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.
‘Shit,’ said Ginger in a whisper to Paula.
‘Shit cubed,’ Paula whispered back.
Brian, who was Ginger and Paula’s immediate boss and editor of theGazette, the group’s recently acquired free-sheet newspaper, stuck his head out of his tiny, glass-fronted office and yelled: ‘Tuesday morning meeting, everyone.’
‘We don’t have Tuesday morning meetings,’ Paula said.
‘Guess we do now,’ Ginger replied, taking her phone, tablet and notebook with her.
The team was ten people – three reporters, one photographer, two subeditors, Deirdre who did everything, two sales guys and Brian, who shut the door when they were all in.
His first words were not encouraging.
‘We’re all for the high jump.’
