Stand up for me, Liza, whispered Ginger in her lonely bathroom prison.
‘She’s always been like that. Buys her clothes from catalogues,’ Liza said dismissively, as if she understood what it was like to go into a shop and search in vain for something modern and in her size when there was always one saleslady who looked at her as if she were an alien beamed down onto Planet Thin. ‘Some people just want to be fat, they hide behind it, comfort-eat and whine that they can’t get thin.’ She paused. ‘You finished?’
‘Yup,’ said Charlene.
The door slammed and they were gone.
When she was sure she was alone, Ginger came out of her hiding place. In the mirror, she was the same Ginger as she had always been: big and curved in her dreadful pink ship of a dress. She had worn this dress for Liza, even though she had hated it. Knowing she was the biggest woman in the bridal party had sliced through her today, especially beside Liza and Charlene, who were slender in columns of cream silk and blush silk respectively rather than in enormous ballgowns.
‘The sort of thing Charlene’s wearing won’t suit you, Ginger,’ Liza had said that day in the bridal shop, standing back to assess her friend’s outfit.
‘Whatever you want,’ Ginger had said valiantly, even though she was sure something a bit more fitted would be better than this dress with its acres of fabric and boob-enhancing qualities. But if Liza wanted her wearing this, Ginger would wear it. That’s what friends did.
Friends.
She’d thought Liza was her friend.
But Liza thought she didn’t want to be thin, that she hid behind her body when, really, she wanted to be seen in spite of it. For people to see the tenderness of her heart; to see that a larger physical body could as easily hide a fragile soul as a thin one.
That the outside and the inside were so terribly, terribly different.
Today, on her thirtieth birthday, it turned out that her best friend only thought of her in terms of her body weight.
Thought she was fat. That horrible word. As if being fat was the worst crime in the world.
You could be anything you wanted in this world, but you couldn’t be fat. No matter what else you achieved, that wiped out the achievement or whatever was on the inside.
To add to the pain, Liza wanted to edit her friends list and Ginger hadn’t made the cut.
Just like that.
Time, friendship – none of it mattered except for her weight.
Ginger wanted to cry, could feel the traitorous tears rearing up, but she wasn’t going to, not now. She would not rush around, red-faced and blubbering.
Blubber and blubbering: that was her.
Oh yes, she could insult herself just as easily as Liza and Charlene did.
Ginger did self-hatred on an industrial scale.
Only she’d never expected Liza to do it, too. Not after twenty-six years of friendship.
She closed her eyes and thought. Getting out of here would need a plan and she needed to be out of this hotel or she would break down completely.
She had her tiny bridesmaidy handbag: there was nothing else in the reception room. If she could sneak upstairs to her bedroom, she could speedily change into her ordinary clothes and leave. She wasn’t going to talk to anyone, not explain anything. She knew she could get upstairs via the back staircase.
Summoning up the courage from somewhere in her bruised heart, she left the women’s room.
To distract herself, Ginger thought of all the tough things she’d had to do in her life.
Exist in a world where she had no mother and everyone else did. Smile and pretend it didn’t hurt when the girls in her class made Mother’s Day cards and she couldn’t. She’d made one for Great-Aunt Grace, who was not precisely motherly but who loved Ginger fiercely in her own eccentric way.
She’d braved college, scared of leaving people like Liza – what an irony – to swim in waters she was sure would be full of sleek sharks. Yet it was there that she’d found her tribe: people who liked knowledge, books, seeking things out.
Her first job: where that first, terrifying day someone had called her a ‘fine big lump of a girl who’d keep a man warm at night’. Ginger hadn’t run crying or screamed harassment. No, she’d begun developing her tough-girl persona.
‘You can dream, old-timer,’ she’d said, dredging up a wide smile, as if he hadn’t hurt her to her marrow.
She’d done all that. She could do this, too.
Then she rounded a corner and reached the bit of the lobby where she needed to slip into the corridor to the back stairs.
Despite being almost hidden by a selection of giant palms, she could see the after-party guests arriving. She recognised some of Liza’s outer circle, people Liza didn’t really hang around with, so they wouldn’t have been considered good enough to ask to the wedding but were still perfect for the after-party.
If they saw her, they would look at her dress and smile, or worse, say: ‘Oh, you look lovely, Ginger.’ Which was a lie, Ginger thought. A complete lie. She obviously looked terrible and everyone thought it but nobody had said it to her face.
And then she stilled. Over to one side of the lobby stood James, Liza’s new husband, along with Liza, Charlene and Stephen, the man that Ginger had really thought she was going to take upstairs to her room. The man who’d asked her for a date, when he had a girlfriend.
He still looked handsome but also strangely conniving at the same time and how had she not noticed that his eyes were so close together?
She was overcome with a desire to slap him, but Ginger, who had never used physical violence in her life, wanted to hit Liza even more.
Liza had betrayed her totally.
Ginger wanted to scream: When were you going to edit me out of your life, Liza?
The four beautiful people were laughing. Probably about her.
Stupid, sad old Ginger – fancying a man who would only want to grope her because she’d pushed herself on him.
Rage, which had been absent when she was in the toilet cubicle reeling from shock, asserted itself.
With fierce determination, she walked right up to the quartet and stood in front of them, not caring that the tears she’d tried so hard to suppress had begun to roll down her face.
‘I heard you,’ she said, staring at Liza, ignoring everyone else. ‘I heard you in the bathroom, I was in one of the stalls. I can’t believe you’d talk about me like that. I’m your oldest friend. How could you say all those things?’
Liza looked discomfited, which was something Ginger had rarely seen before.
‘Well,’ blustered Liza, faced with this new, angry Ginger. ‘Nobody said you can’t snog Stephen. Might be good for you. Get you over the drought . . .’