Ginger was the golden girl, the I-always-get-what-I-want princess. Well,
her life at school initially was far from golden. It was in fact as non-golden
as it could get, to put it mildly. Her name was actually Gala Belén Maya, but
in our first days at Cheltenham Ladies I declared I refused to call her by the
name of the scarlet woman who actually made Dali’s life hell, although poor Salvador
She was flabbergasted. When she suggested hesitantly we could call her
Maya – ‘Maya sounds good, right?’ – I retorted that maya in the tradition of Hinduism meant delusion, and she wrinkled
her pretty nose. Was it because she didn’t like the term or she didn’t know
what delusion meant – we will never know. Until the present day, Ginger insists she
doesn’t remember a single word of that first contact. Nobody believes her, and
it’ll become clear why from the next few paragraphs.
She was a stubborn one. She said it’d be Belén then. I smashed back with belena, the Russian for “black henbane”,
a poisonous though beautiful plant also referred to as “belladonna”. She beamed
and said shyly that Belladonna was nice, and it could be Bell for short.
I was ruthless. ‘Dear’, I said, ‘it is belladonna, but also hog’s
bean or stinking nightshadow. I’m
sure you prefer the former, but I’m also dead sure the girls would know
better.’
Yes, I was a nightmare (to that extent, I still am). At eleven, I could
probably give Hermione Granger a run for her money. By twenty-nine I mutated
into a bespectacled bluestocking, a dire warning to all the know-it-alls and
Mary Sues out there.
Ginger’s Messenger of the Apocalypse, however, was Rose. She eavesdropped
on my little lecture and rolled on the floor with laughter. Safe with her
totally common name, pretty but neither showy nor mile-long, Rosemary exulted
in regaling Ginger and the rest of the school with myriad insulting variations
of her quite beautiful given name. The range was unbelievable, from Hog’s
Shadow to Stinkerbell to Florence Nightinhog to Stinkadonna to God knows what
else.
When Rose wasn’t in the mood, it was simply Hog or Stinky, but when she
felt like taunting poor Gin… well, she could become quite nastily inventive.
Imagine boarding school… breakfast… girls toying with their porridge… Cue
Rosemary, a malicious pixie grin on her face, starting in the creepy mysterious
tones of a practiced Shaman storyteller, stressing every key word with such
dark artistisme one rarely encounters in an
eleven-years-old girl:
‘Once upon a time, the Stinking
Maya Queen was hogging in the nightshadows…
when Prince Charming showed up… But the gales
of stink were so strong that the Prince’s beans
shriveled and fell off…’
Then she would continue, to bouts of stifled giggling,
‘But he braced himself and kissed her… and she turned into what she really was
– a Frog.’
There are probably no words to describe the hell she put Ginger through.
All in all, it wasn’t Gin’s happiest school semester.
As for me, dubbed Gator, or Gate, or – in our senior years – Gates, and
Rose aka the Wicked Witch of the Westside, we became the villain and the
faithful sidekick, the inseparable double horror of Glenlee House. If some
benefic highest power would come and purge the school of us forever, the board
would gladly fill the vacant places with Pest and Famine for a light joyous
change. The teachers would probably throw a weeklong drunken party with war
dances and a pin-sticking ceremony featuring voodoo doll impersonations of Rose
and myself.
But it wasn’t all that easy. Sure enough, it wasn’t hard to guess who
Attila the Hun and the evil gray cardinal were respectively. I was more than
happy with the role of consiglieri, while
Rose enjoyed her limelight to the max. What we both did to the teachers is
another story.
And Gin… well, she was fated to endure it till Christmas time when,
after a terrifying and embarrassing collision, she became our sworn best
friend. But that’s yet another story.
At that time, she forsook her given name for Ginger, a new name
fashioned courtesy of Rose’s knack for nicknaming and the ex-martyr’s own
auburn hair. Gala Belén Maya was for evermore ousted to the stinking
nightshadows of oblivion where she belonged. And Ginger, who became known (and hated)
as Firespitter, turned her righteous wrath to the girls who used to tag along
in Rose’s taunts and my snide encyclopedic remarks. Must say, she proved
herself an apprentice worthy of her forked-tongued mentors.
Mlle de Boussignac was fated to become Ginger; the name suited her
perfectly. For one thing, it gave birth to our university-years Friday night
motto, ‘Gin wants some gin’ or ‘gin for our Gin, make it neat for our honey’
sung all over the local pub’n’club scene to the Sweets for my Sweet classic, drunkenly
slurred and quite out of scansion.
What were her mother’s thoughts, we never found out. When we, Gin’s two
freshmen friends - or freshwomen according to Rose - met that stately, still
strikingly beautiful and quiet woman on a weekend at their Riviera
To be continued...
