‘Darling Sam!’ said Joanne. ‘I’m so thrilled! I was worried, I know it’s crazy – I mean, when you have to have extra scans, you worry.’
‘I am patenting worry,’ said Sam. ‘But it’s all perfect. Oh, got to go, darling Dad’s phoning.’
‘My dearest Sam, I am so pleased for you and Ted,’ said her father, delight audible in every part of his voice.
Sam could hear Ted on his phone talking to his mother and she could hear Vera’s voice excitedly saying ‘. . . the relief! Did you find out whether it’s a boy or a girl, because really I’d love to know what colour to knit the cardigans. I’m doing creams, whites and yellows, but it would be lovely to know either way . . .’
Sam grinned. Vera was not a woman for delayed gratification.
‘We didn’t, Ma,’ said Ted.
It was a full ten minutes before they were able to progress any further and they went into a little tea shop to have tea for Sam and a strong coffee for Ted.
They held hands and smiled at each other, not needing to say anything but just happy it was working out. Miracles did happen. The phone buzzed and Sam at first thought of ignoring it. It was only half eight in the morning, she thought, looking at the number and seeing Andrew, her boss’s name on the small screen.
‘Surely he can wait?’ Ted said mildly.
‘I suppose,’ said Sam, ‘I just want to cherish this moment,’ and then normality kicked in. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ll answer.’ Everything was rushing through her head, the wonderful news of the scan and the sense that perhaps, just perhaps, she and Ted would have this glorious Baby Bean. Then her conscience took over – after all, she was going to be on a certain amount of maternity leave after she’d had the baby and when she had taken the job in the first place, she hadn’t been pregnant. Employers were rarely delirious with staff who got pregnant soon into a new job. Even though Andrew had been very accommodating about it, he needn’t have and . . .
She picked up the phone.
‘Hello Andrew, how are you?’ she said cheerfully.
‘Sam, I need you in the office immediately,’ he said.
‘What’s wrong?’ said Sam, slipping instantly into work mode.
‘You know the south-east part of the organisation? The bit we thought had been closed off? Well, it transpires it had a special bank account with a credit card nobody knew about and, finally, the last remaining volunteer from some speck on the map called Ballyglen phoned Rosalind this morning to say she was sorry about the money and she’d pay it all back—’
‘Pay all what back?’
‘The fifty-five thousand euros of donations she’d seen siphoning off over the years.’
‘Fifty-five thousand euros? How many years?’
‘Twenty. It’s every charity’s nightmare. Sam, I’m sorry, I know you’re just about to go on leave, but I need someone with your experience to co-ordinate this. I know you’re doing a very thorough handover with Dave, but he doesn’t have your experience – and we’ll need a media strategy if it gets out.’
It’ll get out, thought Sam, grimly. Bad news always did.
‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’
She hung up, thinking. One of the earliest problems she’d encountered with the charity was that it was run in such an archaic fashion. As someone who had come from the banking industry, Sam had been horrified at first to see the logistical set-up for their many, many accounts.
Once Sam’s careful banking strictures were in place, every account was tied up and any back-door money heading off to Ballyglen would have stopped.
The volunteer would have sat with increasing credit card company demands.
She explained it all to Ted and they made their way to the car park, still holding hands.
As she drove into the office, she felt a hint of worry that had nothing to do with missing funds. This sort of scenario – her mother racing off because of some crisis at school – had been part and parcel of her home life. What if Sam was going to be that sort of mother too? One called too strongly by her job and not enough by her child?
Perhaps that’s why she’d found it so hard to get pregnant – divine intervention.
What if the lure of her job made her just like her mother?
Ginger
Ginger sat on the train and watched the girl opposite eat a chocolate bar: blithely, unselfconsciously. Ginger longed for both a taste of the chocolate and the ability to eat four hundred calories of pure sugar for breakfast without anyone so much as blinking.
But then, the girl was a skinny little thing in skinny-little-thing jeans with those baby deer legs that looked as if they couldn’t hold a real human up.
Skinny girls could eat four thousand calories of chocolate and say things like ‘I just burn it off, I don’t know how!’ and giggle, and people – OK, men – gazed at them longingly as if the ability to desire chocolate meant they were good in bed.
People – OK, also men – never thought that about girls like Ginger. Although to be fair, Ginger never ate chocolate or anything else on the train. She didn’t eat in public. Ever. So nobody got the chance to wonder if she was fabulous in bed from the way she sensually ate a Twix.
Big, curvy women eating chocolate in public could get looked at with the faint scorn that said: no wonder you’re fat.
She forced herself to look back at her phone and clicked into her daily affirmations for dieting.
Today’s, which she had read over her low-sugar muesli, the one that tasted least like ground-up packing boxes, said: Imagine yourself as a better you. A happier, more contented you. This all will come if you just believe and let go. What you imagine, you draw towards yourself.
Ginger closed her eyes and tried to imagine a happier, more contented her.
Her life would be different. Entirely different. She would be thin. Really thin, in fact. People would say things like: ‘Ginger, darling, you have lost so much weight – you look amazing, but don’t get too thin . . .’
And Ginger would shrug so that her bronzed collarbones would be visible and everyone would sigh enviously at her exquisite bone structure, and she’d say: ‘I drink lots of water, and really, I forget to eat half the time because I’m so busy with Jacques/Dex/Logan . . .’ and said hot boyfriend would smoulder from across the room and people would die with envy . . .
The train stopped with a jolt.
Her stop.
She hoisted her handbag across her chest, pulled her extra bag from between her knees, and made her way out of the carriage into the throng of people wielding coffee and newspapers. Getting off packed buses, trams or trains was a particular hell for larger women and every time she did it, Ginger tried to engage nobody’s eye so as not to invite the censure she would see there.