You Only Live Once Read online

  Til just shrugged. ‘She’s fine. Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘I know she can be weird.’

  ‘Grace, man. My mum once made me come home from school because a seagull had been on the window sill too long and she was worried it was really a spy camera sent by the government to stop her benefits. I know what a difficult family is and yours ain’t it.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Funny though, isn’t it? Who knew Nan would turn out to be such a social media addict?’

  Nan slept for about half of the two and a half hours it took for our train to make its way onto the continent. She spent the other half of the journey talking about people she knew from her road, from the post office, from the pub on the corner, jumping from one to the other without pausing for breath:

  ‘And you know Pauline’s granddaughter is pregnant, of course. And Pauline says to me the other day, “They’ve chosen a name for the baby. It’s a girl and they’re going to call it Lavender. Pretty, isn’t it?” And I says, “Well yes, Pauline, but what are they going to call it for short? Lav?” Little baby Lav! Can you imagine?’

  ‘And Margaret was telling me how she went to the funeral of some old boy from the day centre, and one of the blokes in the audience had on a musical tie! I ask you! Why would you wear a musical tie to a funeral! The son’s in the middle of reading the eulogy and you’ve got Rudolph the flippin’ Red Nosed Reindeer playing at the back of the church!’

  As we pulled into Paris Gare du Nord, Nan seemed to get quiet. It was almost as if she was nervous, the way she blinked slightly as the platforms came into view.

  ‘We’re here then, are we?’ she said.

  ‘Yep. Welcome to Paris, Nan,’ I said smiling, as if I was any more an expert on the city than she was.

  ‘Yes, quite,’ Nan muttered. She got unsteadily to her feet and smoothed her skirt down. ‘Let’s get on with it, then.’

  Nan on Tour

  As we walked down the platform and through the station, Nan was quiet and I wondered if it was all a bit much for her. She seemed to rally though when she spotted the heavily armed French soldiers patrolling the station.

  ‘Oh, I’ve got to have a photo with one of them,’ she said, abandoning her bag with Til and approaching the man. ‘Photo!’ she called, miming a camera action. ‘Photo!’

  The soldier didn’t smile. Instead he shook his head sharply and said, ‘No photo,’ and strode on.

  ‘Miserable git,’ Nan mumbled. ‘Here, let’s do it on the sly, Grace. You ready? Quick!’

  Nan positioned herself just in front of a soldier who had his back turned. She held her arms up, as if holding her own invisible gun and smiled.

  I dutifully took the picture and this time, I did upload it. It was kind of funny. Once again, the internet agreed and this time I could impress Nan with the genuine number of likes and replies she picked up.

  ‘How funny,’ Nan chuckled to herself. ‘Funny old world.’

  We headed out of the station and joined the back of the taxi queue.

  ‘You’re wearing man’s shoes,’ Nan said to Til as we waited.

  ‘Nan!’ I said, alarmed. ‘She’s not.’

  ‘I am actually,’ Til said, leaning against the railings and lifting up one of her heavy black lace-up boots to admire it. ‘Way more comfortable.’

  Nan nodded once. ‘Very good,’ she said. ‘Very sensible. I can’t bear it when girls wear those ridiculous stilettos. What if you needed to outrun a predator? Wouldn’t stand a chance.’

  I had the name of our hotel, our booking reference and a small map of the area printed off and tucked in my bag so when the taxi driver asked where we were going I was prepared, which was lucky as he didn’t speak any English.

  I sat in the front and he seemed keen to chat. If this had been before my French GCSE oral, I would have been either delighted at this opportunity for authentic practice, or aghast at how little I understood. As it was, I just felt slightly embarrassed at the number of times I had to say ‘Je ne comprends pas’ while the driver just smiled and shook his head as if to say ‘Never mind’.

  Nan seemed keen to get in on the chat, insisting on loudly repeating the two French phrases she knew from the back seat any time there was a lull in conversation.

  ‘Je ne regrette rien.’

  and

  ‘Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?’

  The taxi driver’s only response to these interjections was to smile shyly and continue trying to talk to me, but even if my French listening skills had been more polished, I still would’ve found it difficult to maintain a serious conversation about French transport infrastructure with my grandmother poking her head through the gap in the seats every five minutes to proposition the taxi driver in heavily accented French.

