Me Before You Read online

  ‘Third bout. In two years.’

  It took me a minute to catch up. ‘Of pneumonia?’

  He nodded. ‘Wretched thing. He’s pretty brave, you know. Under all that bluster.’ He swallowed and nodded, as if to himself. ‘It’s good you can see it, Louisa.’

  I didn’t know what to do. I reached out a hand and touched his arm. ‘I do see it.’

  He gave me a faint nod, then took his panama hat from the coat hooks in the hall. Muttering something that might have been a thank you or a goodbye, Mr Traynor moved past me and out of the front door.

  The annexe felt oddly silent without Will in it. I realized how much I had become used to the distant sound of his motorized chair moving backwards and forwards, his murmured conversations with Nathan in the next room, the low hum of the radio. Now the annexe was still, the air like a vacuum around me.

  I packed an overnight bag of all the things he might want the next day, including clean clothes, his toothbrush, hairbrush and medication, plus earphones in case he was well enough to listen to music. As I did so I had to fight a peculiar and rising feeling of panic. A subversive little voice kept rising up inside me, saying, This is how it would feel if he were dead. To drown it out, I turned on the radio, trying to bring the annexe back to life. I did some cleaning, made Will’s bed with fresh sheets and picked some flowers from the garden, which I put in the living room. And then, when I had got everything ready, I glanced over and saw the holiday folder on the table.

  I would spend the following day going through all the paperwork and cancelling every trip, every excursion I had booked. There was no saying when Will would be well enough to do any of them. The consultant had stressed that he had to rest, to complete his course of antibiotics, to stay warm and dry. White-water rafting and scuba diving were not part of his plan for convalescence.

  I stared at my folders, at all the effort and work and imagination that had gone into compiling them. I stared at the passport that I had queued to collect, remembering my mounting sense of excitement even as I sat on the train heading into the city, and for the first time since I had embarked upon my plan, I felt properly despondent. There were just over three weeks to go, and I had failed. My contract was due to end, and I had done nothing to noticeably change Will’s mind. I was afraid to even ask Mrs Traynor where on earth we went from here. I felt suddenly overwhelmed. I dropped my head into my hands and, in the silent little house, I left it there.

  ‘Evening.’

  My head shot up. Nathan was standing there, filling the little kitchen with his bulk. He had his backpack over his shoulder.

  ‘I just came to drop off some prescription meds for when he gets back. You … okay?’

  I wiped briskly at my eyes. ‘Sure. Sorry. Just … just a little daunted about cancelling this lot.’

  Nathan swung his backpack off his shoulder and sat down opposite me. ‘It’s a pisser, that’s for sure.’ He picked up the folder, and began flicking through. ‘You want a hand tomorrow? They don’t want me at the hospital, so I could stop by for an hour in the morning. Help you put in the calls.’

  ‘That’s kind of you. But no. I’ll be fine. Probably simpler if I do it all.’

  Nathan made tea, and we sat opposite each other and drank it. I think it was the first time Nathan and I had really talked to each other – at least, without Will between us. He told me about a previous client of his, C3/4 quadriplegic with a ventilator, who had been ill at least once a month for the whole time he worked there. He told me about Will’s previous bouts of pneumonia, the first of which had nearly killed him, and from which it had taken him weeks to recover.

  ‘He gets this look in his eye … ’ he said. ‘When he’s really sick. It’s pretty scary. Like he just … retreats. Like he’s almost not even there.’

  ‘I know. I hate that look.’

  ‘He’s a –’ he began. And then, abruptly, his eyes slid away from me and he closed his mouth.

  We sat holding our mugs. From the corner of my eye I studied Nathan, looking at his friendly open face that seemed briefly to have closed off. And I realized I was about to ask a question to which I already knew the answer.

  ‘You know, don’t you?’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘About … what he wants to do.’

  The silence in the room was sudden and intense.

  Nathan looked at me carefully, as if weighing up how to reply.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m not meant to, but I do. That’s what … that’s what the holiday was meant to be about. That’s what the outings were all about. Me trying to change his mind.’

