She would rip out the throat of anything, anyone, who hurt her baby. Anyone.
And then, the great love and the great sense of protectiveness were overwhelmed by another, fearful thought. The one that had been stalking her.
All her life, she had been in charge. The woman people went to when they wanted a task accomplished and fast.
Suddenly she didn’t feel any of those things. Not organised, not competent.
She had a tiny baby in her arms. In a couple of days, maybe even the next day, she and Ted were going to bring this tiny creature home.
Sam had simply no idea how to do this. No mental template from her own childhood.
How could she now become a proper mother with no background to help her with what was supposed to be the most natural thing in the world?
On her fortieth birthday, cradling her new baby, Sam made a wish.
Please let me learn how to be a good mother. Please.
Ginger
Ginger Reilly danced with her head on Stephen’s shoulder and tried to ignore the wire-like bite of her control tights into her waist. She was impervious to such things, she told herself, inhaling the scent of Stephen’s spicy cologne and resting her face against his dinner jacket, not caring that it was hired and had probably been to more weddings than the band currently murdering ‘Unchained Melody’.
She wasn’t, for once, wondering if she looked hideously enormous, despite today’s bridesmaid’s dress – peach taffeta on a woman who wore head-to-toe black at all times – being a bit too Scarlett O’Hara to disguise Ginger’s substantial bosom and curvy hips. Sometimes, Ginger stood outside rooms and wondered how to walk in as thinly as possible, or else how to walk in so that nobody noticed a larger girl daring to exist in a skinny-girl world.
But none of that mattered today: what mattered was that she was dancing with a man who’d just asked her to go out with him. A good-looking, tall man who’d chatted her up, admired her and had asked her – unpushed by relatives, even though he was Liza’s cousin – out onto the dance floor five times.
‘People will talk,’ Ginger joked weakly the second time Stephen took her hand for a slow dance. She’d even looked around to see if Liza, the bride and her best friend, had manoeuvred this second dance so that Ginger wouldn’t have to be her normal wallflower self. A wallflower who did a remarkable impression of a woman having a fabulous time, because nobody was going to pity Ginger Reilly, but still, in the deepest, most hidden part of her brain, a wallflower.
‘Let them talk,’ Stephen had said, looking down. He was really tall and clearly a sporty guy, with big shoulders and a slightly too-thick neck. But he had wonderful dark hair, matching dark eyes and a smile just for her. How had she never met him before?
For the first time in her life, Ginger did not mind a man looking down into the Grand Canyon of her cleavage. In work, she wore polo necks or crew necks to cover up and had a smart retort to anyone who eyed her 42EE chest with leering interest.
In work, she was sassy Ginger who nipped all smart remarks in the bud.
But today, clad in a dress that had buxom wench written all over it, she found she liked Stephen openly admiring her cleavage. He’d also admired her hair, the auburn tangle of curls that had meant that when her eldest brother called her Ginger as a child, the nickname had stuck.
Her hair, wrapped up into a sheeny coil at the back of her head by the bridal party’s hairdresser that morning, was her most beautiful feature, Liza often pointed out.
‘Wish I had hair like that,’ said Liza, who’d got bum-length extensions onto her platinum hair, which she’d had tonged into long curls that trailed down her fake-tanned back for the wedding.
Ginger’s father, Michael, said his only daughter’s best features were her kindness, her sense of humour, a warm face and eyes like her mother’s: huge, trusting amber eyes with eyelashes longer than any giraffe’s. Michael had brought up his two sons and Ginger all on his own when his wife had been killed in a road accident on the way back from visiting relatives in her home town of Ballyglen. Ginger’s hair was like her mother’s too, her father said.
‘What about next week?’ Stephen was asking as they danced. ‘We could see a film. What do you like?’
Ginger, who quite often went to the cinema as it was something you could do alone, had seen all the films she wanted to. But pleasing a man, Liza insisted, meant kowtowing to him without him knowing. As she’d had at least fifteen steady boyfriends, from the age of fourteen onwards, Ginger – current boyfriend total to date: nil – felt that Liza must know what she was talking about.
‘What do you like?’ Ginger asked, quashing the feeling that she was letting down the sisterhood by not answering honestly. But she had to give it a try. The initial kowtowing clearly was only part of the process. When you knew someone, then you could be honest with them.
She envisioned her and Stephen when they were happily in love, perhaps on holiday in a cold country because Ginger didn’t do beachwear. ‘I lied that first night about films I like,’ she’d say and he’d laugh. ‘I know, silly. It made me fall in love with you faster.’
Stephen led her off the dance floor as the band finished up, and he began talking about the new Fast and Furious spin-off movie he’d take her to see.
Ginger, who had two brothers after all, and had been forced to sit through most of the original series, already knew the entire plot. She did not mention this but instead said: ‘That sounds wonderful.’
And it would be: a date with something other than the remote control.
Ginger Reilly, thirty years old today, and a spinster of this parish, as her Great-Aunt Grace might say jokingly, had only ever been on one other date in her whole life. He’d been a guy from college who’d eventually asked her out to the pub. He’d then proceeded to tell her about how much he fancied her college mate. End of date.
‘You’re curvy, not fat, and you’re a late bloomer,’ Mick, her eldest brother, had said, kindly, as she’d sobbed to him that it was because she was fat, wasn’t it? ‘Your time will come, sis.’
And it had.
Being thirty, Ginger decided, was going to make all the difference.
She had more confidence, more experience of Life, more . . . more something, she was sure of it.
Working for Caraval Media had sharpened her up, helped transform her into the tough cookie with the smart mouth who made gangs of people from work think she was the funniest thing ever. More money, thanks to her agony-aunt column in an online teenage girl mag, meant she could afford cool, well-fitting black clothes. She was getting places.
Except with the opposite sex.
Her sex life was a wasteland. Always had been.