Me Before You Read online

  all pretend they didn’t want one.

  ‘Phil hit the wall about forty miles in. He said he actually heard voices. Feet like lead. He had that zombie face, you know?’

  ‘I got some of those new Japanese balancing trainers fitted. Shaved fifteen minutes off my ten-mile timings.’

  ‘Don’t travel with a soft bike bag. Nigel arrived at tricamp with it looking like a ruddy coat hanger.’

  I couldn’t say I enjoyed the Triathlon Terrors’ gatherings, but what with my increased hours and Patrick’s training timetable it was one of the few times I could be guaranteed to see him. He sat beside me, muscular thighs clad in shorts despite the extreme cold outside. It was a badge of honour among the members of the club to wear as few clothes as possible. The men were wiry, brandishing obscure and expensive sports layers that boasted extra ‘wicking’ properties, or lighter-than-air bodyweights. They were called Scud or Trig, and flexed bits of body at each other, displaying injuries or alleged muscle growth. The girls wore no make-up, and had the ruddy complexions of those who thought nothing of jogging for miles through icy conditions. They looked at me with faint distaste – or perhaps even incomprehension – no doubt weighing up my fat to muscle ratio and finding it wanting.

  ‘It was awful,’ I told Patrick, wondering whether I could order cheesecake without them all giving me the Death Stare. ‘His girlfriend and his best friend.’

  ‘You can’t blame her,’ he said. ‘Are you really telling me you’d stick around if I was paralysed from the neck down?’

  ‘Of course I would.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t. And I wouldn’t expect you to.’

  ‘Well, I would.’

  ‘But I wouldn’t want you there. I wouldn’t want someone staying with me out of pity.’

  ‘Who says it would be pity? You’d still be the same person underneath.’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t be anything like the same person.’ He wrinkled his nose. ‘I wouldn’t want to live. Relying on other people for every little thing. Having strangers wipe your arse –’

  A man with a shaved head thrust his head between us. ‘Pat,’ he said, ‘have you tried that new gel drink? Had one explode in my backpack last week. Never seen anything like it.’

  ‘Can’t say I have, Trig. Give me a banana and a Lucozade any day.’

  ‘Dazzer had a Diet Coke when he was doing Norseman. Sicked it all up at three thousand feet. God, we laughed.’

  I raised a weak smile.

  Shaven-headed man disappeared and Patrick turned back to me, apparently still pondering Will’s fate. ‘Jesus. Think of all the things you couldn’t do … ’ He shook his head. ‘No more running, no more cycling.’ He looked at me as if it had just occurred to him. ‘No more sex.’

  ‘Of course you could have sex. It’s just that the woman would have to get on top.’

  ‘We’d be stuffed, then.’

  ‘Funny.’

  ‘Besides, if you’re paralysed from the neck down I’m guessing the … um … equipment doesn’t work as it should.’

  I thought of Alicia. I did try, she said.I really tried. For months.

  ‘I’m sure it does with some people. Anyway, there must be a way around these things if you … think imaginatively.’

  ‘Hah.’ Patrick took a sip of his water. ‘You’ll have to ask him tomorrow. Look, you said he’s horrible. Perhaps he was horrible before his accident. Perhaps that’s the real reason she dumped him. Have you thought of that?’

  ‘I don’t know … ’ I thought of the photograph. ‘They looked like they were really happy together.’ Then again, what did a photograph prove? I had a framed photograph at home where I was beaming at Patrick like he had just pulled me from a burning building, yet in reality I had just called him an ‘utter dick’ and he had responded with a hearty, ‘Oh, piss off!’

  Patrick had lost interest. ‘Hey, Jim … Jim, did you take a look at that new lightweight bike? Any good?’

  I let him change the subject, thinking about what Alicia had said. I could well imagine Will pushing her away. But surely if you loved someone it was your job to stick with them? To help them through the depression? In sickness and in health, and all that?

  ‘Another drink?’

  ‘Vodka tonic. Slimline tonic,’ I said, as he raised an eyebrow.

  Patrick shrugged and headed to the bar.

  I had started to feel a little guilty about the way we were discussing my employer. Especially when I realized that he probably endured it all the time. It was almost impossible not to speculate about the more intimate aspects of his life. I tuned out. There was talk of a training weekend in Spain. I was only listening with half an ear, until Patrick reappeared at my side and nudged me.

