You Only Live Once Read online

  Thinking of Nan’s letter again, I started to chuckle. ‘Hairy-face man. Oh god.’

  ‘I know,’ Til said, smiling. ‘Proper funny.’

  ‘Maybe I should say something on Twitter,’ I said. ‘Let them know?’

  Til shrugged. ‘I guess.’

  I opened my phone and found the picture of Nan outside the butcher’s. The last photo I’d ever have of her. I posted it to Twitter and Instagram again, this time with the caption:

  Sad to say goodbye to Nan today.

  Rest in Peace, Nan. #HairyFaceMan

  I started to laugh again then, because it was such a bizarre thing to be posting, but I was crying too, and the two got all jumbled in together.

  The replies rolled in fast:

  No! Not Hairy Face Man! #RIP

  So sorry, Gracie. Love you.

  Aw that’s too bad. At least you’ll always have Paris.

  Til’s mum left for work so we went to sit in the lounge and watched some mindless low-budget thriller without really paying attention.

  I was thinking – about my conversation with Ollie, and about what Nan had said.

  ‘I think that’s what I have to do,’ I said randomly as I reached my conclusion.

  ‘What?’ Til said.

  ‘I’m going to put some conscious effort into my interpersonal relationships.’

  Til laughed. ‘You sound like that therapist woman who gives advice on the radio. What does that even mean?’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you want to know what I think?’ Til said, leaning back on the sofa and resting her feet on the arm.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think that there’s one interpersonal relationship where your conscious efforts should definitely be focused.’

  I didn’t reply. I knew what she was going to say.

  ‘Sarah,’ she said with a grin. ‘The lovely Sarah. Lovely library Sarah.’

  Library Sarah

  Since our conversation in the tent at Camp Matilda, neither Til nor I had mentioned the L word. Any of the L words, I should say. Lesbianism. Love. Ladies. But then that wasn’t new. Til had known for ages. I knew she’d known for ages. She knew I’d known she’d known –

  You get the picture. We didn’t talk about it.

  But then the truth was, there wasn’t an awful lot to say. I had never known Til to have a boyfriend, although she did go on casual outings with boys, which I suppose could be considered ‘dates’.

  She’d tell me she’d spent the evening with Milo Wood trying to beat the 2p machines in the arcade while he moaned about how his band were becoming too commercial for his tastes. She’d been to the cinema with Devon Angelo and shared a chilli dog with him on the pier afterwards. I once arrived at her flat just as the Polish boy who cleaned the art room was leaving. I still don’t know what exactly had gone on there. We talked about these encounters a little, but not a lot.

  ‘His trousers are too short. Makes him look insane,’ Til might say.

  Or,

  ‘Did you know he got sacked from work experience for nicking SIM cards and selling them on the internet? Who gets sacked from a job you don’t even get paid for?’

  That was about the full extent of our analysis, the depth of our heart-to-hearts about our love-lives. Of course, where I was concerned, there really was nothing at all to say. As with most of the other areas of my life, I’d been putting all that business off until after my exams. Romance was not in the plan. Plus, as far as I could tell, I didn’t know a single lesbian. Unless you counted Holly Ross’s lesbian mums and they weren’t exactly my type.

  Sarah worked in the library. The library was a place where Til and I spent quite some time, one way or another. It was made up of several different zones, so there was a space for every occasion. If we wanted to work, we could use the computers. If we wanted to listen to music from the dodgy CD borrowing selection, we could sit on the beanbags and use the free headphones. If we wanted to lie on the giant cushions in the sunny patch at the back, we could sit in the kids’ section and read books we’d loved when we were seven.

  I’d noticed Sarah for the first time around six months ago, when Til and I had been sheltering from the freezing rain one afternoon. She’d been stacking DVDs on the shelf in the Media Centre – a small partitioned area to the right of the library – when the entire plastic display unit had toppled forward, scattering DVDs everywhere.

  ‘Oh, terrific,’ Sarah had said, standing in the debris with her hands on her hips. ‘Just the look I was going for.’

