Once in a Lifetime

It was the smile that hurt Natalie the most: a knowing, satisfied, mocking smile.

‘Lizzie, we’ve got to go,’ Natalie said, trying to stay calm in the face of this unrecognisable Lizzie.

‘Not yet,’ said Lizzie, still with that smile plastered across her face. She nuzzled into the man’s neck. ‘We’re having fun.’

Natalie decided that she’d have to try another approach.

‘This is her hen night,’ Natalie explained to the guy. ‘She’s getting married in a week. Her fiancé’s a cop. He’s on the drugs squad.’ This was, of course, entirely untrue, but she guessed it might be a deal-breaker.

Sure enough, alarm flickered in the guy’s face and he got up at speed, letting Lizzie fall unceremoniously to the floor.

‘Ouch!’ she roared.

Natalie and the guy ignored her.

‘For real?’ he asked. He meant about the drugs squad.

Natalie nodded grimly. ‘For real.’

Without a backward glance, the guy shoved the bar of the emergency exit and opened it. Cold wind and a gush of rain blasted in as he vanished out into the dark. Natalie shivered.

She glanced at Lizzie on the floor. Lizzie looked sulky now. She had a big tear on one side of the bodice of her dress where her admirer had been trying over-enthusiastically to access her boobs.

‘Home,’ Natalie said.

‘You ruined it all, Natalie!’ shrieked Lizzie.

‘Yes,’ Natalie agreed, ‘I ruined it all. Come on, let’s go. Where’s your stuff?’

When Natalie hauled her back to their booth, there was no sign of her bag or coat there.

‘Is she OK?’ asked Anna.

‘Oh, fine,’ Natalie said brightly. No point in telling Anna what Lizzie had really been doing. ‘She’s tired and emotional.’

‘Me too,’ sighed Anna. ‘And I’m exhausted. Can we go home now?’

‘Sure. I need to find Lizzie’s things.’

Lizzie’s coat was found in a heap on the floor under the table, but her bag was nowhere to be seen.

Lizzie was too out of it to be the slightest bit worried about this.

‘Cheap bag!’ she kept saying loudly. ‘Cheap bag.’

‘What’s inside it is what counts,’ Natalie said: ‘your wallet, keys and phone.’

‘Cheap, cheap–’

Finally, Natalie gave up looking. The club was heaving by now and she was tired. ‘Home,’ she said to Lizzie, then realised she couldn’t send Lizzie back to the flat she shared with Steve in that condition. ‘You’d better come with me.’

The next morning, Lizzie woke first and ran to the bathroom. Natalie could hear retching, and the bedroom reeked of stale alcohol. Even the bed smelled of boozy sweat. Natalie got up and began stripping off the sheets. She couldn’t wait to wash them, to get rid of the memory of last night. There had been something disturbing about seeing her friend in such a terrible state. Lizzie had been more than drunk, she was out of control. The pillowcase from her side of the bed was striped with make-up. Skin-cleansing hadn’t been high on the agenda when Natalie had finally got her back to the flat. She’d had enough trouble getting Lizzie into bed in the first place. It had taken a lot of cajoling. And then, in bed, Lizzie had shouted that nobody understood her and how horrible Natalie was being, when all she wanted was to have some fun. Then, suddenly, she’d lain down on the bed and fallen asleep in an instant.

‘Don’t do the bed,’ moaned Lizzie, staggering back into the bedroom looking like a representative of the undead. ‘I need to lie down, pleeese.’

‘You can lie down on the couch,’ Natalie said shortly. ‘This place stinks and I need to wash the sheets.’

‘Oh nooo.’ Lizzie lay down on the pile of dirty sheets and curled up into a ball. ‘I can lie here. I’ll wash them later.’

‘Later, if you remember,’ Natalie reminded her tartly, ‘you’re meeting Steve’s friend from San Diego. The one who went with them on the stag night–the wild one, remember? The one you were scared was going to take Steve to all manner of unsuitable clubs to meet unsuitable women.’

Lizzie was chalk white as it was, but at the mention of her fiancé, her face began to look even more ghostly. ‘Shit.’

‘You can say that again,’ Natalie said.

‘Don’t, please don’t,’ begged Lizzie.

‘Don’t what? Remind you about last night?’ Natalie thought of how she’d hauled Lizzie out of the club after giving up on the handbag, and of the people Lizzie had drunkenly bumped into on the way, threatening to start a fight over it, even though she was the one who’d bumped into them. Lizzie! Funny, normally gentle Lizzie.

It had been a nightmare. And then the guy, the guy Lizzie had been with, poor Steve totally forgotten. That was the worst.

‘What do you remember?’ Natalie demanded.

Lizzie covered her eyes with her hands. ‘Lots of it. Too much. I had far too much to drink–’

‘That’s not what I’m talking about.’

‘The guy at the bar, I kissed him–’

‘Kissed him! I thought you were going to devour him, Lizzie. You were glued to him and I had to practically drag you off. If anyone else had seen you and told Steve, can you imagine that?’ Natalie shook her head in disgust. ‘There’s drunk, Lizzie, and there’s crazy–and you were crazy.’

‘I know,’ Lizzie said brokenly. ‘It’s awful, I’m awful. And I promised I’d never, not after the last time–’ she stopped abruptly.

Startled, Natalie stared at her. ‘What last time?’

Lizzie hesitated before whispering: ‘The Christmas party at work. It was work people only, no partners, and there was this big joint being passed around and–Oh, Natalie, you don’t want to know.’

‘You slept with someone else?’ Natalie knew she sounded like the mother superior of a convent, but she couldn’t help it.

Lizzie didn’t reply and that made Natalie absolutely furious.