  ‘Fancy it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Weekend in Spain. Instead of the Greek holiday. You could put your feet up by the pool if you don’t fancy the forty-mile bike ride. We could get cheap flights. Six weeks’ time. Now you’re rolling in it … ’

  I thought of Mrs Traynor. ‘I don’t know … I’m not sure they’re going to be keen on me taking time off so soon.’

  ‘You mind if I go, then? I really fancy getting some altitude training in. I’m thinking about doing the big one.’

  ‘The big what?’

  ‘Triathlon. The Xtreme Viking. Sixty miles on a bike, thirty miles on foot, and a nice long swim in sub-zero Nordic seas.’

  The Viking was spoken about with reverence, those who had competed bearing their injuries like veterans of some distant and particularly brutal war. He was almost smacking his lips with anticipation. I looked at my boyfriend and wondered if he was actually an alien. I thought briefly that I had preferred him when he worked in telesales and couldn’t pass a petrol station without stocking up on Mars Bars.

  ‘You’re going to do it?’

  ‘Why not? I’ve never been fitter.’

  I thought of all that extra training – the endless conversations about weight and distance, fitness and endurance. It was hard enough getting Patrick’s attention these days at the best of times.

  ‘You could do it with me,’ he said, although we both knew he didn’t believe it.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ I said. ‘Sure. Go for it,’ I said.

  And I ordered the cheesecake.

  If I had thought the events of the previous day would create a thaw back at Granta House, I was wrong.

  I greeted Will with a broad smile and a cheery hello, and he didn’t even bother to look round from the window.

  ‘Not a good day,’ Nathan murmured, as he shouldered his way into his coat.

  It was a filthy, low-cloud sort of a morning, where the rain spat meanly against the windows and it was hard to imagine the sun coming out ever again. Even I felt glum on a day like this. It wasn’t really a surprise that Will should be worse. I began to work my way through the morning’s chores, telling myself all the while that it didn’t matter. You didn’t have to like your employer anyway, did you? Lots of people didn’t. I thought of Treena’s boss, a taut-faced serial divorcee who monitored how many times my sister went to the loo and had been known to make barbed comments if she considered her to have exceeded reasonable bladder activity. And besides, I had already done two weeks here. That meant there were only five months and thirteen working days to go.

  The photographs were stacked carefully in the bottom drawer, where I had placed them the previous day, and now, crouched on the floor, I began laying them out and sorting through them, assessing which frames I might be able to fix. I am quite good at fixing things. Besides, I thought it might be quite a useful way of killing time.

  I had been doing this for about ten minutes when the discreet hum of the motorized wheelchair alerted me to Will’s arrival.

  He sat there in the doorway, looking at me. There were dark shadows under his eyes. Sometimes, Nathan told me, he barely slept at all. I didn’t want to think how it would feel, to lie trapped in a bed you couldn’t get out of wit
h only dark thoughts to keep you company through the small hours.

  ‘I thought I’d see if I could fix any of these frames,’ I said, holding one up. It was the picture of him bungee jumping. I tried to look cheerful. He needs someone upbeat, someone positive.

  ‘Why?’

  I blinked. ‘Well … I think some of these can be saved. I brought some wood glue with me, if you’re happy for me to have a go at them. Or if you want to replace them I can pop into town during my lunch break and see if I can find some more. Or we could both go, if you fancied a trip out … ’

  ‘Who told you to start fixing them?’

  His stare was unflinching.

  Uh-oh, I thought. ‘I … I was just trying to help.’

  ‘You wanted to fix what I did yesterday.’

  ‘I –’

  ‘Do you know what, Louisa? It would be nice – just for once – if someone paid attention to what I wanted. Me smashing those photographs was not an accident. It was not an attempt at radical interior design. It was because I actually don’t want to look at them.’

  I got to my feet. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think that –’

  ‘You thought you knew best. Everyone thinks they know what I need. Let’s put the bloody photos back together. Give the poor invalid something to look at. I don’t want to have those bloody pictures staring at me every time I’m stuck in my bed until someone comes and bloody well gets me out again. Okay? Do you think you can get your head around that?’

  I swallowed. ‘I wasn’t going to fix the one of Alicia – I’m not that stupid … I just thought that in a while you might feel –’

  ‘Oh Christ … ’ He turned away from me, his voice scathing. ‘Spare me the psychological therapy. Just go and read your bloody gossip magazines or whatever it is you do when you’re not making tea.’

  My cheeks were aflame. I watched him manoeuvre in the narrow hallway, and my voice emerged even before I knew what I was doing.

  ‘You don’t have to behave like an arse.’

