Me Before You: a novel

would feel if he were dead. To drown it out, I turned on the radio,
trying to bring the annex back to life. I did some cleaning, made
Will’s bed with fresh sheets, and picked some flowers from the
garden, which I put in the living room. And then, when I had gotten
everything ready, I glanced over and saw the holiday folder on the
table.
I would spend the following day going through all the paperwork
and canceling every trip, every excursion I had booked. There was
no saying when Will would be well enough to do any of them. The
consultant had stressed that he had to rest, to complete his course
of antibiotics, to stay warm and dry. White-water rafting and scuba
diving were not part of his plan for convalescence.
I stared at my folder, at all the effort and work and imagination
that had gone into compiling it. I stared at the passport that I had
queued to collect, remembering my mounting sense of excitement
even as I sat on the train heading into the city, and for the first time
since I had embarked upon my plan, I felt properly despondent.
There were just over three weeks to go, and I had failed. My contract
was due to end, and I had done nothing to noticeably change Will’s
mind. I was afraid to even ask Mrs. Traynor where on earth we went
from here. I felt suddenly overwhelmed. I dropped my head into my
hands and, in the silent little house, I left it there.
“Evening.”
My head shot up. Nathan was standing there, filling the little
kitchen with his bulk. He had his backpack over his shoulder.
“I just came to drop off some prescription meds for when he gets
back. You…okay?”
I wiped briskly at my eyes. “Sure. Sorry. Just…just a little daunted
about canceling this lot.”
Nathan swung his backpack off his shoulder and sat down
opposite me. “It’s a pisser, that’s for sure.” He picked up the folder,
and began flipping through. “You want a hand tomorrow? They don’t
want me at the hospital, so I could stop by for an hour in the
morning. Help you put in the calls.”

---

“That’s kind of you. But no. I’ll be fine. Probably simpler if I do it
all.”
Nathan made tea, and we sat opposite each other and drank it. I
think it was the first time Nathan and I had really talked to each other
—at least, without Will between us. He told me about a previous
client of his, C3-4 quadriplegic with a ventilator, who had been ill at
least once a month for the whole time he worked there. He told me
about Will’s previous bouts of pneumonia, the first of which had
nearly killed him, and from which it had taken him weeks to recover.
“He gets this look in his eye…,” he said. “When he’s really sick.
It’s pretty scary. Like he just…retreats. Like he’s almost not even
there.”
“I know. I hate that look.”
“He’s a—” he began. And then, abruptly, his eyes slid away from
me and he closed his mouth.
We sat holding our mugs. From the corner of my eye I studied
Nathan, looking at his friendly open face that seemed briefly to have
closed off. And I realized I was about to ask a question to which I
already knew the answer.
“You know, don’t you?”
“Know what?”
“About…what he wants to do.”
The silence in the room was sudden and intense.
Nathan looked at me carefully, as if weighing how to reply.
“I know,” I said. “I’m not meant to, but I do. That’s what…that’s
what the holiday was meant to be about. That’s what the outings
were all about. Me trying to change his mind.”
Nathan put his mug on the table. “I did wonder,” he said. “You
seemed…to be on a mission.”
“I was. Am.”
He shook his head, whether to say I shouldn’t give up or to tell
me that nothing could be done, I wasn’t sure.
“What are we going to do, Nathan?”
It took him a moment or two before he spoke again. “You know
what, Lou? I really like Will. I don’t mind telling you, I love the guy.
I’ve been with him two years now. I’ve seen him at his worst, and I’ve

---

seen him on his good days, and all I can say to you is I wouldn’t be
in his shoes for all the money in the world.”
He took a swig of his tea. “There have been times when I’ve
stayed over and he’s woken up screaming because in his dreams
he’s still walking and skiing and doing stuff and just for those few
minutes, when his defenses are down and it’s all a bit raw, he literally
can’t bear the thought of never doing it again. He can’t bear it. I’ve
sat there with him and there is nothing I can say to the guy, nothing
that is going to make it any better. He’s been dealt the shittiest hand
of cards you can imagine. And you know what? I looked at him last
night and I thought about his life and what it’s likely to become…and
although there is nothing I’d like more in the world than for the big
guy to be happy, I…I can’t judge him for what he wants to do. It’s his
choice. It should be his choice.”
My breath had started to catch in my throat. “But…that was
before. You’ve all admitted that it was before I came. He’s different
now. He’s different with me, right?”
“Sure, but—”
“But if we don’t have faith that he can feel better, even get better,
then how is he supposed to keep the faith that good things might
happen?”
Nathan put his mug on the table. He looked straight into my eyes.
“Lou. He’s not going to get better.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do. Unless there is some massive breakthrough in stem cell
research, Will is looking at another decade in that chair. Minimum.
He knows it, even if his folks don’t want to admit it. And this is half
the trouble. She wants to keep him alive at any cost. Mr. T thinks
there is a point where we have to let him decide.”
“Of course he gets to decide, Nathan. But he has to see what his
actual choices are.”
“He’s a bright guy. He knows exactly what his choices are.”
My voice lifted in the little room. “No. You’re wrong. You tell me
he was in the same place before I came. You tell me he hasn’t
changed his outlook even a little bit just through me being here.”
“I can’t see inside his head, Lou.”

---

“You know I’ve changed the way he thinks.”
“No, I know that he will do pretty much anything to make you
happy.”
I stared at him. “You think he’s going through the motions just to
keep me happy?” I felt furious with Nathan, furious with them all. “So
if you don’t believe any of this can do any good, why were you going
to come at all? Why did you even want to come on this trip? Just a
nice holiday, was it?”
“No. I want him to live.”
“But—”
“But I want him to live if he wants to live. If he doesn’t, then by
forcing him to carry on, you, me—no matter how much we love him
—we become just another shitty bunch of people taking away his
choices.”
Nathan’s words reverberated into the silence. I wiped a solitary
tear from my cheek and tried to make my heart rate return to normal.
Nathan, apparently embarrassed by my tears, scratched absently at
his neck, and then, after a minute, silently handed me a paper towel.
“I can’t just let it happen, Nathan.”
He said nothing.
“I can’t.”
I stared at my passport, sitting on the kitchen table. It was a
terrible picture. It looked like someone else entirely. Someone whose
life, whose way of being, might actually be nothing like my own. I
stared at it, thinking.
“Nathan?”
“What?”
“If I could fix some other kind of trip, something the doctors would
agree to, would you still come? Would you still help me?”
“Course I would.” He stood, rinsed his mug, and hauled his
backpack over his shoulder. He turned to face me before he left the
kitchen. “But I’ve got to be honest, Lou. I’m not sure even you are
going to be able to pull this one off.”

---

23
Exactly ten days later, Will’s father disgorged us from the car at
Gatwick Airport, Nathan wrestling our luggage onto a trolley, and me
checking and checking again that Will was comfortable—until even
he became irritated.
“Take care of yourselves. And have a good trip,” Mr. Traynor said,
placing a hand on Will’s shoulder. “Don’t get up to too much
mischief.” He actually winked at me when he said this.
Mrs. Traynor hadn’t been able to leave work to come too. I
suspected that actually meant she hadn’t wanted to spend two hours
in a car with her husband.
Will nodded but said nothing. He had been disarmingly quiet in
the car, gazing out the window with his impenetrable stare, ignoring
Nathan and me as we chatted about traffic and what we already
knew we had forgotten.
Even as we walked across the concourse I wasn’t sure we were
doing the right thing. Mrs. Traynor had not wanted him to go at all.
But from the day he agreed to my revised plan, I knew she had been
afraid to tell him he shouldn’t. She seemed to be afraid of talking to
us at all that last week. She sat with Will in silence, talking only to the
medical professionals. Or busied herself in her garden, cutting things
down with frightening efficiency.
“The airline is meant to meet us. They’re meant to come and
meet us,” I said, as we made our way to the check-in desk, flipping
through my paperwork.
“Chill out. They’re hardly going to post someone at the doors,”
Nathan said.
“But the chair has to travel as a ‘fragile medical device.’ I checked
with the woman on the phone three times. And we need to make
sure they’re not going to get funny about Will’s onboard medical
equipment.”

---

The online quad community had given me reams of information,
warnings, legal rights, and checklists. I had subsequently triple-
checked with the airline that we would be given bulkhead seats, and
that Will would be boarded first, and not moved from his power chair
until we were actually at the gate. Nathan would remain on the
ground, remove the joystick and turn it to manual, and then carefully
tie and bolster the chair, securing the pedals. He would personally
oversee its loading to protect against damage. It would be pink-
tagged to warn luggage handlers of its extreme delicacy. We had
been allocated three seats in a row so that Nathan could complete
any medical assistance that Will needed without prying eyes. The
airline had assured me that the armrests lifted so that we wouldn’t
bruise Will’s hips while transferring him from the wheelchair to his
aircraft seat. We would keep him between us at all times. And we
would be the first allowed off the aircraft.
All this was on my “airport” checklist. That was the sheet in front
of my “hotel” checklist but behind my “day before we leave” checklist
and the itinerary. Even with all these safeguards in place, I felt sick.
Every time I looked at Will I wondered if I had done the right
thing. He had been cleared by his GP for travel only the night before.
He ate little and spent much of every day asleep. He seemed not just
weary from his illness, but exhausted with life, tired of our
interference, our upbeat attempts at conversation, our relentless
determination to try to make things better for him. He tolerated me,
but I got the feeling that he often wanted to be left alone. He didn’t
know that this was the one thing I could not do.
“There’s the airline woman,” I said, as a uniformed girl with a
bright smile and a clipboard walked briskly toward us.
“Well, she’s going to be a lot of use on transfer,” Nathan
muttered. “She doesn’t look like she could lift a frozen prawn.”
“We’ll manage,” I said. “Between us, we will manage.”
It had become my catchphrase ever since I had worked out what
I wanted to do. Since my conversation with Nathan in the annex, I
had been filled with a renewed zeal to prove them all wrong. Just
because we couldn’t do the holiday I’d planned did not mean that
Will could not do anything at all.

---

I hit the message boards, firing out questions. Where might be a
good place for a far weaker Will to convalesce? Did anyone else
know where we could go? Temperature was my main consideration
—the English climate was too changeable (there was nothing more
depressing than an English seaside resort in the rain). Much of
Europe was too hot in late July, ruling out Italy, Greece, the south of
France, and other coastal areas. I had a vision, you see. I saw Will
relaxing by the sea. The problem was, with only a few days to plan it
and go, there was a diminishing chance of making it a reality.
There were commiserations from the others, and many, many
stories about pneumonia. It seemed to be the specter that haunted
them all. There were a few suggestions as to places we could go,
but none that inspired me. Or, more important, none that I felt Will
would be inspired by. I didn’t really know what I wanted, but I scrolled
backward through the list of their suggestions and knew that nothing
was right.
It was Ritchie, that chat-room stalwart, who had come to my aid
in the end. The afternoon that Will was released from hospital, he
typed: