unexpected.

Sweeping up the tearful child for a reassuring cuddle, Charlie was surprised to feel that Beryl had suddenly become quite hot. This immediately sent alarm bells ringing. Had she got a temperature? Was she suffering a fever? Should they dose her with Calpol, or step it up a level and take her straight to A&E? As new parents, they’d read horror stories about how other parents (whom Gareth clearly thought were not up to the task of parenting as well as they were) had not reacted quickly enough to a possible fever, and the child then suffered some sort of febrile convulsion. As Beryl’s tears fell and her temperature ascended, out would come their trusty digital ear thermometer to gauge the severity of these apparent sudden onset fevers. But they could never get a sensible reading - her temperature appeared to be off the scale. Yet on each occasion, her elevated body temp-erature returned to normal as quickly as it had shot up in the first place. When all was calm and Beryl was happy again, all their thermometers (Gareth had quickly acquired a wide selection, just to be sure) read normal again. So what was going on?

On one of the first occasions that Beryl appeared to significantly overheat, she was trying to pull herself up using the living room sofa for leverage. She didn’t yet have the strength in her fingers to get the purchase she required to stand up, causing her to collapse back on to the floor. The resulting tantrum exploded, with Beryl angrily swiping the nearby Duplo blocks, sending them flying across the living room floor. From the kitchen, Charlie could hear the tantrum surging like an unstoppable tidal wave. Running in to the room, she tried to stem the flow of tears with some pre-prepared dis-placement tactics. Dropping down to Beryl’s level, this started with a cuddle and a kiss, and a soothing ‘there there’. Charlie’s mother had warned her against instantly sweeping up their child, but suggested the better way to solve a problem was to first assess the issue down at the child’s level. When this didn’t abate the tear-fuelled seismic eruption, Charlie resolved to ignore her mother’s advice and gently picked up her wailing child, narrowly avoiding a little angry fist in her eye socket. Employing the ages-old tradition of gently bobbing her child (she’d read somewhere that this matched the motion the unborn baby felt when growing in the womb), Charlie wiped away Beryl’s tears and added in a distraction gambit of “Oh look, a unicorn.”

Now with her arms wrapped around her child’s still flailing body, she could feel Beryl’s temperature rising rapidly. Alarmed at the heat emanating from her wailing child, Charlie decided to ring their GP to book an emergency appointment. By the time the doctor saw Beryl an hour or so later (they had a very efficient GP service where they lived), her tantrum had subsided and with it, her temperature. This was repeated a number of times over the coming months - whatever had caused baby Beryl to get upset or angry (and by association, her body to rapidly heat up) had passed by the time they were sat in the doctor’s waiting area. The GP (a lovely Frenchman whose name Charlie could never pronounce correctly) was convinced that Charlie was just a hyper-sensitive parent. He said (in a slightly patronising way, but Charlie didn’t mind, as it didn’t sound so patronising when spoken with a French accent) that many new parents were a little over anxious and that he couldn’t find anything wrong with Beryl. Perhaps their therm-ometer (Charlie corrected him, thermometers plural) was at fault?

Despite Dr French’s prognosis, a few second opinions were sought, and Beryl was subject to a string of investigative scans and blood tests. Intriguingly, while she cried when the nurse inserted the phlebotomy needle, the whole process was over so quickly (and conducted so efficiently by the practice nurse) that her temperature only marginally spiked before returning rapidly to normal. All the results came back showing nothing abnormal, and all the doctors at the practice (plus an aged private consultant at their local hospital) could not provide any conclusive answers. They just put it down to the uniqueness of the child, what with her red skin and all. There was no obvious illness, no underlying factors, nothing amiss, nothing wrong, so nothing could be treated.

As Beryl grew older and hit her toddler years, the episodes of her ‘hot body’ (as her parents called it) came more often. But they now had a well-practised (and quickly deployed) routine for calming and distracting her, and they’d provided detailed instructions on this routine to both sets of grandparents, who would often look after Beryl while Charlie and Gareth were at work. Fortunately, this always sent her elevated body temp-erature back to normal within just a few seconds. But one Saturday afternoon, things took an unexpected turn.