  The words rang out in the still air.

  The wheelchair stopped. There was a long pause, and then he reversed and turned slowly, so that he was facing me, his hand on the little joystick.

  ‘What?’

  I faced him, my heart thumping. ‘Your friends got the shitty treatment. Fine. They probably deserved it. But I’m just here day after day trying to do the best job I can. So I would really appreciate it if you didn’t make my life as unpleasant as you do everyone else’s.’

  Will’s eyes widened a little. There was a beat before he spoke again. ‘And what if I told you I didn’t want you here?’

  ‘I’m not employed by you. I’m employed by your mother. And unless she tells me she doesn’t want me here any more I’m staying. Not because I particularly care about you, or like this stupid job or want to change your life one way or another, but because I need the money. Okay? I really need the money.’

  Will Traynor’s expression hadn’t outwardly changed much but I thought I saw astonishment in there, as if he were unused to anyone disagreeing with him.

  Oh hell, I thought, as the reality of what I had just done began to sink in. I’ve really blown it this time.

  But Will just stared at me for a bit and, when I didn’t look away, he let out a small breath, as if about to say something unpleasant.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said, and he turned the wheelchair round. ‘Just put the photographs in the bottom drawer, will you? All of them.’

  And with a low hum, he was gone.

  5

  The thing about being catapulted into a whole new life – or at least, shoved up so hard against someone else’s life that you might as well have your face pressed against their window – is that it forces you to rethink your idea of who you are. Or how you might seem to other people.

  To my parents, I had in four short weeks become just a few degrees more interesting. I was now the conduit to a different world. My mother, in particular, asked me daily questions about Granta House and its domestic habits in the manner of a zoologist forensically examining some strange new creature and its habitat. ‘Does Mrs Traynor use linen napkins at every meal?’ she would ask, or ‘Do you think they vacuum every day, like we do?’ or, ‘What do they do with their potatoes?’

  She sent me off in the mornings with strict instructions to find out what brand of loo roll they used, or whether the sheets were a polycotton mix. It was a source of great disappointment to her that most of the time I couldn’t actually remember. My mother was secretly convinced that posh people lived like pigs – ever since I had told her, aged six, of a well-spoken school friend whose mother wouldn’t let us play in their front room ‘because we’d disturb the dust’.

  When I came home to report that, yes, the dog was definitely allowed to eat in the kitchen, or that, no, the Traynors didn’t scrub their front step every day as my mother did, she would purse her lips, glance sideways at my father and nod with quiet satisfaction, as if I had just confirmed everything she’d suspected about the slovenly ways of the upper classes.

  Their dependence on my income, or perhaps the fact that they knew I didn’t really like my job, meant that I also received a little more respect within the house. This didn’t actually translate to much – in my Dad’s case, it meant that he had stopped calling me ‘lardarse’ and, in my mother’s, that there was usually a mug of tea waiting for me when I came home.

  To Patrick, and to my sister, I was no different – still the butt of jokes, the recipient of hugs or kisses or sulks. I felt no different. I still looked the same, still dressed, according to Treen, like I had had a wrestling match in a charity shop.

  I had no idea what most of the inhabitants of Granta House thought of me. Will was unreadable. To Nathan, I suspected I was just the latest in a long line of hired carers. He was friendly enough, but a bit semi-detached. I got the feeling he wasn’t convinced I was going to be there for long. Mr Traynor nodded at me politely when we passed in the hall, occasionally asking me how the traffic was, or whether I had settled in all right. I’m not sure he would have recognized me if he’d been introduced to me in another setting.

  But to Mrs Traynor – oh Lord – to Mrs Traynor I was apparently the stupidest and most irresponsible person on the planet.

  It had started with the photo frames. Nothing in that house escaped Mrs Traynor’s notice, and I should have known that the smashing of the frames would qualify as a seismic event. She quizzed me as to exactly how long I had left Will alone, what had prompted it, how swiftly I had cleared the mess up. She didn’t actually criticize me – she was too genteel even to raise her voice – but the way she blinked slowly at my responses, her little hmm-hmm, as I spoke, told me everything I needed to know. It came as no surprise when Nathan told me she was a magistrate.

  She thought it might be a good idea if I didn’t leave Will for so long next time, no matter how awkward the situation, hmm? She thought perhaps the next time I dusted I could make sure things weren’t close enough to the edge so that they might accidentally get knocked to the floor, hmm? (She seemed to prefer to believe that it had been an accident.) She made me feel like a first-class eejit, and consequently I became a first-class eejit around her. She always arrived just when I had dropped something on the floor, or was struggling with the cooker dial, or she would be standing in the hallway looking mildly irritated as I stepped back in from collecting logs outside, as if I had been gone much longer than I actually had.

