Once in a Lifetime

by Chrissie Manby

  Jane and Dani sat on the end of Flossie’s bed while she opened her cards. For the past twelve months, Dani had assumed Flossie would want a fancy new phone as her birthday gift but Flossie had changed her mind about wanting new tech. She’d changed her mind about a lot of things.

  Up until the end of her pre-GCSE year – year ten – Flossie seemed to have pretty much the normal teenage concerns. She spent all her allowance in Top Shop and Primark. After school her best friends Xanthe and Camilla would come over to watch on-line make-up tutorials and give each other makeovers (and conjunctivitis, when they shared an old mascara). On Friday nights, they would go to the local youth drama group and try out their new looks on their male peers, who seemed mostly bewildered by the girls’ emerging beauty.

  But at some point during the second term of year eleven, Flossie, Xanthe and Camilla declared they were no longer interested in drama. The lads from the youth group were far too immature. Especially when compared with the gang from the sixth form college that hung out in the Newbay Arts Centre café.

  Though she didn’t like the idea of these new, older pals at all, Dani knew she couldn’t keep Flossie from the café. All Flossie’s friends went there and Camilla’s mother, who volunteered at the Arts Centre, assured Dani that none of them would ever be served an alcoholic drink. Still Dani could only listen with concern as one particular name cropped up in Flossie’s conversation with increasing regularity.

  ‘Jed says … Jed told me … Jed thinks …’

  Until Dani dared to ask, ‘Floss, is this Jed chap your boyfriend?’

  Flossie’s response was immediate and enthusiastic.

  ‘Oh Mum! I really think he likes me!’

  Overnight, Flossie changed her image to match that of her new paramour. She told Dani that Jed didn’t like make-up because even if the end product hadn’t been tested on animals, most of the ingredients had. He didn’t like fast fashion. It was exploitative, expensive and polluting. He didn’t like commercial music. Commercial music relied too heavily on old-fashioned, sexist social tropes. Of course Jed was a feminist.

  ‘He’s a bigger feminist than any woman I know!’ Flossie exclaimed.

  Dani had to admit she was glad when Flossie ditched the heavy make-up, which made her look old enough to get into trouble. She was also glad when Flossie stopped spending all her cash on clothes she’d only wear for one Insta-pic. And she was positively delighted when Flossie stopped listening to awful dance music that necessitated grinding like a pole dancer, swapping it for songs with actual tunes played on proper instruments.

  All the same, Dani wasn’t sure what she thought about the degree to which the opinions of Flossie’s new boyfriend seemed to be infiltrating every part of Flossie’s life. And he was eighteen. Just two years and a month older than Flossie, but at that age it might as well have been a decade. When she found out about the age gap, Dani said she would only allow Flossie to continue to see him on condition that she brought him home to be vetted.

  On first impressions, Jed was pretty much what Dani had expected. He was what she would have called a ‘crusty’ back in the nineties. If Flossie looked as though she had jumped straight out of the laundry basket in her crumpled dingy ‘eco’ clothes, Jed looked as though he dressed exclusively from wheelie bins. The rips in his jeans were less artful than awful. His oversized sweater was shiny with grease at the cuffs and the collar. His hair was matted. He basically looked as though he could do with a good wash. Alas, detergents were one of the things Jed disagreed with.

  Over tea and cake in Dani’s kitchen, Jed held forth. He was passionate about animal welfare, human rights and living a green life. But while his ideologies were sound, the way he delivered them was a little self-important. Dani couldn’t help but feel harangued. Especially when he tried to tell her – while stuffing himself with homemade Victoria sponge – that it was a crime against future generations to use anything except ancestral grains.

  ‘What do you mean by ancestral?’ Dani asked.

  ‘Spelt. Quinoa.’

  ‘Makes a terrible sponge, quinoa,’ Dani said.

  After their first meeting, Dani would have been quite happy to see the back of Jed right away. But could she veto him on the grounds of being pompous?

  ‘He comes from a really nice family,’ Flossie assured her. ‘His dad is a lawyer and his mum’s a doctor.’

  Dani was ashamed to admit those facts helped to put her mind at rest. He had a lawyer for a dad? His mum was a doctor? How bad could he be?

  However, the next time Jed came over, Dani insisted that Jane be in to meet him too, so she could get a second opinion. Jane called for back-up in the form of her best friend Sarah, Dani’s godmother, who lived in the house next door. If anyone would get the measure of Jed, it was Sarah.

  Dani laid out the minus points. ‘For a start, he’s too old.’

  Sarah played devil’s advocate. The age gap between Jed and Flossie wasn’t all that big in the scheme of things, she said. And underneath the grime he looked young and fit and clear-eyed. He seemed sensible. Far from encouraging Flossie to drink underage, Jed had refused the small glass of wine that Dani offered him at Sunday lunch.

  Jane added that she’d read in the Telegraph that young people were much more conservative these days and actually far less likely to drink, smoke or do drugs than their parents’ generation.

  And yet …

  ‘He’s changing Flossie,’ Dani complained to her mother when they were alone.

  ‘Isn’t it good that he seems to be making her think more seriously about the world?’ Jane asked.

  ‘Well, yes,’ Dani admitted. ‘But she’s always proselytising now. She seems to have lost her sense of humour.’

  ‘There comes a moment in every parent’s life when they find their child’s sense of humour bewildering,’ said Jane. ‘She’s doing well at school. She still seems to want to spend time with us. I think, considering she’s a teenager, that’s pretty much all we can hope for. And she’s happy to bring Jed home. If he really were that bad, I don’t suppose we’d have even heard about him.

  ‘I think we need to give this young Jed chap a chance,’ Jane concluded. ‘If you make a fuss about him and try to tell Flossie she shouldn’t be seeing him, the chances are you’ll only make her more determined that he’s the love of her life. Just as you had your heart set on a number of unsuitable chaps back in the day.’

  Whose names she couldn’t even recall. Apart from Nat Hayward.

  ‘She’s very much like you, is Flossie,’ said Jane. ‘She’s stubborn as an ox. But she’s not stupid. If Jed is a waste of space, she’ll work it out in the end.’

  So Jed, for now, got to stay.

  Chapter Six

  Flossie went straight to the Arts Centre café for coffee after her birthday breakfast so that Dani could finish making her ‘secret’ cake. When she returned, Flossie had in tow her two best girl friends, Xanthe and Camilla, who had also embraced the grunge aesthetic since swapping the youth drama group for the Arts Centre café. The three girls looked like extras from a Pirates of the Caribbean movie that afternoon, with their shabby clothes and multiple piercings.

  Thank goodness Flossie was slightly wary of needles and had only managed to get two traditional lobe piercings and a single hoop high on the rim of her left ear. Camilla had a new piercing, though, Dani observed, a nose-ring of the kind seen mostly on bulls.

  ‘All right, Mrs P,’ Xanthe and Camilla chorused.

  ‘Ms,’ said Dani. ‘It’s Ms.’

  ‘Mizz is really difficult to say,’ said Xanthe.

  ‘Perhaps it is with a tongue ring,’ Dani replied.

  Xanthe self-consciously fiddled with the stud that pierced her tongue. She’d already chipped one of her front teeth.

  The girls were invited for lunch to celebrate Flossie’s big day. They would be joined by grandmother Jane, godmother Sarah and, eventually, Jed, who was going to be a little late. Something to do with picking up Flossie’s
present, she told Dani excitedly.

  Flossie led her friends straight into the kitchen, where she pulled a bottle of cava out of the fridge.

  ‘Can we have this?’ she asked her mum.

  ‘You’re sixteen, not eighteen,’ Dani protested.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Flossie. ‘You know you got this for me really. And you’re allowed to have alcohol with a meal at home when you’re four.’

  ‘Five,’ Dani corrected her.

  ‘Well, I’m well over that.’

  ‘Being under age never stopped you from having a drink, Dani,’ Sarah observed as she let herself in through the back door. Sarah’s garden was joined to the Parker house by a gate, which Dani’s dad had fitted so that Dani could go back and forth as a child. Dani was long since grown up but the gate had stayed. It was as convenient for the adults as it had been for the children. Jane and Sarah were always in each other’s kitchens. ‘Oh, the times I saw you rolling home!’

  ‘Sarah, you’re supposed to be on my side,’ Dani said.

  All the same, Dani popped the top of the cava and poured out six very small glassfuls of the glittering liquid.

  ‘Oooh! Cava! Don’t mind if I do,’ said Jane, joining the others at the table.

  ‘Happy birthday, Flossie darling,’ she raised a toast to her granddaughter.

  ‘Happy birthday,’ the others joined in.