  There was something about this – her deadpan delivery, the way her dishevelled blonde hair was piled on her head – that I liked.

  As I’d helped her put the display back together she’d alternated between grumbling about how everything she touched disintegrated in her hands and keeping up a sarcastic commentary about the calibre of films that was popular these days.

  ‘I mean, what is this?’ She said, holding up the case of She’s the Man. ‘Who thought, I know what I’ll do, I’ll take Twelfth Night and make it all about some moronic teenagers playing some dumbo football match and that will be a movie. Oh yes. What a good idea.’

  Sarah chatted to us – to me – every now and then. When she saw me repeatedly watching a video of a kitten falling off a sofa despite the array of history text books spread out in front me of me, she’d said, ‘I see it’s going well then,’ with one eyebrow slightly raised. When an elderly – and apparently quite deaf – woman had trapped her in the corner to tell her loudly about how she’d just this morning got her haemorrhoid cream confused with her denture wash, I’d caught her eye and she’d had to put immense effort into keeping her composure and not collapsing into laughter.

  Through our snippets of conversation, I’d found out a few things about Sarah:

  She was Welsh. Or at least, she had the accent.

  She was seventeen and had just finished her first year of college.

  She was studying all the sciences and planned to do medicine afterwards. She frequently despaired of this choice.

  Also:

  She was gay.

  She hadn’t told me in so many words – I suppose it would’ve been a bit of an odd announcement to make in the course of a normal working day as a librarian – but she’d once mentioned an ex in passing and had quite definitely said ‘she’.

  I don’t know if it was finding this out that prompted me to look at her in a new way, or if it was just a growing awareness that I liked her, but the point at which I realised I might have the smallest spark of interest in Sarah was the day I managed to make a total fool of myself.

  Great English Classics

  I’d often seen her checking out her own books at the end of her shift and she always had some classics in there – Sense and Sensibility, Wuthering Heights, all that sort of thing. So, quite deliberately, I’d paid a visit to the Classic Literature shelf and selected Great Expectations – a book I knew Sarah had just recently borrowed herself.

  I’d sat on the beanbags, the cover clearly visible, in the hope that she’d come over and start a conversation. That’s exactly what had happened.

  ‘Enjoying it?’ she’d said, nodding her head towards the book.

  ‘Oh!’ I said, pretending that I’d been so absorbed by the book that I hadn’t noticed her coming over. ‘Yes, actually. Wonderful.’

  ‘You like the old ones, then? The great English classics?’

  I nodded enthusiastically. ‘Oh, yes. Anything by Dickens. Or the Brontës. And I love everything that Jane Eyre wrote, of course.’

  Sarah frowned slightly. ‘Jane Eyre didn’t do anything, did she? Well, I mean, she did plenty, falling in love with Mr Rochester and what have you, but she didn’t write anything. She was a character.’

  ‘Oh!’ I said again, forcing out a little oh-how-silly- what-a-slip-of-the-tongue laugh. ‘Yes, of course. Jane Eyre was a character from … from …’

  ‘From Jane Eyre,’ Sarah prompted.
/>   ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘I meant to say I like the other one. Jane –’

  ‘Jane Austen?’

  ‘Exactly!’ I said, laughing again in a feeble attempt to cover my shame. ‘Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice, that’s my favourite.’

  My relief at having been able to pluck the name of one of Jane Austen’s works so quickly from the air turned to panic when I realised that I’d just left myself open to an in-depth discussion on a book I’d never read. I hadn’t even seen the film all the way through.

  Luckily, I was off the hook. Sarah scrunched up her nose. ‘Bit long for me, those ones. Too many words. I’m just like, get to the point why don’t you!’

  I was surprised. ‘But you’re always getting them out?’

  I immediately regretted letting Sarah know I’d been monitoring her selections like this, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Yeah, they’re for my mum,’ she said. ‘She loves all those. She’s got more patience than me. And she hasn’t got four A levels to study for!’

  I laughed. ‘Yeah. Course.’

  Still, my attempt to impress Sarah can’t have completely failed because since that day, she’d spoken to me more often, and for longer each time.