  Weirdly, her attitude got to me more than Will’s rudeness. A couple of times I had even been tempted to ask her outright whether there was something wrong. You said that you were hiring me for my attitude rather than my professional skills, I wanted to say. Well, here I am, being cheery every ruddy day. Being robust, just as you wanted. So what’s your problem?

  But Camilla Traynor was not the kind of woman you could have said that to. And besides, I got the feeling nobody in that house ever said anything direct to anyone else.

 
; ‘Lily, our last girl, had rather a clever habit of using that pan for two vegetables at once,’ meant You’re making too much mess.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like a cup of tea, Will,’ actually meant I have no idea what to say to you.

  ‘I think I’ve got some paperwork that needs sorting out,’ meant You’re being rude, and I’m going to leave the room.

  All pronounced with that slightly pained expression, and the slender fingers running up and down the chain with the crucifix. She was so held in, so restrained. She made my own mother look like Amy Winehouse. I smiled politely, pretended I hadn’t noticed, and did the job I was paid to do.

  Or at least, I tried.

  ‘Why the hell are you trying to sneak carrots on to my fork?’

  I glanced down at the plate. I had been watching the female television presenter and wondering what my hair would look like dyed the same colour.

  ‘Uh? I didn’t.’

  ‘You did. You mashed them up and tried to hide them in the gravy. I saw you.’

  I blushed. He was right. I was sitting feeding Will, while both of us vaguely watched the lunchtime news. The meal was roast beef with mashed potato. His mother had told me to put three sorts of vegetables on the plate, even though he had said quite clearly that he didn’t want vegetables that day. I don’t think there was a meal that I was instructed to prepare that wasn’t nutritionally balanced to within an inch of its life.

  ‘Why are you trying to sneak carrots into me?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘So there are no carrots on that?’

  I gazed at the tiny pieces of orange. ‘Well … okay … ’

  He was waiting, eyebrows raised.

  ‘Um … I suppose I thought vegetables would be good for you?’

  It was part deference to Mrs Traynor, part force of habit. I was so used to feeding Thomas, whose vegetables had to be mashed to a paste and hidden under mounds of potato, or secreted in bits of pasta. Every fragment we got past him felt like a little victory.

  ‘Let me get this straight. You think a teaspoon of carrot would improve my quality of life?’

  It was pretty stupid when he put it like that. But I had learnt it was important not to look cowed by anything Will said or did.

  ‘I take your point,’ I said evenly. ‘I won’t do it again.’

  And then, out of nowhere, Will Traynor laughed. It exploded out of him in a gasp, as if it were entirely unexpected.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ he shook his head.

  I stared at him.

  ‘What the hell else have you been sneaking into my food? You’ll be telling me to open the tunnel so that Mr Train can deliver some mushy Brussel sprouts to the red bloody station next.’

  I considered this for a minute. ‘No,’ I said, straight-faced. ‘I deal only with Mr Fork. Mr Fork does not look like a train.’

  Thomas had told me so, very firmly, some months previously.

  ‘Did my mother put you up to this?’

  ‘No. Look, Will, I’m sorry. I just … wasn’t thinking.’

  ‘Like that’s unusual.’

  ‘All right, all right. I’ll take the bloody carrots off, if they really upset you so much.’

  ‘It’s not the bloody carrots that upset me. It’s having them sneaked into my food by a madwoman who addresses the cutlery as Mr and Mrs Fork.’

  ‘It was a joke. Look, let me take the carrots and –’

  He turned away from me. ‘I don’t want anything else. Just do me a cup of tea.’ He called out after me as I left the room, ‘And don’t try and sneak a bloody courgette into it.’

  Nathan walked in as I was finishing the dishes. ‘He’s in a good mood,’ he said, as I handed him a mug.

  ‘Is he?’ I was eating my sandwiches in the kitchen. It was bitterly cold outside, and somehow the house hadn’t felt quite as unfriendly lately.

  ‘He says you’re trying to poison him. But he said it – you know – in a good way.’

  I felt weirdly pleased by this information.

  ‘Yes … well … ’ I said, trying to hide it. ‘Give me time.’

  ‘He’s talking a bit more too. We’ve had weeks where he would hardly say a thing, but he’s definitely up for a bit of a chat the last few days.’