After dinner, Ginger didn’t want to sit at the table and reminisce. She couldn’t cope with that, so she said: ‘Now you’ve done all the work, Dad, I’m going to do some tidying up.’
‘It’s your birthday,’ Declan said, ‘you should sit down.’
‘Oh yes,’ she teased, ‘and you are going to do the tidying up? You were the worst tidier-upper when we were growing up.’
‘He was,’ said Mick.
‘Nearly as bad as you, Mick,’ Ginger added and they all laughed.
Ginger headed to the sink. It was a comfort being a little bit away from them all in the kitchen, the same old kitchen she had grown up with, the same old cupboards as when they had been kids. The shoemaker’s children were never shod, she thought wryly, thinking of all the kitchens her father had put in and had never quite got round to redoing his own. The units were sturdy and workmanlike, but there was nothing glamorous or fabulous about them.
Mick began to help her. ‘Move out of the way there,’ he said. ‘You’re useless at loading the dishwasher.’
‘Go for it,’ she said and moved over to the sink to start scrubbing away on the saucepans.
They chatted a little about this and that, work, politics, and she winkled some information out of Mick about their father having coffee with a newcomer to the village.
‘Very nice woman,’ Mick whispered. ‘Just moved into the area, six months in anyway. Dad was putting in a kitchen for her and somehow they hit it off.’
‘I’m not deaf – I can hear you,’ said their father’s voice from the dining table.
‘Most people his age are going deaf, his hearing is getting better,’ grumbled Mick. ‘Come on outside, I’ll tell you about her. You never know, we might marry him off yet.’
They went out the back door into the garden which their father had kept very beautifully because apparently gardening had been something their mother was into.
Outside, Mick eyeballed her. ‘You haven’t told us much about yesterday,’ he said, ‘so how was it?’ Mick always knew when there was something wrong.
‘It was fine,’ Ginger said lightly. ‘Normal wedding carry-on: photos, champagne, people fighting over bouquets. I thought there’d be a murder over who got it because Liza has some friends who are very keen to get married, you know, the usual . . .’
But her eyes brimmed over and the tears began to fall. A person could only embroider so much.
‘Ah Ginger, tell me, love,’ he said and he pulled her into his arms.
Feeling held and loved, it all came out, but she was too ashamed to tell her brother the bit about her virginity or even how she’d almost brought a man up to her room. However, she told him how Liza had tried to set her up for a pity date with her cousin.
‘I’ll kill her,’ Mick said grimly, after hearing all the vicious things Liza had said.
‘No,’ Ginger answered gloomily, ‘killing her is not a good plan. If you were in jail I’d never see you. I just have to live with it. It’s all true.’
‘It’s not true! Don’t believe a word of it! You have to get away from Liza, I never trusted that bitch,’ Mick said
‘What bitch,’ said Zoe, walking out and somehow shame overcame Ginger in front of her lovely, confident sister-in-law.
Zoe was everything Ginger aspired to be but somehow never managed: slim, pretty, sure of herself . . . She would never let anyone make a fool of her.
More shame and the pain flooded out of her. Ginger started to cry and thought she would never stop.
‘I don’t want Dad to know about any of this,’ she said frantically, wiping her face futilely, knowing she was probably all red and blotchy, the way redheads cried. ‘He’s so happy and he had a coffee with someone new and he made the lovely lunch and everything . . .’
‘No, it’s fine, don’t worry,’ said Zoe. ‘Come on, we’ll go around the front of the house. Mick, let us in the side door and get my handbag, will you? It has my make-up kit in it and we’ll fix your face up, Ginger. Nobody is going to know, right. We can be having a girl talk and I’m showing off my new make-up.’
‘I think something should be done,’ said Mick, glowering in the background. ‘That little cow; she deserves to pay.’
‘No,’ said Ginger, taking a deep breath. ‘I have to handle this my own way.’
The Tuesday morning after Liza’s wedding, Ginger arrived into work convinced that devastation was written all over her face.
She was scared somebody would ask her how it had been, had she had fun – something utterly simple – and she would collapse into a heap of heartbreak on the floor and let it all out.
The humiliation, the pain, the betrayal.
To add to it all, she’d overeaten all day Monday, a day she’d booked off in case she was exhausted from the whole wedding and birthday dinner weekend. She’d felt the shame of it as she’d put three ice cream cartons, four pizza boxes and many, many empty biscuit wrappers into the recycling. But instead of being stopped at the office door and interrogated about precisely how much fun she had had as chief bridesmaid at her best friend’s wedding – she hiccuped with pain every time the words came into her head – all she felt was an undercurrent of high anxiety in the whole office. People were scurrying around like rats.
There was no group lounging around the coffee machine, nobody hanging over anybody else’s mini-desk divider shooting the breeze.
Feeling the anxiety whizzing around like an electrical current, Ginger hurried over to her desk, her best black jacket on plus her most slimming trousers, which had felt woefully tight on her waist that morning.
‘Hi,’ she said, peeping down to look at Paula, who sat beside her and who watched all goings-on in the open-plan office more than she looked at her computer.
‘Email,’ hissed Paula. ‘Sit down, shut up and read it. And don’t talk to me afterwards: we might be being watched.’
Ginger, sat, dumped her bag and checked her emails. It all made sense to her then.
Due to a company-wide mail first thing that morning, the entire staff in Caraval Media Towers were clearly scared out of their minds. A super communications guru beloved of their ultimate boss, the scary Edward Von Bismarck, was coming in to take over and ‘reorganise all the structures at Caraval Media to take us firmly into the twenty-first century’.
Mr Guru was a guy called Zac Tyson, ‘brilliant at management, formerly of Harvard Business School and the man who entirely reordered the company’s vast US media holdings’, who was going to ‘shake things up to give all of us a better future in communications . . .’ gushed the in-house email sent to everyone and their lawyer.