On the Sunday morning after the photo shoot, Ginger lay in bed and listened to the dawn chorus. She was never awake this early, but today her head was clear and she felt as awake as if someone had injected her with a triple espresso. Today was the day her picture in a swimsuit was going to appear in the paper’s magazine supplement. In colour.
Showing off her legs.
More than her legs.
Her boobs . . .
The heat of pure mortification made her throw back the covers and get up.
She brought out some guinea-pig breakfast with her coffee, fed them, and then opened the window closest to the canal, where she could see the tree-lined path where early morning dog-walkers were already up. Church bells were sounding over in the big domed church in Rathmines. In the distance, the dome was peppermint green, while the sun shone on house tiles and made the soft red-brick houses shimmer in the early heat.
On a day this lovely, Ginger knew a sun-lover like Liza would have already organised herself in the garden, determined to get as many rays as she could. Liza went brown easily and never bothered with actual suncreams.
Jodie in work would not be impressed with her. Jodie believed in high sun factors the way ancient religions believed in flinging live sacrifices into volcanoes.
‘Your face turns into an old leather handbag if you don’t wear sunblock,’ she said.
Yeah, Ginger thought. You wait till your face is like an old handbag, Liza, and then come crawling back to me looking to be my friend. And then she grinned. She’d thought about Liza without that painful ache inside her.
It still hurt – twenty-six years of friendship couldn’t vanish that easily. But it hurt less. That was something.
The first text came at just after nine and was from Zoe:
You look incredible, Ginger. We are so proud of you! I hope you are too.
Shortly afterwards, Declan texted:
I’ll have to take you into the office for show-and-tell now. All the lads will want to meet you. Fabulous. Love ya.
Ginger felt halfway between nauseated and excited as she clicked onto the News site. Carla had insisted that those pages had been worked on by the subeditors away from the three participants and warned certain death if they defied her by trying to check them out in any way.
‘No interference,’ she’d snapped.
Nervously, Ginger waited for the page to load. Because she had automatic newspaper subscription, she got the whole paper online. There, on the front page, at the top, was a small pic of her and Jodie beaming, quite obviously in swimwear, with the tagline: ‘Our Girls Get Fit! Full story, page 3’.
Her breasts . . . Ginger pulled the page-size up. Her breasts looked huge. Implant-huge. She cringed and sped through the paper till she reached the magazine where there, on the cover, she stood.
Not Jodie or Fiona – just her.
Jack or the subeditors had cut the others out of the photo till it was just her looking like a plus-sized chorus girl in her heels, hip out, smile in place and all she needed was a basket of fruit on her head to finish off the 1940s movie look. The shock of seeing herself in full colour made her look away, but then she forced herself to look back, to be dispassionate.
She didn’t look hideous. The tan hid a multitude of sins and that swimsuit gave her curves like an hourglass. But still . . .
Shuddering, she looked inside where at least they showed a photo of the three of them together. But the headline with Ginger’s piece, with yet another solo picture of herself, made her grit her teeth:
CURVY GINGER WANTS TO BE A SIZE TEN. WE FOLLOW HER PROGRESS OVER THE NEXT SIX WEEKS ON OUR BIKINI FITNESS PLAN!
If it hadn’t cost hard-earned cash, Ginger would have flung her laptop across the room.
Curvy Ginger wants to be a size ten! She had never said that in her life. How dare Carla make that crap up!
Ginger Reilly felt the rage burning through her system: Game on, Carla, she thought. Game on.
Today was the day she’d picked to start tidying Grace’s warehouse and when she rang the bell, Esmerelda opened the door slowly.
‘My nails!’ she shrieked as Ginger pushed in. ‘Watch out! My nails! She is painted!’
‘Oh, right.’
Ginger and Esmerelda negotiated round each other and the boxes, with Esmerelda holding her hands aloft, nails painted a coral unseen on any non-alien reef.
‘The girl she here doing the nails,’ Esmerelda went on.
‘In here!’ roared Grace, and Ginger made her way past the boxes into the living room where a young woman with café au lait skin was hard at work on Grace’s cuticles.
‘Louella, meet Ginger, my great-niece,’ said Grace.
‘Hello Ginger,’ said Louella, smiling. ‘If Grace say you great, I think you great too.’
