Me Before You (27 page)

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

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

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

‘In terms of what? And what’s that?’

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

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

‘How high?’

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

‘Was it cold?’

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

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

‘So where else have you liked?’

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

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

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

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

‘Is there anywhere you haven’t been?’

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

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

He turned to me in surprise.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Right now?’

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

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

‘Le Marais?’

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

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

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

‘No.’

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

‘No.’

‘But you just told me –’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Okay,’ I said.

‘Okay.’ Will took a deep breath.

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

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

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

‘You claustrophobic?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘What – what are you doing there?’

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

‘What?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I wasn’t alone.

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

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

She nodded, as if in agreement.

‘He talks more than he did.’

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

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

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

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

‘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.’