Me Before You: a novel

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 up to the curb and glanced back at him. “Go on,
then,” he said. “We’ve got nothing else on today.”
“Go on where?”
“To the tattoo parlor.”
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…”
I stared down the road at the tattoo parlor 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 parlor, 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 colored 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.
“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 onto 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 leaned 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.