（Story）Me Before You

Chapter7 I was carrying a basket of washing down the hall when I heard them. The annexe door was slightly ajar and the voices of Mrs Traynor and her daughter carried down the long corridor, the sound coming in muted waves. Will’s sister was sobbing quietly, all fury gone from her voice now. She sounded almost childlike. ‘There must be something they can do. Some medical advance. Can’t you take him to America? Things are always improving in America.’ ‘Your father keeps a very close eye on all the developments. But no, darling, there is nothing … concrete.’ ‘He’s so … different now. It’s like he’s determined not to see the good in anything.’ ‘He’s been like that since the start, George. I think it’s just that you didn’t see him apart from when you flew home. Back then, I think he was still … determined. Back then, he was sure that something would change.’ I felt a little uncomfortable listening in on such a private conversation. But the odd tenor drew me closer. I found myself walking softly towards the door, my socked feet making no sound on the floor. ‘Look, Daddy and I didn’t tell you. We didn’t want to upset you. But he tried … ’ she struggled over the words. ‘Will tried to … he tried to kill himself.’ ‘What?’ ‘Daddy found him. Back in December. It was … it was terrible.’ Even though this only really confirmed what I had guessed, I felt all the blood drain from me. I heard a muffled cry, a whispered reassurance. There was another long silence. And then Georgina, her voice thick with grief, spoke again. ‘The girl … ?’ ‘Yes. Louisa is here to make sure nothing like that happens again.’ I stopped. At the other end of the corridor, from the bathroom, I could hear Nathan and Will talking in a low murmur, comfortably oblivious to the conversation that was going on just a few feet away. I took a step closer to the door. I suppose I had known it since I caught sight of the scars on his wrists. It made sense of everything, after all – Mrs Traynor’s anxiety that I shouldn’t leave Will alone for very long, his antipathy to having me there, the fact that for large stretches of time I didn’t feel like I was doing anything useful at all. I had been babysitting. I hadn’t known it, but Will had, and he had hated me for it. I reached for the handle of the door, preparing to close it gently. I wondered what Nathan knew. I wondered whether Will was happier now. I realized I felt, selfishly, a faint relief that it hadn’t been me Will objected to, just the fact that I – that anyone – had been employed to watch over him. My thoughts hummed so busily that I almost missed the next snatch of conversation. ‘You can’t let him do this, Mum. You have to stop him.’ ‘It’s not our choice, darling.’ ‘But it is. It is – if he’s asking you to be part of it,’ Georgina protested. The handle stilled in my hand. ‘I can’t believe you’re even agreeing to it. What about your religion? What about everything you’ve done? What was the point in you even bloody saving him the last time?’ Mrs Traynor’s voice was deliberately calm. ‘That’s not fair.’ ‘But you’ve said you’ll take him. What does –’ ‘Do you think for a moment that if I said I refuse, he wouldn’t ask someone else?’ ‘But Dignitas? It’s just wrong. I know it’s hard for him, but it will destroy you and Daddy. I know it. Think of how you would feel! Think of the publicity! Your job! Both your reputations! He must know it. It’s a selfish thing to even ask. How can he? How can he do this? How can you do this?’ She began to sob again. ‘George … ’ ‘Don’t look at me like that. I do care about him, Mummy. I do. He’s my brother and I love him. But I can’t bear it. I can’t bear even the thought of it. He’s wrong to ask, and you’re wrong to consider it. And it’s not just his own life he will destroy if you go ahead with this.’ I took a step back from the window. The blood thumped so loudly in my ears that I almost didn’t hear Mrs Traynor’s response. ‘Six months, George. He promised to give me six months. Now. I don’t want you to mention this again, and certainly not in front of anyone else. And we must … ’ She took a deep breath. ‘We must just pray very hard that something happens in that time to change his mind.’ Chapter14 ‘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.’