9
I didn’t sleep that night. I lay awake in the little box room, gazing up at the
ceiling and carefully reconstructing the last two months based on what I now
knew. It was as if everything had shifted, fragmented and settled in some other
place, into a pattern I barely recognized.
I felt duped, the dim-witted accessory who hadn’t known what was going on. I
felt they must have laughed privately at my attempts to feed Will vegetables, or
cut his hair - little things to make him feel better. What had been the point, after
all?
I ran over and over the conversation I had heard, trying to interpret it in some
alternative way, trying to convince myself that I had misunderstood what they
had said. But Dignitas wasn’t exactly somewhere you went for a mini-break. I
couldn’t believe Camilla Traynor could contemplate doing that to her son. Yes, I
had thought her cold, and yes, awkward around him. It was hard to imagine her
cuddling him, as my mother had cuddled us - fiercely, joyously - until we
wriggled away, begging to be let go. If I’m honest, I just thought it was how the
upper classes were with their children. I had just read Will’s copy of Love in a
Cold Climate, after all. But to actively, to voluntarily play a part in her own son’s
death?
With hindsight her behaviour seemed even colder, her actions imbued with
some sinister intent. I was angry with her and angry with Will. Angry with them
for letting me engage in a facade. I was angry for all the times I had sat and
thought about how to make things better for him, how to make him comfortable,
or happy. When I was not angry, I was sad. I would recall the slight break in her
voice as she tried to comfort Georgina, and feel a great sadness for her. She was,
I knew, in an impossible position.
But mostly I felt filled with horror. I was haunted by what I now knew. How
could you live each day knowing that you were simply whiling away the days
until your own death? How could this man whose skin I had felt that morning
under my fingers - warm, and alive - choose to just extinguish himself? How
could it be that, with everyone’s consent, in six months’ time that same skin
would be decaying under the ground?
I couldn’t tell anyone. That was almost the worst bit. I was now complicit in
the Traynors’ secret. Sick and listless, I rang Patrick to say I wasn’t feeling well
and was going to stay home. No problem, he was doing a 10k, he said. He
probably wouldn’t be through at the athletics club until after nine anyway. I’d
see him on Saturday. He sounded distracted, as if his mind were already
elsewhere, further along some mythical track.
I refused supper. I lay in bed until my thoughts darkened and solidified to the
point where I couldn’t bear the weight of them, and at eight thirty I came back
downstairs and sat silently watching television, perched on the other side of
Granddad, who was the only person in our family guaranteed not to ask me a
question. He sat in his favourite armchair and stared at the screen with glassy¬
eyed intensity. I was never sure whether he was watching, or whether his mind
was somewhere else entirely.
‘Are you sure I can’t get you something, love?’ Mum appeared at my side
with a cup of tea. There was nothing in our family that couldn’t be improved by
a cup of tea, allegedly.
‘No. Not hungry, thanks.’
I saw the way she glanced at Dad. I knew that later on there would be private
mutterings that the Traynors were working me too hard, that the strain of looking
after such an invalid was proving too much. I knew they would blame
themselves for encouraging me to take the job.
I would have to let them think they were right.
Paradoxically, the following day Will was on good form - unusually talkative,
opinionated, belligerent. He talked, possibly more than he had talked on any
previous day. It was as if he wanted to spar with me, and was disappointed when
I wouldn’t play.
‘So when are you going to finish this hatchet job, then?’
I had been tidying the living room. I looked up from plumping the sofa
cushions. ‘What?’
‘My hair. I’m only half done. I look like one of those Victorian orphans. Or
some Hoxton eejit.’ He turned his head so that I could better see my handiwork.
‘Unless this is one of your alternative style statements.’
‘You want me to keep cutting?’
‘Well, it seemed to keep you happy. And it would be nice not to look like I
belong in an asylum.’
I fetched a towel and scissors in silence.
‘Nathan is definitely happier now I apparently look like a bloke,’ he said.
‘Although he did point out that, having restored my face to its former state, I will
now need shaving every day.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘You don’t mind, do you? Weekends I’ll just have to put up with designer
stubble.’
I couldn’t talk to him. I found it difficult even to meet his eye. It was like
finding out your boyfriend had been unfaithful. I felt, weirdly, as if he had
betrayed me.
‘Clark?’
‘Hmm?’
‘You’re having another unnervingly quiet day. What happened to “chatty to
the point of vaguely irritating?”’
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘Running Man again? What’s he done now? He hasn’t gone and run off, has
he?’
‘No.’ I took a soft slice of Will’s hair between my index and middle fingers
and lifted the blades of the scissors to trim what lay exposed above them. They
stilled in my hand. How would they do it? Would they give him an injection?
Was it medicine? Or did they just leave you in a room with a load of razors?
‘You look tired. I wasn’t going to say anything when you came in, but - hell -
you look terrible.’
‘Oh.’
How did they assist someone who couldn’t move their own limbs? I found
myself gazing down at his wrists, which were always covered by long sleeves. I
had assumed for weeks that this was because he felt the cold more than we did.
Another lie.
‘Clark?’
‘Yes?’
I was glad I was behind him. I didn’t want him to see my face.
He hesitated. Where the back of his neck had been covered by hair, it was
even paler than the rest of his skin. It looked soft and white and oddly
vulnerable.
‘Look, I’m sorry about my sister. She was ... she was very upset, but it didn’t
give her the right to be rude. She’s a bit direct sometimes. Doesn’t know how
much she rubs people up the wrong way.’ He paused. ‘It’s why she likes living in
Australia, I think.’
‘You mean, they tell each other the truth?’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. Lift your head up, please.’
I snipped and combed, working my way methodically around his head until
every single hair was chopped or trimmed and all that remained was a fine
sprinkling around his feet.
It all became clear to me by the end of the day. While Will was watching
television with his father, I took a sheet of A4 paper from the printer and a pen
from the jar by the kitchen window and wrote down what I wanted to say. I
folded the paper, found an envelope, and left it on the kitchen table, addressed to
his mother.
When I left for the evening, Will and his father were talking. Actually, Will
was laughing. I paused in the hallway, my bag over my shoulder, listening. Why
would he laugh? What could possibly provoke mirth given that he had just a
matter of weeks before he took his own life?
‘I’m off,’ I called through the doorway, and started walking.
‘Hey, Clark -’ he began, but I had already closed the door behind me.
I spent the short bus ride trying to work out what I was going to tell my
parents. They would be furious that I had left what they would see as a perfectly
suitable and well-paid job. After her initial shock my mother would look pained
and defend me, suggesting that it had all been too much. My father would
probably ask why I couldn’t be more like my sister. He often did, even though I
was not the one who ruined her life by getting pregnant and having to rely on the
rest of the family for financial support and babysitting. You weren’t allowed to
say anything like that in our house because, according to my mother, it was like
implying that Thomas wasn’t a blessing. And all babies were God’s blessing,
even those who said bugger quite a lot, and whose presence meant that half the
potential wage earners in our family couldn’t actually go and get a decent job.
I would not be able to tell them the truth. I knew I owed Will and his family
nothing, but I wouldn’t inflict the curious gaze of the neighbourhood on him.
All these thoughts tumbled around my head as I got off the bus and walked
down the hill. And then I got to the corner of our road and heard the shouting,
felt the slight vibration in the air, and it was all briefly forgotten.
A small crowd had gathered around our house. I picked up my pace, afraid
that something had happened, but then I saw my parents on the porch, peering
up, and realized it wasn’t our house at all. It was just the latest in a long series of
small wars that characterized our neighbours’ marriage.
That Richard Grisham was not the most faithful of husbands was hardly news
in our street. But judging by the scene in his front garden, it might have been to
his wife.
‘You must have thought I was bloody stupid. She was wearing your T-shirt!
The one I had made for you for your birthday!’
‘Baby ... Dympna ... it’s not what you think.’
‘I went in for your bloody Scotch eggs! And there she was, wearing it! Bold
as brass! And I don’t even like Scotch eggs!’
I slowed my pace, pushing my way through the small crowd until I was able
to get to our gate, watching as Richard ducked to avoid a DVD player. Next
came a pair of shoes.
‘How long have they been at it?’
My mother, her apron tucked neatly around her waist, unfolded her arms and
glanced down at her watch. ‘It’s a good three-quarters of an hour. Bernard,
would you say it’s a good three-quarters of an hour?’
‘Depends if you time it from when she threw the clothes out or when he came
back and found them.’
‘I’d say when he came home.’
Dad considered this. Then it’s really closer to half an hour. She got a good lot
out of the window in the first fifteen minutes, though.’
‘Your dad says if she really does kick him out this time he’s going to put in a
bid for Richard’s Black and Decker.’
The crowd had grown, and Dympna Grisham showed no sign of letting up. If
anything, she seemed encouraged by the increasing size of her audience.
‘You can take her your filthy books,’ she yelled, hurling a shower of
magazines out of the window.
These prompted a small cheer among the crowd.
‘See if she likes you sitting in the loo with those for half of Sunday afternoon,
eh?’ She disappeared inside, and then reappeared at the window, hauling the
contents of a laundry basket down on to what remained of the lawn. ‘And your
filthy undercrackers. See if she thinks you’re such a - what was it? - hot stud
when she’s washing those for you every day!’
Richard was vainly scooping up armfuls of his stuff as it landed on the grass.
He was yelling something up at the window, but against the general noise and
catcalls it was hard to make it out. As if briefly admitting defeat, he pushed his
way through the crowd, unlocked his car, hauled an armful of his belongings on
to the rear seat, and shoved the car door shut. Oddly, whereas his CD collection
and video games had been quite popular, no one made a move on his dirty
laundry.
Crash. There was a brief hush as his stereo met the path.