  She’d sit down beside me on the cushions sometimes and chat to me while she ate an apple, or she’d flop down heavily, sigh and say things like, ‘I tell you what, sometimes this is the best job in the world but sometimes it’s the absolute worst,’ before launching into a story, told in hushed conspiratorial tones, about how Tony, the library manager, kept muddling people’s reservations so Sarah often found herself presenting seven-year-old boys with knitting pattern collections or smart elderly gentlemen with books called, Some Like it Hot: A Guide to Spicing Up Your Sex Life.

  By April, I was pretty sure I was into her. Not in the slightly mad obsessive way that I had been with sixth-form Amelia who helped Reggie with his maths or Elodie the mysterious French-exchange girl, but I liked her. I wanted her to be my friend, I suppose. Maybe more than a friend, but I felt OK about it. I didn’t feel like a crazy stalker like I had when I’d waited at a bus stop for over an hour, letting bus after bus pass me by in the hope that if I hovered around long enough, Elodie might need to go somewhere, and so would come and ask me for help reading the timetable.

  What I hadn’t really ever given any thought to though, was the idea that Sarah might be at all interested in me.

  Requited

  ‘She is so into you, man,’ Til said, throwing grapes up into the air and trying to catch them in her mouth.

  ‘What?’ I said, squinting at her. ‘She is n— what? Why would you say that?’

  ‘Number one: she’s always talking to you. And if I come over when she is, she looks annoyed and gets up. Number two: she’s always giving you lesbian books to read. Number three: she looks at you, right in the eyes. That’s the real giveaway.’

  ‘Where else is she supposed to look? My knees?’

  ‘But it’s like this.’ Til scooted over to my end of the sofa, sat directly in front of me, pushed her face so it was a few centimetres away from mine and stared at my eyes without blinking. ‘See? That’s totally flirting.’

  I laughed. ‘That is not flirting.’

  ‘Basically is though.’

  I thought about this for a moment. I had admired plenty of girls from afar but this was the first time I had ever had reason to believe that a genuine lesbian may be interested in doing any genuine lesbianing with me.

  It was very interesting news.

  Although I wasn’t yet totally convinced.

  ‘But how would she know to? Flirt with me, I mean? I’m like … incognito. She could be barking up the wrong tree, for all she knows.’

  Til shrugged. ‘Dunno. She must have one of those gaydars. Do you all get one? Do you have one?’

  I looked down at myself. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. Maybe I need to get one.’

  ‘Not sure you can just pick one up from Argos, Gracie. You obviously need to put some practice in. So far, my gaydar is outstripping yours by a mile.’

  I looked out of the window for a minute, thinking about all this. I realised my natural impulse was, as ever, to tell Til she was talking rubbish, keep hanging around the library hoping Sarah might engage me in the odd chat, but essentially, to do nothing.

  But then, doing nothing wasn’t part of the new plan, was it? No longer was I an avoider, a procrastinator, a coward. I was a plunge-taker and a go-getter. I couldn’t start chickening out now, just because it was getting scary. I’d swung from a giant metal arch with my trousers round my ankles, for goodness’ sake!

  Surely this wasn’t beyond me?

  Not Indifferent

  I got to the library early the next day.

  So early, in fact, that I had to hover around pretending to look at my phone until someone came to unlock the automatic doors. This was partly because I knew that Sarah was working the morning shift, but mostly because I knew that the longer I dwelled on if and when and how to speak to her, the more likely it was that I’d just bottle it altogether.

  I didn’t really have a plan. I wasn’t totally sure what I was hoping to achieve. I think I was going to ask Sarah out on a date. But then, was that something people actually did? Did people really go on ‘dates’ still? This wasn’t a world I’d been involved with before.

  I hoped that I could just turn up at the library and some easy, friendly chat with Sarah would naturally develop. And this time I’d be finely attuned to any flirtatious undertones and be ready to pounce (figuratively speaking). In short, I suppose my grand scheme to ask Sarah out was basically to hope that she asked me out, and that all I’d have to do is accept graciously.