  Nathan put his mug on the table. ‘I did wonder,’ he said. ‘You seemed … to be on a mission.’

  ‘I was. Am.’

  He shook his head, whether to say I shouldn’t give up, or to tell me that nothing could be done, I wasn’t sure.

  ‘What are we going to do, Nathan?’

  It took him a moment or two before he spoke again. ‘You know what, Lou? I really like Will. I don’t mind telling you, I love the guy. I’ve been with him two years now. I’ve seen him at his worst, and I’ve seen him on his good days, and all I can say to you is I wouldn’t be in his shoes for all the money in the world.’

  He took a swig of his tea. ‘There have been times when I’ve stayed over and he’s woken up screaming because in his dreams he’s still walking and skiing and doing stuff and just for those few minutes, when his defences are right down and it’s all a bit raw, he literally can’t bear the thought of never doing it again. He can’t bear it. I’ve sat there with him and there is nothing I can say to the guy, nothing that is going to make it any better. He’s been dealt the shittiest hand of cards you can imagine. And you know what? I looked at him last night and I thought about his life and what it’s likely to become … and although there is nothing I’d like more in the world than for the big guy to be happy, I … I can’t judge him for what he wants to do. It’s his choice. It should be his choice.’

  My breath had started to catch in my throat. ‘But … that was before. You’ve all admitted that it was before I came. He’s different now. He’s different with me, right?’

  ‘Sure, but –’

  ‘But if we don’t have faith that he can feel better, even get better, then how is he supposed to keep the faith that good things might happen?’

  Nathan put his mug on the table. He looked straight into my eyes.

  ‘Lou. He’s not going to get better.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘I do. Unless there is some massive breakthrough in stem cell research, Will is looking at another decade in that chair. Minimum. He knows it, even if his folks don’t want to admit it. And this is half the trouble. She wants to keep him alive at any cost. Mr T thinks there is a point where we have to let him decide.’

  ‘Of course he gets to decide, Nathan. But he has to see what his actual choices are.’

  ‘He’s a bright guy. He knows exactly what his choices are.’

  My voice lifted in the little room. ‘No. You’re wrong. You tell me he was in the same place before I came. You tell me he hasn’t changed his outlook even a little bit just through me being here.’

  ‘I can’t see inside his head, Lou.’

  ‘You know I’ve changed the way he thinks.’

  ‘No, I know that he will do pretty much anything to make you happy.’

  I stared at him. ‘You think he’s going through the motions just to keep me happy?’ I felt furious with Nathan, furious with them all. ‘So if you don’t believe any of this can do any good, why were you going to come at all? Why did you even want to come on this trip? Just a nice holiday, was it?’

  ‘No. I want him to live.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘But I want him to live if he wants to live. If he doesn’t, then by forcing him to carry on, you, me – no matter how much we love him – we become just another shitty bunch of people taking away his choices.’

  Natha
n’s words reverberated into the silence. I wiped a solitary tear from my cheek and tried to make my heart rate return to normal. Nathan, apparently embarrassed by my tears, scratched absently at his neck, and then, after a minute, silently handed me a piece of kitchen roll.

  ‘I can’t just let it happen, Nathan.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘I can’t.’

  I stared at my passport, sitting on the kitchen table. It was a terrible picture. It looked like someone else entirely. Someone whose life, whose way of being, might actually be nothing like my own. I stared at it, thinking.

  ‘Nathan?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If I could fix some other kind of trip, something the doctors would agree to, would you still come? Would you still help me?’

  ‘Course I would.’ He stood, rinsed his mug and hauled his backpack over his shoulder. He turned to face me before he left the kitchen. ‘But I’ve got to be honest, Lou. I’m not sure even you are going to be able to pull this one off.’

  23

  Exactly ten days later, Will’s father disgorged us from the car at Gatwick Airport, Nathan wrestling our luggage on to a trolley, and me checking and checking again that Will was comfortable – until even he became irritated.