  We checked into our hotel, which was called Maison Vert and was on the border of the eighteenth and ninth arrondisements in an area called Pigalle. On the same road were several shops with mannequins dressed in lacy underwear in the window beneath neon signs that said things like ‘Scarlet’s’ and ‘Fantasy’. One place cut to the chase and just had ‘SEX’ in metre-high letters above the door.

  Nan stood on the edge of the pavement and looked around her.

  ‘Grace, why have you brought me to a red-light district?’

  ‘I haven’t!’ I protested, although I had to agree the evidence suggested otherwise. ‘It’s the perfect location to explore all the key landmarks. It’ll be fine, I’m sure.’

  ‘Well, I shan’t be standing too long at any corners, I can tell you,’ Nan said, peering closely at a mannequin’s nipple tassels. ‘I get enough offers when I’m down The Crown at home. Can do without the French starting on at me too.’

  I had a detailed itinerary written out in pencil in the back of a notebook, complete with addresses, opening times, prices and directions. It was a perfect blueprint for the quintessential Parisian weekend.

  Til saw me studying it and peered over my shoulder. ‘Still going with the flow then, is it?’

  I didn’t look up. ‘We’ve been through this. I’m on an accelerated flow path. To ensure maximum flow at all times, I have to put careful plans in place.’

  ‘Right,’ Til said, fanning herself with a leaflet. ‘Well, what does the masterplan say we’re doing for dinner? I’m starving.’

  Dogs Cats Zebra

  The plan said we were going to Les Trois Canards, which was, according to the guidebook, ‘a traditional French bistro oozing with classic Parisian charm’.

  The restaurant did indeed look exactly as you’d imagine a traditional French restaurant should look – white tablecloths, little jars of red wine and heavy velvet curtains everywhere, as well as waiters who looked both elegant and a little bit miffed.

  The menu was leather-bound and printed in curling italics on thick yellow paper. All in French of course. As it should be! And I was confident that with five years of French study under my belt I should be more than capable of something as rudimentary as translating a menu.

  I was wrong.

  ‘Well, it’s all in foreign,’ Nan said, closing it immediately. ‘I might as well close my eyes and point at anything. I want egg and chips. I’ll have egg and chips, please, waiter!’ she called.

  ‘Nan, no!’ I said feeling myself blush. ‘You can’t have egg and chips. It’s a waste.’ I opened her menu back up. ‘Here, look. Steak tartare. You like steak.’

  Nan looked suspiciously at where I was pointing. ‘OK fine. I’ll have it well done. With plenty of ketchup.’

  The waiter barely moved his face while taking our order so I had no idea what he made of my French – if he understood, if he didn’t, or if he was just doing an unflattering sketch of us all as he scratched his pencil on his notepad. We’d just have to wait and see.

  He returned fifteen minutes later and put the plate down in front of Nan.

  ‘Ugh!’ She recoiled in horror. ‘What is that!’ She put her napkin up to her mouth, as if she was concerned her plate may be emitting n
oxious fumes.

  The waiter raised a weary eyebrow. ‘Steak tartare, madame.’

  ‘Grace!’ Nan said turning to me. ‘There’s been a horrible mistake! They haven’t cooked it! They’re trying to kill me!’

  Til and I looked at Nan’s plate. It was a ball of raw mince, topped with a raw egg. It did indeed seem that there had been some mistake.

  ‘Excusez-moi,’ I called, as the waiter was already turning away from us. ‘Il y a une problème. Je pense que you have forgotten to cook le steak?’

  ‘Non,’ he said sharply. ‘C’est steak tartare.’

  I looked at Til and she looked at me and then she got her phone out.

  ‘Ah yeah,’ she said after a minute. ‘It says this on Wikipedia: “Steak tartare is a meat dish made from minced raw beef or –” OH GOD NO.’

  Nan and I both jumped. ‘What?’

  ‘ “… or horsemeat”, ’ Til finished. ‘Oh, my actual good god.’

  Nan jolted her chair backwards and sat, as if pinned to the back of it, staring at her plate in horror. ‘It’s a horse!’ she cried.

