The Year that Changed Everything Read online

  Dedication

  For Mum, with huge love and lots of laughs.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  PART ONE

  Callie

  Sam

  Ginger

  PART TWO

  Callie

  Sam

  Ginger

  Callie

  Sam

  PART THREE

  Callie

  Sam

  Ginger

  Callie

  Sam

  Ginger

  Callie

  Sam

  Ginger

  Callie

  Sam

  Ginger

  Callie

  Sam

  Ginger

  Callie

  Sam

  Ginger

  PART FOUR

  Callie

  Sam

  Ginger

  Callie

  Ginger

  Sam

  Ginger

  Ginger

  Callie

  Sam

  Ginger

  PART FIVE

  Callie

  Sam

  Ginger

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Cathy Kelly

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  The Birthday

  The first Saturday in June

  Callie

  Outside the great sash windows, party lights snaked around the sycamores beside her bathroom, and even from two floors up, the pulse of party music could be heard.

  The neighbours would hate it – the flash Reynolds family showing off again, Callie Reynolds thought with a grimace, standing ready in her dress and shoes, wishing fifty wasn’t a birthday people felt that a person had to celebrate.

  She’d have been happy with a small dinner, but no. Jason, who always wanted the biggest and best, had organised this highly expensive, three-ring circus.

  ‘You deserve it,’ he’d told her earlier that day, as he’d proudly surveyed scurrying waiters and watched the party organiser ticking off cases of expensive wine. ‘We’ve worked hard for this life.’

  Callie had leaned into her handsome husband – everyone said they were a stunning couple – and murmured thank you.

  Mentally, she was thinking: but what if, after all the hard work, you find you don’t really like this life after all?

  Still bathed in the party lights, Callie locked the door of her glamorous cream marble bathroom. Bending down, she reached under the sink right to the back of the bottom of the cupboard to find the small cosmetics bag stuffed behind the spare shower gels and old bottles of fake tan. It was an ancient bag, chosen on purpose because Poppy, her teenage daughter, was unlikely to riffle through it on one of her forays into Callie’s cabinets in search of make-up.

  Since Poppy had turned fourteen, she had grown tall, nearly as tall as her mother, and was no longer even vaguely pleased with ordinary cosmetics, wanting instead to use her mother’s wildly expensive Chantecaille stuff, which Callie herself felt guilty about using.

  A full make-up bag of Chantecaille could keep a family of four fed for a month and still have enough left over for takeaway pizza.

  ‘I got you lovely MAC stuff,’ Callie protested the last time she found that Poppy had whipped her foundation, primer and pressed powder and had broken the latter.

  Poppy, who had her father’s colouring and his utter self-belief, had flicked her long, dark hair out of her perfectly made-up eyes. ‘Your stuff is nicer and I don’t see why I can’t share it,’ she said with the entitled air that shocked Callie.

  Where is my lovely, sweet daughter and what have you done with her? Callie wondered.

  In the past six months since the radical conversion from Beloved Child into Daughter-From-Hell, Callie had tried everything in her maternal arsenal: withholding pocket money; loss of phone privileges; and the When I Was Your Age talk.

  The When I Was Your Age talk had backfired the most.

  ‘That was years ago, the seventies,’ said Poppy dismissively, as if the seventies were on a par with the Jurassic period. ‘This is like, now?’

  Callie had ground her teeth. Poppy’s generation had no clue what life had been like for Callie growing up, or for Poppy’s father, Jason. Sometimes, when she thought of how having so little had given Jason and herself such drive and determination, Callie went with: ‘if you get too many things too young, Poppy, what values are you learning?’

  The prepubescent Poppy, the one who loved animals, seals and sparkly nail varnish, might have teared up or let her bottom lip wobble at having upset her mum. The new, unimproved Poppy just rolled her eyes, went back to her phone and ignored her mother for the rest of the day, which was obviously what she was assiduously learning in school from the handful of other, equally privileged kids she was now palling around with.

  Not having a clue how to handle this new, tempestuous child was partly to blame for Callie’s need of the occasional Xanax.

  Her oldest friend, Mary Butler, a real pal from her modelling days who’d lived in Canada for years and had three daughters older than Poppy, often said:

  ‘I know it seems counter-intuitive, but making us want to kill them is a part of teenagers’ growing up. It’s how we let them fly the nest, because there comes a point where you think you might just smother them in their sleep when they’ve accused you of being passive-aggressive four times in one day and then demanded to know if you’ve handwashed their pink sweater.’

  Mary was in her late fifties, older and wiser, no longer caught up in the hormonal maelstrom of perimenopause. Mary had three girls in college. She was not, Callie reflected, dealing with a daughter currently behaving like a particularly venal child from Game of Thrones.

  From being around people like Mary, Callie had always assumed that when a person hit fifty, all knowledge flowed into them, automatically. But she was wrong. Because today, Callie Reynolds was fifty. Fifty! And she didn’t seem to know anything more than she ever had.

