You Only Live Once Read online

  Maybe I wasn’t a lesbian after all? I’d only just come out. Would I have to go back in again? Would Mum and Dad be disappointed? Mum had already told Hilary from Pilates, after all. But then I reminded myself of the statistics. Amelia. Elodie. Hot Miss Perrin. Sarah (Sarah was still very much on my mind). Girls 4, boys nil. It was still fairly conclusive, I decided.

  Once, bold from beer, I plucked up the courage to address the kissing habit with Vicky. Specifically, to ask her why she did it.

  She laughed. ‘Why not? Maybe you just taste good, you little cutey.’

  I didn’t know what to make of this not-quite-an-answer.

  It was true, I was quite heavy-handed with my application of mint-choc-chip lip balm, so maybe that’s all there was to it.

  Next time I went over, I picked up a Mint Whisper en route to give to Vicky. I hoped that might satisfy her mint-chocolate craving and she wouldn’t feel the need to lick my face to get her fix.

  It seemed altogether more hygienic that way.

  Enjoyment

  On my home for dinner one evening, I bumped into Sarah.

  Instantly I felt my cheeks go pink. It was partly because I was surprised to see her, although I quickly realised I had no reason to be as my feet had automatically carried me on a route home that passed directly behind the library.

  ‘Hi, Grace,’ she said, looking up from fiddling with her bike lock.

  ‘Hey!’ My voice came out too brightly. I was overcompensating for the tension there’d been the last time we’d spoken, when she’d seen me drunkenly kissing an equally drunk Vicky that night at the beach gathering. ‘How are you?’

  She nodded. ‘Yeah. Fine. How are you?’

  I shrugged. ‘Yeah. OK. You? Oh, sorry. We already did you, didn’t we.’

  Sarah laughed, then there was an awkward silence.

  ‘I messaged you,’ I said. And you didn’t reply, I thought, but didn’t say.

  ‘Yeah.’ She looked down at her bike and adjusted the position of the saddle slightly. Then there was silence again.

  ‘So how goes the summer?’ she said. ‘You still fitting in lots of crazy stunts?’

  I put my head on one side. ‘Not crazy, really. But I’ve been doing some stuff, yeah. I went body-boarding. I ate frogs’ legs.’

  Sarah nodded. She pushed her jacket into the bag on the back of her bike. ‘Any good?’

  I wasn’t sure which she was referring to so I answered for both. ‘Body-boarding was cold. Frogs’ legs were kind of disgusting.’

  Sarah laughed again. ‘Fair enough. Been doing anything you actually enjoy, then?’

  ‘Yeah I …’ I couldn’t think of anything, not right there off the top of my head. I mean, I knew I had been having a great summer, I just couldn’t think of a specific activity to mention right at that moment.

  Sarah looked at me strangely. ‘You know, Grace, you probably shouldn’t seize the day by filling it with stuff you don’t even like doing.’

  ‘I’m not,’ I protested. ‘I’ve done loads of good stuff!’

  Sarah smiled. ‘OK!’ she said brightly. ‘Good.’

  Then she climbed onto her bike and she was gone, and once again I was left wishing that I’d said something more, although I wasn’t sure what.

  I thought about what Sarah said as I continued on my way home. I was doing stuff, I enjoyed, wasn’t I?

  But then it was hard to always know, wasn’t it, what was actually enjoyable and what wasn’t. And should we only do the things we know we like? What about pushing ourselves? What about stepping outside of our comfort zones?

  I suppose what I enjoyed the most when I was actually doing it was eating margarita pizza and watching the same box sets on repeat, but that wasn’t the kind of thing you could look back on and feel proud of. And yes, maybe body-boarding and frogs’ legs hadn’t been episodes of unmitigated joy, but I was still glad I’d done them. I enjoyed the feeling of having done them. I enjoyed the feeling of telling people I’d done them.

  That counted too, surely?

