Ways to Live Forever

by Sally Nicholls

  “How can I work with you lot with a name like Dr Bottomley?” he says, and everyone laughs. So he’s Dr Bill.

  Dad wanted me to have more treatment, but Dr Bill said he didn’t think it would work because I wasn’t strong enough after the last lot. He said it was too dangerous.

  “Can’t we try it anyway?” said Dad and Dr Bill pursed up his lips.

  “We could,” he said. “But it would mean spending a lot of time in hospital again. And as it hasn’t been successful this time. . .”

  I knew what he meant. I’d have to have all those chemicals and get sick again but this time they already knew it wouldn’t work.

  “I don’t want to,” I said. “It’s poison.”

  “It’s poison that works,” said Dad.

  But Dr Bill shook his head.

  “Not this time.”

  So what I get now are different drugs. It’s still chemotherapy, but it’s not the sort that makes you get sick or your hair fall out. It doesn’t try and cure you, it just stops you getting worse. Although I still get tired a lot and have nosebleeds and stuff like that.

  They could work for a long time, these new drugs, Dr Bill says. People can live for a whole year or more. I’ve had four months already.

  A year’s a long time.

  Anything can happen in a year.

  ESCALATORS

  22nd January

  Going up down-escalators or down up-escalators is a stupid last wish.

  I’ve wanted to do it for ages, though. Ever since I read this book where this dog did. I think it was a magic dog. I can’t remember. It wasn’t like he didn’t know which escalator was which; he just did it to be daring. Because it was cool. So then I wanted to too. Does that make sense?

  It sounds like an easy wish to do, but actually it isn’t. I’m not allowed into town by myself. And how would I explain it to Mum? “Oh, is this the down-escalator? I thought it was the up. I wondered why it was taking so long to get to the top.”

  She’d think I was crazy.

  Maybe I am. But I still want to do it.

  I’ve been into town with Mum a couple of times since I wrote my list and each time I’ve thought I’ll do it and then chickened out. I had half an idea of getting Mickey to take me and Felix next time he’s home. But today Mum took me to the dentist5 and afterwards we had lunch in the shopping centre. It was pretty much empty. And there were two escalators.

  One up.

  And one down.

  All the time we were eating, I couldn’t stop thinking about them. Felix is right. There’s no point having wishes if you don’t at least try to do them. The possible ones anyway. Going up down-escalators . . . it’s not exactly hard, is it? Doing a world record is hard. And we did that.

  I looked at Mum. She was fussing, as usual.

  “Sam. Sam. Are you all right? You haven’t finished your sandwich.” She looked at me closely. “You aren’t too tired, are you?”

  “I’m not tired at all,” I said. I stood up. “I’m going to the toilet.”

  I went out of the café and straight to the escalators. I wanted to go up the down one, I decided. I went right down to the bottom and stood there, looking up. They went from the top floor of the shopping centre into a round, open bit with a baker and a charity shop and a couple of other little shops. There weren’t many people, but there were a few.

  All the way from the café, I’d been getting nervouser and nervouser. My heart swelled until it seemed to sit just under my throat. I wish I was as strong as I was before I got ill. What if I couldn’t do it? What sort of idiot would I look like then? Or what if people started yelling at me for messing around with shopping centre property? Or what if there were security guards lurking somewhere?

  I went and stared into the window of the charity shop. “This is stupid,” I thought. “It’s an easy one! You can’t not do it.” I went back. There was no one on the down-escalator. Before I could think any more about it, I put my hand on the rail and stepped forward.

  I’d been worried about going up the steps, but I’d forgotten about the bit at the bottom where the floor moves forward. As soon as I stepped on to it, I could feel myself being pulled backwards. I didn’t have time to worry though. I ploughed forward and suddenly, there I was, going up.

