Ginger woke late and her head felt as if she had a hangover, even though all she’d had to drink the previous day was half a glass of champagne and a glass of red wine. It was an emotional hangover, she thought miserably, lying in her bed, the beautiful bed that nobody was ever going to share with her.
She should have been staying in the hotel and going down to breakfast with all her friends, happy in the aftermath of the wonderful wedding of her best friend Liza. And possibly – how had she even thought this was possible? – she might have been there holding hands with Stephen, finally part of a couple.
Instead, she was in her lonely bed and her only accompaniment in the tiny house was the sound of her guinea pigs rattling around in their duplex.
Perhaps, if reincarnation was really where it was at, she could come back as the small pet of a lonely woman. Miss Nibbles and Squelch were treated like princesses, adored. She’d quite like a cat, too, but knew that Miss Nibbles and Squelch would then need a mini-defibrillator as cat/guinea pig relationships were rarely good ones. But a cat could sit on her lap, purr, help in a way that the guinea pigs – whom she had not been able to house-train – could not.
Ginger reached over to her cluttered bedside table to pick up her phone, wondering would Liza have texted her with any sort of apology.
Over the twenty-six years of their friendship, they’d fallen out before, but they’d been only small things. Apart from that horrible time after their final school state exams when Ginger got such fabulous results and Liza was shocked to have only scraped by.
Or recently, that time Ginger had had a big work event – the relaunch of the digital paper – and hadn’t been able to go out with Liza on the spur of the moment to comfort her because she’d broken up, briefly, with James.
Liza hadn’t spoken to her for an entire week.
It was always Liza that did the falling out, Ginger reflected now. That should have been a warning sign. Really, how dumb was she? Clever at books, an idiot at humans.
But there were no texts from Liza.
Instead there was a raft of happy birthday messages from her crew in work sent the day before, some with bits added on late last night:
Hope you’re having a marvellous time! Happy Thirtieth!
Catch yourself a hot man. That was from Paula, who felt that a hot man was the main requirement for happiness in life.
Don’t go too wild. Busy week in work next week!!! and a few exclamations marks from Brian, her boss. Given that Brian was a curmudgeonly sort of guy, that was almost a hug, a kiss and a birthday cake with sparkles from him.
Ginger smiled.
We’ll have cake on Monday! was the text from Deirdre, one of the researchers with whom Ginger was friends. Big gooey chocolatey with cream in the middle!!
Wow, reflected Ginger.
Was that the sum of her parts to her friends? Either into cake or men?
Or was that just Deirdre and Paula?
She’d have to stop everyone assuming she was a cake- and man-obsessed woman. Besides, how could she be madly into sex when she’d never had any?
She imagined the email to her own agony column.
‘Dear Girlfriend, my pals all talk about sex all the time – I have not had sex. Ever. And I am thirty! Is this normal, because there is nobody else I can ask without being humiliated?’
‘Normal is a setting on the dryer,’ Girlfriend would reply. ‘You can be into what you want to be into, and if anyone asks, tell them all you are a Christian woman and you are waiting for marriage before you give the precious gift of your virginity to anyone.’
Ginger lay back on the bed and started to laugh. Maybe that’s what she might tell everyone in future. She was a truly Christian woman who didn’t believe in sex before marriage or dating before marriage or even having a boyfriend before marriage.
Yes, it was the perfect excuse.
Or else, she could become Amish. Or did they have arranged marriages? Still, a husband . . .
But how would she cope with no TV? No Starbucks’ hot chocolate. No lipstick.
OK, maybe not.
Finally, she dragged herself out of bed and went into the living room to where Miss Nibbles and Squelch were scooting around in their duplex. They were genuinely delighted to see her, pushing their little pink guinea pig noses at the tiny bars of their cool perspex and cage home.
‘Come on, my little babas,’ she crooned, taking them out for a little meander. They were sweethearts and liked to sit on her and snuffle her instead of running off like the clappers, which was what they’d done before she’d socialised them enough to enjoy being held. Miss Nibbles was apricot-coloured and Squelch was a misty grey. They were affectionate, although once at the vet’s Miss Nibbles had managed to bite both the vet and Ginger in a one-off fit of temper.
