The Year that Changed Everything

by Cathy Kelly

  ‘A restaurant, are you mad?’ Sam stared at her sister. ‘I’m wondering how we are going to get her home from the hospital in the car and you’re talking about restaurants.’

  Joanne laughed. India stirred. ‘Oh look at her,’ she said and reached in to expertly pick the baby up. ‘She’s so beautiful. Yes, you are,’ she said, nuzzling India’s downy little head.

  As if sensing she was in the hands of an expert, India made a little whimper and settled in closely. ‘Auntie Jo brought you lots of nice gifts and things for your mummy so she doesn’t go nuts,’ murmured Joanne.

  ‘What sort of things did you bring me so I wouldn’t go nuts?’ asked Sam, trying to hide her anxiety. ‘Because unless it’s a very big baby instruction booklet, I can’t imagine what it could possibly be.’

  ‘I brought in a couple of new comfy T-shirts,’ Jo said, putting a bag down on the bed, ‘and in the car I have some shopping, because that’s what you need when you have a baby: big, non-pregnancy things to wear and food for when you get out of hospital. Later today? Tomorrow morning?’

  ‘The morning,’ said Sam. ‘You’re a sweetheart, that sounds brilliant.’

  Ted looked stricken, ‘I never thought to do shopping,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’

  ‘Of course you weren’t thinking,’ said Joanne gently. ‘You’ve just become a father. It’s very hard to think and fall desperately in love at the same time. No, I popped into the supermarket and got a load of pre-cooked meals so you’ll be fed. I’ll drop it off at yours on the way home, all ready for tomorrow. And chocolate too!’

  ‘But I’m breastfeeding,’ said Sam anxiously. ‘I have to eat only really healthy stuff.’

  ‘There’s good stuff in there: pasta salads, spinach,’ said Joanne, ‘not too much, though, babies don’t like too much spinach in their milk.’

  ‘Was there a study done?’ Sam asked.

  ‘No,’ her sister said placidly, ‘it was more of an on-the-ground field study sort of thing. Isabelle hated when I’d eaten spinach. I was so lacking in iron when I had her, but I tried to take in as much of it as I could bear, and Lord, the state of the poor child’s nappies.’

  Sam managed a grin. She felt safe having her sister around. Joanne knew stuff. For years, it had been Sam who had known things: all sorts of stuff about politics and finance and what garages to go to get the car fixed where the mechanic didn’t talk to you like you were a complete idiot because you possessed female chromosomes.

  But now Joanne was the one who knew it all.

  ‘You all right?’ asked Joanne, taking in Sam’s suspiciously red eyes.

  ‘Fine,’ lied Sam. ‘Tired.’

  She would not give into her fears: she could do this.

  Ted had gone home and the ward was on full noise alert when the social worker came round.

  Unlike the lovely nurses on the ward, this woman did not look full of the milk of human kindness. She looked as if she’d found no human kindness anywhere, thank you very much, and she had long since given up looking for it.

  She looked at Sam as if she found her lacking.

  Sam tried to tell herself that this woman’s job was tough: that she saw the worst in life and might have just come from some horrific case. But four minutes in the woman’s company made her feel that if Ellen, the social worker, was suddenly turned into the Dalai Lama, she’d still be this cranky.

  She had a questionnaire to be filled out, she explained, and went through it all, talking about the importance of registering the child’s birth—

  ‘India,’ interrupted Sam.

  Ellen glared at her.

  ‘Have you ever suffered from any depressive incidents?’ demanded Ellen, changing tack instantly.

  ‘No,’ said Sam.

  ‘Any previous pregnancy problems?’

  ‘No,’ lied Sam. She did not plan to discuss her infertility pain with this woman. Her nerves felt stretched enough as it was.

  ‘Fine.’

  Job done, Ellen gave Sam some leaflets, took her questionnaire and marched off.

  Sam didn’t know why, but she felt shaken. She reached out and touched India’s tiny hand with the softest touch.

