You Only Live Once

by Jess Vallance

  ‘Badgers?’

  He nodded. ‘Yep. As well as –’ he gestured to the gang of slightly embarrassed-looking people giggling behind him – ‘Disney princesses, chocolate and Abba.’

  That explained the white jumpsuits, at least.

  So there I was, holding a badger costume and agreeing to dance the Macarena in public. Even if I hadn’t been embracing my new philosophy, I felt the conversation had already gone too far for me to back out. I had no choice but to step into the thick fur suit, pull on the enormous badger head and join the others, wondering how on earth we’d ended up here when we were just going about our business one quiet Sunday morning.

  ‘OK, team!’ Romeo said, clapping his hands. ‘Her train gets in at eight minutes past. When I see her come towards the barriers, I’ll start the music. When she sees me, I’ll turn it down so I can do the whole one-knee thing. So basically, just dance till the music stops!’

  At least, I thought, as I loitered around with the other recruits, at least no one can see my face.

  When the music started, I flung my arms out in front of me, trying to keep in sync with the others as much as I could, bearing in mind how hard it was to see them through my tiny badger eye-holes.

  Once I got going, I had the weirdest feeling that I might actually be enjoying myself. I had no idea when I’d left home to buy a lightbulb and some face wipes that an hour later I’d be dancing the Macarena in a full badger suit as the 11.08 from London pulled into platform five.

  But then, as the passengers climbed off the train and started to swarm towards the barrier, something funny happened to the music. I think the CD must’ve started skipping in the little stereo the guy had brought with him because the same three or four seconds kept repeating again and again.

  Now let me ask you: what would you do if you were performing a dance routine and the same snippet of music kept repeating? Would you:

  Ignore the music and continue to work through the steps of the whole routine undeterred?

  OR

  Repeat the snippet of dance routine that matched the snippet of music, and hope to get back on track when the music did?

  It’s not an easy predicament to find oneself in, but I plumped for B.

  Unfortunately, the moment the music decided to stick was the part of the routine where you’re supposed to slap yourself on the hips with each hand in turn.

  So there I was, standing in the middle of Brighton station in a badger suit, repeatedly slapping myself on the bum.

  I have a feeling it wasn’t quite the romantic spectacle the Romeo man was going for because I suddenly felt him pulling on my arm, ‘Stop it!’ he hissed. ‘What are you doing?’ The interruption threw me completely, so I just stopped altogether.

  Anyway, the lady in question finally arrived and seemed more than a little alarmed by the spectacle of the bizarrely dressed strangers circling her boyfriend, who by this point was down on one knee.

  I wasn’t close enough to hear what was said, but the woman didn’t look very happy, and shortly after, neither did the man. She stormed off in the direction of the station exit and he jogged after her.

  ‘She said no!’ I heard someone say.

  Then the Snow White man called, ‘She said no, everyone! It’s all off! Abort! Abort!’

  The whole scene seemed to have got a little out of hand so I quickly slipped off the badger suit, draped it over a railing and made my exit.

  On the way home, I typed a tweet:

  Just dressed up as a badger and slapped my own bum at the station. #youonlyliveonce

  The Greatest of Ease

  I was surprised to find that my badger bum tweet had proved rather popular. It had been retweeted thirty-five times and people were even sharing their own stories with my #youonlyliveonce hashtag.

  All in all, I was pretty pleased with my progress. First the donkey ride, then Til’s birthday – including the unplanned and understated coming out episode – and then the slapping of the badger bum. So far, so carpe diem.

  I felt I wanted to do something more though. I wanted to up the ante. I wanted to do something that I categorically would not have even considered if it hadn’t been for my new philosophy.

  I went back to the ‘My Ultimate Bucket List’ website and scanned down. I’d seen this one before, but this time I paused on it:

  Do a bungee jump

  It was the classic stunt, wasn’t it?

  It was basically the poster child for the whole concept of living for the moment. When you saw photos of people online who were fun and free and happy and embracing life, they were invariably dangling upside down over some beautiful waterfall with a strap around their ankles, their hands in the air and a beaming smile on their face.