‘Lovely to meet you, Louella,’ said Ginger.
‘Louella is from Guatemala,’ said Aunt Grace. ‘We have new nail stuff.’ She picked up a bottle of lurid opalescent purple nail varnish. ‘We got it—’
‘Don’t tell me: from the television?’ said Ginger.
Louella giggled.
‘Your aunt is very great also.’
Grace beamed.
‘Yes, she is,’ Ginger agreed. ‘And kind. I thought we were going to do some tidying up today?’ she added, trying to find somewhere to sit.
‘This was the only day Louella could come,’ Grace said gravely.
‘OK, I’ll start in the kitchen. By the way, the dogs are . . .?’
‘In the groomers. He picked them up in his van.’
‘Just checking. I was afraid there was a mobile dog nail-painting business too.’
Ginger escaped to the kitchen where there was no Esmerelda, thankfully, to interfere with her plans, and unpacked the supplies in her small backpack. In the car, she had huge, flat-packed boxes. She’d mentioned the plan to Declan, who said he’d drive over later with a friend’s van to bring the first load to the online seller Ginger had found if – and it was a big if – she had made enough progress to fill a van.
She looked around the kitchen and tried to figure out where to start. It probably made sense to start with the bigger boxes first, because the little boxes would necessitate lots of opening to see what was in them, and she could be hours at that. At least with the big boxes, she’d be discovering big new things that could be sold on and she’d be making more space. She found a playlist she liked on her phone and set to work.
After about forty-five minutes, she found that she’d got sort of a rhythm going. So far she’d opened seven boxes and found a doughnut maker, an ice cream maker, an incredible machine that chopped, minced and sliced, and several other vitally important household goods. From the documentation that accompanied each box, it was clear these things had been bought a couple of years ago and had simply never been used. Or taken out of the box.
‘Oh, Grace,’ muttered Ginger to herself, as she photographed the last item and placed it in a big box.
Grace, she realised, was a totally addicted shopper. The only difference between Grace and the crazy TV shows was that Grace’s stuff was pretty much new and unused, unlike some of the unfortunates on the television programmes who had piles of utterly ancient things that hid lots of mice droppings and generally dead mice too. At least, Ginger thought with a shiver, she hadn’t come across any mice droppings so far.
Declan phoned by the time she was filling the second box.
‘How’s it going, sis?’ he asked. ‘Do you need me around with the van?’
‘Actually, I think I do,’ said Ginger. ‘I’ve nearly filled the second big box and I’ve got quite a lot of stuff here. Judging from how much Grace paid for this stuff, she could make a tidy sum if she sold it all.’
‘Yess,’ said Declan, drawing out the word slowly. ‘But you never make anything like the same money back on the resale, even if things are brand new and still in their boxes.’
‘I know,’ agreed Ginger. ‘But it’s the only way I could get her to agree to this. I told her that if we sold the stuff she hasn’t used, she could buy lots of new stuff.’
‘Isn’t that enabling?’ asked Declan.
Ginger agreed. ‘But it’s either that or have Grace and Esmerelda swallowed up by boxes of crazy kitchen implements and becoming mummified by dog hair.’
‘What time will I come over with the van?’
‘Can you give me another two hours and then come over?’
‘No prob,’ said Declan. ‘Good luck, sis.’
Once she’d hung up, Ginger decided to go into the big sitting room to see how the beautification process was going on. As Esmerelda’s toes were now done, she and Grace were sitting back watching the shopping channel with great interest while holding their nails aloft.
Grace turned to Louella. ‘My great-niece is famous, you know,’ she said in confidential tones. ‘She had a beautiful spread in the newspaper today. Looks amazing, doesn’t she, Esmerelda?’
‘Very sexy,’ agreed Esmerelda. ‘You get a man no problem, or woman. I not forget, you might like woman.’
Ginger went puce. ‘You mean you’ve seen my pictures in the paper?’ she demanded.
‘Of course,’ said Grace. ‘Esmerelda got it first thing. Do you think we’d miss that?’
‘I wasn’t sure if you knew about it,’ said Ginger, feeling the embarrassment surge.