  ‘Sweet sixteen,’ said Sarah. ‘And don’t you all look … unusual,’ she added, taking a proper look at Flossie’s pals. ‘New piercing, Camilla?’

  ‘Yes, Auntie Sarah.’ All the girls called Sarah ‘Auntie’. ‘It’s gone a bit septic.’

  Sarah took a large swig from her glass as if to wash down the thought.

  ‘What are we having for supper, Mrs P?’ Xanthe asked.

  ‘Flossie’s favourite,’ said Dani. ‘A vegetable lasagne.’

  ‘With vegan cheese, right?’ Xanthe confirmed.

  ‘Of course. Everything on the table is vegan tonight. No need to worry about any of it.’

  Xanthe nodded approvingly. ‘My mum doesn’t bother,’ she said. ‘She tries to tell me she’s giving me vegan cheddar but I can so tell it’s not. I said to her, Mum, this cheese smells of death.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ said Dani.

  ‘And that death smell seeps out through your pores when you eat it,’ Camilla added.

  ‘Really?’ said Sarah. ‘I eat a lot of cheese. Do I smell like death?’

  Sarah lifted her wrist towards Flossie to be sniffed.

  ‘You always smell of Fracas, Auntie Sarah,’ Flossie said.

  ‘Well, there will be no pore-seeping here,’ said Dani, wondering what arch-vegan Jed was eating to make him smell like silage. ‘This is all one hundred per cent vegetable matter.’

  ‘That didn’t used to be a good thing,’ said Sarah.

  The three girls and the two older women sat down at the table and started tucking into the vegan canapés Dani had prepared that morning. There were little vegan crackers topped with olive tapenade, smoked mushroom pâté, celery with cashew nut cheese (which was a very poor substitute for Philadelphia, thought Dani, but if it was what Flossie wanted).

  Jane went for some celery. ‘Oh,’ she said, barely hiding her disappointment at the lack of cheesy taste. ‘These are … er, different.’

  ‘What is this supposed to be?’ Sarah asked, holding a cracker topped with mushroom pâté aloft.

  ‘Magic mushroom paste,’ Dani joked.

  ‘Oh good,’ said Sarah. ‘Haven’t had that in a long while.’

  ‘You took magic mushrooms?’ Xanthe looked shocked.

  ‘In the sixties. It was the only way to make any sense of the music,’ Sarah replied.

  ‘Auntie Sarah is pulling your leg,’ said Jane. ‘The sixties didn’t happen in Newbay.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ Sarah said.

  Dani carried on preparing the rest of the meal while Flossie and her guests chatted happily. Sarah handed over a birthday gift of a bottle of Chanel No. 5. ‘As Coco Chanel said, a woman who doesn’t wear perfume has no future.’

  Dani was relieved that Flossie accepted the gift with grace rather than a lecture on parabens. In this room full of women – young and of a certain age – Dani felt very happy. Friends told her that their teenage daughters wanted nothing to do with them, so Dani was proud that Flossie felt she did want to bring her pals home. Dani hoped Flossie would always feel able to be as free in her presence as she seemed to be now.

  ‘So, Mum,’ Flossie announced through a mouthful of cracker and tapenade. ‘Xanthe and Camilla have clubbed together to get me the best birthday present ever.’

  Xanthe and Camilla shared a complicit glance and grinned.

  ‘What’s that?’ Dani asked, walking over to the table and placing a rainbow-coloured salad in the middle of the cloth.

  ‘Guess,’ said Flossie, immediately stealing a cherry tomato from the bowl. ‘You too, Gran and Auntie Sarah. You have a guess as well. What would be the best birthday present ever?’

  Sarah jumped straight in. ‘For me, it would be a night of passion with Alfie Boe.’

  ‘Ugh!’ said Flossie. ‘Too much information. Gran?’

  ‘Well, the best present anyone could get me right now would be a pair of smart yet fashionable boots that can accommodate a bunion,’ said Jane.

  The three young women grimaced. Bunions were still happily well outside their frame of reference.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘I’d like a new bicycle,’ said Dani. ‘One with two wheels in actual alignment. But what would be the best present for you, Flossie.’ Dani tapped her bottom lip as she thought about it. ‘Gift vouchers for Top Shop?’

