by Shari Low
I wanted them to be close. Hadn’t I thought of little else lately? Ginger and Cassie’s relationship had to be tight, had to be rock solid and I’d do everything I could to encourage that.
Not that it required much effort. Ginger had done so much more than I could ever thank her for.
After I managed to get her to something resembling a communicative state, she chatted to Cassie and then we all said our goodbyes.
Ginger flopped back onto the chaise and called to the universe for aspirin. I served up a breakfast cocktail of painkillers de jour, coffee and water, made tea for Lizzy and me, then climbed back into bed.
Last night’s reminiscing was still playing on my mind. ‘Hey, Auntie Ginger,’ I said softly.
‘Will you stop shouting,’ came the reply.
‘I was just thinking. You know how we were talking about pivotal, landmark moments last night?’
‘Mmmm.’
‘Well, I don’t know if I ever thanked you enough for what you did for me after Cassie was born. You really saved my life.’
Even though she had her eyes closed, I hoped she was getting this. I hoped she was feeling just how much gratitude I had for the fact that she was there when I needed the kind of love that only she could deliver.
‘Lou,’ she whispered.
Yep, her voice was chock-full of emotion. She got it. She knew. And, oh dear Lord, get the bunting out because we were about to have an exquisite moment of emotional connection.
‘Yes?’ I answered.
I waited. It was only natural that she would find this difficult. She struggled with stuff like this. Take your time, my darling. Don’t rush it. Just let it flow.
‘Lou.’ Lizzy nudged me then gestured in Ginger’s direction. ‘Don’t hold your breath for more. The snoring’s a bit of a giveaway that she’s fallen asleep.’
Thirty-eight
Lou
2004 – Aged 34
The doorbell rang and I jumped, causing me splash the hot cup of tea I was holding all down my front. Door. Change. Door. Change. Another urgent ring of the doorbell made my mind up for me – no time to change. Heading down the hall, I strategically positioned my arm across the brown damp patch. Before I even had the door fully open, Ginger burst in, carrying so many of those big cardboard designer shopping bags that she looked like she’d done a trolley dash up Rodeo Drive.
Halfway up the hall she turned, scanned my appearance and frowned. ‘You’ve forgotten haven’t you?’
‘Forgotten what?’
‘Lunch. Today. You were supposed to get a babysitter, we were going to get the glad rags on and we were . . .’ She spotted the stain on the front of my T-shirt. ‘Eeeew, are you lactating again?’
‘No! I haven’t breastfed Cassie for a year. I spilled my tea.’
I was aware that I was skirting around the main issue here. ‘Ginger, I’m so sorry. I forgot all about lunch.’
With a dramatic sigh, she leaned back against the brick wall. Plastering it was somewhere on the list between finishing the roof and tiling the loo.
‘Excuse?’ she demanded.
‘Cassie has been up all night, four nights in a row, because she’s teething. Red is in Cannes with three models on a fashion shoot. I’ve got a house full of builders. Cassie has started calling the plumber “Daddy” – which would be fine if he was easy on the eye but he’s sixty-two and no longer in possession of his front teeth. I’ve done two sets of highlights and a cut and blow-dry in the kitchen this morning. My mother came to see me. She only stayed for half an hour because my dad wanted her to go out for lunch with him and I couldn’t even muster up the strength to be annoyed. My sanity is slowly slipping to the point where I could curl into the foetal position and start rocking backwards and forwards at any moment. Help me. Or shoot me. I’m not sure which option I’d prefer.’
Burden unloaded, I sighed, realising we made an incongruous sight. Designer lady, in her immaculate Stella McCartney suit with a black studded vest underneath, skyscraper Louboutin shoes, a Hermes Birkin bag and me, doing my best impression of a bag lady with lactating breasts.
‘Mamamamama!’
Ginger’s expression immediately flipped from unamused to ecstatic.
‘She’s in the kitchen with a bowl of spaghetti hoops, so chatting out here for the last five minutes probably wasn’t one of our better ideas.’
Heading towards the kitchen, I’m not ashamed to admit that I stayed behind Ginger in the manner of a warrior going into battle with his trusty shield. She had no idea of the danger that lurked behind that door.