  Help a Fellow Person

  I don’t know why I ended up reading the notice in the window of the Age Awareness UK shop at all, but something about it obviously caught my eye.

  Volunteers wanted

  to help clients in our drop-in IT centre.

  Some computer skills a bonus.

  I was interested that computer skills were only regarded as a ‘bonus’ attribute for this role. I wondered how far they’d get with someone who’d never so much as used a ticket machine at the station trying to help the old folk with their online banking.

  Perhaps it was my conversation with Sarah that spurred me on – perhaps it had made me want to do something that I’d added to the list myself (‘help a fellow person’) rather than always going along with Vicky and Spider’s choices – or if these weeks of seeking new experiences had just changed my default setting to one of doing things, as opposed to walking past on the other side of the road, but I found myself pushing open the door of Age Awareness UK and approaching the woman at the counter.

  ‘I can help,’ I said brightly. ‘Help people with computers, I mean. I’m OK at them. I can do the basics, anyway. Maybe a bit more than the basics, actually.’

  She looked at me blankly.

  ‘The sign,’ I pointed to it. ‘In the window?’

  She squinted, looking over. ‘Oh, yeah. I got you. Speak to Linda.’ She nodded towards an archway at the back of the shop. Through the gap I could see a room with two rows of fairly shabby-looking desktop computers, arranged across long desks.

  I went through the archway and into the room. All across the walls were posters featuring photos of smart, modern computers – much smarter and more modern than the ones in the room – being used by tanned, healthy-looking white-haired people in brightly coloured polo shirts. All of the people in the posters seem to be besides themselves with joy at whatever they were looking at on their screens.

  The real people using the real computers in the actual room seemed less pleased. There was a woman with her hair in a bun typing furiously in the corner and a man with neatly combed hair and a green jumper frowning confusedly at a piece of paper in his lap.

  Another much younger woman was crouching down, wrestling with a paper jam in a printer on the floor.

  ‘Um … are you Linda?’ I called to her from the archway.

  ‘That’s me,’ she said with a sigh. She didn’t look up.

  ‘The other lady said I should talk to you about helping out in the IT centre.’ I supposed this was the IT centre? ‘I mean, helping out here.’

  ‘Right you are,’ Linda said, pushing herself up to a standing position with great effort. ‘Put your name on the form and we’ll be in touch.’

  I was slightly put out by this unenthusiastic reaction to the generous offer of my time and expertise, but undeterred, I went over to the clipboard she’d pointed at, which was tied to a desk in the far corner. It was a simple blank table with spaces for names and email addresses. At the top it said, ‘Volunteering expression of interest: complete your details below and we’ll be in touch when a place on our training scheme becomes available.’

  I scrunched up my nose. I didn’t like the sound of this training scheme. I didn’t like the sound of this waiting for a place. I wasn’t looking for a full-time job. I didn’t want to get roped into something serious. I just thought I’d pop in, show a few old folk how to check their emails for half an hour, then be on my way. This all seemed a bit much. I wanted to help people, sure, but I didn’t want to put myself out too much to do it.

  I was about to slink away, to continue on my way home, when the man with the green jumper and the neat hair turned around and looked at me nervously.

  ‘Excuse me for bothering you … you couldn’t give me a helping hand, could you?’

  William

  His voice started off loud, grew quiet in the middle, then loud again at the end, like he had no internal volume-adjustment mechanism.
r />   ‘Um … sure.’ I nodded and approached his workstation. ‘I can try?’

  His computer was open on the email account [email protected]. In front of him, there were several loose sheets of lined paper, obviously torn out of a notebook of some sort. They were filled with neat blue handwriting. At the top of each one there was a title:

  Jerry

  Dawn and Matthew

  Abigail and boys

  Council

  ‘What it is,’ he said, ‘is I’m just trying to send a few notes to people – friends and family and what-have-you, but – it’s silly, I know – I can’t remember where to put the destination. The address?’

  ‘The email address?’

  He nodded enthusiastically. ‘Exactly that.’