  ‘Mum, no one goes to Top Shop any more.’ Flossie was outraged. ‘Didn’t you learn anything when we watched The True Cost? Fast fashion is like the worst thing for the environment and it’s supported by deeply unethical working practices.’

  Xanthe and Camilla both nodded.

  ‘I suppose that rules out Primark vouchers too,’ Dani quipped.

  Flossie feigned despair. ‘How can you even say the word?’

  ‘Vouchers?’

  ‘Primark.’

  ‘You used to love Primark.’

  ‘Before I was woke.’

  ‘Don’t you mean awake?’ asked Jane.

  ‘Woke,’ said Flossie. ‘Grandma, it’s woke.’

  ‘This is fun,’ said Sarah.

  ‘Oh go on then,’ said Dani, also wondering whether Flossie was using ‘woke’ in the right context. She’d already had a lecture on the word from Jed. ‘I give up. What have you two lovely girls bought Flossie for her birthday?’

  Dani popped a cracker with tapenade into her mouth as she waited for the answer.

  Flossie’s eyes sparkled as she announced, ‘They’re paying for me to have a tattoo!’

  ‘What? A tattoo? No they’re bloody not,’ Dani spat cracker crumbs all over the table. ‘Not happening. Over my dead body.’

  ‘It’s my body actually,’ said Flossie.

  ‘And it’s illegal. You have to be eighteen.’

  Not that that had stopped Flossie’s mates. Both Xanthe and Camilla were tattooed. Someone in the Newbay tattoo business wasn’t very diligent about checking his customers’ ID.

  ‘You can’t have a tattoo at school,’ Dani protested.

  ‘Mum, I’m going to be leaving school in a couple of weeks. You can have whatever you like at sixth form college. They don’t check. Besides I’ll have it somewhere I can hide it. Like Xanthe and Mills do.’

  ‘Then what’s the point of having a tattoo at all?’ Dani asked.

  ‘Because I want one?’

  ‘Well, sometimes I want to smoke a great big spliff,’ said Dani. ‘But you can’t always get what you want …’

  ‘Oh, I know where you can get …’ Camilla began, before Sarah gave her a look that said, ‘Not now, dear.’

  ‘Mum, it’s really not that big a deal,’ Flossie continued. ‘In man
y aboriginal cultures, people get their first tattoos while they’re still babies.’

  ‘That’s different. That’s cultural. You’re not talking about a historically based ritual. You’re talking about going to one of those terrible shops near the pier. Dirty needles. Septicaemia …’

  ‘We’d only let her go to the best place,’ said Xanthe.

  ‘Which place? If they’re tattooing under eighteens, I’m going to report them to the police.’

  ‘Flossie,’ said Sarah, trying to bring the temperature of the debate down. ‘Do you really think it’s such a good idea to have a tattoo now? In a couple of years, when you’re eighteen, it really will be your choice and you’ll probably have a better idea of what you want the tattoo to be. It’s a life-long commitment.’

  ‘I already know what I’m getting,’ said Flossie.

  Dani and the others were all ears.

  ‘I’m having a hammer and sickle.’

  ‘What? Under a portrait of Jeremy Corbyn?’ Dani asked.

  ‘What’s so funny about that?’ Flossie asked.

  ‘A hammer and sickle? For heaven’s sake, Flossie. Do you even know what that stands for?’

  ‘I’m not stupid, Mum.’

  ‘I wish you’d prove it.’

  Flossie’s birthday party was fast turning into a disaster and the vegan lasagne wasn’t even out of the oven.

  ‘Dani,’ said Jane. ‘Flossie. Please. We’ve got guests. Let’s talk about this tomorrow. This is a birthday party. Nobody wants to have a fight.’

  ‘I’m enjoying it,’ said Sarah.

  Dani shot her daughter’s godmother a look.

  Thank goodness, the ringing of the doorbell interrupted the argument.

  ‘That’ll be Jed,’ said Flossie, jumping up and rushing for the door.

  ‘I wonder what he’s got her as a gift,’ Dani hissed. ‘A clitoral piercing?’

  Xanthe and Camilla were agog.

  ‘I understand they’re rather good,’ said Sarah.

  ‘Oh oh oh!’ Jane covered her ears. ‘Sarah, please!’

  But Jed had not bought Flossie a clitoral piercing for her birthday. Oh no. It was far far worse than that.

  Dani’s blood pressure started to rise again as she heard her daughter’s excited ‘ohmygodding’ from the hall.