You Only Live Once

by Jess Vallance

  ‘And people have to pay?’

  ‘Well, duh! A specialist service like this one doesn’t come cheap. A fifteen-minute session is fifty pounds.’

  ‘Fifty pounds!’ I said. ‘There’s no way anyone will pay that.’

  ‘Course they will!’ Vicky said, grinning. ‘Thing is, Gracie baby, this is important stuff, you know? People are going to be getting messages from their actual real-life dead relatives. We’re talking literally life and death. People say, “Oh I’d give my right arm to have just one more conversation with him,” don’t they? So fifty pounds is nothing. And if I said, “Oh that’ll be two-pound-fifty please,” people would be suspicious, wouldn’t they? This isn’t some dodgy end-of-the-pier set-up to give tourists a cheap thrill on a Saturday afternoon. This is the real deal!’

  I think Vicky had actually managed to talk herself into it. To convince even herself that she genuinely had the power to help people make contact with the dead. And maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. They always say you’ve got to believe in yourself if you expect anyone else to, don’t they?

  The three of us set out to put up the posters across town. We were in high spirits, all of us. I was relieved after the tension that the money worries had caused in the flat the day before. I’d started to wonder if I was part of the problem. I often picked up supplies on my way over, but maybe I wasn’t paying my fair share. Maybe they thought I was a freeloader.

  As I had walked home after watching Vicky and Spider stress and snap at each other over the electricity meter I’d started to wonder if maybe I’d been too quick to see Vicky and Spider’s life as some kind of perfect bohemian dream. When it came down to it, was it going to turn out that they didn’t have any more fun or freedom than anyone else? But now, as we swaggered around town, Spider with a beer can in his hand, Vicky spontaneously breaking into song in Madame Violet’s strange Welsh-Jamaican accent, all three of us laughing and laughing and laughing, things felt good again.

  This was definitely fun. This was definitely living. Just thinking of something silly and crazy and hilarious and just going out and doing it.

  On the way home that day, I decided to go and see Til. I knew I’d been neglecting her but every time we’d met up recently things had been tense. It just seemed to me that the nearer we got to September, the more she was thinking – and talking – about the new term and the less I wanted to hear it.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, when her mum let me in and I went into her bedroom.

  ‘Yes,’ I said pointlessly. ‘Me.’

  She didn’t say anything else. She was sitting on her bed looking at her laptop. She didn’t look up at me. I felt like I was in trouble.

  I sat down on the end of the bed. ‘What you doing?’

  ‘Reading about psychology.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why not?

  Silence. Til still didn’t look up.

  ‘I –’ I began, but at exactly the same time Til started to speak too, so I stopped. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘What were you going to say?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she mumbled.

  I sighed. ‘What is your problem? Why are you being so miserable all the time?’

  She looked at me then. ‘Because my mum got the sack, OK? She doesn’t have a job and she’s just in bed and I don’t know what we’re going to do.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Why?’

  Til shrugged. ‘Who knows? Because she never turns up? Because she cries all the time all over the customers? How should I know?’

  ‘Well, it will be OK,’ I said. ‘I’m sure she’ll get another job. I’m sure it will be OK.’

  ‘Great,’ Til said, turning back to her screen. ‘That’s all fine then. As long as you’re sure it’s going to be OK, I’m sure it will. You can get back to your new mates now. I’ll be fine here. Just fine.’

  I just looked at her. What did she want me to say? It wasn’t my fault her mum was such an enormous sad-sack. I was just trying to say something kind to make her feel better.

  What did she want me to say?

  I stood up. ‘I’ll go then.’

  She didn’t reply, or even look up.

  Restructuring

  At home that evening, Dad was sitting in the living room.

  The curtains were drawn and the room was bathed in a gloomy blue light. It was too hot in there and he was watching the cricket with the sound turned down.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I said.

  ‘Nothing.’ He didn’t even look up from the screen. He was slouched in his chair, the remote control resting on one knee.

