You Only Live Once

  Contents

  Title Page

  ALSO BY JESS VALLANCE

  Part 1: During Which I Have an Epiphany

  Diseased

  Urgent Emergency

  A Leak

  Planning

  Immoral Support

  Diagnosis

  A Wake-Up

  The Epiphany

  Part 2: During Which I Am Care-Free and Luxuriate in Hedonistic Pursuits

  The Ultimate Bucket

  The Plural of Sand

  Nobby, Petal and Brenda

  Soft

  Hapy Brthdax, Til

  Camp Matilda

  Queen of Spades

  Badger

  The Greatest of Ease

  Rush

  Say Cheese

  Ollie

  Post

  Part 3: During Which I Visit the City of Light and My Grandmother Becomes an Unwitting Internet Sensation

  Mini-Break

  Nan on Tour

  Dogs Cats Zebra

  Mona Lisa

  Other Plans

  Happy-Face Nan

  Part 4: During Which I Consider the Unlikely Hypothesis That I Am, in Fact, a People Person

  News

  Goodbye

  Interpersonal Relationships

  Library Sarah

  Great English Classics

  Requited

  Not Indifferent

  Such a Fan

  Reboot

  Better Than Nothing

  Date Night

  Sold Out

  Busted

  To Infinity

  An Outing

  People

  Making Friends

  My Idols

  Part 5: During Which I Learn How to Have Fun, for Crying Out Loud

  Gathering

  Prophecy

  Oversharing

  Like Disgusting

  Strangers

  The Flat

  The Way They Did Things

  While You Can

  The List

  Good Night

  Vicky

  Enjoyment

  Help a Fellow Person

  William

  Results Day

  Screaming and Hugging

  Candles

  Part 6: During Which I Discover My Entrepreneurial Spirit and Learn to Converse With the Departed

  Money

  Everyone’s Invited

  Nagging

  The Spirit Whisperer

  Madame Violet Verano

  Down to Business

  Restructuring

  Black and White

  Paying Customers

  Going Concern

  Not Going Back

  Business Trouble

  Mrs c Gunn

  Difficult Customer

  Part 7: During Which My Three-Year-Old Brother and I Form an Unlikely Private Investigation Partnership

  Google

  Tiny Tigers

  Tension

  Further Investigations

  A Recruit

  Market Research

  Conscience

  The Truth

  Part 8: During Which I Realise a Number of People, Myself Included, Are Not That Great

  Rescue

  Part 9: During Which I Make a New, Altogether More Important, List and Begin Work on It at Once

  A New List

  Freshers

  Spider

  The Future

  To Be Perfectly Honest Extract

  Jess Vallance

  Copyright

  ALSO BY JESS VALLANCE

  Birdy

  The Yellow Room

  PART 1

  During which I have an epiphany

  Diseased

  It was the timing of it all that was so unbearable.

  Surely the only thing worse than being struck down by a deadly tropical disease is being struck down two weeks after you finish your exams.

  After.

  If my face had erupted with gruesome pustules two or three or even six months earlier, I still would’ve been dismayed, naturally, but at least there would’ve been a compensatory silver lining where I got to build an extravagant bonfire at the end of the garden and laugh into the sky while every text book, notepad and colour-coded timetable turned to dust, on the very day everyone else in Year Eleven was locking their doors and putting on their comfiest knickers ready for weeks of revision hell.

  But no.

  It was just my luck that the holiday my parents had taken me on as a reward for the previous six months of exam and coursework horror had turned out to be a death sentence.

  My parents had tried to give me a treat and ended up killing me. This was exactly typical of them.

  I read the web page – www.diagnose-me.com – for probably the eighteenth time.

  Severe skin ulceration

  Particularly affecting the nose and mouth

  Mutilation of the airways

  Liver failure

  Death

  Death! Could they not have put it a bit more poetically? ‘Untimely demise’? ‘Sad passing’? Though I suppose that wouldn’t really have made it any better when it got down to it.

  Just then, my three-year-old brother, Paddy, crashed into my bedroom wearing his Queen Elsa dress. As ever, he was dragging his toy giraffe behind him by its tail. My other brother, Ollie – actual age: nineteen, mental age: nine – had persuaded Paddy that an appropriate name for his treasured companion was Dick. This had led to a whole range of bizarre giraffe scenarios, including the time a Jehovah’s Witness had called around and Paddy had decided to push the giraffe’s face into her stomach and jubilantly shout, ‘I LOVE Dick!’

  ‘Made you a sandwich, Gracie!’ Paddy said, placing the plate on the end of my bed before sprinting back out.

  ‘Thanks,’ I mumbled, glancing over to see what weird combination of ingredients he’d assembled for me this time.

