You Only Live Once Read online

  ‘What was the best thing?’ Spider asked.

  I thought about this for a moment and realised the answer was obvious. ‘I went to Paris,’ I said. ‘With my nan. And it was OK. I mean, it was good. Random and weird but good. But then she died, right after.’

  ‘You killed your nan?’ Vicky said loudly, lifting her head up.

  Spider gave her a sharp look and she mumbled, ‘Sorry,’ and lay back down.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It turned out she was ill but that trip was the last time …’

  I couldn’t finish the explanation. I was getting too choked up. It was partly the hangover perhaps, but really just the image of Nan, sitting outside that cafe with her red wine, posing with the crazy grin outside the butcher’s.

  Spider put his hand on my knee and gave me a kind smile.

  Vicky sat up and pulled me into a hug. ‘Ah, babe. Don’t blub.’ She smelt faintly of beer and sweat. I hoped she wouldn’t try to kiss me again.

  ‘What are you going to do today, then?’ Spider asked, clearly trying to brighten the tone of the conversation. ‘How are you seizing today?’

  I lay down on the floor and spread out my arms and legs like a starfish. ‘I don’t know. I guess I’ll just have to see what comes to me.’

  ‘You want to come back to ours?’ Vicky said suddenly.

  For some reason I felt the need to look at her to check she was talking to me, even though I don’t know who else she could’ve been talking to.

  ‘Hey, maybe that can be your thing for today!’ she said. ‘Going back to our flat. Who knows what you’ll find there! Who knows what we’ll do to you! It’s a real adventure!’

  The Flat

  I did go back with them.

  The flat was a one-bedroom top-floor flat in one of the old buildings on the roads that lead from the main high street down to the seafront, on the border of Brighton and Hove. It was just two rooms really – a bedroom and an all-in-one lounge and kitchen room with a red sofa pushed against one wall and a TV on a table in the corner. It was painted white but the walls were covered with paintings. They weren’t in frames, they were just big sheets of A3 paper, Blu-Tacked straight onto the paintwork.

  ‘Vicky’s art,’ Spider said when he saw me looking. ‘Talented, isn’t she?’

  I nodded as was the polite thing to do – and I could see that, technically speaking, they probably were quite good – but the paintings made me nervous.

  They featured disembodied heads and creepy children screaming in the dark and dolls with black holes for eyes and all sorts of other horrors. I wasn’t sure I’d have felt too comfortable with that lot staring down at me when I was trying to spend a quiet evening in front of the telly.

  ‘It’s a nice flat,’ I said, leaning on the windowsill and sticking my head out of the window. If you looked to the left you could just about make out the sea at the end of the road. Seagulls called above me and I could smell the barbecues from the lawns in front of the beach.

  ‘It’s my uncle’s,’ Spider said, coming to stand next to me. ‘He lives in London but he uses it at the weekend. Or he used to. He’s sick now. Too sick to get down here.’

  Spider pushed his hands in his pockets and looked out of the window sadly.

  ‘Lucky for us!’ Vicky called from the sofa, where she was sitting with her feet on the arm, painting her toenails. Spider’s face moved into a small frown but he didn’t say anything.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ Spider said, moving away from the window. ‘You want chips?’

  I nodded and Spider emptied an entire bag of frozen chips into a roasting tray and slid it into the oven. When they were ready, we sat cross-legged on the floor and ate them out of a giant mixing bowl while we played Monopoly.

  The Way They Did Things

  I liked Vicky and Spider. I liked their company and the way they did things.

  They enthusiastically embraced my seize-the-day philosophy, and together we drew up a formal list of adventures and wrote it out on the chalkboard in the kitchen of the flat. These adventures ranged from simple, easily achievable pleasures like ‘try a battered Mars Bar’ or ‘wear a bikini in the rain’, to the more ambitious ‘hula on the Great Wall of China’ and ‘busk outside the Taj Mahal’.

