Once in a Lifetime by Cathy Kelly Page A

plus assorted brothers and sisters. And there was Eileen, a quiet mouse of a girl with long strawberry blonde hair she wore like a curtain hiding her eyes. She lived on her own with her mother and went mute whenever any event came up that involved dads.
    Eileen might not have had a dad, but she had a mother.
    Even when Natalie was seven and her mind was gently exploring such things, even when Eileen was by far the strangest kid in the class, even then Natalie knew that Eileen had something she didn’t: a real mother.
    Dads sometimes got involved in other things or worked all hours, but mums didn’t. Mums were there. Except for Natalie Flynn’s. Her mum was dead. She had Bess instead, her stepmum, who was wonderful, and so kind, but still wasn’t her real mum. She’d said Natalie didn’t have to call her ‘Mum’, so Natalie hadn’t; and that simple thing, that name, had strangely made all the difference. Other kids had mums and dads: Natalie had Dad and Bess. And Bess, no matter how wonderful, wasn’t Mum.
     
    Natalie forgot loads of things: the sheer pain of writing her thesis had burned off so many brain cells, but she’d never forget the first time she was asked: ‘What’s it like not to have a mum?’
    Toby - now grown up and cute, and always friendly whenever she went to the garage he ran - had been a teacher’s nightmare at the age of seven: hyperactive and overfond of the word ‘why?’
    Why does the sun go down at night?
    Why are the people on the television so small?
    Why do we have to go to school?
    Why did your mum die? Are you still sad about her being dead?
    Natalie could see her seven-year-old self: a skinny little thing, with those matchstick legs poking out of the grey-and-white school uniform and her dark hair tangled and coming out of its ponytail no matter how carefully Bess did it before she went to school.
    ‘I’m not sad,’ she’d said defiantly. Toby obviously wanted her to say she was sad, so it was important to say she wasn’t. Toby said girls couldn’t climb trees and she’d shown him he was wrong.
    She’d skinned her knees in the process, but she’d shown him.
    ‘I’m never sad.’
    Had she stuck her tongue out at him then? That she couldn’t remember. Probably. Sticking out your tongue was a vital way of winning arguments when she was seven, akin to pulling wimpy girls’ hair and jumping on to any bit of wall to dance along it.
    She’d gone home and told Dad and Bess what Toby had said, and they’d exchanged that look that grownups did when they didn’t want to answer the question.
    She had no memory of what her father had said, although she could remember subsequent conversations: God takes people sometimes, we don’t know why.
    God’s responsibility had shifted vastly when the ten-year old Natalie had said: ‘I hate God.’
     
    Bess hadn’t missed a beat. ‘We don’t always understand what God does. We just have to accept it.’
    Natalie had never accepted it.
    There were so many pluses in her life: a lovely family with Bess as the centrepoint, Dad being sweet and just a little bit not-of-this-planet, her half-brothers Ted and Joe, and good friends like Molly. She had so much, particularly when she looked at the disadvantaged kids whom Molly worked with. Compared to them, she was rich in every way.
    Yet Natalie felt as if there was a part of her missing.
    Lizzie and Anna seemed to think that any missing bit could be fixed with the right man. Natalie felt it was more than that. But what exactly?
    ‘Hi, beautiful, can I buy you a drink?’ she heard the guy with the skull-and-crossbones earring ask Lizzie.
    Natalie could see him reflected in the bar mirror. He was tall, and good-looking enough for one of Lizzie’s model cousins to be giving him a hard, appreciative stare. Natalie took in the tousled fair hair and the honed body. She also saw Lizzie’s lustful look.
    ‘No thanks,’ Natalie broke in as politely as she could. ‘It’s a hen night. No men