You Only Live Once Read online

  ‘So.’ Til had an amused smile. ‘You’re not going back to school? No A levels?’

  ‘No,’ I said, with more certainty than I felt.

  ‘We’ll see,’ Til said, leaning back in her chair and tilting her face towards the sun again.

  Other Plans

  After a while a man came to sit on the table next to us. He was probably about seventy. He had wispy grey hair and was wearing a grey waistcoat over a T-shirt.

  He sat down heavily on one of the metal chairs and one of the waiters said something to him in a tone that made me think he went there often and they knew him well. He said something to Nan in French. I didn’t understand it so I can’t imagine Nan did, but that didn’t stop her replying.

  ‘Perfect, isn’t it. When you stop rushing around. When you just sit.’

  The man said something else. Although it might just have been a noise. It can be hard to tell.

  Then he pointed at me and said, ‘Daughter?’

  Nan laughed. ‘Granddaughter. Ain’t she lovely?’

  I’d never heard Nan say anything like this about me before. She was probably drunk.

  ‘Ah, oui,’ the man agreed, without really looking at me.

  Nan then launched into a monologue. I have no idea how much the man understood but he nodded and smiled and had a twinkle in his eye like he was finding the whole thing rather amusing.

  Nan told him how well I did at school, how organised I was and how even as a little kid I was always making lists and plans and keeping everyone in check. At first I felt a bit irritated by all this – the way she was basically making fun of me, right in front of me, to a perfect stranger. But then Nan started talking about how I’d organised this whole trip as a surprise for her and how I’d taken care of everything and made lists and printed out maps and wanted everything to be just right. It was about at this point that I realised Nan wasn’t really talking to the man at all. She was looking at him, and he was looking at her, but he probably didn’t have a clue what she was saying and she wasn’t bothered either way. She was talking to me. For my benefit, anyway.

  She was saying thank you.

  She was definitely drunk.

  Eventually, she stopped pretending to talk to the man at all and he finished his coffee and ambled off.

  ‘I thought you didn’t like it here,’ I said quietly.

  Nan held my hand. ‘I like it very much, my love.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That’s good then.’

  Then Nan leant back in her chair and poured herself another glass of wine from her jug.

  ‘You know, Grace,’ she said, looking up at the sky. ‘The best things in my life weren’t planned. Moving to Scotland in the seventies. Didn’t know that was going to happen. Opening the shop. That was never on the cards. Just took a punt. Having your father! That was definitely not planned.’

  I wasn’t sure you were supposed to say that kind of thing out loud. I wondered if Dad knew.

  ‘You can’t plan everything. Else you start to miss out,’ Nan went on.

  ‘Life is what happens to us while we’re busy making other plans,’ Til said suddenly.

  ‘Exactly, my girl,’ Nan said, clapping her hands together. ‘Who said that?’

  ‘John Lennon,’ I said, quick as a flash. I should know – the day of my post-hospital epiphany I’d written out the lyric and sellotaped it to the wall next to my bed.

  ‘Nope,’ Nan said. ‘Allen Saunders. Don’t believe everything you read.’

  Happy-Face Nan

  Getting a rather drunk Nan up from her rickety chair on the pavement and steering her by the elbow through the uneven streets of Paris to the hotel took some considerable time. She kept stopping to sit down on the metal chairs dotted along the pavements outside bars and restaurant and to make unsolicited comments to the people all around her.

  We passed a row of shops and Nan spent a long time gazing at the ornate pastries in the window in wonder, before ordering me in to spend a shocking amount of money on a box of them. Nan ate one, cream spreading from her cheek to her nose as we ambled past some more shops.

  ‘Look at this, girls,’ Nan said, stopping abruptly outside one window. ‘A butcher’s! This is where they get the horses from! Look at it all!’ she said, gesturing to the plates of raw meat in a glass case in the window and laughing loudly. ‘They got it all here, I can see. Alligators. Hippos. That’s a unicorn, I shouldn’t wonder!’ she said, pointing at something I thought was almost certainly a joint of beef. ‘Here, take a photo.’ She turned to look at me, her arms outstretched as if presenting the array of meats, a wide smile on her face.

