You Only Live Once Read online

  ‘What’s going on?’ I’d said from the doorway.

  ‘Blocked sink,’ she grumbled, standing up and wiping her hands on her jeans, before taking my laptop out of my hands and placing it on the table in the lounge. She tapped around on the keyboard for a few moments, turned it over, took the battery out, put it back in, typed a bit more, and then turned the screen around to face me. The normal loading screen was showing again.

  ‘You fixed it?’ I’d said, surprised.

  ‘Yeah, course,’ she’d shrugged, before heading back to the kitchen to resume her plumbing repairs.

  Til didn’t manage to completely solve her blocked sink and she’d been forced to call out an emergency plumber at 11 p.m. one Friday. The cost of which had both disgusted and impressed her, so much so that she’d announced the following Monday that she planned to study plumbing at college. I hadn’t taken her quite seriously at the time, but the way she was steadily building up a collection of plumbers’ manuals and tools told me she meant business.

  I found some paper bunting letters that Mum had used to decorate the desk of a bloke at work who was leaving so I decided to make Til a birthday banner. I was a few letters short, so the message that would greet Til when she turned up at our camp was:

  HAPY BRTHDAX TIL

  If I’d started planning everything weeks in advance, no doubt I would’ve managed to collect enough letters to spell out ‘Many happy returns, Matilda Romero. Have a lovely time’, but these are the idiosyncrasies we must accept when we’re celebrating spontaneously. I thought she’d get the general idea.

  Camp Matilda

  Til arrived at seven, as I had instructed.

  ‘All right?’ she said. ‘You gonna do me a birthday then, is it?’

  I nodded. ‘Yep. Come, come.’

  Til looked at me quizzically and followed me through the hallway and towards the back door.

  ‘Welcome to Camp Matilda!’ I said as I opened the back door to the garden.

  ‘Ha,’ Til said, dropping her bag to the floor and folding her arms. ‘Beautiful work, Gracie.’

  I turned around. I think the pole in the middle of the tent must’ve toppled over, because all the canvas was sagging. With nothing to support it, my banner had dropped on the right-hand side. It looked like a storm had ripped through our camp.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, frowning as I struggled to pull the tent upright. ‘Stupid thing.’

  Til laughed.

  ‘I was recreating your birthday camp!’ I said, still trying to get the tent together. ‘But now it looks rubbish. Sorry.’

  Til came over to help me. ‘Ah well,’ she said, managing to get the pole back in position. ‘The thought ain’t so rubbish.’

  It had been warm all day. Not perfect blue skies, but fine. Fine for camping. But as Til and I finally set the tent straight, a fat drop of rain splashed off my shoulder.

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ I said, looking up at the sky. ‘This was absolutely not forecast.’

  ‘Never mind. That’s what the tent is for, I guess.’ She pushed her bag through the entrance. ‘Oh, you beauty,’ she said as we clambered awkwardly through the flap and she saw the cans of Guinness I’d lined up.

  Last Christmas, Til and I had gone to a house party that a boy from the year above was holding while his parents were away. We’d asked Ollie to go to the shop to get us a bottle of vodka to mix with the Coke we’d bought, but at the last minute he’d come over all responsible and returned with some cans of Guinness instead. ‘Better for you,’ he explained. ‘And it was on offer.’ Without any better options, we ended up taking the Guinness to the party anyway, and we’d found that we’d actually quite liked it. It tasted like a wholesome, robust gravy. And more to the point, we felt that drinking it made us appear interesting and quirky.

  Til snapped open two cans and passed one to me. We sat at opposite ends of the tent and sipped our drinks.

  I looked around me. ‘What else are you supposed to do when you go camping? What did you do on your birthday trip?’

  Til shrugged. ‘Made a fire, cooked on the fire. Sat around the fire. Played guitars next to the fire. The fire was kind of a thing, really.’

  ‘I planned for that!’ I said, putting my can down and scrambling out of the tent.

  ‘Course you did,’ Til said, following me. ‘Course you did.’

  I took Til over to the corner of the garden where I’d stacked logs, newspaper and matches, together with a bag of marshmallows ready for the traditional toasting.