  All the books on menopause seemed to say her Inner Goddess would be along soon, bringing wisdom, new sex appeal and the glow of a new life, which was an Inner Goddess guarantee. Ha! That was a cosmic joke, for sure. Staring at herself in the mirror, Callie firmly believed that her blasted Inner Goddess had run off and had left the stand-in, Inner Crone, in her place.

  Crone had dry skin, got irritable, cried at the drop of a hat and sometimes sweated so much in bed she wondered when Jason would start asking if he could sleep in the shallow end.

  Crone snapped at her husband – not that he was around much these days, possibly because Crone was not experiencing the much-vaunted sexual surge but more of a sexual Saharan drought.

  Plus, the anti-Inner Goddess wanted a daughter who appreciated what she had and didn’t order stuff from the internet with Crone’s credit card without asking.

  Finally, Inner Crone missed her family and tended to cry when she thought of them. Which was the other reason Callie needed the odd Xanax.

  It was ten years since she’d seen her mother, her brother or Aunt Phil. Ten years. They should have been at this party. But they weren’t. Because of Jason, and the row and . . .

  Feeling the panic rise, Callie unzipped the little bag and popped a pill out of its packet. She washed down the Xanax with some water and took a deep breath.

  The Inner Goddess would probably suggest dealing with the family rift as well as
talking to Jason about how they really needed to spend more time together as a couple. She’d advise a book on healing herbs and how to get through the tricky teenage years, and to take up meditation.

  But Crone liked chemicals to block out the pain because it was easier.

  Callie could hear music throbbing from the party two floors below and knew she had to hurry. Quickly, she took stock of herself in the mirror: golden blonde hair perfect, the charcoal silk shift dress with its modern Jackson Pollock-style pattern on the front caressed collarbones nearly as slender as those of the teenage models on which it had been photographed in the magazines.

  At least collarbones never got fat, unlike waists.

  She’d had her hair blow-dried but made her own face up. After those early years as a model, Callie knew what worked. She knew other people saw beauty – full lips, her face a perfect oval and eyes that someone had once described as huge misty grey orbs that dominated her face. She, who’d been the skinny little kid in school with the weirdly big mouth, now saw only flaws: the lines, the inevitable sag of her jawline, and a tiredness no multivitamin could shift.

  ‘Like a Greek goddess with mysterious eyes, as if all the world’s knowledge is upon those slender shoulders . . .’ someone had once written about her.

  Jason had teased her about it, but she knew that, secretly, he’d been pleased.

  ‘Greek indeed,’ he’d joked, ‘when we both know you’re pure Ballyglen.’

  Callie had known he was pleased because normally he never mentioned their home town, having long since brushed its rural dust from his handmade shoes.

  Their glamorous detached mansion in Dublin was a far cry from their council homes in Ballyglen, a small East coast town with no industry anymore, no jobs, and her family—

  Stop thinking about the past!

  She slicked on another sweep of lip gloss.

  There had been little joking from her husband this week as the planner had consulted with Callie about the party. Jason, whose idea the blasted thing was, had been distant, on the phone a lot of the time hidden away in his study when he wasn’t at work.

  Callie, whose perimenopausal emotional barometer was set to ‘high alert’ anyway, sensed him moving away emotionally.

  Worse, Poppy had gone into overdrive in teenage cattiness, a type of meanness that must register on some Teenage Richter Scale of Narkiness somewhere.

  ‘Are you wearing that?’ she had asked her mother earlier in the week, spying the shift dress on its hanger.

  ‘Yes,’ said Callie, summoning all her patience, waiting for what Poppy and her friends called ‘the burn’ – a caustic remark that hurt as much as raw flames.

  ‘You wear that, it’ll look like the eighties threw up on you,’ said Poppy. ‘Plus, the waist is in, you know, Mum.’

  There it was – the burn.

  Her friend Mary, who was as all-knowing as Google, had warned her that the teenage era was tough.

  ‘Remember when you were the most fabulous Mummy in the world, small people snuggled up to you on the couch and said you were beautiful?’ Mary emailed gently, when Poppy hit thirteen. ‘That’s over. OVAH. You are now the thing Poppy tests her claws on, like a cat scratcher, only mobile. You’ve got to start reining her in, Callie, because it’s Armageddon time and she will pick on you, not Jason. You are going to be the cat scratcher.’

  Mary had been right so far.

  Mild acne and raging hormones that made Poppy question Callie’s every word both hit at the same time.

  Armageddon, Callie thought, shell-shocked.

  Poppy had fallen in with a different crowd at school, the gang with rich parents, the ultra-entitled gang who were always demanding money.

  ‘Do you remember that Christmas she wanted Santa Claus to give her presents to poor children?’ Callie asked Jason one morning.

  ‘Yeah,’ muttered Jason, scanning his iPad and barely listening.

  ‘Where has that person gone?’ Callie said earnestly.

  Jason didn’t answer, his attention already elsewhere. Jason thought that as long as the family had plenty of money, that was all that mattered. Growing up poor could do that to a person. Once, she’d been the same.

  But now . . . now she was afraid her beloved Poppy was becoming someone else: someone who knew the cost of everything and, truly, the value of absolutely nothing. A child of the wealthy who had nothing with which to compare her life. No memories of jam sandwiches for dinner all week, no recall of not having proper school shoes.