  I did as I was told.

  ‘Post that one!’ Nan ordered. ‘Show everyone what goes on over here!’ She laughed again.

  It had been a while since I updated the world on #NanOnTour, and I couldn’t deny it was quite a funny photo, so I posted it to Instagram with the caption:

  My fave happy-face nan

  I could feel my phone vibrating with notifications straight away, and by the time we got back to the hotel I had seventy-five likes.

  ‘Weird,’ I said to Til, as I sat on the bed and kicked my shoes off. ‘Why would so many people like a photo of an old lady outside a shop?’

  She took her own phone out and frowned at the screen.

  ‘Ha. Amazing,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nice caption.’ She tossed her phone over to me.

  ‘Oh no!’

  There was the photo of Nan, smiling delightedly at the meat display, her face smeared with the remnants of an expensive French patisserie. And above her, there was my caption, which for some reason my phone had decided to correct from ‘My fave happy-face nan’ to:

  My fave hairy-face man

  ‘Hairy-face man!’ I wailed, as Til lay on her back on her bed, shaking with laughter. ‘Why would I call my nan that?’

  ‘I think she’d like it,’ Til said. ‘She’s always talking about her whiskers.’

  Til may have been right, but I decided not to risk it by telling her.

  On the train home the next day, Nan opened her handbag and tipped out in excess of fifteen croissants, clearly stolen from the continental breakfast buffet at the hotel.

  ‘Seemed a shame to leave them there, in the basket,’ she said, ripping one open.

  Til put her earphones in and closed her eyes. Nan seemed to be watching her from her seat.

  ‘She’s good, that Til,’ she said to me. ‘You want to stick with her.’

  I saw a small smile creep over Til’s face. She didn’t open her eyes.

  PART 4

  During which I consider the unlikely hypothesis that I am, in fact, a people person

  News

  Nan died four days after we returned from Paris.

  I came home from Til’s one evening to find Mum, Dad and Ollie sitting around the kitchen table. They were all staring into space. Ollie was often sitting around staring at nothing, but not Mum and Dad. I knew something was up.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Sit down,’ Mum said quietly, so I did.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nan,’ Mum said quietly.

  ‘What?’ I said again.

  Dad rubbed his hand over his face. ‘She’s gone, Grace.’

  ‘Gone?’ I said, although I, of course, knew what he meant.

  ‘It was her heart,’ Mum sad. ‘Uncle Paul just rang.’

  I sat down next to Ollie. It didn’t feel real. She’d been fine. The whole time we were away. Fine.

  ‘Was it because we …?’ I started. ‘We shouldn’t have gone to Paris, should we? But she was OK! I thought she was OK.’

  Mum shook her head. ‘She hadn’t been fine for a long time, apparently. She knew she wasn’t going to be with us for long.’

  ‘So, the whole time we were there, she knew … she knew that …’

  Dad nodded. ‘She knew she wasn’t going to be making any more trips.’

  ‘Did she kn
ow it was the last time she’d see me?’

  Mum looked at Dad. ‘I think that’s likely,’ he said.

  I wanted to walk, so I did, with no particular purpose, although I discovered forty minutes later that, in a roundabout way, my feet had carried me to Til’s block.

  The lift wasn’t working – it was never working – so I trudged my way up the nine flights of steps to her flat. Her mum was smoking and watching TV in the lounge as usual.

  ‘Hi,’ I called through the open door. She didn’t reply.

  Til was lying on her bed with her headphones on. She was holding her hand up above her head, turning it over slowly as if she was examining it.

  ‘Do you think I should get a tattoo?’ she said when she saw me. ‘Like loads of tattoos. Not pointless flowers or Chinese writing. I mean, like, information. Dates I should remember. The periodic table. Not being funny, right, but I’ve got a lot of skin. Think how much info I could pack in. Like, tide timetables, them charts that show what shapes the stars make … I saw this poster once with diagrams of different cocktails. You know, like the ingredients to make them. I could have that. I could –’

  ‘Nan’s dead,’ I said from the doorway.