  Mum came in and replaced the flowers on the table with some new ones. ‘What’s the matter with Dad?’ I said, as if he wasn’t right there.

  ‘Bad news at work,’ she said gently. ‘Restructuring.’

  She touched his shoulder gently and left the room.

  Dad sighed.

  ‘Are you going to lose your job?’ I asked him.

  He shook his head and shrugged. ‘Who knows. Didn’t think I even liked the job until I thought they were going to take it away from me.’

  He flicked the telly off and left the room.

  I found Mum in her bedroom, changing the pillowcases on the bed.

  ‘Is Dad really going to lose his job?’ I asked.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ she said.

  ‘So why’s he so grumpy?’

  She thought for a moment, shaking the pillowcase by the corners to get the pillow to sit neatly inside. ‘I think it’s because he only took that computer job to be sensible. It was hardly his calling. He wanted to be outdoors, didn’t he. To teach sailing or orienteering or something. But he was careful and took a sensible job with sensible hours and sensible money because he wanted security for himself, and for all of us. But now he feels like there hasn’t been any reward for being so sensible.’

  I nodded. That did sound annoying, to be fair.

  ‘Is the sex clinic your calling?’ I asked Mum suddenly.

  She laughed. ‘When you’ve got three children and a clinic full of itchy crotches to look after, you don’t have much time to think about callings.’ Then she added, ‘I don’t think I believe in callings, really. At least not for me.’

  ‘No?’

  She shook her head slowly. ‘When I was young, the thing back then was to tell you that there was one person out there for everyone. Magazines, your mates – they were all obsessed with the idea. One true love. One soul mate. But then I got older and realised that probably wasn’t true. There are plenty of people for everyone. Plenty of people perfectly able to love each other and share a life together.

  ‘These days everyone wants to believe that they have one true calling, that one thing they’re just born to do and if they can only find it they’ll never have to do anything they don’t like again.

  ‘But we all like lots of things. And we all don’t like lots of things. And the reality is, we’ll probably have a bit of both in our lives. So no, the sex clinic isn’t my calling. But I like it just fine. I like my life just fine. God knows, it’s a lot better than what some people end up with.’

  Black and White

  A few days later, one of Mum’s friends came to the house and she and Mum were sitting at the kitchen table eating carrot cake and drinking coffee. I was in my bedroom.

  ‘Grace!’ Mum called. ‘Come down here a minute.’

  I reluctantly did as I was told.

  ‘Grace, love, tell Julia what you got in your exams.’

  I made a face. ‘Three 9s, five A*s and three As,’ I mumbled.

  ‘Wow,’ Julia said. ‘Very impressive.’

  ‘Isn’t it just?’ Mum said, smiling. ‘You know, Gracie, I don’t think Dad and I have even seen them written down, in black and white. Will you show me?’

  ‘Why?’ I demanded crossly. ‘You think I’m lying?’

  Mum blinked, and looked at me, her head on one side, bemused. ‘Of course not. I’d just like to see it.’

  I sighed. ‘
I’ll show you later.’ I left the kitchen before she could press the point.

  Paying Customers

  When I got to Vicky and Spider’s later that day, Vicky proudly announced that she had not one but two clients booked in for their first session with Madame Violet.

  ‘OK, so two is only two, but it’s a start, hey? This kind of thing has to spread through word of mouth, you know?’

  I nodded enthusiastically. ‘Absolutely. Two is amazing, I’m impressed.’ And I was. ‘And they both know the price? I mean, they’re both going to spend fifty pounds on this … on you?’

  Vicky laughed. ‘Yes, kiddo, they are! I told you to have faith.’

  Something I hadn’t realised during the early planning stages of our new business was the role that Vicky and Spider had in mind for me. Apparently it was important that I was present for all the appointments, to welcome people, to see them into the flat, and to deal with the money side of things. I was basically to act as a kind of executive PA to the great Madame Violet.

