Once in a Lifetime by Cathy Kelly

wood. We have three different looks, that’s all,’ she added, relenting. Lizzie’s figure anxiety was a barometer of her mood. In times of stress, it became more pronounced and she needed more reassurance. ‘Anna works the cute look, you do curvy and hot.’ Lizzie grinned despite herself. ‘And I’m the lanky one. I wish I had curves like yours.’
    A lie, but a white one to make Lizzie feel better. Natalie’s stepmother, Bess, was a seamstress who made a lot of wedding dresses and Natalie had grown up hearing about bridal anxiety.
    ‘No you don’t,’ Lizzie replied, but she was smiling as she tried on her hen-night regalia.
    As part of her preparations for the evening Natalie had dutifully bought pink fluffy horns, Tshirts emblazoned with Bride on Tour and had booked a booth in Laguna, a happening club where the karaoke machine got turned on at eleven and poles were put up on stage for anyone wanting to try pole dancing and willing to sign the insurance waiver first.
     
    It was ten to eleven now. Lizzie knew there was a still long night ahead.
     
    She was thrilled her friend was happy. Steve was such a nice guy: kind, polite, decent. But Natalie couldn’t help recalling how, when they were younger, the three of them had had such dreams about conquering the world. And now they were twenty-three and suddenly it seemed as if the world had shrunk. Anna was dating a guy who was perfect on paper but slightly dull in real life. Gavin worked in the bank, owned his own flat, played rugby with his old school friends at the weekend and wore rugby jerseys with the collars turned up. Give him another ten years and he’d have golf club membership and a rowing machine with clothes thrown over it in the bedroom. They used to laugh at guys like him, the safe guys, and now Anna was enraptured.
     
    Lizzie was getting married in a week to the sweet and kind Steve - and she wouldn’t be wearing bright red, the way she’d always promised: ‘I’ll never go down the aisle in white: the roof of the church would fall in!!’
     
    Instead, her dress was creamy lace with a bustier top to make the most of her assets; her dark curls would be covered by a demure veil, and the guest list included all the various horrors of relations that she’d sworn blind would never get invited.
     
    ‘You have to ask them,’ she’d said when Natalie dropped by and found her fretting over the seating plan. Great Aunt Mona couldn’t sit with Uncle Tom or they’d kill one another.
    They hadn’t met without rowing in fifty years and it was unlikely they were about to stop now.
     
    ‘Why do you have to ask them?’
     
    ‘Because, that’s why.’
     
    ‘You never see any of them, except at other people’s weddings and funerals. I thought this day was supposed to be about you and Steve, not the usual outdated cliche of a wedding with ninety awful second-cousins-once-removed.’
     
    Lizzie grimaced at having her words quoted back at her.
     
    ‘My mother would die if we didn’t have a big wedding,’
     
    she said. ‘You-know what she’s like, Natalie. Anyway …’
    Lizzie paused. ‘I know it sounds strange, but I like the idea of having them there. It makes it real when all the cousins and aunties show up. Like we wouldn’t be properly married if we did it on a beach somewhere without them all clucking over the waste of money spent on the flowers or giving out about the bones in the fish.’
    Natalie laughed. ‘Point taken. But when they’re all squabbling because you’ve sat them too far from the top table, don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
    ‘Mum will sort them out,’ laughed Lizzie.
    Once, thinking of Lizzie’s mum might have upset Natalie.
    When she was a child, she’d felt different because she didn’t have a mum. She wasn’t the only kid in her class to have an unusual family set-up. There were two kids whose dads lived elsewhere, and one boy who had two families: his mother and stepfather, and his dad and stepmother,