‘I don’t know what I’d do without you both,’ she said. ‘Otherwise I’d be talking to myself, and isn’t that the first sign of madness? Can I take you both to my birthday family lunch as my guests? I will pretend I don’t want dates ever: just you two.’
The house Ginger had grown up in was out in the country, although the city was encroaching now with several housing estates coming closer and closer. Her mother had come from a small town much further down the coast called Ballyglen, but there was no family left there anymore and Ginger could barely recall ever having been there.
Her father still went, though: to visit their mother’s grave. Declan and Mick did too, but not Ginger.
‘I don’t believe in that visiting grave stuff,’ she’d told Aunt Grace. ‘You can remember people without seeing where they’re buried,’ which was a handy way of saying she had nothing to remember because her mother had died when she was so young. And it was easier not to remember, anyhow.
For all Ginger’s life, the Reilly family home had been a true country farmhouse, although nobody had farmed the land for a long time, but still a kitchen garden sat to the back of the house and, behind that, a large meadow around which, on summer days, the young Reillys used to gallop and play games. To the right of the house was a large barn converted into a work shed which had once housed just a kitchen-renovating business. Then, about fifteen years ago, Michael Reilly got his hands on a wonderful old table with incredible decorative legs.
Ginger could remember his absolute delight as she was wearily studying and he’d come in brandishing an exquisitely carved leg with delight.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I had this amazing idea, Ginger, darling! I could turn this into a wizard’s chair! Imagine these posts coming up the back with roundels on the top. I could carve a beautiful back around them and then the other posts could be the armrests and – don’t worry,’ he added, mistaking Ginger’s surprised expression for one of disbelief. ‘You know I’ll still be doing the kitchens.’ Putting in kitchens was his main job, the job that had kept them all going since Mum had died.
‘But this . . .’ His face lit up as he looked at the old table leg.
‘Dad, whatever makes you happy,’ said Ginger.
And he was off to his workshop, singing, delighted.
Now he still did the odd kitchen, but his heart was in those special commissions where he made beautiful, one-off furniture, working away for hours in his big shed, music on in the background.
In the true style of the shoemaker, while Michael Reilly had been fixing everyone else’s kitchens and bedrooms, his own home had been left to itself in later years.
The house itself was a bit higgledy-piggledy but there was a lovely wooden porch her father had made. And in June, the climbing roses were clambering all over it with amazing old floribunda blooms clustering around it.
Seeing all the cars parked in front of the house as she drove up made Ginger realise that everyone else had arrived before her. Taking a deep breath, she used her key and went in. The scents of her childhood home assailed her. Beeswax polish because her father thought it was the best thing for wood; wet dog as the family’s old sheepdog, Ronni, could never resist a roll in the river every day; and just . . . home. It was here that Ginger felt safest and most loved.
Yet she’d wanted to be a journalist, wanted to get out into the big world all those years ago because she had done so well at school and she’d wanted to write.
Moving into the city when she’d got her first job had made so much sense and she’d thought a whole new life awaited her, a life away from being the chubby girl in St Anne’s secondary school, always the third wheel in every party. And yet only some of that wondrous new life had happened. She had her beautiful little house, even though the mortgage was murderous, and she had her tiny little car, old banger that it was.
The job was going well and she was making more money because of the Girlfriend column. Professionally, everything was good. Personally, everything was dreadful.
She caught sight of herself in the hall mirror and knew she’d done a good job hiding the ravages of a face ruined from crying the night before. Her hair was washed, rippling like copper. She’d worn a coral top and a turquoise necklace that made her look bright and sparkly. Just because things had gone so hideously wrong yesterday, she was not going to ruin this party for the people who loved her.
In other words, she was going to fake it.
‘Hello everyone,’ she said, striding into the big open-plan kitchen sitting area to find her father and her sister-in-law Zoe busy in the kitchen and her brothers Mick and Declan standing up with a glass of beer each, shooting the breeze, while Margaret, her soon to be sister-in-law, sat on the couch and knitted.
Margaret looked like an advert for kitesurfing – tall, leggy, tanned – yet she was a mad crafter, always knitting, always had needles and a ball of wool attached.
‘Easier than meditation,’ she kept saying to Ginger, encouraging her to get into it.