  There was only one small problem.

  ‘Oh no …’ I looked down at the pile of wood and paper. The rain had stopped, but it had obviously been going for long enough to leave my fire-lighting material completely sodden. There was no way any of it was going to be producing a roaring fire any time soon.

  ‘Ah well,’ Til said, peeling a sheet of soaking paper off the ground. ‘Good thing about garden camping is you’re not too far from the oven.’

  Queen of Spades

  Twenty minutes later, we were back in the tent with hot dogs cooked under the grill and a bowl of pink goo that was the result of attempting to toast marshmallows in a microwave. We decided we’d have to eat it with a spoon.

  ‘Argh!’ Til screamed, her mouth hanging open. ‘This stuff is like molten lava. You could kill someone with this.’

  I passed her a can of Guinness and reached for my own can. ‘Now what shall we do?’ I said, fiddling with the metal ring pull. ‘What are you supposed to do when you’re camping? Now that the fire’s a no-go, anyway?’

  Til shrugged. ‘Thing is, normally it’s all about, like, survival, you know? Spend ages putting up shelter, ages trying to cook food. Keep warm. Stay dry. Just making it through the night kind of keeps you busy.’

  I frowned. ‘It’s a weird thing to do for fun, isn’t it? Pretend to be homeless.’

  Til nodded. ‘Uh huh. And it don’t really work when you’re ten metres away from a kitchen with a toaster and an electric tin opener and a fridge full of avocado salad.’

  I didn’t say anything. I suddenly wasn’t sure that I’d created such a good birthday celebration after all.

  ‘Cards,’ said Til suddenly. ‘We played cards. That’s what people do when there isn’t any TV or when they’re in the war or whatever.’

  This brightened me up. Cards I could do. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Good idea. I’m on it.’

  I ran into the kitchen and grabbed the pack of cards that Ollie had left there after his weekend poker game.

  ‘Right!’ I said, taking my seat in the corner of the tent again. ‘We have cards.’ I tipped the cards out of the box. ‘I can hardly remember any games though, it’s been ages. Only like Snap and Pairs and those boring ones. Do you know an – oh god!’ I dropped the pack like it was electrified, letting the cards scatter everywhere. ‘Oh god, I didn’t know they were going to be … to look like …’

  Til was laughing. She picked up a card. ‘You bought porno cards?’

  ‘I didn’t! I mean, I brought them out here, but I didn’t buy them! I didn’t know! They’re Ollie’s!’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Til said, still laughing. ‘It’s fine, Gracie. You got to get your kicks where you can find them.’ She picked up the cards and shuffled through them, having a good look at each one. ‘Wowzers,’ she said, holding one out to me. ‘Queen of Spades really likes spades, huh?’

  ‘Oh my goodness,’ I said, covering my eyes. ‘That is so unnatural. I will never be able to look at a garden spade again.’

  ‘Ah, well,’ Til said. ‘We can battle through it. Wouldn’t want these ladies’ hard work to go to waste.’

  She started to deal and we did actually become desensitised to the naked bodies pretty quickly.

  As Til dealt our second hand, she stopped suddenly. ‘Oh, wait,’ she said. ‘Wait a minute. You didn’t do this on purpose, did you? Oh, you did! This was your ice breaker. Your conversation starter. And I’ve completely missed it. Oh, man! Sorry. You’re right.
I am insensitive.’

  I looked at her. ‘What?’

  ‘You got these cards on purpose because you want to talk. You wanted to bring up the whole lezzer issue and you weren’t sure how, so you thought you’d “accidentally” whip these out and I’d take the conversation from there.’

  I opened my mouth and closed it again. I felt my cheeks flush. ‘What lezzer issue?’

  Til put the cards down and sat facing me square on, her hands folded in her lap. She looked me straight in the face. ‘Grace. Come on. Let’s just talk about the elephant in the room. In the tent. The big rainbow elephant in the tent. It would be a relief to have to stop pretending I don’t know, to be honest.’