He looked up in disbelief. ‘You crazy bitch!’
‘You’re shagging that disease-ridden cross-eyed troll from the garage, and I’m
the crazy bitch?’
My mother turned to my father. ‘Would you like a cup of tea, Bernard? I think
it’s turning a little chilly.’
My dad didn’t take his eyes off next door. ‘That would be great, love. Thank
you.’
It was as my mother went indoors that I noticed the car. It was so unexpected
that at first I didn’t recognize it - Mrs Traynor’s Mercedes, navy blue, low-slung
and discreet. She pulled up, peering out at the scene on the pavement, and
hesitated a moment before she climbed out. She stood, staring at the various
houses, perhaps checking the numbers. And then she saw me.
I slid out from the porch and was down the path before Dad could ask where I
was going. Mrs Traynor stood to the side of the crowd, gazing at the chaos like
Marie Antoinette viewing a load of rioting peasants.
‘Domestic dispute,’ I said.
She looked away, as if almost embarrassed to have been caught looking. ‘I
see.’
‘It’s a fairly constructive one by their standards. They’ve been going to
marriage guidance.’
Her elegant wool suit, pearls and expensive hair were enough to mark her out
in our street, among the sweatpants and cheap fabrics in bright, chain-store
colours. She appeared rigid, worse than the morning she had come home to find
me sleeping in Will’s room. I registered in some distant part of my mind that I
was not going to miss Camilla Traynor.
‘I was wondering if you and I could have a little talk.’ She had to lift her voice
to be heard over the cheering.
Mrs Grisham was now throwing out Richard’s fine wines. Every exploding
bottle was greeted with squeals of delight and another heartfelt outburst of
pleading from Mr Grisham. A river of red wine ran through the feet of the crowd
and into the gutter.
I glanced over at the crowd and then behind me at the house. I could not
imagine bringing Mrs Traynor into our front room, with its litter of toy trains,
Granddad snoring mutely in front of the television, Mum spraying air-freshener
around to hide the smell of Dad’s socks, and Thomas popping by to murmur
bugger at the new guest.
‘Urn ... it’s not a great time.’
‘Perhaps we could talk in my car? Look, just five minutes, Louisa. Surely you
owe us that.’
A couple of my neighbours glanced in my direction as I climbed into the car. I
was lucky that the Grishams were the hot news of the evening, or I might have
been the topic of conversation. In our street, if you climbed into an expensive car
it meant you had either pulled a footballer or were being arrested by plain¬
clothes police.
The doors closed with an expensive, muted clunk and suddenly there was
silence. The car smelt of leather, and there was nothing in it apart from me and
Mrs Traynor. No sweet wrappers, mud, lost toys or perfumed dangly things to
disguise the smell of the carton of milk that had been dropped in there three
months earlier.
‘I thought you and Will got on well.’ She spoke as if addressing someone
straight ahead of her. When I didn’t speak, she said, 'Is there a problem with the
money?’
‘No.’
'Do you need a longer lunch break? I am conscious that it’s rather short. I
could ask Nathan if he would -’
‘It’s not the hours. Or the money.’
‘Then -’
‘I don’t really want to -’
'Look, you cannot hand in your notice with immediate effect and expect me
not even to ask what on earth’s the matter.’
I took a deep breath. ‘I overheard you. You and your daughter. Last night. And
I don’t want to ... I don’t want to be part of it.’
‘Ah.’
We sat in silence. Mr Grisham was now trying to bash his way in through the
front door, and Mrs Grisham was busy hurling anything she could locate through
the window down on to his head. The choice of projectile missiles - loo roll,
tampon boxes, toilet brush, shampoo bottles - suggested she was now in the
bathroom.
'Please, don’t leave,’ Mrs Traynor said, quietly. ‘Will is comfortable with you.
More so than he’s been for some time. I ... it would be very hard for us to
replicate that with someone else.’
‘But you’re ... you’re going to take him to that place where people commit
suicide. Dignitas.’
‘No. I am going to do everything I can to ensure he doesn’t do that.’
‘Like what - praying?’
She gave me what my mother would have termed an ‘old-fashioned’ look.
‘You must know by now that if Will decides to make himself unreachable, there
is little anybody can do about it.’
‘I worked it all out,’ I said. ‘I’m basically there just to make sure he doesn’t
cheat and do it before his six months are up. That’s it, isn’t it?’
‘No. That’s not it.’
‘Which is why you didn’t care about my qualifications.’
‘I thought you were bright and cheerful and different. You didn’t look like a
nurse. You didn’t behave ... like any of the others. I thought... I thought you
might cheer him up. And you do - you do cheer him up, Louisa. Seeing him
without that awful beard yesterday ... you seem to be one of the few people who
are able to get through to him.’
The bedding came out of the window. It came down in a ball, the sheets
extending themselves briefly and gracefully before they hit the ground. Two
children picked one up and began running around the little garden with it over
their heads.
‘Don’t you think it would have been fair to mention that I was basically on
suicide watch?’
The sigh Camilla Traynor gave was the sound of someone forced to explain
something politely to an imbecile. I wondered if she knew that everything she
said made the other person feel like an idiot. I wondered if it was something
she’d actually cultivated deliberately. I didn’t think I could ever manage to make
someone feel inferior.
‘That might have been the case when we first met you ... but I’m confident
Will is going to stick to his word. He has promised me six months, and that’s
what I’ll get. We need this time, Louisa. We need this time to give him the idea
of there being some possibility. I was hoping it might plant the idea that there is
a life he could enjoy, even if it wasn’t the life he had planned.’
‘But it’s all lies. You’ve lied to me and you’re all lying to each other.’
She didn’t seem to hear me. She turned to face me, pulling a chequebook from
her handbag, a pen ready in her hand.
‘Look, what do you want? I will double your money. Tell me how much you
want.’
‘I don’t want your money.’
‘A car. Some benefits. Bonuses -’
‘No -’
‘Then ... what can I do that might change your mind?’
‘I’m sorry. I just don’t -’
I made to get out of the car. Her hand shot out. It sat there on my arm, strange
and radioactive. We both stared at it.
‘You signed a contract, Miss Clark,’ she said. ‘You signed a contract where
you promised to work for us for six months. By my calculations you have only
done two. I am simply requiring you to fulfil your contractual obligations.’
Her voice had become brittle. I looked down at Mrs Traynor’s hand and saw
that it was trembling.
She swallowed. ‘Please.’
My parents were watching from the porch. I could see them, mugs poised in
their hands, the only two people facing away from the theatre next door. They
turned away awkwardly when they saw that I had noticed them. Dad, I realized,
was wearing the tartan slippers with the paint splodges.
I pushed the handle of the door. ‘Mrs Traynor, I really can’t sit by and
watch ... it’s too weird. I don’t want to be part of this.’
‘Just think about it. Tomorrow is Good Friday - I’ll tell Will you have a
family commitment if you really just need some time. Take the Bank Holiday
weekend to think about it. But please. Come back. Come back and help him.’
I walked back into the house without looking back. I sat in the living room,
staring at the television while my parents followed me in, exchanged glances and
pretended not to be watching me.
It was almost eleven minutes before I finally heard Mrs Traynor’s car start up
and drive away.
My sister confronted me within five minutes of arriving home, thundering up the
stairs and throwing open the door of my room.
‘Yes, do come in,’ I said. I was lying on the bed, my legs stretched up the wall,
staring at the ceiling. I was wearing tights and blue sequinned shorts, which now
looped unattractively around the tops of my legs.
Katrina stood in the doorway. ‘Is it true?’
‘That Dympna Grisham has finally thrown out her cheating no-good
philandering husband and -’
‘Don’t be smart. About your job.’
I traced the pattern of the wallpaper with my big toe. ‘Yes, I handed in my
notice. Yes, I know Mum and Dad are not too happy about it. Yes, yes, yes to
whatever it is you’re going to throw at me.’
She closed the door carefully behind her, then sat down heavily on the end of
my bed and swore lustily. ‘I don’t bloody believe you.’
She shoved my legs so that I slid down the wall, ending up almost lying on the
bed. I pushed myself upright. ‘Ow.’
Her face was puce. ‘I don’t believe you. Mum’s in bits downstairs. Dad’s
pretending not to be, but he is too. What are they supposed to do about money?
You know Dad’s already panicking about work. Why the hell would you throw
away a perfectly good job?’
‘Don’t lecture me, Treen.’
‘Well, someone’s got to! You’re never going to get anything like that money
anywhere else. And how’s it going to look on your CV?’
‘Oh, don’t pretend this is about anything other than you and what you want.’
‘What?’
‘You don’t care what I do, as long as you can still go and resurrect your high¬
flying career. You just need me there propping up the family funds and providing
the bloody childcare. Sod everyone else.’ I knew I sounded mean and nasty but I
couldn’t help myself. It was my sister’s plight that had got us into this mess,
after all. Years of resentment began to ooze out of me. ‘We’ve all got to stick at
jobs we hate just so that little Katrina can fulfil her bloody ambitions.’
‘It is not about me.’
‘No?’
‘No, it’s about you not being able to stick at the one decent job you’ve been
offered in months.’
‘You know nothing about my job, okay?’
‘I know it paid well above the minimum wage. Which is all I need to know
about it.’
‘Not everything in life is about the money, you know.’
‘Yes? You go downstairs and tell Mum and Dad that.’
‘Don’t you dare bloody lecture me about money when you haven’t paid a
sodding thing towards this house for years.’
‘You know I can’t afford much because of Thomas.’
I began to shove my sister out of the door. I can’t remember the last time I
actually laid a hand on her, but right then I wanted to punch someone quite badly
and I was afraid of what I would do if she stayed there in front of me. ‘Just piss
off, Treen. Okay? Just piss off and leave me alone?
