Almost afraid to touch this little person, astonished that she had grown this child inside her body, Sam touched the tiny fingers with awe. The baby’s little nails were translucent, her fingers tiny but perfect. Even with some of the film of childbirth over her, she was exquisite.
Her lovely eyelids were so delicate, like petals draped over blue eyes that stared up at Sam as if she could see her perfectly.
‘She’s ours,’ said Sam, staring at her baby.
‘She’s beautiful,’ said Ted, and Sam looked up to see his eyes brimming with tears and the trails of more tears down his face. ‘Just beautiful. I never thought this would happen,’ he said, choking the words out, ‘and look at her: perfect and ours and we get to bring her home, bring her up. We are a family ...’
At that moment, something strange happened to Sam.
Something that made her feel fiercely protective, deeply in love and terrified all at the same time.
This tiny little being was hers to take care of.
She would kill for her baby.
‘Mummy loves you with all her heart and will injure anyone who tries to hurt you,’ she murmured into the baby’s fragile skull with its covering of downy dark hair.
Suddenly, she understood all those nature programmes where lonely leopard mothers risked taking down bigger animals all for their cubs, where birds flew across dangerous deserts to sip water at deadly waterholes surrounded by predators so they could regurgitate the water later to keep their tiny baby birds alive.
She would rip out the throat of anything, anyone, who hurt her baby. Anyone.
And then, the great love and the great sense of protectiveness were overwhelmed by another, fearful thought. The one that had been stalking her.
All her life, she had been in charge. The woman people went to when they wanted a task accomplished and fast.
Suddenly she didn’t feel any of those things. Not organised, not competent.
She had a tiny baby in her arms. In a couple of days, maybe eventhe next day, she and Ted were going to bring this tiny creature home.
Sam had simply no idea how to do this. No mental template from her own childhood.
How couldshenow become a proper mother with no background to help her with what was supposed to be the most natural thing in the world?
On her fortieth birthday, cradling her new baby, Sam made a wish.
Please let me learn how to be a good mother. Please.
Ginger
Ginger Reilly danced with her head on Stephen’s shoulder and tried to ignore the wire-like bite of her control tights into her waist. She was impervious to such things, she told herself, inhaling the scent of Stephen’s spicy cologne and resting her face against his dinner jacket, not caring that it was hired and had probably been to more weddings than the band currently murdering ‘Unchained Melody’.
She wasn’t, for once, wondering if she looked hideously enormous, despite today’s bridesmaid’s dress – peach taffeta on a woman who wore head-to-toe black at all times – being a bit too Scarlett O’Hara to disguise Ginger’s substantial bosom and curvy hips. Sometimes, Ginger stood outside rooms and wondered how to walk in as thinly as possible, or else how to walk in so that nobody noticed a larger girl daring to exist in a skinny-girl world.
But none of that mattered today: what mattered was that she was dancing with a man who’d just asked her to go out with him. A good-looking, tall man who’d chatted her up, admired her and had asked her – unpushed by relatives, even though he was Liza’s cousin – out onto the dance floor five times.
‘People will talk,’ Ginger joked weakly the second time Stephen took her hand for a slow dance. She’d even looked around to see if Liza, the bride and her best friend, had manoeuvred this second dance so that Ginger wouldn’t have to be her normal wallflower self. A wallflower who did a remarkable impression of a woman having a fabulous time, becausenobodywas going to pity Ginger Reilly, but still, in the deepest, most hidden part of her brain, a wallflower.
‘Let them talk,’ Stephen had said, looking down. He was really tall and clearly a sporty guy, with big shoulders and a slightly too-thick neck. But he had wonderful dark hair, matching dark eyes and a smile just for her. How had she never met him before?
For the first time in her life, Ginger did not mind a man looking down into the Grand Canyon of her cleavage. In work, she wore polo necks or crew necks to cover up and had a smart retort to anyone who eyed her 42EE chest with leering interest.
In work, she was sassy Ginger who nipped all smart remarks in the bud.
But today, clad in a dress that hadbuxom wenchwritten all over it, she found she liked Stephen openly admiring her cleavage. He’d also admired her hair, the auburn tangle of curls that had meant that when her eldest brother called her Ginger as a child, the nickname had stuck.
Her hair, wrapped up into a sheeny coil at the back of her head by the bridal party’s hairdresser that morning, was her most beautiful feature, Liza often pointed out.
‘Wish I had hair like that,’ said Liza, who’d got bum-length extensions onto her platinum hair, which she’d had tonged into long curls that trailed down her fake-tanned back for the wedding.