  Paddy had two main interests in his young life:

  Dressing as Disney princesses, with particular care taken to the issue of female underwear. Mum and I both frequently found our knickers screwed up in balls at the bottom of Paddy’s bed.

  Sandwiches – specifically, making them for other people. In Paddy’s world though, any three things piled on top of each other fulfilled the brief. Today’s treat was a slice of ham, spread with lemon curd and topped with a raw lasagne sheet. I’d had worse, to be fair.

  I got out of bed and went back over to the mirror (coughing all the way – no doubt due to my mutilated airway) to check for any fatal disease developments.

  The severe ulceration was plain to see. My skin – from the corner of my mouth all the way to my nose – was so disturbingly blistered and pink that it would clearly only be a matter of days before my whole face started to flake off in chunks. Like cooked chicken falling off the bone is how I imagined it.

  I might have been able to tell myself that this was OK – that I could wear a comedy mask or a Tesco bag on my head or maybe just pretend that having no face at all was some kind of feminist statement – if it hadn’t been for my startlingly yellow arms and legs. Standing there in my pants and pyjama top, they looked exactly like overripe bananas dangling from my torso. And something I knew for certain was that if you turn yellow all of a sudden it means your liver is finished.

  Mental Kenneth who used to live at number fifty-seven went yellow on account of him being a raging alcoholic. He used to sit in a plastic chair on the pavement with a can of Strongbow in one hand and a cigarette in the other and sing ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ to the neighbourhood cats.

  I remember the day Mental Kenneth went yellow because when we’d passed him in the street, Paddy, then a toddler in a pushchair, had screamed loudly and covered his face with his
blanket. Mum hurried us off, told me that we shouldn’t stare at Mental Kenneth and explained he’d only gone yellow because his liver had packed up from all the Strongbows. Since that day I’ve been well aware that if you go yellow it means your liver’s done for and consequently you’re not long for this world (Mental Kenneth died three weeks later).

  So that was that. I had the full house of symptoms:

  Ulcerated skin

  Coughing (i.e. mutilated airways)

  Liver failure

  It was leishmaniasis. I had no idea how to say it out loud but it would probably kill me before the summer was over.

  It was all incredibly shocking.

  Urgent Emergency

  Leishmaniasis is caused by a sand-fly bite. Sand-flies, I’d read, hung around rubbish and came from Southern Europe. I had just spent two weeks in Spain – undeniably the southerly end of Europe – in an apartment that overlooked four enormous rubbish bins swarming with all manner of insect wildlife. I was no expert on flies and I hadn’t exactly got up close to have a look, but I would’ve put good money on at least one of them being a sand-fly.

  You can see how the facts of the situation were inescapable. I didn’t want to waste time on denial or hope. One thing about me is that I’ve always been a realist. Another thing about me is that I have the doctor’s surgery saved as one of my speed dial options, for just this kind of eventuality. I decided to make use of this now.

  ‘I need an urgent appointment,’ I said as soon as the woman answered.

  ‘Can I take your name and date of birth, please?’

  If you asked me to describe the receptionist’s tone at this point I would have had to say ‘bored’. I’d kept my voice calm when I said ‘urgent’ because I didn’t want to come across as hysterical, but what kind of person hears of an urgent situation and doesn’t at least adopt a grave tone and immediately ask what’s wrong? But then I suppose doctor’s receptionists are used to people phoning up and saying that every little runny nose is urgent so it isn’t always easy to recognise those of us with a genuine life-or-death predicament to discuss.

  I gave her my details. As I said my date of birth I got a sudden glimpse of the numbers of my tombstone:

  Grace Georgina Dart

  13th February 2001 – 15th August 2017

  A waste of a beautiful talent

  I didn’t strictly know what the beautiful talent was but that’s the point really, isn’t it? If one’s life is cruelly snatched away when it’s only just beginning then how can anyone ever know what beautiful talents would lie forever undiscovered?

  The bored receptionist was clearly still having issues grasping the concept of urgent because she said, ‘Surgery closes at one on a Saturday. Looks like I can fit you in Monday though.’

  You’d think I was making an appointment for a manicure or a palm reading. This was obviously the sad state of the NHS in these modern times. I wished that Mum and Dad had good jobs with private healthcare like Chloe Bright’s parents. When she had to have a metal pin put in her ankle she went private and got a luxury room with a view of the sea and a TV where you could order any film you wanted from a panel in the side of the bed. She told me that she’d ended up pulling out four of her stitches with her tweezers so she could stay in an extra night because The Lord of the Rings trilogy turned out to be longer than she realised.

  ‘I just don’t think Monday is soon enough,’ I explained as calmly as I could manage. ‘My condition may have deteriorated significantly by that point. In fact, I couldn’t say for certain that I will still be alive.’

