‘I might be out, you know.’
‘No,’ said Ginger, ‘you can’t be out. Besides, I’m going to bring somebody with me,’ which was a total fib.
‘Really?’ said Grace, who loved a party. ‘A pal? Lovely. A man? Or someone to replace that horrible Liza. I heard about it, you know, but we won’t talk about it if it upsets you.’
Ginger shuddered at the memory. She should have known Grace would winkle the truth out of Mick and Zoe.
‘Sorry, pet,’ Grace said, reaching out to stroke Ginger’s hand with her own one with its manicured nails and papery thin skin. ‘Just be careful. You’re such a soft-hearted person and the Lizas of this world take advantage of you.’
‘Grace, you’re just saying that to get me off the point. We need to do this or a TV crew will be arriving from America saying they’re going to do an episode ofHoarders.’
‘No,’ said Grace. ‘I don’t want anyone tidying me up. I’m fine as I am.’
Ginger knew when Grace had put her foot down. She’d have to discuss the whole thing with her father and try to find a solution that way. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘For now. I suppose I should make us tea?’
‘Ooh yes,’ said Grace, finding her glasses and peering at the on-screen TV guide. ‘They’re doing cosmetics next. Some dragon fruit thingamabob that makes you look much younger. It was on earlier only we missed the best bits. Esmerelda has decided she wants it.’
‘We must have it then,’ sighed Ginger.
She made tea and then sat with the two ladies and the dogs and watched as a wildly made-up woman extolled the virtues of dragon fruit lotions and potions with the aid of before and after pictures that looked heavily doctored.
While Esmerelda and Grace discussed whether it would be worth it or not, Ginger ate some biscuits – Grace always had the best chocolate ones – and thought of Grace’s comment about emotional baggage.
She had dealt with not having a mother. She’d dealt with it all her life, thank you very much. And as for saying she wasn’t the sum of her weight ... well, Grace hadn’t been out in the world for a long time. The rules were different for bigger women: harder, more vicious, more cruel.
If Ginger could lose weight, she’d sort that out.
Guiltily, she put down the biscuit she’d just picked up. She had to start. Soon.
When she got home, her stomach was grumbling. A few chocolate biscuits did not a dinner make. She turned on the TV and went into the kitchen to pop a Lean Cuisine in the microwave. She was starting a diet, another one of the zillions she had secretly tried over the years, but this one was going to work because it was about time, she decided.
Time to change her life.
If her mother was alive, she’d have known how to diet and do stuff like that: the thought flew unbidden into her head. And just as quickly, she stamped it out.
No looking back and getting miserable. Not now, not ever. Her mother had been wonderful, or so Dad said, but she was in the past, killed in a horrific traffic accident when Ginger was a baby. Aunt Grace had been all for counselling when the three Reilly kids were in their teens:
‘Do you good. You have to let go of grief. Some things, we have to let go in life,’ she had said with the same imperiousness that would have made her a fabulous Roman empress.
‘We’re fine,’ Ginger said hurriedly in later years when Grace came back to the subject. Keep moving on – nothing to see here.
Declan and Mick remembered their mother, but Ginger had been too small when she’d died. She only had the photos to remember her mother by and she had enough complexes without adding to them. No thank you, she was doing fine.
There was only one thing Ginger wanted to let go of: her extra weight. If she got thin, everything would be fine.
Callie
Callie was exhausted.
At five the previous morning, when the pre-dawn light was shimmering in the sky, she had woken, dressed, roused Poppy and together with Brenda, they’d slipped out the back of the house, through four other people’s back gardens via side gates and into the lane where a friend of Brenda’s named Tommy waited with a car. It was a beat-up old Renault, circa 1994. Callie had looked at the car, once a pale blue, now a combination of rust, dents and dirt, and thought of the glamorous Ferrari sitting in her garage at home. But it would get them where they needed to go.
‘I know she looks a bit bashed-up, Mrs Reynolds, but my uncle has had her for years and she’s a grand aul car. Lots of miles on the clock, but she won’t let you down. I gave her a quick service and she’s running fine. The tyres are good, the tank is full.’
Callie had felt like crying because he was being so kind, but no tears came: it was like they were all gone.
‘I don’t know how to thank you, Tommy,’ said Callie, and she handed over the money for the car: five hundred euros, which seemed ridiculously low for a car and yet barely the price of a wheel on her Range Rover, she recalled.
Callie had turned and hugged Brenda tightly.
