Ginger sat on the train and watched the girl opposite eat a chocolate bar: blithely, unselfconsciously. Ginger longed for both a taste of the chocolate and the ability to eat four hundred calories of pure sugar for breakfast without anyone so much as blinking.
But then, the girl was a skinny little thing in skinny-little-thing jeans with those baby deer legs that looked as if they couldn’t hold a real human up.
Skinny girls could eat four thousand calories of chocolate and say things like ‘I just burn it off, I don’t know how!’ and giggle, and people – OK, men – gazed at them longingly as if the ability to desire chocolate meant they were good in bed.
People – OK, also men – never thought that about girls like Ginger. Although to be fair, Ginger never ate chocolate or anything else on the train. She didn’t eat in public. Ever. So nobody got the chance to wonder if she was fabulous in bed from the way she sensually ate a Twix.
Big, curvy women eating chocolate in public could get looked at with the faint scorn that said: no wonder you’re fat.
She forced herself to look back at her phone and clicked into her daily affirmations for dieting.
Today’s, which she had read over her low-sugar muesli, the one that tasted least like ground-up packing boxes, said: Imagine yourself as a better you. A happier, more contented you. This all will come if you just believe and let go. What you imagine, you draw towards yourself.
Ginger closed her eyes and tried to imagine a happier, more contented her.
Her life would be different. Entirely different. She would be thin. Really thin, in fact. People would say things like: ‘Ginger, darling, you have lost so much weight – you look amazing, but don’t get too thin . . .’
And Ginger would shrug so that her bronzed collarbones would be visible and everyone would sigh enviously at her exquisite bone structure, and she’d say: ‘I drink lots of water, and really, I forget to eat half the time because I’m so busy with Jacques/Dex/Logan . . .’ and said hot boyfriend would smoulder from across the room and people would die with envy . . .
The train stopped with a jolt.
Her stop.
She hoisted her handbag across her chest, pulled her extra bag from between her knees, and made her way out of the carriage into the throng of people wielding coffee and newspapers. Getting off packed buses, trams or trains was a particular hell for larger women and every time she did it, Ginger tried to engage nobody’s eye so as not to invite the censure she would see there.
As she quickened her pace along Hinde Street on her way to Caraval Media, she knew she was transforming herself into the Ginger office version: 2.0.
With her old school friends, people like Liza, she fitted into another slot: that of helpful friend, a person whose shoulder you could cry on.
At home with her family, she was the Ginger who took care of everyone.
But in work, Ginger was a different person. In fact, she was pretty sure that the people she knew from her non-work life wouldn’t recognise her. Here, she sloughed off the cloak of the girl who’d been plump forever.
Here, she was the reinvented Ginger.
On the fifth floor, Ginger went over to her cubicle and saw a message on her desk from Paula, who sat at the next desk.
Alice Jeter called – wants 2 c u.
‘’Lo,’ said Paula, poking her head round the cubicle. ‘What are you going up to the tenth floor for, anyway?’
‘Research for some online thing,’ said Ginger, managing to sound bored.
‘Oh, yeah, I forgot. Snoresville,’ said Paula, instantly uninterested.
Ginger took her things – several big folders that looked very important – and beetled out to the lifts.
She was amazed at how remarkably good she’d become at lying over the past six months. Six months like no other in her life.
It was like being a spy in a novel, living a double life and telling nobody. Six months previously, Ginger had been an ordinary staff member of the Dublin Clarion, a small local paper which had just been bought up by the giant Caraval Media group, who’d never seen a bit of media they didn’t want to buy, Monopolies Commission excepting.
People liked reading actual newspapers for local news, unlike so many other types of news, so the Clarion was a good buy in a struggling industry hit by the internet downloading of news. Ginger was a general reporter, but by the unspoken edict of male-dominated journalism, she got to do all the stories where female empathy was required. She loved it, but she often wondered if it was what she was truly destined to do. Then the paper moved into the giant Caraval Media Towers and she got the company-wide email about the agony aunt required for Teen Now, a magazine that was going totally electronic – from paper to e-format.
Ginger, who had been considered an old head on young shoulders since she’d been very young, felt that thrill of excitement that told her this could be the job of her dreams.
‘We need someone who has empathy, some qualifications for this role and is able to turn out copy quickly. Apply to the above email,’ said the ad.
Well, Ginger could turn out articles at high speed, as anyone who had ever seen her write that two-page emergency advertorial on a peanut company could testify.
‘You made peanuts sound sexy, interesting almost,’ said the chief sub in astonishment when she emailed him the required 1000 words.
