‘This is a pep talk, then?’ said Ginger and everyone laughed nervously.
Brian ignored her. ‘We used to call them time-management people in our day,’ he went on gloomily. He said everything gloomily. As far as Brian was concerned, the world was a sad, miserable place and he faced it with an equally sad, miserable face, ready for the slings and arrows to take him down at any moment.
‘They come in, spend ages writing things down and secretly watch your every move,’ he went on. ‘They say things like “... don’t mind me, go on and do your work, I’m just here to help fine-tune the place ...” and then three weeks later, you’re fired.’
‘Oh.’ Ginger and Paula shuddered simultaneously.
Ginger didn’t have a full-time job, she was on contract, like pretty much everyone else in Caraval Media. There were no full-time jobs anymore, expect for the top execs and they got paid buckets, if the urban myths coming out of the pub when everyone was four pints in were to be believed.
‘We have to prove ourselves,’ Brian said. ‘Friday’s edition has to be the best yet. We need plenty of advertising money as that’s all these guys are interested in. Money.’
Ginger tuned out and imagined herself with everything going fabulously with her career, with her own wonderful column in theSunday News, Caraval Media’s flagship newspaper. It would be clever without being patronising and read by everyone. She’d write witty, marvellous and incisive columns which would make people love and admire her. She’d be on news panels and in magazines, much in demand on the radio and Liza would look at her and feel consumed with guilt over how badly she’d treated her so-called best friend.
‘Ginger, have you finished that advertorial article on the industrial estate yet?’ snapped Brian and woke her from her reverie.
Advertorials were advertising articles written as actual stories and surrounded by adverts. People who were not wise to this carry-on thought they were faintly boring articles. People who had to write them thought they were the spawn of the devil in word form.
‘Oh, er ... yes, nearly ... nearly finished,’ said Ginger, standing up. ‘I’ll go now?’
‘Yes,’ barked Brian.
Scurrying out of the office to her computer, Ginger could hear Brian barking at everyone. She sat and logged on.
It was, she thought as she looked at what she had written so far, very difficult to write a thrilling advertorial on an industrial estate, particularly one with several unthrilling tool shops, a big garage dedicated to tyre repair, and a meat wholesaler business, the boss of whom had looked her up and down with a frankly lecherous grin. She’d had to spend the entire interview shuffling her chair away from his because he kept leaning closer, putting a hand on her arm to make a point, edging his fingers breastward. He wouldn’t do that to a male reporter, she thought grimly. Or to someone like Paula who could banish men with a single sharp glance. Ginger had no such tools in her arsenal.
How was she ever going to become fabulously successful if the extent of her writing was industrial estates, peanuts and pervy meat wholesalers?
Her only breakout area was her online agony-aunt blogs and nobody knew about them.
She couldn’t tell anyone, either, because she had been so personal in her writings.
At the start, she hadn’t thought about that when she answered questions from desperate people seeking help. She’d taken stories from her own life to illustrate them. But now – now how could she let people know that she, Ginger, was the face behind Girlfriend? Girlfriend understood pain, loneliness and the sensation of being alone on Friday nights, knowing everyone else was having a fabulous time. Girlfriend knew what it was like not looking like a Victoria’s Secret runway model or, indeed, a plus-sized catalogue model.
Girlfriend knew the pain of feeling different, of no Valentine’s cards, families who wondered if you were ever going to settle down, the pain of being invisible, the pain of being different.
Girlfriend talked to her cats – she’d given her online alter ego cats because to say she had two guinea pigs, Squelch and Miss Nibbles, would have given the game away entirely.
Readers had asked several times if Girlfriend would vlog, but Ginger couldn’t do that.
And if people knew who Girlfriend really was, they’d laugh at her, surely.
Ginger gave herself a mental slap. What sort of agony aunt was she when she couldn’t even sort herself out?
She tapped away at the information about the industrial estate, nearly at her magic thousand words deadline. But despite her determination to be brave in the face of firing, her mind kept running off to the time-management person.
Newcomers arriving in Caraval Towers to be interviewed were always fascinated by the organised chaos: photographers meandering across newsroom floors having delivered fabulous pictures, while frantic reporters listened to digitally taped interviews, looked up information online, tried to jam it all into a coherent piece that wasn’t too short, wasn’t too long and wasn’t weak beside the piece in theThe Predator, the year-old, online newspaper that was creating havoc in journalistic circles for ripping into their circulation figures.
Someone was always shouting, the bank of TVs on the wall were always on too loud because the subeditors at the windows couldn’t hear them otherwise, and a mild fight was always breaking out in the news department, full of people like thoroughbred racehorses on speed: fiery, high-spirited and argumentative.
What if the management guru was let in on the secret that she wrote the online column? It would become common knowledge and people would know all her secrets ...
‘Psst.’
Ginger looked quickly up from her computer to see Paula peering over it. Ginger jumped.
‘You gave me a fright,’ she said. ‘Brian is watching us. He’s waiting for this blasted article.’
‘Oh, he’s gone out,’ said Paula. ‘Probably off to the pub to have a pint to drown his sorrows. If anyone comes in to see who is working the hardest, Brian will be the first to go as he never does anything. Just shouts at the rest of us.’