‘Gingingingin!’ Cassie screamed with delight at seeing her favourite aunt, the one with whom she shared oh so many personality traits. At two years old, my daughter was stubborn, she was bold, she was loud, she was opinionated and she had a unique sense of fashion – as witnessed by the bowl of spaghetti hoops that she was currently wearing on her head. She was also fiercely loving and had a wicked sense of humour and unbridled energy. I now had a deep understanding of why Moira (Ginger and Red’s mother) had a high-grade sherry habit and smoked twenty cigarettes a day to settle her nerves.
Ginger plumped her bags down on the floor and lifted Cassie out of her high chair, not caring that she’d be wearing evidence of spaghetti on her silk suit for the rest of the day.
One of the biggest revelations of the last two years had been Ginger’s overwhelming adoration of her new niece. She made a monthly trip from London to see her, phoned twice a week to check on her progress and had moved the entire stock of Hamleys to our back room. Who knew she could have such a soft spot for a baby? When we were eight years old, Lizzy and I would play with dolls, dressing them and feeding them, while Ginger would shave their heads and send them to war with the boy next-door’s He-Man. Zero maternal instincts. None. It had been one of the ground rules when she married Ike – richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, and don’t ever think about your sperm fertilising my eggs.
Ike was happy to agree. With two grown-up children from a previous marriage he was already fulfilled in the procreation department.
‘Ginger, are you sure you wouldn’t like a little one? Just one. You don’t need to go mad and have a squad of them.’
‘Don’t even say it!’ she cut me off. ‘If my mother tells me one more time that she’s said three novenas at the Chapel in the hope that the Virgin Mary will swoop in and somehow impregnate me, I’m phoning Childline to report psychological abuse.’
‘But . . .’
The death stare was beamed in my direction. ‘Never gonna happen. Some people are just not meant to reproduce. Talking of which, why was your mother here?’
‘She wanted to give me a hand, do some ironing and look after Cassie for a couple of hours to let me get some sleep.’
‘You’re kidding!’
‘Of course I am. She came to remind me that it’s my dad’s birthday this weekend and to tell me they’re going abroad for Christmas. Apparently they’ve wanted to do it for years but didn’t because they had to stay here for my sake, which should of, course, win them some kind of heroic accolade. I was thinking the Nobel Peace Prize. Anyway, she stayed for less than an hour, long enough to say she’d seen her grand-daughter and claim she was granny of the year, then wafted off to meet my dad for lunch.’
I sighed as I ran a cloth over the kitchen wall in an attempt to begin to change the colour of the paintwork, currently listed on the Dulux shade chart as ‘Heinz Spaghetti’.
To Cassie’s shrieking delight, Ginger blew raspberries on her neck.
‘How can she not just want to spend every little minute with this little snugglebug? Huh? Huh?’ It really disconcerted me when Ginger spoke in a baby voice.
‘So how long will it take you to get ready?’ she asked, her voice returning to adulthood.
‘I’d need a satellite navigation system to find my make-up bag and I would end up wearing something I’ve dragged out of the ironing basket.’
She didn’t look impress
ed. ‘And what are you wearing tomorrow?’
I was immediately gripped by panic. Tomorrow was Cassie’s christening. We’d been planning to have her christened since she was born but we’d been mired in so many problems and obstacles that we were only now managing to have it done. To my horror, I felt tears prickle under my eyelids.
‘I’ve absolutely no idea. I’ve . . . I’ve . . . What’s happened to me Ginger?’
