Once in a Lifetime. Cathy Kelly

too…Ingrid felt the magnetic pull of her laptop in the study. She could just nip in and see if Ethan had emailed her from Vietnam, which was where he and the gang were now. But if he hadn’t emailed, that would make it four days since his last contact, and Ingrid found that, after three days, she went into a kind of slow panic if she hadn’t heard anything. No, she’d go to bed. If he hadn’t emailed, she wouldn’t sleep for worrying. Though even if he hadn’t emailed, it didn’t mean anything bad had happened, did it?

      

      Ingrid woke alone the following morning, star-fished in their huge bed. Her hands reached over to David’s pillow and found nothing. He must have gone to the store, she thought drowsily, and wriggled further under the covers to doze again. The sheets felt warm, the bed was soft. She felt in the bed, her limbs a part of it. If she kept her eyes closed and allowed her mind to drift, she’d be asleep again.

      After about five minutes, she knew that wasn’t going to happen. Her mental database had started up. Ingrid often wished there was some system whereby she could plug a USB cable into her head and connect it directly to the computer, so that all the stuff that rattled around in her mind could be magically transferred to her laptop hard drive instead. She could compose entire emails in her head, write letters, draft speeches, imagine exactly what she’d say to the opposition health spokesperson on the programme that night, all while lying in bed at five o’clock in the morning. Some of her best work was done in that perfect stillness of the pre-dawn. She’d once been asked to take part in a feature for a magazine about career women’s hints for success. She’d said the normal stuff everyone else did: about making lists and trying to be organised, doing grocery shopping on-line, catching up on phone calls on her phone headset in traffic…She did all those things, but she’d never mentioned the early-morning mental download. It sounded too manic, as if she was constantly switched on. But then, she was–her mind racing, scanning ideas, deleting them, speeding on to the next one. Like now.

      Fighting it never worked. It was better to go with the flow. She needed to take the cream dress with the caramel beading on it to the dry cleaners, because she was going to need it for the Domestic Abuse Association’s dinner at which she was the guest speaker on Thursday night. It was a good dress, always worked; it didn’t matter whether she had put on a few pounds or not. Which reminded her, she hadn’t been to the gym all week and she needed two workouts and a swim to keep that awful middle-aged spread at bay. Ethan might have emailed. She sent a silent prayer that he had. Please God, please keep him safe.

      She had to reply to the latest batch of emails from people looking for a start in the TV industry. She loved helping people, but sometimes she got so many emails that it was impossible to deal with them all. She liked to answer those ones herself, they weren’t something she could hand over to her personal assistant, Gloria. Gloria was wonderfully efficient, handled Ingrid’s diary and organised all the reams of research she needed for her job, but Ingrid preferred writing a lot of her letters herself. No journalist could let someone else write for them. Hell, that was another thing, she’d been asked to be a patron of a journalism course.

      Ingrid had never attended a journalism course. She had come into the business by a rather circuitous route: after her politics degree she got her start in radio, working behind the scenes as a researcher, and then producing, before moving into television news and from there, taking the totally unexpected giant leap into presenting. She approved of journalism courses and approved of helping people, but there really wasn’t enough time. Her schedule was always hectic, too hectic for all the causes she wanted to support. And even though the children were grown up, she still needed to make time for her family.

      Tomorrow, Molly was coming for Sunday dinner. As she lay in bed with her eyes closed, Ingrid smiled. Her darling daughter was the reason the beautiful cream dress needed a trip to the cleaners. Molly had borrowed it for a formal event two months before.

      ‘Mom, I’m really sorry, I meant to get it dry cleaned, only I knew I’d forget about it and it’d get left there, so I thought I better drop it back to you first and…’ she’d said.

      ‘It’s fine,’ Ingrid interrupted. ‘Honestly.’

      And she meant it. Kind, wonderful Molly was twenty-three and hopeless at things like dry cleaning and having milk in the fridge, but she was a one-woman powerhouse when it came to campaigns to help other human beings. Molly’s ethical work made Ingrid feel like a capitalist pig. Molly was involved in so many causes that it was a miracle she found time to do anything. By day, she was press officer for Fight Poverty, an organisation that worked with disadvantaged children. At night and at weekends, she rattled tins for an animal shelter, and donated her services to a charity that funded a small school in Kenya and hoped to fund two more. She cared about her carbon footprint, cycled everywhere and owned two rescue cats. She didn’t care much about ironing her clothes or eating food before its best-before date. Her mother was endlessly grateful that Molly lived with Natalie, her best friend and a person with organisational skills to rival Madonna’s, otherwise both Molly and the cats would be in their respective hospitals with food poisoning.

      If only Ethan, twenty-one and currently on a year-long trip around the world with a group of friends, had one person in his entourage to match Natalie, then Ingrid would sleep so much better at night.

      Ethan was usually quite good at emailing home, although most of the time his missives were frustratingly short.

       Hi Ma and Pa, having a brilliant time, weather not great but the people are. Don’t worry, we’re all fine. Love Ethan.

      Ingrid, who looked at everything in the paper and had the news on practically twenty-four hours a day, could hardly bear to look at any story about twenty-something world travellers any more. When she came across stories about Vietnam and Thailand, she was terrified that she might see something that would spell impending disaster for Ethan. He was travelling with five friends, all big, strong lads, and clever with it, but that didn’t stop her worrying. At twenty-one, they were innocents abroad; a bunch of friendly Irishmen who thought the best of people, and had a smile for anyone. All it would take was for them to turn up in the wrong place at the wrong time, and who knew what might happen. No matter how hard she had tried to teach her children a little of her own cynicism, it hadn’t worked. Ingrid could imagine Ethan smilingly helping some sweet girl get on the plane, holding her rucksack to be kind–and he’d be the one caught with whatever drugs she was trying to smuggle. Nobody would believe Ingrid if she told them that her son didn’t do drugs, that he was a good kid, that he’d clearly been duped. She’d be like every other mother who protested her son’s innocence. And they’d say: ‘Of course she believes him, but we know he’s guilty.’

      She couldn’t bear it. She had to get up and stop thinking like this.

      Even if David had been there, Ingrid wouldn’t have told him about the anxiety. David simply didn’t seem to understand it.

      ‘Ethan will be fine, you know,’ he’d say, when she let herself go with a stream-of-consciousness rant against what could happen to six hopelessly naïve young guys. No, even worse, what was it David had said the last time?

      ‘You have to let him go, Ingrid. He’s an adult, not a little boy.’

      She felt the rip of rage inside her again, the combination of anger and helplessness at knowing that she couldn’t give her son a quick hug, just for five minutes. That’s all she wanted: to jump on a plane to see him, to touch him, for five minutes, then she’d get back on the plane happy, because she’d know he was OK.

      ‘I have let him go,’ she hissed at David. ‘But he’s my son, I love him and he’ll always be a part of me, so I’m frightened.’

      Then the analytical Ingrid Fitzgerald had taken over, the woman who had interviewed thousands of spin doctors and psychologists over the years, who knew how to skewer an interviewee but who never normally brought her interviewing skills home. ‘Letting go is not what I’m talking about,’ she said coolly. ‘You can let somebody go and still worry about them. I need to be able to share that with you, because if I can’t…well, we shouldn’t be together, should we?’

      David