‘It’s the birthday girl,’ said Dad, delightedly putting down his wooden spoon and racing over to grab his daughter and twirl her around. Mick joined in and then Ronni, clearly recently dried from the pungent wet dog scent of him, jumped up on his back paws and tried to help.
It was beautiful to be home, Ginger thought, and she almost let herself go, almost let the tears fall, because now that she was here and in the warmth and the comfort of their love she could tell them and . . .
‘Did you have a great day yesterday?’ said her father, going back to the saucepan. ‘Sorry, I can’t let this burn. It’s a special sauce I’m making for your birthday. I know you love the old hollandaise and it’s a nightmare.’
This reality check made Ginger convinced she couldn’t tell them all about the day before and how betrayed she’d felt.
‘It was great,’ she lied, feigning happy exhaustion. ‘Just brilliant. I’m so tired though. We were all up late – it was a fabulous day.’
‘Do you have pictures?’ said Zoe eagerly, ‘I bet Liza looked amazing.’
‘Goodness, you know I didn’t really take that many pictures of the afters. I took a few early on, but not that many later,’ said Ginger, deadpan. ‘But you know, loads of other people will have and I’m sure they’ll be up on Facebook later. Yes, Liza was beautiful and, yes, her dress was fabulous.’
‘And yours?’ said Zoe anxiously, knowing how worried her sister-in-law had been about the whole bridesmaid as battleship in full Scarlett O’Hara dress.
‘Perfect. The colour was really nice after all,’ said Ginger.
Another lie. She would go to hell, or whatever sort of hell there was for people who lied through their teeth and were good at it. Although there had been many times when she’d been in this very house and she’d lied about things: yes, school was grand; yes, the disco was fun.
All those things that came back to not fitting in and feeling like the fat girl. Nothing changed, did it?
‘Where’s Aunt Grace and Esmerelda?’ she asked. ‘They’re not here?’
‘Grace has got the flu,’ said her dad. ‘She’s hoarse and she can’t talk, which means there is no point to her existence.’
Everyone giggled. Grace was a fabulous talker.
‘But she wants you over soon because she’s got a special present for you.’
It was handy that Aunt Grace wasn’t here, because Grace had gimlet eyes and could search out a secret faster than a bird could pick a worm off a lawn. Grace was the one who’d scrutinised Ginger when she was a teenager and said things about not believing in standing at gravesides.
Ginger was aware that Mick was watching her now. He was a bit like Grace – very perceptive.
‘All right, sis?’ he said, leaning over and squeezing her shoulders.
‘Yes,’ she said, trying to channel exhausted-thirty-year-old vibes. ‘Just weary.’
‘Sit down there,’ interrupted their father, ‘birthday lunch is about to begin.’
It was a delicious lunch full of all the food that Ginger loved, food her father knew she loved. There was asparagus with lots of butter dripping over it to start, followed by salmon with that complicated hollandaise sauce that her father had taken years to master. There were mashed potatoes because they were Ginger’s favourite and salad that Ginger noticed her two sisters-in-law ate loads of. Slim people always ate salad. She liked salad, but when faced with a plate of mashed potato and a plate of salad, the mashed potato always won. And afterwards, there was a huge chocolate cake.
‘Professionally made,’ said Dad proudly as he brought it to the table with two candles, a big 3 and a big 0, lit up on it.
‘Call the fire brigade!’ shrieked Mick, and Ginger slapped him affectionately.
They sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to her and Ginger thought she really might cry then because they loved her so much. She wanted to unburden herself, but she knew it would break their hearts. She’d keep this in if it killed her.
After dinner, Ginger didn’t want to sit at the table and reminisce. She couldn’t cope with that, so she said: ‘Now you’ve done all the work, Dad, I’m going to do some tidying up.’
‘It’s your birthday,’ Declan said, ‘you should sit down.’
‘Oh yes,’ she teased, ‘and you are going to do the tidying up? You were the worst tidier-upper when we were growing up.’
‘He was,’ said Mick.
‘Nearly as bad as you, Mick,’ Ginger added and they all laughed.
Ginger headed to the sink. It was a comfort being a little bit away from them all in the kitchen, the same old kitchen she had grown up with, the same old cupboards as when they had been kids. The shoemaker’s children were never shod, she thought wryly, thinking of all the kitchens her father had put in and had never quite got round to redoing his own. The units were sturdy and workmanlike, but there was nothing glamorous or fabulous about them.
