Once in a Lifetime

She phoned me at ten to eight in the morning.

‘Charlie, I’m in bed with the flu. Can you pick up my dry cleaning on your way to work? I left my good jackets in, the tweed ones, and my baby-blue coat, and I need them.’

You wouldn’t think that two fake Chanel jackets and a baby-blue woollen coat circa 1963 could make a grown woman want to kill someone with their bare hands, but they can. Dry cleaning can be a powerful tool in the hands of a master.

‘I don’t really have the time. I’m leaving in a few minutes and I have to drop Mikey at school. Can’t you phone Iseult and ask her to do it?’

Pause. The phrase ‘red rag to a bull’ comes to mind. I knew I shouldn’t have said no, but I had to. I mean, I’m the supervisor of the Organic Belle department in Kenny’s, which is not the sort of place where you can be late. Plus, I have a thirteen-year-old son who views arriving a moment late to school with the horror of a Japanese train scheduler facing a leaf-on-the-line crisis, so we don’t have time for either morning phone calls or emergency dry-cleaning stops.

The pause ended abruptly.

‘No, that’s fine,’ snapped my mother. Think Lady Bracknell on crystal meth. ‘I’ll do it myself. I couldn’t sleep last night, you know. My cough’s worse. I don’t know if I’ll last the winter…’

This is where I think that if only she gave up her bloody thirty-a-day smoking habit, the cough wouldn’t get worse, but I don’t say it. There’s only so much reckless abandon I can manage of a morning.

‘I’ll pick up your dry cleaning,’ I say.

‘No, you’re too busy. I’ll do it–’

‘Really, I’ll fit it in.’

‘No, I can look after myself, thank you very much. Nobody needs to fit me into their life.’

Sound of phone slamming down. My mother has broken many phones in her life and refuses to have a portable one because there’s no satisfying slamming down involved.

Not having a portable means she often doesn’t get to the phone in time when I ring and I then panic, imagining her unconscious at the bottom of the stairs or falling asleep in the bath thanks to an enormous martini (triple measure of gin and the vermouth bottle sort of waved about in the vicinity), and I have to keep redialling until she answers with an inevitable growl: ‘What is it? Can’t a girl go to the bathroom in peace?’

My mother likes describing herself as a girl. She waxes lyrical about how she and her friends from the sixties and seventies fought the tyranny of State and Church to bring the Pill and women’s rights into Ireland, all the time referring to ‘this wonderful girl’ or ‘that darling girl’ who faced furious right wingers waving crucifixes. And that’s all wonderful, really. My mother was part of something incredibly important at a time when women couldn’t control their fertility and were prevented from achieving all that they should, and so on and so forth, but–I can’t believe I’m admitting this finally, even if it is only on paper–I find it insanely irritating. I HATE IT! Because ‘girl’ implies sweetness, innocence and a hint of gentleness. My mother is about as girlish as a Hell’s Angel.

She is tough–had to be tough. So stop with the ‘girls’ thing, please. Let everyone else see the gritty person underneath and stop saving it just for me.

She can do the girlish thing, all right. This involves smiling at people (mainly men) and fluttering her eyelashes–she was never one of the bra-burning feminists. She’s the more modern variety, the kind who want red lipstick and push-up bosoms to go with their financial equality in the workplace.

With me, Number Two Daughter, she gives the smiling and fluttering a miss. I get instructions on where I’m going wrong in life: not wearing my hair the correct way, having middle-aged spread (‘So ageing, Charlotte,’ she murmurs), and doing what she considers a menial job are chief on the list. Ideally, I should be ruthlessly running my own company instead of standing at a counter in a department store selling hope in pretty bottles to women. The ideal me would also credit my mother with all my success, along the lines of ‘She taught me everything I know.’

Iseult, my older sister and Number One Daughter, who is beautiful, clever and successful, does not get instructions on where she’s going wrong. She gets compliments and her newspaper clippings kept. Iseult is a playwright. She’s written three plays, two of which were wonderfully received, and there’s talk of one of them going to Broadway. Iseult’s plays are her work-in-progress. My mother considers Iseult to be her best work and has a folder of Iseult’s triumphs since her first play was performed: her favourite is the article in a Galway paper where a famous person and their mother talk about their relationship and Iseult said, along with the obligatory ‘my mother taught me everything I know’, that our mother was always so glamorous that our boyfriends fancied her more than either of us.

I can’t quite remember this myself, but my mother has taken the story and run with it. Not only was she personally responsible for female emancipation in our historically embattled country, she sees herself as a dead ringer for Mrs Robinson in The Graduate.

Now that sounds like carping. It’s not poor Iseult’s fault, don’t get me wrong, God, no. It’s just the way things are in our family, and families are weird, aren’t they? Ours is no weirder than anybody else’s probably: I’m just bad at dealing with it all. I should know better at my age. I’m nearly forty, have a wonderful son, wonderful husband, can’t complain about any of that. It’s just my mother: she drives me nuts. And that’s not normal, is it?