  I couldn’t even think where one might go to take part in a bungee jump. I was obviously keen that it should be a reputable arrangement. I may have become wild these days, but I wasn’t about to be throwing myself head-first off some unofficial crane with a dressing gown cord tied around my legs.

  I heard Ollie’s bedroom door open. It was one in the afternoon so about the usual time he made an appearance.

  Ollie was taking a year out after finishing college to work out what he was going to do next. The only thing was, his year out was fast becoming two years and I don’t think he was any nearer to making a plan. He said he wanted to find his ‘passion’ but so far the only places he’d tried looking were in his bed, in his PlayStation controller and in the pub at the bottom of the hill.

  ‘Ollie!’ I called. ‘Come here a minute.’

  ‘What?’ he grunted, appearing in my doorway in his filthy pyjama bottoms and no top. He hadn’t shaved for a while but he wasn’t really hairy enough for a proper beard so he just looked like he had a bit of a grubby face.

  ‘If one wanted to take part in a bungee-jump type activity, where would one go?’

  He crossed his arms over his chest. ‘One?’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Why are you talking like a weirdo?’

  ‘OK, me,’ I said.

  ‘Ha. You. As if.’

  I ignored him. I could hardly object to this response when I’d spent the last sixteen years avoiding anything with any element of risk. Avoiding anything that didn’t directly contribute to my ultimate goal of academic success.

  ‘Marvin did a bungee jump, didn’t he? For his eighteenth?’ Marvin was Ollie’s best friend. He was just the type of person to do a bungee jump. He was currently travelling around India on his own. Last week he uploaded a photo of himself squatting in the street next to an elderly bearded gentleman cooking something in a pan on an open fire. In fact, I thought, Marvin could be another idol for me. I decided to consider this later.

  Ollie narrowed his eyes, thinking for a moment. ‘Sort of. It wasn’t a bungee cord though … more of a swing. They wrap a thing around your waist, crank you up to the top of a metal arch, then let you go. And whoosh!’ He made a swooping motion with his arm. ‘You swing right down.’

  I thought about this. ‘Is it high?’

  Ollie nodded. ‘Seventy metres or so, I think.’

  I still wasn’t sure if it counted though. I mean, a bungee jump was iconic, wasn’t it? You could say to people, ‘I’ve done a bungee jump,’ and sound impressive and daredevil and wild. I wasn’t sure ‘I went on a sort of massive swing thing’ had the same ring to it.

  ‘It looked amazing, actually,’ Ollie said. ‘Because you’ve got the strap around your middle, and you’re going horizontal as well as down, so it looks like you’re actually flying. For a minute, anyway.’

  Flying. This was more like it, I suppose. Imagine feeling like you’re flying! This was the kind of mind-blowing once in a lifetime sensation I was after.

  What did you do this morning, Grace?’

  Oh, you know, a bit of a flying through the air with the greatest of ease.

  Ollie looked at me. He could tell I was seriously considering it. ‘There is no way you’re going to do that,’ he said, pushing his hands in his p
yjama pockets and yawning. ‘No way.’

  ‘You don’t know that. I might do.’

  ‘If you do that I will personally give you fifty pounds.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said, turning back round to face my computer. ‘We’ll see.’

  The fact that Ollie seemed to find the idea of me doing anything daring so hard to believe made my mind up.

  Rush

  It was called Rush.

  I realised I’d seen the huge steel arc hundreds of times when I’ve been on the bus along the seafront but I’d never really thought about what it was. Up close, it was enormous. A dirty, dark, industrial-looking metal structure with a platform near the top, and some kind of rope hanging from the peak. It was rather intimidating, as a spectacle.

  There was a small prefab hut at the bottom, a bit like one of the mobile classrooms at school. Above it was a sign painted on a wooden board. ‘Rush: Don’t look down’, it said. Where exactly you were supposed to look, I wasn’t sure.

