You Only Live Once

by Jess Vallance

  Genitals! She said genitals. How had this happened? We were meant to be talking about my mutilated airways and now we were talking about genitals and sex diseases.

  ‘How would I have got it?’ I felt myself reaching up to cover the blisters with my hands. I was suddenly deeply ashamed of them, sitting there, all sex-diseased on my face.

  Claudette shrugged. ‘Any contact with the virus. Kissing …’

  I made a face. That was not something that had happened recently.

  ‘Sharing a cup with friends or family members …’

  Great, I thought. So that was it. I’d caught it from sharing the toothpaste mug with Dad. I’d got a sex disease

  on my face

  from my dad.

  I still felt there was a fairly major issue that Claudette seemed to be overlooking.

  ‘I’m still jaundiced,’ I said. ‘So my liver must be diseased. That’s my most serious symptom.’

  Claudette frowned a little, then she came over and lifted up one of my arms. She ran her fingers over it then – weirdness beyond weirdness – she lifted it up and smelt it.

  Suddenly I wasn’t sure if Claudette was a real nurse at all. First there was the squeamishness around a perfectly naturally (albeit slight leaky) urine sample, then she’d started talking about genitals, and now she was outright sniffing my limbs! She was clearly one of those bizarre fetishists and had snuck into the hospital just to rub her nose on body parts and other such oddness.

  ‘Dihydroxyacetone,’ she said, letting my arm go again. ‘That’s what I think that is.’

  I felt my eyes widen. ‘Is it terminal?’

  Claudette laughed. ‘It’s not a disease. It’s a chemical. It’s what they put in fake tan to colour the skin. That biscuity smell is what happens when it reacts with the top layer of skin.’

  I looked at my arms. ‘I haven’t used fake tan. I don’t. As a natural redhead, my colouring doesn’t carry a tan well. I prefer to stay fair. Like a delicate porcelain doll.’

  Claudette frowned slightly. ‘Well, that’s what it smells like. And that would certainly explain your … vivid skin tone.’ She smiled in the way that people do when they’re trying not to smile, like their lips are being tugged upwards by tiny invisible threads. ‘I think you might be right when you say you don’t carry a tan well.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t used fake tan. It can’t be that. Unless someone has come into my bedroom in the night and fake tanned me without my consent, which is a very strange thing to do. Although nonetheless disturbing.’

  ‘What about moisturisers? Any other products that could contain dihydroxyacetone?’

  I shook my head firmly. ‘No! I –’

  Then I stopped myself. Due to a lack of funds, and a lack of inclination to walk all the way to Boots, I had for the past four days been sneaking Mum’s body lotion into my room after my shower in the morning.

  ‘Radiance,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Pardon me?’

  I looked up at Claudette. I could feel my cheeks turning pink, which no doubt was setting off my yellow arms a treat. ‘It was called Radiance. But it just said it would give me a healthy glow!’

  Claudette smiled again. She didn’t even try to hide it this time. ‘Well, it’s certainly a glow.’

  ‘So, just to confirm,’ I said. ‘What you’re saying is that I’m not in danger of an imminent and painful death?’

  Claudette shook her head. ‘I shouldn’t think so. A cold sore and a cold, that’s all. They’ve probably struck at the same time because you were tired and run down after your exams.’

  I felt very small indeed.

  I thanked Claudette for her time and bolted through the hospital curtain before I could be diagnosed with any more sex diseases and before Claudette could smell any more of my limbs.

  A Wake-Up

  It was only when I got outside that the reality hit me:

  The bad thing about being told you’re not going to die from a tropical disease is that you feel quite silly. The good thing about it, though, is that you’re not going to die.

  I wasn’t going to die. Not any time soon anyway.

  I had to phone Til at once to tell her the good news.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Til. I’m not going to die!’

  ‘No? You get tested then? You give them your wee?’

  ‘Yes. Well, sort of. I mean, I’m not well, obviously, but I’m not dying. That’s the main thing.’

  ‘How do you mean “not well”?’

  ‘I have a bad throat. And a cold sore.’

  ‘Didn’t you say you’d turned yellow? What’s that about?’

  ‘Tell me, Til. Do you think it’s ethical or sensible or legal for a company to just slip fake tan into a moisturiser without being quite explicit that that’s what it is?’

  Til was already laughing. ‘No way. You did not.’

  ‘It’s actually not funny when you think about it.’

  ‘Tell me you have not just been to casualty to tell them your fake tan has gone wrong. That is too good.’

  I ignored her. ‘I’m serious, Til. Think about it. They put a chemical in their product that changes people’s skin! Changing people’s skin colour without their consent is assault! Or vandalism. Vandalism of the skin! It’s not OK, anyway.’

  Til just carried on laughing so I hung up on her to annoy her.

  The bus wasn’t due to come for another twenty minutes so I decided to walk home. I turned off the busy main road and into the park. It would take ten minutes longer that way, but I didn’t care because suddenly, I wasn’t running out of time. I had all the time in the world!

  I had been given a second chance!

