The Year that Changed Everything Page 6

  She leaned against the stall again and sighed with happiness.

  For the first time in years, she felt as if she liked her body. He liked it, loved it. She would stick on some more perfume too . . .

  ‘Oh and really, what is Ginger like? Talk about desperation,’ Charlene said.

  Ginger smothered a gasp. The bitch. Charlene must fancy Stephen herself.

  Well, turns out he wasn’t interested in twiglets but liked curvy babes instead, she thought with a satisfied grin.

  She waited for Liza to stand up for her.

  ‘I know,’ sighed Liza.

  Not a warm-hearted ‘I know’. More of a resigned tone. The way you spoke of a relative who went off the rails at parties and let the side down.

  Ginger breathed out shakily.

  ‘I love Ginger, but she’s her own worst enemy. Won’t exercise, won’t diet. I’ve spent years trying to help her, Charlene. Years. You and I both know it takes effort to stay thin, but she won’t and then she whines that she can’t get a guy.’

  Whines? In the stall, Ginger was shocked. Did she whine about not having a man to share her life?

  ‘Sometimes I think of doing a friendship edit and getting Ginger out of my life because she totally wrecks my head,’ Liza went on. ‘I hate seeing her so huge, hate watching her eat all sorts of crap and then be surprised when she gets fat. That bridesmaid’s dress is a size eighteen, you know. Eighteen! If a girl in the salon was that size, she’d die! Or diet.’

  ‘Totally,’ agreed Charlene.

  ‘She’s the friend I’ve known the longest but I’ve totally moved on. You do, right?’

  ‘Totally.’

  ‘But ugh.’ Liza’s distaste was audible. ‘I really didn’t think she was going to slobber over poor Stephen like that. He has a lovely girlfriend, you know: fabulous skin, amazing clothes, runs half-marathons. But she’s away for a work trip and I don’t know how Ginger latched onto him.’

  ‘Have you seen the way she’s pushing her boobs up at him. It’s embarrassing to watch,’ Charlene said.

  ‘Have I seen it?’ Liza groaned. ‘Everybody can see it.’

  Disbelieving, Ginger listened as her best and oldest friend spoke.

  ‘I know she’s desperate for a date, but really.’

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ said Charlene, enjoying sticking the knife in now that it was clear Liza was amenable to it, ‘is why she’s your chief bridesmaid?’

  Ginger felt as if the whole world had slowed.

  ‘Ma said I had to. I’ve known her since I was four. Ma said Ginger was my oldest friend. But let’s face it, it was fine when we were four, not anymore. Not now it’s so obvious she doesn’t fit into my life. She’s hardly a friend like you, hon,’ said Liza, and Ginger knew, from years of standing beside her best friend in bathrooms and watching Liza apply make-up in mirrors, that Liza was now putting on lipstick.

  She always stretched her lips to get it into the furthest corners of her mouth and she was speaking in what Ginger thought of as her lipstick voice.

  She’d heard that voice countless times: in school bathrooms when Liza had been upset and Ginger had been the one to comfort her; after their big exams when Liza had done badly and Ginger, who could have gone and whooped it up with her pals from higher level English, had stayed and taken care of Liza who’d done so badly.

  ‘Honestly, Ma, I said. I’ve taken her under my wing my whole life! But Ma said I had to, what with Ginger having no mother.’

  ‘But . . .’ Charlene’s voice was almost a whisper as she said it and, alone in the stall, Ginger felt herself tense because she knew just what word Charlene was going to use, ‘. . . she’s fat. The photos! You don’t need a fat bridesmaid! Liza, you’re too gorgeous to need a fugly.’

  A fugly – a fat and ugly friend, Ginger knew.

  Liza laughed, happy at being called gorgeous, not saying that looks weren’t important – all the things she said to Ginger when Ginger stared at herself in mirrors and hated what she saw.

  Clearly, that was what she said to Ginger – not what she felt.

  Charlene was on a roll now.

  ‘At the fittings for the dresses, did you see the way she kept trying to hide in the dressing room?’

