Besides, she’d changed so much in the last six months, it was incredible to think of herself now and compare herself with the Ginger who’d been so heartbroken on her birthday. Oh, she was still the same girl but stronger and wiser and more confident.
She and Alice were discussing her coming out from behind the Girlfriend pseudonym.
Ginger had asked for a bit of time to get ready for it.
‘I’ve had a bit of a setback,’ she confided to Alice, no longer astonished that she was having a meaningful conversation with this woman who’d once intimidated her so much.
‘OK,’ said Alice. ‘But I have so many plans for you, Ginger – you can be the face of bigger, beautiful women, like that fabulous model, Ashley Graham.’
‘I’m not exactly beautiful,’ Ginger had said, laughing.
‘Course you are,’ stated Alice, almost crossly. ‘How can we stop women being blackmailed by “thin is best” messages, if the advice giver lets herself be blackmailed too?’
But she’d grudgingly agreed to give Ginger some time.
‘OK, go off and sob about your long-lost love, honey, but think of your career too?’
It was freezing when Ginger stepped outside the apartment and started off at a brisk pace towards the canal. She liked to use this time to think about the advice she was dispensing through her column to her online readers. It was one of the online magazine’s most popular pages. She had learned so much in the past six months and that wisdom was springing out of her and she wanted to help other women with it. Thanks to her new and stronger advice, and the honesty and candour with which she gave it, Girlfriend was growing a huge audience. Ginger was making more from that than from her job on the newspaper. Alice was right – it was time. Then she wouldn’t have to schlep down to doorstep a poor woman who’d been abandoned to the wolves by her own husband and who was probably in so much pain, she didn’t know which way was up.
‘I’ll send a good photographer with you,’ the features editor said. ‘He can do the actual doorstepping. You just need to get her into your confidence.’
Ginger was sick, thinking of that.
Sometimes she hated this job.
Callie
Callie had begun working on the reading for the care assistant and psychology night courses. She wouldn’t be able to enrol until the following September, but when she’d mentioned it to Rona, the director of nursing at Leap of Faith, Rona had been thrilled and had produced massive textbooks the next day.
‘I think it’s a wonderful idea,’ Rona had said, ‘and here are some books to get you started.’
The books had given Callie a new impetus and she was consumed by them, reading when Poppy was doing homework, sitting up late in bed at night, working and making notes while Ketchup roamed between their rooms. She loved the nursing home and today, when a petite and attractive dark-haired woman arrived and began walking through the locked ward where Callie worked most, she assumed this was a person with a relative who was ill.
Callie found that they generally needed as much help as their ill family members.
‘I feel so guilty – we should be taking care of my mother, but I can’t, not anymore. She needs twenty-four-hour care,’ the person would sob and Callie instinctively knew to take them into a quiet room and explain that there came a time when the most loving and dedicated families couldn’t possibly provide the twenty-four-hour care that a person with dementia required.
So when Rona asked her to go upstairs to talk to the lady who was checking out the home, Callie felt confident.
‘It’s not a relative,’ Rona said. ‘Sam wants to talk about a charity who are going to help us with funding again. They stopped for a while, but it would be amazing if they helped us out. They used to be called Cineáltas, but they’ve rebranded as Kindness, which is lovely. Their sole function is dementia. She was watching you downstairs and she thought you were the perfect person to talk to. One of the girls told her that you helped your uncle and it led on from there.’
Callie felt a frisson of anxiety.
‘Rona, you know I have to be careful who I talk to.’
Rona knew the whole story and now she stared at the quiet gentle woman who’d made such a difference to everyone on the locked ward. Quietly and unobtrusively, Callie Reynolds’ lovely presence had enhanced the lives of the patients and the staff alike.
‘It’s totally informal. Would you like me to sit in with you?’
‘Yes,’ said Callie eagerly.
At her afternoon break, Callie did her normal things: phoning Poppy to see if she was out of school and how she’d got on that day and checking that Ma was there for her at home. If Callie herself had changed over the past months, Poppy had changed just as much. She was a different girl from the one who had gone on the road trip with her mother six months before. Jason might have wrecked the family but perhaps, Callie thought, it had been the making of them.
Ginger
Ginger took her own car and wasn’t surprised when the photographer, Johnny, who was young, eager and drove far too fast, made it down to Ballyglen by three.
‘Told you I’d do it in an hour and a half,’ he said.