Mick began to help her. ‘Move out of the way there,’ he said. ‘You’re useless at loading the dishwasher.’
‘Go for it,’ she said and moved over to the sink to start scrubbing away on the saucepans.
They chatted a little about this and that, work, politics, and she winkled some information out of Mick about their father having coffee with a newcomer to the village.
‘Very nice woman,’ Mick whispered. ‘Just moved into the area, six months in anyway. Dad was putting in a kitchen for her and somehow they hit it off.’
‘I’m not deaf – I can hear you,’ said their father’s voice from the dining table.
‘Most people his age are going deaf, his hearing is getting better,’ grumbled Mick. ‘Come on outside, I’ll tell you about her. You never know, we might marry him off yet.’
They went out the back door into the garden which their father had kept very beautifully because apparently gardening had been something their mother was into.
Outside, Mick eyeballed her. ‘You haven’t told us much about yesterday,’ he said, ‘so how was it?’ Mick always knew when there was something wrong.
‘It was fine,’ Ginger said lightly. ‘Normal wedding carry-on: photos, champagne, people fighting over bouquets. I thought there’d be a murder over who got it because Liza has some friends who are very keen to get married, you know, the usual . . .’
But her eyes brimmed over and the tears began to fall. A person could only embroider so much.
‘Ah Ginger, tell me, love,’ he said and he pulled her into his arms.
Feeling held and loved, it all came out, but she was too ashamed to tell her brother the bit about her virginity or even how she’d almost brought a man up to her room. However, she told him how Liza had tried to set her up for a pity date with her cousin.
‘I’ll kill her,’ Mick said grimly, after hearing all the vicious things Liza had said.
‘No,’ Ginger answered gloomily, ‘killing her is not a good plan. If you were in jail I’d never see you. I just have to live with it. It’s all true.’
‘It’s not true! Don’t believe a word of it! You have to get away from Liza, I never trusted that bitch,’ Mick said
‘What bitch,’ said Zoe, walking out and somehow shame overcame Ginger in front of her lovely, confident sister-in-law.
Zoe was everything Ginger aspired to be but somehow never managed: slim, pretty, sure of herself . . . She would never let anyone make a fool of her.
More shame and the pain flooded out of her. Ginger started to cry and thought she would never stop.
‘I don’t want Dad to know about any of this,’ she said frantically, wiping her face futilely, knowing she was probably all red and blotchy, the way redheads cried. ‘He’s so happy and he had a coffee with someone new and he made the lovely lunch and everything . . .’
‘No, it’s fine, don’t worry,’ said Zoe. ‘Come on, we’ll go around the front of the house. Mick, let us in the side door and get my handbag, will you? It has my make-up kit in it and we’ll fix your face up, Ginger. Nobody is going to know, right. We can be having a girl talk and I’m showing off my new make-up.’
‘I think something should be done,’ said Mick, glowering in the background. ‘That little cow; she deserves to pay.’
‘No,’ said Ginger, taking a deep breath. ‘I have to handle this my own way.’
The Tuesday morning after Liza’s wedding, Ginger arrived into work convinced that devastation was written all over her face.
She was scared somebody would ask her how it had been, had she had fun – something utterly simple – and she would collapse into a heap of heartbreak on the floor and let it all out.
The humiliation, the pain, the betrayal.
To add to it all, she’d overeaten all day Monday, a day she’d booked off in case she was exhausted from the whole wedding and birthday dinner weekend. She’d felt the shame of it as she’d put three ice cream cartons, four pizza boxes and many, many empty biscuit wrappers into the recycling. But instead of being stopped at the office door and interrogated about precisely how much fun she had had as chief bridesmaid at her best friend’s wedding – she hiccuped with pain every time the words came into her head – all she felt was an undercurrent of high anxiety in the whole office. People were scurrying around like rats.
There was no group lounging around the coffee machine, nobody hanging over anybody else’s mini-desk divider shooting the breeze.
Feeling the anxiety whizzing around like an electrical current, Ginger hurried over to her desk, her best black jacket on plus her most slimming trousers, which had felt woefully tight on her waist that morning.
‘Hi,’ she said, peeping down to look at Paula, who sat beside her and who watched all goings-on in the open-plan office more than she looked at her computer.