While Charlie was out at her weekly Pilates class, Gareth was sat in their living room playing with his daughter. I say playing, but actually he was sat on the sofa with his phone, reading his emails and occasionally glancing over to his child in that way parents do, to make sure nothing untoward was about to happen. Beryl had been arranging her toy cars and now turned her attention to making a tower of bricks. Try as she might, she couldn’t manage to get the last few bricks to stay on top of the tall stack she’d built. Time and again, the whole tower toppled and fell. But Beryl was a tenacious toddler, so despite some irritation, she saw the tumbling bricks as part of a game, and continued to restack the brightly coloured wooden cubes, at least for the first few stack falls.

As Beryl’s frustration started to grow with yet another plummeting tower of bricks, even from the sofa, Gareth started to feel the telltale signs that her body heat was rising. Putting his phone to one side and sliding off the sofa, Gareth implemented the well-practised drill, dis-tracting his daughter, and suggested she build several smaller, more stable brick towers. As usual, her elevated radiant temperature rapidly decreased to normal the moment her frustration had dissipated. Just then the house phone rang. Secure in the knowledge the current hot body moment had safely passed, Gareth stepped out of the room to answer it. Both he and Charlie rarely used their landline, but he thought he’d better answer it in case it was his mother, who still occasionally called their home phone and not his mobile, which was far more in-convenient to answer, as said house phone was miles away, and he’d have to get up to answer it. Meanwhile in the living room, Beryl decided that despite her Daddy’s suggestion, it wasn’t short towers she wanted to build, but big, tall towers, so she set about once again balancing the bricks higher and higher. But as before, her newly built tall stack toppled to the floor, and as before, tears of frustration welled up in the child’s eyes. Why was this happening? She started babbling instructions to the blocks, which pretty much amounted to a rather direct and possibly impolite request that once the blocks were stacked, they stayed stacked, thank you very much!

Not to be beaten, Beryl scooped up the fallen bricks and again, started placing them very carefully one on top of another. Due possibly to a single, imperceptibly wonky floorboard, located directly under the thick pile carpet immediately beneath her current construction site, the brick tower soon toppled and fell once again. Beryl’s frustration was turning to anger and then to rage. She saw red.

Grabbing one of the naughty bricks, Beryl hurled it across the room.

Meanwhile, Gareth had answered the house phone in their hallway, which lay immediately adjacent to the living room where Beryl was playing. On picking up the receiver, he heard one of those automated robotic voices, telling him how it was aware he’d been involved in a car accident and that with a no win, no fee–. He hung up before the voice could finish its automated sentence. As he set the phone back into its charging cradle, he could now hear Beryl’s angry babbling coming from the adjacent room. He’d never heard the toddler sound quite so irate before, and quickly made his way back to see what the problem was.

Opening the door, Gareth was hit by a wall of heat, just like opening a hot oven. He instinctively threw up his hands to shield his face. Looking through his fingers, he could see Beryl was standing in the centre of the living room in the throes of a huge toddler tantrum, the skin on her face and hands now glowing bright red. As he stepped forward, he was hit in the face by a flying brick. Now in floods of tears, Beryl was violently sending all the remaining bricks and toy cars flying across the room.

The heat coming from Beryl’s little body continued to increase. It was like standing next to a huge bonfire - so hot, that even with his hands up shielding his face, Gareth had to take a step back. He could also hear a weird fizzing or crackling noise. Gareth thought it sounded like electrical static, or something akin to the noise of a welder’s torch.

Unable to approach his daughter due to the significant temperature now radiating from her body, Gareth called out from behind his hands, trying all his usual distraction techniques. Let’s look outside, what can we see? Where’s Snowy (her unicorn)? Oh look, an elephant! Shall we see what’s on CBeebies? All to no avail.

A moment later, Gareth thought he could smell burning. Not like toast burning, but like the time he burnt his eyebrows when he got too close to the campfire at Scout camp many decades earlier. The burning smell and the electrical crackling sound appeared to be coming direct from the hot body of his tantruming daughter. Gareth stood at the doorway, unsure what to do next, still held back from approaching Beryl by the fierce heat radiating directly from her.

Then Beryl ignited.