As Alice had suggested, Ginger hadn’t discussed her new role with anyone. The girls who read e-Teen Nowwere looking for big-sister sort of advice from someone who was cool and trendy, like one of the modern vloggers who could throw on a pair of skinny jeans, flat shoes and a funky little T-shirt and tell them how to get over that guy or how to stand up for themselves. But Ginger didn’t look like that person.
She wasn’t aspirational, a thought which hurt, but she needed to pay the mortgage.
So she put on her big-girl panties, and took the implied insult.
She could have fought and said it was time that bigger role models were used and where better than in a young woman’s magazine? But that would have been the office Ginger 2:0 speaking. The real Ginger, the private one who felt her weight meant she was judged cruelly, could not have faced it.
Writing the column was a joy. Her alter ego, Girlfriend, was sassy and truthful. Girlfriend had no time for boyfriends or girlfriends who wanted to belittle their dates or friends who weren’t supportive. There were shades of grey in her column because life was all shades of grey.
With each week, the letters got more serious, as the audience could see that the woman behind the Girlfriend column had changed.
Girls wrote in about eating disorders and hating their bodies; about whether they should sleep with that guy who really wanted them to but they didn’t want to go that far, and if they didn’t, he’d dump them. They wrote in about having sent semi-naked pictures of themselves to guys on their phones. They wrote in about being gay or bisexual and worrying about who to tell.
Ginger learned the hard way how to deal with these letters; she learned to explain the rules of the law, but she learned that the law didn’t protect the girls who found themselves at the mercy of the modern world.
Instead she went up to Alice on the tenth floor and said, ‘I’d like to do some feature articles.’
‘On what?’
‘This week about some guy who wants you to send him topless pictures of yourself. Because that’s what’s happening to thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds’.
‘OK,’ said Alice, who never appeared shocked no matter what Ginger came up with. ‘Write it under the Girlfriend pseudonym.’
‘Absolutely’ said Ginger, ‘that’s what you pay me for.’
‘I like you, you remind me of ...’ began Alice and Ginger thought that perhaps she had been about to say ‘... me when I was younger’, but Alice didn’t finish it because her phone rang and she nodded at Ginger to go.
All the way down in the lift, Ginger thought of how Alice was skinny and all gym-toned. There was no way she’d everlookedlike Ginger.
No wayshe’d ever bought clothes from a catalogue, no way she had ever slid into a room sort of sideways, hoping that was the thinnest way possible to enter a space. No.
Alice’s strength was real and Ginger’s was a cloak she put on every morning she entered the Caraval Media building. Still, she thought, taking a deep breath as the lift slid to a smooth halt on the fifth floor, the cloak was working so far.
If work was busy, her private life was busier.
Twenty-six years after they’d bonded in the classroom with lots of crying four-year-olds, her best friend, Liza, was getting married and Ginger was asked to be chief bridesmaid.
However, Liza’s desire to get married quickly, because she didn’t do delayed gratification, meant the day had to be planned in just three months. A wedding planner had managed to swing a marvellous deal on a beautiful hotel because of a wedding that had been cancelled. Ginger had promised to help plan all the other details.
A fan of internet ‘magical weddings’, Liza first decided she wanted white horses with crimped manes faked up to look like unicorns – ‘impossible’, the wedding planner had sighed and had launched into a long and complex story of brides who had gone down this road before. The horn/headdress creations had frightened every horse bar a nearly-blind one and had been a health and safety danger on many grounds.
Once the unicorns were nixed, Liza was fiercely determined to be even more creative. This would be a fairy-tale marriage because she had waited until she was nearly thirty – thirty! – to be married and it had to be the most special ever.
Ginger forgave her the comment about being nearly thirty. Ginger was the same age and Ginger had never even dated anyone. Liza just wasn’t thinking when she’d said it, she convinced herself.
‘Let’s have a serious planning night where we fill in all the extras,’ Ginger suggested.
Liza was delighted, but the wedding planner couldn’t make it.
So in the end, it was just Liza, Ginger and Charlene, the other bridesmaid and a friend of Liza’s from beauty college, who congregated in Liza and James’s rented flat.
The flat didn’t have the homey touches of her own place, but then, they couldn’t paint any walls and do their own thing.
Liza positioned herself on a leather couch once they’d organised the snacks they had brought.
Charlene had brought wine and sushi.
Ginger had brought wine and chocolates. She felt stupid now, looking at the big box of Dairy Milk, untouched on Liza’s coffee table, while the two other women wielded chopsticks and discussed how helpful sushi was for dieting.
