The Year that Changed Everything

by Cathy Kelly

  ‘No idea how it could have happened?’ said Ted, deadpan.

  ‘I don’t know, I mean it’s . . . confusing,’ Shazz said, as if she’d never had a single sex education lesson in her life.

  Cynthia was more prosaic about the impending birth of her first grandchild.

  ‘Shazz never did pay much attention in school and I think she thought that pregnancy happened to other girls. It’s not that she doesn’t know how it happened, it’s just that she has absolutely no idea how it happened to her. Because Shazz is one of those people who coasted through life with good things happening to her.’

  Shazz certainly seemed to be enjoying pregnancy and delighted in going around with her tiny bronzed beach-ball belly on show for all to see.

  ‘Mum says it’s winter and I should be wearing more clothes, but you know, I’m hot,’ she said.

  Sam giggled. Even in previous winters, Shazz had worn skimpy little clothes all the time and being pregnant wasn’t really changing that, except for the fact that her pink hair was now blonde and tipped with a fabulous feathery purple.

  ‘Have you got names for the baby?’ Ted asked. Ted loved Shazz and her dizzy madness. He looked at her as if she was a sort of slightly daft alien from the planet Moon-Dust, a planet where normal rules did not apply and where the inhabitants lived in a lovely hazy world of unicorns and moonbeams.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Shazz dreamily. ‘I just can’t get my head around the right sort of names. Petal and Flower, I love all those names, but Unicorn – that’s so pretty and I have a unicorn tattoo on my lower back. Have I ever showed it to you?’

  ‘Yes,’ fibbed Sam.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Ted hurriedly, ‘we’re fine, we don’t need to see the tattoo. Today. Again, I mean.’

  Sam grinned. While Ted loved Shazz, he was also a bit scared of her.

  ‘I was going to get it coloured in, but I’ve been told that you shouldn’t have any tattoos done when you’re pregnant, so I’m going to be careful because I’m going to be a good mum, like you, Sam. You can explain to me how to be a good mum.’

  ‘Your mother could explain how to be a good mum because she’s amazing,’ Sam had said.

  ‘I know,’ said Shazz, ‘but she’s, you know, old. I mean you’re old too, but you’re different old, you’re young old, you know.’

  Sam grinned at the memory as she drove off down the road. With Cynthia and Shazz living next door it was always lively. Vera and Cynthia had struck up a surprising friendship and spent much time talking to one another about baby India’s routine. All in all, thought Sam as she headed towards Ballyglen, she was incredibly lucky.

  Even work was flying. Somehow, they’d managed to keep the lid on the whole credit card scandal in Ballyglen and Andrew had covered the whole of the misappropriated funds personally. Today, Sam was going to visit the local nursing home who’d received some funding from the charity and to see their whole place. She couldn’t bear to think that they would miss out on thousands of euros of help.

  She’d downloaded a book onto her phone, stuck the jack into her car dashboard and prepared to listen to Jane Austen all the way there. All was right with her world.

  Ginger

  December had arrived with a ferocious blast in Dublin. An unexpected flurry of snow overnight had turned mainly to slush and as Ginger looked out of her bedroom window onto the street below, she could see nothing but a mild dusting of early snow on the car roofs. She could still feel the chill in the air, even though her heating had come on. No matter what the weather was though, she walked, although today it would have to be a speedy one – today she had a horrible job to do in Ballyglen and a photographer was picking her up in an hour.

  Carla must have mentioned that no newspaper had still got the exclusive on Jason Reynolds’ abandoned wife – now apparently exonerated by the police – and Carla thought it would be wonderful to ‘have someone with Ginger’s empathy talk to her’. Yeah, right.

  She pulled on her dressing gown, went out into the living room, switching on lights, and greeted her beloved guinea pigs.

  ‘Good morning darlings,’ she said, reaching into their luxury guinea pigs’ duplex. There was no sign of either of them: burrowing in their soft nests against the early cold, she figured.