Charlie had never kept a diary before, she’d simply never had the inclination. Iseult was the writer in the family and Charlie liked keeping her own thoughts to herself. But a gratitude journal: now that was a different proposition. She’d heard a woman on the radio talking about a gratitude journal, where you wrote down all the things you were grateful for. Eventually, some alchemy was supposed to take place and the act of writing about being grateful somehow made you actually grateful. That’s how she’d started out at Christmas.

I’m grateful for today when I watched Mikey at football practice and he was so happy, joyful…

…Brendan took me to dinner last night in the Chinese place on the hill and it was wonderful. There was no special occasion; he just thought it would be nice to do something on the spur of the moment. It was. It’s silly how something that simple makes me happy, but it does.

…Sales are up and David Kenny, the big boss, came down to congratulate us and we had champagne–Laurent Perrier, no cheap muck for David–and a bit of a party. Shotsy and I sat in a corner and decided the bonuses would be up, too, which is brilliant because Brendan and I are still paying for the garage conversion and Shotsy has her eye on a little red MG.

Two days before Christmas and a week into pure gratitude, the day came when she was so irritated with her mother that attempting gratitude was a waste of time.

Mother is NOT coming to us for Christmas, even though it was our year to have her and we’d had to say no to going to Wales with Brendan’s family. No, she’s just blithely told me she’s going to Biarritz with Iseult, and who cares if I’ve spent a week getting the place ready for her to stay and buying her favourite food! We can’t go to Wales because Brendan’s sister is now going and there won’t be room for us. And we’d love to have gone, loved it. I am so angry I could scream.

Bizarrely, it had worked. Charlie, who hadn’t written an essay since she left college many years before, filled seven pages.

Instead of burning rage at the rant against her mother, she felt an unusual sense of calm when she was finished. The anger was no longer in her head: it was on paper. Writing words down had a magical quality. It was absolutely alchemy. Anger in her head throbbed relentlessly, but anger on paper was flat and had no power over her. The diary itself still made her feel guilty–treasonous, even. Writing down things that annoyed her was one thing, but the person who annoyed her constantly was her mother and that couldn’t be right. Everyone else adored her mother.

‘She’s fabulous, such a raconteur,’ everyone said.

‘She must have been so beautiful when she was younger.’ Charlie always hoped Kitty never heard that one: the implication was that the beauty was very much a thing of the past, and Kitty Nelson didn’t care to be an ex-beauty. She wanted to be a still-beautiful-for-her-age.

I wish I handled her better, she wrote now. That she didn’t make me so angry all the time. Or, like Brendan says, that I could learn not to get upset. But she has that knack of saying exactly the thing to upset me.

‘The reason your mother can push all your buttons is because she installed them,’ he says to me.

I think he read it on a postcard. Isn’t it annoying that postcards nowadays all come with the wisdom of Nietzsche?

‘Detach with love’ is what Shotsy says to me. If she explains what that means, I’d like to try it, but I have absolutely no idea…

‘Charlie?’

Charlie jumped and her pen leapt across the page with an inky scrawl and fell to the café floor. She actually felt guilty every time she took the notebook out of its hiding place in the ripped bit of lining of her black handbag. No matter how good it felt to write down her feelings, she’d die if anyone actually saw any of it.

‘You writing love letters?’ said a teasing voice.

Dolores, who’d worked in Kenny’s since she was in her teens and was now nearing retirement, plonked a tray on to the table beside Charlie’s untouched sandwich.

‘No,’ answered Charlie cheerily, closing the notebook and stuffing it into her handbag. ‘Lists, you know,’ she added vaguely.

She loved lists. The trick, according to the experts, was not to have too many items. Then, you could realistically achieve them.

‘I hate lists,’ Dolores said, stirring sugar into her coffee. ‘I found one the other day and it was years old, from my fortieth, and it was all the stuff I wanted in my life by the time I turned forty-one.’

‘Like what?’

‘A new car–not a second-hand one, but new. To have lost two stone. To have found the man of my dreams…’ She sighed and began unwrapping salad dressing. ‘None of it has happened: so much for bloody cosmic ordering.’

‘Does it work like that?’ Charlie was instantly terribly sorry she’d asked. Dolores’ ill-fated love life had taken up many a lunchtime among the Kenny’s staff, and while Charlie wished her love, happiness and a double portion of George Clooney with cream on top, she wasn’t emotionally up to another session about how There Were No Decent Men Left.

‘Clearly not,’ Delores said gloomily. ‘Unless it’s cumulative, like compound interest. If you do enough lists, eventually you get some of what you asked for. Perhaps the fact that you stuck at the whole thing counts for something.’

‘Stuck at what? Marriage? Life? Working here?’ Shotsy, birdlike, brown as a walnut and with a whirl of platinum-blonde hair, placed a cup on the table. Charlie didn’t have to look to see what was in it: a treble espresso. Shotsy ran the handbag and accessories department, lived for fashion, and was only ever seen putting two things in her mouth: strong cigarettes and black coffee.

‘Here’s not so bad,’ said Charlie, smiling at Shotsy.

‘Speak for yourself,’ muttered Dolores, going to get more milk for her coffee.

‘Have news for you,’ Shotsy said in a whisper to Charlie.