  It wasn’t as hard as I’d thought it would be. It was weird, because I was practically running up the stairs, so I felt like I ought to be going up and up and up, only of course I wasn’t, because the stairs were going down. But overall, I did go up. Slowly. I started gasping for breath, but I didn’t dare stop. And I couldn’t look up, in case I fell over. Still, now I could see the flat bit at the top coming closer. Suddenly I didn’t know what to do. My feet were so used to climbing, I wasn’t sure they could do forward. But I couldn’t stop now, right at the top.

  I took as big a step forward as I could manage and fell over. I was all right though. My hands and one knee were on the flat, not-moving ground. I pulled myself forward and stumbled to my feet, scraped and giddy, but triumphant. I did it! And no one stopped me!

  There was an old lady at the top, waiting to go down.

  “It’s quicker if you use the other ones, dear,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. I glanced at her. She was smiling.

  “Some sort of dare, was it?” she said.

  “Something like that,” I said, smiling back.

  DEATH SCENE

  24th January

  “How’re you going to die?” said Felix.

  I looked at him. It was after school. He was waiting for his mum to come. I was painting one of the new dwarfs that one of Mum’s friends had bought me. He was supposed to be helping, but he’d got bored and was playing with the cat instead.

  “You know,” I said.

  He pulled a face. “In your book, I mean,” he said. Mrs Willis had brought a Van de Graaff generator to class and we’d been playing with static electricity. He was still buzzing. “You can’t just end it. People will wonder what happened. You’ll have to have your mum sitting by your bed with a dictaphone. ‘How do you feel now, Sam?’ ‘I see a light . . . I’m moving towards the light . . . There’s all these dodgy blokes with wings and haloes flapping around. . .’”

  “Shut up,” I said. Felix never usually talks like this. I wasn’t sure I liked it. I preferred the Felix who carried on as if everything was normal, apart from little things like being in a wheelchair or not going to school. He didn’t pay any attention to me, though.

  “You could write it in advance,” he said. “‘My death was very sad. Everyone cried. I gave a long speech about how much I was going to miss everything and how I would look down on everyone from my cloud. Everyone said how wonderful I was, and. . .’”

  I threw an orc at him. He reversed out of range, laughing. Columbus meowed.

  “I know!” he said. “You could ask Dr Bill if you could watch someone else dying, as research, and then pretend it was you. You could put them in your acknowledgements—”

  “My what?”

  “The bit where you thank everyone for helping you. You know, ‘I thank Mrs Willis for giving me the idea in the first place and Felix Stranger for all the ideas I shamelessly stole off him. And Johnny Jones, or whoever, for letting me take notes when he popped it.’”

  “You’re mad!” I said. “Would you let some kid take notes when you died?”

  Felix was wearing his fedora again. He pulled it right down so it covered his eyes. “I wouldn’t care,” he said. “I’m not having anyone there.”

  “Much you could do about it,” I said. “You’d have your mum, anyway.”

  Felix shook his head. The hat was still down over his eyes. “You can come and take notes if you want,” he said. “But I’m not having my mum. She’d hate it.”

  He sounded so certain that I didn’t know what to say.

  “I wouldn’t write a death scene anyway,” I said uncomfortably. “People would know.” I’d been thinking about this, while he was talking. “T
he rest of the book is all true, that’s the whole point. But people would know I couldn’t write the last bit, so they’d know I was making it up.”

  “So?” said Felix. He pushed back his hat and reappeared. He was laughing. “Hey!” he said. “Hey, I know! What you want to do, right, is make a set of tick boxes or something, for your mum and dad to fill in. You know, like all your daft lists:

  1. Sam’s death was:

  a. Peaceful

  b. Horrible and agonizingly painful.

  c. Kind of in the middle.

  d. We don’t know – we were at the chip shop.

  e. Other, please specify.

  And then they could fill them in afterwards.”

  “That’s nuts!” I said, but I was laughing at the thought of Mum and Dad filling in Felix’s survey.