  Her walk had become an integral part of her day. It was her meditation. How had nobody told her that when you walked and breathed in the fresh air, and looked at the trees growing around you and the canal floating beside you with its birds and wildlife, that your mind could be freed to rest. It wasn’t the hardcore workout sessions she’d done with Will, but in some ways it was better.

  She tried not to think about Will so much anymore. It was easier that way. Love hurt.

  That was another thing she thought a lot about on her morning walks, that love hurt so much. She must have been crazy to have dreamed of love and men and finding that perfect person to spend her life with. What if you found the perfect person and they still hurt you? What happened then? She had meant to throw out all the novels she’d loved for years, where heroic men won the hearts of women who had been through so much, but she couldn’t bear to do it and now she allowed herself to read them, for comfort.

  Sometimes you need to comfort yourself because nobody else is going to do it. You need to be kind to yourself. Remember that, girls: you have to take care of you and find the simple things that make you happy. For me, it can be books, but for you it might be chocolate, or a run, or talking with your friends or talking to your mother or hugging your pet.

  Ginger had given that advice in a Girlfriend column just the other week and she hadn’t flinched when she’d written about her mother. She’d been so lucky with her family, even if her mother hadn’t been there. But her mother had left her so many wonderful things, like her father and her two brothers and Aunt Grace and then Esmerelda had come along, as had Zoe, Margaret, Jodie, Paula, Lulu and Fiona. There were so many wonderful people in Ginger’s life.

  Besides, she’d changed so much in the last six months, it was incredible to think of herself now and compare herself with the Ginger who’d been so heartbroken on her birthday. Oh, she was still the same girl but stronger and wiser and more confident.

  She and Alice were discussing her coming out from behind the Girlfriend pseudonym.

  Ginger had asked for a bit of time to get ready for it.

  ‘I’ve had a bit of a setback,’ she confided to Alice, no longer astonished that she was having a meaningful conversation with this woman who’d once intimidated her so much.

  ‘OK,’ said Alice. ‘But I have so many plans for you, Ginger – you can be the face of bigger, beautiful women, like that fabulous model, Ashley Graham.’

  ‘I’m not exactly beautiful,’ Ginger had said, laughing.

  ‘Course you are,’ stated Alice, almost crossly. ‘How can we stop women being blackmailed by “thin is best” messages, if the advice giver lets herself be blackmailed too?’

  But she’d grudgingly agreed to give Ginger some time.

  ‘OK, go off and sob about your long-lost love, honey, but think of your career too?’

  It was freezing when Ginger stepped outside the apartment and started off at a brisk pace towards the canal. She liked to use this time to think about the advice she was dispensing through her column to her online readers. It was one of the online magazine’s most popular pages. She had learned so much in the past six months and that wisdom was springing out of her and she wanted to help other women with it. Thanks to her new and stronger advice, and the honesty and candour with which she gave it, Girlfriend was growing a huge audience. Ginger was making more from that than from her job on the newspaper. Alice was right – it was time. Then she wouldn’t have to schlep down to doorstep a poor woman who’d been abandoned to the wolves by her own husband and who was probably in so much pain, she didn’t know which way was up.

  ‘I
’ll send a good photographer with you,’ the features editor said. ‘He can do the actual doorstepping. You just need to get her into your confidence.’

  Ginger was sick, thinking of that.

  Sometimes she hated this job.

  Callie

  Callie had begun working on the reading for the care assistant and psychology night courses. She wouldn’t be able to enrol until the following September, but when she’d mentioned it to Rona, the director of nursing at Leap of Faith, Rona had been thrilled and had produced massive textbooks the next day.

  ‘I think it’s a wonderful idea,’ Rona had said, ‘and here are some books to get you started.’

  The books had given Callie a new impetus and she was consumed by them, reading when Poppy was doing homework, sitting up late in bed at night, working and making notes while Ketchup roamed between their rooms. She loved the nursing home and today, when a petite and attractive dark-haired woman arrived and began walking through the locked ward where Callie worked most, she assumed this was a person with a relative who was ill.

