The Year that Changed Everything

by Cathy Kelly

  Ginger shuddered at the memory. She should have known Grace would winkle the truth out of Mick and Zoe.

  ‘Sorry, pet,’ Grace said, reaching out to stroke Ginger’s hand with her own one with its manicured nails and papery thin skin. ‘Just be careful. You’re such a soft-hearted person and the Lizas of this world take advantage of you.’

  ‘Grace, you’re just saying that to get me off the point. We need to do this or a TV crew will be arriving from America saying they’re going to do an episode of Hoarders.’

  ‘No,’ said Grace. ‘I don’t want anyone tidying me up. I’m fine as I am.’

  Ginger knew when Grace had put her foot down. She’d have to discuss the whole thing with her father and try to find a solution that way. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘For now. I suppose I should make us tea?’

  ‘Ooh yes,’ said Grace, finding her glasses and peering at the on-screen TV guide. ‘They’re doing cosmetics next. Some dragon fruit thingamabob that makes you look much younger. It was on earlier only we missed the best bits. Esmerelda has decided she wants it.’

  ‘We must have it then,’ sighed Ginger.

  She made tea and then sat with the two ladies and the dogs and watched as a wildly made-up woman extolled the virtues of dragon fruit lotions and potions with the aid of before and after pictures that looked heavily doctored.

  While Esmerelda and Grace discussed whether it would be worth it or not, Ginger ate some biscuits – Grace always had the best chocolate ones – and thought of Grace’s comment about emotional baggage.

  She had dealt with not having a mother. She’d dealt with it all her life, thank you very much. And as for saying she wasn’t the sum of her weight . . . well, Grace hadn’t been out in the world for a long time. The rules were different for bigger women: harder, more vicious, more cruel.

  If Ginger could lose weight, she’d sort that out.

  Guiltily, she put down the biscuit she’d just picked up. She had to start. Soon.

  When she got home, her stomach was grumbling. A few chocolate biscuits did not a dinner make. She turned on the TV and went into the kitchen to pop a Lean Cuisine in the microwave. She was starting a diet, another one of the zillions she had secretly tried over the years, but this one was going to work because it was about time, she decided.

  Time to change her life.

  If her mother was alive, she’d have known how to diet and do stuff like that: the thought flew unbidden into her head. And just as quickly, she stamped it out.

  No looking back and getting miserable. Not now, not ever. Her mother had been wonderful, or so Dad said, but she was in the past, killed in a horrific traffic accident when Ginger was a baby. Aunt Grace had been all for counselling when the three Reilly kids were in their teens:

  ‘Do you good. You have to let go of grief. Some things, we have to let go in life,’ she had said with the same imperiousness that would have made her a fabulous Roman empress.

  ‘We’re fine,’ Ginger said hurriedly in later years when Grace came back to the subject. Keep moving on – nothing to see here.

  Declan and Mick remembered their mother, but Ginger had been too small when she’d died. She only had the photos to remember her mother by and she had enough complexes without adding to them. No thank you, she was doing fine.

  There was only one thing Ginger wanted to let go of: her extra weight. If she got thin, everything would be fine.

  Callie

  Callie was exhausted.

  At five the previous morning, when the pre-dawn light was shimmering in the sky, she had woken, dressed, roused Poppy and together with Brenda, they’d slipped out the back of the house, through four other people’s back gardens via side gates and into the lane where a friend of Brenda’s named Tommy waited with a car. It was a beat-up old Renault, circa 1994. Callie had looked at the car, once a pale blue, now a combination of rust, dents and dirt, and thought of the glamorous Ferrari sitting in her garage at home. But it would get them where they needed to go.

  ‘I know she looks a bit bashed-up, Mrs Reynolds, but my uncle has had her for years and she’s a grand aul car. Lots of miles on the clock, but she won’t let you down. I gave her a quick service and she’s running fine. The tyres are good, the tank is full.’

  Callie had felt like crying because he was being so kind, but no tears came: it was like they were all gone.