  ‘Take care of yourselves. And have a good trip,’ Mr Traynor said, placing a hand on Will’s shoulder. ‘Don’t get up to too much mischief.’ He actually winked at me when he said this.

  Mrs Traynor hadn’t been able to leave work to come too. I suspected that actually meant she hadn’t wanted to spend two hours in a car with her husband.

  Will nodded but said nothing. He had been disarmingly quiet in the car, gazing out of the window with his impenetrable stare, ignoring Nathan and me as we chatted about traffic and what we already knew we had forgotten.

  Even as we walked across the concourse I wasn’t sure we were doing the right thing. Mrs Traynor had not wanted him to go at all. But from the day he agreed to my revised plan, I knew she had been afraid to tell him he shouldn’t. She seemed to be afraid of talking to us at all that last week. She sat with Will in silence, talking only to the medical professionals. Or busied herself in her garden, cutting things down with frightening efficiency.

  ‘The airline is meant to meet us. They’re meant to come and meet us,’ I said, as we made our way to the check-in desk, flicking through my paperwork.

  ‘Chill out. They’re hardly going to post someone at the doors,’ Nathan said.

  ‘But the chair has to travel as a “fragile medical device”. I checked with the woman on the phone three times. And we need to make sure they’re not going to get funny about Will’s on-board medical equipment.’

  The online quad community had given me reams of information, warnings, legal rights and checklists. I had subsequently triple-checked with the airline that we would be given bulkhead seats, and that Will would be boarded first, and not moved from his power chair until we were actually at the gates. Nathan would remain on the ground, remove the joystick and turn it to manual, and then carefully tie and bolster the chair, securing the pedals. He would personally oversee its loading to protect against damage. It would be pink-tagged to warn luggage handlers of its extreme delicacy. We had been allocated three seats in a row so that Nathan could complete any medical assistance that Will needed without prying eyes. The airline had assured me that the armrests lifted so that we wouldn’t bruise Will’s hips while transferring him from the wheelchair to his aircraft seat. We would keep him between us at all times. And we would be the first allowed off the aircraft.

  All this was on my ‘airport’ checklist. That was the sheet in front of my ‘hotel’ checklist but behind my ‘day before we leave’ checklist and the itinerary. Even with all these safeguards in place, I felt sick.

  Every time I looked at Will I wondered if I had done the right thing. Will had only been cleared by his GP for travel the night before. He ate little and spent much of every day asleep. He seemed not just weary from his illness, but exhausted with life, tired of our interference, our upbeat attempts at conversation, our relentless determination to try to make things better for him. He tolerated me, but I got the feeling that he often wanted to be left alone. He didn’t know that this was the one thing I could not do.

  ‘There’s the airline woman,’ I said, as a uniformed girl with a bright smile and a clipboard walked briskly towards us.

  ‘Well, she’s going to be a lot of use on transfer,’ Nathan muttered. ‘She doesn’t look like she could lift a frozen prawn.’

  ‘We’ll manage,’ I said. ‘Between us, we will manage.’

  It had become my catchphrase, ever since I had worked out what I wanted to do. Since my conversation with Nathan in the annexe, I had been filled with a renewed zeal to prove them all wrong. Just because we couldn’t do the holiday I’d planned did not mean that Will could not do anything at all.

  I hit the message boards, firing out questions. Where might be a good place for a far weaker Will to convalesce? Did anyone else know where we could go? Temperature was my main consideration – the English climate was too changeable (there was nothing more depressing than an English seaside resort in the rain). Much of Europe was too hot in late July, ruling out Italy, Greece, the South of France and other coastal areas. I had a vision, you see. I saw Will, relaxing by the sea. The problem was, with only a few days to plan it and go, there was a diminishing chance of making it a reality.

  There were commiserations from the others, and many, many stories about pneumonia. It seemed to be the spectre that haunted them all. There were a few suggestions as to places we could go, but none that inspired me. Or, more importantly, none that I felt Will would be inspired by. I did not want spas, or places where he might see other people in the same position as he was. I didn’t really know what I wanted, but I scrolled backwards through the list of their suggestions and knew that nothing was right.

  It was Ritchie, that chat-room stalwart, who had come to my aid in the end. The afternoon that Will was released from hospital, he typed:

  Give me your email address. Cousin is travel agent. I have got him on the case.

  I had rung the number he gave me and spoken to a middle-aged man with a broad Yorkshire accent. When he told me what he had in mind, a little bell of recognition rang somewhere deep in my memory. And within two hours, we had it sorted. I was so grateful to him that I could have cried.

  ‘Think nothing of it, pet,’ he said. ‘You just make sure that bloke of yours has a good time.’

  That said, by the time we left I was almost as exhausted as Will. I had spent days wrangling with the finer requirements of quadriplegic travel, and right up until the morning we left I had not been convinced that Will would be well enough to come. Now, seated with the bags, I gazed at him, withdrawn and pale in the bustling airport, and wondered again if I had been wrong. I had a sudden moment of panic. What if he got ill again? What if he hated every minute, as he had with the horse racing? What if I had misread this whole situation, and what Will needed was not an epic journey, but ten days at home in his own bed?

  But we didn’t have ten days to spare. This was it. This was my only chance.

  ‘They’re calling our flight,’ Nathan said, as he strolled back from the duty free. He looked at me, raised an eyebrow, and I took a breath.

  ‘Okay,’ I replied. ‘Let’s go.’

  The flight itself, despite twelve long hours in the air, was not the ordeal I had feared. Nathan proved himself dextrous at doing Will’s routine changes under cover of a blanket. The airline staff were solicitous and discreet, and careful with the chair. Will was, as promised, loaded first, achieved transfer to his seat with no bruising, and then settled in between us.

  Within an hour of being in the air I realized that, oddly enough, above the clouds, provided his seat was tilted and he was wedged in enough to be stable, Will was pretty much equal to anyone in the cabin. Stuck in front of a screen, with nowhere to move and nothing to do, there was very litt
le, 30,000 feet up, that separated him from any of the other passengers. He ate and watched a film, and mostly he slept.

  Nathan and I smiled cautiously at each other and tried to behave as if this were fine, all good. I gazed out of the window, my thoughts as jumbled as the clouds beneath us, unable yet to think about the fact that this was not just a logistical challenge but an adventure for me – that I, Lou Clark, was actually headed to the other side of the world. I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see anything beyond Will by then. I felt like my sister, when she had first given birth to Thomas. ‘It’s like I’m looking through a funnel,’ she had said, gazing at his newborn form. ‘The world has just shrunk to me and him.’

  She had texted me when I was in the airport.

  You can do this. Am bloody proud of you xxx

  I called it up now, just to look at it, feeling suddenly emotional, perhaps because of her choice of words. Or perhaps because I was tired and afraid and still finding it hard to believe that I had even got us this far. Finally, to block my thoughts, I turned on my little television screen, gazing unseeing at some American comedy series until the skies around us grew dark.

  And then I woke to find that the air stewardess was standing over us with breakfast, that Will was talking to Nathan about a film they had just watched together, and that – astonishingly, and against all the odds – the three of us were less than an hour away from landing in Mauritius.

  I don’t think I believed that any of this could actually happen until we touched down at Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam International Airport. We emerged groggily through Arrivals, still stiff from our time in the air, and I could have wept with relief at the sight of the operator’s specially adapted taxi. That first morning, as the driver sped us towards the resort, I registered little of the island. True, the colours seemed brighter than England, the sky more vivid, an azure blue that just disappeared and grew deeper and deeper to infinity. I saw that the island was lush and green, fringed with acres of sugar cane crops, the sea visible like a strip of mercury through the volcanic hills. The air was tinged with something smoky and gingery, the sun so high in the sky that I had to squint into the white light. In my exhausted state it was as if someone had woken me up in the pages of a glossy magazine.