‘You did! You actually slept with someone because you were stoned, Lizzie, and that didn’t shock you enough, so you still went out on your hen night and got absolutely plastered. If I hadn’t found you, where would you be now? I’ll tell you: you’d be waking up in that guy’s bed–I doubt if you even know his name–and we’d have phoned the police because we thought you were in trouble, and everyone, including your fiancé, would be searching for you now, while you’d be holed up in bed with a hangover with a bloody stranger. That would wreck the Valentine’s Day wedding, for sure. Why would you do that? You don’t need to sleep around with strangers, you’ve got a man who loves you.’

‘Oh, shut up! I hate myself enough, I don’t need you hating me too!’ Lizzie screamed. She clambered to her feet, still bleary-eyed, clutching the sheets to her. ‘Why are you so bloody judgemental, anyway? It’s none of your business; I didn’t kiss your bloody boyfriend, did I? It’s only my life I’m fucking up!’

Suddenly, Natalie felt sorry for what she’d said. Lizzie was right; she was being judgemental and she didn’t know why, because lots of people went out and got terribly drunk on their hen nights. It was almost a rite of passage, wasn’t it? But this had been something worse. Natalie had never seen anyone she loved change so much under the influence of alcohol. Her father barely drank, Bess was the same, and even the boys didn’t drink to the extent that Lizzie had, although she knew many guys their age who did.

It had been part of the family ethos when they’d been growing up: treat alcohol with respect.

But it seemed that Lizzie’s family hadn’t given her the same message. Last night, Lizzie had been like another person: someone Natalie didn’t know and certainly didn’t like.

‘Sorry,’ Natalie said now, and sat down on the mattress. She felt weary after so few hours in bed. ‘I am your friend, Lizzie, but I wouldn’t be a proper friend if I pretended last night was normal or good. I’m not trying to take the moral high ground. You can sleep with who you like, but I can’t stand by and be your bridesmaid if you really don’t want to marry Steve. Why marry him if you want to sleep with other men?’

‘I do want to marry him!’ protested Lizzie. ‘I was drunk, it was a blip. Really.’

‘But–’

‘But nothing. I love Steve. Last night was stupid, that’s all. And he doesn’t need to know, does he?’

‘I suppose not.’ Natalie opened the drawer where she kept clean sheets. She couldn’t believe she was having this conversation with Lizzie. It was like discovering a totally different side to one of her oldest friends. She’d had no idea that Lizzie was capable of a one-night stand before her wedding, and then convincing herself it was all fine, as long as nobody found out. Natalie had found Lizzie’s drunken aggression frightening, but her cool ‘it doesn’t matter as long as nobody knows’ theory was even worse. Lizzie would be devastated if Steve slept with another woman. It wasn’t right not to care that she’d done the same.

‘Where’s my handbag?’ asked Lizzie, looking around the room.

‘You lost it,’ Natalie reminded her. ‘We looked everywhere, but couldn’t find it. You should cancel your credit card, actually.’

‘Oh shit, that’s my phone, my cards, everything!’ wailed Lizzie. ‘What am I going to tell Steve?’

Natalie stared blankly at her clean sheets. She liked the violet-sprigged ones best, and her fingers ran absently over the smooth percale. ‘I’m not sure what you should tell him,’ she said slowly.

‘I know.’ Lizzie sounded confident. ‘We’ll say you and I got totally plastered, we came back here and, even though I’d meant to go home in a taxi, I decided to stay because it was so late. OK?’

No, not OK at all, Natalie thought. But then, it wasn’t her job to fix Lizzie’s relationship or be her moral guardian. ‘OK,’ she said. But her insides felt like lead.

3

Learn how to say no. Practise. Say it at least once every day and you know what? You’ll get better at it.

Charlie sat down with a sigh and eased off her shoes. Blissful cool air enveloped her toes and she wriggled them. The Hatbox Café on Kenny’s second floor wasn’t too busy. The lunchtime rush was over and the afternoon tea people hadn’t yet started wandering in looking for the café’s speciality: pink fairycakes with quirky shoe designs in multi-coloured icing.

The Hatbox had retained its traditional appearance. Old Mr Kenny, who set the store up all those years ago, would have been right at home here. The fittings were still cherry wood and brass, the wallpaper a riot of bosomy Belle Époque girls spilling out of Grecian gowns, and the chairs were still upholstered in ruby velvet. But the staff no longer wore black and white with frilled caps, having long since moved into chic navy trousers and tops with waiter’s white aprons. The menu was similarly up-to-date.

Charlie’s lunch was a bottle of water and a brown bread sandwich. She’d brought a magazine she’d borrowed from the staff room. The magazine was cover. Once she realised nobody wanted to join her for lunch and that she’d have privacy, she took out her little notebook and pen and furtively began to write.

My mother’s a travel agent for guilt trips.

You think that’s a joke? Wrong.

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.

‘What?’ Charlie could tell from Shotsy’s frown that it wasn’t good news.

‘Later,’ mouthed Shotsy.

Shotsy waited until Dolores–not known for discretion–had gone before spilling the beans.

‘Don’t tell anyone,’ Shotsy whispered, ‘but I’ve heard that David met Stanley DeVere last week.’

Charlie gasped out loud. ‘You sure?’ she said.

DeVere’s was the country’s premier department store, a high-end chain with branches in five Irish cities and three of the biggest shopping centres. They stood for money. Big money. Stanley DeVere was the complete opposite of David Kenny: a wearer of loud stripey suits, he thought that waving an unlit cigar around somehow enhanced his image as a bon viveur. Charlie had only ever seen him on television and she’d disliked him on sight. It was no secret that DeVere’s would love another store on the high-density east coast of the country, and buying out Kenny’s, with its fabulous location and its reputation as the country’s only bijou department store, would be a real coup for them. It was also no secret that David disliked Stanley DeVere and had vowed that he would never sell Kenny’s.