  ‘I don’t know how to thank you, Tommy,’ said Callie, and she handed over the money for the car: five hundred euros, which seemed ridiculously low for a car and yet barely the price of a wheel on her Range Rover, she recalled.

  Callie had turned and hugged Brenda tightly.

  Poppy installed herself in the front seat with the distaste of someone sitting in the back of the bin lorry. She held her precious handbag up on her lap, not wanting to put it into the footwell which was definitely not valeted like the cars she was used to.

  ‘Don’t look at it like you’re going to get a disease from it,’ said Brenda, leaning in to give her a last embrace. ‘It’s a grand vehicle, it will get you to where you need to go.’

  ‘And where’s that?’ said Poppy, ‘some shithole somewhere?’

  Callie didn’t even remonstrate with her, there was no point. Poppy had been in a foul mood all the previous evening and it was as if the sweet teenager of the previous night, when Callie had removed her make-up, had gone.

  ‘Thank you, Brenda,’ Callie said, ‘I’d have been lost without you.’

  Brenda and Tommy had helped her sell her diamonds to a second-hand jeweller the previous afternoon to pay Fiona McPharland’s fee, and after that, she had 3,854 euros in cash in her wallet. The earrings alone were worth four times that much, but beggars could not be choosers. Apart from the rest of her haul – the watch, a few bits and bobs – it was all the money she had to her name.

  ‘I’m your friend, you know that,’ said Brenda, ‘so keep in touch and tell me how you’re getting on. I think what you are doing now is the right thing.’

  Callie had needed just one more night before she left Dublin, just in case Jason tried to get in touch. So here they were, having spent the night in a cheap hotel on the outskirts of the city. Reporters had indeed got hold of her phone number and kept on calling, the Sunday News making her most upset as she could remember when she’d appeared in their fashion pages years ago, and later, in their society pages.

  But Jason had changed all that.

  She would have to take out the SIM card soon and replace it with the pay-as-you-go one that would ensure nobody could get hold of her.

  She had hung up on every reporter and the one person she wanted to phone her, Jason, hadn’t.

  They were out of options.

  ‘I don’t know how we’re going to cope,’ she’d emailed to Mary Butler, who’d heard the news from Evelyn.

  ‘I will do anything, Cal,’ wrote Mary, in a heart-warming email where she promised that Poppy and Callie could come to Canada for a holiday and spend months there. ‘We’ve got the granny flat. You could have it, and you’d love it.’

  ‘I can’t go anywhere until this is sorted out,’ Callie had written back sadly.

  She was a prisoner in all but name. Not able to leave the country and not safe from the rampaging journalists keen to find some person connected with the story.

  ‘But soon, when it’s over,’ Mary urged.

  ‘We’d love that,’ said Callie, thinking that it all felt as if it would never be over.

  She and Poppy checked out of the hotel after much grumbling from Poppy about why she couldn’t lie in bed seeing as she wasn’t in school.

  ‘Because we have to check out!’ shrieked Callie, finally losing it. ‘We are going to visit your grandmother.’ She was putting on a bold front because her mother could turn them away from the door; she could have moved. They might be homeless in Ballyglen that night.


  ‘She won’t want us,’ said Poppy furiously. ‘I don’t want to go there. Dad always said that it was a tip, that you guys came from nothing, from some crappy housing estate in the middle of nowhere.’

  Callie bit her tongue. She would not respond, not say that it was a pity bloody Jason had forgotten his working-class background. He’d managed to make their daughter forget it too and if she ever got her hands on him . . .

  Stop, she whispered to herself.

  Somehow, they managed to get out of the hotel without killing each other and got back into the old car, which smelled even more than it had the previous day.

  Pigs and sheep, Callie decided: the car had been used to transport them both. It was the only answer for that foul smell, and no tree-shaped air-freshener was going to fix it.

  As she drove out of the hotel car park, Callie realised she was gripping the old steering wheel so tightly that she could see the veins in her hands. She breathed in and out deeply.