‘Email,’ hissed Paula. ‘Sit down, shut up and read it. And don’t talk to me afterwards: we might be being watched.’
Ginger, sat, dumped her bag and checked her emails. It all made sense to her then.
Due to a company-wide mail first thing that morning, the entire staff in Caraval Media Towers were clearly scared out of their minds. A super communications guru beloved of their ultimate boss, the scary Edward Von Bismarck, was coming in to take over and ‘reorganise all the structures at Caraval Media to take us firmly into the twenty-first century’.
Mr Guru was a guy called Zac Tyson, ‘brilliant at management, formerly of Harvard Business School and the man who entirely reordered the company’s vast US media holdings’, who was going to ‘shake things up to give all of us a better future in communications . . .’ gushed the in-house email sent to everyone and their lawyer.
‘Shit,’ said Ginger in a whisper to Paula.
‘Shit cubed,’ Paula whispered back.
Brian, who was Ginger and Paula’s immediate boss and editor of the Gazette, the group’s recently acquired free-sheet newspaper, stuck his head out of his tiny, glass-fronted office and yelled: ‘Tuesday morning meeting, everyone.’
‘We don’t have Tuesday morning meetings,’ Paula said.
‘Guess we do now,’ Ginger replied, taking her phone, tablet and notebook with her.
The team was ten people – three reporters, one photographer, two subeditors, Deirdre who did everything, two sales guys and Brian, who shut the door when they were all in.
His first words were not encouraging.
‘We’re all for the high jump.’
‘This is a pep talk, then?’ said Ginger and everyone laughed nervously.
Brian ignored her. ‘We used to call them time-management people in our day,’ he went on gloomily. He said everything gloomily. As far as Brian was concerned, the world was a sad, miserable place and he faced it with an equally sad, miserable face, ready for the slings and arrows to take him down at any moment.
‘They come in, spend ages writing things down and secretly watch your every move,’ he went on. ‘They say things like “. . . don’t mind me, go on and do your work, I’m just here to help fine-tune the place . . .” and then three weeks later, you’re fired.’
‘Oh.’ Ginger and Paula shuddered simultaneously.
Ginger didn’t have a full-time job, she was on contract, like pretty much everyone else in Caraval Media. There were no full-time jobs anymore, expect for the top execs and they got paid buckets, if the urban myths coming out of the pub when everyone was four pints in were to be believed.
‘We have to prove ourselves,’ Brian said. ‘Friday’s edition has to be the best yet. We need plenty of advertising money as that’s all these guys are interested in. Money.’
Ginger tuned out and imagined herself with everything going fabulously with her career, with her own wonderful column in the Sunday News, Caraval Media’s flagship newspaper. It would be clever without being patronising and read by everyone. She’d write witty, marvellous and incisive columns which would make people love and admire her. She’d be on news panels and in magazines, much in demand on the radio and Liza would look at her and feel consumed with guilt over how badly she’d treated her so-called best friend.
‘Ginger, have you finished that advertorial article on the industrial estate yet?’ snapped Brian and woke her from her reverie.
Advertorials were advertising articles written as actual stories and surrounded by adverts. People who were not wise to this carry-on thought they were faintly boring articles. People who had to write them thought they were the spawn of the devil in word form.
‘Oh, er . . . yes, nearly . . . nearly finished,’ said Ginger, standing up. ‘I’ll go now?’
‘Yes,’ barked Brian.
Scurrying out of the office to her computer, Ginger could hear Brian barking at everyone. She sat and logged on.
It was, she thought as she looked at what she had written so far, very difficult to write a thrilling advertorial on an industrial estate, particularly one with several unthrilling tool shops, a big garage dedicated to tyre repair, and a meat wholesaler business, the boss of whom had looked her up and down with a frankly lecherous grin. She’d had to spend the entire interview shuffling her chair away from his because he kept leaning closer, putting a hand on her arm to make a point, edging his fingers breastward. He wouldn’t do that to a male reporter, she thought grimly. Or to someone like Paula who could banish men with a single sharp glance. Ginger had no such tools in her arsenal.
How was she ever going to become fabulously successful if the extent of her writing was industrial estates, peanuts and pervy meat wholesalers?
Her only breakout area was her online agony-aunt blogs and nobody knew about them.