  Callie found that they generally needed as much help as their ill family members.

  ‘I feel so guilty – we should be taking care of my mother, but I can’t, not anymore. She needs twenty-four-hour care,’ the person would sob and Callie instinctively knew to take them into a quiet room and explain that there came a time when the most loving and dedicated families couldn’t possibly provide the twenty-four-hour care that a person with dementia required.

  So when Rona asked her to go upstairs to talk to the lady who was checking out the home, Callie felt confident.

  ‘It’s not a relative,’ Rona said. ‘Sam wants to talk about a charity who are going to help us with funding again. They stopped for a while, but it would be amazing if they helped us out. They used to be called Cineáltas, but they’ve rebranded as Kindness, which is lovely. Their sole function is dementia. She was watching you downstairs and she thought you were the perfect person to talk to. One of the girls told her that you helped your uncle and it led on from there.’

  Callie felt a frisson of anxiety.

  ‘Rona, you know I have to be careful who I talk to.’

  Rona knew the whole story and now she stared at the quiet gentle woman who’d made such a difference to everyone on the locked ward. Quietly and unobtrusively, Callie Reynolds’ lovely presence had enhanced the lives of the patients and the staff alike.

  ‘It’s totally informal. Would you like me to sit in with you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Callie eagerly.

  At her afternoon break, Callie did her normal things: phoning Poppy to see if she was out of school and how she’d got on that day and checking that Ma was there for her at home. If Callie herself had changed over the past months, Poppy had changed just as much. She was a different girl from the one who had gone on the road trip with her mother six months before. Jason might have wrecked the family but perhaps, Callie thought, it had been the making of them.

  Ginger

  Ginger took her own car and wasn’t surprised when the photographer, Johnny, who was young, eager and drove far too fast, made it down to Ballyglen by three.

  ‘Told you I’d do it in an hour and a half,’ he said.

  ‘If you get any more points on your licence, you’ll be off the road,’ Ginger told him severely. ‘I’ll be there in another fifteen. Find somewhere to stop for coffee and directions, and I’ll meet you there then.’

  A retired Sunday News guy who now lived in Wexford had told them the rumour that Callie Reynolds and her daughter were back living in Ballyglen, but another far bigger financial crisis had knocked the Reynolds affair off the general news radar, so nobody had bothered with it. However, word had it that Jason Reynolds’ girlfriend’s mother was dying and he might come back if she did.

  ‘A cop contact told us that,’ the news editor told an increasingly edgy Ginger that morning. ‘If you do your magic, we could be in before anyone else. Bet the wife will want to kill him.’

  ‘Thought she knew nothing about it all, has no money?’ said Ginger.

  ‘Exactly. The story “woman he fooled and left” makes for lots of newspaper sales.’

  The thought of writing that story made Ginger sick.

  In the coffee shop, Johnny had already asked for directions to the nursing home. Ballyglen was a close-knit town, the Wexford ex-reporter said. ‘She and Reynolds both came from a tough area. If they’re on her side, you won’t find out anything in there. Try the nursing home.’

  Ginger hated this. It was not the sort of thing she’d signed up to do. She’d followed the case, sure, but her sympathies had been with Mrs Reynolds and the poor kid. And now she had to go and try to extract Callie Reynolds’ pain from her like a dentist removing a tooth.

  Sam

  ‘Music,’ Dr Arnold, the director of the nursing home, had told Sam when she first arrived, ‘is often one of the last links to our world that people with dementia have. See how everyone’s eyes light up when they hear music? Or even if their eyes don’t light up, they automatically move, remembering. The mind is the last great undiscovered field, but we are beginning to learn a little more about it. But here at Leap of Faith charity, we are not keen on researching our patients, we want to make them happy.’

  Sam had been touring the nursing home for over two hours and it was thrilling, glorious, to see how people with dementia could be taken care of and stimulated.