  Breathe. She was going to be calm and get through the day.

  ‘Did you find something on the radio?’ she said to Poppy, attempting a normal voice.

  ‘Find a radio station on this heap of shit?’ said Poppy, glaring at her mother. ‘I’m going to listen to my phone instead,’ and she stuck her headphones into her ears.

  Fine, thought Callie, deep breathing. A lot more deep breathing.

  She found a classical station and let soothing ballet music drift all over her as they drove out of Dublin towards Ballyglen.

  It was a long time since she had been on this road heading home. When she was younger, the big modern roads hadn’t existed, and when she used to drive up and down to see her mam, she’d had her first car, an old Mini. Its suspension had been dreadful and she’d felt every bump in the road. She could recall getting stuck in a line of cars as everyone trundled along slowly behind some giant tractor dragging hay bales from one field to another. Yet the journeys had been hopeful. She’d loved going home then, loved seeing her family. Mam had never put a guilt trip on her, never said ‘why don’t you settle down around here, after all Jason is from here’.

  No, there’d been none of that.

  Mam had given her roots and wings, had let her fly, and what had she repaid her mother with? Callie thought bitterly. Ostracisation – just because Jason had fought with her mother and made Callie take sides.

  Except, a little voice said in her head, nobody made you take sides: you took his side, nobody can make us do what we don’t want to do.

  Oh shut up, she said to the little voice and she turned the radio up louder to drown out her own thoughts.

  ‘It’s too loud, I can’t hear my music,’ snapped Poppy.

  Callie looked at her daughter who was wearing expensive Beats headphones and said: ‘Turn the sound up, then.’

  Poppy’s eyes widened marginally. Normally, Callie talked about being careful of her hearing and not turning her headphones’ volume too high.

  But not today, Callie thought, and kept on driving.

  Crone was in charge now.

  She stopped when she came to a small petrol station with a tiny coffee shop.

  ‘You’re stopping here?’ said Poppy in scandalised tones, as if here was a pigsty in the middle of nowhere.

  ‘Yes, here,’ said Callie, a hint of madness in her voice. Everyone had a limit, she thought, and she had just reached hers. Shattered mother had gone and Old Crone With No Filter was definitely in her place.

  ‘Let’s hear it for Old Crone who is able to deal with irritating teenagers,’ Crone whooped.

  ‘Well, I’m not getting out.’

  Poppy stared around her as if savages armed with spears and covered with cow shit were going to ram the car at any moment.

  ‘Fine,’ said Callie, just as decisively. ‘You stay in the car. I’m going to have a pee, get a nice cup of coffee and maybe a bun. Buy sweets for the rest of the journey, but you’re fine sitting in the car. You can mind it. Make sure nobody steals it.’

  ‘As if anyone would want to steal this heap of junk,’ snapped Poppy.

  ‘Whatever.’

  Two could play at that game.

  Callie took the keys out of the ignition and climbed out, stretching to ease her aching bones.

  After a moment, Poppy got out too. ‘Thought I might visit the bathroom and I want a drink too,’ she grumbled.

  ‘Fine,’ said Callie in a saccharine voice that sounded marginally better than the sarcastic one she really wanted to let out. She might get a job as a TV presenter yet: there was always time. Surely TV channels were always looking for the abandoned wives of fraudulent businessmen to front children’s TV shows? On that basis, she’d get a job right away.

  Callie’s face had been on every daily paper in the country both in her glamorous incarnation and as she looked these days. Since being ambushed by the photographers, she’d worn her hair pulled back, had borrowed a pair of Brenda’s old black-rimmed reading glasses and had a baseball hat on so that she looked different, hopefully unrecognisable from the woman with the long blonde hair who’d been caught with an anguished face going into Brenda’s.

  But all she needed was for someone to recognise them. Whatever get-up-and-go she had left would depart if she was confronted.

  They needed petrol too, so she drove over to the pumps, put some gas in the car, paid in the shop with her head down, and then came out.