  ‘Love you, India,’ she whispered.

  Ginger

  In her lonely hotel room, Ginger stripped off the hideous bridesmaid’s dress at high speed and pulled on the clothes she’d packed for the morning after, normal clothes. A big sloppy jumper in a charcoal colour, extra-stretch black leggings, long boots and a scarf round her neck that looped over her boobs and sort of hid them. Her camouflage.

  The kind of clothes she wore as her casual wear. For work, she had long black jackets that flowed around her and looked businessy. She brightened it all up with geometric jewellery. Nothing feminine, ever.

  Next, she stuffed everything into her tiny little suitcase, except for the dress, which she left on the bed, crumpled.

  The words she’d heard in the toilet stall ran through her brain like ticker tape in the stock exchange:

  ‘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.’

  Worse were the comments about how she’d pushed herself at Stephen:

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

  And then the finale, James saying he’d told Liza’s cousin that Ginger was a virgin and that he could ‘give you what you want’.

  Ginger shuddered at the horror of it all.

  She left the key on the vanity table and made it down the back stairs within ten minutes. Her room was pre-paid. Nobody at the front desk seemed to notice her go out onto the street where there was no problem picking up a taxi. It was still early: no mad rush after the pubs had closed.

  She got into the back, still panting slightly from all the rushing, and gave her address. The taxi driver repeated the address slowly, speaking English as one who had only recently learned it.

  ‘Yes, that’s it, thank you,’ said Ginger.

  She was so glad this lovely driver wasn’t a natural English speaker because then there would be no conversation, no ‘where are you going at this hour of the night with a suitcase?’ or ‘what do you think about the government, life, the universe?’ – the sort of conversations she had all her life.

  It wasn’t just taxi drivers, it was people in shops, people on the train, and just about everyone because people talked to Ginger.

  ‘It’s your face, pet,’ her father said. ‘You’ve got that lovely warm, open face and people feel they need to talk to you, to share their secrets.’

  Most of the time, Ginger wished they wouldn’t share their secrets because she got quite enough of that, thank you very much. Tonight, she was spectacularly grateful for a non-chatty taxi driver so she could sit numbly in the back of the cab and watch the people racing around town having fun. People who were going places, doing all the usual things that people did on a Saturday, except for people who had just had their life ripped out from under them by someone they thought was a friend.

  On their birthday, too.

  ‘I can’t believe she’s getting married on the day of your thirtieth,’ Great-Aunt Grace had said.

  Grace was a spiky, funny woman, but one who would walk through fire for her Ginger. Her home had been where Ginger and her two brothers went when their father was working late. Grace regularly sat with them as they laboured through homework, although she said she wasn’t responsible for teaching them any religion.

  ‘All hocus-pocus,’ Grace maintained. She liked both science and shocking people by saying to them, if God was so good, she’d like a new car, thank you very much.

  She liked to brush Ginger’s hair and
tell her how proud her mother would be of her. Ginger had no memory of her mother, although her father sometimes said they looked alike. Same hair, same eyes, same open face.

  ‘Your mother wasn’t as beautiful,’ Grace liked to say, which Ginger knew to be a lie. In the old photographs, her mother was slender as a twig.

  How could you not be beautiful if you were slim?

  Grace never talked about Ginger’s mother anymore. Ginger had asked her not to and Grace, sorrowfully, had said fine.

  ‘You’ll have to face it one day, my pet.’

  No, thought Ginger, I won’t. It’s gone. It hurts, but it’s gone now.

  As the taxi sped through the city night, Ginger stared blankly out of the car window.

  It was well after ten forty-five at night now, and the stars glittered in the clear summer sky. They were so beautiful, like jewels thrown across a canvas. It was a cloudless night and she thought of the pagan festival of Lughnasa which ran throughout the whole month of August, a time of festivals to praise the god Lugh and ask his benevolence for the harvest.