She couldn’t tell anyone, either, because she had been so personal in her writings.
At the start, she hadn’t thought about that when she answered questions from desperate people seeking help. She’d taken stories from her own life to illustrate them. But now – now how could she let people know that she, Ginger, was the face behind Girlfriend? Girlfriend understood pain, loneliness and the sensation of being alone on Friday nights, knowing everyone else was having a fabulous time. Girlfriend knew what it was like not looking like a Victoria’s Secret runway model or, indeed, a plus-sized catalogue model.
Girlfriend knew the pain of feeling different, of no Valentine’s cards, families who wondered if you were ever going to settle down, the pain of being invisible, the pain of being different.
Girlfriend talked to her cats – she’d given her online alter ego cats because to say she had two guinea pigs, Squelch and Miss Nibbles, would have given the game away entirely.
Readers had asked several times if Girlfriend would vlog, but Ginger couldn’t do that.
And if people knew who Girlfriend really was, they’d laugh at her, surely.
Ginger gave herself a mental slap. What sort of agony aunt was she when she couldn’t even sort herself out?
She tapped away at the information about the industrial estate, nearly at her magic thousand words deadline. But despite her determination to be brave in the face of firing, her mind kept running off to the time-management person.
Newcomers arriving in Caraval Towers to be interviewed were always fascinated by the organised chaos: photographers meandering across newsroom floors having delivered fabulous pictures, while frantic reporters listened to digitally taped interviews, looked up information online, tried to jam it all into a coherent piece that wasn’t too short, wasn’t too long and wasn’t weak beside the piece in the The Predator, the year-old, online newspaper that was creating havoc in journalistic circles for ripping into their circulation figures.
Someone was always shouting, the bank of TVs on the wall were always on too loud because the subeditors at the windows couldn’t hear them otherwise, and a mild fight was always breaking out in the news department, full of people like thoroughbred racehorses on speed: fiery, high-spirited and argumentative.
What if the management guru was let in on the secret that she wrote the online column? It would become common knowledge and people would know all her secrets . . .
‘Psst.’
Ginger looked quickly up from her computer to see Paula peering over it. Ginger jumped.
‘You gave me a fright,’ she said. ‘Brian is watching us. He’s waiting for this blasted article.’
‘Oh, he’s gone out,’ said Paula. ‘Probably off to the pub to have a pint to drown his sorrows. If anyone comes in to see who is working the hardest, Brian will be the first to go as he never does anything. Just shouts at the rest of us.’
She perched on the edge of Ginger’s desk.
‘Listen, gossip central: I’ve been messaging around and I’ve got some amazing answers to who this Zac dude is. I don’t care what he does, but he’s in his thirties and wait till you see his pics! Or his pecs!’
Paula smirked at her own joke.
‘What about Keith?’ said Ginger, feeling a moment of protectiveness for Paula’s existing boyfriend.
‘Oh.’ Paula waved him away with a flick of a wrist. ‘Keith isn’t serious, I mean, he doesn’t really know what he wants to do with his life. Imagine if me and Zac hit it off . . . older men like bright young things like me.’ Paula was staring into space. ‘Go on, look him up,’ she said.
Ginger typed his name into her computer and a picture of an extremely attractive guy came up. Zac was richly tanned in a way that spoke of a lot of time spent outdoors. Dark hair coaxed into a short, controlled cut fell over eyes so shockingly blue both she and Paula peered closer to see if he was wearing coloured contacts. He was indeed fabulous.
As Ginger scrolled through the shots at speed, Paula sighed, ‘Man candy, ten out of ten. Actually, eleven out of ten.’
‘Absolutely,’ Ginger agreed. ‘He’s drop-dead gorgeous.’
‘I know,’ said Paula. ‘Imagine all that testosterone walking around Caraval. I hope he comes here first, because if they get their hands on him in the Sunday News, they’ll never let him go. That ho Carla Mattheson will get her gel nails into him and forget it, he’ll be another notch on her ornately carved bedpost.’
‘You can’t call another woman a ho,’ said Ginger, shocked. ‘It’s unsisterly.’
Paula fixed her with a knowing stare. ‘You haven’t met her, babes. Her arms are so long, she can smile at your face while she’s stabbing you in the back. Watch out for her.’