Once in a Lifetime

Ingrid smiled. Her pre-wedding party had been a very sedate affair compared to the ones girls had now.

‘Are you going to the hen night?’

‘Not so far. Natalie wants me to, but I’m trying to get out of it. Lizzie’s great, but I’m not one of her long-time friends and everyone else on the hen night is. She’s known them for years.’

Ingrid nodded but she felt the catch in her throat she so often felt about her older child. Molly had always been shy, although she hid it well enough. She was friendly and charming, well brought up enough to be polite, so few people would know how shy she was. She’d never been one of those children comfortable in the middle of a group; for the first year of school, she’d cried every single morning when Ingrid left her.

‘Oh, hen parties are all a bit mad now,’ Ingrid said nonchalantly. ‘It’ll probably be wild,’ she added, wishing inwardly that, for once, Molly would want to join in. Ingrid knew that you couldn’t make a person behave in a certain way, but how could two such outgoing people as herself and David have a daughter who was the opposite?

At school, there had never been any special friend, never any one little girl Molly adored and brought home to play. Molly was at her happiest in her own company, reading or talking to the pets–back then, the family had a mad collie with one ear, and a minxy cat who collected small cuddly toys and brought them into her bed at night.

Molly loved to curl up on her bed and read, with one or both of the animals snuggled beside her. Accepting that her daughter was a solitary little person had been one of the toughest lessons Ingrid had ever had to learn.

Ingrid was thrilled that her darling Molly shared a flat with Natalie. They’d met at college and for the first time in her life, Molly had found a close friend.

Both were serious in their own way: Molly with her charity work and Natalie with her absolute dedication to jewellery design. She’d put herself through college and was working part-time in the café in Kenny’s to raise funds to set up her own business. She had lots of drive and ambition, and yet there was a vulnerable side to her, Ingrid felt.

Trust Molly to have held out until she found a friend with integrity.

When Molly had gone, Ingrid walked around tidying up. She loved their house. Guests were surprised to see that it was the antithesis of Kenny’s Edwardian charm. Instead, Ingrid and David’s home was coolly modern, with large open-plan spaces and swathes of pale wall. The floors were bleached wood, except in the kitchen, where the restaurant-style stainless steel was offset by polished poured-concrete slabs. Ingrid’s love of white was reflected in couches and chairs upholstered in warm white loose covers, with colour coming from the artwork on their walls, including many works by the emerging artists that David loved to support. The large burst of colour in the hall came from a giant tapestry from Kenny’s, one of the unusual Bluestone Tapestries. It depicted a wooden house nestled in a glade of trees, all of which was partly obscured by banks of peonies in the foreground.

The nine o’clock news began and David was already yawning. Ingrid watched him affectionately and thought of the joke when they were younger about being ‘in bed before the news’. Of course, back then, they went to bed to make love. These days, that happened somewhat less. Tiredness, Ingrid knew, was a major reason. And although it was a subject they were careful to talk about, it took longer for both of them to get in the mood than it had when they were younger. The wham, bam, thank you, mam days were over. Ingrid had never liked speedy sex anyway, even though it was flattering to think that David couldn’t wait for her, needed to be inside her. But she rarely orgasmed that way: she needed time and gentleness, and now their love-making took time. It suited her, working up to heat instead of exploding into a fireball straight off.

‘Let’s go to bed,’ she said softly.

David looked up from the news, his clever grey eyes intense as they stared at her. Unreadable, she would have said, had it been anyone else. But she knew him and all his moods. She could see desire there.

He flicked off the television with the remote control, stretched long legs out slowly, then got to his feet. He held out his hand: ‘Come on,’ he said.

Their bedroom was one of the only carpeted rooms in the house and as soon as they reached it, Ingrid took off her shoes and let her bare feet luxuriate in the soft wool. She switched on the lamps, letting light warm the room, creating a burnished glow on the expanse of bed covered by a king-sized silk throw in a muted jade colour.

‘Are you too tired?’ she asked David as she sat on the edge of the bed and began unbuttoning her crisp white shirt.

He shook his head, then joined her.

Ingrid hadn’t been a virgin when she’d met David. She’d had three lovers, which, she knew, was quite average. He’d had more and they’d promised never to become jealous of people long gone in the way some couples did.

All Ingrid knew was that her other lovers had never been able to make her feel as if this was the only way to make love, as if now was the most perfect moment. She had no idea how many times they’d gone to bed together over the course of their marriage, but as soon as David’s hand wound its way around her to pull her closer so he could kiss her, she felt that familiar stirring inside.

Tonight, there was an urgency in his kisses and he cradled her skull in both hands as their mouths merged. When he gently pulled her shirt away from her body and curved his fingers over her breasts, it was like he’d never done it before. Ingrid let herself melt into this fresh passion. This was his apology, she knew. He was saying sorry for his distance in the only way he could: by making love to her.

When he finally entered her, his familiar face above hers, Ingrid felt a surge of pure happiness. This was love, she thought, raising her head to nuzzle his shoulder. Sharing everything with another human being. She knew his body as well as she knew her own, knew when he was close to orgasm, knew that if she concentrated on the fierce heat and if his fingers reached into her wetness, that she’d explode at the same time as him. And then it came: fireworks inside her, a single explosion searing into thousands of exquisite ripples that made her cry out.

He fell on to his side of the bed with a groan afterwards, and Ingrid kept the contact between them by reaching one bare leg out over his. She lay there quietly and happily, listening to his breathing slow until she was sure he was asleep.

‘Goodnight, darling David,’ she murmured, kissing him.

In reply, he muttered something she didn’t quite hear.

With one last gentle pat, she drew the sheet up around his waist, then got out of bed to go through her night-time routine. Cleanse, moisturise and brush teeth. As she stood in the bathroom and carefully creamed her skin with body lotion, she reflected again on how no cosmetic could make a person feel beautiful the way being loved did.

2 (#ulink_752cc31e-bbb0-58a3-b136-3a88b5e402e6)

Be true to yourself. Sounds mad, doesn’t it? I mean, what’s true? But you’ll know when you get there, trust me on this.

The following Saturday night Natalie Flynn sat on a barstool in Club Laguna, letting the music and the noise flow around her, and thought idly of her word for the day. Lodestone. A person or a thing regarded as a focus. Lodestone. Natalie rolled it around in her mouth. She looked up a new word in her dictionary every day. People with dyslexia were liable to have diminished vocabularies and Natalie knew she was one of them, so she’d bought a dictionary when she left school. Each day, she closed her eyes, opened a page and pointed.

When she was a kid, a boy in her school named Ben had dyspraxia. Natalie asked him what it meant.

‘I fall over things. Clumsy, they say.’

‘You’re not clumsy, you’re just a big person and the world is too small for you,’ she’d said. Ben was massive, with hands like giant hams. ‘They said I was stupid. Not my family, other people did. And it turned out I’m not; I’m dyslexic, that’s all.’

‘All the “dy” words are bad,’ Ben said gloomily. At the time, they were sitting outside Miss Evans’s room. Miss Evans took Special Education classes. People who didn’t have to go to Special Ed made Hunchback of Notre Dame faces and mouthed ‘special’ as if they had speech defects at people who did. Ben and Natalie were used to it. Natalie sometimes stuck her tongue out at the people involved, but not all the time.

She’d finally worked out that the people who teased about special education were the very ones in need of it themselves.

Ben and Natalie considered the dy words.

Dyspraxia–called clumsy by stupid people.

Dyslexia–word blindness was how Natalie liked to describe it.

‘Dysfunctional,’ added Joanne, who was in her final year in school, and who went to Special Ed because she kept missing school. Joanne’s father was unreliable, which Natalie realised was some sort of adult code for crazy. During his unreliable periods, Joanne didn’t turn up for school much, which meant she would not be doing her Leaving Cert exams with everyone else in her class.

Natalie sometimes wondered what Joanne was doing now. Joanne had seemed so grown up then, yet she’d only been four years older than Natalie. She’d be twenty-seven now.

Yesterday’s word had been opaque. Natalie had loved that. It was a word you could touch. Back on the farm in the small shed that she used as a studio, she had sifted the semi-precious stones through her fingers, working out which ones were opaque. Some tiger’s eye, lots of the misty smoky quartzes. Lodestone was a good word, too. She wondered how she’d never heard it before. That’s what she did as a jeweller: work with metals and stones to make talismans that hung around people’s necks or on their wrists, stones that meant something to them.

Lodestone. It could mean a person who was the focus of attention too, not just a thing. Sitting quietly on her barstool, a little apart from the other girls at Lizzie’s hen night, Natalie gazed around her and tried to apply her new word to her surroundings.

When they were alone or uncomfortable, other people read magazines or texted their friends. Because of her dyslexia, Natalie did neither. She hated text-speak; the strange jumble of letters seemed utterly wrong to her even when the predictive text gizmo claimed it was right.

‘You’re like my mother,’ said Molly, her flatmate. ‘She hates texting.’

Natalie smiled at the thought of being compared to the erudite Ingrid Fitzgerald, who’d probably read the entire dictionary cover to cover and committed it to memory. Molly’s mother was the sort of person who should have made her feel insecure, yet she didn’t. Ingrid wore her intelligence lightly, treating everyone with the same level of respect. Natalie never felt like an idiot in her presence.

‘Your mother only hates texting because it stops people being able to spell properly. I’ve never been able to spell in the first place.’

‘You spell just fine. You’re clever where it counts,’ Molly said. ‘Look at all the people we know who have degrees coming out their ears and are still clueless.’

They’d met at college while Natalie had been painfully trying to negotiate the written part of the foundation art course. Give her clay to mould, and she could spin poetry. But hand her a pen, and she was like a small child wielding a crayon and trying to work out the difference between the number six and the number nine. It was why she’d hated school.

She wished Molly was here tonight for the hen-night extravaganza but her flatmate, not being much of a party person, had elected to stay at home with the cats. Hopeless at small talk with humans, Molly talked to her beloved Bambi and Loopy as though they were her babies, all three of them curled up together on the couch watching TV. The cats liked programmes with fish in them best.

‘I love them too, but an hour of National Geographic just for them?’ Natalie had said before she left the house, complete with a sports bag jammed with hen-night paraphernalia, the pièce de résistance being fake zebra-skin cowboy hats.

‘We’re only watching till the end of this show,’ Molly said seriously, ‘and then we’re turning over to the salsa programme.’