I slammed the door in my sister’s face. And when I finally heard her walking
slowly back down the stairs, I chose not to think about what she would say to my
parents, about the way they would all treat this as further evidence of my
catastrophic inability to do anything of any worth. I chose not to think about
Syed at the Job Centre and how I would explain my reasons for leaving this most
well paid of menial jobs. I chose not to think about the chicken factory and how
somewhere, deep within its bowels, there was probably a set of plastic overalls,
and a hygiene cap with my name still on it.
I lay back and I thought about Will. I thought about his anger and his sadness.
I thought about what his mother had said - that I was one of the only people able
to get through to him. I thought about him trying not to laugh at the
‘Molahonkey Song’ on a night when the snow drifted gold past the window. I
thought about the warm skin and soft hair and hands of someone living, someone
who was far cleverer and funnier than I would ever be and who still couldn’t see
a better future than to obliterate himself. And finally, my head pressed into the
pillow, I cried, because my life suddenly seemed so much darker and more
complicated than I could ever have imagined, and I wished I could go back, back
to when my biggest worry was whether Frank and I had ordered in enough
Chelsea buns.
There was a knock on the door.
I blew my nose. ‘Piss off, Katrina.’
‘I’m sorry.’
I stared at the door.
Her voice was muffled, as if her lips were close up to the keyhole. ‘I’ve got
wine. Look, let me in for God’s sake, or Mum will hear me. I’ve got two Bob the
Builder mugs stuck up my jumper, and you know how she gets about us drinking
upstairs.’
I climbed off the bed and opened the door.
She glanced up at my tear-stained face, and swiftly closed the bedroom door
behind her. ‘Okay,’ she said, wrenching off the screw top and pouring me a mug
of wine, ‘what really happened?’
I looked at my sister hard. ‘You mustn’t tell anyone what I’m about to tell
you. Not Dad. Especially not Mum.’
Then I told her.
I had to tell someone
There were many ways in which I disliked my sister. A few years ago I could
have shown you whole scribbled lists I had written on that very topic. I hated her
for the fact that she got thick, straight hair, while mine breaks off if it grows
beyond my shoulders. I hated her for the fact that you can never tell her anything
that she doesn’t already know. I hated the fact that for my whole school career
teachers insisted on telling me in hushed tones how bright she was, as if her
brilliance wouldn’t mean that by default I lived in a permanent shadow. I hated
her for the fact that at the age of twenty-six I lived in a box room in a semi¬
detached house just so she could have her illegitimate son in with her in the
bigger bedroom. But every now and then I was very glad indeed that she was my
sister.
Because Katrina didn’t shriek in horror. She didn’t look shocked, or insist that
I tell Mum and Dad. She didn’t once tell me I’d done the wrong thing by
walking away.
She took a huge swig of her drink. ‘Jeez.’
‘Exactly.’
‘It’s legal as well. It’s not as if they can stop him.’
‘I know.’
‘Fuck. I can’t even get my head around it.’
We had downed two glasses just in the telling of it, and I could feel the heat
rising in my cheeks. ‘I hate the thought of leaving him. But I can’t be part of
this, Treen. I can’t.’
‘Mmm.’ She was thinking. My sister actually has a ‘thinking face’. It makes
people wait before speaking to her. Dad says my thinking face makes it look like
I want to go to the loo.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ I said.
She looked up at me, her face suddenly brightening. ‘It’s simple.’
‘Simple.’
She poured us another glass each. ‘Oops. We seem to have finished this
already. Yes. Simple. They’ve got money, right?’
‘I don’t want their money. She offered me a raise. It’s not the point.’
‘Shut up. Not for you, idiot girl. They’ll have their own money. And he’s
probably got a shedload of insurance from the accident. Well, you tell them that
you want a budget and then you use that money, and you use the - what was it?
- four months you’ve got left. And you change Will Traynor’s mind.’
‘What?’
‘You change his mind. You said he spends most of his time indoors, right?
Well, start with something small, then once you’ve got him out and about again,
you think of every fabulous thing you could do for him, everything that might
make him want to live - adventures, foreign travel, swimming with dolphins,
whatever - and then you do it. I can help you. I’ll look things up on the internet
at the library. I bet we could come up with some brilliant things for him to do.
Things that would really make him happy.’
I stared at her.
‘Katrina -’
‘Yeah. I know.’ She grinned, as I started to smile. ‘I’m a fucking genius.’
Friday, July 12, 2019
me before you, 08
8
Camilla
I never set out to help kill my son.
Even reading the words seems odd - like something you might see in a tabloid
newspaper, or one of those awful magazines that the cleaner always has poking
out of her handbag, full of women whose daughters ran off with their cheating
partners, tales of amazing weight loss and two-headed babies.
I was not the kind of person this happened to. Or at least, I thought I wasn’t.
My life was a fairly structured one - an ordinary one, by modern standards. I had
been married for almost thirty-seven years, I raised two children, I kept my
career, helped out at the school, the PTA, and joined the bench once the children
didn’t need me any more.
I had been a magistrate for almost eleven years now. I watched the whole of
human life come through my court: the hopeless waifs who couldn’t get
themselves together sufficiently even to make a court appointment on time; the
repeat offenders; the angry, hard-faced young men and exhausted, debt-ridden
mothers. It’s quite hard to stay calm and understanding when you see the same
faces, the same mistakes made again and again. I could sometimes hear the
impatience in my tone. It could be oddly dispiriting, the blank refusal of
humankind to even attempt to function responsibly.
And our little town, despite the beauty of the castle, our many Grade II listed
buildings, our picturesque country lanes, was far from immune to it. Our
Regency squares held cider-drinking teenagers, our thatched cottages muffled
the sounds of husbands beating their wives and children. Sometimes I felt like
King Canute, making vain pronouncements in the face of a tide of chaos and
creeping devastation. But I loved my job. I did it because I believe in order, in a
moral code. I believe that there is a right and a wrong, unfashionable as that
view might be.
I got through the tougher days because of my garden. As the children grew it
had become a bit of an obsession of mine. I could give you the Latin name of
almost any plant you cared to point at. The funny thing was, I didn’t even do
Latin at school - mine was a rather minor public school for girls where the focus
was on cooking and embroidery, things that would help us become good wives -
but the thing about those plant names is that they do stick in your head. I only
ever needed to hear one once to remember it forever: Helleborus niger,Eremurus
stenophyllus,Athyrium niponicum. I can repeat those with a fluency I never had
at school.
They say you only really appreciate a garden once you reach a certain age,
and I suppose there is a truth in that. It’s probably something to do with the great
circle of life. There seems to be something miraculous about seeing the
relentless optimism of new growth after the bleakness of winter, a kind of joy in
the difference every year, the way nature chooses to show off different parts of
the garden to its full advantage. There have been times - the times when my
marriage proved to be somewhat more populated than I had anticipated - when it
has been a refuge, times when it has been a joy.
There have even been times when it was, frankly, a pain. There is nothing
more disappointing than creating a new border only to see it fail to flourish, or to
watch a row of beautiful alliums destroyed overnight by some slimy culprit. But
even when I complained about the time, the effort involved in caring for it, the
way my joints protested at an afternoon spent weeding, or my fingernails never
looked quite clean, I loved it. I loved the sensual pleasures of being outside, the
smell of it, the feel of the earth under my fingers, the satisfaction of seeing
things living, glowing, captivated by their own temporary beauty.
After Will’s accident I didn’t garden for a year. It wasn’t just the time,
although the endless hours spent at hospital, the time spent toing and froing in
the car, the meetings - oh God, the meetings - took up so much of it. I took six
months’ compassionate leave from work and there was still not enough of it.
It was that I could suddenly see no point. I paid a gardener to come and keep
the garden tidy, and I don’t think I gave it anything but the most cursory of looks
for the best part of a year.
It was only when we brought Will back home, once the annexe was adapted
and ready, that I could see a point in making it beautiful again. I needed to give
my son something to look at. I needed to tell him, silently, that things might
change, grow or fail, but that life did go on. That we were all part of some great
cycle, some pattern that it was only God’s purpose to understand. I couldn’t say
that to him, of course - Will and I have never been able to say much to each
other - but I wanted to show him. A silent promise, if you like, that there was a
bigger picture, a brighter future.
Steven was poking at the log fire. He manoeuvred the remaining half-burnt logs
expertly with a poker, sending glowing sparks up the chimney, then dropped a
new log on to the middle. He stood back, as he always did, watching with quiet
satisfaction as the flames took hold, and dusted his hands on his corduroy
trousers. He turned as I entered the room. I held out a glass.
Thank you. Is George coming down?’
‘Apparently not.’
‘What’s she doing?
‘Watching television upstairs. She doesn’t want company. I did ask.’
‘She’ll come round. She’s probably jet-lagged.’
‘I hope so, Steven. She’s not very happy with us at the moment.’
We stood in silence, watching the fire. Around us the room was dark and still,
the windowpanes rattling gently as they were buffeted by the wind and rain.
‘Filthy night.’
‘Yes.’
The dog padded into the room and, with a sigh, flopped down in front of the
fire, gazing up adoringly at us both from her prone position.
‘So what do you think?’ he said. ‘This haircut business.’
‘I don’t know. I’d like to think it’s a good sign.’
‘This Louisa’s a bit of a character, isn’t she?’
I saw the way my husband smiled to himself. Not her too, I found myself
thinking, and then squashed the thought.
‘Yes. Yes, I suppose she is.’
‘Do you think she’s the right one?’
I took a sip of my drink before answering. Two fingers of gin, a slice of lemon
and a lot of tonic. ‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘I don’t think I have the faintest idea
what is right and wrong any more.’