‘Just doin’ my job, boss,’ said Ginger, tipping an imaginary hat at him, although it had been a nightmare to write. Peanuts were not sexy or interesting, unless you were a monkey.
That was the Ginger she was in work – funny, sassy and someone who took no crap from anyone.
She applied in secret to Teen Now and, also secretly, had two interviews on the tenth floor, which was one of the executive floors and was decorated far more beautifully than her floor, which was a warren of desks and had a scratchy blue carpet that gave off enough static electric to power the national grid.
Ginger had done her homework. She read past online editions of Teen Now, which was aimed at a fourteen- to sixteen-year-old age group but probably read by twelve- to fourteen-year-olds, before they moved on to Cosmo and how to do more than make out with boyfriends.
She had realised quickly that the previous agony aunt had veered towards the lightweight.
All in all, she had never dealt with any serious questions. ‘The previous agony aunt,’ she said at her interview, ‘what was her background?’
‘Why do you ask?’ said Alice, who’d just been made boss of the e-magazine department, staring hard at Ginger. Alice Jeter was exquisite: slim, dark-eyed, hair a sheet of fashionable silvery pink.
‘I just wondered because she seems to have kept to light topics and there’s nothing meaty or serious there. What did she do if she got any real, in-depth questions? I mean, how does she handle those. I can’t find any of them.’
‘That’s because I’m pretty sure she made up most of the questions, so making up the answers wasn’t that difficult,’ said Alice wryly.
‘She made them up?’ said Ginger, astonished.
‘Yup. She was a college kid, had never worked in journalism before and no had clue that you have to keep it real. She taught us all something, though: never hire the daughter of someone in management. Which is why she is out looking for another job and we’re looking for another agony aunt who can deal with online threads about self-esteem, slut shaming, sexting, body image. Do you want to try your hand at it?’
‘I’d love to’, said Ginger, flattening down the fear.
‘OK. Good.’ Alice’s eyes travelled up and down Ginger. ‘We’re going to use a pseudonym. We all like “Girlfriend” as the column name until we get the right person. If you don’t work out, we need continuity for the readers until we do get the right person. Probably best if you do this on your own time and we’ll pay you freelance rates. Four columns to see if you can do it, OK?’
Ginger bit her lip. She thought she knew exactly why her name and picture would not be on the column – a photo of an overweight woman was hardly seen as aspirational to a readership of young girls who watched models’ vlogs and worshipped skinny singers and actresses.
‘I understand,’ she said evenly. She would not be upset by this: she would stand tall and be herself. Her brain was what they were going to pay her for.
Her brain.
That first week, when she emailed over her column, she felt as shaky as she had done as a brand new reporter.
A succinct email had come back from Alice an hour later. ‘I like this. It’s good. You’ve got empathy and don’t shy away from the tough ones. Keep going.’
Three columns later, Alice said they wanted to put her under contract for a year.
As Alice had suggested, Ginger hadn’t discussed her new role with anyone. The girls who read e-Teen Now were looking for big-sister sort of advice from someone who was cool and trendy, like one of the modern vloggers who could throw on a pair of skinny jeans, flat shoes and a funky little T-shirt and tell them how to get over that guy or how to stand up for themselves. But Ginger didn’t look like that person.
She wasn’t aspirational, a thought which hurt, but she needed to pay the mortgage.
So she put on her big-girl panties, and took the implied insult.
She could have fought and said it was time that bigger role models were used and where better than in a young woman’s magazine? But that would have been the office Ginger 2:0 speaking. The real Ginger, the private one who felt her weight meant she was judged cruelly, could not have faced it.
Writing the column was a joy. Her alter ego, Girlfriend, was sassy and truthful. Girlfriend had no time for boyfriends or girlfriends who wanted to belittle their dates or friends who weren’t supportive. There were shades of grey in her column because life was all shades of grey.
With each week, the letters got more serious, as the audience could see that the woman behind the Girlfriend column had changed.
Girls wrote in about eating disorders and hating their bodies; about whether they should sleep with that guy who really wanted them to but they didn’t want to go that far, and if they didn’t, he’d dump them. They wrote in about having sent semi-naked pictures of themselves to guys on their phones. They wrote in about being gay or bisexual and worrying about who to tell.
Ginger learned the hard way how to deal with these letters; she learned to explain the rules of the law, but she learned that the law didn’t protect the girls who found themselves at the mercy of the modern world.
Instead she went up to Alice on the tenth floor and said, ‘I’d like to do some feature articles.’
‘On what?’
‘This week about some guy who wants you to send him topless pictures of yourself. Because that’s what’s happening to thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds’.
‘OK,’ said Alice, who never appeared shocked no matter what Ginger came up with. ‘Write it under the Girlfriend pseudonym.’