  ‘I need to maintain an aura of mystique,’ Vicky explained. ‘It’s damaging to the image if I’m struggling with the sticky door catch or scrabbling around looking for change in my purse. You need to do all that for me, so I can stay in character in the room.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Fine.’ I thought it sounded simple enough. ‘So what’s Spider going to do then?’

  ‘Oh god,’ Vicky laughed. ‘Spider has to stay behind the scenes. A beardy bloke with tattoos is not going to give people confidence. He’ll be out.’

  Our first customer arrived at four o’ clock that afternoon. She was a woman called Lilian. She wore a thick fleece and walking boots as if she was coming to us straight from a hiking expedition and she brought with her a long pearl necklace that, completely without prompting, she informed me used to belong to her grandmother.

  ‘Have I got the right place?’ Lilian asked, looking around her nervously as we trudged up the stairs to the second-floor flat. ‘Isn’t quite what I imagined?’

  ‘Oh yes, absolutely,’ I said confidently. ‘People never expect it to look like this but that’s because of all the media brainwashing out there these days. People think of psychics and fortune tellers as people who live in gypsy caravans or in little huts in the woods but that’s all nonsense. Fairy-tale stuff. This is where Madame Violet lives so this is where she carries out her work. She needs to be completely relaxed in her environment for her powers and senses to be at full capacity.’

  I was saying all this entirely off the top of my head but I was rather pleased with the explanation. And hiking Lilian certainly seemed to buy it well enough.

  I opened the door to the bedroom to show Lilian in, and Vicky lifted her arms, letting her sleeves billow, and said, ‘Welcome, welcome, Lilian, my dear. Oh, you are exactly as I imagined. I knew it was you at once.’

  I made sure not to catch Vicky’s eye or to allow myself even the smallest smirk at this opening line. I bowed my head in a manoeuvre that I intended to represent my deference to the great Madame Violet, and I then excused myself. I was glad my role didn’t require me to be present during any more of Vicky’s performance as I was quite sure I would have felt the need to giggle throughout.

  The door opened fifteen minutes later and Vicky stood in the doorway and kissed Lilian extravagantly on both cheeks. Lilian didn’t say much as I showed her down the stairs and out of the flat. She seemed slightly shell-shocked.

  ‘How was it?’ I asked Vicky as soon as I got back up to the flat. ‘Did you get away with it?’

  Vicky laughed, making her ornate earrings rattle, and took a can of Coke out of the fridge. ‘I more than got away with it, doll! I had her eating out of the palm of my hand.’

  ‘But how?’ I said with a bemused smile. ‘How on earth did you manage to convince her you were really talking to … who was it? Her mum?’

  ‘Grandma,’ Vicky said, going over to the mirror and retying her headscarf. ‘Easy, mate. Eeeeeasy. She gave it to me on a plate. “I’m seeing a dress,” I said. “A beautiful dress …” Her eyes light up and she says, “Oh yes, she used to be a ballroom dancer. She had so many beautiful dancing dresses when she was younger.” And then bingo-bango, I’m away. I’m “seeing” trophies and crowds and sparkly dancing shoes. And anything I said, the woman would feed me a little more info. I just had to jump on the details and run with it.’

  ‘Did you have to do the voice?’ I asked. ‘A grandma voice?’

  Vicky laughed. ‘No, babe! I wasn’t pretending to be possessed! I just passed on some nice messages. “I’m watching you from up here, little Lilian. I like to see you happy.” All that rubbish. Just told her what she wanted to hear, and off she trots, pleased as pineapple. And I’m pretty pleased myself because …’ Vicky put her hand down the front of her robe and pulled out two twenty-pound notes and one ten. ‘Fifty smackers! How easy was that?’

  I shook my head and smiled. ‘Mad.’

  ‘Hey, you know what, kiddo, if it turns out I’m a natural at this, I can put you in touch with your old nan if you like.’ She put on her Welsh-Jamaican accent. ‘Nan, oh Nan, are you there? Gracie’s missing you!’