‘He likes her. I’m sure he likes her. We were talking while watching the news
the other night, and he mentioned her twice. He hasn’t done that before.’
‘Yes. Well. I wouldn’t get your hopes up.’
‘Do you have to?’
Steven turned from the fire. I could see him studying me, perhaps conscious
of the new lines around my eyes, the way my mouth seemed set these days into a
thin line of anxiety. He looked at the little gold cross, now ever present around
my neck. I didn’t like it when he looked at me like that. I could never escape the
feeling that I was being compared to someone else.
‘I’m just being realistic.’
‘You sound ... you sound like you’re already expecting it to happen.’
‘I know my son.’
‘Our son.’
‘Yes. Our son.’ More my son, I found myself thinking. You were never really
there for him. Not emotionally. You were just the absence he was always striving
to impress.
‘He’ll change his mind,’ Steven said. ‘There’s still a long way to go.’
We stood there. I took a long sip of my drink, the ice cold against the warmth
given out by the fire.
‘I keep thinking ... ’ I said, staring into the hearth. ‘I still keep thinking that
I’m missing something.’
My husband was still watching me. I could feel his gaze on me, but I couldn’t
meet it. Perhaps he might have reached out to me then. But I think we had
probably gone too far for that.
He took a sip of his drink. ‘You can only do what you can do, darling.’
‘I’m well aware of that. But it’s not really enough, is it?’
He turned back to the fire, poking unnecessarily at a log until I turned and
quietly left the room.
As he had known I would.
When Will first told me what he wanted, he had to tell me twice, as I was quite
sure I could not have heard him correctly the first time. I stayed quite calm when
I realized what it was he was proposing, and then I told him he was being
ridiculous and I walked straight out of the room. It’s an unfair advantage, being
able to walk away from a man in a wheelchair. There are two steps between the
annexe and the main house, and without Nathan’s help he could not traverse
them. I shut the door of the annexe and I stood in my own hallway with the
calmly spoken words of my son still ringing in my ears.
I’m not sure I moved for half an hour.
He refused to let it go. Being Will, he always had to have the last word. He
repeated his request every time I went in to see him until I almost had to
persuade myself to go in each day. I don’t want to live like this, Mother. This is
not the life I chose. There is no prospect of my recovery, hence it is a perfectly
reasonable request to ask to end it in a manner I see fit. I heard him and could
well imagine what he had been like in those business meetings, the career that
had made him rich and arrogant. He was a man who was used to being heard,
after all. He couldn’t bear it that in some way I had the power to dictate his
future, that I had somehow become mother again.
It took his attempt to make me agree. It’s not that my religion forbade it -
although the prospect of Will being consigned to hell through his own
desperation was a terrible one. (I chose to believe that God, a benign God, would
understand our sufferings and forgive us our trespasses.)
It’s just that the thing you never understand about being a mother, until you
are one, is that it is not the grown man - the galumphing, unshaven, stinking,
opinionated offspring - you see before you, with his parking tickets and
unpolished shoes and complicated love life. You see all the people he has ever
been all rolled up into one.
I looked at Will and I saw the baby I held in my arms, dewily besotted, unable
to believe that I had created another human being. I saw the toddler, reaching for
my hand, the schoolboy weeping tears of fury after being bullied by some other
child. I saw the vulnerabilities, the love, the history. That’s what he was asking
me to extinguish - the small child as well as the man - all that love, all that
history.
And then on 22 January, a day when I was stuck in court with a relentless roll
call of shoplifters and uninsured drivers, of weeping angry ex-partners, Steven
walked into the annexe and found our son almost unconscious, his head lolling
by his armrest, a sea of dark, sticky blood pooling around his wheels. He had
located a rusty nail, barely half an inch emerging from some hurriedly finished
woodwork in the back lobby, and, pressing his wrist against it, had reversed
backwards and forwards until his flesh was sliced to ribbons. I cannot to this day
imagine the determination that kept him going, even though he must have been
half delirious from the pain. The doctors said he was less than twenty minutes
from death.
It was not, they observed with exquisite understatement, a cry for help.
When they told me at the hospital that Will would live, I walked outside into
my garden and I raged. I raged at God, at nature, at whatever fate had brought
our family to such depths. Now I look back and I must have seemed quite mad. I
stood in my garden that cold evening and I hurled my large brandy twenty feet
into the Euonymus compactus and I screamed, so that my voice broke the air,
bouncing off the castle walls and echoing into the distance. I was so furious, you
see, that all around me were things that could move and bend and grow and
reproduce, and my son - my vital, charismatic, beautiful boy - was just this
thing. Immobile, wilted, bloodied, suffering. Their beauty seemed like an
obscenity. I screamed and I screamed and I swore - words I didn’t know I knew
- until Steven came out and stood, his hand resting on my shoulder, waiting until
he could be sure that I would be silent again.
He didn’t understand, you see. He hadn’t worked it out yet. That Will would
try again. That our lives would have to be spent in a state of constant vigilance,
waiting for the next time, waiting to see what horror he would inflict upon
himself. We would have to see the world through his eyes - the potential
poisons, the sharp objects, the inventiveness with which he could finish the job
that damned motorcyclist had started. Our lives had to shrink to fit around the
potential for that one act. And he had the advantage - he had nothing else to
think about, you see?
Two weeks later, I told Will, ‘Yes.’
Of course I did.
What else could I have done?
Camilla
I never set out to help kill my son.
Even reading the words seems odd - like something you might see in a tabloid
newspaper, or one of those awful magazines that the cleaner always has poking
out of her handbag, full of women whose daughters ran off with their cheating
partners, tales of amazing weight loss and two-headed babies.
I was not the kind of person this happened to. Or at least, I thought I wasn’t.
My life was a fairly structured one - an ordinary one, by modern standards. I had
been married for almost thirty-seven years, I raised two children, I kept my
career, helped out at the school, the PTA, and joined the bench once the children
didn’t need me any more.
I had been a magistrate for almost eleven years now. I watched the whole of
human life come through my court: the hopeless waifs who couldn’t get
themselves together sufficiently even to make a court appointment on time; the
repeat offenders; the angry, hard-faced young men and exhausted, debt-ridden
mothers. It’s quite hard to stay calm and understanding when you see the same
faces, the same mistakes made again and again. I could sometimes hear the
impatience in my tone. It could be oddly dispiriting, the blank refusal of
humankind to even attempt to function responsibly.
And our little town, despite the beauty of the castle, our many Grade II listed
buildings, our picturesque country lanes, was far from immune to it. Our
Regency squares held cider-drinking teenagers, our thatched cottages muffled
the sounds of husbands beating their wives and children. Sometimes I felt like
King Canute, making vain pronouncements in the face of a tide of chaos and
creeping devastation. But I loved my job. I did it because I believe in order, in a
moral code. I believe that there is a right and a wrong, unfashionable as that
view might be.
I got through the tougher days because of my garden. As the children grew it
had become a bit of an obsession of mine. I could give you the Latin name of
almost any plant you cared to point at. The funny thing was, I didn’t even do
Latin at school - mine was a rather minor public school for girls where the focus
was on cooking and embroidery, things that would help us become good wives -
but the thing about those plant names is that they do stick in your head. I only
ever needed to hear one once to remember it forever: Helleborus niger,Eremurus
stenophyllus,Athyrium niponicum. I can repeat those with a fluency I never had
at school.
They say you only really appreciate a garden once you reach a certain age,
and I suppose there is a truth in that. It’s probably something to do with the great
circle of life. There seems to be something miraculous about seeing the
relentless optimism of new growth after the bleakness of winter, a kind of joy in
the difference every year, the way nature chooses to show off different parts of
the garden to its full advantage. There have been times - the times when my
marriage proved to be somewhat more populated than I had anticipated - when it
has been a refuge, times when it has been a joy.
There have even been times when it was, frankly, a pain. There is nothing
more disappointing than creating a new border only to see it fail to flourish, or to
watch a row of beautiful alliums destroyed overnight by some slimy culprit. But
even when I complained about the time, the effort involved in caring for it, the
way my joints protested at an afternoon spent weeding, or my fingernails never
looked quite clean, I loved it. I loved the sensual pleasures of being outside, the
smell of it, the feel of the earth under my fingers, the satisfaction of seeing
things living, glowing, captivated by their own temporary beauty.
After Will’s accident I didn’t garden for a year. It wasn’t just the time,
although the endless hours spent at hospital, the time spent toing and froing in
the car, the meetings - oh God, the meetings - took up so much of it. I took six
months’ compassionate leave from work and there was still not enough of it.
It was that I could suddenly see no point. I paid a gardener to come and keep
the garden tidy, and I don’t think I gave it anything but the most cursory of looks
for the best part of a year.
It was only when we brought Will back home, once the annexe was adapted
and ready, that I could see a point in making it beautiful again. I needed to give
my son something to look at. I needed to tell him, silently, that things might
change, grow or fail, but that life did go on. That we were all part of some great
cycle, some pattern that it was only God’s purpose to understand. I couldn’t say
that to him, of course - Will and I have never been able to say much to each
other - but I wanted to show him. A silent promise, if you like, that there was a
bigger picture, a brighter future.
Steven was poking at the log fire. He manoeuvred the remaining half-burnt logs
expertly with a poker, sending glowing sparks up the chimney, then dropped a
new log on to the middle. He stood back, as he always did, watching with quiet
satisfaction as the flames took hold, and dusted his hands on his corduroy
trousers. He turned as I entered the room. I held out a glass.
Thank you. Is George coming down?’
‘Apparently not.’
‘What’s she doing?
‘Watching television upstairs. She doesn’t want company. I did ask.’
‘She’ll come round. She’s probably jet-lagged.’