  Stand up for me, Liza, whispered Ginger in her lonely bathroom prison.

  ‘She’s always been like that. Buys her clothes from catalogues,’ Liza said dismissively, as if she understood what it was like to go into a shop and search in vain for something modern and in her size when there was always one saleslady who looked at her as if she were an alien beamed down onto Planet Thin. ‘Some people just want to be fat, they hide behind it, comfort-eat and whine that they can’t get thin.’ She paused. ‘You finished?’

  ‘Yup,’ said Charlene.

  The door slammed and they were gone.

  When she was sure she was alone, Ginger came out of her hiding place. In the mirror, she was the same Ginger as she had always been: big and curved in her dreadful pink ship of a dress. She had worn this dress for Liza, even though she had hated it. Knowing she was the biggest woman in the bridal party had sliced through her today, especially beside Liza and Charlene, who were slender in columns of cream silk and blush silk respectively rather than in enormous ballgowns.

  ‘The sort of thing Charlene’s wearing won’t suit you, Ginger,’ Liza had said that day in the bridal shop, standing back to assess her friend’s outfit.

  ‘Whatever you want,’ Ginger had said valiantly, even though she was sure something a bit more fitted would be better than this dress with its acres of fabric and boob-enhancing qualities. But if Liza wanted her wearing this, Ginger would wear it. That’s what friends did.

  Friends.

  She’d thought Liza was her friend.

  But Liza thought she didn’t want to be thin, that she hid behind her body when, really, she wanted to be seen in spite of it. For people to see the tenderness of her heart; to see that a larger physical body could as easily hide a fragile soul as a thin one.

  That the outside and the inside were so terribly, terribly different.

  Today, on her thirtieth birthday, it turned out that her best friend only thought of her in terms of her body weight.

  Thought she was fat. That horrible word. As if being fat was the worst crime in the world.

  You could be anything you wanted in this world, but you couldn’t be fat. No matter what else you achieved, that wiped out the achievement or whatever was on the inside.

  To add to the pain, Liza wanted to edit her friends list and Ginger hadn’t made the cut.

  Just like that.

  Time, friendship – none of it mattered except for her weight.

  Ginger wanted to cry, could feel the traitorous tears rearing up, but she wasn’t going to, not now. She would not rush around, red-faced and blubbering.

  Blubber and blubbering: that was her.

  Oh yes, she could insult herself just as easily as Liza and Charlene did.

  Ginger did self-hatred on an industrial scale.

  Only she’d never expected Liza to do it, too. Not after twenty-six years of friendship.

  She closed her eyes and thought. Getting out of here would need a plan and she needed to be out of this hotel or she would break down completely.

  She had her tiny bridesmaidy handbag: there was nothing else in the reception room. If she could sneak upstairs to her bedroom, she could speedily change into her ordinary clothes and leave. She wasn’t going to talk to anyone, not explain anything. She knew she could get upstairs via the back staircase.

  Summoning up the courage from somewhere in her bruised heart, she left the women’s room.

  To distract herself, Ginger thought of all the tough things she’d had to do in her life.

  Exist in a world where she had no mother and everyone else did.
Smile and pretend it didn’t hurt when the girls in her class made Mother’s Day cards and she couldn’t. She’d made one for Great-Aunt Grace, who was not precisely motherly but who loved Ginger fiercely in her own eccentric way.

  She’d braved college, scared of leaving people like Liza – what an irony – to swim in waters she was sure would be full of sleek sharks. Yet it was there that she’d found her tribe: people who liked knowledge, books, seeking things out.

  Her first job: where that first, terrifying day someone had called her a ‘fine big lump of a girl who’d keep a man warm at night’. Ginger hadn’t run crying or screamed harassment. No, she’d begun developing her tough-girl persona.

  ‘You can dream, old-timer,’ she’d said, dredging up a wide smile, as if he hadn’t hurt her to her marrow.

  She’d done all that. She could do this, too.

