‘It was part of it, and so was Mum.’
Sam’s head had shot up. ‘What do you mean Mum?’
‘You’re worried that you’d be the same sort of mother as her.’
Sam almost laughed. That fear was mixed in there for sure and yet it was only a part of the pain she felt right now.
‘I was worried,’ she admitted, ‘but how did you know?’
‘It wasn’t hard. You are the career chick and that sort of defined you. When you weren’t going to have a baby, it defined you even more so. I don’t think we needed a psychiatrist to figure that out,’ Joanne said. ‘You were scared you’d be her sort of mum.’
‘Yes,’ said Sam, exhaling on the word, ‘it sounds stupid now, doesn’t it?’
‘Not stupid at all, but you’re not our mum. You can be anything you want to be, you can be a different sort of mother. Am I like her? No. You can break the cycle. And – you’re going to hate me saying this – but it’s the way she’s made. Not everyone should have kids, end of story.’
Sam nodded. ‘Yeah,’ she said fervently. ‘I just want to feel better and to be a mother who isn’t crying all the time.’
‘Right, let’s do something about this, then,’ said Joanne. ‘First, you need to go to the doctor about having post-natal depression. Let’s phone now, and make an appointment. I’m coming too. It’s medication time – pretty much the only answer here even if you feel you’re almost allergic to meds after all the fertility drugs. Then, when the tablets begin to work, don’t spend too much time looking at the books and trying to figure out what you should be doing exactly now,’ she said, ‘because that can be fatal. One book might say you should be feeding your baby this way or treating your baby that way, and when you are vulnerable that doesn’t help. Just see if you can do ityourway for a while.’
‘My way?’ said Sam doubtfully.
‘Yes.’ Joanne hugged her sister. ‘Your wonderful way.’
Ginger
Ginger held tightly onto her takeaway coffee cup and went for nonchalant. It seemed to be the best attitude to strike as she and most of the paper’s magazine team stood outside the glass conference room in theSunday Newsoffice and watched the features editor, Carla Mattheson, flick back her chestnut hair, lick her already heavily glossed lips and swivel in her chair. She wore a short flirty skirt the wrong side of decent and with every move of those long, bare legs, it was sliding further and further up. This carry-on did not seem to bother either the editor or Zac, who both sat on the couch near Carla and appeared transfixed.
Up until her recent, thrilling and entirely out-of-the-blue appointment to theSunday Newsa mere week ago, Ginger had never had much to do with Carla, but she was beginning to see why Paula hated her.
Paula called her a ho, and Ginger loathed name-calling and especially women slut-shaming other women. But after a week in theSunday Newson the magazine team, it was obvious that Carla used her sex appeal as just another bargaining tool in her climb to the top – plus, and this was the worst bit, she appeared to view fellow women reporters as competition to be trampled on.
If the teenage readers of Girlfriend wrote in and said:my boss treats all women like crap and sucks up to the men, Girlfriend would have some sage advice about how sisters needed to help each other, but that message would not cut it in this job.
Ginger now had to work with Carla and Carla had, in one short week, made it plain that nobody on her staff was her friend. They were all her competitors.
She never flirted with the guys on the features team because she didn’t see them as a threat to her plan for world domination.
But for the women reporters, she made life hell. A subtle hell that would be damned difficult to explain out loud, but still hell.
‘I don’t understand her,’ Ginger said to Paula after a couple of days, when they’d both managed to sneak off for a ten-minute sandwich. ‘It’s not as if any of us are any threat to her.’
‘And still here we are, talking about how horrible she is,’ said Paula, who’d been assigned to the paper’s news department in part of Zac Tyson’s reorganisation of the company. ‘It’s simple: you’re women, so you could be. It’s like that oldHighlanderseries –there can be only one. If there’s only one woman at the top in theNews, it’s going to be Mattheson, and the rest of you will have spiked heel marks all over your bodies from being trampled on.’
‘What about feminism?’ Ginger demanded.
‘To her, that was a course in women’s studies and politics in college,’ Paula said. ‘This is the real world, Ginger, where women like Carla don’t burn bras but buy really good plunge ones when they want to go in and ask for a raise. This is sexual politics at the very dirty coalface. Instead of changing the game, Carla plays the old game.’
‘Someone should complain,’ Ginger said and earned herself a pitying look from Paula.
‘Are you kidding? You see what happens when women in big London City jobs complain about bullying or sexism? Do they get a medal? No, they might get some payoff money but only after years of hell, two weeks of pain in court where they’re pilloried and they will never work in the industry again. Complain at your peril.’
‘How did I ever think being part of theSunday Newsteam would be a good career move?’ said Ginger miserably.
‘You’re a dreamer,’ Paula said. ‘I’ma dreamer. I keep giving Mr Zac Hotness the eye but he ignores me. Guess if Carla’s heating his bed, his brain cells are too frazzled to notice anything. She probably uses handcuffs.’
They both laughed.
‘Do you think she’s the type to lock him up, leave him, then head off to the shops for an hour, just to show him who’s boss?’ Ginger asked.