  She burst into one of her customary cackles and I managed a weak chuckle, although I didn’t feel really like laughing at all. What struck me about what she’d just said is the brief wave of hope that had washed over me. For one tiny moment, I think the irrational part of my brain actually hoped Nan was there – that somehow she could make contact through Vicky. And that made me think, if I could have that thought, however fleetingly, when I knew full well that Vicky had no powers whatsoever, then how powerful was this stuff to the people we were trying to convince?

  Wanting to believe something that badly, had a damaging effect on your rational judgement, that was for sure.

  Going Concern

  Over the next few days I welcomed another five or six clients to the flat, and showed them to Madame Violet’s studio. They were definitely all of a certain type, I noticed. Nervous, a bit shy. Maybe even a little bit unhinged.

  Vicky had been lucky so far, with the people we’d had interested in taking up our dubious service. They were all so keen to be told what they wanted to hear that they invariably revealed crucial clues almost at once, making Vicky’s job no more complicated than delivering some meaningless platitudes in her bizarre accent and closing her eyes at the right moment, as if disappearing off to some higher level of consciousness.

  One evening when we’d just said goodbye to our third customer of the week, Spider raised a point that I too had been worried about: ‘I’m starting to feel a bit guilty, you know? Cashing in on these people’s grief. Are we taking advantage?’

  I looked at Vicky, keen to hear her answer to this. She, of course, had one.

  ‘Look at it this way, babe: these guys are sad and lonely and missing whoever they’re missing. They come in here, I tell them what they want to hear – that the dead dudes are happy and looking after them and that they’ll see them again one day. This stuff makes them happy! Fifty pounds is a small price to pay for happiness, isn’t it? Who cares if it’s not true? Since when did the truth make anyone happy? The truth is probably that the dead rellies are nowhere at all. Dead and cold in the ground. How is telling them that any better? My conscience is clear. I’m providing a service here. A happiness service. There’s nothing wrong with charging for a service.’

  She made a compelling case, I thought. If our customers left us with thoughts of their relatives safe and happy and out there, somewhere, waiting for them, how could that really be a bad thing? Maybe honesty wasn’t the best policy, not always.

  And there was another, less honourable, reason that made me want to keep going with the scheme:

  The cash.

  The money was so good! Madame Violet’s studio had only been trading for a week and already we’d made six hundred pounds.

  We sat on the floor of the lounge and I counted out the notes I’d been collecting in the insi
de pocket of my jacket into piles. I wasn’t yet sure what share of the money might be mine, and I didn’t like to ask, scared they might tell me this was their flat, so their money, or that I’d already taken enough from them by hanging around and eating their food for weeks on end.

  ‘I can’t believe it’s so easy,’ Spider said, shaking his head. ‘It’s mad.’

  I felt the same. I’d grown up being taught the value of hard work, believing that the only way to get anywhere in life was to get your head down and put in the hard graft, no matter how boring or difficult it got. Since the day of my hospital visit, I’d been questioning the way I’d spent the last few years, but now more than ever I couldn’t believe I’d been so naive.

  Why in god’s name had I spent my whole life memorising facts about oil refineries and scribbling equations in an exercise book and reading poems written by some old guy two hundred years ago when it was this easy to make money?

  Not Going Back

  With the earnings from our first few clients, Vicky and Spider took care of a few basics – topping up the electricity meter, restocking the kitchen with chocolate and cheese and beers, replacing the dead lightbulb in the bathroom – but then we started to dream big.

  ‘We could make enough to really do something,’ Spider said. ‘All those real adventures on our list. The Taj Mahal. Great Wall of China. Or we could travel around Europe or something,’ Spider said. ‘We could get an Interrail ticket. See Berlin. Bucharest. Krakow.’

  Vicky rolled her eyes. ‘Or we could go somewhere that isn’t a total dive. Like Paris or Rome?’

  Spider sighed and smiled. ‘Whatever. We could do it all. It’s been a long time since we’ve been able to afford to travel anywhere,’ he told me. ‘I’ve got itchy feet. It’s a shame you can’t come, Gracie.’