  In giving their daughter everything she ever wanted, Callie wondered if she and Jason had damaged her by making Poppy spoiled.

  Not that Jason thought so: he thought Poppy hung the moon.

  But Callie, though she adored her daughter, worried and she was determined to teach Poppy the right things again.

  First, she had to get through tonight – this enormous, entirely unwanted fiftieth birthday party that Jason had insisted on throwing for her.

  ‘People will expect it from us,’ Jason had said. ‘We’ve got an image to maintain, honey.’

  Callie was sick of their damned image.

  Sure, it seemed like Callie Reynolds had it all: the big house, the rich and glamorous businessman husband who never strayed, the looks of a former model, an interesting past, and a tall, beautiful daughter any mother would be proud of.

  Yet it wasn’t perfect. Nothing ever really was. Real life was not like the pretend world on some people’s Instagram. Where was the Instagram that said ‘My Not So Damn Perfect Life’, with no happy-glow filters?

  Jason had certainly pulled out all the stops, which meant a giant drinks party for two hundred people with the catering kitchen in the basement full of sous-chefs prepping for the plating of chocolate surprise bombes, tiny amandine biscuits shaped like stars, sashimi, sushi, cod and chips, Anjou pigeon (watch out for shot, warned the waiters and waitresses) and fat round pieces of beef that had been made into the most luxurious beef burgers ever. If any of the guests had an allergy, or even felt they might like to have an allergy on fashionable grounds, it would be catered for. There wasn’t a bag of Peruvian black quinoa or a tin of organic matcha tea to be had within a ten-block radius, just in case.

  Holding her stomach in, Callie slowly made her way into the party, knocked sideways by expensive perfumes and the noisy clatter of hundreds of people drinking cocktails perfected by a mixologist.

  ‘Fabulous party,’ said someone, and a face Callie barely recognised from the newspaper air-kissed her. ‘The house is divine.’

  Callie beamed her photograph smile.

  ‘Yes, it’s lovely,’ she said, poise in motion now that the Xanax had kicked in nicely and had chemically flattened her worries about Poppy or guilt over her family’s absence at this party. ‘Jason has such incredible ideas for the house.’

  It was easier than saying that Jason was a nightmare when it came to the notion of improving everything he owned.

  Everything had to be the best or most expensive. Like the recent renovation.

  Thanks to endless months of building works on the mansion in the embassy belt, a huge basement had been dug for an extension which opened up to a three-storey conservatory complete with a walkway around the highest floor, at ground level, where tropical plants grew, and solar panels in the giant glass panes made the whole thing work.

  She didn’t explain that her husband knew zilch about exotic plants.

  He’d actually got the idea from an article in the Financial Times’s How To Spend It magazine about a billionaire who had a greenhouse in Manhattan where he grew all manner of exotic things.

  ‘Cyrtochilum Dasyglossum orchids,’ he’d read out, admiring a photo of a yellow orchid with delicately ruffled petals.

  His elocution and command of the Latin words were impressive for a man who’d grown up in a council estate not too far fr
om Callie’s own in a big county town, and whose knowledge of plants was confined to his mam’s dahlias.

  But Jason was a quick learner. He could now talk exotic plants with the best of them. He expected Callie to do the same, as well as look just as beautiful all the time.

  Unlike those husbands who died a little when their wives went to the shops wielding credit cards, Jason was always urging Callie to buy clothes.

  ‘I want you looking good, sexy,’ he’d say.

  She could hardly complain, and yet lately she felt more like another thing in Jason’s life. His wife, to add to the Ferrari and the yacht.

  ‘Do enjoy yourself,’ Callie said to the guest now and she moved as if something vital was happening somewhere and she must race off. It was her fiftieth birthday party, after all, and the hostess needed to be all over the place, a handy excuse when it came to conversing with some of the guests, who were clearly a rent-a-celeb crowd drummed up by the party planner.

  Callie moved on through the beautiful grey reception room that soared up to a vast glass and steel structure which had guests admiring it all.

  She could see her husband in the distance, surrounded by friends as if it was his fiftieth birthday party and not hers. But then Jason drew people to him with the magnetism of the handsome and charismatic. He was tall, even among the statuesque, Pilates- or barre-toned Amazons in heels who were flirting with him.

  She had no idea how he’d grown so tall: his own father, now long dead, had been wizened, but then that was due to smoking untipped cigarettes for years and thinking pints of beer and greasy pub sausages and chips were nourishment. Jason was dark, with that Spanish/Irish combination of raven blue-black hair, blue Irish eyes and skin that tanned when he so much as looked at the sun. Tonight, he was wearing a suit of such a dark navy that it appeared almost black. He looked like a movie star: an almost unreal presence among the rest of the guests.

  ‘We were flying over Monument Valley and the pilot took us really low. It was awesome. Nothing can do justice to that landscape, but flying over it comes pretty close,’ he was saying, his voice at the same time husky – which was natural – and exquisitely modulated to sound posh Irish – which was not natural but the result of years of voice lessons.