‘I hope so, Steven. She’s not very happy with us at the moment.’
We stood in silence, watching the fire. Around us the room was dark and still,
the windowpanes rattling gently as they were buffeted by the wind and rain.
‘Filthy night.’
‘Yes.’
The dog padded into the room and, with a sigh, flopped down in front of the
fire, gazing up adoringly at us both from her prone position.
‘So what do you think?’ he said. ‘This haircut business.’
‘I don’t know. I’d like to think it’s a good sign.’
‘This Louisa’s a bit of a character, isn’t she?’
I saw the way my husband smiled to himself. Not her too, I found myself
thinking, and then squashed the thought.
‘Yes. Yes, I suppose she is.’
‘Do you think she’s the right one?’
I took a sip of my drink before answering. Two fingers of gin, a slice of lemon
and a lot of tonic. ‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘I don’t think I have the faintest idea
what is right and wrong any more.’
‘He likes her. I’m sure he likes her. We were talking while watching the news
the other night, and he mentioned her twice. He hasn’t done that before.’
‘Yes. Well. I wouldn’t get your hopes up.’
‘Do you have to?’
Steven turned from the fire. I could see him studying me, perhaps conscious
of the new lines around my eyes, the way my mouth seemed set these days into a
thin line of anxiety. He looked at the little gold cross, now ever present around
my neck. I didn’t like it when he looked at me like that. I could never escape the
feeling that I was being compared to someone else.
‘I’m just being realistic.’
‘You sound ... you sound like you’re already expecting it to happen.’
‘I know my son.’
‘Our son.’
‘Yes. Our son.’ More my son, I found myself thinking. You were never really
there for him. Not emotionally. You were just the absence he was always striving
to impress.
‘He’ll change his mind,’ Steven said. ‘There’s still a long way to go.’
We stood there. I took a long sip of my drink, the ice cold against the warmth
given out by the fire.
‘I keep thinking ... ’ I said, staring into the hearth. ‘I still keep thinking that
I’m missing something.’
My husband was still watching me. I could feel his gaze on me, but I couldn’t
meet it. Perhaps he might have reached out to me then. But I think we had
probably gone too far for that.
He took a sip of his drink. ‘You can only do what you can do, darling.’
‘I’m well aware of that. But it’s not really enough, is it?’
He turned back to the fire, poking unnecessarily at a log until I turned and
quietly left the room.
As he had known I would.
When Will first told me what he wanted, he had to tell me twice, as I was quite
sure I could not have heard him correctly the first time. I stayed quite calm when
I realized what it was he was proposing, and then I told him he was being
ridiculous and I walked straight out of the room. It’s an unfair advantage, being
able to walk away from a man in a wheelchair. There are two steps between the
annexe and the main house, and without Nathan’s help he could not traverse
them. I shut the door of the annexe and I stood in my own hallway with the
calmly spoken words of my son still ringing in my ears.
I’m not sure I moved for half an hour.
He refused to let it go. Being Will, he always had to have the last word. He
repeated his request every time I went in to see him until I almost had to
persuade myself to go in each day. I don’t want to live like this, Mother. This is
not the life I chose. There is no prospect of my recovery, hence it is a perfectly
reasonable request to ask to end it in a manner I see fit. I heard him and could
well imagine what he had been like in those business meetings, the career that
had made him rich and arrogant. He was a man who was used to being heard,
after all. He couldn’t bear it that in some way I had the power to dictate his
future, that I had somehow become mother again.
It took his attempt to make me agree. It’s not that my religion forbade it -
although the prospect of Will being consigned to hell through his own
desperation was a terrible one. (I chose to believe that God, a benign God, would
understand our sufferings and forgive us our trespasses.)
It’s just that the thing you never understand about being a mother, until you
are one, is that it is not the grown man - the galumphing, unshaven, stinking,
opinionated offspring - you see before you, with his parking tickets and
unpolished shoes and complicated love life. You see all the people he has ever
been all rolled up into one.
I looked at Will and I saw the baby I held in my arms, dewily besotted, unable
to believe that I had created another human being. I saw the toddler, reaching for
my hand, the schoolboy weeping tears of fury after being bullied by some other
child. I saw the vulnerabilities, the love, the history. That’s what he was asking
me to extinguish - the small child as well as the man - all that love, all that
history.
And then on 22 January, a day when I was stuck in court with a relentless roll
call of shoplifters and uninsured drivers, of weeping angry ex-partners, Steven
walked into the annexe and found our son almost unconscious, his head lolling
by his armrest, a sea of dark, sticky blood pooling around his wheels. He had
located a rusty nail, barely half an inch emerging from some hurriedly finished
woodwork in the back lobby, and, pressing his wrist against it, had reversed
backwards and forwards until his flesh was sliced to ribbons. I cannot to this day
imagine the determination that kept him going, even though he must have been
half delirious from the pain. The doctors said he was less than twenty minutes
from death.
It was not, they observed with exquisite understatement, a cry for help.
When they told me at the hospital that Will would live, I walked outside into
my garden and I raged. I raged at God, at nature, at whatever fate had brought
our family to such depths. Now I look back and I must have seemed quite mad. I
stood in my garden that cold evening and I hurled my large brandy twenty feet
into the Euonymus compactus and I screamed, so that my voice broke the air,
bouncing off the castle walls and echoing into the distance. I was so furious, you
see, that all around me were things that could move and bend and grow and
reproduce, and my son - my vital, charismatic, beautiful boy - was just this
thing. Immobile, wilted, bloodied, suffering. Their beauty seemed like an
obscenity. I screamed and I screamed and I swore - words I didn’t know I knew
- until Steven came out and stood, his hand resting on my shoulder, waiting until
he could be sure that I would be silent again.
He didn’t understand, you see. He hadn’t worked it out yet. That Will would
try again. That our lives would have to be spent in a state of constant vigilance,
waiting for the next time, waiting to see what horror he would inflict upon
himself. We would have to see the world through his eyes - the potential
poisons, the sharp objects, the inventiveness with which he could finish the job
that damned motorcyclist had started. Our lives had to shrink to fit around the
potential for that one act. And he had the advantage - he had nothing else to
think about, you see?
Two weeks later, I told Will, ‘Yes.’
Of course I did.
What else could I have done?
Thursday, July 11, 2019
me before you, 07.2
‘You’re twenty-six years old, Clark. You should be out there, claiming the
world as your own, getting in trouble in bars, showing off your strange wardrobe
to dodgy men ... ’
‘I’m happy here,’ I said.
‘Well, you shouldn’t be.’
‘You like telling people what they should be doing, don’t you?’
‘Only when I know I’m right,’ he said. ‘Can you adjust my drink? I can’t quite
reach it.’
I twisted his straw round so that he could reach it more easily and waited
while he took a drink. The faint cold had turned the tips of his ears pink.
He grimaced. ‘Jesus, for a girl who made tea for a living you make a terrible
cup.’
‘You’re just used to lesbian tea,’ I said. ‘All that lapsang souchong herbal
stuff.’
‘Lesbian tea!’ He almost choked. ‘Well, it’s better than this stair varnish.
Christ. You could stand a spoon up in that.’
‘So even my tea is wrong.’ I sat down on the bench in front of him. ‘So how is
it okay for you to offer an opinion on every single thing I say or do, and yet
nobody else gets to say anything at all?’
‘Go on, then, Louisa Clark. Give me your opinions.’
‘On you?’
He gave a theatrical sigh. ‘Do I have a choice?’
‘You could cut your hair. It makes you look like some kind of vagrant.’
‘Now you sound like my mother.’
‘Well, you do look bloody awful. You could shave, at least. Isn’t all that facial
hair starting to get itchy?’
He gave me a sideways look.
‘It is, isn’t it? I knew it. Okay - this afternoon I am going to take it all off.’
‘Oh no.’
‘Yes. You asked me for my opinion. This is my answer. You don’t have to do
anything.’
‘What if I say no?’
‘I might do it anyway. If it gets any longer I’ll be picking bits of food out of it.
And, frankly, if that happens I’ll have to sue you for undue distress in the
workplace.’
He smiled then, as if I had amused him. It might sound a bit sad, but Will’s
smiles were so rare that prompting one made me feel a bit light-headed with
pride.
‘Here, Clark,’ he said. ‘Do me a favour?’
‘What?’
‘Scratch my ear for me, will you? It’s driving me nuts.’
‘If I do you’ll let me cut your hair? Just a bit of a trim?’
‘Don’t push your luck.’
‘Shush. Don’t make me nervous. I’m not great with scissors.’
I found the razors and some shaving foam in the bathroom cabinet, tucked well
back behind the packets of wipes and cotton wool, as if they hadn’t been used in
some time. I made him come into the bathroom, filled a sink with warm water,
got him to tilt his headrest back a little and then placed a hot flannel over his
chin.
‘What is this? You’re going to be a barbershop? What’s the flannel for?’
‘I don’t know,’ I confessed. ‘It’s what they do in the films. It’s like the hot
water and towels when someone has a baby.’
I couldn’t see his mouth, but his eyes creased with faint mirth. I wanted to
keep them like that. I wanted him to be happy - for his face to lose that haunted,
watchful look. I gabbled. I told jokes. I started to hum. Anything to prolong the
moment before he looked grim again.
I rolled up my sleeves and began to lather the shaving foam over his chin, all
the way up to his ears. Then I hesitated, the blade over his chin. ‘Is this the
moment to tell you I’ve only ever done legs before?’
He closed his eyes, and settled back. I began to scrape gently at his skin with
the blade, the silence broken only by the splash as I rinsed the razor in the
basinful of water. I worked in silence, studying Will Traynor’s face as I went, the
lines that ran to the corners of his mouth, lines that seemed prematurely deep for
his age. I smoothed his hair from the side of his face and saw the telltale tracks
of stitches, perhaps from his accident. I saw the mauve shadows that told of
nights and nights of lost sleep, the furrow between his brows that spoke of silent
pain. A warm sweetness rose from his skin, the scent of the shaving cream, and
something that was peculiar to Will himself, discreet and expensive. His face
began to emerge and I could see how easy it must have been for him to attract
someone like Alicia.
I worked slowly and carefully, encouraged by the fact that he seemed briefly
at peace. The thought flashed by that the only time anyone ever touched Will
was for some medical or therapeutic procedure, and so I let my fingers rest
lightly upon his skin, trying to make the movements as far from the
dehumanized briskness that characterized Nathan’s and the doctor’s interactions
with him as possible.
It was a curiously intimate thing, this shaving of Will. I realized as I continued
that I had assumed his wheelchair would be a barrier; that his disability would
prevent any kind of sensual aspect from creeping in. Weirdly, it wasn’t working
like that. It was impossible to be this close to someone, to feel their skin tauten
under your fingertips, to breathe in the air that they breathed out, to have their
face only inches from yours, without feeling a little unbalanced. By the time I
reached his other ear I had begun to feel awkward, as if I had overstepped an
invisible mark.
Perhaps Will was able to read the subtle changes in my pressure on his skin;
perhaps he was just more attuned to the moods of the people around him. But he
opened his eyes, and I found them looking into mine.
There was a short pause, and then he said, straight-faced, ‘Please don’t tell me
you’ve shaved off my eyebrows.’
‘Only the one,’ I said. I rinsed the blade, hoping that the colour would have
drained from my cheeks by the time I turned round. ‘Right,’ I said, finally. ‘Have
you had enough? Won’t Nathan be here in a bit?’
‘What about my hair?’ he said.
‘You really want me to cut it?’
‘You might as well.’
‘I thought you didn’t trust me.’
He shrugged, as far as he could. It was the smallest movement of his
shoulders. ‘If it will stop you moaning at me for a couple of weeks I figure it’s a
small price to pay.’
‘Oh my God, your mum is going to be so delighted,’ I said, wiping a stray dob
of shaving cream.
‘Yes, well, we won’t let that put us off.’
We cut his hair in the living room. I lit the fire, we put on a film - an American
thriller - and I placed a towel around his shoulders. I had warned Will that I was
a bit rusty, but added that it couldn’t look worse than it did already.
‘Thanks for that,’ he said.
I set to work, letting his hair slide through my fingers, trying to remember the
few basics I had learnt. Will, watching the film, seemed relaxed and almost
content. Occasionally he told me something about the film - what else the lead
actor had starred in, where he had first seen it - and I made a vaguely interested
noise (like I do with Thomas when he presents me with his toys), even though all
my attention was actually focused on not mucking up his hair. Finally, I had the
worst of it off, and whipped round in front of him to see how he looked.
‘Well?’ Will paused the DVD.
I straightened up. T’m not sure I like seeing this much of your face. It’s a bit
unnerving.’
Teels cold,’ he observed, moving his head from left to right, as if testing the
feel of it.
‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘I’ll get two mirrors. Then you can see it properly. But don’t
move. There’s still a bit of tidying up to be done. Possibly an ear to slice.’
I was in the bedroom, going through his drawers in search of a small mirror,
when I heard the door. Two sets of brisk footsteps, Mrs Traynor’s voice, lifted,
anxious.
‘Georgina, please don’t.’
The door to the living room was wrenched open. I grabbed the mirror and ran
out of the room. I had no intention of being found absent again. Mrs Traynor was
standing in the living-room doorway, both hands raised to her mouth, apparently
witnessing some unseen confrontation.
‘You are the most selfish man I ever met!’ a young woman was shouting. ‘I
can’t believe this, Will. You were selfish then and you’re worse now.’
‘Georgina.’ Mrs Traynor’s gazed flicked towards me as I approached. ‘Please,
stop.’
I walked into the room behind her. Will, the towel around his shoulders, hair
in soft brown fronds at the wheels of his chair, was facing a young woman. She
had long dark hair, pinned into a messy knot at the back of her head. Her skin
was tanned, and she was wearing expensively distressed jeans and suede boots.
Like Alicia, her features were beautiful and regular, her teeth the astonishing
white of a toothpaste commercial. I knew they were because, her face puce with
anger, she was still hissing at him. ‘I can’t believe it. I can’t believe you would
even think of it. What do you -’
‘Please. Georgina.’ Mrs Traynor’s voice lifted sharply. This is not the time.’
Will, his face impassive, was staring straight ahead of him at some unseen
point.
‘Um ... Will? Do you need any help?’ I said, quietly.
‘Who are you?’ she said, whipping round. It was then that I saw her eyes were
filled with tears.
‘Georgina,’ Will said. ‘Meet Louisa Clark, my paid companion and shockingly
inventive hairdresser. Louisa, meet my sister, Georgina. She appears to have
flown all the way from Australia to shriek at me.’
‘Don’t be facile,’ Georgina said. ‘Mummy told me. She’s told me everything .’
Nobody moved.
‘Shall I give you a minute?’ I said.
‘That would be a good idea.’ Mrs Traynor’s knuckles were white on the arm
of the sofa.
I slid out of the room.
‘In fact, Louisa, perhaps now would be a good time to take your lunch break.’
It was going to be a bus shelter kind of a day. I grabbed my sandwiches from
the kitchen, climbed into my coat and set off down the back path.
As I left, I could hear Georgina Traynor’s voice lifting inside the house. ‘Has
it ever occurred to you, Will, that believe it or not, this might not be just about
you?’
When I returned, exactly half an hour later, the house was silent. Nathan was
washing up a mug in the kitchen sink.
He turned as he saw me. ‘How you doing?’
‘Has she gone?’
‘Who?’
‘The sister?’
He glanced behind him. ‘Ah. That who it was? Yeah, she’s gone. Just skidding
off in her car when I got here. Some sort of family row, was it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I was in the middle of cutting Will’s hair and this
woman came in and just started having a go at him. I assumed it was another
girlfriend.’
Nathan shrugged.
I realized he would not be interested in the personal minutiae of Will’s life,
even if he knew.
‘He’s a bit quiet, though. Nice work with the shave, by the way. Good to get
him out from behind all that shrubbery.’
I walked back into the living room. Will was sitting staring at the television,
which was still paused at the exact moment I had left it.
‘Do you want me to turn this back on?’ I said.
He didn’t seem to hear me for a minute. His head was sunk in his shoulders,
the earlier relaxed expression replaced by a veil. Will was closed off again,
locked behind something I couldn’t penetrate.
He blinked, as if he had only just noticed me there. ‘Sure,’ he said.
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.’
world as your own, getting in trouble in bars, showing off your strange wardrobe
to dodgy men ... ’
‘I’m happy here,’ I said.
‘Well, you shouldn’t be.’
‘You like telling people what they should be doing, don’t you?’
‘Only when I know I’m right,’ he said. ‘Can you adjust my drink? I can’t quite
reach it.’
I twisted his straw round so that he could reach it more easily and waited
while he took a drink. The faint cold had turned the tips of his ears pink.
He grimaced. ‘Jesus, for a girl who made tea for a living you make a terrible
cup.’
‘You’re just used to lesbian tea,’ I said. ‘All that lapsang souchong herbal
stuff.’
‘Lesbian tea!’ He almost choked. ‘Well, it’s better than this stair varnish.
Christ. You could stand a spoon up in that.’
‘So even my tea is wrong.’ I sat down on the bench in front of him. ‘So how is
it okay for you to offer an opinion on every single thing I say or do, and yet
nobody else gets to say anything at all?’
‘Go on, then, Louisa Clark. Give me your opinions.’
‘On you?’
He gave a theatrical sigh. ‘Do I have a choice?’
‘You could cut your hair. It makes you look like some kind of vagrant.’
‘Now you sound like my mother.’
‘Well, you do look bloody awful. You could shave, at least. Isn’t all that facial
hair starting to get itchy?’
He gave me a sideways look.
‘It is, isn’t it? I knew it. Okay - this afternoon I am going to take it all off.’
‘Oh no.’
‘Yes. You asked me for my opinion. This is my answer. You don’t have to do
anything.’
‘What if I say no?’
‘I might do it anyway. If it gets any longer I’ll be picking bits of food out of it.
And, frankly, if that happens I’ll have to sue you for undue distress in the
workplace.’
He smiled then, as if I had amused him. It might sound a bit sad, but Will’s
smiles were so rare that prompting one made me feel a bit light-headed with
pride.
‘Here, Clark,’ he said. ‘Do me a favour?’
‘What?’
‘Scratch my ear for me, will you? It’s driving me nuts.’
‘If I do you’ll let me cut your hair? Just a bit of a trim?’
‘Don’t push your luck.’
‘Shush. Don’t make me nervous. I’m not great with scissors.’
I found the razors and some shaving foam in the bathroom cabinet, tucked well
back behind the packets of wipes and cotton wool, as if they hadn’t been used in
some time. I made him come into the bathroom, filled a sink with warm water,
got him to tilt his headrest back a little and then placed a hot flannel over his
chin.
‘What is this? You’re going to be a barbershop? What’s the flannel for?’
‘I don’t know,’ I confessed. ‘It’s what they do in the films. It’s like the hot
water and towels when someone has a baby.’
I couldn’t see his mouth, but his eyes creased with faint mirth. I wanted to
keep them like that. I wanted him to be happy - for his face to lose that haunted,
watchful look. I gabbled. I told jokes. I started to hum. Anything to prolong the
moment before he looked grim again.