  Just five hours earlier I’d been thinking about all the things I’d never get to do – I’d never visit New York, never ride an elephant, never learn to play chess or speak Mandarin. I mean, some things I wasn’t that bothered about – chess always seemed a very dreary way to spend time – but the point was, it was up to me again. If I wanted to waste four hours shuffling little bits of wood around a chequered board with a bearded Russian then I could.

  A whole day of thinking about how I’d spent most of the last six months – locked in my room in the dark, hunched over my desk, listening to music that sounded like whales having orgasms because it apparently ‘aided concentration’ – had been an alarming wake-up call.

  I was only going to be sixteen once. I would be seventeen in a few months. And then a few months after that I’d be eighteen. All these ages – my youth, my best years – weren’t going to last long, and what the hell was I doing with them? I had voluntarily spent fifty per cent of being sixteen listening to whales having sex and doing other things that actively brought me displeasure.

  What are you doing, Grace?

  What are you doing with your life?

  The Epiphany

  I’d heard all the sayings, of course, all the motivational slogans – ‘you only live once’, ‘carpe diem’, ‘live for the moment’ – but I’d never really taken in the words before. They were just things that people put on bumper stickers and fridge magnets that didn’t mean anything. Just like ‘believe in yourself’ or ‘shoot for the moon – even if you miss you’ll land among the stars’.

  I mean, honestly. Repulsive, the lot of them.

  (And, as I frequently liked to point out, that stars thing makes no sense at all. The nearest star to the moon is 93 million miles away so if you landed among them you should probably give up shooting altogether.)

  But suddenly I was seeing these words for the life-changing messages they really were.

  You do only live once.

  I will only have this day – this being sixteen and five months and two days – once. Tomorrow it will be gone.

  I was taken aback by the monumental profoundness of the realisation. I was having an epiphany, right there, standing in Queen’s Park, watching a duck eating a samosa by the pond.

  I heard laughter coming from my left, across th
e other side of the water. I looked over and saw a group of four people probably a few years older than me. They seemed to be some kind of care-free bohemians, with dreadlocked hair and coloured skirts and no tops (the boys had no tops, not the girls. They weren’t that care-free).

  One boy was juggling with floaty bits of coloured fabric. A girl was poking a small campfire (technically not allowed in Queen’s Park – more evidence of their care-free nature, I suppose). They were tanned and laughing and quite obviously beautifully untroubled.

  Before my near-death experience, I probably wouldn’t have thought much about the people at all, but if you’d asked me, I suppose I might have guessed they were rather disorganised, perhaps a bit lazy and probably never going to do much with their lives. But looking at them now, still in the midst of my life-changing epiphany, I could see that the reality was that it was me who was never going to do much with my life. Not at the rate I was going, anyway.

  When we’d gone to Thorpe Park in the spring for my belated sixteenth birthday celebration, I’d left early because I wanted to get a good night’s sleep so I could perform to the best of my ability in a history test. I’d spent the whole day barely listening to anything anyone said to me because I was so busy trying to make sure I could list all the key elements of Roosevelt’s New Deal. In fact, so distracted was I, that as we reached the pinnacle of Nemesis Inferno and everyone else screamed in delight in anticipation of our fast descent, I’d found myself shouting out loud the words ‘Agricultural Adjustment Act’.

  But it turned out that it wasn’t even a proper test. It didn’t count for anything at all. One of the questions was to make up an amusing mnemonic to help us remember the names of Roosevelt’s main critics, and the only criteria for getting the mark was if Mr Day thought it was funny enough. An utter waste of time.

  When I’d been going around cutting short milestone birthday celebrations for that kind of inconsequential nothingness I didn’t see how I’d ever had the cheek to think that the free-spirited jugglers were wasting their lives. If anything these people should be my idols. My inspiration.

  I watched them a while longer. I imagined what their lives were like. They were definitely outside a lot; you could see that from their skin. They probably travelled to places like India and Peru and made friends with people they met in hostels and stayed up late playing ukuleles and cooking noodles over camp fires. They probably did something new or interesting every day. They probably never got cold sores on account of being so stressed about trying to memorise a list of alkali metals for some stupid science exam. They probably didn’t accidentally paint themselves yellow and then bombard pleasant nurses called Claudette with tedious details about their summer holidays because they assumed they were dying. They probably learnt languages by striking up conversations with friendly, crinkly-eyed old men selling street food from a wheelbarrow, not from staring at a list of verbs they’d pinned to the back of a toilet door. These people probably never worried at all. They probably never had time to worry about life because they were too busy living it.

  And so I decided, then and there, that’s what I was going to do too.

  I was going to start living.

  PART 2

  During which I am care-free and luxuriate in hedonistic pursuits

  The Ultimate Bucket

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Til, do you want to ride a horse along a deserted beach with me? Maybe without a saddle. Health and safety dependent.’

  ‘No. Yeah. Maybe. Why?’

  I’d been buzzing with the excitement of my epiphany all the way home. Today was the first day of the rest of my life! That was another saying that once would’ve made me roll my eyes and/or puke in my own mouth but now seemed to be written just for me.

  It was the sheer endless possibility of it all that I was quite overcome with.