What had happened to me? I used to run a business, work long hours, manage my life and make a pretty good job of it. Now I couldn’t even manage to remember lunch. It wasn’t that I was unhappy, because I had nothing to be unhappy about. OK, so I still felt a desperate surge of sadness when I reflected on losing my salon. And yes, we’d had builders in the house for almost two years on and off, because on top of the full-scale renovation that the house originally required to make it habitable, we’d discovered woodworm in the joists and rot in the basement that the surveyor had failed to pick up when we bought it. Alex was suing them on our behalf for negligence, but in the meantime it had taken every penny we had and it still wasn’t done. I tried to tell myself that the tarpaulin covering the gap in the wall, which would eventually be patio doors to the garden, made an interesting design feature. The glass doors had been lying in the garage for months but we didn’t have the money to get them fitted yet. Oh and Red worked away a lot. A lot. In order to finance the building work, he took every assignment going at his normal job, and then topped it up with freelance work. In a week he could be in Aberdeen one day, Orkney the next, then London, then a weekend fashion shoot in Barcelona. With models. Was it wrong that the ‘with models’ bit really bothered me? They were all glam, and skinny, and they had arses the size of two perfectly formed grapefruits. Red was going from that to me – sporting ‘dragged through a hedge chic’ and smelling of hairspray from the succession of clients I’d seen in my half-built kitchen. But he never stopped telling me he loved me and I knew he wouldn’t run off with Katanya, aged 21, 36–22–33, likes winter sports, foreign travel and Bacardi Breezers. He wouldn’t. He was a good man, I had a beautiful daughter, great friends, I was healthy and the next day we were having a gathering of all those I loved to christen my girl . . . So why was I crying in the middle of the day, when I had absolutely nothing to cry about?
‘You’re exhausted,’ Ginger announced. ‘You need sleep, you’ve been completely neglecting yourself, and you look like crap.’
After a deafening sniff, I wiped the palms of my hands across my cheeks.
‘Was that supposed to be a comforting, motivational speech?’ I asked her.
‘Come on, I’m taking you out.’
‘I can’t go out like this – everyone will think I’m lactating.’ I sounded as fed up as I looked.
‘Hang on.’ The bags from the hall were retrieved and she pulled a gorgeous grey silk jersey T-shirt from one of them. ‘Throw this on, go find a clean pair of jeans, I’ll clean up Cassie and we’re going out. You, my darling, are in need some serious repair work.’
An hour later we were in the centre of Glasgow, standing outside a beauty salon I’d only ever read about in magazines, Cassie fast asleep in her buggy.
‘They won’t let me in there,’ I told Ginger apprehensively as we approached the door. This place was seriously flash and seriously expensive. It was for the glossy and the groomed, not for women with inch-long roots and trousers with dust on the hems.
My heart sank even further when we got inside. It was like something out of a Balinese beach resort, all dark wood floors and white walls, with a huge waterfall in the middle of the room and some kind of tinkling, ethereal music playing in the background.
‘Ginger! So great to see you. You’re looking fabulous,’ said the vision of perfection behind the desk. Tall, willowy, with jet-black hair, parted in the middle and falling like a sheet of granite to her waist, she looked to be in her thirties but that was just a guess because where were her wrinkles? Where? In a rush of defensive insecurity, an internal monologue was building up resentments by the second. I bet she hadn’t gone four nights on twenty minutes’ sleep. I bet she didn’t work twelve-hour days while looking after her child. I bet she didn’t have a husband who worked away all the time. I bet she didn’t have an overdraft. I bet she had four fecking walls in her kitchen.
‘Are you OK?’ Ginger hissed to me and I realised that while I was busy welling up and launching an internal war on this perfectly lovely woman in front of me, I’d been asked a question to which they were now waiting for a reply.
‘Saskia was just asking what you’d like done?’
‘Erm . . . erm . . .’ Sleep. I just wanted to sleep and then wake up and be organised, and in control and not exhausted any more. ‘A manicure, maybe?’
Ginger sighed in despair, gave me a disdainful glare and then took over. ‘What time do you close?’
‘Eight o’clock.’
I glanced at the ornate mahogany clock on the wall. It was one o’clock now.
‘That gives us seven hours.’ Ginger was way ahead of me. ‘Hot stone massage to start, total body exfoliation, removal of excess hair in all areas, spray tan, manicure, pedicure, eyebrows, hair colour and cut, eyelash extensions and anything else you can throw at her that’ll make her a goddess. Add it all to my account and –’ she turned to me ‘– I will send a taxi at eight to collect you.’
‘But I can’t, I . . .’
A hand shot up and suddenly I was staring at an intimidating palm.
‘Stop! This isn’t an optional situation.’
God, she was bossy. And obstinate and stroppy and blunt. But I don’t think I could ever have loved her more. Seven and a half hours later, I re-evaluated that statement.