  Til opened her mouth then closed it again. She shifted herself so she was sitting up on her bed. There was a pause, maybe thirty seconds or more.

  ‘God,’ she said. ‘Oh, god.’

  And then I started to cry.

  We didn’t cry, Til and I, as a rule. I had never seen Til cry. Not even close. And I think the only time I’d cried – at least with her – was when I’d got my hand trapped in the hinge of the PE cupboard in Year Nine. Til had laughed then. She didn’t laugh this time.

  I sat down on the end of Til’s bed and cried for a solid four and a half minutes. Til edged over to me and put her arm awkwardly around my shoulder.

  ‘Oh, man,’ she said. ‘Sorry, Gracie. She was so sound.’

  I nodded but I couldn’t say anything.

  Goodbye

  Til came with us to the funeral. I didn’t ask her to but she wanted to. She looked funny in a way, wearing her black school trousers and a black shirt, which I guessed she must’ve borrowed from her mum because it was too short in the body. I felt a surge of affection for her when we picked her up outside her block, for making the effort. For wanting to say goodbye to Nan with me.

  It was my first funeral. I didn’t know what to expect. I’d seen them on films, and seen news footage of grand celebrity funerals. I suppose I assumed it would all be quite dramatic. Ladies in flamboyant black hats with netting covering their faces. Men with red eyes grasping each other tightly. It wasn’t really like that at all though.

  Everything felt so low-key. Sad, but so ordinary. It didn’t seem like we were marking the end of a life. That we were there because Nan – a person who had been very much alive – now simply didn’t exist at all.

  As we pulled into the crematorium, Mum and Dad chatted quietly about where they should park and if different chapels had designated parking zones or if we could just put the car anywhere. It felt no more momentous than if we’d been pulling up outside Ikea.

  It was strange too, seeing everyone outside the crematorium. Lots of them I saw all the time – Uncle Paul, some of my cousins – but others I hadn’t seen for years. I’d last seen my cousin Daniel when I was six and he was nine and he’d broken my radio by pouring lemonade into the speaker. He’d been weedy then, no bigger than me. Now he was nineteen, a rugby player, bursting out of his neatly ironed grey shirt. He and Ollie shook hands like proper grown-up men.

  There was some awkward chat about what everyone had been up to. I heard several people say it was good to see each other again, just that it was ‘a shame about the circumstances’. Dad shook hands with people I didn’t recognise and thanked them for coming. Lots of people came over to us and said they were sorry for our loss and we gave sad smiles and said thank you.

  Inside the chapel, each of the wooden benches had been laid with ‘order of service’ cards with Nan’s name and photo on the front. Seeing her face there, her eyes looking mischievous, made something turn over in my chest. I thought of her demanding to have her photo taken outside the butcher’s in the Paris street. Mum squeezed my hand.

  Uncle Paul read the eulogy and Dad said some words too. It was interesting, hearing about everything Nan had done earlier in her life. Everything she and Granddad had done together. Playing in poker tournaments. Fostering wayward teenagers even though they had little kids of their own. I suppose I’d sort of forgotten Nan hadn’t been old all her life.

  The man leading the funeral – the celebrant, he was called, which seemed an odd term for it – thanked Dad and Paul, and then he said that he had a few words to read from Elizabeth herself. People looked at each other then, twitches of surprise on their faces.

  The celebrant began to read.

  Hello family, friends, people I used to know, people who have just shown up for the free sandwiches. Welcome to my party. Sorry I couldn’t be with you.

  I’m seventy-eight now, and the docs reckon I won’t make seventy-nine, so I wanted to get a few things down while I’ve got your attention. Maybe this way some of you will actually listen to me for once.

  I’ve been on this planet for 28,515 days. I just worked it out. It doesn’t sound that long really, when you think of how quickly each day goes by. I know I’m lucky to have had as much time as I have. I know a lot of people get far less. But I tell you one thing for sure – it doesn’t half go quick! Especially as you get older.

