Free Once in a Lifetime by Cathy Kelly

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 semiprecious 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 piece de resistance 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