Thirty-nine
As I waved goodbye to the taxi and opened the front door, the first thing that struck me was the smell. Real food. Not the microwave meals for one that I’d been living on while Red was away, but a mixture of aromas that could only be a simmering home-cooked meal. There was another smell too. Furniture polish and wax and . . . The floor! The oak flooring was gleaming for the first time since the day we moved in here. Properly shiny. How had that happened? I put my handbag down on the hall table, which was now so buffed it was almost reflective.
It was like a fairy with cleaning OCD had flown in and slaved away until everything was left spotless.
Opening the door to the kitchen, I wouldn’t have been more gobsmacked if George Clooney was lying there naked with a rose between his teeth. The tarpaulin was gone and in its place were two glass doors, perfectly fitted, giving a beautiful view into the garden. Or what would be a garden once we did some work to elevate it from swamp status.
The rest of the room was almost unrecognisable. The bare brick walls had been plastered, the worktops had been scrubbed, all the wonky cupboard doors had been adjusted, the floor had been polished and over at the spotless table sat Cassie, in her high chair, gurgling into her toy telephone. Presumably she was calling Miracles Are Us to thank them for their contribution to my day.
‘How . . . how . . . ?’
I could barely speak. ‘Don’t you dare cry again, those eyelash extensions will never cope,’ Ginger warned.
‘How did this happen?’ I stammered. Without tears. Just.
‘You know the one guy in Stud who is from Glasgow?’
I nodded. Of course I did. Josh. Aged nineteen. An abdomen so finely toned that it looked like a toast rack. Made females scream in the street. Number one honey in Heat.
‘I called his brother. He owns a building company that works on corporate stuff, shopping malls and office blocks, but he brought some of his boys over and finished off some of the jobs that were needing done.’
I officially, absolutely and utterly adjusted my love for her to infinite levels, previously occupied only by Red, Cassie and John Taylor from Duran Duran.
A whirlwind suddenly arrived at my side. Josie, in my pink dressing gown, wearing a pair of Red’s blue socks, hair w
rapped in a Barbie beach towel, cigarette dangling from her mouth.
‘I offered him sexual favours in return for his time but he passed – can you believe it?’
The giggles overwhelmed me. ‘I can’t. The guy is obviously unhinged.’
Grinning, Ginger carried on with her explanation of events. ‘Then I called Josie who arrived with four of her pals and the floor buffing machine from the community centre . . .’
‘I hope Senga gets that back in the cleaning cupboard before they notice it’s gone,’ Josie interjected.
‘And they gave the house a spring clean from top to bottom, got all the windows and floors done for you. I know that with all the work that’s still to be done, it’ll be chaos again soon, but at least having those doors fitted and the walls plastered means that you’ll be warm and the worst of the dust and grime is over.’
‘Oh, Ginger, I can’t thank you enough. We’ll pay you ba –’
‘Stop!’ The hand of silence came up again. ‘Lou, enough. I’m loaded, gorgeous and successful, with great contacts – it’s the least I can do.’
‘And modest, love. You forgot to mention modest,’ Josie observed. ‘Right, I’ve made a curry for dinner, Mr. Patel’s favourite recipe. I still miss him, you know. Who’d have thought that with all that meditation and health stuff he’d drop dead of a heart attack in the middle of Costco? Sit, sit!’
I gave Cassie a huge hug and sloppy kiss, then sat down at the table while Josie dished out our meals. Lamb rogan josh, huge doughy naan breads and saffron rice. Suddenly I was ravenous. When was the last time I’d eaten a proper meal? Somewhere between that hot stone massage and now, I’d come to the realisation that some things had to change. Having even a few hours away from the bedlam had given me time to think and I’d had some kind of flash of enlightenment.
For years my focus had been work, building the business, slogging away six, sometimes seven, days a week and, much as I’d adored it, I’d seriously neglected the other areas of my life. Then I’d married Red, already pregnant and we’d gone straight into parenthood while juggling a major renovation project that had wiped us out financially, still spending hours every day seeing clients in my kitchen, with Red working day and night too to keep our heads above water. When he did make it home, the two of us were so exhausted that we barely made it past a hello and a hug before one of us fell asleep. It was madness. Where was the quality of life? Where were the balance and the enjoyment?