  ‘Oh, OK,’ I said. ‘It’s just here.’ I pointed to his screen. ‘This bar at the top where it says “to”.’

  The man squinted at the screen. ‘Ah yes, right you are. It’s coming back to me now. Jolly good. So, now then …’ He shuffled his papers. ‘This one is the email address, is it?’

  He showed me something written below the name ‘Jerry’. It looked like a plausible enough email address to me.

  I nodded. ‘Probably. You need to look for the ‘at’ symbol.’

  ‘At …’

  ‘It’s the kind of ‘a’ sign in a circle.’

  The man nodded again, firmly this time, but I could tell his confidence was feigned. ‘Yep. Yes. I’ve got it. OK then, so it’s J … where’s the J? Oh, there it is! E … E … has this keyboard got an E? I don’t think it has?’

  ‘There,’ I said, pointing to the E key on the keyboard. Admittedly the text was a little rubbed off.

  ‘Ah!’ he smiled. ‘Got it.’ He looked back up at the screen. ‘Oh, where it’s gone?’

  His address bar was once again empty, his hard-won J and E nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Um, I think you must’ve hit delete. Or maybe the cursor jumped or something …’

  ‘Cursor …’ he said slowly, turning the words over in his mouth. ‘Cursor?’

  ‘I could type it for you?’ I found myself saying. It seemed beyond heartless not to offer. At this rate – of approximately one letter per two minutes – it would be Christmas before he’d sent his first email.

  The man looked at me, amazed. Like I’d told him I could converse fluently with badgers if he so required. ‘Could you? Could you really do that?’

  I nodded. ‘Sure.’

  He got up hurriedly as if he was anxious I would change my mind if he didn’t make way for me immediately. I took my seat in the chair and entered Jerry’s email address in the box.

  ‘They’ve been on at me, you see,’ the man said, peering over my shoulder, ‘about keeping in touch. Since my wife died it’s been difficult. June. That was her name, I mean. She didn’t die in June. She died in January. She was always on the phone, you see, chatting away, morning, noon and night, letting people know what was what, passing on news. But I’ve never been one for the phone. And especially not now.’ He tapped his right ear and I noticed he was wearing a hearing aid. ‘I lip-read as much as listen these days, so the phone is a challenge. So I’ve written to them.’ He nodded to the pages of handwriting. ‘Now it’s just a case of getting it all in there.’

  We both looked at the screen.

  ‘Maybe you could read it out, and I could type it?’ I suggested. ‘Will probably be quicker that way?’

  I wanted to give him something to do; I thought it would be less awkward that way. Less pressure than having him sitting there, watching me while I typed.

  ‘Yes, yes. Of course. Good idea. Dear Jerry,’ he began, slowly and clearly. ‘Billy here …’ Then as an aside to me he added, ‘Jerry’s the only one to call me that, of course. That’s what they called me in the Navy. I’m just plain William to everyone else.’

  I nodded and smiled. I hoped William wasn’t going to feel the need to explain every sentence of his message to me or we might still be here at Christmas after all.

  Luckily, after this, William got into his stride and I helped him let his friend Jerry, along with his daughters Dawn and Abigail and their respective partners and children, know that he had been watching cricket with Peter from down the road, that the doctor was pleased with how his knee was healing and that he had been for lunch at the club – whatever the club was. He asked a lot of questions too – how was the job hunt going (Dawn), how was the new puppy settling in (Abigail) and was there any more news from that lively young lady from the cruise (Jerry).

  ‘How long is it looking?’ William said, leaning over my shoulder. I moved my head aside so he could see. ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Could do with a little more, I suppose … Oh, I know. Tell Dawn I’ve been to lunch with Audrey. She’ll like that. She thinks Audrey is nice to me.’

  ‘Is Audrey not nice to you, then?’

  William laughed. ‘I have no idea. Haven’t seen her for years. Years and years!’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, confused. ‘So you haven’t been for lunch with her?’