‘We not forget about it,’ said Esmerelda, walking on her heels over to a pile of newspapers and extracting the magazine with careful fingers. She showed Louella the front-page picture and Ginger cringed a little, the thought of this beautiful, lithe young girl looking at her with her boobs stuck out.
‘You look beautiful,’ said Louella.
‘She does, doesn’t she?’ said Grace proudly. Then she turned to Esmerelda. ‘Esmerelda, she doesn’t want a woman. She told you that. It’s a man she’s after.’
‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ said Esmerelda loftily.
‘Why didn’t you mention it when I came in?’ said Ginger.
‘We didn’t want you to go home because I thought you might be a bit embarrassed,’ Grace said. ‘My niece doesn’t like pictures of herself, but this is fabulous. Get you all sorts of men.’
Her eyes glittered at Ginger.
‘Aunt Grace, you’re shameful,’ said Ginger, but she was grinning too. ‘I don’t want all sorts of men.’
Grace cackled a little bit. ‘Said no woman ever!’
For her first training session at the gym, Ginger bought a special pair of new trainers that had involved the mortification of going into a sports shop in the first place and being fitted for them.
‘What you going to be doing?’ asked the lithe girl assisting her.
‘Er . . . CrossFit,’ said Ginger, feeling the ludicrousness of the whole situation. This woman must be thinking: you’re fat! You can’t cross-train. Go home and eat the contents of your fridge, babe.
But she didn’t seem to be. She treated the whole thing seriously, which was more than Ginger could do.
In a state of high anxiety, Ginger bought the first pair that fitted. Then, she embarked on a two-hour excavation of her wardrobe to find something, anything, that would look reasonable in a gym.
So for her training session with a man called Will Stapleton, who owned the gym and looked disturbingly sexy on the website despite shaggy blond surfer hair, she was wearing an overlarge black T-shirt, an industrial-strength sports bra, a pair of loose black leggings and the new trainers.
In fear, she had weighed herself: something she almost never did.
She was nearly fourteen stone. Ginger winced. But at least she knew before the inevitability of the weigh-in. Better to know now, right?
The gym turned out to be a large, warehouse-style premises that was painted black and was pretty quiet at that point in the afternoon. Ginger made her way over to an inside reception desk where a friendly-looking young guy greeted her. He was about twenty and looked sweet, not at all threateningly fit and cool.
‘Hi,’ he said, ‘can I help?’
Yes, thought Ginger, you could magically explain all about CrossFit and let me leave here without having to do anything with some hot, muscly guy who’d look down at me for being a sloth. But that was not the answer this guy needed.
‘Er, yes . . . I’m here to see Will,’ she said. ‘I’m Ginger Reilly and—’
‘Ginger! Will is looking forward to this,’ interrupted the guy delightedly. ‘Come on, I think he’s in his office.’
‘OK,’ said Ginger. Her chance of running out of here was disappearing.
Courage, she told herself.
Getting to Will involved going through the centre of the gym, and even though it wasn’t busy, there were plenty of people around working out, people who would look at Ginger and judge her. People who worked out always judged fat people.
But while she saw a lot of people lifting kettlebells and doing a confusing variety of lunges, nobody paid her the slightest bit of attention.
Neither were they all thin gym bunnies – they were normal-shaped people; some lean, some like herself, which astonished Ginger. They were all listening to various coaches or concentrating very hard on what they were doing.
All she needed was to talk to the Will person with the surfer hair, let him look her up and down and find her lacking, and then be sent off with the sweet young guy and let loose on a running machine or something. Even she couldn’t mess that up.
Sweet young guy peered around, then stopped by a wall where a tall man with muscles on his muscles was coaxing a teenage girl into squats.
The man had his back to them but the girl was possibly eighteen and she made Ginger think of herself at that age: verging on the plump, with a lip bitten down from nibbling at it anxiously. Yet this girl didn’t look as if she was uncomfortable: she looked determined. Her long dark hair was tied back in a ponytail and she held two small hand-weights.
‘You can do this, Marina. We’re going to do six sets, take a break, then six more. Sure, you’re going to feel sore tomorrow, but that means you’ve worked your body, this is the last part of the workout.’
‘OK,’ said the girl, gritting her teeth. ‘I can do this.’
‘Yes,’ said the guy, encouraging her, ‘you can do this.’