  I had a feeling I was losing control of the situation. ‘I’m sure it’s not …’ I looked around for the waiter. ‘Excusez-moi? Le steak is boeuf, oui? Ce n’est pas une horse?’

  But everyone ignored me. And Nan had had enough anyway. She was getting to her feet, pulling on her coat and making for the door. I threw a small wad of Euros on the table and Til and I trailed after her.

  Outside, an American couple were perusing the menu in the window.

  ‘You don’t want to go in there!’ Nan said to their surprised faces. ‘They’re serving all sorts and calling it dinner! Tried to give me a horse! And they didn’t even cook it. They’ve got it all, back there, I shouldn’t wonder. Dogs. Cats. Zebra! They think just because you’re foreign you’ll just take what you’re given and not say a word. Well, not I! I won’t have it.’

  We eventually found a pizza takeaway place a few roads away. Nan told the man behind the counter all about our raw horse fiasco while he prepared us two large ham and pineapple pizzas and tried not to laugh.

  We ate the pizza sitting on plastic chairs on the pavement. It wasn’t the Parisian dinner I had pictured, and I told Til as much when she asked me what I was sulking about.

  She shrugged. ‘Your nan seems all right with it.’

  This was true, at least.

  Mona Lisa

  The next day was our only full day in Paris and, naturally, I had a plan that maximised every minute of it.

  0800 hours: breakfast

  0900 hours: Eiffel Tower

  1100 hours: the Louvre

  Et cetera et cetera.

  I knew Til still thought I was over-controlling things but she didn’t bring it up this time. What could I say? It’s hard to change a habit of a lifetime overnight.

  I gave Nan a rundown of the plan. ‘The Loo-vree,’ she said slowly, trying carefully to make the sounds. ‘Loo-vror. What’s that, then?’

  ‘Art gallery thing,’ I told her. ‘We can see the Mona Lisa?’

  ‘The Mona What-a?’

  ‘You know, it’s that really famous painting. Of a woman.’ I took out my phone and did a quick image search. ‘Here.’

  I held it up and Nan squinted at the screen. ‘Oh yeah. I know the one. Funny looking, isn’t she?’

  I shrugged. ‘I guess. I don’t know who she is.’

  ‘Well, I’ve seen her now, haven’t I? There, in your phone. Don’t need to traipse all the way down to this Loo-vror, do we?’

  ‘Yeah but –’

  ‘Maybe just let your nan do what she wants to do?’ Til said, picking lazily at a croissant.

  I glared at her. She was meant to be here for support, not rebellion.

  ‘Yes, let me do what I want to do,’ Nan echoed.

  ‘What do you want to do, Nan?’

  ‘I want to sit outside a nice French cafe and drink as much red wine as they’ll bring me and talk to handsome French men.’

  So that’s what we did. Sort of.

  It was a hot day, and since Nan had thrown my plans into disarray I didn’t know which direction to walk in. We ambled around the quiet residential streets of the ninth arrondisement but Nan kept getting out of breath and asking us to stop every few minutes and eventually Til said, ‘All these cafes look the same, Grace. Let’s just pick somewhere.

  We sat down around a metal table on a pavement corner near the entrance to a tiny park and a metro station. Nan ordered a bottle of red wine (‘Why pretend I’m only here for a glass?’) and Til and I ordered some random bits of food and drink – chips, croque monsieurs, lemonade.

  Nan was quiet for a bit, just sipping her wine and staring out across the road at the cars and bikes and smart women with tiny dogs and men carrying ladders and everything else going on.

  I was anxious about keeping up my live tweeting of our mini-break. I’d told my followers I’d be seeing all the sights today, but here I was sitting on the pavement in a perfectly boring street with nothing more to show them than a few tall buildings and some railings.

  I took my phone out of my pocket. The image of the Mona Lisa was still in my browser. I saved it to my photos, then I posted it to Instagram:

  Nan hanging out with this mysterious lady today #NanOnTour

  Who was to know that I hadn’t seen it in the flesh? What did it matter anyway? The painting was going to look exactly the same if I went down there and took my own photo, wasn’t it?