‘Absolutely’ said Ginger, ‘that’s what you pay me for.’
‘I like you, you remind me of . . .’ began Alice and Ginger thought that perhaps she had been about to say ‘. . . me when I was younger’, but Alice didn’t finish it because her phone rang and she nodded at Ginger to go.
All the way down in the lift, Ginger thought of how Alice was skinny and all gym-toned. There was no way she’d ever looked like Ginger.
No way she’d ever bought clothes from a catalogue, no way she had ever slid into a room sort of sideways, hoping that was the thinnest way possible to enter a space. No.
Alice’s strength was real and Ginger’s was a cloak she put on every morning she entered the Caraval Media building. Still, she thought, taking a deep breath as the lift slid to a smooth halt on the fifth floor, the cloak was working so far.
If work was busy, her private life was busier.
Twenty-six years after they’d bonded in the classroom with lots of crying four-year-olds, her best friend, Liza, was getting married and Ginger was asked to be chief bridesmaid.
However, Liza’s desire to get married quickly, because she didn’t do delayed gratification, meant the day had to be planned in just three months. A wedding planner had managed to swing a marvellous deal on a beautiful hotel because of a wedding that had been cancelled. Ginger had promised to help plan all the other details.
A fan of internet ‘magical weddings’, Liza first decided she wanted white horses with crimped manes faked up to look like unicorns – ‘impossible’, the wedding planner had sighed and had launched into a long and complex story of brides who had gone down this road before. The horn/headdress creations had frightened every horse bar a nearly-blind one and had been a health and safety danger on many grounds.
Once the unicorns were nixed, Liza was fiercely determined to be even more creative. This would be a fairy-tale marriage because she had waited until she was nearly thirty – thirty! – to be married and it had to be the most special ever.
Ginger forgave her the comment about being nearly thirty. Ginger was the same age and Ginger had never even dated anyone. Liza just wasn’t thinking when she’d said it, she convinced herself.
‘Let’s have a serious planning night where we fill in all the extras,’ Ginger suggested.
Liza was delighted, but the wedding planner couldn’t make it.
So in the end, it was just Liza, Ginger and Charlene, the other bridesmaid and a friend of Liza’s from beauty college, who congregated in Liza and James’s rented flat.
The flat didn’t have the homey touches of her own place, but then, they couldn’t paint any walls and do their own thing.
Liza positioned herself on a leather couch once they’d organised the snacks they had brought.
Charlene had brought wine and sushi.
Ginger had brought wine and chocolates. She felt stupid now, looking at the big box of Dairy Milk, untouched on Liza’s coffee table, while the two other women wielded chopsticks and discussed how helpful sushi was for dieting.
‘A thought occurred to me last night,’ said Liza. ‘Swans. What do you both think?’
‘Swans, right.’ Ginger wrote it down in her notebook doubtfully.
Swans were beautiful, wild birds and were definitely not to be used as part of a ceremony. She could explain it all to Liza later, she thought and absently reached over and picked up the unopened chocolate box.
Her fingers froze mid-cellophane-rip as she realised Liza and Charlene were staring at her, not a hint of muffin top between them.
‘You skinny girls can eat all the sushi you want, but us big girls like chocolate!’ she said valiantly, and the other two laughed.
‘Ginger, you’re so funny,’ said Liza. ‘I told you she was brilliant, didn’t I?’ she added to Charlene.
Because there was nothing she could do at this point, Ginger had beamed at the other two girls and opened the chocolates rapidly as if she could not possibly exist without oxygen, water and Dairy Milk.
‘Chocolate and nuts, yummy,’ she said, picking up two and putting them in her mouth.
‘You’re fabulous,’ squealed Charlene, who didn’t appear to have much else to say other than fabulous, Ginger thought, with a hint of sourness despite the chocolate melting in her mouth.
No, she thought, stop being an absolute bitch. Just because Charlene and Liza’s apparent closeness meant she appeared to have taken over Ginger’s position as Liza’s best friend, there was no need to take it out on the poor girl.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘What next?’
‘Butterflies,’ said Liza, ‘I’ve been thinking that butterflies would be lovely as soon as we arrive at the hotel.’
‘Right,’ said Ginger in relief, scrawling a big line through swans on her notebook. ‘So, no swans then?’
Butterflies had to be easier to organise, but where did they go afterwards, poor things. She wondered how to nix this idea.
‘No,’ said Liza, ‘swans and butterflies, I mean it’s got to be magical and special.’
‘I’m just a bit nervous about the swans, Liza,’ Ginger said, because she felt this was slightly getting away from them with all the wildlife.