  She drove off the forecourt to an almost empty part of the parking area and stopped the car. Reaching over, she pulled the headphones from her daughter’s head.

  ‘Now listen,’ Callie said firmly. ‘Big talk time. We are in this together, Poppy. I don’t like it any more than you like it. I know it’s frightening, terrifying, horrible – our lives have been ripped apart and we don’t know what’s happening, but we have one thing.’

  Poppy stared mutinously ahead.

  ‘We have each other. So stop being a bitch to me. I’ll try not to take my irritation out on you and we can get through this together.’

  ‘But, Mum, I don’t want to go to my grandmother’s house,’ wailed Poppy. ‘I don’t want to go to Ballygobackwards, to somewhere I can’t remember. I want to stay in our old house, I want Dad back.’

  Callie closed her eyes for a minute.

  What she wouldn’t have given to get her hands on Jason at that moment and ask him what he was playing at. Jason, who she’d always thought had adored them both and would never have hurt Poppy for the world. For a while, she’d hoped there was some reason he’d gone and that he’d return, magically, to fix it all.

  Now, she no longer believed this to be the case. Whatever had made him leave, it would never be excuse enough for the hurt he was putting them through now.

  ‘You know what, honey,’ she said softly, ‘I want all those things too, but we can’t have them. It’s like a hurricane came and raced through our lives, whirling all the good stuff up and left us just about standing with the clothes on our backs and with each other. That’s what we’ve got.’

  A single tear slid down Poppy’s face.

  ‘So we’ve got to make the best of it,’ Callie went on. ‘It’s a bit like one of your dystopian movies when people end up with nothing but they have to get on with it. We’re stuck in a dystopian movie and we have to keep moving, sort this out.’

  ‘’Kay,’ said Poppy, suspiciously snuffly but definitely brightening up.

  Wow, thought Callie, thrilled. She should have used that dystopian movie metaphor before.

  Poppy flipped down the visor to see the mirror, found that elderly cars often lost their passenger vanity mirrors, so instead adjusted the rear-view one to check her eyeliner hadn’t run.

  Callie managed to say nothing about how the rear-view mirror was for the driver and how with a car this old, it might just fall off altogether with any unexpected movement, but she
waited until the primping was done, then calmly readjusted it.

  Make-up checked, Poppy was satisfied.

  ‘Let’s do this,’ she said, vigour in her voice.

  Poppy was like her father, Callie decided as the entente cordiale which had begun in the coffee shop continued for the rest of the journey. Once Jason made up his mind to do something, he did it with all his energy. Poppy was the same.

  ‘Tell me about Ballyglen,’ she said, giving her mother all her attention apart from a little bit of poking around with eyeshadow from one of her beautiful compacts. Callie eyed the compact and thought about how much it had cost in the first place.

  Still, there was no point crying over money that was spent. Madness lay in that direction.

  ‘Well . . . It’s pretty different to Dublin.’

  ‘You were, like, really poor, right?’ Poppy said, as if such a concept was entirely unimaginable. ‘I mean, Dad never talked much about it, but he said he and his brother used to steal coal. Imagine having to steal coal.’

  Callie laughed. They had probably stolen a lot more than coal and his older brother, who’d actually done time for hash growing, might well still be at it for all she knew.

  Of course, Jason appeared to have no contact with his family, but maybe he did? She didn’t know what to think anymore. Maybe he saw his mother, talked to her. Maybe it was just Callie who’d been forced to leave her family behind. Mam, Freddie, Auntie Phil . . .

  She shook her head. The thought was disquieting, she wouldn’t dwell on it.

  ‘We didn’t have much money,’ Callie said, the way she always did, and then she thought she’d better elaborate a little more. If her mother was still living in Sugarloaf Terrace and would let them stay, then Poppy was going to see first-hand exactly how humble those beginnings had been: one small terraced house which had housed an entire family, with just one bathroom that had only been installed inside the house when she’d been ten. She laughed.