  So message number one, family, friends and sandwich-lovers: don’t waste any time. You can’t afford to.

  Decide what you want to do, and then do it. And if you can’t decide what you want to do, just do anything. Just do something. And you might find that when you’re doing that something, you realise what else you might want to do. Whatever you do, don’t waste time sitting around in your underpants waiting for something to come to you. Nothing good ever happened like that.

  Mum, Dad and I all looked at Ollie. He just looked down at his lap, rubbing his thumbs together.

  What else? Be honest, I think. Tell people you love them while you can. And tell people when they’re getting on your wick too, because nothing is a bigger waste of energy than a grudge. Pick your battles wisely, but if you’ve picked a battle then fight it well. Be brave and kind and fair. Admit when you’re wrong.

  See the world, if you can. Don’t stay in when you could go out. Don’t say no when you could say yes.

  Remember this: in the end, all that matters is the people you know. Know as many people as you can. Love some of them too, if you can bear to. They’re not as bad as you think. They’re just trying their best, just like you are.

  Goodbye, my loves. Look after each other.

  From

  Elizabeth

  AKA Mum

  AKA Aunty Bet

  AKA Betty-boo

  and

  – the celebrant coughed awkwardly and blinked.

  AKA your favourite hairy-face man.

  Around us people exchanged confused looks and muttered comments about if they’d heard that quite right. I turned around to look at Til, who was sitting in the row behind me, her mouth clamped shut, her eyes shining as she tried to hold in the laughter.

  ‘How did she find out?’ I whispered.

  Til just shook her head and shrugged, and I too had to try not to laugh in case people thought I was being disrespectful at this sombre occasion, even though I knew Nan wouldn’t have been a bit bothered if I had.

  In fact, I’m sure she’d have been delighted.

  Interpersonal Relationships

  That evening, when Mum and Dad dropped Til off, I got out too and went up to her flat with her. She handed me a can of Diet Coke and we sat in silence for a while.

  ‘It’s sort of amazing in a way,’ Til said slowly. ‘Like, the timing I mean.’

  I looked at her.

  ‘I just mean,’ she
said, ‘the way you decide to start all this … living, all this doing stuff … right now. And that meant you decided to see your nan and take her to Paris and do all this once-in-a-lifetime stuff with her.’

  I felt myself tearing up. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘It was all too late, wasn’t it? Why, why, why did I keep putting her off? I should have gone to see her more. Every Sunday. With flowers and a box of Jaffa Cakes. Why did I leave it till it was too late?’

  Til sat up straight and put her hand on my arm. ‘No, that’s not what I meant at all, man!’ she said. ‘The opposite. It wasn’t too late. It was just in time, wasn’t it? You took your nan on her trip of a lifetime, just in time.’

  I breathed out heavily and rubbed my eyes. ‘I guess.’

  ‘It’s totally true, Gracie,’ Til said.

  We were quiet again while I thought this over. She was right, I decided. Or at least, that was the best way I could look at it now.

  ‘When I started all this – when I decided to start seizing the day, all the days, doing stuff – I thought I’d just do some stupid stuff like the horse riding or whatever. I didn’t think it would make me do this. I didn’t realise it would be the difference between spending three last, proper, days with my nan and fobbing her off with a postcard and a made-up promise to come and see her at some point.’

  Til nodded and we were quiet again for a while. I was thinking.

  I sat up suddenly, and turned to look at Til. ‘I think this is it, you know. This is what it’s all about. The other day, I had this whole conversation with Ollie, about his life and what we were doing and everything. We never talk! That would never have happened if it hadn’t been for the new philosophy. And then Paris, my last days with Nan. That wouldn’t have happened either. This is what it’s about, Til. Don’t you think? It’s about people. And, like, relationships. Not stupid stuff.’

  Til nodded, spinning her can around in her hands. ‘Sort of like what your nan said, in her letter.’