‘Have you ever suffered from any depressive incidents?’ demanded Ellen, changing tack instantly.
‘No,’ said Sam.
‘Any previous pregnancy problems?’
‘No,’ lied Sam. She did not plan to discuss her infertility pain with this woman. Her nerves felt stretched enough as it was.
‘Fine.’
Job done, Ellen gave Sam some leaflets, took her questionnaire and marched off.
Sam didn’t know why, but she felt shaken. She reached out and touched India’s tiny hand with the softest touch.
‘Love you, India,’ she whispered.
Ginger
In her lonely hotel room, Ginger stripped off the hideous bridesmaid’s dress at high speed and pulled on the clothes she’d packed for the morning after, normal clothes. A big sloppy jumper in a charcoal colour, extra-stretch black leggings, long boots and a scarf round her neck that looped over her boobs and sort of hid them. Her camouflage.
The kind of clothes she wore as her casual wear. For work, she had long black jackets that flowed around her and looked businessy. She brightened it all up with geometric jewellery. Nothing feminine, ever.
Next, she stuffed everything into her tiny little suitcase, except for the dress, which she left on the bed, crumpled.
The words she’d heard in the toilet stall ran through her brain like ticker tape in the stock exchange:
‘I love Ginger, but she’s her own worst enemy. Won’t exercise, won’t diet. I’ve spent years trying to help her, Charlene.Years. You and I both know it takes effort to stay thin, but she won’t and then she whines that she can’t get a guy.’
Worse were the comments about how she’d pushed herself at Stephen:
‘Have you seen the way she’s pushing her boobs up at him. It’s embarrassing to watch.’
And then the finale, James saying he’d told Liza’s cousin that Ginger was a virgin and that he could‘give you what you want’.
Ginger shuddered at the horror of it all.
She left the key on the vanity table and made it down the back stairs within ten minutes. Her room was pre-paid. Nobody at the front desk seemed to notice her go out onto the street where there was no problem picking up a taxi. It was still early: no mad rush after the pubs had closed.
She got into the back, still panting slightly from all the rushing, and gave her address. The taxi driver repeated the address slowly, speaking English as one who had only recently learned it.
‘Yes, that’s it, thank you,’ said Ginger.
She was so glad this lovely driver wasn’t a natural English speaker because then there would be no conversation, no ‘where are you going at this hour of the night with a suitcase?’ or ‘what do you think about the government, life, the universe?’ – the sort of conversations she had all her life.
It wasn’t just taxi drivers, it was people in shops, people on the train, and just about everyone because people talked to Ginger.
‘It’s your face, pet,’ her father said. ‘You’ve got that lovely warm, open face and people feel they need to talk to you, to share their secrets.’
Most of the time, Ginger wished they wouldn’t share their secrets because she got quite enough of that, thank you very much. Tonight, she was spectacularly grateful for a non-chatty taxi driver so she could sit numbly in the back of the cab and watch the people racing around town having fun. People who were going places, doing all the usual things that people did on a Saturday, except for people who had just had their life ripped out from under them by someone they thought was a friend.
On their birthday, too.
‘I can’t believe she’s getting married on the day of your thirtieth,’ Great-Aunt Grace had said.
Grace was a spiky, funny woman, but one who would walk through fire for her Ginger. Her home had been where Ginger and her two brothers went when their father was working late. Grace regularly sat with them as they laboured through homework, although she said she wasn’t responsible for teaching them any religion.
‘All hocus-pocus,’ Grace maintained. She liked both science and shocking people by saying to them, if God was so good, she’d like a new car, thank you very much.
She liked to brush Ginger’s hair and tell her how proud her mother would be of her. Ginger had no memory of her mother, although her father sometimes said they looked alike. Same hair, same eyes, same open face.