  I went into the hut. There was a man on reception in a T-shirt with the same Rush logo as the sign. He had a beard and his hair scraped up into a sort of top-knot.

  ‘Howdy,’ he said with a smile.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Can I have a go? On the swing thing?’

  The man laughed. ‘Swing thing! It’s seventy metres in the air, it’s not a kiddies’ play park!’

  ‘Yes, I know, sorry.’ I felt my cheeks flush. I hadn’t meant to insult the extremeness of the extreme sport.

  ‘We’ve got a slot at three o'clock if you can hang on a bit?’

  I said I could and the man gave me a clipboard with a form to fill in asking me to confirm I didn’t have back or heart problems, and that I wasn’t pregnant. The entire second page of the form seemed to be a very long-winded and formal statement that could be essentially summed up as, ‘If you die, it’s not our fault.’ This made me slightly nervous to say the least.

  ‘It is safe, isn't it?’ I called to the man from my plastic chair in the hut. ‘I mean, I get that it’s meant to be a bit scary but there’s no actual danger involved, is there?’

  The man shrugged. ‘Nothing in life is one hundred per cent guaranteed safe. You could walk out of here and be hit by a bus. A bus could plunge down off the main road and flatten this whole hut. Everything’s dangerous, isn’t it, in the end. And not just buses.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, looking down at the form, looking at the bold lettering across the top:

  AT PARTICIPANT’S OWN RISK.

  ‘Why do you want to do it, anyway?’ the man asked, lazily flicking the elastic band on his wrist. ‘You don’t look the type, to be honest.’

  I looked down at myself. I looked quite normal, I thought. T-shirt. Trainers. I didn’t think there was anything about me to say whether I was or wasn’t the type to enjoy a go on a giant swing.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I demanded.

  He shrugged. ‘Oh, I dunno really. Just seem a bit uptight.’

  The cheek of it!

  I frowned.

  ‘No?’ he said. ‘Well, obviously not, as you’re here. What is it that appeals?’

  Looking up at the daunting steel structure with the waist strap flapping loosely in the wind, it was quite a difficult question to answer, it had to be said.

  ‘I’m living every moment as if it were my last,’ I told him.

  He laughed. ‘Fair enough. Hope it isn’t your last, then!’

  He laughed again. I did not.

  ‘Joke!’ he said. ‘You’ll be fine.’

  I decided to take the precaution of getting a photo of the Rush sign and slogan and posting it on Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram so that if I didn’t make it off the swing alive, at least people would know how daring and adventurous I’d been.

  Three people liked it immediately, and someone called Dolly Rocket replied:

  Been meaning to do that for months, but just know I couldn’t handle it!

  The man with the top-knot had to stay and man reception, so my assistant for the feat itself was a boy called Saul, who seemed a bit young to be entrusted with safely stringing me up from a giant metal arch.

  ‘I’m eighteen,’ he said when I enquired.

  ‘Are you properly trained?’

  He shrugged. ‘Not much to it, really. Just strap you in, undo the clip and you’re away.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. I was beginning to have serious doubts.

  I followed Saul up fifteen flights of corrugated metal steps. They had a handrail but they were swaying gently in the wind and I must say the whole set-up had a rather temporary, unstable feel about it.

  I started to think how I could get out of it. I so badly wanted to be able to tell people I’d done it but if I was lying dead at the bottom I wouldn’t be telling anyone anything. I started to think: I could just make it up, couldn’t I? I could imagine what it would feel like to be swung from a great height and just say that. Make up a bit of stuff about the rush of the wind and feeling so alive.

  ‘Did you want pictures?’ Saul asked as we reached the top, me red faced and panting, him barely breaking a sweat.

  ‘Pictures?’

  ‘There’s a camera,’ he said, pointing to a black box on a stem in front of us. ‘It’s automatic. Gets a great shot of you mid-flight.’

  Too right I wanted pictures. If I was going to go through this, I wanted all the photographic evidence available. I’d realised I’d started to think of things a bit like that tree in the forest that people talk about: ‘If a tree falls in a forest, and no one was there to see it, did it really fall at all?’