I rolled up my sleeves and began to lather the shaving foam over his chin, all
the way up to his ears. Then I hesitated, the blade over his chin. ‘Is this the
moment to tell you I’ve only ever done legs before?’
He closed his eyes, and settled back. I began to scrape gently at his skin with
the blade, the silence broken only by the splash as I rinsed the razor in the
basinful of water. I worked in silence, studying Will Traynor’s face as I went, the
lines that ran to the corners of his mouth, lines that seemed prematurely deep for
his age. I smoothed his hair from the side of his face and saw the telltale tracks
of stitches, perhaps from his accident. I saw the mauve shadows that told of
nights and nights of lost sleep, the furrow between his brows that spoke of silent
pain. A warm sweetness rose from his skin, the scent of the shaving cream, and
something that was peculiar to Will himself, discreet and expensive. His face
began to emerge and I could see how easy it must have been for him to attract
someone like Alicia.
I worked slowly and carefully, encouraged by the fact that he seemed briefly
at peace. The thought flashed by that the only time anyone ever touched Will
was for some medical or therapeutic procedure, and so I let my fingers rest
lightly upon his skin, trying to make the movements as far from the
dehumanized briskness that characterized Nathan’s and the doctor’s interactions
with him as possible.
It was a curiously intimate thing, this shaving of Will. I realized as I continued
that I had assumed his wheelchair would be a barrier; that his disability would
prevent any kind of sensual aspect from creeping in. Weirdly, it wasn’t working
like that. It was impossible to be this close to someone, to feel their skin tauten
under your fingertips, to breathe in the air that they breathed out, to have their
face only inches from yours, without feeling a little unbalanced. By the time I
reached his other ear I had begun to feel awkward, as if I had overstepped an
invisible mark.
Perhaps Will was able to read the subtle changes in my pressure on his skin;
perhaps he was just more attuned to the moods of the people around him. But he
opened his eyes, and I found them looking into mine.
There was a short pause, and then he said, straight-faced, ‘Please don’t tell me
you’ve shaved off my eyebrows.’
‘Only the one,’ I said. I rinsed the blade, hoping that the colour would have
drained from my cheeks by the time I turned round. ‘Right,’ I said, finally. ‘Have
you had enough? Won’t Nathan be here in a bit?’
‘What about my hair?’ he said.
‘You really want me to cut it?’
‘You might as well.’
‘I thought you didn’t trust me.’
He shrugged, as far as he could. It was the smallest movement of his
shoulders. ‘If it will stop you moaning at me for a couple of weeks I figure it’s a
small price to pay.’
‘Oh my God, your mum is going to be so delighted,’ I said, wiping a stray dob
of shaving cream.
‘Yes, well, we won’t let that put us off.’
We cut his hair in the living room. I lit the fire, we put on a film - an American
thriller - and I placed a towel around his shoulders. I had warned Will that I was
a bit rusty, but added that it couldn’t look worse than it did already.
‘Thanks for that,’ he said.
I set to work, letting his hair slide through my fingers, trying to remember the
few basics I had learnt. Will, watching the film, seemed relaxed and almost
content. Occasionally he told me something about the film - what else the lead
actor had starred in, where he had first seen it - and I made a vaguely interested
noise (like I do with Thomas when he presents me with his toys), even though all
my attention was actually focused on not mucking up his hair. Finally, I had the
worst of it off, and whipped round in front of him to see how he looked.
‘Well?’ Will paused the DVD.
I straightened up. T’m not sure I like seeing this much of your face. It’s a bit
unnerving.’
Teels cold,’ he observed, moving his head from left to right, as if testing the
feel of it.
‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘I’ll get two mirrors. Then you can see it properly. But don’t
move. There’s still a bit of tidying up to be done. Possibly an ear to slice.’
I was in the bedroom, going through his drawers in search of a small mirror,
when I heard the door. Two sets of brisk footsteps, Mrs Traynor’s voice, lifted,
anxious.
‘Georgina, please don’t.’
The door to the living room was wrenched open. I grabbed the mirror and ran
out of the room. I had no intention of being found absent again. Mrs Traynor was
standing in the living-room doorway, both hands raised to her mouth, apparently
witnessing some unseen confrontation.
‘You are the most selfish man I ever met!’ a young woman was shouting. ‘I
can’t believe this, Will. You were selfish then and you’re worse now.’
‘Georgina.’ Mrs Traynor’s gazed flicked towards me as I approached. ‘Please,
stop.’
I walked into the room behind her. Will, the towel around his shoulders, hair
in soft brown fronds at the wheels of his chair, was facing a young woman. She
had long dark hair, pinned into a messy knot at the back of her head. Her skin
was tanned, and she was wearing expensively distressed jeans and suede boots.
Like Alicia, her features were beautiful and regular, her teeth the astonishing
white of a toothpaste commercial. I knew they were because, her face puce with
anger, she was still hissing at him. ‘I can’t believe it. I can’t believe you would
even think of it. What do you -’
‘Please. Georgina.’ Mrs Traynor’s voice lifted sharply. This is not the time.’
Will, his face impassive, was staring straight ahead of him at some unseen
point.
‘Um ... Will? Do you need any help?’ I said, quietly.
‘Who are you?’ she said, whipping round. It was then that I saw her eyes were
filled with tears.
‘Georgina,’ Will said. ‘Meet Louisa Clark, my paid companion and shockingly
inventive hairdresser. Louisa, meet my sister, Georgina. She appears to have
flown all the way from Australia to shriek at me.’
‘Don’t be facile,’ Georgina said. ‘Mummy told me. She’s told me everything .’
Nobody moved.
‘Shall I give you a minute?’ I said.
‘That would be a good idea.’ Mrs Traynor’s knuckles were white on the arm
of the sofa.
I slid out of the room.
‘In fact, Louisa, perhaps now would be a good time to take your lunch break.’
It was going to be a bus shelter kind of a day. I grabbed my sandwiches from
the kitchen, climbed into my coat and set off down the back path.
As I left, I could hear Georgina Traynor’s voice lifting inside the house. ‘Has
it ever occurred to you, Will, that believe it or not, this might not be just about
you?’
When I returned, exactly half an hour later, the house was silent. Nathan was
washing up a mug in the kitchen sink.
He turned as he saw me. ‘How you doing?’
‘Has she gone?’
‘Who?’
‘The sister?’
He glanced behind him. ‘Ah. That who it was? Yeah, she’s gone. Just skidding
off in her car when I got here. Some sort of family row, was it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I was in the middle of cutting Will’s hair and this
woman came in and just started having a go at him. I assumed it was another
girlfriend.’
Nathan shrugged.
I realized he would not be interested in the personal minutiae of Will’s life,
even if he knew.
‘He’s a bit quiet, though. Nice work with the shave, by the way. Good to get
him out from behind all that shrubbery.’
I walked back into the living room. Will was sitting staring at the television,
which was still paused at the exact moment I had left it.
‘Do you want me to turn this back on?’ I said.
He didn’t seem to hear me for a minute. His head was sunk in his shoulders,
the earlier relaxed expression replaced by a veil. Will was closed off again,
locked behind something I couldn’t penetrate.
He blinked, as if he had only just noticed me there. ‘Sure,’ he said.
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.’
me before you, 07.1
me before you, 07
7
Spring arrived overnight, as if winter, like some unwanted guest, had abruptly
shrugged its way into its coat and vanished, without saying goodbye. Everything
became greener, the roads bathed in watery sunshine, the air suddenly balmy.
There were hints of something floral and welcoming in the air, birdsong the
gentle backdrop to the day.
I didn’t notice any of it. I had stayed at Patrick’s house the evening before. It
was the first time I had seen him for almost a week due to his enhanced training
schedule, but having spent forty minutes in the bath with half a pack of bath
salts, he was so exhausted he could barely talk to me. I had begun stroking his
back, in a rare attempt at seduction, and he had murmured that he was really too
tired, his hand flicking as if he were swatting me away. I was still awake and
staring at his ceiling discontentedly four hours later.
Patrick and I had met while I was doing the only other job I have ever held,
that of trainee at The Cutting Edge, Hailsbury’s only unisex hairdresser’s. He
walked in while Samantha, the proprietor, was busy, asking for a number four. I
gave him what he described afterwards as the worst haircut not only that he had
ever had, but the worst haircut in the history of mankind. Three months later,
realizing that a love of fiddling with my own hair did not necessarily mean that I
was cut out to do anyone else’s, I left and got the job at the cafe with Frank.
When we started going out, Patrick had been working in sales and his
favourite things could have been listed as beer, garage chocolate, talking about
sport and sex (doing, not talking about), in that order. A good night out for us
would probably comprise all four. He was ordinary-looking rather than
handsome, and his bum was podgier than mine, but I liked it. I liked the solidity
of him, the way he felt when I wrapped myself around him. His dad was dead
and I liked the way he acted towards his mother; protective and solicitous. And
his four brothers and sisters were like the Waltons. They actually seemed to like
each other. The first time we went out on a date, a little voice in my head said:
This man will never hurt you, and nothing he had done in the seven years since
had led me to doubt it.
And then he turned into Marathon Man.
Patrick’s stomach no longer gave when I nestled into him; it was a hard,
unforgiving thing, like a sideboard, and he was prone to pulling up his shirt and
hitting it with things, to prove quite how hard it was. His face was planed, and
weathered from his time spent constantly outdoors. His thighs were solid
muscle. That would have been quite sexy in itself, had he actually wanted to
have sex. But we were down to about twice a month, and I wasn’t the kind to
ask.