‘Oh for goodness sake, Ginger,’ snapped Charlene, ‘it’s got to be possible to organise swans and butterflies. People do it all the time. I’ve seen it in the magazines. It’s going to be a very special wedding.’
Liza beamed at Charlene and Ginger felt that horrible pang of jealously again. It had been the same the day Liza had gone off to choose her wedding dress. She wasn’t sure how Liza had ended up picking a day when she couldn’t go, but Charlene had been happy to step into the breach, and from all accounts, it had been a glorious day of trekking around beautiful shops trying on fabulous bridal gowns without Ginger.
As the only way Ginger felt she was ever going to get into a wedding shop to look at bridal gowns was with a friend, she felt her chances were gone.
‘Next, we have to discuss the bridesmaids’ dresses,’ Liza went on, looking meaningfully at Ginger. ‘Charlene and I have been speaking about this and we don’t want you to get upset.’
Ginger blinked.
‘Why would I get upset?’ she stammered.
‘Because, you know . . .’
Liza looked at Ginger, who felt every inch of her size eighteen at that exact moment. Nervously she stuffed another chocolate into her mouth and took a big gulp of wine, not a good combination.
‘Er . . . OK, what were you thinking of?’ said Ginger, feeling the colour begin to come up from her chest into her neck.
Soon it would hit her face and she’d be bright orange. She used to go that particularly unappealing shade during sports in school.
Liza warmed to her theme: ‘I was thinking that we should perhaps go for a similar colour for you and Charlene but a different shape. Charlene loves elegant streamlined dresses, quite like my own actually,’ said Liza. ‘So I’m thinking violet or a sort of a blush pink or . . .’
‘Or crimson,’ said Charlene.
Ginger, who had never hated anyone in her life, felt a tinge of loathing.
Crimson would be absolutely beautiful for someone with Charlene’s colouring and shape. But for a woman who went orange when she flushed, a woman with rippling auburn curls, crimson was the very worst colour in the book.
‘I’m not really much a fan of crimson,’ she said.
‘Oh.’ Both Liza and Charlene stared at her as if she’d just mentioned clubbing baby seals.
‘It doesn’t suit my hair colouring,’ said Ginger.
‘I love the idea of crimson,’ said Liza mournfully.
The Ginger who had let Liza Hannon walk all over her for twenty-six years resurfaced.
‘But, of course, if that’s what you want,’ said Ginger, abandoning all hope of looking beautiful in an elegant bridesmaid’s gown. She was going to look like a giant cherry. Red all over and round.
‘Well, we’ll see,’ said Liza, ‘let’s pick a date to go shopping.’
In order to keep her cheerful, us-fat-girls-LOVE-chocolate thing going, Ginger had to eat half the box, even though it made her feel ashamed. Comfort eating always did. That was why she could never lose weight: when her heart was heavy, she numbed it with chocolate or biscuits or ice cream. Hating herself for being fat meant she could keep all other feelings at bay.
And for a while, food filled all the dark, sad holes inside her.
Liza and Charlene were still talking about swans, butterflies and how crimson bridesmaids’ dresses could suit redheads if they made the effort.
Liza’s mother had always been on a diet. Maybe Charlene’s had too. Was that the trick, Ginger wondered: to have a mother who showed you how to do dieting and things like make-up or clothes?
Dad was brilliant, but he didn’t know any of that stuff.
‘I’m sorry your Ma isn’t here to help you with this,’ he’d say mournfully, and Ginger would change the subject at speed. Under no circumstances did she want to talk about her mother. The lack of her hurt too much. Some pain needed to be buried deep. The deeper the better.
When she was growing up, he dressed her in the same sort of stuff as her brothers. For years, the three siblings all had the same short haircuts until Ginger was about six and Liza, who’d been her bestest friend for two years, said, ‘Why do you have boys’ hair?’
Ginger had gone home crying to her dad. He’d felt so bad, he always said when he remembered the story now.
‘I said, “Right, long girly, hair, let’s do that. Grace has been nagging me about it, but I said kids get nits in school. Still, we can’t have my girl looking like a boy.” And oh, Ginger my love, when it grew, it was stunning, but the tangles! I wasn’t used to combing out tangles, but we did it. And now look at you,’ he liked to say, pride in every word. ‘Your hair is your crowning glory.’
In misery, Ginger ate another chocolate, swallowing it down like sawdust. Her crowning glory would look horrendous on top of a crimson gown.
She’d had such plans for this wedding: she’d be part of Liza’s life in a way that she wasn’t anymore, not really. Liza hung out with people from work and Ginger was always so busy. This wedding and her being chief bridesmaid would bring the closeness back.
But it wasn’t looking that way at all.