by Cathy Kelly
From Ted’s mother, Vera, who had three grandchildren already and operated on a lovely non-hassle mother-in-law style of relationship, there had been a speedy phone call the night before.
‘I’m saying a novena,’ she’d told Sam.
Vera had a novena or a special prayer for everything. ‘I know you don’t believe in that sort of thing, lovie, but I’m doing it. Father McIntyre has said a Mass for you. I’ve another cardigan knitted, too. Cream this time with a hint of yellow.’
Sam had teared up.
‘Vera, you’re so good.’
She got so weepy these days and now, with the scan, she felt extra teary. She was an old mother: things went wrong. She was half expecting billboards out every time she appeared near the hospital – Elderly mother en route. Should geriatrics have babies? Public debate later.
Who knew what this scan would bring.
But Vera kept repeating the magic words: ‘Don’t worry. You’ll be fine, Sam. You’re strong and healthy. You’ll be fine.’
To keep her mind off potential problems, she thought about a daft conversation she and Joanne had had about hair, of all things. Sam said she’d have to get up extra early when she went back to work after Baby Bean was born in order to get her hair blow-dried.
‘You are so not going to do that,’ said Joanne, when she heard about that plan. ‘Getting up earlier than is absolutely required will be a nightmare and you are going to be in severe sleep deprivation.’
‘But you know I can’t do my own hair and I can’t go into work looking like I’ve been plugged in,’ said Sam. ‘You have normal hair – I have insane hair. I have spent my whole life battling it.’
‘You’ll stop caring when you have a baby,’ said Joanne, and added ominously: ‘Babies change everything.’
‘Of course, the baby is going to change a huge amount, but you know I’m still going to be me and Ted is going to be Ted. We’re going to have a normal life.’
‘Yeah, right,’ said Joanne, straight-faced. ‘You’re going to be the only woman on the planet whose life is not utterly changed by the birth of a baby,’ and she’d laughed.
Joanne was brilliant at rolling with whatever plan came along. Sam had been really good at crisis management when she’d worked in the bank, but baby crises . . .? They were an unknown.
Sam breathed deeply. She had to stop with this negative self-talk. She was going to be able to handle it fine. She and Ted were clever, intelligent people and babies were a normal part of life.
It was going to be fine.
This wisdom was going to be the one bonus to being an older mother.
Finally, the scan was over and when a relieved Sam had emptied her bladder, sitting on the loo till she thought she’d welded herself to it, she and Ted waited again to see her obstetrician.
Dr Laurence looked the way she always did at first: glasses on, eyes focused on notes as if she was about to diagnose something dreadful.
‘Yes,’ said the doctor finally. ‘Baby’s doing well. Might have been in the breech position but has shifted back. I know you’re worried about your age.’
Sam nodded.
Ted squeezed her hand.
‘We’ve gone through so much fertility-wise over the past few years and it makes me terribly nervous to hear about the risks, even though I do need to know them.’
‘But you and your baby are going to be fine from the looks of this scan,’ said the obstetrician. ‘Baby’s progressing well, in the correct percentile growth-wise, all good.’
‘Yes,’ said Ted, squeezing her hand, again. ‘Fine. That’s wonderful news, thank you.’
As they walked out of the clinic, they both sent joyful text messages: to Sam’s father, to her sister Joanne, to Ted’s mother. They spread the news wherever it needed to go. Seconds later the phone rang.
‘Darling Sam!’ said Joanne. ‘I’m so thrilled! I was worried, I know it’s crazy – I mean, when you have to have extra scans, you worry.’
‘I am patenting worry,’ said Sam. ‘But it’s all perfect. Oh, got to go, darling Dad’s phoning.’
‘My dearest Sam, I am so pleased for you and Ted,’ said her father, delight audible in every part of his voice.
Sam could hear Ted on his phone talking to his mother and she could hear Vera’s voice excitedly saying ‘. . . the relief! Did you find out whether it’s a boy or a girl, because really I’d love to know what colour to knit the cardigans. I’m doing creams, whites and yellows, but it would be lovely to know either way . . .’
Sam grinned. Vera was not a woman for delayed gratification.
‘We didn’t, Ma,’ said Ted.
It was a full ten minutes before they were able to progress any further and they went into a little tea shop to have tea for Sam and a strong coffee for Ted.
They held hands and smiled at each other, not needing to say anything but just happy it was working out. Miracles did happen. The phone buzzed and Sam at first thought of ignoring it. It was only half eight in the morning, she thought, looking at the number and seeing Andrew, her boss’s name on the small screen.
‘Surely he can wait?’ Ted said mildly.
‘I suppose,’ said Sam, ‘I just want to cherish this moment,’ and then normality kicked in. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ll answer.’ Everything was rushing through her head, the wonderful news of the scan and the sense that perhaps, just perhaps, she and Ted would have this glorious Baby Bean. Then her conscience took over – after all, she was going to be on a certain amount of maternity leave after she’d had the baby and when she had taken the job in the first place, she hadn’t been pregnant. Employers were rarely delirious with staff who got pregnant soon into a new job. Even though Andrew had been very accommodating about it, he needn’t have and . . .
She picked up the phone.
‘Hello Andrew, how are you?’ she said cheerfully.
‘Sam, I need you in the office immediately,’ he said.
‘What’s wrong?’ said Sam, slipping instantly into work mode.
‘You know the south-east part of the organisation? The bit we thought had been closed off? Well, it transpires it had a special bank account with a credit card nobody knew about and, finally, the last remaining volunteer from some speck on the map called Ballyglen phoned Rosalind this morning to say she was sorry about the money and she’d pay it all back—’
‘Pay all what back?’
‘The fifty-five thousand euros of donations she’d seen siphoning off over the years.’
‘Fifty-five thousand euros? How many years?’
‘Twenty. It’s every charity’s nightmare. Sam, I’m sorry, I know you’re just about to go on leave, but I need someone with your experience to co-ordinate this. I know you’re doing a very thorough handover with Dave, but he doesn’t have your experience – and we’ll need a media strategy if it gets out.’
It’ll get out, thought Sam, grimly. Bad news always did.
‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’
She hung up, thinking. One of the earliest problems she’d encountered with the charity was that it was run in such an archaic fashion. As someone who had come from the banking industry, Sam had been horrified at first to see the logistical set-up for their many, many accounts.
Once Sam’s careful banking strictures were in place, every account was tied up and any back-door money heading off to Ballyglen would have stopped.
The volunteer would have sat with increasing credit card company demands.
She explained it all to Ted and they made their way to the car park, still holding hands.
As she drove into the office, she felt a hint of worry that had nothing to do with missing funds. This sort of scenario – her mother racing off because of some crisis at school – had been part and parcel of her home life. What if Sam was going to be that sort of mother too? One called too s
trongly by her job and not enough by her child?
Perhaps that’s why she’d found it so hard to get pregnant – divine intervention.
What if the lure of her job made her just like her mother?
Ginger
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 t
he 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.