Ginger and the sweet young guy watched Marina as she squatted and as the big man counted down the squats, ‘Six, five, four . . .’
Ginger could see how much effort it was taking out of the girl and it was obvious she had done a lot of exercise up to this point, because her simple T-shirt was wet with sweat. But the big man was gentle and encouraging, all the time.
‘You can do this,’ he said between counts.
When she’d finished one set of lunges, he looked at his big manly diving watch and counted down. ‘One minute break,’ he said, ‘but keep those feet moving.’
‘OK,’ said Marina, determination written all across her face.
Ginger wondered why they’d stopped here in their progress to get to Will, Surfer God’s office, but she was enjoying this. This big guy was obviously one of the trainers and there was no sense that Marina was being humiliated in any way for being unfit. No, she was being encouraged every step of the way. Maybe the sweet young guy had stopped her just to let her see what it could be like.
After the second set, the girl’s face lit up. She put the weights carefully away and then did a little jump in the air, a jump that completely surprised Ginger.
‘Thank you, Will,’ she said delightedly and hugged the big man. ‘I couldn’t have done it without you, I really couldn’t.’
‘Course you could,’ he said, patting her on the back in an avuncular manner. ‘You’re well able to do it. You just need a little encouragement.’
This was Will? This man did not have blond surfer hair. While his hair was still naturally blond, it was cut short all over his head. The sweet young guy tapped him on the shoulder and Will turned around.
‘Will, this is Ginger Reilly, the lady from the newspaper.’
Will Stapleton gave Ginger the full blast of what she had already defined as a very sexy smile. He looked as if he was delighted to see her, but then, she decided cynically, he was probably delighted to see anyone who was going to give publicity to his gym. He didn’t know that Carla wanted free membership as part of the deal.
‘Great to meet you, Ginger,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘I half expected you to come dressed up in that swimsuit,’ he added as they reached the sanctuary of his office and he shut the door.
Ginger flushed the way only a redhead could flush and she wished she had one of her big black flowing coats to pull around herself as camouflage.
Words simply failed her, but then Will said: ‘Sorry. I really didn’t mean to embarrass you. It was meant to be funny. Me and my size thirteen feet. Let’s start again.’
He held out one huge hand.
‘I’m Will Stapleton. I’m thrilled you’re here to write about our gym, I’m delighted to meet you and I apologise for putting both feet in my mouth.’
Ginger looked into his face and found him gazing down at her with absolute sincerity. So few men looked down at her. So few men made her feel small. But Will was genuinely huge. Tall, strong and looking every inch the man who owned a gym.
He was no longer the tanned surfer man from the photos and somehow, while he was still very gorgeous, he wasn’t smug with it. He looked sorry. Understanding.
The man who understood that a teenage girl with weight issues needed to be treated with kindness as she worked out.
Instead of making some crack about how she only wore her swimsuit on her days off, the way she might have treated a smart comment at work, Ginger found herself being honest.
‘I’m nervous as I’m not a gym person and I’ve never worn anything like that before and certainly not for a photograph.’ The words came tumbling out.
Will nodded slowly.
‘Hopefully, I can make you a gym person,’ he said. ‘Some of us get frightened by the idea of exercise and feel that all our faults are going to be shown up, so we don’t try.’
‘We?’ said Ginger doubtfully. ‘You don’t look like you understand that.’
‘Oh, I do.’
Will pointed to a photo on the desk. It showed a tall, blond and undeniably chubby teenager hanging out with two skinny friends on either side of him.
‘That’s me in the middle. The larger kid. So yes, I understand. I hid from exercise and comfort ate for all my teenage years.’
Ginger thought of herself and her Ben and Jerry’s nights in front of the TV with only the guinea pigs for company.
‘I went abroad for a gap year with this pair of nutters, we ended up surfing and I discovered exercise.’
‘You certainly did,’ agreed Ginger, no longer shy.
Will laughed. ‘I love it. I love the endorphin buzz. So let’s get you into it too. And if it’s not embarrassing to say it, I did like those pictures. You should be proud of them.’
Ginger flushed again, but this time it was a flush of something Paula would have delightedly called excitement.
Maybe this workout thing mightn’t be so bad after all.