  I could tell the receptionist needed some powerful language like this to jolt her into action.

  ‘May I ask what the complaint is?’

  I didn’t really want to go into details with this woman when I had no idea of her medical credentials but I could see that this was the only way to get her to take me seriously. The only problem was, I still didn’t know how to say leishmaniasis out loud.

  ‘It’s a rare tropical disease,’ I told her. ‘Usually fatal.’

  ‘I see,’ the receptionist said – staggeringly, still without any real alarm in her voice. ‘If you’re really concerned then your best bet might be to go to Accident and Emergency at the Royal Sussex.’

  Emergency.

  Finally, we were getting somewhere. Obviously I should’ve said ‘emergency’ not ‘urgent’ to start with. That was clearly the code word required to get through the system.

  ‘Can you make me an appointment there?’ I asked.

  The receptionist laughed! She actually laughed. She sounded more tired than genuinely hysterical but still, there is a time and place for a wry chuckle and I did not think this was it. I seriously wondered if I should spend ten minutes of the little time I had left writing a formal complaint to the Secretary for Health about this woman’s attitude to the sickly and unfortunate.

  ‘Doesn’t work like that, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘Just walk in. They’ll see you when they can. You can expect a wait though.’

  I said thank you to the receptionist (more than she deserved) and hung up.

  A Leak

  The hospital wasn’t that far away. I could probably even have walked it if it wasn’t for my failing health. But it was on the number seventeen bus route so that seemed the best option.

  Of course, I did think about telling Mum and Dad or even Ollie about the grave situation to see if they would give me a lift but, believe it or not, without a rock-solid diagnosis in the form of a Near-to-Death Certificate from a fully qualified medical practitioner, I was concerned I may have trouble convincing them of the severity of my condition.

  I knew that if I asked them to take me to A&E they would want to know why and that would more than likely lead to unhelpful, naïve and, frankly, disrespectful comments about whether I was quite sure it was ‘as serious as all that’, et cetera et cetera. It wouldn’t matter if my arms and legs burst into flames. They would still insist that it was ‘probably nothing’ and suggest we ‘wait and see’ what happens. I could just imagine them all standing around my coffin in the church (closed, so as not to alarm mourners with my ulcerated and disintegrating face), Dad saying to Mum, ‘Still, it’ll probably be OK. Let’s just wait and see how it pans out.’

  Anyway, I quite liked the idea of taking myself to hospital on the bus. I thought it made me sound gutsy and independent. I could see the story as a feature on the local news.

  ‘Meet Grace, the brave teen with only months to live facing her fate with dignity and humour. Welcome to the show, Grace,’ Jane Kirkwood would say. (She was always my favourite – kind eyes – so I’d pick her to do my interview). ‘So first of all, tell us – is it true that when you discovered you were ill you quite calmly took yourself down to the hospital on the bus?’

  ‘That’s right, Jane,’ I’d say with a brave smile. ‘I didn’t want to make a fuss. Mum and Dad were busy retiling the en suite. I knew I just had to get on with things.’

  Then Jane and Duncan Walker (who I didn’t like as much but did at least have nice hair) would look at each other and shake their heads as if to say, ‘Blow me down, isn’t this girl a marvel?’

  I packed my bag with all the essentials you could expect to need for a trip to the hospital to collect a dismal diagnosis:

  – Money for the bus (one-way). On the way back I thought I could show them my Near-to-Death Certificate and undoubtedly the fare would be waived.

  – Raw broccoli to help counteract the toxins in my bloodstream.

  – A bottle of wee (my own). I expected they would want a sample and I always have trouble performing on command.

  – One of Mum’s magazines as a little light reading material. I doubted I’d be able to concentrate on anything but there was an article in there about a woman who’d found out her internet boyfriend was actually her dad and it’s always cheering to know there’s someone in a worse situation than you.

  When I got on the bus I quite deliberately said, ‘Student si
ngle to the Royal Sussex Hospital, please.’ I didn’t really need to specify my destination, but I was thinking that perhaps the bus driver would take pity on me and at the very least give me a sympathetic and supportive smile. But no! Quite the reverse. He insisted on seeing my student card, which luckily I had, otherwise no doubt the miserable old git would’ve charged me for an adult ticket. I had half a mind to add him to the list of uncaring professionals I needed to formally complain about. I could put the letter in with the one to the Secretary for Health and ask him to pass it on to the Secretary for Transport.

  I’d only been sitting down for a couple of minutes when I noticed the unmistakeable smell:

  Wee.

  At first, I didn’t think anything of it – buses aren’t exactly known for their hygiene standards – but then I noticed the woman next to me scrunching up her nose and edging away from me and I realised she thought the smell was coming from me.