  As a plan, it was perhaps a little on the optimistic side.

  But the point was, I had to ramp things up a notch, so that we could progress from our current librarian/customer dynamic to people who were choosing to spend leisure time together. Even without any romantic intentions though, it seemed quite a leap.

  I wasn’t even sure it was allowed. Were there some rules about ethics in this situation? Like a doctor and patient? Was there some invisible line that could never be breached between a librarian and a book-browser? I decided not.

  The first difficulty I encountered was looking nonchalant. Nonchalant isn’t a look I’ve ever really been able to pull off. I can do stressed or keen or awkward but I’ve never been able to create the impression that I’m feeling cool or relaxed or indifferent, not even when I am feeling cool or relaxed or indifferent. And when I walked into the library and immediately found myself looking at Sarah as she pushed the returns trolley between the shelves, I realised just how non-indifferent I felt about it all. I felt quite different indeed.

  Oh my dear lord she was attractive.

  I don’t know if I’d known it all along or if it was just because Til had put the idea in my head that Sarah might like me, but I suddenly realised that I really wanted to kiss her. It was quite a surprising sensation to have first thing in the morning in the glass walkway outside the library gift shop. I was just looking at her, looking at her cute confused expression she made as she couldn’t work out why the wheels of her trolley were stuck. Her hair was all messy on top of her head. She had very nice teeth.

  The thunderbolt realisation that I did actually quite like her, and that I wasn’t only going along with this whole asking-her-out episode to prove to Til – and myself – that I was serious about grabbing life by the horns, made the whole operation even more complicated.

  Such a Fan

  Sarah had moved over to the Media Centre, and was untangling the headphones cords before putting them back in their holders. I approached the CD unit and pretended to be engrossed in reading the backs of the CDs. I had my back to her, so she made me jump when she appeared next to me.

  ‘Oh god, I love those guys,’ she said.

  I looked up and saw her nod towards the CD in my hand. I turned it over. The Sneaks.


  ‘I saw them at Reading,’ she went on, ‘at like eleven o’clock in the morning or something, when no one knew who they were. And I said to my mate Davey, “They’re amazing, they are,” and then what do you know? Two weeks later they’re on Radio 1 and then they’re everywhere. That one’s OK but their best album is The Office Stereo.’

  ‘Oh yeah, I love that one,’ I heard myself saying.

  But why was I saying that? I had never heard of The Sneaks. I had never heard any of their albums. I suppose it just seemed like a good thing to say to keep the conversation going.

  Sarah’s eyes lit up. ‘Isn’t it lush?’ she said. ‘Like when the intro kicks in on “Endless Ends” I’m just like …’ She opened her eyes wide and shook her head rapidly from side to side, like someone with their head in a washing machine.

  ‘Yeah,’ I agreed, smiling. ‘Totally.’

  Oh god. What was I talking about?

  ‘You know they’re playing at Concorde 2, the day after tomorrow. But the tickets all sold like that.’ She clicked her fingers. ‘So gutting.’

  ‘Oh, I know someone who can get tickets,’ I said.

  WHY? Stop talking, Grace. You have actually gone mad.

  Sarah’s mouth fell open and she looked at me, blinking. ‘Shut. Up,’ she said. ‘You serious?’

  I nodded. What else could I do?

  My claim wasn’t complete, one-hundred-per-cent fiction – although it was close – because I was thinking of Niall Gregson, who I sat next to in maths and who worked in Reboot Records where tickets were sold. But I had no idea if there was any truth whatsoever in the idea that he could get me tickets to a sold-out gig. It was, I immediately realised, highly unlikely. But the conversation had taken on a life of its own. I couldn’t back-track now.

  ‘We should go, shouldn’t we?’ Sarah said, her eyes still shining. ‘We can’t not go. I can pay. If you can get the tickets, I’ll pay. How amazing would that be?’

  It was at this point that I realised that my dubious plan was actually working: Sarah was asking me out. The one small problem was that I’d managed to orchestrate the situation only by saying something that I was pretty certain was a monumental lie.