  And it was actually the perfect time for me to have an epiphany, with eight weeks of glorious freedom stretching out in front of me. Now, more than ever before, I was free to do anything!

  I felt a sudden compulsion to share my resolution with the world. I reached for my phone and typed a tweet:

  Life starts here!

  I probably sounded mad. Or drunk. But then on the other hand, social media was full of giddy, jubilant posts from students up and down the country, all on an end-of-exams high.

  I was sure that from this moment on I was going to seize every day. I was going to squeeze every minute for everything it had to give. I would try things, do things, have experiences. I wouldn’t turn down a single opportunity. But I knew I couldn’t sit around and wait for opportunities to come to me. Otherwise I might not get an offer any more exciting than extra cheese on my Subway. I was going to have to go out there and find things. Create opportunities.

  It was almost too much. I didn’t know where to begin. When the whole world is a collage of experiences, of which you’ve had basically none, how do you choose which experience to experience first?

  I turned on my laptop and ran a few searches:

  Experiences

  Things to do

  Things to do before you die

  After scrolling past a few websites selling corporate team-building activities and promoting stag dos, I found a site called ‘My Ultimate Bucket List’. It was a list of 1001 things everyone should do at least once in their lives. It was exactly what I was looking for.

  I didn’t want to spend too long examining every activity. Partly because sitting at my desk squinting at my laptop screen was exactly what I didn’t want to be doing now I’d been reborn, but also because I planned to get through a good chunk of those 1001 things eventually anyway, so it didn’t matter where I started.

  I scanned down the list.

  Give money to charity

  I wasn’t sure that was officially an ‘experience’, was it? I could easily drop a pound into the collection pot at the end of the till at Sainsbury’s if I wanted to check something off the list, but it wasn’t really what I had in mind.

  Tell someone you love them

  Oh, please. Who would I be saying it to? Mum? Where was the excitement? Where was the stuff I could take photos of myself doing to show everyone how I was really living?

  Then, there it was, coming in at number forty-five.

  Ride a horse along a deserted beach

  Now this was what I was talking about.

  I could imagine it already – the sunset, the sound of the waves lapping the shore, the gentle breeze giving my hair a relaxed, tousled look as I expertly guided an elegant mare called Ebony or Clementine across the unspoilt sands. It would be the perfect start to my new life. And it would be the perfect scene for some attractive photos that I could post on Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat to show everyone that yes, I had been boring, I had been focused on school because that’s what I’d had to do, but now that was over, the real me could emerge – and the real me was fun and wild and care-free and having an amazing time.

  The Plural of Sand

  As brave I was feeling in my new role, I couldn’t help but think it would be more fun if I had someone to share my inaugural spontaneous experience with. I also needed someone to take the photos. All I had to do was convince Til what a good time we’d have.

  ‘I just think it sounds amazing, don’t you?’ I gushed. (I’m not sure I had ever gushed before.) ‘Galloping through the sands, not a care in the world, not a living person in sight. Well, except for each other, I suppose.’

  ‘Dude, it’s summer. The weather’s lush. The beach is going to be packed with kids and tourists and just about everyone from our school getting wasted on warm white wine.’

  She had a point, but I wasn’t deterred. ‘OK, so maybe not this beach. Maybe not Brighton beach. That wouldn’t work anyway because it’s stones, and I feel quite strongly that we need unspoilt sands. But we can find one, I’m sure. We can find some sands.’

  Til wasn’t exactly buzzing with enthusiasm but then if it was enthusiasm I was looking for, Ti
l probably wasn’t the first person I’d go to. ‘Why do you keep saying “sands”?’ she said. ‘Ain’t the plural of “sand” just “sand”? Unless you’re the Prince of Persia.’

  I ignored this question. ‘Meet me at the station in an hour.’

  ‘What, we’re doing this today?’

  ‘Yes!’ I said, exasperated. ‘Because today is everything. Today is all we’ve got. This moment. Now or never.’

  ‘Gracie, have you been sniffing your Tippex pen?’

  ‘No. I’ll explain when I get there.’

  I met Til at the station ready for the 13.04 train to Chichester. After I’d (sort of) managed to rope Til into my first spontaneous experience, I’d done a bit of research and found there were some stables that offered horse rides a short walk away from West Wittering beach, which, according to the tourist board website, had ‘an expansive sandy beach’ and was in an area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. It sounded perfect for our needs.

  I remembered as I looked through the gallery of images on the website that just last term, my whole geography class had been taken on a day trip to West Wittering beach. There was some spurious educational reason for the outing – something to do with grass species and sand dunes – but it was widely acknowledged by staff and students alike that the trip was essentially about having some fun in the sun before the serious business of GCSE revision began in earnest. My fellow students embraced this opportunity fully, but I didn’t even entertain the idea of going.

  The trip, it was clear, would in no way contribute to my exam grade. There was nothing I would learn by taking a whole day out of study that I couldn’t find out from reading two short pages of my text book. In terms of facts harvested per hour spent, it simply did not offer a good return on investment. I’d put this reasoning to Mr Gosport, our Geography teacher.

  ‘That’s probably true,’ he’d conceded. ‘But this is a more enjoyable way of learning the facts, surely?’