[English Novel] Me Before You

Me Before You
Me Before You Page 60



I wrote the card, and posted it. I said nothing more about it. But that evening, Will’s words still echoing around my head, I found myself diverting into the library and, spying an unused computer, I logged on to the internet. I looked up whether there were any devices that Will could use to do his own writing. Within an hour, I had come up with three – a piece of voice recognition software, another type of software which relied on the blinking of an eye, and, as my sister had mentioned, a tapping device that Will could wear on his head.

He was predictably sniffy about the head device, but he conceded that the voice recognition software might be useful, and within a week we managed, with Nathan’s help, to install it on his computer, setting Will up so that with the computer tray fixed to his chair, he no longer needed someone else to type for him. He was a bit self-conscious about it initially, but after I instructed him to begin everything with, ‘Take a letter, Miss Clark,’ he got over it.

Even Mrs Traynor couldn’t find anything to complain about. ‘If there is any other equipment that you think might be useful,’ she said, her lips still pursed as if she couldn’t quite believe this might have been a straightforwardly good thing, ‘do let us know.’ She eyed Will nervously, as if he might actually be about to wrench it off with his jaw.

Three days later, just as I set off for work, the postman handed me a letter. I opened it on the bus, thinking it might be an early birthday card from some distant cousin. It read, in computerized text:

Dear Clark,

This is to show you that I am not an entirely selfish arse. And I do appreciate your efforts.

Thank you.

Will

I laughed so hard the bus driver asked me if my lottery numbers had come up.

After years spent in that box room, my clothes perched on a rail in the hallway outside, Treena’s bedroom felt palatial. The first night I spent in it I spun round with my arms outstretched, just luxuriating in the fact that I couldn’t touch both walls simultaneously. I went to the DIY store and bought paint and new blinds, as well as a new bedside light and some shelves, which I assembled myself. It’s not that I’m good at that stuff; I guess I just wanted to see if I could do it.

I set about redecorating, painting for an hour a night after I came home from work, and at the end of the week even Dad had to admit I’d done a really good job. He stared for a bit at my cutting in, fingered the blinds that I had put up myself, and put a hand on my shoulder. ‘This job has been the making of you, Lou.’

I bought a new duvet cover, a rug and some oversized cushions – just in case anyone ever stopped by, and fancied lounging. Not that anyone did. The calendar went on the back of the new door. Nobody saw it except for me. Nobody else would have known what it meant, anyway.

I did feel a bit bad about the fact that once we had put Thomas’s camp bed up next to Treena’s in the box room, there wasn’t actually any floor space left, but then I rationalized – they didn’t even really live here any more. And the box room was somewhere they were only going to sleep. There was no point in the larger room being empty for weeks on end.

I went to work each day, thinking about other places I could take Will. I didn’t have any overall plan, I just focused each day on getting him out and about and trying to keep him happy. There were some days – days when his limbs burnt, or when infection claimed him and he lay miserable and feverish in bed – that were harder than others. But on the good days I had managed several times to get him out into the spring sunshine. I knew now that one of the things Will hated most was the pity of strangers, so I drove him to local beauty spots, where for an hour or so it could be just the two of us. I made picnics and we sat out on the edges of fields, just enjoying the breeze and being away from the annexe.

‘My boyfriend wants to meet you,’ I told him one afternoon, breaking off pieces of cheese and pickle sandwich for him.

I had driven several miles out of town, up on to a hill, and we could see the castle, across the valley opposite, separated from us by fields of lambs.

‘Why?’

‘He wants to know who I’m spending all these late nights with.’

Oddly, I could see he found this quite cheering.

‘Running Man.’

‘I think my parents do too.’

‘I get nervous when a girl says she wants me to meet her parents. How is your mum, anyway?’

‘The same.’

‘Your dad’s job? Any news?’

‘No. Next week, they’re telling him now. Anyway, they said did I want to invite you to my birthday dinner on Friday? All very relaxed. Just family, really. But it’s fine … I said you wouldn’t want to.’

‘Who says I wouldn’t want to?’

‘You hate strangers. You don’t like eating in front of people. And you don’t like the sound of my boyfriend. It seems like a no-brainer to me.’

I had worked him out now. The best way to get Will to do anything was to tell him you knew he wouldn’t want to. Some obstinate, contrary part of him still couldn’t bear it.

Will chewed for a minute. ‘No. I’ll come to your birthday. It’ll give your mother something to focus on, if nothing else.’

‘Really? Oh God, if I tell her she’ll start polishing and dusting this evening.’

‘Are you sure she’s your biological mother? Isn’t there supposed to be some kind of genetic similarity there? Sandwich please, Clark. And more pickle on the next bit.’

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I had been only half joking. Mum went into a complete tailspin at the thought of hosting a quadriplegic. Her hands flew to her face, and then she started rearranging stuff on the dresser, as if he were going to arrive within minutes of me telling her.

‘But what if he needs to go to the loo? We don’t have a downstairs bathroom. I don’t think Daddy would be able to carry him upstairs. I could help … but I’d feel a bit worried about where to put my hands. Would Patrick do it?’

‘You don’t need to worry about that side of things. Really.’

‘And what about his food? Will he need his pureed? Is there anything he can’t eat?’

‘No, he just needs help picking it up.’

‘Who’s going to do that?’

‘I will. Relax, Mum. He’s nice. You’ll like him.’

And so it was arranged. Nathan would pick Will up and drive him over, and would come by two hours later to take him home again and run through the night-time routine. I had offered, but they both insisted I should ‘let my hair down’ on my birthday. They plainly hadn’t met my parents.

At half past seven on the dot, I opened the door to find Will and Nathan in the front porch. Will was wearing his smart shirt and jacket. I didn’t know whether to be pleased that he had made the effort, or worried that my mum would now spend the first two hours of the night worrying that she hadn’t dressed smartly enough.

‘Hey, you.’

My dad emerged into the hallway behind me. ‘Aha. Was the ramp okay, lads?’ He had spent all afternoon making the particle-board ramp for the outside steps.

Nathan carefully negotiated Will’s chair up and into our narrow hallway. ‘Nice,’ Nathan said, as I closed the door behind him. ‘Very nice. I’ve seen worse in hospitals.’

‘Bernard Clark.’ Dad reached out and shook Nathan’s hand. He held it out towards Will, before snatching it away again with a sudden flush of embarrassment. ‘Bernard. Sorry, um … I don’t know how to greet a … I can’t shake your –’ He began to stutter.

‘A curtsy will be fine.’

Dad stared at him and then, when he realized Will was joking, he let out a great laugh of relief. ‘Hah!’ he said, and clapped Will on the shoulder. ‘Yes. Curtsy. Nice one. Hah!

It broke the ice. Nathan left with a wave and a wink, and I wheeled Will through to the kitchen. Mum, luckily, was holding a casserole dish, which absolved her of the same anxiety.

‘Mum, this is Will. Will, Josephine.’

‘Josie, please.’ She beamed at him, her oven gloves up to her elbows. ‘Lovely to meet you finally, Will.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said. ‘Don’t let me interrupt.’

She put down the dish and her hand went to her hair, always a good sign with my mother. It was a shame she hadn’t remembered to take an oven glove off first.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Roast dinner. It’s all in the timing, you know.’

‘Not really,’ Will said. ‘I’m not a cook. But I love good food. It’s why I have been looking forward to tonight.’

‘So … ’ Dad opened the fridge. ‘How do we do this? Do you have a special beer … cup, Will?’

If it was Dad, I told Will, he would have had an adapted beer cup before he had a wheelchair.

‘Got to get your priorities right,’ Dad said. I rummaged in Will’s bag until I found his beaker.

‘Beer will be fine. Thank you.’

He took a sip and I stood in the kitchen, suddenly conscious of our tiny, shabby house with its 1980s wallpaper and dented kitchen cupboards. Will’s home was elegantly furnished, its things sparse and beautiful. Our house looked as if 90 per cent of its contents came from the local pound shop. Thomas’s dog-eared paintings covered every spare surface of wall. But if he had noticed, Will said nothing. He and Dad had quickly found a shared point of reference, which turned out to be my general uselessness. I didn’t mind. It kept them both happy.

‘Did you know, she once drove backwards into a bollard and swore it was the bollard’s fault … ’

‘You want to see her lowering my ramp. It’s like Ski Sunday coming out of that car sometimes … ’

Dad burst out laughing.

I left them to it. Mum followed me out, fretting. She put a tray of glasses on to the dining table, then glanced up at the clock. ‘Where’s Patrick?’

‘He was coming straight from training,’ I said. ‘Perhaps he’s been held up.’

‘He couldn’t put it off just for your birthday? This chicken is going to be spoilt if he’s much longer.’

‘Mum, it will be fine.’

I waited until she had put the tray down, and then I slid my arms around her and gave her a hug. She was rigid with anxiety. I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for her. It couldn’t be easy being my mother.

‘Really. It will be fine.’

She let go of me, kissed the top of my head, and brushed her hands down her apron. ‘I wish your sister was here. It seems wrong to have a celebration without her.’

Not to me it didn’t. Just for once, I was quite enjoying being the focus of attention. It might sound childish, but it was true. I loved having Will and Dad laughing about me. I loved the fact that every element of supper – from roast chicken to chocolate mousse – was my favourite. I liked the fact that I could be who I wanted to be without my sister’s voice reminding me of who I had been.

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The doorbell rang, and Mum flapped her hands. ‘There he is. Lou, why don’t you start serving?’

Patrick was still flushed from his exertions at the track. ‘Happy birthday, babe,’ he said, stooping to kiss me. He smelt of aftershave and deodorant and warm, recently showered skin.

‘Best go straight through.’ I nodded towards the living room. ‘Mum’s having a timing meltdown.’

‘Oh.’ He glanced down at his watch. ‘Sorry. Must have lost track of time.’

‘Not your time, though, eh?’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

Dad had moved the big gateleg table into the living room. He had also, on my instruction, moved one of the sofas to the other wall so that Will would be able to enter the room unobstructed. He manoeuvred his wheelchair to the placing I pointed to, and then elevated himself a little so that he would be the same height as everyone else. I sat on his left, and Patrick sat opposite. He and Will and Granddad nodded their hellos. I had already warned Patrick not to try to shake his hand. Even as I sat down I could feel Will studying Patrick, and I wondered, briefly, whether he would be as charming to my boyfriend as he had been to my parents.

Will inclined his head towards me. ‘If you look in the back of the chair, there’s a little something for the dinner.’

I leant back and reached my hand downwards into his bag. I pulled it up again, retrieving a bottle of Laurent-Perrier champagne.

‘You should always have champagne on your birthday,’ he said.

‘Oh, look at that,’ Mum said, bringing in the plates. ‘How lovely! But we have no champagne glasses.’

‘These will be fine,’ Will said.

‘I’ll open it.’ Patrick reached for it, unwound the wire, and placed his thumbs under the cork. He kept glancing over at Will, as if he were not what he had expected at all.

‘If you do that,’ Will observed, ‘it’s going to go everywhere.’ He lifted his arm an inch or so, gesturing vaguely. ‘I find that holding the cork and turning the bottle tends to be a safer bet.’

‘There’s a man who knows his champagne,’ Dad said. ‘There you go, Patrick. Turning the bottle, you say? Well, who knew?’

‘I knew,’ Patrick said. ‘That’s how I was going to do it.’

The champagne was safely popped and poured, and my birthday was toasted.

Granddad called out something that may well have been, ‘Hear, hear.’

I stood up and bowed. I was wearing a 1960s yellow A-line minidress I had got from the charity shop. The woman had thought it might be Biba, although someone had cut the label out.

‘May this be the year our Lou finally grows up,’ Dad said. ‘I was going to say “does something with her life” but it seems like she finally is. I have to say, Will, since she’s had the job with you she’s – well, she’s really come out of herself.’

‘We’re very proud,’ Mum said. ‘And grateful. To you. For employing her, I mean.’

‘Gratitude’s all mine,’ Will said. He glanced sideways at me.

‘To Lou,’ Dad said. ‘And her continued success.’

‘And to absent family members,’ Mum said.

‘Blimey,’ I said. ‘I should have a birthday more often. Most days you all just hurl abuse at me.’

They began to talk, Dad telling some other story against me that made him and Mum laugh out loud. It was good to see them laughing. Dad had looked so worn down these last weeks, and Mum had been hollow-eyed and distracted, as if her real self were always elsewhere. I wanted to savour these moments, of them briefly forgetting their troubles, in shared jokes and familial fondness. Just for a moment, I realized I wouldn’t have minded if Thomas was there. Or Treena, for that matter.

I was so lost in my thoughts that it took a minute to register Patrick’s expression. I was feeding Will as I said something to Granddad, folding a piece of smoked salmon in my fingers and placing it to Will’s lips. It was such an unthinking part of my daily life now that the intimacy of the gesture only struck me when I saw the shock on Patrick’s face.

Will said something to Dad and I stared at Patrick, willing him to stop. On his left, Granddad was picking at his plate with greedy delight, letting out what we called his ‘food noises’ – little grunts and murmurs of pleasure.

‘Delicious salmon,’ Will said, to my mother. ‘Really lovely flavour.

‘Well, it’s not something we would have every day,’ she said, smiling. ‘But we did want to make today special.’

Stop staring, I told Patrick silently.

Finally, he caught my eye and looked away. He looked furious.

I fed Will another piece, and then some bread when I saw him glance at it. I had, I realized in that moment, become so attuned to Will’s needs that I barely needed to look at him to work out what he wanted. Patrick, opposite, ate with his head down, cutting the smoked salmon into small pieces and spearing them with his fork. He left his bread.

‘So, Patrick,’ Will said, perhaps sensing my discomfort. ‘Louisa tells me you’re a personal trainer. What does that involve?’

I so wished he hadn’t asked. Patrick launched into his sales spiel, all about personal motivation and how a fit body made for a healthy mind. Then he segued into his training schedule for the Xtreme Viking – the temperatures of the North Sea, the body fat ratios needed for marathon running, his best times in each discipline. I normally tuned out at this point, but all I could think of now, with Will beside me, was how inappropriate it was. Why couldn’t he have just said something vague and left it at that?

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‘In fact, when Lou said you were coming, I thought I’d take a look at my books and see if there was any physio I could recommend.’

I choked on my champagne. ‘It’s quite specialist, Patrick. I’m not sure you’d really be the person.’

‘I can do specialist. I do sports injuries. I have medical training.’

‘This is not a sprained ankle, Pat. Really.’

‘There’s a man I worked with a couple of years ago had a client who was paraplegic. He’s almost fully recovered now, he says. Does triathlons and everything.’

‘Fancy,’ said my mother.

‘He pointed me to this new research in Canada that says muscles can be trained to remember former activity. If you get them working enough, every day, it’s like a brain synapse – it can come back. I bet you if we hooked you up with a really good regime, you could see a difference in your muscle memory. After all, Lou tells me you were quite the action man before.’

‘Patrick,’ I said loudly. ‘You know nothing about it.’

‘I was just trying to –’

‘Well don’t. Really.’

The table fell silent. Dad coughed, and excused himself for it. Granddad peered around the table in wary silence.

Mum made as if to offer everyone more bread, and then seemed to change her mind.

When Patrick spoke again, there was a faint air of martyrdom in his tone. ‘It’s just research that I thought might be helpful. But I’ll say no more about it.’

Will looked up and smiled, his face blank, polite. ‘I’ll certainly bear it in mind.’

I got up to clear the plates, wanting to escape the table. But Mum scolded me, telling me to sit down.

‘You’re the birthday girl,’ she said – as if she ever let anyone else do anything, anyway. ‘Bernard. Why don’t you go and get the chicken?’

‘Ha-ha. Let’s hope it’s stopped flapping around now, eh?’ Dad smiled, his teeth bared in a kind of grimace.

The rest of the meal passed off without incident. My parents, I could see, were completely charmed by Will. Patrick, less so. He and Will barely exchanged another word. Somewhere around the point where Mum served up the roast potatoes – Dad doing his usual thing of trying to steal extras – I stopped worrying. Dad was asking Will all sorts, about his life before, even about the accident, and he seemed comfortable enough to answer him directly. In fact, I learnt a fair bit that he’d never told me. His job, for example, sounded pretty important, even if he played it down. He bought and sold companies and made sure he turned a profit while doing so. It took Dad a few attempts to prise out of him that his idea of profit ran into six or seven figures. I found myself staring at Will, trying to reconcile the man I knew with this ruthless City suit that he now described. Dad told him about the company that was about to take over the furniture factory, and when he said the name Will nodded almost apologetically, and said that yes, he knew of them. Yes, he would probably have gone for it too. The way he said it didn’t sound promising for Dad’s job.

Mum just cooed at Will, and made a huge fuss of him. I realized, watching her smile, that at some stage during the meal he had just become a smart young man at her table. No wonder Patrick was pissed off.

‘Birthday cake?’ Granddad said, as she began to clear the dishes.

It was so distinct, so surprising, that Dad and I stared at each other in shock. The whole table went quiet.

‘No,’ I walked around the table and kissed him. ‘No, Granddad. Sorry. But it is chocolate mousse. You like that.’

He nodded in approval. My mother was beaming. I don’t think any of us could have had a better present.

The mousse arrived on the table, and with it a large, square present, about the size of a telephone directory, wrapped in tissue.

‘Presents, is it?’ Patrick said. ‘Here. Here’s mine.’ He smiled at me as he placed it in the middle of the table.

I raised a smile back. This was no time to argue, after all.

‘Go on,’ said Dad. ‘Open it.’

I opened theirs first, peeling the paper carefully away so that I didn’t tear it. It was a photograph album, and on every page there was a picture from a year in my life. Me as a baby; me and Treena as solemn, chubby-faced girls; me on my first day at secondary school, all hairclips and oversized skirt. More recently, there was a picture of me and Patrick, the one where I was actually telling him to piss off. And me, dressed in a grey skirt, my first day in my new job. In between the pages were pictures of our family by Thomas, letters that Mum had kept from school trips, my childish handwriting telling of days on the beach, lost ice creams and thieving gulls. I flicked through, and only hesitated briefly when I saw the girl with the long, dark flicked-back hair. I turned the page.

‘Can I see?’ Will said.

‘It’s not been … the best year,’ Mum told him, as I flicked through the pages in front of him. ‘I mean, we’re fine and everything. But, you know, things being what they are. And then Granddad saw something on the daytime telly about making your own presents, and I thought that was something that would … you know … really mean something.’

‘It does, Mum.’ My eyes had filled with tears. ‘I love it. Thank you.’

‘Granddad picked out some of the pictures,’ she said.

‘It’s beautiful,’ said Will.

‘I love it,’ I said again.

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The look of utter relief she and Dad exchanged was the saddest thing I have ever seen.

‘Mine next.’ Patrick pushed the little box across the table. I opened it slowly, feeling vaguely panicked for a moment that it might be an engagement ring. I wasn’t ready. I had barely got my head around having my own bedroom. I opened the little box, and there, against the dark-blue velvet, was a thin gold chain with a little star pendant. It was sweet, delicate, and not remotely me. I didn’t wear that kind of jewellery, never had.

I let my eyes rest on it while I worked out what to say. ‘It’s lovely,’ I said, as he leant across the table and fastened it around my neck.

‘Glad you like it,’ Patrick said, and kissed me on the mouth. I swear he’d never kissed me like that in front of my parents before.

Will watched me, his face impassive.

‘Well, I think we should eat pudding now,’ Dad said. ‘Before it gets too hot.’ He laughed out loud at his own joke. The champagne had boosted his spirits immeasurably.

‘There’s something in my bag for you too,’ Will said, quietly. ‘The one on the back of my chair. It’s in orange wrapping.’

I pulled the present from Will’s backpack.

My mother paused, the serving spoon in her hand. ‘You got Lou a present, Will? That’s ever so kind of you. Isn’t that kind of him, Bernard?’

‘It certainly is.’

The wrapping paper had brightly coloured Chinese kimonos on it. I didn’t have to look at it to know I would save it. Perhaps even create something to wear based on it. I removed the ribbon, putting it to one side for later. I opened the paper, and then the tissue paper within it, and there, staring at me was a strangely familiar black and yellow stripe.

I pulled the fabric from the parcel, and in my hands were two pairs of black and yellow tights. Adult-sized, opaque, in a wool so soft that they almost slid through my fingers.

‘I don’t believe it,’ I said. I had started to laugh – a joyous, unexpected thing. ‘Oh my God! Where did you get these?’

‘I had them made. You’ll be happy to know I instructed the woman via my brand-new voice recognition software.’

‘Tights?’ Dad and Patrick said in unison.

‘Only the best pair of tights ever.’

My mother peered at them. ‘You know, Louisa, I’m pretty sure you had a pair just like that when you were very little.’

Will and I exchanged a look.

I couldn’t stop beaming. ‘I want to put them on now,’ I said.

‘Jesus Christ, she’ll look like Max Wall in a beehive,’ my father said, shaking his head.

‘Ah Bernard, it’s her birthday. Sure, she can wear what she wants.’

I ran outside and pulled on a pair in the hallway. I pointed a toe, admiring the silliness of them. I don’t think a present had ever made me so happy in my life.

I walked back in. Will let out a small cheer. Granddad banged his hands on the table. Mum and Dad burst out laughing. Patrick just stared.

‘I can’t even begin to tell you how much I love these,’ I said. ‘Thank you. Thank you.’ I reached out a hand and touched the back of his shoulder. ‘Really.’

‘There’s a card in there too,’ he said. ‘Open it some other time.’

My parents made a huge fuss of Will when he left.

Dad, who was drunk, kept thanking him for employing me, and made him promise to come back. ‘If I lose my job, maybe I’ll come over and watch the footie with you one day,’ he said.

