Me Before You: a novel

This isn’t going to work, a little voice said.
“Do you need anything?” I whispered.
“No.” He shook his head. He swallowed. “Actually, yes.
Something’s digging into my collar.”
I leaned over and ran my finger around the inside of it; a nylon
tag had been left inside. I pulled at it, hoping to snap it, but it proved
stubbornly resistant.
“New shirt. Is it really troubling you?”
“No. I just thought I’d bring it up for fun.”
“Do we have any scissors in the bag?”
“I don’t know, Clark. Believe it or not, I rarely pack it myself.”
There were no scissors. I glanced behind me, where the other
concertgoers were still settling themselves into their seats,
murmuring and scanning their programs. If Will couldn’t relax and
focus on the music, the outing would be wasted. I couldn’t afford a
second disaster.
“Don’t move,” I said.
“Why—”
Before he could finish, I leaned across, gently peeled his collar
from the side of his neck, placed my mouth against it, and took the
offending tag between my front teeth. After a few seconds, I was
able to bite through it, and I closed my eyes, trying to ignore the

---

scent of clean male, the feel of his skin against mine, the incongruity
of what I was doing. And then, finally, I felt it give. I pulled back my
head and opened my eyes, triumphant, with the freed tag between
my front teeth.
“Got it!” I said, pulling the tag from my teeth and flicking it across
the seats.
Will stared at me.
“What?”
I swiveled in my chair to catch those audience members who
suddenly seemed to find their programs absolutely fascinating. Then
I turned back to Will.
“Oh, come on, it’s not as if they’ve never seen a girl nibbling a
bloke’s collar before.”
I seemed to have briefly silenced him. Will blinked a couple of
times and made as if to shake his head. I noticed with amusement
that his neck had colored a deep red.
I straightened my skirt. “Anyway,” I said, “I think we should both
just be grateful that it wasn’t in your trousers.”
And then, before he could respond, the orchestra musicians
walked out in their dinner jackets and cocktail dresses and the
audience grew quiet. I felt a little flutter of excitement despite myself.
I placed my hands together on my lap and sat up in my seat. They
began to tune up, and suddenly the auditorium was filled with a
single sound—the most alive, three-dimensional thing I had ever
heard. It made the hairs on my skin stand up, my breath catch in my
throat.
Will looked sideways at me, his face still carrying the mirth of the
last few moments. Okay, his expression said. We’re going to enjoy
this.
The conductor stepped up, tapped twice on the rostrum, and a
great hush descended. I felt the stillness, the auditorium alive,
expectant. Then he brought down his baton and suddenly everything
was pure sound. I felt the music like a physical thing; it didn’t just sit
in my ears, it flowed through me, around me, made my senses
vibrate. It made my skin prickle and my palms dampen. Will hadn’t

---

described any of it like this. I had thought I might be bored. It was the
most beautiful thing I had ever heard.
And it made my imagination do unexpected things; as I sat there,
I found myself thinking of things I hadn’t thought of for years, old
emotions washing over me, new thoughts and ideas being pulled
from me as if my perception itself were being stretched out of shape.
It was almost too much, but I didn’t want it to stop. I wanted to sit
there forever. I stole a look at Will. He was rapt, suddenly unself-
conscious. I turned away, unexpectedly afraid to look at him. I was
afraid of what he might be feeling, the depth of his loss, the extent of
his fears. Will Traynor’s life had been so far beyond the experiences
of mine. Who was I to tell him how he should want to live it?
Will’s friend left a note asking us to go backstage and see him
afterward, but Will didn’t want to. I urged him once, but I could see
from the set of his jaw that he would not be budged. I couldn’t blame
him. I remembered how his former workmate Rupert had looked at
him that day—that mixture of pity, revulsion, and, somewhere, deep
relief that he himself had escaped this particular stroke of fate. I
suspected there were only so many of those sorts of meetings he
could stomach.
We waited until the auditorium was empty, then I wheeled him
out, down to the car park in the lift, and loaded Will up without
incident. I didn’t say much; my head was still ringing with the music,
and I didn’t want it to fade. I kept thinking back to it, the way that
Will’s friend had been so lost in what he was playing. I hadn’t
realized that music could unlock things in you, could transport you to
somewhere even the composer hadn’t predicted. It left an imprint in
the air around you, as if you carried its remnants with you when you
went. For some time, as we sat there in the audience, I had
completely forgotten Will was even beside me.
We pulled up outside the annex. In front of us, just visible above
the wall, the castle sat, floodlit under the full moon, gazing serenely
down from its position on the top of the hill.
“So you’re not a classical music person.”
I looked into the rearview mirror. Will was smiling.