  Then she rounded a corner and reached the bit of the lobby where she needed to slip into the corridor to the back stairs.

  Despite being almost hidden by a selection of giant palms, she could see the after-party guests arriving. She recognised some of Liza’s outer circle, people Liza didn’t really hang around with, so they wouldn’t have been considered good enough to ask to the wedding but were still perfect for the after-party.

  If they saw her, they would look at her dress and smile, or worse, say: ‘Oh, you look lovely, Ginger.’ Which was a lie, Ginger thought. A complete lie. She obviously looked terrible and everyone thought it but nobody had said it to her face.

  And then she stilled. Over to one side of the lobby stood James, Liza’s new husband, along with Liza, Charlene and Stephen, the man that Ginger had really thought she was going to take upstairs to her room. The man who’d asked her for a date, when he had a girlfriend.

  He still looked handsome but also strangely conniving at the same time and how had she not noticed that his eyes were so close together?

  She was overcome with a desire to slap him, but Ginger, who had never used physical violence in her life, wanted to hit Liza even more.

  Liza had betrayed her totally.

  Ginger wanted to scream: When were you going to edit me out of your life, Liza?

  The four beautiful people were laughing. Probably about her.

  Stupid, sad old Ginger – fancying a man who would only want to grope her because she’d pushed herself on him.

  Rage, which had been absent when she was in the toilet cubicle reeling from shock, asserted itself.

  With fierce determination, she walked right up to the quartet and stood in front of them, not caring that the tears she’d tried so hard to suppress had begun to roll down her face.

  ‘I heard you,’ she said, staring at Liza, ignoring everyone else. ‘I heard you in the bathroom, I was in one of the stalls. I can’t believe you’d talk about me like that. I’m your oldest friend. How could you say all those things?’

  Liza looked discomfited, which was something Ginger had rarely seen before.

  ‘Well,’ blustered Liza, faced with this new, angry Ginger. ‘Nobody said you can’t snog Stephen. Might be good for you. Get you over the drought . . .’

  ‘What drought?’ Charlene was eager to know.

  ‘The permanent bloody drought,’ said James, who looked bored. ‘Let’s not ruin our day, Liza,’ he said to his new wife. ‘Ginger, go and do the wild thing with Stephen. Get it out of your system. You need a fuck. Virginity’s only for the really religious. At your age, it’s embarrassing. You just need a kick-start.’

  Ginger felt the words like a fist to her solar plexus.

  ‘You’ve never had sex?’ gasped Charlene, fascinated. ‘Like, ever?’

  ‘You told James about me,’ said Ginger quietly to Liza. ‘My secret.’

  ‘We’re married, now,’ Liza said defensively. ‘I tell him everything.’

  ‘Liza was only trying to help,’ interrupted James. ‘I told Stephen because he’s a decent guy and he’s been around the block, you know, could give you what you want.’

  He slapped Stephen on the back.

  ‘What I want? Meaningless sex to get rid of my embarrassing virginity with a man who has a girlfriend? How could you?’

  ‘Listen, Ginge,’ said Stephen, wading in. ‘We would have had fun, babes, we could still have some fun – don’t be so heavy.’

  It was the wrong word to use.

  Ginger stared at him.

  Heavy.

  So the wrong word: a fat, heavy, pitiful virgin on her thirtieth birthday who thought she’d finally found somebody special.

  Instead she was part of some cruel fix-up where everyone would laugh about her afterwards.

  Satisfied that Ginger had at last had a man, Liza could happily unfriend her and the twenty-six years of knowing each other would cease to exist.

  How had she ever thought Liza was her friend?

  Her brothers, Mick and Declan, hated Liza, always had.

  Great-Aunt Grace, her father’s aunt, and her only female relative, had agreed.

  ‘A little madam – take care of yourself around her,’ she’d warned. Grace was wise. Utterly eccentric, but wise.

  They were all devastatingly correct and it had taken this for her to see it: this public humiliation.

  Ginger swivelled and walked towards the corridor where the back stairs lay.

  Nobody called after her, nobody said ‘please come back’.

  Liza, who could have hurried after her in the high but comfortable shoes Ginger had helped her choose, did none of those things.

  They let Ginger go alone and she kept walking, ramrod straight, not once looking back.

  At the small staircase, she went up to her floor, sweating as she hurried.

  Finally, she was in her hotel bedroom – had it really only been a few hours before that she’d been here getting ready, so happy for her friend? Why hadn’t she come up here to take off her damn tights?

  Then she wouldn’t have heard those horrible words.

  But she’d had to hear them, Ginger thought sadly.

  Fate had wanted her to. The truth shall set you free, she thought, remembering her Gloria Steinem from college, but wow, it was utterly devastating. She would need a lot more time for it to merely piss her off.

  She began to laugh, and then the laugh turned to tears as she thought that, really, there couldn’t be anyone having as bad a birthday in the whole city as her. And then she closed her eyes, and let the tears fall.

  I wish that next year, everything in my life could be totally different.

  PART TWO

  One month earlier

  Callie

  Callie Reynolds sat in the cosmetic surgeon’s chair and winced.

  This was going to hurt, no doubt about it.

  ‘I think you need a little more filler . . .’ Frederica, the cosmetic surgeon pointed, ‘. . . just there. A little lift.’

  Callie held the small mirror up to her face and knew why she never had enlarging mirrors in her bathroom. Up this close in the heavily magnified dermatologist’s mirror, she looked about seventy and her skin was as pitted as Pompeii on Day Two of the disaster. And as for the increasing growth of fine facial hairs . . .

  If it kept up this way, she’d look like a baby chicken by the time she was sixty.

  Once, sixty had seemed old, but not now. She would be fifty in a month.

  Fifty. She’d never thought she’d care and yet, now that it was around the corner, she found that she did. Worse, she kept thinking of her family and all the bridges she’d burned.

  Was that why people hated the big birthdays? Not the age but the retrospection?

  ‘I don’t want to look done,’ she said again to Frederica, who was the best in Dublin.

  ‘Nobody who comes to me looks done,’ said Frederica indignantly and then they both grinned. They’d often had
this conversation. Just across the hall was a dermatologist who specialised in turning out people who looked expensively retouched from a distance of fifty yards when viewed even by people who were legally blind. They came out of her office with big lips, puffy cheeks and glassily smooth foreheads that couldn’t move a muscle even at the onset of an earthquake.

  ‘Sorry,’ apologised Callie. ‘I’m just anxious, Frederica. I feel old, irritable and anxious.’

  ‘Hormones,’ said Frederica firmly. ‘Have you seen anyone for HRT yet?’

  ‘No. It’s like admitting I need it. Being on the verge of menopause makes me feel so . . .’ She searched for the word. ‘Ancient. Dried up. Unfeminine.’ There, she’d said it.

  ‘We all fight ageing the best we can, Callie. You could be mourning the lack of fertility. And for the moods with perimenopause, you need help. If you needed insulin, you’d take it. I’ve given you the name of the best gynaecologist I know, please see her.’

  ‘I know,’ muttered Callie. ‘I didn’t know it was going to be like this. I thought I’d sink into elegant fiftyhood and, instead, I just feel like a dried-out prune on the inside, with no sex drive. I’ve no energy and zero interest in the party my poor husband is planning.’

  ‘That’s sweet of him.’ Frederica went to the fridge where she kept her magical ampoules and filled up a syringe.

  ‘Yes, he’s very good,’ agreed Callie, even though she knew that Jason was driven to have the party for them, the fabulous Reynolds family, rather than as a love letter to her.

  Jason, bless him, loved to show off.

  She got ready for the pain as the doctor flicked on her special light, put on her glasses and looked closely at her.

  ‘So, where are you having this fabulous fiftieth birthday party?’

  ‘At home.’

  It would all look amazing, though, she thought, almost tearfully. Jason would stop at nothing to make sure it would be sensational. He loved her. He wanted to show off both her and their fabulous house.