  I just looked at her. It wasn’t that I didn’t want her to know – I had a feeling she’d guessed a while ago – I just couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

  ‘So first, in Year Eight, every Food Tech class you make some excuse to stay behind and help Miss Perrin dry up the baking trays. Miss Perrin, also known as “Hot Miss Perrin” by everyone, including the teachers. Then, Year Nine … who was that sixth former who came in to help Reggie with his maths? Amanda? No idea how you got any maths done, the amount of time you spent gazing at her across the classroom.’

  ‘Amelia,’ I said. ‘Not Amanda.’

  Til raised her eyebrows and smirked. ‘Well, of course you’d remember her name.’

  I didn’t reply. I just rolled my eyes.

  ‘Year Ten,’ she said, shuffling the cards absent-mindedly as she thought. ‘Maybe that was a dry patch for you. Can’t think of anyone. But this year, well, that one’s easy. The girl from the library. That Welsh bird with the dimples. Sarah?’

  I just shook my head and grinned. ‘Shut up,’ I said.

  ‘It is Sarah though, isn’t it?’

  I half nodded, half shrugged. ‘Think so, something like that.’

  Til rolled her eyes. ‘Like you haven’t been writing her name all over the inside of your geography folder for the last four months.’

  Til didn’t say anything at all then, which turned out to be a good tactic because it made me want to say something.

  ‘It was Elodie, in Year Ten.’

  Til frowned for a second, thinking. ‘The French exchange girl! But she was only here for a couple of weeks.’

  ‘I know. Knew her for two weeks, thought about her for ten months.’

  Til just smiled. ‘The French, eh?’ she said. ‘Such heartbreakers.’

  I just nodded and fiddled with my shoelace.

  ‘Anyway!’ Til said. ‘Thank god that’s out the way. Wasn’t so hard, was it, you moron. Your turn to deal.’

  And that was that, really. It was so typical of Til, to lure me into a momentous revelation then turn it into something totally mundane and run-of-the-mill that I ended up feeling like I’d just told her that my favourite pizza topping was sweetcorn. What kind of coming-out story was that to tell people?

  We played for a bit longer without talking about anything very much. Then suddenly it occurred to me. ‘Oh sorry, do you want to talk about you?’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘You know, do you want to talk about your feelings? Your family? About your mum being sick?’

  ‘Shut up, Grace,’ Til said, taking a swig of her beer.

  ‘Right. OK. Sure.’

  I knew Til would say that really. But it seemed rude not to offer.

  Til’s home never seemed a particularly happy one. It was just her and her mum in the little flat. Her mum had let Til have the only decent-sized bedroom so she slept on an inflatable mattress that had to be propped against the wall every morning so she could get in and out of the room. I’d met Til’s mum plenty of times but heard her say only perhaps ten words. And mostly they were variations on ‘I’m going to lie down’. She worked in the Post Office but she had a bad back, and ‘bad nerves’ as she called it, so was always phoning in sick. She left Til to do the shopping and the washing and to sort out the bills and to do most other things, it seemed.

  Til didn’t seem to talk to her mum very much, and she never talked about her really, either. One Wednesday in Year Nine, Til had been nearly two hours late for school. When I’d asked her what had happened she just said, ‘Mum … giving me grief again.’

  I suppose I’d imagined the kind of grief my own mum would dish out – refusing to give me a lift, insisting I eat a bowl of cereal before leaving the house, unreasonable behaviour like that – although I did think that a two-hour delay seemed a little extreme. It wasn’t until weeks later that Til let slip that the reason for her lateness that morning had been that her mum had decided, in a fit of paranoia, that the vents in the kitchen were leaking noxious fumes that were highly likely to kill both Til and herself in their sleep. To deal with this threat, she’d cut a bin liner into pieces, climbed up a stepladder and begun sealing the vents closed by covering them with plastic squares stuck down with duct tape. Halfway through her mission though, the ladder had toppled over, taking Til’s mum with it, and she’d cracked her head open on the side of the worktop.

  When Til had said she was late because her mum had been giving her grief, she meant the kind of grief that involved using an entire packet of toilet roll to clear up the litre of blood on the kitchen floor, riding in an ambulance and waiting in A&E while her mum had her head X-rayed.