  William laughed again. ‘My dear girl, I haven’t done half of these things! But if I tell them I’ve just been sitting in my living room watching the news or walking along the seafront on my own they’ll make a dreadful fuss about me getting “isolated and depressed”.’

  ‘Oh, right. OK.’ This made me feel unspeakably sad but it was hardly my place to be telling William what he could and couldn’t say to his own friends and family.

  When I’d finished helping William with his correspondence, he bid me farewell, thanking me profusely and promising to practise his typing, as if it made any difference to me.

  As I walked home, now very late for dinner, I started to think. Was William exaggerating his social activities to his family any sadder than me pretending I’d been to the Louvre or sharing photos of the aftermath of a party I hadn’t even been to? If anything, perhaps I was sadder. After all, William was only trying to put his family’s minds at ease.

  Why on earth was I doing it?

  Results Day

  For much of the previous two years, my focus had been very much on one date:

  The 24th August. GCSE results day.

  I’d read somewhere once about the power of visualisation: imagining our goals turning into reality in glorious, vivid detail.

  In the same way other people might have imagined themselves travelling to exotic locations around the world or kissing the boy or girl of their dreams or playing football for England or whatever, my daydreams had been focused squarely on the 24th August.

  I’d pull up at school, collect my envelope from reception and rip it open to see a dazzling list of As and A*s, 8s and 9s. Teachers and fellow students would congratulate me and I’d smile shyly and humbly accept their praise. Mum and Dad would cook a special meal for me. I’d pin the results list to the wall above my bed, but sometime later in the day Mum would take it without me knowing, and I’d come downstairs to find she’d framed it, and hung it in pride of place in the downstairs toilet.

  However, by the time the day itself rolled around, I could barely be bothered to go into school at all. I didn’t even feel like getting out of bed.

  Paddy came in, carrying a plate. ‘Made you a sandwich, Gracie!’ he shouted, resting the plate on my stomach. Two slices of cheese wrapped around a frozen veggie burger. ‘Lovely, Paddy. Thanks,’ I said, moving the plate off my stomach and sitting up.

  Luckily Mum came in as Paddy ran out, with a slightly more appetising plate of toast and a glass of milk.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked me, perching on the end of my bed.

  I shrugged and took a bite of my toast. I looked out of the window, to avoid engaging with Mum’s expression.

  ‘Excited? Bit nervous?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said flatly.

  Mum looked at me, her head on one side. ‘Of course you’ll be nervous,’ she said. ‘That’s normal. The last two years have been building up to this day!’

  I sho
ok my head hard. I was annoyed but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. Annoyed with her for trying to suggest I felt something I didn’t? Annoyed with myself for spending the last two years focused on something I suddenly couldn’t care less about?

  ‘I think what your brain’s doing, is telling you that you don’t care, to stop the nerves getting too much.’ She nodded wisely. ‘That’s what it is.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. And maybe she was right, but what I thought was more likely, was that I actually didn’t care.

  Screaming and Hugging

  I met Til at the school gates. Already, people from our year were milling around outside the main entrance. Every so often we’d hear a whoop erupt from a little group and we’d see them fall into each other in a hug.

  There were a few more downbeat sights too – Toby Harris was sitting on a wall on the phone to someone, his print-out of results hanging down at his side. Lucy Kapoor was crying hard and being comforted by some girl from the year above, but then Lucy Kapoor was always crying so that could’ve been about anything.

  Til was leaning on the railing. ‘Ready then?’ she said, one eyebrow slightly raised.

  I nodded. ‘I guess.’

  ‘What’s the matter? Ain’t today basically Christmas for you?’

  I didn’t say anything. I could feel myself getting annoyed again, like I had with Mum earlier. I felt like Til was making fun of me, which in itself wasn’t unusual or even particularly annoying, but now it was like she was making fun of a person I didn’t even think I was any more, so it felt unfair.

  ‘Come on then,’ I said, walking off towards reception. ‘Let’s get it over with.’