  Sometimes, when we were talking, one of us might say something like, ‘oh, I’ve never actually tasted real lobster’ or ‘kite-surfing looks cool’ and another of us would get up and add it to the chalkboard. Even doing that felt good – the simple act of writing it down. Whereas other people might mention an idle interest then forget all about it, too bogged down in daily drudgery to ever revisit the idea, we kept a log of them. We had a plan of action. We were going to make things happen, somehow.

  But despite our ever-growing list of experiences and adventures we planned to have, the atmosphere at Vicky and Spider’s was always one of relaxation.

  Over the next week or so, I saw them almost every day. They even gave me a key so I could come and go without Spider having to come down the stairs to let me in. I would walk through town and along Western Road with my headphones on, dodging tourists and students and old people on mobility scooters. I felt free. I didn’t have any plans. No one expected me to be anywhere. No one expected me to be anything.

  They ate whatever was in the flat – frozen pizzas, biscuits, crackers – or noodles from foil trays from the Chinese takeaway opposite. They drank cans of beer from the fridge and water flavoured with lemon slices from the freezer. They listened to dance music on a tiny silver stereo or played their acoustic guitar. Sometimes Vicky would cover the kitchen floor with newspaper and work on a painting – big brushes, big strokes, huge tubs of paint sloshing all over herself and the flat. They didn’t ask me many questions. They just seemed to accept that I was there.

  Sometimes one of us would wander into the kitchen to peruse our list and call out a suggestion to the others. ‘You know, if we really want to hold a husky puppy we could just go down to the dog’s home and see one there’, or ‘Let’s fly a kite today. We can get one from that shop on North Street and get a bus up to the Downs. It’s definitely windy enough.’

  If we did manage to do something, when we got back to the flat we’d draw a thick chalk line through it, but we never rubbed anything off. I loved looking at those, the completed items. They reminded me just how much living I was doing these days.

  While You Can

  After a few weeks of hanging around with Vicky and Spider, I was helping Mum sort the clean laundry into piles on her bed and she asked me where I’d been going recently.

  I shrugged. ‘Just seeing friends,’ I said.

  ‘Til?’ Mum asked.

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Anyone else? Girls? Anyone special?’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘No, Mum. Nothing like that.’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Just asking. You’re out a lot, that’s all.’

  I shrugged again. ‘It’s the summer holidays, isn’t it. It’s just nice not to have to revise all the time.’

  Mum nodded. ‘Fair enough. You thought about asking for your old job back, now school’s over?’

  I sighed. ‘Can’t I be allowed to have fun for a bit?’

  ‘Of course, love,’ Mum said calmly. ‘I just thought a bit of extra cash might come in handy. Actually, they’re looking for cover down at the clinic now that Lacey’s off on maternity. I could put your name forward if you like. That’d be fun, wouldn’t it? You and me working together?’

  I made a face. ‘No, Mother, that would not be fun. I don’t want to sit in a room full of people scratching their crotches, listening to you say words like ‘discharge’ and ‘scrotum’ on the phone all day. That would be abominable.’

  Mum sighed. ‘Oh, right. My mistake.’

  Til made it quite clear that she thought it was strange that I was spending so much time with ‘those weirdo hippies’ so I simply stopped telling her when I was going to see them.

  I still saw her a reasonable amount – every couple
of days or so – but she seemed to be becoming more and more preoccupied with her upcoming college course. Whenever I went to her flat, she was lying on her floor with her textbook in front of her and collection of oddly shaped pieces of plastic spread out on the carpet.

  Unlike me, Til did have a summer job. She was working nearly thirty hours a week in a shop on Western Road that sold second-hand phones, laptops and games consoles. Sometimes I’d call in to see her on my way to Vicky and Spider’s, and on one of these occasions I made some idle comment about how she was going to regret wasting the whole summer either at work or lying on her bedroom floor looking at dismantled pipework. The comment did not go down well.

  ‘Jesus, Grace. Listen to yourself. We don’t all live in your little bubble, you know. We can’t all spend every day lounging around in the park or on the beach with Mummy and Daddy pushing cash into our pockets. Mum’s been off work for a week now. We’re two hundred quid down on what we should be. I have to buy food with the money I make here. It’s called survival, you know? And I’m sorry if plumbing isn’t an exciting enough job for you and your new mates, but guess what? I want to actually be able to do something useful when I get out of college. I want to be able to do something that people will pay me real money for.’

  I was taken aback. Til was moody and grumpy almost all of the time, but she was rarely angry. She never lost her temper.

  I suddenly realised that maybe we weren’t as good friends as I had thought. It had been OK when we were seeing each other every day at school, when we had lessons and the people around us in common. But now, without those ties, we were growing apart. I could see why she was annoyed at me; I didn’t blame her for that. But the facts remained: maybe we were just too different now.

  I mumbled an apology.

  ‘I’m just trying to enjoy myself for a bit,’ I said quietly. ‘I don’t want to ever think about study or work ever again.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ Til said, her voice calmer again now. ‘Enjoy it while you can. With the A levels you’ve chosen you won’t have much time to enjoy anything come September.’

  She was right, I knew, and the thought made me sick.

  I was down to do four A levels. I’d had to get special permission to do that many. On top of the ones I’d always planned to do – English, history and biology – I’d decided to add art in case any future profession required me to demonstrate that I have a creative side. As it happened, I enjoyed art a lot, but I would never have factored something as frivolous as that into my decision.

  ‘You’re going to be busy,’ Mrs Maybury, Head of Sixth Form, had warned.

  ‘I know,’ I’d said, and smiled. I’d felt smug! What an absolute fool I was.

  Now, I was just pretending that it wasn’t happening. That it was never going to happen. I was fooling myself into thinking that August was going to last forever, that it wouldn’t morph slowly but surely into September, into September the sixth, the day when I’d have to go back to school and once again begin spending every day going from book to essay to book, from classroom to library to bedroom, trying to memorise facts I didn’t want to know and write convincing essays exploring questions I didn’t care about.

  I was in denial, basically. And I think this was one of the main reasons I spent so much time with Vicky and Spider. They hadn’t known me how I was before – when I was all revision cards and colour-coded Post-its and study schedules divided into twenty-minute chunks. When I’d turned down every invite that came my way to stay in my bedroom with a textbook.

  When I’d walk disapprovingly past people getting drunk in the park, feeling sure that they were the ones throwing their lives away, and that I was the one with the right idea.

  With Vicky and Spider, I could be whoever I wanted to be. I could reinvent myself. They didn’t ask me what my plans for the future were. They didn’t ask me about next year or even next week.

  The most difficult question they ever asked me was if I wanted a cheese toastie or if I’d rather finish the potato waffles.

  The List

  Of course, it was only to be expected that the less effort required for an experience, the sooner we’d manage to get to it. The sooner it would be crossed off the list.

  It took just ten minutes to assemble a steel band out of saucepans. We hired boards from the shop at the end of the road and were able to go body-boarding and be back at the flat for beers and noodles within the hour. Food-based experiences were particularly hassle-free so we embraced these with gusto: we made ice cream. We cooked a whole squid. We dipped crisps in melted chocolate.

  Sometimes we added things to the list after we’d done them, just for the satisfaction of crossing them off. This is because there were occasions where we didn’t realise we wanted to do something until we were halfway through doing it – like the time we decided to dye mashed potato pink with red food colouring – but that seemed no reason not to count it. Our list had got so long we’d had to extend it with big sheets of Vicky’s painting paper. I liked adding things, even if it was only to cross them off immediately. It didn’t lessen the sense of accomplishment.

  I think Vicky and Spider felt the same, because on more than one occasion I noticed some corner-cutting. ‘Learn to juggle with clubs’ was proudly crossed off after a few feeble attempts down on the beach, even though neither Vicky nor I managed to successfully handle more than two clubs at once. One time, after a few cans of beer, I got misty-eyed and gave Vicky and Spider an impassioned case for why I wanted to do something for others.

  I’d wobbled over to the kitchen and added ‘Help a fellow person’ to the bottom of the list.

  ‘Bring us a beer then,’ Vicky had called. ‘If you really want to help a person out.’

  I did as I was told, and when Vicky had finished her can, she’d got up and crossed my addition off the list.

  ‘That’s more than enough helping for one lifetime,’ she told me.

  Good Night

  One morning I arrived at the flat to find Spider and Vicky fast asleep in bed and the lounge a complete mess – beer cans, pizza boxes and, for some reason, loose plastic daffodils were strewn over the carpet. There was an overflowing ashtray on the windowsill and the cushions had been pulled off the sofa and piled next to the television. They’d obviously had a party of some sort and judging by the degree of devastation it had been a good one. While I waited for them to stir, I took a photo of the scene and tweeted it with the caption:

  You know it’s been a good night when you wake up to this.

  As I read the replies, I quickly realised that my followers had interpreted my comment to mean that I had been part of this wild evening myself, rather than just encountering it cold the next day. I didn’t do anything to correct them.

  I liked it, this impression I was creating of myself, as someone on a non-stop party rollercoaster. So what if that impression was a little contrived? Who cared if the persona was based on a curation of true and less-true events? Didn’t we all spend basically our whole lives carefully manufacturing the impression we wanted to create of ourselves anyway? That was why we wore clothes, after all, or got our hair cut.

  That was why we went to school on Mondays and told people we’d had a brilliant weekend when really we’d just watched Masterchef with Mum and Dad and made sure all our socks were in matching pairs.

  Vicky

  Out of the two of them – out of Vicky and Spider – Vicky was clearly in charge. She made the decisions. Spider might suggest something – a trip to the beach, that we clean the kitchen because ants were sticking to the orange juice we’d spilt on the side three days ago – but if Vicky didn’t want to do it, it wouldn’t happen.

  I’d made a joke about this to Spider once when Vicky was out, and he’d given me a shy smile and looked down.

  ‘Yeah,’ he nodded, blowing a smoke ring out of the window. ‘She calls the shots. She can be full-on. And yeah, she can do my head in sometimes, but … she rescued me, in a way.’

  ‘Rescued
you? From what?’

  ‘From myself, I suppose. From boredom. From chronic inertia. I was living at home with my dad. He always wanted – always assumed – that I’d go into the family business, so I just kind of did. Seemed rude not to, and I didn’t know what else I wanted to do anyway. So I’d go in every day and ring up a list of people who hadn’t paid for their conservatories and send emails to builders and eat the same cheese-and-onion sandwich from the petrol station outside the office five days a week and then go home and watch rubbish TV and drink beer with my dad. Every day, always the same. Since Vicky came into my life – bulldozed into my life – every day’s been different. I’ve done more stuff in the last year than in the rest of my life put together, you know?’

  I nodded. I did know. Maybe people like me and Spider needed people like Vicky to spur us into action, to shake us up.

  Sometimes, late in the evening, we’d watch films and Spider would blow smoke rings from the cigarettes he rolled and Vicky would drink cans of beer and then, usually near the end of the film, she would lean over and kiss me. It wasn’t like that first time on the beach – like a big, wet eel flapping around in my face. I wasn’t sure it was romantic kissing at all, but it was kissing. Proper on-the-mouth kissing.

  I usually just sat there afterwards, wondering what I was supposed to do about it. I’d look at Spider, waiting for him to object, but he never even looked up. Then Vicky would move away from me, put her head on Spider’s shoulder, and he’d drape his arm around her. I’d just go back to watching the film, act like I was completely at home with these kinds of impromptu displays of affection – if affection is what it even was – but they’d always leave me feeling strange. Was Vicky trying to tell me something? Should I ask her about it? Was there something going on I didn’t know about?

  I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not. I liked that she wanted to do it, I decided. It was flattering, good for the ego. But I didn’t think I liked the actual process that much. Vicky tended to ambush me when I wasn’t expecting it, when I was just trying to watch the telly or open a Pop Tart wrapper with my teeth. And also she smoked and drank a lot, so she always tasted slightly stale. But my lack of enthusiasm for this girl-on-girl action so soon after my official coming out alarmed me.