  ‘We should make a list,’ I said after a while. ‘Of all the stuff we’re going to do this summer. You know, all the things we can do to live for the moment. All the ways we can seize the days. Carpe the diems.’

  ‘Woah, woah, woah,’ Til said, opening a new drink. ‘What do you mean, “we”? This is your crusade, dude. Your mission. I just … go with the flow.’

  ‘So do I!’ I said. ‘That’s exactly what I do now. I just flow around, flowing with the flow. Flowing into whatever opportunities come my way.’

  ‘Grace, you can’t plan to go with the flow. That’s too intense, man. If you’re planning, that ain’t flowing. That’s swimming. That’s like doing front crawl, you know?’

  I pushed my hair out of my eyes. ‘But, Til, I haven’t got time to drift. I’ve got catching up to do. I’ve got to find things and do things and make things happen!’

  Til laughed and shook her head. ‘Whatever.’

  She dealt the cards again.

  Badger

  The day after Til’s birthday (part two) I took part in a choreographed dance routine.

  In public.

  On camera.

  Dressed as a badger.

  If that isn’t evidence of how I had revolutionised my life, then I don’t know what is.

  I was walking through the station when I realised there seemed to be a lot of shouting and laughing going on, but then there was always a lot of noise in the station – charity choirs, people playing the free piano, steel drum bands, that kind of thing.

  I had my earphones in so I wasn’t paying too much attention until I almost walked right into them – a group of people, mostly looking slightly uncomfortable and bemused, pulling on a range of fancy dress costumes over their clothes. There was a man stepping into a Snow White dress so ornate that I wished Paddy had been there to see it. A woman was zipping up a giant bodysuit in the shape of a Galaxy Caramel. There were two men and two women in white jumpsuits and long wigs. I had no idea what they were supposed to be.

  As I was staring at them, a man stepped into my path suddenly. He had curly hair and little round glasses. He smiled at me like he knew me. ‘You’d like to earn ten pounds, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Huh?’ I said.

  My instinct was to put my head down and walk quickly away. My instincts were shouting ‘Avoid avoid avoid’. But I stopped myself, remembering that turning things down was no longer my default.

  I took my earphones out.

  ‘Do you want to earn ten pounds?’ the guy said again. ‘It’ll only take five minutes.’

  ‘What would I have to do?’ I drew the line at immediately agreeing to anything. I m
ay have been embracing life as a general principle, but I still had some standards regarding what (or who) I would embrace.

  He didn’t reply. He didn’t reply in words, anyway. Instead he put both arms out in front of him, then crossed them across his chest. Then he put each one on each of his hips in turn.

  I didn’t need him to do any more.

  ‘The Macarena?’ I said.

  The man stopped and his face broke into a wide smile. ‘You know it!’ he said. ‘Even better.’

  ‘I recognise it, definitely,’ I said. I had watched my dad roll out the old Macarena routine at every wedding, family barbecue and Christmas drinks party I’d ever been to. He even did a low-energy version in the queue at Asda once, much to my dismay. That series of moves was burnt into my brain.

  Still, it was a slightly bizarre request. ‘But, like … why?’

  ‘I’m proposing to my girlfriend. I didn’t want to just go down the normal diamond-ring-in-the-chocolate-mousse route. I wanted to do something different. Bit more personal, you know. So the plan is basically this: everyone dresses up as all her favourite things and dances her favourite dance. Then I come out and pop the question.’

  ‘Right, OK …’ It all sounded most strange. ‘Her favourite dance is really the Macarena?’

  The bloke shrugged. ‘Yeah. Why? What’s your favourite dance?’

  It was a good point. ‘Don’t suppose I’ve ever thought about it.’

  ‘So anyway, if you can put this on, do the dance when the track starts, then that’s it. I’ll give you a tenner. Cash. Here and now.’

  I found myself taking what he was holding out. A heavy piece of black and white fur. ‘It’s a badger suit,’ he explained. ‘She likes badgers.’