  I checked my phone fifteen minutes later but I had just one like. I was disappointed. Had the people lost interest in #NanOnTour? I decided they were clearly just an uncultured rabble with no appreciation of art. I decided to keep my updates more low-brow from now on. One has to tailor one’s material to one’s audience, after all.

  Til laughed suddenly. I looked at her. ‘Paris, eh,’ she said, shaking her head. She tilted her head towards the sun and closed her eyes.

  I just nodded.

  Paris.

  Was this it? Was this the moment? The one we were living for? Why did I still feel like I was waiting for something?

  I’d felt like this before. I was used to it. I remembered one specific occasion when I was about nine, Dad had taken Ollie and me to a new leisure centre that had opened up fifteen miles away. The place was heaven – four water slides, a wave machine activated every twenty minutes in the huge oblong pool, a self-service milkshake machine in reception. We’d been there less than fifteen minutes when I turned to Dad wide-eyed and said, ‘This is amazing! Can we come here again?’ and Dad had laughed and said, ‘But we’re here now, Gracie. Just enjoy that.’ I knew he’d made a good point, but I still struggled with the idea. That this moment was it. I wanted some guarantee of a future moment. Now did not seem enough.

  As Nan drank her wine, she asked Til about what she planned to do after the summer.

  ‘College,’ Til said.

  Nan nodded slowly. ‘Education, eh. You kids love it, don’t you? I couldn’t wait to get away. Get a job. Make some money.

  ‘Can’t hardly get any jobs without it though,’ Til said.

  ‘Not these days, I suppose,’ Nan said. ‘Do you know, Grace, I said to your cousin Katie the other day, I said, “What exactly is it that you do for a living?” and she sat there with a totally straight face and said, “I’m a Senior Digital Strategy Executive, Nan.” I ask you! They make this stuff up, they surely do. Is that what you’re going to do, Til, after all this education? Be a Senior Digital Strategy Executive?’

  Til laughed. ‘Nah. Nothing like that. I’m going to do plumbing. Going to get my NVQ then probably do an apprenticeship. Then, work.’

  Nan nodded her approval. ‘Sounds very sensible, my girl,’ she said. ‘You should listen to your mate here, Grace. She’ll be looking after herself in no time. None of this living off your mum and dad for the next ten years that you’ve got planned. Lounging around in grubby student digs smoking funny cigarettes and reading poetry. They in
dulge you, you know. I wouldn’t have been bankrolling that kind of lifestyle for any of mine, I can tell you that for nothing.’

  I sat up in my chair. I felt like I’d been ambushed from nowhere. ‘I don’t want … I’m not planning to –’

  Nan held her hands up, her palms facing me, and leant back in her chair. ‘Nothing to do with me, is it. How you spend your time. How you spend their money. No one’s interested in what their old grandma has to say about anything, I know that.’

  I was so annoyed by what Nan had said, annoyed on so many levels, that I could hardly get the words out. The idea that I’d been tied to my desk, never having any fun or putting a foot out of line for the last year was because of laziness, because I wanted to live off Mum and Dad for as long as possible, was so far from the truth I didn’t even know where to start.

  Til stepped in for me. ‘My plan ain’t no judgement on what other people want to do,’ she said. ‘I just can’t be like my mum, getting paid zero money all her life because she never learnt to do anything that other people need. She gets dropped from a job in a second because there’s always a hundred other people who can do the exact same thing queueing up to do it. I just want a van and a toolbox and a little business to call my own.’

  Nan nodded and smiled and probably wished that Til was her granddaughter instead of me. I glared at my sandwich.

  ‘Don’t sulk,’ Til said, as Nan was gesticulating to the waiter that he should bring more wine. ‘I thought you did want to sit around in a grubby house reading poetry. That’s what uni’s all about, isn’t it?’

  ‘No!’ I said. ‘I just wanted a good job in law or business or fashion or something.’

  ‘Fashion?’ Til smirked.

  ‘Yeah OK, not fashion.’ I paused. ‘I don’t know. I just wanted to … to be something.’

  ‘Something better than a plumber?’ Til leant on her elbow, one eyebrow raised.

  I sighed. ‘No. I don’t even know. Anyway, I don’t want it any more, do I. I told you. I’m done with that. With studying. With waiting. This is life. Now.’