‘I’d like that,’ said Will, even though I’d never seen him watch a football match.

My mum pressed some leftover mousse on him, wrapping it in a Tupperware container, ‘Seeing as you liked it so much.’

What a gentleman, they would say, for a good hour after he had gone. A real gentleman.

Patrick came out to the hallway, his hands shoved deep in his pockets, as if perhaps to stop the urge to shake Will’s own. That was my more generous conclusion.

‘Good to meet you, Patrick,’ Will said. ‘And thank you for the … advice.’

‘Oh, just trying to help my girlfriend get the best out of her job,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’ There was a definite emphasis on the word my.

‘Well, you’re a lucky man,’ Will said, as Nathan began to steer him out. ‘She certainly gives a good bed bath.’ He said it so quickly that the door was closed before Patrick even realized what he had said.

‘You never told me you were giving him bed baths.’

We had gone back to Patrick’s house, a new-build flat on the edge of town. It had been marketed as ‘loft living’, even though it overlooked the retail park, and was no more than three floors high.

‘What does that mean – you wash his dick?’

‘I don’t wash his dick.’ I picked up the cleanser that was one of the few things I was allowed to keep at Patrick’s place, and began to clean off my make-up with sweeping strokes.

‘He just said you did.’

‘He’s teasing you. And after you going on and on about how he used to be an action man, I don’t blame him.’

‘So what is it you do for him? You’ve obviously not been giving me the full story.’

‘I do wash him, sometimes, but only down to his underwear.’

Patrick’s stare spoke volumes. Finally, he looked away from me, pulled off his socks and hurled them into the laundry basket. ‘Your job isn’t meant to be about this. No medical stuff, it said. No intimate stuff. It wasn’t part of your job description.’ A sudden thought occurred to him. ‘You could sue. Constructive dismissal, I think it is, when they change the terms of your job?’

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‘Don’t be ridiculous. And I do it because Nathan can’t always be there, and it’s horrible for Will to have some complete stranger from an agency handling him. And besides, I’m used to it now. It really doesn’t bother me.’

How could I explain to him – how a body can become so familiar to you? I could change Will’s tubes with a deft professionalism, sponge bathe his naked top half without a break in our conversation. I didn’t even balk at Will’s scars now. For a while, all I had been able to see was a potential suicide. Now he was just Will – maddening, mercurial, clever, funny Will – who patronized me and liked to play Professor Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle. His body was just part of the whole package, a thing to be dealt with, at intervals, before we got back to the talking. It had become, I supposed, the least interesting part of him.

‘I just can’t believe … after all we went through … how long it took you to let me come anywhere near you … and here’s some stranger who you’re quite happy to get up close and personal with –’

‘Can we not talk about this tonight, Patrick? It’s my birthday.’

‘I wasn’t the one who started it, with talk of bed baths and whatnot.’

‘Is it because he’s good looking?’ I demanded. ‘Is that it? Would it all be so much easier for you if he looked like – you know – a proper vegetable?’

‘So you do think he’s good looking.’

I pulled my dress over my head, and began peeling my tights carefully from my legs, the dregs of my good mood finally evaporating. ‘I can’t believe you’re doing this. I can’t believe you’re jealous of him.’

‘I’m not jealous of him.’ His tone was dismissive. ‘How could I be jealous of a cripple?’

Patrick made love to me that night. Perhaps ‘made love’ is stretching it a bit. We had ***, a marathon session in which he seemed determined to show off his athleticism, his strength and vigour. It lasted for hours. If he could have swung me from a chandelier I think he would have done so. It was nice to feel so wanted, to find myself the focus of Patrick’s attention after months of semi-detachment. But a little part of me stayed aloof during the whole thing. I suspected it wasn’t for me, after all. I had worked that out pretty quickly. This little show was for Will’s benefit.

‘How was that, eh?’ He wrapped himself around me afterwards, our skin sticking slightly with perspiration, and kissed my forehead.

‘Great,’ I said.

‘I love you, babe.’

And, satisfied, he rolled off, threw an arm back over his head, and was asleep within minutes.

When sleep still didn’t come, I got out of bed and went downstairs to my bag. I rifled through it, looking for the book of Flannery O’Connor short stories. It was as I pulled them from my bag that the envelope fell out.

I stared at it. Will’s card. I hadn’t opened it at the table. I did so now, feeling an unlikely sponginess at its centre. I slid the card carefully from its envelope, and opened it. Inside were ten crisp £50 notes. I counted them twice, unable to believe what I was seeing. Inside, it read:

Birthday bonus. Don’t fuss. It’s a legal requirement. W.

14

May was a strange month. The newspapers and television were full of headlines about what they termed ‘the right to die’. A woman suffering from a degenerative disease had asked that the law be clarified to protect her husband, should he accompany her to Dignitas when her suffering became too much. A young football player had committed suicide after persuading his parents to take him there. The police were involved. There was to be a debate in the House of Lords.

I watched the news reports and listened to the legal arguments from pro-lifers and esteemed moral philosophers, and didn’t quite know where I stood on any of it. It all seemed weirdly unrelated to Will.

We, in the meantime, had gradually been increasing Will’s outings – and the distance that he was prepared to travel. We had been to the theatre, down the road to see the morris dancers (Will kept a straight face at their bells and hankies, but he had gone slightly pink with the effort), driven one evening to an open-air concert at a nearby stately home (more his thing than mine), and once to the multiplex where, due to inadequate research on my part, we ended up watching a film about a girl with a terminal illness.

But I knew he saw the headlines too. He had begun using the computer more since we got the new software, and he had worked out how to move a mouse by dragging his thumb across a trackpad. This laborious exercise enabled him to read the day’s newspapers online. I brought him in a cup of tea one morning to find him reading about the young football player – a detailed feature about the steps he had gone through to bring about his own death. He blanked the screen when he realized I was behind him. That small action left me with a lump somewhere high in my chest that took a full half-hour to go away.

I looked up the same piece at the library. I had begun to read newspapers. I had worked out which of their arguments tended to go deeper – that information wasn’t always at its most useful boiled down to stark, skeletal facts.

The football player’s parents had been savaged by the tabloid newspapers. How Could They Let Him Die? screamed the headlines. I couldn’t help but feel the same way. Leo McInerney was twenty-four. He had lived with his injury for almost three years, so not much longer than Will. Surely he was too young to decide that there was nothing left to live for? And then I read what Will had read – not an opinion piece, but a carefully researched feature about what had actually taken place in this young man’s life. The writer seemed to have had access to his parents.

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Leo, they said, had played football since he was three years old. His whole life was football. He had been injured in what they termed a ‘million to one’ accident when a tackle went wrong. They had tried everything to encourage him, to give him a sense that his life would still hold value. But he had retreated into depression. He was an athlete not just without athleticism, but without even the ability to move or, on occasion, breathe without assistance. He gleaned no pleasure from anything. His life was painful, disrupted by infection, and dependent on the constant ministrations of others. He missed his friends, but refused to see them. He told his girlfriend he wouldn’t see her. He told his parents daily that he didn’t want to live. He told them that watching other people live even half the life he had planned for himself was unbearable, a kind of torture.

He had tried to commit suicide twice by starving himself until hospitalized, and when returned home had begged his parents to smother him in his sleep. When I read that, I sat in the library and stuck the balls of my hands in my eyes until I could breathe without sobbing.

Dad lost his job. He was pretty brave about it. He came home that afternoon, got changed into a shirt and tie and headed back into town on the next bus, to register at the Job Centre.

He had already decided, he told Mum, that he would apply for anything, despite being a skilled craftsman with years of experience. ‘I don’t think we can afford to be picky at the moment,’ he said, ignoring Mum’s protestations.

But if I had found it hard to get employment, prospects for a 55-year-old man who had only ever held one job were harder. He couldn’t even get a job as a warehouseman or a security guard, he said, despairingly, as he returned home from another round of interviews. They would take some unreliable snot-nosed seventeen-year-old because the government would make up their wages, but they wouldn’t take a mature man with a proven work record. After a fortnight of rejections, he and Mum admitted they would have to apply for benefits, just to tide them over, and spent their evenings poring over incomprehensible, fifty-page forms which asked how many people used their washing machine, and when was the last time they had left the country (Dad thought it might have been 1988). I put Will’s birthday money into the cash tin in the kitchen cupboard. I thought it might make them feel better to know they had a little security.

When I woke up in the morning, it had been pushed back under my door in an envelope.

The tourists came, and the town began to fill. Mr Traynor was around less and less now; his hours lengthened as the visitor numbers to the castle grew. I saw him in town one Thursday afternoon, when I walked home via the dry cleaner’s. That wouldn’t have been unusual in itself, except for the fact he had his arm around a red-haired woman who clearly wasn’t Mrs Traynor. When he saw me he dropped her like a hot potato.

I turned away, pretending to peer into a shop window, unsure if I wanted him to know that I had seen them, and tried very hard not to think about it again.

On the Friday after my dad lost his job, Will received an invitation – a wedding invitation from Alicia and Rupert. Well, strictly speaking, the invitation came from Colonel and Mrs Timothy Dewar, Alicia’s parents, inviting Will to celebrate their daughter’s marriage to Rupert Freshwell. It arrived in a heavy parchment envelope with a schedule of celebrations, and a fat, folded list of things that people could buy them from stores I had never even heard of.

‘She’s got some nerve,’ I observed, studying the gilt lettering, the gold-edged piece of thick card. ‘Want me to throw it?’

‘Whatever you want.’ Will’s whole body was a study in determined indifference.

I stared at the list. ‘What the hell is a couscoussier anyway?’

Perhaps it was something to do with the speed with which he turned away and began busying himself with his computer keyboard. Perhaps it was his tone of voice. But for some reason I didn’t throw it away. I put it carefully into his folder in the kitchen.

Will gave me another book of short stories, one that he’d ordered from Amazon, and a copy of The Red Queen. I knew it wasn’t going to be my sort of book at all. ‘It hasn’t even got a story,’ I said, after studying the back cover.

‘So?’ Will replied. ‘Challenge yourself a bit.’

I tried – not because I really had an appetite for genetics – but because I couldn’t bear the thought that Will would go on and on at me if I didn’t. He was like that now. He was actually a bit of a bully. And, really annoyingly, he would quiz me on how much I had read of something, just to make sure I really had.

‘You’re not my teacher,’ I would grumble.

‘Thank God,’ he would reply, with feeling.

This book – which was actually surprisingly readable – was all about a kind of battle for survival. It claimed that women didn’t pick men because they loved them at all. It said that the female of the species would always go for the strongest male, in order to give her offspring the best chance. She couldn’t help herself. It was just the way nature was.

I didn’t agree with this. And I didn’t like the argument. There was an uncomfortable undercurrent to what he was trying to persuade me of. Will was physically weak, damaged, in this author’s eyes. That made him a biological irrelevance. It would have made his life worthless.

