[English Novel] Me Before You

Me Before You
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‘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 ****tail 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.’

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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.

‘You know,’ I said, finally, ‘I could have been horrible to you back there. I could have pointed out that you do nothing either.’

‘I’m not sure Nathan would have offered particularly good odds on me going out dancing,’ Will said.

‘I know it’s a joke,’ I continued, discarding a long piece of potato peel. ‘But you just made me feel really crap. If you were going to bet on my boring life, did you have to make me aware of it? Couldn’t you and Nathan just have had it as some kind of private joke?’

He didn’t say anything for a bit. When I finally looked up, he was watching me. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘You don’t look sorry.’

‘Well … okay … maybe I wanted you to hear it. I wanted you to think about what you’re doing.’

‘What, how I’m letting my life slip by … ?’

‘Yes, actually.’

‘God, Will. I wish you’d stop telling me what to do. What if I like watching television? What if I don’t want to do much else other than read a book?’ My voice had become shrill. ‘What if I’m tired when I get home? What if I don’t need to fill my days with frenetic activity?’

‘But one day you might wish you had,’ he said, quietly. ‘Do you know what I would do if I were you?’

I put down my peeler. ‘I suspect you’re going to tell me.’

‘Yes. And I’m completely unembarrassed about telling you. I’d be doing night school. I’d be training as a seamstress or a fashion designer or whatever it is that taps into what you really love.’ He gestured at my minidress, a Sixties-inspired Pucci-type dress, made with fabric that had once been a pair of Granddad’s curtains.

The first time Dad had seen it he had pointed at me and yelled, ‘Hey, Lou, pull yourself together!’ It had taken him a full five minutes to stop laughing.

‘I’d be finding out what I could do that didn’t cost much – keep-fit classes, swimming, volunteering, whatever. I’d be teaching myself music or going for long walks with somebody else’s dog, or –’

‘Okay, okay, I get the message,’ I said, irritably. ‘But I’m not you, Will.’

‘Luckily for you.’

We sat there for a bit. Will wheeled himself in, and raised the height of his chair so that we faced each other over the table.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So what did you do after work? That was so valuable?’

‘Well, there wasn’t much time left after work, but I tried to do something every day. I did rock climbing at an indoor centre, and squash, and I went to concerts, and tried new restaurants –’

‘It’s easy to do those things if you have money,’ I protested.

‘And I went running. Yes, really,’ he said, as I raised an eyebrow.

‘And I tried to learn new languages for places I thought I might visit one day. And I saw my friends – or people I thought were my friends … ’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘And I planned trips. I looked for places I’d never been, things that would frighten me or push me to my limit. I swam the Channel once. I went paragliding. I walked up mountains and skied down them again. Yes –’ he said, as I made to interrupt ‘– I know a lot of these need money, but a lot of them don’t. And besides, how do you think I made money?’

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‘Ripping people off in the City?’

‘I worked out what would make me happy, and I worked out what I wanted to do, and I trained myself to do the job that would make those two things happen.’

‘You make it sound so simple.’

‘It is simple,’ he said. ‘The thing is, it’s also a lot of hard work. And people don’t want to put in a lot of work.’

I had finished the potatoes. I threw the peel into the bin, and put the pan on to the stove ready for later. I turned and lifted myself on my arms so that I was sitting on the table facing him, my legs dangling.

‘You had a big life, didn’t you?’

‘Yeah, I did.’ He moved a bit closer, and raised his chair so that he was almost at eye level. ‘That’s why you piss me off, Clark. Because I see all this talent, all this … ’ He shrugged. ‘This energy and brightness, and –’

‘Don’t say potential …’

‘ … potential. Yes. Potential. And I cannot for the life of me see how you can be content to live this tiny life. This life that will take place almost entirely within a five-mile radius and contain nobody who will ever surprise you or push you or show you things that will leave your head spinning and unable to sleep at night.’

‘This is your way of telling me I should be doing something far more worthwhile than peeling your potatoes.’

‘I’m telling you there’s a whole world out there. But that I’d be very grateful if you’d do me some potatoes first.’ He smiled at me, and I couldn’t help but smile back.

‘Don’t you think –’ I started, and then broke off.

‘Go on.’

‘Don’t you think it’s actually harder for you … to adapt, I mean? Because you’ve done all that stuff?’

‘Are you asking me if I wish I’d never done it?’

‘I’m just wondering if it would have been easier for you. If you’d led a smaller life. To live like this, I mean.’

‘I will never, ever regret the things I’ve done. Because most days, if you’re stuck in one of these, all you have are the places in your memory that you can go to.’ He smiled. It was tight, as if it cost him. ‘So if you’re asking me would I rather be reminiscing about the view of the castle from the minimart, or that lovely row of shops down off the roundabout, then, no. My life was just fine, thanks.’

I slid off the table. I wasn’t entirely sure how, but I felt, yet again, like I’d somehow been argued into a corner. I reached for the chopping board on the drainer.

‘And Lou, I’m sorry. About the money thing.’

‘Yeah. Well.’ I turned, and began rinsing the chopping board under the sink. ‘Don’t think that’s going to get you your tenner back.’