---

“I didn’t enjoy that in the slightest.”
“I could tell.”
“I especially didn’t enjoy that bit near the end, the bit where the
violin was singing by itself.”
“I could see you didn’t like that bit. In fact, I think you had tears in
your eyes you hated it so much.”
I grinned back at him. “I really loved it,” I said. “I’m not sure I’d
like all classical music, but I thought that was amazing.” I rubbed my
nose. “Thank you. Thank you for taking me.”
We sat in silence, gazing at the castle. Normally, at night, it was
bathed in a kind of orange glow from the lights dotted around the
fortress wall. But tonight, under a full moon, it seemed flooded in an
ethereal blue.
“What kind of music would they have played there, do you think?”
I said. “They must have listened to something.”
“The castle? Medieval stuff. Lutes, strings. Not my cup of tea, but
I’ve got some I can lend you, if you like. You should walk around the
castle with it on earphones, if you really want the full experience.”
“Nah. I don’t really go to the castle.”
“It’s always the way, when you live close by somewhere.”
We sat there a moment longer, listening to the engine tick its way
to silence.
“Right,” I said, unfastening my belt. “We’d better get you in. The
evening routine awaits.”
“Just wait a minute, Clark.”
I turned in my seat. Will’s face was in shadow and I couldn’t quite
make it out.
“Just hold on. Just for a minute.”
“Are you all right?” I found my gaze dropping toward his chair,
afraid some part of him was pinched, or trapped, that I had gotten
something wrong.
“I’m fine. I just…”
I could see his pale collar, his dark suit jacket a contrast against
it.
“I don’t want to go in just yet. I just want to sit and not have to
think about…” He swallowed.

---

Even in the half-dark it seemed effortful.
“I just…want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in
a red dress. Just for a few minutes more.”
I released the door handle.
“Sure.”
I closed my eyes and lay my head against the headrest, and we
sat there together for a while longer, two people lost in remembered
music, half hidden in the shadow of a castle on a moonlit hill.
My sister and I never really talked about what happened that night at
the maze. I’m not entirely sure we had the words. She held me for a
bit, then spent some time helping me find my clothes, and then
searched in vain in the long grass for my shoes until I told her that it
really didn’t matter. I wouldn’t have worn them again, anyway. And
then we walked home slowly—me in my bare feet, her with her arm
linked through mine, even though we hadn’t walked like that since
she was in her first year at school and Mum had insisted I never let
her go.
When we got home, we stood on the porch and she wiped at my
hair and then at my eyes with a damp tissue, and then we unlocked
the front door and walked in as if nothing had happened.
Dad was still up, watching some football match. “You girls are a
bit late,” he called out. “I know it’s a Friday, but still…”
“Okay, Dad,” we called out, in unison.
Back then, I had the room that is now Granddad’s. I walked
swiftly upstairs and, before my sister could say a word, I closed the
door behind me.
I chopped all my hair off the following week. I canceled my plane
ticket. I didn’t go out with the girls from my old school again. Mum
was too sunk in her own grief to notice, and Dad put any change in
mood in our house, and my new habit of locking myself in my
bedroom, down to “Women’s problems.” I had worked out who I was,
and it was someone very different from the giggling girl who got
drunk with strangers. It was someone who wore nothing that could
be construed as suggestive. Clothes that would not appeal to the
kind of men who went to the Red Lion, anyway.

---

Life returned to normal. I took a job at the hairdresser’s, then the
Buttered Bun, and put it all behind me.
I must have walked past the castle five thousand times since that
day.
But I have never been to the maze since.

