Me Before You

‘No.’ It came out more quickly than I would have liked, and I caught the look Will gave me.

‘You claustrophobic?’

‘Something like that.’ I began to gather up our things. ‘Let’s just go back to the house.’

The following weekend, I came down in the middle of the night to fetch some water. I had been having trouble sleeping, and had found that actually getting up was marginally preferable to lying in my bed batting away the swirling mess of my thoughts.

I didn’t like being awake at night. I couldn’t help but wonder whether Will was awake, on the other side of the castle, and my imagination kept prising my way into his thoughts. It was a dark place to go to.

Here was the truth of it: I was getting nowhere with him. Time was running out. I couldn’t even persuade him to take a trip to Paris. And when he told me why, it was hard for me to argue. He had a good reason for turning down almost every single longer trip I suggested to him. And without telling him why I was so anxious to take him, I had little leverage at all.

I was walking past the living room when I heard the sound – a muffled cough, or perhaps an exclamation. I stopped, retraced my steps and stood in the doorway. I pushed gently at the door. On the living-room floor, the sofa cushions arranged into a sort of haphazard bed, lay my parents, under the guest quilt, their heads level with the gas fire. We stared at each other for a moment in the half-light, my glass motionless in my hand.

‘What – what are you doing there?’

My mother pushed herself up on to her elbow. ‘Ssh. Don’t raise your voice. We …’ she looked at my father. ‘We fancied a change.’

‘What?’

‘We fancied a change.’ My mother glanced at my father for backup.

‘We’ve given Treena our bed,’ Dad said. He was wearing an old blue T-shirt with a rip in the shoulder, and his hair stuck up on one side. ‘She and Thomas, they weren’t getting on too well in the box room. We said they could have ours.’

‘But you can’t sleep down here! You can’t be comfortable like this.’

‘We’re fine, love,’ Dad said. ‘Really.’

And then, as I stood, dumbly struggling to comprehend, he added, ‘It’s only at weekends. And you can’t sleep in that box room. You need your sleep, what with … ’ He swallowed. ‘What with you being the only one of us at work and all.’

My father, the great lump, couldn’t meet my eye.

‘Go on back to bed now, Lou. Go on. We’re fine.’ Mum practically shooed me away.

I walked back up the stairs, my bare feet silent on the carpet, dimly aware of the brief murmured conversation below.

I hesitated outside Mum and Dad’s room, now hearing what I had not heard before – Thomas’s muffled snoring within. Then I walked slowly back across the landing to my own room, and I closed the door carefully behind me. I lay in my oversized bed and stared out of the window at the sodium lights of the street, until dawn – finally, thankfully – brought me a few precious hours of sleep.

There were seventy-nine days left on my calendar. I started to feel anxious again.

And I wasn’t alone.

Mrs Traynor had waited until Nathan was taking care of Will one lunchtime, then asked me to accompany her to the big house. She sat me down in the living room and asked me how I thought things were.

‘Well, we’re going out a lot more,’ I said.

She nodded, as if in agreement.

‘He talks more than he did.’

‘To you, perhaps.’ She gave a half-laugh that wasn’t really a laugh at all. ‘Have you mentioned going abroad to him?’

‘Not yet. I will. It’s just … you know what he’s like.’

‘I really don’t mind,’ she said, ‘if you want to go somewhere. I know we probably weren’t the most enthusiastic advocates of your idea, but we’ve been talking a lot, and we both agree …’

We sat there in silence. She had made me coffee in a cup and saucer. I took a sip of it. It always made me feel about sixty, having a saucer balanced on my lap.

‘So – Will tells me he went to your house.’

‘Yes, it was my birthday. My parents were doing a special dinner.’

‘How was he?’

‘Good. Really good. He was really sweet with my mum.’ I couldn’t help but smile when I thought back to it. ‘I mean, she’s a bit sad because my sister and her son moved out. Mum misses them. I think he … he just wanted to take her mind off it.’

Mrs Traynor looked surprised. ‘That was … thoughtful of him.’

‘My mum thought so.’

She stirred at her coffee. ‘I can’t remember the last time Will agreed to have supper with us.’

She probed a little more. Never asking a direct question, of course – that wasn’t her way. But I couldn’t give her the answers she wanted. Some days I thought Will was happier – he went out with me without a fuss, he teased me, prodded me mentally, seemed a little more engaged with the world outside the annexe – but what did I really know? With Will I sensed a vast internal hinterland, a world he wouldn’t give me even a glimpse of. These last couple of weeks I’d had the uncomfortable feeling that hinterland was growing.

‘He seems a little happier,’ she said. It sounded almost as if she were trying to reassure herself.

‘I think so.’

‘It has been very –’ her gaze flickered towards me ‘– rewarding, to see him a little more like his old self. I am very well aware that all these improvements are due to you.’

‘Not all of them.’

‘I couldn’t reach him. I couldn’t get anywhere near him.’ She placed her cup and saucer on her knee. ‘He’s a singular person, Will. From the time he hit adolescence, I always had to fight the feeling that in his eyes I had somehow done something wrong. I’ve never been quite sure what it was.’ She tried to laugh, but it wasn’t really a laugh at all, glancing briefly at me and then looking away.

I pretended to sip my coffee, even though there was nothing in my cup.

‘Do you get on well with your mother, Louisa?’

‘Yes,’ I said, then added, ‘it’s my sister who drives me nuts.’

Mrs Traynor gazed out of the windows, to where her precious garden had begun to bloom, its blossoms a pale and tasteful melding of pinks, mauves and blues.

‘We have just two and a half months.’ She spoke without turning her head.

I put my coffee cup on the table. I did it carefully, so that it didn’t clatter. ‘I’m doing my best, Mrs Traynor.’

‘I know, Louisa.’ She nodded.

I let myself out.

Leo McInerney died on 22 May, in the anonymous room of a flat in Switzerland, wearing his favourite football shirt, with both his parents at his side. His younger brother refused to come, but issued a statement saying that no one could have been more loved, or more supported than his brother. Leo drank the milky solution of lethal barbiturate at 3.47pm and his parents said that within minutes he was in what appeared to be a deep sleep. He was pronounced dead at a little after four o’clock that afternoon by an observer who had witnessed the whole thing, alongside a video camera there to forestall any suggestion of wrongdoing.

‘He looked at peace,’ his mother was quoted as saying. ‘It’s the only thing I can hold on to.’

She and Leo’s father had been interviewed three times by police and faced the threat of prosecution. Hate mail had been posted to their house. She looked almost twenty years older than her given age. And yet, there was something else in her expression when she spoke; something that, alongside the grief and the anger and the anxiety and exhaustion, told of a deep, deep relief.

‘He finally looked like Leo again.’

15

‘So come on, then, Clark. What exciting events have you got planned for this evening?’

We were in the garden. Nathan was doing Will’s physio, gently moving his knees up and down towards his chest, while Will lay on a blanket, his face turned to the sun, his arms spread out as though he was sunbathing. I sat on the grass alongside them and ate my sandwiches. I rarely went out at lunchtime any more.

‘Why?’

‘Curiosity. I’m interested in how you spend your time when you’re not here.’

‘Well … tonight it’s a quick bout of advanced martial arts, then a helicopter is flying me to Monte Carlo for supper. And then I might take in a cocktail in Cannes on the way home. If you look up at around – ooh – around 2am, I’ll give you a wave on my way over,’ I said. I peeled the two sides of my sandwich apart, checking the filling. ‘I’m probably finishing my book.’

Will glanced up at Nathan. ‘Tenner,’ he said, grinning.

Nathan reached into his pocket. ‘Every time,’ he said.

I stared at them. ‘Every time what?’ I said, as Nathan put the money into Will’s hand.

‘He said you’d be reading a book. I said you’d be watching telly. He always wins.’

My sandwich stilled at my lips. ‘Always? You’ve been betting on how boring my life is?’

‘That’s not a word we would use,’ Will said. The faintly guilty look in his eyes told me otherwise.

I sat up straight. ‘Let me get this straight. You two are betting actual money that on a Friday night I would either be at home reading a book or watching television?’

‘No,’ said Will. ‘I had each way on you seeing Running Man down at the track.’

Nathan released Will’s leg. He pulled Will’s arm straight and began massaging it from the wrist up.

‘What if I said I was actually doing something completely different?’

‘But you never do,’ Nathan said.

‘Actually, I’ll have that.’ I plucked the tenner from Will’s hand. ‘Because tonight you’re wrong.’

‘You said you were going to read your book!’ he protested.

‘Now I have this,’ I said, brandishing the ten-pound note. ‘I’ll be going to the pictures. So there. Law of unintended consequences, or whatever it is you call it.’

I stood up, pocketed the money, and shoved the remains of my lunch into its brown paper bag. I was smiling as I walked away from them but, weirdly, and for no reason that I could immediately understand, my eyes were prickling with tears.

I had spent an hour working on the calendar before coming to Granta House that morning. Some days I just sat and stared at it from my bed, magic marker in hand, trying to work out what I could take Will to. I wasn’t yet convinced that I could get Will to go much further afield, and even with Nathan’s help the thought of an overnight visit seemed daunting.

I scanned the local paper, glancing at football matches and village fêtes, but was afraid after the racing debacle that Will’s chair might get stuck in the grass. I was concerned that crowds might leave him feeling exposed. I had to rule out all horse-related activities, which in an area like ours meant a surprising amount of outdoor stuff. I knew he wouldn’t want to watch Patrick running, and cricket and rugby left him cold. Some days I felt crippled by my own inability to think up new ideas.

Perhaps Will and Nathan were right. Perhaps I was boring. Perhaps I was the least well-equipped person in the world to try to come up with things that might inflame Will’s appetite for life.

A book, or the television.

Put like that, it was hard to believe any differently.

After Nathan left, Will found me in the kitchen. I was sitting at the small table, peeling potatoes for his evening meal, and didn’t look up when he positioned his wheelchair in the doorway. He watched me long enough for my ears to turn pink with the scrutiny.