He had been going on and on about this for the best part of an afternoon when I butted in. ‘There’s one thing this Matt Ridley bloke hasn’t factored in,’ I said.

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Will looked up from his computer screen. ‘Oh yes?’

‘What if the genetically superior male is actually a bit of a dickhead?’

On the third Saturday of May, Treena and Thomas came home. My mother was out of the door and up the garden path before they had made it halfway down the street. Thomas, she swore, clutching him to her, had grown several inches in the time they had been away. He had changed, was so grown-up, looked so much the little man. Treena had cut off her hair and looked oddly sophisticated. She was wearing a jacket I hadn’t seen before, and strappy sandals. I found myself wondering, meanly, where she had found the money.

‘So how is it?’ I asked, while Mum walked Thomas around the garden, showing him the frogs in the tiny pond. Dad was watching football with Granddad, exclaiming in mild frustration at another supposed missed opportunity.

‘Great. Really good. I mean, it’s hard not having any help with Thomas, and it did take him a while to settle in at the crèche.’ She leant forwards. ‘Although you mustn’t tell Mum – I told her he was fine.’

‘But you like the course.’

Treena’s face broke out into a smile. ‘It’s the best. I can’t tell you, Lou, the joy of just using my brain again. I feel like there’s been this big chunk of me missing for ages … and it’s like I’ve found it again. Does that sound wanky?’

I shook my head. I was actually glad for her. I wanted to tell her about the library, and the computers, and what I had done for Will. But I thought this should probably be her moment. We sat on the foldaway chairs, under the tattered sunshade, and sipped at our mugs of tea. Her fingers, I noticed, were all the right colours.

‘She misses you,’ I said.

‘We’ll be back most weekends from now on. I just needed … Lou, it wasn’t just about settling Thomas in. I just needed a bit of time to be away from it all. I just wanted time to be a different person.’

She looked a bit like a different person. It was weird. Just a few weeks away from home could rub the familiarity right off someone. I felt like she was on the path to being someone I wasn’t quite sure of. I felt, weirdly, as if I were being left behind.

‘Mum told me your disabled bloke came to dinner.’

‘He’s not my disabled bloke. His name’s Will.’

‘Sorry. Will. So it’s going well, then, the old anti-bucket list?’

‘So-so. Some trips have been more successful than others.’ I told her about the horse racing disaster, and the unexpected triumph of the violin concert. I told her about our picnics, and she laughed when I told her about my birthday dinner.

‘Do you think … ?’ I could see her working out the best way to put it. ‘Do you think you’ll win?’

Like it was some kind of contest.

I pulled a tendril from the honeysuckle and began picking off its leaves. ‘I don’t know. I think I’m going to need to up my game.’ I told her what Mrs Traynor had said to me about going abroad.

‘I can’t believe you went to a violin concert, though. You, of all people!’

‘I liked it.’

She raised an eyebrow.

‘No. Really, I did. It was … emotional.’

She looked at me carefully. ‘Mum says he’s really nice.’

‘He is really nice.’

‘And handsome.’

‘A spinal injury doesn’t mean you turn into Quasimodo.’ Please don’t say anything about it being a tragic waste, I told her silently.

But perhaps my sister was smarter than that. ‘Anyway. She was definitely surprised. I think she was prepared for Quasimodo.’

‘That’s the problem, Treen,’ I said, and threw the rest of my tea into the flower bed. ‘People always are.’

Mum was cheerful over supper that night. She had cooked lasagne, Treena’s favourite, and Thomas was allowed to stay up as a treat. We ate and talked and laughed and talked about safe things, like the football team, and my job, and what Treena’s fellow students were like. Mum must have asked Treena a hundred times if she was sure she was managing okay on her own, whether there was anything she needed for Thomas – as if they had anything spare they could have given her. I was glad I had warned Treena about how broke they were. She said no, gracefully and with conviction. It was only afterwards I thought to ask if it was the truth.

That night I was woken at midnight by the sound of crying. It was Thomas, in the box room. I could hear Treena trying to comfort him, to reassure him, the sound of the light going on and off, a bed being rearranged. I lay in the dark, watching the sodium light filter through my blinds on to my newly painted ceiling, and waited for it to stop. But the same thin wail began again at two. This time, I heard Mum padding across the hallway, and murmured conversation. Then, finally, Thomas was silent again.

At four I woke to the sound of my door creaking open. I blinked groggily, turning towards the light. Thomas stood silhouetted against the doorway, his oversized pyjamas loose around his legs, his comfort blanket half spooled on the floor. I couldn’t see his face, but he stood there uncertainly, as if unsure what to do next.

‘Come here, Thomas,’ I whispered. As he padded towards me, I could see he was still half asleep. His steps were halting, his thumb thrust into his mouth, his treasured blanket clutched to his side. I held the duvet open and he climbed into bed beside me, his tufty head burrowing into the other pillow, and curled up into a foetal ball. I pulled the duvet over him and lay there, gazing at him, marvelling at the certainty and immediacy of his sleep.

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‘Night, night, sweetheart,’ I whispered, and kissed his forehead, and a fat little hand crept out and took a chunk of my T-shirt in its grasp, as if to reassure itself that I couldn’t move away.

‘What was the best place you’ve ever visited?’

We were sitting in the shelter, waiting for a sudden squall to stop so that we could walk around the rear gardens of the castle. Will didn’t like going to the main area – too many people to gawp at him. But the vegetable gardens were one of its hidden treasures, visited by few. Its secluded orchards and fruit gardens were separated by honeyed pea-shingle paths that Will’s chair could negotiate quite happily.

‘In terms of what? And what’s that?’

I poured some soup from a flask and held it up to his lips. ‘Tomato.’

‘Okay. Jesus, that’s hot. Give me a minute.’ He squinted into the distance. ‘I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro when I hit thirty. That was pretty incredible.’

‘How high?’

‘A little over nineteen thousand feet to Uhuru Peak. That said, I pretty much crawled the last thousand or so. The altitude hits you pretty hard.’

‘Was it cold?’

‘No … ’ he smiled at me. ‘It’s not like Everest. Not the time of year that I went, anyway.’ He gazed off into the distance, briefly lost in his remembrance. ‘It was beautiful. The roof of Africa, they call it. When you’re up there, it’s like you can actually see to the end of the world.’

Will was silent for a moment. I watched him, wondering where he really was. When we had these conversations he became like the boy in my class, the boy who had distanced himself from us by venturing away.

‘So where else have you liked?’

‘Trou d’Eau Douce bay, Mauritius. Lovely people, beautiful beaches, great diving. Um … Tsavo National Park, Kenya, all red earth and wild animals. Yosemite. That’s California. Rock faces so tall your brain can’t quite process the scale of them.’

He told me of a night he’d spent rock climbing, perched on a ledge several hundred feet up, how he’d had to pin himself into his sleeping bag, and attach it to the rock face, because to roll over in his sleep would have been disastrous.

‘You’ve actually just described my worst nightmare, right there.’

‘I like more metropolitan places too. Sydney, I loved. The Northern Territories. Iceland. There’s a place not far from the airport where you can bathe in the volcanic springs. It’s like a strange, nuclear landscape. Oh, and riding across Central China. I went to this place about two days’ ride from the Capital of Sichuan province, and the locals spat at me because they hadn’t seen a white person before.’

‘Is there anywhere you haven’t been?’

He took another sip of soup. ‘North Korea?’ He pondered. ‘Oh, I’ve never been to Disneyland. Will that do? Not even Eurodisney.’

‘I once booked a ticket to Australia. Never went, though.’

He turned to me in surprise.

‘Stuff happened. It’s fine. Perhaps I will go one day.’

‘Not “perhaps”. You’ve got to get away from here, Clark. Promise me you won’t spend the rest of your life stuck around this bloody parody of a place mat.’

‘Promise me? Why?’ I tried to make my voice light. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I just … can’t bear the thought of you staying around here forever.’ He swallowed. ‘You’re too bright. Too interesting.’ He looked away from me. ‘You only get one life. It’s actually your duty to live it as fully as possible.’

‘Okay,’ I said, carefully. ‘Then tell me where I should go. Where would you go, if you could go anywhere?’

‘Right now?’

‘Right now. And you’re not allowed to say Kilimanjaro. It has to be somewhere I can imagine going myself.’

When Will’s face relaxed, he looked like someone quite different. A smile settled across his face now, his eyes creasing with pleasure. ‘Paris. I would sit outside a cafe in Le Marais and drink coffee and eat a plate of warm croissants with unsalted butter and strawberry jam.’

‘Le Marais?’

‘It’s a little district in the centre of Paris. It is full of cobbled streets and teetering apartment blocks and g*y men and orthodox Jews and women of a certain age who once looked like Brigitte Bardot. It’s the only place to stay.’

I turned to face him, lowering my voice. ‘We could go,’ I said. ‘We could do it on the Eurostar. It would be easy. I don’t think we’d even need to ask Nathan to come. I’ve never been to Paris. I’d love to go. Really love to go. Especially with someone who knows his way around. What do you say, Will?’

I could see myself in that cafe. I was there, at that table, maybe admiring a new pair of French shoes, purchased in a chic little boutique, or picking at a pastry with Parisian red fingernails. I could taste the coffee, smell the smoke from the next table’s Gauloises.

‘No.’

‘What?’ It took me a moment to drag myself away from that roadside table.

‘No.’

‘But you just told me –’

‘You don’t get it, Clark. I don’t want to go there in this – this thing.’ He gestured at the chair, his voice dropping. ‘I want to be in Paris as me, the old me. I want to sit in a chair, leaning back, my favourite clothes on, with pretty French girls who pass by giving me the eye just as they would any other man sitting there. Not looking away hurriedly when they realize I’m a man in an overgrown bloody pram.’

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‘But we could try,’ I ventured. ‘It needn’t be –’

‘No. No, we couldn’t. Because at the moment I can shut my eyes and know exactly how it feels to be in the Rue des Francs Bourgeois, cigarette in hand, clementine juice in a tall, cold glass in front of me, the smell of someone’s steak frites cooking, the sound of a moped in the distance. I know every sensation of it.’

He swallowed. ‘The day we go and I’m in this bloody contraption, all those memories, those sensations will be wiped out, erased by the struggle to get behind the table, up and down Parisian kerbs, the taxi drivers who refuse to take us, and the wheelchair bloody power pack that wouldn’t charge in a French socket. Okay?’

His voice had hardened. I screwed the top back on the vacuum flask. I examined my shoes quite carefully as I did it, because I didn’t want him to see my face.

‘Okay,’ I said.

‘Okay.’ Will took a deep breath.

Below us a coach stopped to disgorge another load of visitors outside the castle gates. We watched in silence as they filed out of the vehicle and into the old fortress in a single, obedient line, primed to stare at the ruins of another age.

It’s possible he realized I was a bit subdued, because he leant into me a little. And his face softened. ‘So, Clark. The rain seems to have stopped. Where shall we go this afternoon. The maze?’

‘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.