  “It’s a stroke of genius,” said Felix. “It’ll be the most scientific death scene in history. And then when you publish your book, I’ll get all the royalties, because at this rate I’ll have written most of it, and I’ll go on a Caribbean cruise on the profits.” He rummaged down the side of his chair for a biro. “Come on, Charles Dickens. Write this down. Number two. . .”

  THE STORY OF GRANDFATHER’S FOOTSTEPS

  This is another true story. At least, Granny says it’s true and she doesn’t lie. Hardly ever.

  Granny and Grandad met during the war. He was a conscientious objector, which means he refused to join the army and kill people. He went to work on a farm instead. Granny was fourteen and she was living on the farm because of the bombs and that’s how they met. I don’t remember him, but I’ve seen pictures. Granny says he looked just like Mum, apart from the grey beard and the pipe.

  He died very suddenly of a heart attack, just after Ella was born. He got up in the morning feeling fine and by the evening he was dead.

  Everyone was very shocked. All the next day, Granny says, there were people in the house; Mum and Dad and us and Uncle Douglas and neighbours and everybody, fussing about making cups of tea and talking. It was only at night that they left her alone, just her all alone in the big bed where she and Grandad had slept together every night, nearly, since she was sixteen.

  She didn’t think she was going to fall asleep, but she must have done because she had a dream. Except she isn’t sure that it was a dream because it felt so real. She says Grandad came into the room and sat on the edge of the bed and talked to her. He said he was very sorry and he didn’t want to leave, but he had to go, and she wasn’t to be frightened or feel sad or anything because he was all right. She says she cried and asked him to stay, but he just kept saying he had to go, and in the end he went.

  Granny was still sad, of course. And she didn’t like living on her own. But she says that whenever she felt unhappiest, she used to be able to smell Grandad’s pipe smoke, as if he was still there, keeping an eye upon her.

  “Did you ever see him?” I asked once.

  “No,” she said. “But once, when you two were staying, Ella turned to me – I can see her now, clear as day – and said, ‘Who’s that man with the beard?’ She could only have been two or three.”

  “And was anybody there?” I asked.

  “No,” said Granny. “Just the smell of your grandad’s pipe, that’s all.”

  So Ella has seen a ghost. Except she can’t remember it. And Mum has heard a ghost too. Because when I was ill for the second time, when everyone was so worried about me, Granny used to hear footsteps going down her corridor. At first she thought it was burglars, but when she went to look there was no one there. So she thought maybe she was imagining it, but then Mum stayed over one night and she could hear them too. So now Granny thinks it was Grandad, letting her know he was there when she was frightened about me.

  Scientists would say none of this proves ghosts exist. It’s circumstantial evidence, which means evidence that makes it more likely that something is true, but doesn’t prove it. Granny’s story is just like that. I mean, Ella was only two. The man with the beard could have been a picture, or a funny mark on the wallpaper. And the pipe smoke could have been Granny imagining things or smelling smoke from someone in the street. And maybe the footsteps were just creaky floorboards. But when you put them all together, you start to think maybe ghosts do exist.

  I asked Granny if Grandad’s footsteps had come back when I got ill this time, but she said she hadn’t heard from him in a long time.

  “He probably thinks I’m old enough to cope now,” she said. “Or maybe he’s moved on. I doubt he wants to spend his afterlife babysitting for an old stick like me.”

  So I don’t know what I believe. I wouldn’t want to spend my afterlife as a ghost either. But it made me think. And what I think is, if I were Grandad, I’d want to visit too.

  ME AND MARIAN

  27th January

  We had class again today. I showed Mrs Willis my story, “Grandfather’s Footsteps”, and she told us ghost stories. There was one about two ladies who got lost in Versailles Palace garden, which was where the old French royalty used to live before the revolutionaries chopped their heads off. These two ladies said they went back in time to how it looked when Queen Marie Antoinette lived there. There were all these people in old-fashioned clothes speaking French. Felix said they’d probably got lost in some school’s dress-as-a-French-queen day but Mrs Willis said no, the garden was different and everything.