  Was life easier then? she wondered. Possibly not. No medicine, no modern music, no cake. But then, rounded women were much fancied. They were considered very hot in some periods of history because curviness was a sign of wealth. It was the other way now, Ginger thought sadly.

  The taxi rumbled along closer to her apartment and she got nearer home where absolutely nothing awaited her but the guinea pigs – who were not, it had to be said, great cuddlers because of their desire to belt off and explore – and the frantic remains of her rushing out of the house that morning. There was nobody waiting to hug her and ask her how her day had been. Nobody to kiss or massage her neck. And never would be.

  Had she whined to Liza? she wondered. She couldn’t remember Liza ever offering diet or exercise advice.

  As Ginger sat in the taxi on the night of her thirtieth birthday and felt as if her heart would break, it seemed to her that she was the only person who’d ever had her heart broken in that particular way.

  When the taxi pulled up outside Ginger’s house, she felt strangely immobilised in the back seat. She didn’t want to move – moving would mean going into the house and confronting the mess. Not the mess in her house, but the mess her life seemed to be in.

  ‘We are here, yes?’ said the taxi driver and finally Ginger stirred into action.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ she said. Typically Ginger, she left a big tip, even though she couldn’t afford big tips. The mortgage on the tiny 1920s terrace house along the canal would not be paid for zillions of years, but Ginger always tipped people, smiled at people, put money in charity boxes rattled under her nose. She was the person who had crossed the road to give money or a cup of takeaway tea and a kind word to a homeless person hoping for some human contact.

  ‘Thank you, have good night,’ said the taxi driver, as she pulled her small suitcase out and went to her door.

  Ginger’s home was like her nest – part of a beautiful row, Hamilton Terrace had been built in the 1920s and was elegant yet rather tiny, as if people had decided they wanted attractive houses but size had not been a factor. They were two-storey and when she’d bought the house, it had been modernised in the sense that the whole downstairs had been turned into one airy open-plan space.

  Unfortunately, the recession had hit the owners and the open-plan part was the only modernisation done. She’d bought it four years ago and thanks to some amazing work from her brothers Mick and Declan, and her father’s help with creating the best kitchen ever for his beloved Ginger, the tiny house was now a very different place.

  Downstairs was pretty and eclectic with huge white bookcases and white walls apart from one midnight blue gallery wall where she hung photographs and pictures. The room had an old-fashioned fireplace where a real fire blazed in the grate in the winter. A small dining room table that doubled as her desk overlooked a postage-stamp back garden with which she had done absolutely nothing.

  She dumped her suitcase on the floor and looked at the gallery wall. There was her life laid out – that’s what she hadn’t been looking forward to seeing. There was her and Dad, Mick and Declan, photos of them all with Aunt Grace.

  There were ones of some of the family dogs over the years: herself and Dad watching the boys playing football, both boys with skinny legs appearing from the bottom of football shorts. In posed shots, Ginger was in the middle: plump, red-haired, beaming with joy and pride at her big brothers’ accomplishments. There were pictures of Mick’s wedding to Zoe, a wonderful event just a couple of years ago where Ginger had been a bridesmaid and had worn an elegant olive green dress. She looked at the picture now: herself in the long slithering dress, the pretty little fake fur bolero in a matching olive green over her shoulders and thought how much she loved Zoe and Mick. Then, there were all the older pictures of Liza and Ginger at kids’ birthday parties in silly hats with balloon animals, and later ones of discos and parties, arms around each other.

  Now Ginger knew it was all fake.

  ‘I hate you, bloody pictures,’ she said to the wall. She began taking the ones with herself and Liza off the wall, wriggling them from the hooks angrily, leaving only the pictures of herself and her family.

  This was her lovely wall of happy memories and now a big chunk of it was ruined.

  She’d gathered up all the frames, brought them into the kitchen, opened the bin and threw them in. Then she took a carton of orange juice from the fridge and poured it into a wine glass. That would be her night-night drink: not the cheap Prosecco Liza and James had been giving out at the wedding.