---

13
Patrick stood on the edge of the track, jogging on the spot, his new
Nike T-shirt and shorts sticking slightly to his damp limbs. I had
stopped by to say hello and to tell him that I wouldn’t be at the
Triathlon Terrors meeting at the pub that evening. Nathan was off,
and I had stepped in to take over the evening routine.
“That’s three meetings you’ve missed.”
“Is it?” I counted back on my fingers. “I suppose it is.”
“You’ll have to come next week. It’s all the travel plans for the
Xtreme Viking. And you haven’t told me what you want to do for your
birthday.” He began to do his stretches, lifting his leg high and
pressing his chest to his knee. “I thought maybe the cinema? I don’t
want to do a big meal, not while I’m training.”
“Ah. Mum and Dad are planning a special dinner.”
He grabbed at his heel, pointing his knee to the ground.
I couldn’t help but notice that his leg was becoming weirdly
sinewy.
“It’s not exactly a night out, is it?”
“Well, nor is the multiplex. Anyway, I feel like I should, Patrick.
Mum’s been a bit down.”
Treena had moved out the previous weekend (minus my lemons
washbag). Mum was devastated; it was actually worse than when
Treena had gone to university the first time around. She missed
Thomas like an amputated limb. His toys, which had littered the
living-room floor since babyhood, were boxed up and put away.
There were no chocolate fingers or small cartons of drink in the
cupboard. She no longer had a reason to walk to the school at 3:15
P.M.
, nobody to chat to on the short walk home. It had been the only
time Mum ever really spent outside the house. Now she went
nowhere at all, apart from the weekly supermarket shopping with
Dad.

---

She floated around the house looking a bit lost for three days,
then she began spring cleaning with a vigor that frightened even
Granddad. He would mouth gummy protests at her as she tried to
vacuum under the chair that he was still sitting in or flick at his
shoulders with her duster. Treena had said she wouldn’t come home
for the first few weeks, just to give Thomas a chance to settle in.
When she rang each evening, Mum would speak to them and then
cry for a full half hour in her bedroom afterward.
“You’re always working late these days. I feel like I hardly see
you.”
“Well, you’re always training. Anyway, it’s good money, Patrick.
I’m hardly going to say no to the overtime.”
He couldn’t argue with that.
I was earning more than I had ever earned in my life. I doubled
the amount I gave my parents, put some aside into a savings
account every month, and I was still left with more than I could
spend. Part of it was, I worked so many hours that I was never away
from Granta House when the shops were open. The other was,
simply, that I didn’t really have an appetite for spending. The spare
hours I did have I had started to spend in the library, looking things
up on the Internet.
There was a whole world available to me from that PC, layer
upon layer of it, and it had begun to exert a siren call.
It had started with the thank-you letter. A couple of days after the
concert, I told Will I thought we should write and thank his friend, the
violinist.
“I bought a nice card on the way in,” I said. “You tell me what you
want to say, and I’ll write it. I’ve even brought in my good pen.”
“I don’t think so,” Will said.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“You don’t think so? That man gave us front-of-house seats. You
said yourself it was fantastic. The least you could do is thank him.”
Will’s jaw was fixed, immovable.
I put down my pen. “Or are you just so used to people giving you
stuff that you don’t feel you have to?”

---

“You have no idea, Clark, how frustrating it is to rely on someone
else to put your words down for you. The phrase ‘written on behalf
of’ is…humiliating.”
“Yeah? Well, it’s still better than a great big fat nothing,” I
grumbled. “I’m going to thank him, anyway. I won’t mention your
name, if you really want to be an arse about it.”
I wrote the card, and posted it. I said nothing more about it. But
that evening, with Will’s words still echoing around my head, I found
myself diverting into the library. I looked up whether there were any
devices that Will could use to do his own writing. Within an hour, I
had come up with three—a piece of voice recognition software,
another type of software that relied on the blinking of an eye, and, as
my sister had mentioned, a tapping device that Will could wear on
his head.
He was predictably sniffy about the head device, but he
conceded that the voice recognition software might be useful, and
within a week we managed, with Nathan’s help, to install it on his
computer, setting Will up so that with the computer tray fixed to his
chair, he no longer needed someone else to type for him. He was
self-conscious about it initially, but after I instructed him to begin
everything with “Take a letter, Miss Clark,” he got over it.
Even Mrs. Traynor couldn’t find anything to complain about. “If
there is any other equipment that you think might be useful,” she
said, her lips still pursed as if she couldn’t quite believe this might
have been a straightforwardly good thing, “do let us know.” Three
days later, just as I set off for work, the postman handed me a letter.
I opened it on the bus, thinking it might be an early birthday card
from some distant cousin. It read, in computerized text: