Cathy Kelly - Once in a Lifetime

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.

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.’

Natalie nodded. ‘When the men with the white coats arrive, will I make them tea or coffee?’

Molly beamed a wide smile that lit up her small, round face and made her eyes dance. Apart from her eyes, she looked nothing like her famous mother. Short and adolescently skinny, she had reddish-brown curly hair that she liked to wear in a ponytail. Even when dressed for work and presiding over weighty reports on poverty, she looked about sixteen instead of twenty-three.

‘The men in the white coats had tea the last time,’ she said. ‘They might have coffee this. I know I’m mad, but I like the fish programmes too,’ she added. ‘Fish are very soothing. And there’s nothing else on TV tonight. I’m fed up with forensic science shows, they give me nightmares. There’s a good film on later.’

Something romantic, Natalie guessed fondly. Molly might work at the sharp end of society, but for relaxation, she devoured romantic novels and movies. The only thing that might get her off the couch was a real-life Johnny-Depp type in Regency costume with the desire to crush Molly to his manly bosom.

‘I got you a hat, just in case you wanted to come…’ Natalie plonked a zebra-skin cowboy hat on her friend’s head.