The first text came at just after nine and was from Zoe:
You look incredible, Ginger. We are so proud of you! I hope you are too.
Shortly afterwards, Declan texted:
I’ll have to take you into the office for show-and-tell now. All the lads will want to meet you. Fabulous. Love ya.
Ginger felt halfway between nauseated and excited as she clicked onto theNewssite. Carla had insisted that those pages had been worked on by the subeditors away from the three participants and warned certain death if they defied her by trying to check them out in any way.
‘No interference,’ she’d snapped.
Nervously, Ginger waited for the page to load. Because she had automatic newspaper subscription, she got the whole paper online. There, on the front page, at the top, was a small pic of her and Jodie beaming, quite obviously in swimwear, with the tagline: ‘Our Girls Get Fit! Full story, page 3’.
Her breasts ... Ginger pulled the page-size up. Her breasts looked huge. Implant-huge. She cringed and sped through the paper till she reached the magazine where there, on the cover, she stood.
Not Jodie or Fiona – just her.
Jack or the subeditors had cut the others out of the photo till it was just her looking like a plus-sized chorus girl in her heels, hip out, smile in place and all she needed was a basket of fruit on her head to finish off the 1940s movie look. The shock of seeing herself in full colour made her look away, but then she forced herself to look back, to be dispassionate.
She didn’t look hideous. The tan hid a multitude of sins and that swimsuit gave her curves like an hourglass. But still ...
Shuddering, she looked inside where at least they showed a photo of the three of them together. But the headline with Ginger’s piece, with yet another solo picture of herself, made her grit her teeth:
CURVY GINGER WANTS TO BE A SIZE TEN. WE FOLLOW HER PROGRESS OVER THE NEXT SIX WEEKS ON OUR BIKINI FITNESS PLAN!
If it hadn’t cost hard-earned cash, Ginger would have flung her laptop across the room.
Curvy Ginger wants to be a size ten!She had never said that in her life. How dare Carla make that crap up!
Ginger Reilly felt the rage burning through her system:Game on, Carla, she thought.Game on.
Today was the day she’d picked to start tidying Grace’s warehouse and when she rang the bell, Esmerelda opened the door slowly.
‘My nails!’ she shrieked as Ginger pushed in. ‘Watch out! My nails! She is painted!’
‘Oh, right.’
Ginger and Esmerelda negotiated round each other and the boxes, with Esmerelda holding her hands aloft, nails painted a coral unseen on any non-alien reef.
‘The girl she here doing the nails,’ Esmerelda went on.
‘In here!’ roared Grace, and Ginger made her way past the boxes into the living room where a young woman with café au lait skin was hard at work on Grace’s cuticles.
‘Louella, meet Ginger, my great-niece,’ said Grace.
‘Hello Ginger,’ said Louella, smiling. ‘If Grace say you great, I think you great too.’
‘Lovely to meet you, Louella,’ said Ginger.
‘Louella is from Guatemala,’ said Aunt Grace. ‘We have new nail stuff.’ She picked up a bottle of lurid opalescent purple nail varnish. ‘We got it—’
‘Don’t tell me: from the television?’ said Ginger.
Louella giggled.
‘Your aunt is very great also.’
Grace beamed.