  ‘We can do both,’ said Sam, writing in her notebook: ‘make them happy and do a little research, that’s part of what Kindness wants to do. Our aim is to help organisations like yourself and help to fund research into areas of dementia that may not have been covered before. If only we could get some researchers in here to investigate what sort of music works best, just to give people peace and happiness.’

  Dr Arnold, an older man who walked with a stick, looked thoughtful.

  ‘I don’t see what harm it would do,’ he said, ‘but the researchers have to be mindful about the people we work with. They are the most important people in this place.’

  Sam smiled at him. ‘That’s why I’m here,’ she said, ‘because of that ethos.’

  ‘Walk around, make yourself at home,’ said Dr Arnold, ‘I’ll have one of the team come out later to show you around the whole facility. I’m afraid I’ve a meeting right now. Your boss is pretty persuasive though.’

  ‘He is,’ agreed Sam, thinking of how long it had taken her to persuade him to change the charity’s name to Kindness instead of the beautiful Irish name that nobody outside Ireland could pronounce.

  As she walked around the nursing home, she became aware of a sense of lightness and happiness that she hadn’t felt in any of the other care homes she’d been in. The music was a huge part of it.

  Each place in the home had speakers and music played from them. Upstairs, there was classical in one room and gentle Big Band stuff from the forties and fifties in a sitting room.

  The ward for the people with the most serious level of dementia was locked.

  ‘People move from upstairs to down here eventually,’ said the director of nursing, letting her in. ‘That said, we do our best to make this a very special place.’

  Wards and rooms surrounded a large airy room that led into a beautifully maintained garden. There were flowers on the windowsills, Glenn Miller was playing in the background, and feet were tapping.

  A very slim blonde woman was gently feeding the tiny, frail little old lady who was seated on a chair covered with a beautiful piece of sheepskin to protect her delicate bones. There was something vaguely familiar about the woman carer, although Sam couldn’t quite say what it was. Yet there was just something . . . the woman was tall, older than Sam for sure, and had blonde hair tied back in a very severe ponytail. She was murmuring gently to the little old lady as she fed her.

  ‘Come on, Mildred. Jus
t a tiny little bit more and we can stop. You’ve got to keep your strength up. How are you going to go dancing with Stanley later this afternoon if you haven’t had any lunch at all?’

  Again, Sam marvelled at the gentleness of the carers who worked with these people. It wasn’t always easy, she knew. She watched the woman for a little while, watched Mildred holding her tiny little head up to be fed, like a little beautiful bird.

  When lunch was over, the woman very gently cleaned Mildred’s tiny face with a soft cloth and then laid a gentle hand on her cheek.

  ‘Now, my darling,’ she said, ‘you’re beautiful again. You’re always beautiful, but even more so. Shall we get your lipstick and your powder?’

  Mildred nodded, the first sign Sam had seen that she understood anything.

  ‘I’ll be back in a tickety-boo,’ said the woman, smiling.

  As she walked towards the corridor, Sam noticed that the woman had a word for everyone, a smile, a touch on a shoulder, a gentle, ‘How are we doing today?’ One of the nurses whirled past and Sam interrupted her.

  ‘That carer, she’s very good, isn’t she?’ Sam said.

  ‘Cal?’ said the nurse. ‘Brilliant. She came in initially to help out with her uncle-in-law. Seamus over there. But she stayed. Don’t know what we did without her to be honest. For some people it’s a job, but for her, it’s a vocation.’

  That woman, Sam decided, that woman would be perfect to talk about what caring for someone with dementia meant. She was connected to the nursing home by family and yet she had that rare and precious gift of being able to take care of people.

  Rona, Callie and Sam sat in a small sitting room and shared a pot of tea.

  ‘I’m trying to get a vision of what it takes to be a carer,’ Sam explained to the woman who’d been introduced to her as Cal, who looked a little uneasy. ‘Rona tells me you started coming as a volunteer to help with your uncle and it turned into a job?’