  But even as my senses wrestled with the unfamiliar, my gaze returned repeatedly to Will, to his pale, weary face, to the way his head seemed oddly slumped on his shoulders. And then we pulled into a palm-tree-lined driveway, stopped outside a low framed building and the driver was already out and unloading our bags.

  We declined the offer of iced tea, of a tour around the hotel. We found Will’s room, dumped his bags, settled him into his bed and almost before we had drawn the curtains, he was asleep again. And then there we were. I had done it. I stood outside his room, finally letting out a deep breath, while Nathan gazed out of the window at the white surf on the coral reef beyond. I don’t know if it was the journey, or because this was the most beautiful place I had ever been in my life, but I felt suddenly tearful.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Nathan said, catching sight of my expression. And then, totally unexpectedly, he walked up to me and enveloped me in a huge bear hug. ‘Relax, Lou. It’s going to be okay. Really. You did good.’

  It was almost three days before I started to believe him. Will slept for most of the first forty-eight hours – and then, astonishingly, he began to look better. His skin regained its colour and he lost the blue shadows around his eyes. His spasms lessened and he began to eat again, wheeling his way slowly along the endless, extravagant buffet and telling me what he wanted on his plate. I knew he was feeling more like himself when he bullied me into trying things I would never have eaten – spicy creole curries and seafood whose name I did not recognize. He swiftly seemed more at home in this place than I did. And no wonder. I had to remind myself that, for most of his life, this had been Will’s domain – this globe, these wide shores – not the little annexe in the shadow of the castle.

  The hotel had, as promised, come up with the special wheelchair with wide wheels, and most mornings Nathan transferred Will into it and we all three walked down to the beach, me carrying a parasol so that I could protect him if the sun grew too fierce. But it never did; that southern part of the island was renowned for sea breezes and, out of season, the resort temperatures rarely rose past the early twenties. We would stop at a small beach near a rocky outcrop, just out of view of the main hotel. I would unfold my chair, place myself next to Will under a palm tree, and we would watch Nathan attempt to windsurf, or waterski – occasionally shouting encouragement, plus the odd word of abuse – from our spot on the sand.

  At first the hotel staff wanted to do almost too much for Will, offering to push his chair, constantly pressing cool drinks upon him. We explained what we didn’t need from them, and they cheerfully backed off. It was good, though, during the moments when I wasn’t with him, to see porters or reception staff stopping by to chat with him, or sharing with him some place that they thought we should go. There was one gangly young man, Nadil, who seemed to take it upon himself to act as Will’s unofficial carer when Nathan was not around. One day I came out to find him and a friend gently lowering Will out of his chair on to a cushioned sunbed he had positioned by ‘our’ tree.

  ‘This better,’ he said, giving me the thumbs up as I walked across the sand. ‘You just call me when Mr Will want to go back in his chair.’

  I was about to protest, and tell them they should not have moved him. But Will had closed his eyes and lay there with a look of such unexpected contentment that I just closed my mouth and nodded.

  As for me, as my anxiety about Will’s health began to ebb, I slowly began to suspect that I was actually in paradise. I had never, in my life, imagined I would spend time somewhere like this. Every morning I woke to the sound of the sea breaking gently on the shore, unfamiliar birds calling to each other from the trees. I gazed up at my ceiling, watching the sunlight playing through the leaves, and from next door heard the murmured conversation that told me Will and Nathan had already been up long before me. I dressed in sarongs and swimsuits, enjoying the feeling of the warm sun on my shoulders and back. My skin grew freckled, my nails bleached, and I began to feel a rare happiness at the simple pleasures of existing here – of walking on a beach, eating unfamiliar foods, swimming in warm, clear water where black fish gazed shyly from under volcanic rocks, or watching the sun sink fiery red into the horizon. Slowly the past few months began to slip away. To my shame, I hardly thought of Patrick at all.

  Our days fell into a pattern. We ate breakfast together, all three of us, at the gently shaded tables around the pool. Will usually had fruit salad, which I fed to him by hand, and sometimes followed up with a banana pancake as his appetite grew. We then went down to the beach, where we stayed – me reading, Will