  Turning off the lights, she climbed the stairs. If the downstairs of her house was all eclectic and unusual, upstairs was a shrine to creams and whites. The floorboards had been too far gone to do anything with them, so Declan had sanded them and she, Mick, Declan and her father had painted them many times until now they were all a glossy white covered with rag rugs. The walls were a beautiful off-white hue with pretty old-fashioned pictures. Everything had a faintly Swedish, Gustavian look to it, which she’d achieved thanks to darling Leo from college, who’d started out in journalism like herself and then realised that it wasn’t really for him.

  Leo now worked in an interior design company and was gloriously successful, but it had been a joy, he’d insisted, to help Ginger out. He’d been the one to find the exquisite old 1930s dressing table and helped Ginger strip it down and repaint it cream. He had had the idea of turning her ordinary bed into a four-poster thanks to poles her carpenter father had hand-carved. Painted cream and with muslins attached, the bed was a joy.

  ‘You see it’s very simple,’ Leo had said, wielding his staple gun as he stood on the stepladder and attacked the plain cross-beams in a cavalier way that would have had her father turning pale. ‘I think a few lights up here, what do you think, darling? White muslin, white lights: romance central.’

  ‘Can we have the lights twinkling, like stars?’ Ginger had asked.

  ‘Of course! I wish we’d been able to get one of those bulb-dressing table mirrors, but the proper ones aren’t cheap and the cheap ones look hideous.’

  Ginger shut the door of her beautiful bower and turned down the lights. She was home, alone as ever. After what had to be one of the most horrible, horrible evenings of her life. Dad and the boys had begged her to leave the wedding early so they could celebrate her birthday, but she’d been firm.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘tomorrow is fine. We can celebrate my birthday tomorrow.’

  Tomorrow was going to be a family meal in the gorgeous old Reilly house in the countryside, with all the people she loved who would instantly divine if she was suffering.

  She wasn’t sure if she could face them all, not after today.

  Callie

  Callie woke early the next morning to a faint scratching noise that she couldn’t quite identify.

  �
��Jason,’ she said, ‘what’s that?’ and then she became aware that there was nobody in the bed with her. She opened her eyes and sat up. Reality crashed in. She wasn’t in her and Jason’s bed: she was in the small guest bedroom of Brenda’s house, alone, and surrounded by suitcases that Brenda had plundered from her house, suitcases stuffed full of the only things she’d been allowed to take with her.

  The horror of it all sank in again as if the whole catastrophe that was last night was happening once more.

  Still the noise went on, accompanied by a faint mewing: the cats, that was it.

  Callie got out of bed, feeling every joint in her body ache. It was as if she had been on a huge mountain hike the day before and every part of her was sore. Maybe this was her body’s reaction to the intense stress.

  She opened the door and Brenda’s marmalade cat, Joe, crashed fatly in. Instantly, he wound himself around her ankles and began purring. Despite everything, Callie smiled. She loved the feel of his fur against her bare ankles, the sensation that this beautiful animal was happy to see her. In the midst of the chaos, it was a moment of simple, momentary happiness. She picked him up and crooned to him, and all the while Joe purred with a deep rich purr like something motorised.

  ‘Aren’t you wonderful,’ she said, burying her head in his fur.

  ‘Yes,’ he seemed to be saying, ‘I am wonderful and I’m allowing you to pet me and I might even allow you to give me some breakfast.’

  He was like a baby, Callie decided.

  ‘Will you come with me to the bathroom before I get you breakfast?’ she said.

  Joe didn’t reply, so she took that for a yes.

  She popped the cat on the bed, riffled around in her many suitcases and found a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, shoving her feet into old tennis shoes, then she picked Joe up and went into the bathroom. Brenda’s own bedroom had a tiny en suite, so Poppy and Callie shared this little bathroom with its old bath and what had to be the original black and white tiles from the 1930s above the sink. There were ferns growing healthily, art deco prints on the walls advertising various French liqueurs, and towels with retro trim. Minimalist it was not, and Callie loved it.