  If I didn’t share hard evidence of what I was doing, did it even count as doing it? What was the point if no one knew?

  Say Cheese

  Learning of the camera had given me a renewed enthusiasm for the endeavour.

  Saul pulled the thick padded strap around my waist and pulled it tight. Ollie had given me a rundown of what to expect and warned me that I should wear soft, loose clothes if I didn’t want to end up with the button of my jeans embedded somewhere in my small intestine. With this in mind, I’d borrowed a pair of Ollie’s old joggers as my outfit for the occasion. I’d had to hitch them up at least eight times on the walk up the steps but now I could see that I was right to have chosen them.

  With my harness on, I was ready to go.

  I stood at the platform and looked down (contrary to the slogan’s instruction). I can’t say I’d ever had a genuine phobia of heights, but I did have a healthy anxiety about anything that could lead to an immediate and grisly death, and it seemed to me that balancing precariously on a wooden platform seventy metres in the air with nothing but a strap of fabric to support you fell quite firmly into that category.

  ‘So, what now?’ I asked Saul. ‘Do I just – WOAH WAIT!’

  I’d been thinking I’d have a moment to compose myself, to take in the view, to think some big thoughts about life and the world, and then, when I was good and ready, leap gracefully into my flight. But suddenly I was being hoisted upwards by the cord attached to my waist strap. I was dangling a few feet above the platform, my arms and legs hanging loosely. I felt like a beetle being plucked out of the ground by a sadistic child, keen to watch its legs flail about in panic.

  ‘OK, ready?’ Saul said. ‘Remember to smile for the camera!’

  ‘OK but wait, I –’

  But Saul didn’t wait. He reached up and released some kind of catch above my back and then

  OH

  MY

  GOD.

  The absolute speed of the thing! It was like I was just falling from space. Which I was, in a way. As I was careering towards the ground, I honestly thought the cord was too long and nothing was going to stop me smashing into the concrete below.

  But then the whole swing dynamic kicked in. I was no longer falling downwards but swinging forwards. This, I realised, was the flight element. This is what I was here for.

  I became aware of some flashing in front of me. The camera! Somehow,
through my absolute terror, I had to remain focused on my goal: to obtain photographic evidence of me doing something daring and exciting, and looking exhilarated yet elegant while doing it. I stretched my arms out either side of me, imaging myself as graceful as a swallow in flight.

  More flashes. How many photos was it taking?

  As the swing reached its climax I had two horrible realisations:

  1) I was now almost as high in the air as I’d been when I’d been dropped from the platform. I’d swung down and all the way up the other side. Which meant, now, I had to fall all the way back down again. And backwards! Would this horror never end?

  2) My legs were suspiciously cold.

  Despite the extreme G-forces being exerted on my head I managed to peer down and my worst fears were confirmed. The comfortable, loose elastic of Ollie’s joggers had let me down. My trousers were around my ankles.

  There was very little I could do. I was at the mercy of gravity. I wriggled around a bit and tried to reach them but there was no way it was going to happen. I just had to ride it out. Each climb and fall seemed to go on forever.

  Finally, the swing started to slow. I was near the ground again, and Saul was approaching, ambling towards me from the direction of the hut.

  I was still suspended in mid-air a few feet above the ground. I was floating around Saul’s chest height. My trousers were still around my ankles. I was, apart from my grey M&S pants, naked from the waist down. It was less than ideal.

  ‘Enjoy that?’ Saul asked, trying to lower me to the ground.

  ‘Sort of,’ I said, wriggling my legs to try to find the floor with my feet. ‘Bit of a wardrobe malfunction!’ I thought it was better to make a joke of it than pretend it wasn’t happening. Saul obviously thought otherwise though as he didn’t reply, or even smile, keeping his eyes firmly on the top half of my body as he positioned me upright and released the strap.

  I don’t know if it was the sudden release from my support strap or having my trousers pinning my ankles together, but as Saul unclipped me, I staggered unsteadily for a moment, then fell to my knees.