Me Before You: a novel

looking after him next week. It may be someone who depresses him, or even
doesn’t like him very much. That, like everything else, is out of his control. We SCIs
know that very little is under our control—who feeds us, dresses us, washes us,
dictates our medication. Living with that knowledge is very hard.
So I think you are asking the wrong question. Who are the AB to decide what
our lives should be? If this is the wrong life for your friend, shouldn’t the question
be: How do I help him to end it?
Best wishes,
Gforce, Missouri, US

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I stared at the message, my fingers briefly stilled on the
keyboard. Then I scrolled down. The next few were from other
quadriplegics, criticizing Gforce for his bleak words, protesting that
they had found a way forward, that theirs was a life worth living.
There was a brief argument going on that seemed to have little to do
with Will at all.
And then the thread dragged itself back to my request. There
were suggestions of antidepressants, massage, miracle recoveries,
stories of how members’ own lives had been given new value. There
were a few practical suggestions: wine tasting, music, art, specially
adapted keyboards.
“A partner,” said Grace31 from Birmingham. “If he has love, he
will feel he can go on. Without it, I would have sunk many times
over.”
That phrase echoed in my head long after I had left the library.
Will came out of the hospital on Thursday. I picked him up in the
adapted car, and brought him home. He was pale and exhausted,
and stared out the window listlessly for the whole journey.
“No sleep in these places,” he explained when I asked him if he
was okay. “There’s always someone moaning in the next bed.”
I told him he would have the weekend to recover, but after that I
had a series of outings planned. I told him I was taking his advice
and trying new things, and he would have to come with me. It was a
subtle change in emphasis, but I knew that was the only way I could
get him to accompany me.
In fact, I had devised a detailed schedule for the next couple of
weeks. Each event was carefully marked on my calendar in black,
with red pen outlining the precautions I should take, and green for
the accessories I would need. Every time I looked at the back of my
door I felt a little glimmer of excitement, both that I had been so
organized and that one of these events might actually be the thing
that changed Will’s view of the world.
As my dad always says, my sister is the brains of our family.
The art gallery trip lasted a shade under twenty minutes. And that
included driving around the block three times in search of a suitable

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parking space. We got there, and almost before I had closed the
door behind him he said all the work was terrible. I asked him why
and he said if I couldn’t see it he couldn’t explain it. The cinema had
to be abandoned after the staff told us, apologetically, that their lift
was out of order. Others, such as the failed attempt to go swimming,
required more time and organization—ringing up the swimming pool
beforehand, booking Nathan for overtime—and then, when we got to
the leisure center, after the flask of hot chocolate was drunk in
silence in the car park, Will resolutely refused to go in.
The following Wednesday evening, we went to hear a singer he
had once seen live in New York. That was a good trip.
And then the following day I took him to a wine tasting, part of a
promotional event held by a vineyard in a specialist wine shop. I had
to promise Nathan I wouldn’t get him drunk. I held up each glass for
Will to sniff, and he knew what it was even before he’d tasted it. I
tried quite hard not to snort when Will spat it into the beaker (it did
look really funny), and he looked at me and said I was a complete
child. The shop owner went from being weirdly disconcerted by
having a man in a wheelchair in his shop to being quite impressed.
As the afternoon went on, he sat down and started opening other
bottles, discussing region and grape with Will, while I wandered up
and down looking at the labels, becoming, frankly, a little bored.
“Come on, Clark. Get an education,” he said, nodding at me to sit
down beside him.
“I can’t. My mum told me it was rude to spit.”
The two men looked at each other as if I were the mad one. And
yet he didn’t spit every time. I watched him. And he was suspiciously
talkative for the rest of the afternoon—swift to laugh, and even more
combative than usual.
And then, on the way home, we were driving through a town we
didn’t normally go to and, as we sat in traffic, I glanced over and saw
the Tattoo and Piercing Parlor.
“I always quite fancied a tattoo,” I said.
I should have known that you couldn’t just say stuff like that in
Will’s presence. He didn’t do small talk, or shooting the breeze. He
immediately wanted to know why I hadn’t gotten one.

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“Oh, the thought of what everyone would say, I guess.”
“Why? What would they say?”
“My dad hates them.”
“How old are you again?”
“Patrick hates them too.”
“And he never does anything that you might not like.”
“I might get claustrophobic. I might change my mind once it was
done.”
“Then you get it removed by laser, surely?”
I looked at him in my rearview mirror. His eyes were merry.
“Come on, then,” he said. “What would you have?”
I realized I was smiling. “Not a snake. Or anyone’s name.”
“I wasn’t expecting a heart with a banner saying ‘Mother.’”
“You promise not to laugh?”
“You know I can’t do that. Oh God, you’re not going to have some
Indian Sanskrit proverb or something, are you? What doesn’t kill me