Two days later Will ended up in hospital with an infection. A precautionary measure, they called it, although it was obvious to everyone that he was in a lot of pain. Some quadriplegics had no sensation but, while he was impervious to temperature, below his chest Will could feel both pain and touch. I went in to see him twice, bringing him music and nice things to eat, and offering to keep him company, but peculiarly I felt in the way, and realized quite quickly that Will didn’t actually want the extra attention in there. He told me to go home and enjoy some time to myself.

A year previously, I would have wasted those free days; I would have trawled the shops, maybe gone over to meet Patrick for lunch. I would probably have watched some daytime television, and maybe made a vague attempt to sort out my clothes. I might have slept a lot.

Now, however, I felt oddly restless and dislocated. I missed having a reason to get up early, a purpose to my day.

It took me half a morning to work out that this time could be useful. I went to the library and began to research. I looked up every website about quadriplegics that I could find, and worked out things we could do when Will was better. I wrote lists, adding to each entry the equipment or things I might need to consider for each event.

I discovered chat rooms for those with spinal injuries, and found there were thousands of men and women out there just like Will – leading hidden lives in London, Sydney, Vancouver, or just down the road – aided by friends or family, or sometimes, heartbreakingly alone.

I wasn’t the only carer interested in these sites. There were girlfriends, asking how they could help their partners gain the confidence to go out again, husbands seeking advice on the latest medical equipment. There were advertisements for wheelchairs that would go on sand or off-road, clever hoists or inflatable bathing aids.

There were codes to their discussions. I worked out that SCI was a spinal cord injury, AB the able-bodied, a UTI an infection. I saw that a C4/5 spinal injury was far more severe than a C11/12, most of whom still seemed to have use of their arms or torso. There were stories of love and loss, of partners struggling to cope with disabled spouses as well as young children. There were wives who felt guilty that they had prayed their husbands would stop beating them – and then found they never would again. There were husbands who wanted to leave disabled wives but were afraid of the reaction of their community. There was exhaustion and despair, and a lot of black humour – jokes about exploding catheter bags, other people’s well-meaning idiocy, or drunken misadventures. Falling out of chairs seemed to be a common theme. And there were threads about suicide – those who wanted to, those who encouraged them to give themselves more time, to learn to look at their lives in a different way. I read each thread, and felt like I was getting a secret insight into the workings of Will’s brain.

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At lunchtime I left the library and went for a brief walk around town to clear my head. I treated myself to a prawn sandwich and sat on the wall watching the swans in the lake below the castle. It was warm enough for me to take off my jacket, and I let my face tilt towards the sun. There was something curiously restful about watching the rest of the world getting on with its business. After spending all morning stuck in the world of the confined, just being able to walk out and eat my lunch in the sun felt like a freedom.

When I had finished, I walked back to the library, reclaimed my computer terminal. And I took a breath and typed a message.

Hi – I am the friend/carer of a 35 yo C5/6 quadriplegic. He was very successful and dynamic in his former life and is having trouble adjusting to his new one. In fact, I know that he does not want to live, and I am trying to think of ways of changing his mind. Please could anyone tell me how I could do this? Any ideas for things he might enjoy, or ways I could get him to think differently? All advice gratefully received.

I called myself Busy Bee. Then I sat back in my chair, chewed at my thumbnail for a bit, and finally pressed ‘Send’.

When I sat down at the terminal the next morning, I had fourteen answers. I logged into the chat room, and blinked as I saw the list of names, the responses which had come from people worldwide, throughout the day and night. The first one said:

Dear Busy Bee,

Welcome to our board. I’m sure your friend will gain a lot of comfort from having someone looking out for him.

I’m not so sure about that, I thought.

Most of us on here have hit a definite hump at some point in our lives. It may be that your friend has hit his. Don’t let him push you away. Stay positive. And remind him that it is not his place to decide both when we enter and depart this world, but that of the Lord. He decided to change your friend’s life, in His own wisdom and there may be a lesson in it that He –

I scanned down to the next one.

Dear Bee,

There is no way around it, being a quad can suck. If your guy was a bit of a player too, then he is going to find it extra hard. These are the things that helped me. A lot of company, even when I didn’t feel like it. Good food. Good docs. Good meds, depression meds when necessary. You didn’t say where you were based, but if you can get him talking to others in the SCI community it may help. I was pretty reluctant at first (I think some part of me didn’t want to admit I was actually a quad) but it does help to know you’re not alone out there.

Oh, and DON’T let him watch any films like

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

. Major downer!

Let us know how you get on.

All best,

Ritchie

I looked up The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. ‘The story of a man who suffers a paralysing stroke, and his attempts to communicate with the outside world,’ it said. I wrote the title down on my pad, uncertain whether I was doing so to make sure Will avoided it, or so I remembered to watch it.

The next two answers were from a Seventh-day Adventist, and a man whose suggested ways in which I could cheer Will up were certainly not covered by my working contract. I flushed and hurriedly scrolled down, afraid that someone might glance at the screen from behind me. And then I hesitated on the next reply.

Hi Busy Bee,

Why do you think your friend/charge/whatever needs his mind changing? If I could work out a way of dying with dignity, and if I didn’t know it would devastate my family, I would take it. I have been stuck in this chair eight years now, and my life is a constant round of humiliations and frustrations. Can you really put yourself in his shoes? Do you know how it feels to not even be able to empty your bowels without help? To know that forever after you are going to be stuck in your bed/unable to eat, dress, communicate with the outside world without someone to help you? To never have *** again? To face the prospect of sores, and ill health and even ventilators? You sound like a nice person, and I’m sure you mean well. But it may not be you looking after him next week. It may be someone who depresses him, or even doesn’t like him very much. That, like everything else, is out of his control. We SCIs know that very little is under our control – who feeds us, dresses us, washes us, dictates our medication. Living with that knowledge is very hard.

So I think you are asking the wrong question. Who are the AB to decide what our lives should be? If this is the wrong life for your friend, shouldn’t the question be: How do I help him to end it?

Best wishes,

Gforce, Missouri, US

I stared at the message, my fingers briefly stilled on the keyboard. Then I scrolled down. The next few were from other quadriplegics, criticizing Gforce for his bleak words, protesting that they had found a way forward, that theirs was a life worth living. There was a brief argument going on that seemed to have little to do with Will at all.

And then the thread dragged itself back to my request. There were suggestions of antidepressants, massage, miracle recoveries, stories of how members’ own lives had been given new value. There were a few practical suggestions: wine tasting, music, art, specially adapted keyboards.

‘A partner,’ said Grace31 from Birmingham. ‘If he has love, he will feel he can go on. Without it, I would have sunk many times over.’

That phrase echoed in my head long after I had left the library.

Will came out of hospital on Thursday. I picked him up in the adapted car, and brought him home. He was pale and exhausted, and stared out of the window listlessly for the whole journey.

‘No sleep in these places,’ he explained, when I asked him if he was okay. ‘There’s always someone moaning in the next bed.’

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I told him he would have the weekend to recover, but after that I had a series of outings planned. I told him I was taking his advice and trying new things, and he would have to come with me. It was a subtle change in emphasis, but I knew that was the only way I could get him to accompany me.

In fact, I had devised a detailed schedule for the next couple of weeks. Each event was carefully marked on my calendar in black, with red pen outlining the precautions I should take, and green for the accessories I would need. Every time I looked at the back of my door I felt a little glimmer of excitement, both that I had been so organized, but also that one of these events might actually be the thing that changed Will’s view of the world.

As my Dad always says, my sister is the brains of our family.

The art gallery trip lasted a shade under twenty minutes. And that included driving round the block three times in search of a suitable parking space. We got there, and almost before I had closed the door behind him he said all the work was terrible. I asked him why and he said if I couldn’t see it he couldn’t explain it. The cinema had to be abandoned after the staff told us, apologetically, that their lift was out of order. Others, such as the failed attempt to go swimming, required more time and organization – the ringing of the swimming pool beforehand, the booking of Nathan for overtime, and then, when we got there, the flask of hot chocolate drunk in silence in the leisure centre car park when Will resolutely refused to go in.

The following Wednesday evening, we went to hear a singer he had once seen live in New York. That was a good trip. When he listened to music he wore an expression of intense concentration. Most of the time, it was as if Will were not wholly present, as if there were some part of him struggling with pain, or memories, or dark thoughts. But with music it was different.

And then the following day I took him to a wine tasting, part of a promotional event held by a vineyard in a specialist wine shop. I had to promise Nathan I wouldn’t get him drunk. I held up each glass for Will to sniff, and he knew what it was even before he’d tasted it. I tried quite hard not to snort when Will spat it into the beaker (it did look really funny), and he looked at me from under his brows and said I was a complete child. The shop owner went from being weirdly disconcerted by having a man in a wheelchair in his shop to quite impressed. As the afternoon went on, he sat down and started opening other bottles, discussing region and grape with Will, while I wandered up and down looking at the labels, becoming, frankly, a little bored.

‘Come on, Clark. Get an education,’ he said, nodding at me to sit down beside him.

‘I can’t. My mum told me it was rude to spit.’

The two men looked at each other as if I were the mad one. And yet he didn’t spit every time. I watched him. And he was suspiciously talkative for the rest of the afternoon – swift to laugh, and even more combative than usual.

And then, on the way home, we were driving through a town we didn’t normally go to and, as we sat, motionless, in traffic, I glanced over and saw the Tattoo and Piercing Parlour.

‘I always quite fancied a tattoo,’ I said.

I should have known afterwards that you couldn’t just say stuff like that in Will’s presence. He didn’t do small talk, or shooting the breeze. He immediately wanted to know why I hadn’t had one.

‘Oh … I don’t know. The thought of what everyone would say, I guess.’

‘Why? What would they say?’

‘My dad hates them.’

‘How old are you again?’

‘Patrick hates them too.’

‘And he never does anything that you might not like.’

‘I might get claustrophobic. I might change my mind once it was done.’

‘Then you get it removed by laser, surely?’

I looked at him in my rear-view mirror. His eyes were merry.

‘Come on, then,’ he said. ‘What would you have?’

I realized I was smiling. ‘I don’t know. Not a snake. Or anyone’s name.’

‘I wasn’t expecting a heart with a banner saying “mother”.’

‘You promise not to laugh?’

‘You know I can’t do that. Oh God, you’re not going to have some Indian Sanskrit proverb or something, are you? What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.’

‘No. I’d have a bee. A little black and yellow bee. I love them.’

He nodded, as if that were a perfectly reasonable thing to want. ‘And where would you have it? Or daren’t I ask?’

I shrugged. ‘Dunno. My shoulder? Lower hip?’

‘Pull over,’ he said.

‘Why, are you okay?’

‘Just pull over. There’s a space there. Look, on your left.’

I pulled the car into the kerb and glanced back at him. ‘Go on, then,’ he said. ‘We’ve got nothing else on today.’

‘Go on where?’

‘To the tattoo parlour.’

I started to laugh. ‘Yeah. Right.’

‘Why not?’

‘You have been swallowing instead of spitting.’

‘You haven’t answered my question.’

I turned in my seat. He was serious.

‘I can’t just go and get a tattoo. Just like that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because … ’

‘Because your boyfriend says no. Because you still have to be a good girl, even at twenty-seven. Because it’s too scary. C’mon, Clark. Live a little. What’s stopping you?’

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I stared down the road at the tattoo parlour frontage. The slightly grimy window bore a large neon heart, and some framed photographs of Angelina Jolie and Mickey Rourke.

Will’s voice broke into my calculations. ‘Okay. I will, if you will.’

I turned back to him. ‘You’d get a tattoo?’

‘If it persuaded you, just once, to climb out of your little box.’

I switched off the engine. We sat, listening to it tick its way down, the dull murmur of the cars queuing along the road beside us.

‘It’s quite permanent.’

‘No “quite” about it.’

‘Patrick will hate it.’

‘So you keep saying.’

‘And we’ll probably get hepatitis from dirty needles. And die slow, horrible, painful deaths.’ I turned to Will. ‘They probably wouldn’t be able to do it now. Not actually right now.’

‘Probably not. But shall we just go and check?’

Two hours later we exited the tattoo parlour, me eighty pounds lighter and bearing a surgical patch over my hip where the ink was still drying. Its relatively small size, the tattoo artist said, meant that I could have it lined and coloured in one visit, so there I was. Finished. Tattooed. Or, as Patrick would no doubt say, scarred for life. Under that white dressing sat a fat little bumblebee, culled from the laminated ring binder of images that the tattoo artist had handed us when we walked in. I felt almost hysterical with excitement. I kept reaching around to peek at it until Will told me to stop, or I was going to dislocate something.

Will had been relaxed and happy in there, oddly enough. They had not given him a second look. They had done a few quads, they said, which explained the ease with which they had handled him. They were surprised when Will said he could feel the needle. Six weeks earlier they had finished inking a paraplegic who had had trompe l’oeil bionics inked the whole way down one side of his leg.

The tattooist with the bolt through his ear had taken Will into the next room and, with my tattooist’s help, laid him down on a special table so that all I could see through the open door were his lower legs. I could hear the two men murmuring and laughing over the buzz of the tattooing needle, the smell of antiseptic sharp in my nostrils.

When the needle first bit into my skin, I chewed my lip, determined not to let Will hear me squeal. I kept my mind on what he was doing next door, trying to eavesdrop on his conversation, wondering what it was he was having done. When he finally emerged, after my own had been finished, he refused to let me see. I suspected it might be something to do with Alicia.

‘You’re a bad bloody influence on me, Will Traynor,’ I said, opening the car door and lowering the ramp. I couldn’t stop grinning.

‘Show me.’

I glanced down the street, then turned and peeled a little of the dressing down from my hip.

‘It’s great. I like your little bee. Really.’

‘I’m going to have to wear high-waisted trousers around my parents for the rest of my life.’ I helped him steer his chair on to the ramp and raised it. ‘Mind you, if your mum gets to hear you’ve had one too … ’

‘I’m going to tell her the girl from the council estate led me astray.’

‘Okay then, Traynor, you show me yours.’

He gazed at me steadily, half smiling. ‘You’ll have to put a new dressing on it when we get home.’

‘Yeah. Like that never happens. Go on. I’m not driving off until you do.’

‘Lift my shirt, then. To the right. Your right.’

I leant through the front seats, and tugged at his shirt, peeling back the piece of gauze beneath. There, dark against his pale skin was a black and white striped ink rectangle, small enough that I had to look twice before I realized what it said.

Best before: 19 March 2007

I stared at it. I half laughed, and then my eyes filled with tears. ‘Is that the –’

‘Date of my accident. Yes.’ He raised his eyes to the heavens. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, don’t get maudlin, Clark. It was meant to be funny.’

‘It is funny. In a crappy sort of way.’

‘Nathan will enjoy it. Oh, come on, don’t look like that. It’s not as if I’m ruining my perfect body, is it?’

I pulled Will’s shirt back down and then I turned and fired up the ignition. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what any of this meant. Was this him coming to terms with his state? Or just another way of showing his contempt for his own body?

‘Hey, Clark, do me a favour,’ he said, just as I was about to pull away. ‘Reach into the backpack for me. The zipped pocket.’

I glanced into the rear-view mirror, and put the handbrake on again. I leant through the front seats and put my hand in the bag, rummaging around according to his instructions.

‘You want painkillers?’ I was inches from his face. He had more colour in his skin than at any time since he came back from hospital. ‘I’ve got some in my –’

‘No. Keep looking.’

I pulled out a piece of paper and sat back. It was a folded ten-pound note.

‘There you go. The emergency tenner.’

‘So?’

‘It’s yours.’

‘For what?’

‘That tattoo.’ He grinned at me. ‘Right up until you were in that chair, I didn’t think for a minute you were going to actually do it.’

16

There was no way around it. The sleeping arrangements just weren’t working. Every weekend that Treena came home, the Clark family began a lengthy, nocturnal game of musical beds. After supper on Friday night Mum and Dad would offer up their bedroom, and Treena would accept it, after they had reassured her that no, they were not in the least bit put out, and how much better Thomas was at sleeping in a room he knew. It would mean, they said, that everyone got a good night’s sleep.

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But Mum sleeping downstairs also involved her and Dad needing their own quilt, their own pillows and even under-sheet, as Mum couldn’t sleep properly unless her bed was just as she liked it. So after supper she and Treena would strip Mum and Dad’s bed and put on a new set of sheets, together with a mattress protector, just in case Thomas had an accident. Mum and Dad’s bedding, meanwhile, would be folded and placed in the corner of the living room, where Thomas would dive into it and on to it and string the sheet across the dining chairs to turn it into a tent.

Granddad offered his room, but nobody took it. It smelt of yellowing copies of the Racing Post and Old Holborn, and it would have taken all weekend to clear out. I would alternately feel guilty – all this was my fault, after all – while knowing I would not offer to return to the box room. It had become a kind of spectre for me, that airless little room with no windows. The thought of sleeping in there again made my chest feel tight. I was twenty-seven years old. I was the main earner of the family. I could not sleep in what was essentially a cupboard.

One weekend I offered to sleep at Patrick’s, and everyone looked secretly relieved. But then, while I was away, Thomas put sticky fingers all over my new blinds and drew on my new duvet cover in permanent pen, at which point Mum and Dad decided it would be best if they slept in my room, while Treena and Thomas went into theirs, where the odd bit of felt tip apparently didn’t matter.

Once you had accounted for all the extra bed stripping and laundry, me spending Friday and Saturday nights at Pat’s, Mum admitted, wasn’t actually much help at all.

And then there was Patrick. Patrick was now a man obsessed. He ate, drank, lived and breathed the Xtreme Viking. His flat, normally sparsely furnished and immaculate, was strung with training schedules and dietary sheets. He had a new lightweight bike which lived in the hallway and which I wasn’t allowed to touch, in case I interfered with its finely balanced lightweight racing capabilities.

And he was rarely home, even on a Friday or Saturday night. What with his training and my work hours we seemed to have become used to spending less time together. I could follow him down to the track and watch him push himself round and round in circles until he had completed the requisite number of miles, or I could stay home and watch television by myself, curled up in a corner of his vast leather settee. There was no food in the fridge, apart from strips of turkey breast and vile energy drinks the consistency of frogspawn. Treena and I had tried one once and spat it out, gagging theatrically, like children.

The truth of it was I didn’t like Patrick’s flat. He had bought it a year ago, when he finally felt his mother would be okay by herself. His business had done well, and he had told me it was important that one of us get on to the property ladder. I suppose that would have been the cue for us to have a conversation about whether we were going to live together, but somehow it didn’t happen, and neither of us is the type to bring up subjects that make us feel a bit uncomfortable. As a result, there was nothing of me in that flat, despite our years together. I had never quite been able to tell him, but I would rather live in my house, with all its noise and clutter, than in that soulless, featureless bachelor pad, with its allocated parking spaces and executive view of the castle.

And besides, it was a bit lonely.

‘Got to stick to the schedule, babe,’ he would say, if I told him. ‘If I do any fewer than twenty-three miles at this stage of the game, I’ll never make it back on schedule.’ Then he would give me the latest update on his shin splints or ask me to pass him the heat spray.

When he wasn’t training, he was at endless meetings with other members of his team, comparing kit and finalizing travel arrangements. Sitting amongst them was like being with a bunch of Korean speakers. I had no idea what any of it meant, and no great desire to immerse myself.

And I was supposed to be going with them to Norway in seven weeks’ time. I hadn’t yet worked out how to tell Patrick that I hadn’t asked the Traynors for the time off. How could I? By the time the Xtreme Viking took place, there would be less than one week of my contract left to run. I suppose I was childishly refusing to deal with it all, but truthfully, all I could see was Will and a ticking clock. Not a lot else seemed to register.

The great irony of all this was that I didn’t even sleep well at Patrick’s flat. I don’t know what it was, but I came to work from there feeling like I was speaking through a glass jar, and looking like I had been punched in both eyes. I began painting concealer on my dark shadows with the same slapdash abandon as if I were decorating.

‘What’s going on, Clark?’ Will said.

I opened my eyes. He was right beside me, his head ****ed to one side, watching me. I got the feeling he might have been there for some time. My hand went automatically for my mouth in case I had been dribbling.

The film I was supposed to have been watching was now a series of slow-moving cre***s.

‘Nothing. Sorry. It’s just warm in here.’ I pushed myself upright.

‘It’s the second time you’ve fallen asleep in three days.’ He studied my face. ‘And you look bloody awful.’

So I told him. I told him about my sister, and our sleeping arrangements, and how I didn’t want to make a fuss because every time I looked at Dad’s face I saw his barely concealed despair that he could not even provide his family with a house we could all sleep in.

‘He’s still not found anything?’

‘No. I think it’s his age. But we don’t talk about it. It’s … ’ I shrugged. ‘It’s too uncomfortable for everyone.’

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We waited for the movie to finish, and then I walked over to the player, ejected the DVD and put it back in its case. It felt somehow wrong, telling Will my problems. They seemed embarrassingly trivial next to his.

‘I’ll get used to it,’ I said. ‘It’ll be fine. Really.’

Will seemed preoccupied for the rest of the afternoon. I washed up, then came through and set up his computer for him. When I brought him a drink, he swivelled his chair towards me.

‘It’s quite simple,’ he said, as if we had been in conversation. ‘You can sleep here at weekends. There’s a room going spare – it might as well get some use.’

I stopped, the beaker in my hand. ‘I can’t do that.’

‘Why not? I’m not going to pay you for the extra hours you’re here.’

I placed the beaker in his holder. ‘But what would your mum think?’

‘I have no idea.’

I must have looked troubled, because he added, ‘It’s okay. I’m safe in taxis.’

‘What?’

‘If you’re worried I have some devious secret plan to seduce you, you can just pull my plug out.’

‘Funny.’

‘Seriously. Think about it. You could have it as your backup option. Things might change faster than you think. Your sister might decide she doesn’t want to spend every weekend at home after all. Or she might meet someone. A million things might change.’

And you might not be here in two months, I told him silently, and immediately hated myself for thinking it.

‘Tell me something,’ he said, as he went to leave the room. ‘Why isn’t Running Man offering you his place?’

‘Oh, he has,’ I said.

He looked at me, as if he were about to pursue the conversation.

And then he seemed to change his mind. ‘Like I said.’ He shrugged. ‘The offer’s there.’

These are the things that Will liked.

Watching films, especially foreign ones with subtitles. He could occasionally be persuaded into an action thriller, even an epic romance, but drew the line at romantic comedies. If I dared to rent one, he would spend the entire 120 minutes letting out little pffts of derision, or pointing out the great clichés in the plot, until it was no fun for me at all.

Listening to classical music. He knew an awful lot about it. He also liked some modern stuff, but said jazz was mostly pretentious guff. When he saw the contents of my MP3 player one afternoon, he laughed so hard he nearly dislodged one of his tubes.

Sitting in the garden, now that it was warm. Sometimes I stood in the window and watched him, his head tilted back, just enjoying the sun on his face. When I remarked on his ability to be still and just enjoy the moment – something I had never mastered – he pointed out that if you can’t move your arms and legs, you haven’t actually got a lot of choice.

Making me read books or magazines, and then talk about them. Knowledge is power, Clark, he would say. I hated this at first; it felt like I was at school, being quizzed on my powers of memory. But after a while I realized that, in Will’s eyes, there were no wrong answers. He actually liked me to argue with him. He asked me what I thought of things in the newspapers, disagreed with me about characters in books. He seemed to hold opinions on almost everything – what the government was doing, whether one business should buy another, whether someone should have been sent to jail. If he thought I was being lazy, or parroting my parents’ or Patrick’s ideas, he would just say a flat, ‘No. Not good enough.’ He would look so disappointed if I said I knew nothing about it; I had begun to anticipate him and now read a newspaper on the bus on the way in, just so I felt prepared. ‘Good point, Clark,’ he would say, and I would find myself beaming. And then give myself a kick for allowing Will to patronize me again.

Getting a shave. Every two days now, I lathered up his jaw and made him presentable. If he wasn’t having a bad day, he would lean back in his chair, close his eyes, and the closest thing I saw to physical pleasure would spread across his face. Perhaps I’ve invented that. Perhaps I saw what I wanted to see. But he would be completely silent as I gently ran the blade across his chin, smoothing and scraping, and when he did open his eyes his expression had softened, like someone coming out of a particularly satisfactory sleep. His face now held some colour from our time spent outside; his was the kind of skin that tanned easily. I kept the razors high up in the bathroom cabinet, tucked behind a large bottle of con***ioner.

Being a bloke. Especially with Nathan. Occasionally, before the evening routine, they would go and sit at the end of the garden and Nathan would crack open a couple of beers. Sometimes I heard them discussing rugby, or joking about some woman they had seen on the television, and it wouldn’t sound like Will at all. But I understood he needed this; he needed someone with whom he could just be a bloke, doing blokey things. It was a small bit of ‘normal’ in his strange, separate life.

Commenting on my wardrobe. Actually, that should be raising an eyebrow at my wardrobe. Except for the black and yellow tights. On the two occasions I had worn those he hadn’t said anything, but simply nodded, as if something were right with the world.

‘You saw my dad in town the other day.’

‘Oh. Yes.’ I was hanging washing out on a line. The line itself was hidden in what Mrs Traynor called the Kitchen Garden. I think she didn’t want anything as mundane as laundry polluting the view of her herbaceous borders. My own mother pegged her whites out almost as a badge of pride. It was like a challenge to her neighbours: Beat this, ladies! It was all Dad could do to stop her putting a second revolving clothes dryer out the front.

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‘He asked me if you’d said anything about it.’

‘Oh.’ I kept my face a studied blank. And then, because he seemed to be waiting, ‘Evidently not.’

‘Was he with someone?’

I put the last peg back in the peg bag. I rolled it up, and placed it in the empty laundry basket. I turned to him.

‘Yes.’

‘A woman.’

‘Yes.’

‘Red-haired?’

‘Yes.’

Will thought about this for a minute.

‘I’m sorry if you think I should have told you,’ I said. ‘But it … it didn’t seem like my business.’

‘And it’s never an easy conversation to have.’

‘No.’

‘If it’s any consolation, Clark, it’s not the first time,’ he said, and headed back into the house.

Deirdre Bellows said my name twice before I looked up. I was scribbling in my notepad, place names and question marks, pros and cons, and I had pretty much forgotten I was even on a bus. I was trying to work out a way of getting Will to the theatre. There was only one within two hours’ drive, and it was showing Oklahoma! It was hard to imagine Will nodding along to ‘Oh What A Beautiful Morning’, but all the serious theatre was in London. And London still seemed like an impossibility.

Basically, I could now get Will out of the house, but we had pretty much reached the end of what was available within an hour’s radius, and I had no idea how to get him to go further.

‘In your own little world, eh, Louisa?’

‘Oh. Hi, Deirdre.’ I scooched over on the seat to make room for her.

Deirdre had been friends with Mum since they were girls. She owned a soft-furnishings shop and had been divorced three times. She possessed hair thick enough to be a wig, and a fleshy, sad face that looked like she was still dreaming wistfully of the white knight who would come and sweep her away.

‘I don’t normally get the bus but my car’s in for a service. How are you? Your mum told me all about your job. Sounds very interesting.’

This is the thing about growing up in a small town. Every part of your life is up for grabs. Nothing is secret – not the time I was caught smoking at the out-of-town supermarket car park when I was fourteen, nor the fact that my father had re-tiled the downstairs loo. The minutiae of everyday lives were currency for women like Deirdre.

‘It’s good, yes.’

‘And well paid.’

‘Yes.’

‘I was so relieved for you after the whole Buttered Bun thing. Such a shame they shut the cafe. We’re losing all the useful shops in this town. I remember when we had a grocer, a baker and a butcher on the high street. All we needed was a candlestick maker!’

‘Mmm.’ I saw her glance at my list and closed my notepad. ‘Still. At least we do have somewhere to buy curtains. How’s the shop?’

‘Oh, fine … yes … What’s that, then? Something to do with work?’

‘I’m just working on things that Will might like to do.’

‘Is that your disabled man?’

‘Yes. My boss.’

‘Your boss. That’s a nice way of putting it.’ She nudged me. ‘And how’s your clever old sister getting on at university?’

‘She’s good. And Thomas.’

‘She’ll end up running the country, that one. I have to say, though, Louisa, I was always surprised you didn’t leave before her. We always thought you were such a bright little thing. Not that we still don’t, of course.’

I raised a polite smile. I wasn’t sure what else I could do.

‘But still. Someone’s got to do it, eh? And it’s nice for your mum that one of you is happy to stay so close to home.’

I wanted to contradict her, and then I realized that nothing I had done in the last seven years suggested I had either any ambition or any desire to move further than the end of my street. I sat there, as the bus’s tired old engine snarled and juddered beneath us, and had a sudden sense of time racing, of losing whole chunks of it in my small journeys backwards and forwards along the same stretch. Round and round the castle. Watching Patrick go round and round the track. The same petty concerns. The same routines.

‘Oh, well. Here’s my stop.’ Deirdre rose heavily beside me, hoisting her patent handbag over her shoulder. ‘Give your mum my love. Tell her I’ll be round tomorrow.’

I looked up, blinking. ‘I got a tattoo,’ I said suddenly. ‘Of a bee.’

She hesitated, holding on to the side of the seat.

‘It’s on my hip. An actual tattoo. It’s permanent,’ I added.

Deirdre glanced towards the door of the bus. She looked a bit puzzled, and then gave me what I think she thought was a reassuring smile.

‘Well, that’s very nice, Louisa. As I said, tell your mum I’ll be round tomorrow.’

Every day, while he was watching television, or otherwise engaged, I sat in front of Will’s computer and worked on coming up with the magic event that might Make Will Happy. But as time went on, I found that my list of things we couldn’t do, places we couldn’t go to, had begun to exceed my ideas for those we could by a significant factor. When the one figure first exceeded the other, I went back on to the chatroom sites, and asked their advice.

Ha! said Ritchie. Welcome to our world, Bee.

From the ensuing conversations I learnt that getting drunk in a wheelchair came with its own hazards, including catheter disasters, falling down kerbs, and being steered to the wrong home by other drunks. I learnt that there was no single place where non-quads were more or less helpful than anywhere else, but that Paris was singled out as the least wheelchair-friendly place on earth. This was disappointing, as some small, optimistic part of me had still hoped we might make it there.

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I began to compile a new list – things you cannot do with a quadriplegic.

Go on a tube train (most underground stations don’t have listpfts), which pretty much ruled out activities in half of London unless we wanted to pay for taxis.

Go swimming, without help, and unless the temperature was warm enough to stop involuntary shivering within minutes. Even disabled changing rooms are not much use without a pool hoist. Not that Will would have allowed himself into a pool hoist.

Go to the cinema, unless guaranteed a seat at the front, or unless Will’s spasms were low-grade that day. I had spent at least twenty minutes of Rear Window on my hands and knees picking up the popcorn that Will’s unexpected knee jerk had sent flying into the air.

Go on a beach, unless your chair had been adapted with ‘fat wheels’. Will’s hadn’t.

Fly on aircraft where the disabled ‘quota’ had already been used up.

Go shopping, unless all the shops had got their statutory ramps in place. Many around the castle used their listpsted building status to say they couldn’t fit them. Some were even tellistpng the truth.

Go anywhere too hot, or too cold (temperature issues).

Go anywhere spontaneously (bags needed to be packed, routes to be double-checked for accessibility).

Go out to eat, if feelistpng self-conscious about being fed, or – depending on the catheter situation – if the restaurant’s bathroom was down a flistpght of stairs.

Go on long train journeys (exhausting, and too difficult to get heavy motorized chair on to train without help).

Get a haircut if it had been raining (all the hair stuck to Will’s wheels. Weirdly, this made both of us nauseous).

Go to friend’s houses, unless they had wheelchair ramps. Most houses have stairs. Most people do not have ramps. Our house was a rare exception. Will said there was nobody he wanted to see anyway.

Go down the hill from the castle in heavy rain (the brakes were not always safe, and that chair was too heavy for me to hold).

Go anywhere where there were listpkely to be drunks. Will was a magnet for drunks. They would crouch down, breathe fumes all over him, and make big, sympathetic eyes. Sometimes they would, indeed, try to wheel him off.

Go anywhere where there might be crowds. This meant that, as summer approached, outings around the castle were getting harder, and half the places I thought we might be able to go – fairs, outdoor theatre, concerts – were ruled out.

When, struggling for ideas, I asked the online quads what was the thing they would like to do most in all the world, the answer nearly always came back as, ‘Have ***.’ I got quite a lot of unsolicited detail on that one.

But essentially it was not a huge help. There were eight weeks to go, and I had run out of ideas.

A couple of days after our discussion under the washing line, I returned home to find Dad standing in the hallway. This would have been unusual in itself (the last few weeks he seemed to have retreated to the sofa in the daytime, supposedly to keep Granddad company), but he was wearing an ironed shirt, had shaved, and the hallway was filled with the scent of Old Spice. I am pretty sure he’d had that bottle of aftershave since 1974.

‘There you are.’

I closed the door behind me. ‘Here I am.’

I was feeling tired and anxious. I had spent the whole bus journey home talking on my mobile phone to a travel agent about places to take Will, but we were both stumped. I needed to get him further away from home. But there didn’t seem to be a single place outside a five-mile radius of the castle that he actually wanted to visit.

‘Are you okay getting your own tea tonight?’

‘Sure. I can join Patrick at the pub later. Why?’ I hung up my coat on a free peg.

The rack was so much emptier with all Treena’s and Thomas’s coats gone.

‘I am taking your mother out for dinner.’

I did a quick mental calculation. ‘Did I miss her birthday?’

‘Nope. We’re celebrating.’ He lowered his voice, as if it were some kind of secret. ‘I got a job.’

‘You didn’t!’ And now I could see it; his whole body had lightened. He was standing straighter again, his face wreathed in smiles. He looked years younger.

‘Dad, that’s fantastic.’

‘I know. Your mother’s over the moon. And, you know, she’s had a tough few months what with Treena going and Granddad and all. So I want to take her out tonight, treat her a bit.’

‘So what’s the job?’

‘I’m going to be head of maintenance. Up at the castle.’

I blinked. ‘But that’s –’

‘Mr Traynor. That’s right. He rang me and said he was looking for someone, and your man, Will there, had told him that I was available. I went this afternoon and showed him what I could do, and I’m on a month’s trial. Beginning Saturday.’

‘You’re going to work for Will’s dad?’

‘Well, he said they have to do a month’s trial, to go through the proper procedures and all, but he said he couldn’t think of any reason why I shouldn’t get it.’

‘That – that’s great,’ I said. I felt weirdly unbalanced by the news. ‘I didn’t even know there was a job going.’

‘Nor me. It’s great, though. He’s a man who understands quality, Lou. I talked to him about green oak, and he showed me some of the work done by the previous man. You wouldn’t believe it. Shocking. He said he was very impressed by my work.’