‘What drought?’ Charlene was eager to know.
‘The permanent bloody drought,’ said James, who looked bored. ‘Let’s not ruin our day, Liza,’ he said to his new wife. ‘Ginger, go and do the wild thing with Stephen. Get it out of your system. You need a fuck. Virginity’s only for the really religious. At your age, it’s embarrassing. You just need a kick-start.’
Ginger felt the words like a fist to her solar plexus.
‘You’ve never had sex?’ gasped Charlene, fascinated. ‘Like, ever?’
‘You told James about me,’ said Ginger quietly to Liza. ‘My secret.’
‘We’re married, now,’ Liza said defensively. ‘I tell him everything.’
‘Liza was only trying to help,’ interrupted James. ‘I told Stephen because he’s a decent guy and he’s been around the block, you know, could give you what you want.’
He slapped Stephen on the back.
‘What I want? Meaningless sex to get rid of my embarrassing virginity with a man who has a girlfriend? How could you?’
‘Listen, Ginge,’ said Stephen, wading in. ‘We would have had fun, babes, we could still have some fun – don’t be so heavy.’
It was the wrong word to use.
Ginger stared at him.
Heavy.
So the wrong word: a fat, heavy, pitiful virgin on her thirtieth birthday who thought she’d finally found somebody special.
Instead she was part of some cruel fix-up where everyone would laugh about her afterwards.
Satisfied that Ginger had at last had a man, Liza could happily unfriend her and the twenty-six years of knowing each other would cease to exist.
How had she ever thought Liza was her friend?
Her brothers, Mick and Declan, hated Liza, always had.
Great-Aunt Grace, her father’s aunt, and her only female relative, had agreed.
‘A little madam – take care of yourself around her,’ she’d warned. Grace was wise. Utterly eccentric, but wise.
They were all devastatingly correct and it had taken this for her to see it: this public humiliation.
Ginger swivelled and walked towards the corridor where the back stairs lay.
Nobody called after her, nobody said ‘please come back’.
Liza, who could have hurried after her in the high but comfortable shoes Ginger had helped her choose, did none of those things.
They let Ginger go alone and she kept walking, ramrod straight, not once looking back.
At the small staircase, she went up to her floor, sweating as she hurried.
Finally, she was in her hotel bedroom – had it really only been a few hours before that she’d been here getting ready, so happy for her friend? Why hadn’t she come up here to take off her damn tights?
Then she wouldn’t have heard those horrible words.
But she’d had to hear them, Ginger thought sadly.
Fate had wanted her to. The truth shall set you free, she thought, remembering her Gloria Steinem from college, but wow, it was utterly devastating. She would need a lot more time for it to merely piss her off.
She began to laugh, and then the laugh turned to tears as she thought that, really, there couldn’t be anyone having as bad a birthday in the whole city as her. And then she closed her eyes, and let the tears fall.
I wish that next year, everything in my life could be totally different.
PART TWO
One month earlier
Callie
Callie Reynolds sat in the cosmetic surgeon’s chair and winced.
This was going to hurt, no doubt about it.
‘I think you need a little more filler . . .’ Frederica, the cosmetic surgeon pointed, ‘. . . just there. A little lift.’
Callie held the small mirror up to her face and knew why she never had enlarging mirrors in her bathroom. Up this close in the heavily magnified dermatologist’s mirror, she looked about seventy and her skin was as pitted as Pompeii on Day Two of the disaster. And as for the increasing growth of fine facial hairs . . .
If it kept up this way, she’d look like a baby chicken by the time she was sixty.
Once, sixty had seemed old, but not now. She would be fifty in a month.
Fifty. She’d never thought she’d care and yet, now that it was around the corner, she found that she did. Worse, she kept thinking of her family and all the bridges she’d burned.
Was that why people hated the big birthdays? Not the age but the retrospection?
‘I don’t want to look done,’ she said again to Frederica, who was the best in Dublin.
‘Nobody who comes to me looks done,’ said Frederica indignantly and then they both grinned. They’d often had this conversation. Just across the hall was a dermatologist who specialised in turning out people who looked expensively retouched from a distance of fifty yards when viewed even by people who were legally blind. They came out of her office with big lips, puffy cheeks and glassily smooth foreheads that couldn’t move a muscle even at the onset of an earthquake.
‘Sorry,’ apologised Callie. ‘I’m just anxious, Frederica. I feel old, irritable and anxious.’
‘Hormones,’ said Frederica firmly. ‘Have you seen anyone for HRT yet?’
‘No. It’s like admitting I need it. Being on the verge of menopause makes me feel so . . .’ She searched for the word. ‘Ancient. Dried up. Unfeminine.’ There, she’d said it.
‘We all fight ageing the best we can, Callie. You could be mourning the lack of fertility. And for the moods with perimenopause, you need help. If you needed insulin, you’d take it. I’ve given you the name of the best gynaecologist I know, please see her.’
‘I know,’ muttered Callie. ‘I didn’t know it was going to be like this. I thought I’d sink into elegant fiftyhood and, instead, I just feel like a dried-out prune on the inside, with no sex drive. I’ve no energy and zero interest in the party my poor husband is planning.’
‘That’s sweet of him.’ Frederica went to the fridge where she kept her magical ampoules and filled up a syringe.
‘Yes, he’s very good,’ agreed Callie, even though she knew that Jason was driven to have the party for them, the fabulous Reynolds family, rather than as a love letter to her.
Jason, bless him, loved to show off.
She got ready for the pain as the doctor flicked on her special light, put on her glasses and looked closely at her.