  I said they should’ve told Marie Antoinette the revolutionaries were going to chop her head off. If they’d only persuaded her to hide in a bush or something they’d have changed the whole course of history forever.

  “Why bother?” said Mrs Willis. “Who needs the monarchy? Chop all their heads off, that’s what I say.”

  Mrs Willis is a secret revolutionary.

  After she’d gone, Felix said, “I think we need to do another one off your list, don’t you? How about seeing a ghost?”

  “How?” I said. I’d already decided this one was “probably-impossible”. (Not like “Ride in an airship”, for example, which is “possible-but-very-very-difficult”.) “What do you want to do? Stand in a haunted house and look hopeful?”

  Kids in books never have any trouble finding haunted houses, but there isn’t one round here.

  Felix tapped his nose and looked mysterious.

  “Leave it to me,” he said. “But let’s go to your room. We don’t want your mum to see.”

  Felix wouldn’t say anything until we were in my room with the door shut. Then he put on this hushed voice and said, “Have you ever done a Ouija board?”

  I haven’t. My mum hates Ouija boards. She says you shouldn’t meddle with stuff you don’t understand. I told Felix and he said, “She goes to church, doesn’t she? What’s that if not meddling with things you don’t understand?”

  I hesitated. I couldn’t help remembering The Exorcist, even though I knew it probably wasn’t a very scientific film. Felix said, “Oh, come on! You want to meet a ghost, don’t you? How else are we going to get one to come?”

  So we did it.

  Felix knew exactly what to do. He opened my writing pad and drew the Ouija board in red and black felt tip. He put all the letters of the alphabet in a big circle with the numbers up to nine in a small circle in the middle and YES and NO in two corners.

  “There!” He looked round my room. “Now, it has to be properly dark and ghostly, like a séance.”

  We went into the kitchen. Felix stood guard (not that he needed to – Mum was upstairs, on the phone). I found a whole pack of night lights, the kitchen matches and the big torch.

  “They have this sort of veil,” said Felix.

  “Net curtains!”

  I was kneeling on the sideboard taking the net curtains down when Ella came in. She stared at us.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Making a Wendy house,” said Felix. “Want to play?”

  Ella’s not stupid. “You are not.”

  “We’re doing research,” I said. “For my book.”
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br />   Ella screwed up her face. She wasn’t sure if we were having her on or not, but she did know whatever we were doing, we probably weren’t supposed to be.

  “We’re going to call up a ghost,” said Felix. “A great big one drippling with blood. You want to see?”

  If he thought she was going to be scared, he was wrong.

  “Yes! Let me come!”

  “I dunno. . .” He grinned at me. Ella launched herself on him.

  “Let me! I’ll tell Mum!”

  Felix loves an audience. He made her go and put on her bridesmaid’s dress, because, he said, they always have girls in white at séances. While she was gone, we put all the candles out on saucers around the room and drew the curtains.

  It was only four o’clock, so it wasn’t really dark. Ella and I sat on the bed with my pad between us. Felix pushed his chair up against the bed and draped the net curtain over our heads, so it covered us completely. It was like being in a tent; dim and dappled and a little bit spooky. Felix switched on the torch and shone it under his chin, sending dark shadows leaping up his cheeks.

  “Welcome to the Pit of Oblivion,” he said, in this deep, mock-scary voice.

  The idea of a Ouija board is that you put a penny or a glass in the middle of the bit of paper. Then you each put a finger on the penny or glass and any spirits hanging about make it move.

  “Why do you need your fingers if the spirits move it?” I said.

  “You just do,” said Felix. “Otherwise it doesn’t work.”

  None of us had a penny and we didn’t want to leave our tent to get a glass, so we used a jelly baby instead. We all put our fingers on it and Felix said:

  “OK. Is anyone there?”

  For a moment, nothing happened. Then the jelly baby moved.

  YES

  Ella squealed.

  “You did that!” I said.

  “I did not!” said Felix. Then, before I could argue, “What is your name?”