It was as if the fitter he got, the more obsessed by his own shape he became,
the less interested he was in mine. I asked him a couple of times if he didn’t
fancy me any more, but he seemed pretty definite. ‘You’re gorgeous,’ he would
say. ‘I’m just shattered. Anyway, I don’t want you to lose weight. The girls at the
club - you couldn’t make one decent boob out of all of theirs put together.’ I
wanted to ask how exactly he had come to work out this complex equation, but it
was basically a nice thing to say so I let it go.
I wanted to be interested in what he did, I really did. I went to the triathlon
club nights, I tried to chat to the other girls. But I soon realized I was an anomaly
- there were no girlfriends like me - everyone else in the club was single, or
involved with someone equally physically impressive. The couples pushed each
other on workouts, planned weekends in spandex shorts and carried pictures of
each other in their wallets completing triathlons hand in hand, or smugly
comparing joint medals. It was unspeakable.
‘I don’t know what you’re complaining about,’ my sister said when I told her.
‘I’ve had sex once since I had Thomas.’
‘What? Who with?’
‘Oh, some bloke who came in for a Vibrant Hand-Tied,’ she said. ‘I just
wanted to make sure I still could.’
And then, when my jaw dropped, ‘Oh, don’t look like that. It wasn’t during
working hours. And they were funeral flowers. If they had been wife flowers, of
course I wouldn’t have touched him with a gladioli.’
It’s not that I was some kind of sex maniac - we’d been together a long time,
after all. It’s just that some perverse bit of me had begun to question my own
attractiveness.
Patrick had never minded the fact that I dressed ‘inventively’, as he put it. But
what if he hadn’t been entirely tmthful? Patrick’s job, his whole social life now
revolved around the control of flesh - taming it, reducing it, honing it. What if,
faced with those tight little tracksuited bottoms, my own suddenly seemed
wanting? What if my curves, which I had always thought of as pleasantly
voluptuous, now seemed doughy to his exacting eyes?
These were the thoughts that were still humming messily around my head as
Mrs Traynor came in and pretty much ordered Will and me to go outside. ‘I’ve
asked the cleaners to come and do a special spring clean, so I thought perhaps
you could enjoy the nice weather while they’re all in there.’
Will’s eyes met mine with the faintest lift of his eyebrows. ‘It’s not really a
request, is it, Mother?’
‘I just think it would be good if you took some air,’ she said. ‘The ramp is in
place. Perhaps, Louisa, you might take some tea out there with you?’
It wasn’t an entirely unreasonable suggestion. The garden was beautiful. It
was as if with the slight lifting of temperatures everything had suddenly decided
to look a little bit greener. Daffodils had emerged as if from nowhere, their
yellowing bulbs hinting at the flowers to come. Buds burst from brown branches,
perennials forcing their way tentatively through the dark, claggy soil. I opened
the doors and we went outside, Will keeping his chair on the York stone path. He
gestured towards a cast-iron bench with a cushion on it, and I sat there for some
time, our faces lifted to the weak sunshine, listening to the sparrows squabbling
in the hedgerow.
‘What’s up with you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re quiet.’
‘You said you wanted me to be quiet.’
‘Not this quiet. It alarms me.’
‘I’m all right,’ I said. And then, ‘It’s just boyfriend stuff, if you really want to
know.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Running Man.’
I opened my eyes, just to see if he was mocking me.
‘What’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Come on, tell Uncle Will.’
‘No.’
‘My mother is going to have the cleaners running around like lunatics in there
for at least another hour. You’re going to have to talk about something.’
I pushed myself upright, and turned to face him. His house chair had a control
button that elevated his seat so that he could address people at head height. He
didn’t often use it, as it frequently made him dizzy, but it was working now. I
actually had to look up at him.
I pulled my coat around me, and squinted at him. ‘Go on, then, what do you
want to know?’
‘How long have you two been together?’ he said.
‘Bit over six years.’
He looked surprised. ‘That’s a long time.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well.’
I leant over and adjusted a rug across him. It was deceptive, the sunshine - it
promised more than it could actually deliver. I thought of Patrick, up at 6.30
sharp this morning to go for his morning run. Perhaps I should take up running,
so that we would become one of those Lycra-clad couples. Perhaps I should buy
frilly underwear and look up sex tips online. I knew I would do neither.
‘What does he do?’
‘He’s a personal trainer.’
‘Hence the running.’
‘Hence the running.’
‘What’s he like? In three words, if it makes you uncomfortable.’
I thought about it. ‘Positive. Loyal. Obsessed with body fat ratios.’
‘That’s seven words.’
‘Then you got four for free. So what was she like?’
‘Who?’
‘Alicia?’ I looked at him like he had looked at me, directly. He took a deep
breath and gazed upwards to a large plane tree. His hair fell down into his eyes
and I fought the urge to push it to one side for him.
‘Gorgeous. Sexy. High maintenance. Surprisingly insecure.’
‘What does she have to be insecure about?’ The words left my mouth before I
could help myself.
He looked almost amused. ‘You’d be surprised,’ he said. ‘Girls like Lissa
trade on their looks for so long they don’t think they have anything else.
Actually, I’m being unfair. She’s good with stuff. Things - clothes, interiors. She
can make things look beautiful.’
I fought the urge to say anyone could make things look beautiful if they had a
wallet as deep as a diamond mine.
‘She could move a few things around in a room, and it would look completely
different. I never could work out how she did it.’ He nodded towards the house.
‘She did this annexe, when I first moved in.’
I found myself reviewing the perfectly designed living room. I realized my
admiration of it was suddenly slightly less uncomplicated than it had been.
‘How long were you with her?’
‘Eight, nine months.’
‘Not that long.’
‘Long for me.’
‘How did you meet?’
‘Dinner party. Areally awful dinner party. You?’
‘Hairdresser’s. I was one. He was my client.’
‘Hah. You were his something extra for the weekend.’
I must have looked blank because he shook his head and said softly, ‘Never
mind.’
Inside, we could hear the dull drone of the vacuum cleaner. There were four
women in the cleaning company, all wearing matching housecoats. I had
wondered what they would find to do for two hours in the little annexe.
‘Do you miss her?’
I could hear them talking amongst themselves. Someone had opened a
window, and occasional bursts of laughter filtered out into the thin air.
Will seemed to be watching something in the far-off distance. ‘I used to.’ He
turned to me, his voice matter-of-fact. ‘But I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve
decided that she and Rupert are a good match.’
I nodded. ‘They’ll have a ridiculous wedding, pop out an ankle biter or two, as
you put it, buy a place in the country, and he’ll be shagging his secretary within
five years/ I said.
‘You’re probably right.’
I was warming to my theme now. ‘And she will be a little bit cross with him
all the time without really knowing why and bitch about him at really awful
dinner parties to the embarrassment of their friends, and he won’t want to leave
because he’ll be scared of all the alimony.’
Will turned to look at me.
‘And they will have sex once every six weeks and he will adore his children
while doing bugger all to actually help look after them. And she will have
perfect hair but get this kind of pinched face -’ I narrowed my mouth ‘- through
never saying what she actually means, and start an insane Pilates habit or maybe
buy a dog or a horse and develop a crush on her riding instructor. And he will
take up jogging when he hits forty, and maybe buy a Harley-Davidson, which
she will despise, and every day he will go to work and look at all the young men
in his office and listen in bars to who they pulled at the weekend or where they
went on a jolly and feel like somehow - and he will never be quite sure how - he
got suckered.’
I turned.
Will was staring at me.
‘Sorry,’ I said, after a moment. ‘I don’t really know where that came from.’
‘I’m starting to feel just the tiniest bit sorry for Running Man.’
‘Oh, it’s not him,’ I said. ‘It’s working at a cafe for years. You see and hear
everything. Patterns, in people’s behaviour. You’d be amazed at what goes on.’
‘Is that why you’ve never got married?’
I blinked. ‘I suppose so.’
I didn’t want to say I had never actually been asked.
It may sound as though we didn’t do much. But, in truth, the days with Will were
subtly different - depending on his mood and, more importantly, how much pain
he was in. Some days I would arrive and I could see from the set of his jaw that
he didn’t want to talk to me - or to anyone - and, noting this, I would busy
myself around the annexe, trying to anticipate his needs so that I didn’t have to
bother him by asking.
There were all sorts of things that caused him pain. There were the general
aches that came with loss of muscle - there was so much less holding him up,
despite Nathan’s best attempts at physio. There was stomach pain from digestive
problems, shoulder pain, pain from bladder infections - an inevitability,
apparently, despite everyone’s best efforts. He had a stomach ulcer from taking
too many painkillers early on in his recovery, when he apparently popped them
like Tic Tacs.
Occasionally, there were pressure sores, from being seated in the same
position for too long. A couple of times Will was confined to bed, just to let them
heal, but he hated being prone. He would lie there listening to the radio, his eyes
glittering with barely suppressed rage. Will also got headaches - a side effect, I
thought, of his anger and frustration. He had so much mental energy, and nothing
to take it out on. It had to build up somewhere.
But the most debilitating was a burning sensation in his hands and feet;
relentless, pulsing, it would leave him unable to focus on anything else. I would
prepare a bowl of cold water and soak them, or wrap cold flannels around them,
hoping to ease his discomfort. A stringy muscle would flicker in his jaw and
occasionally he would just seem to disappear, as if the only way he could cope
with the sensation was to absent himself from his own body. I had become
surprisingly used to the physical requirements of Will’s life. It seemed unfair that
despite the fact he could not use them, or feel them, his extremities should cause
him so much discomfort.
Despite all this, Will did not complain. This was why it had taken me weeks to
notice he suffered at all. Now, I could decipher the strained look around his eyes,
the silences, the way he seemed to retreat inside his own skin. He would ask,
simply, ‘Could you get the cold water, Louisa?’ or ‘I think it might be time for
some painkillers.’ Sometimes he was in so much pain that his face actually
leached colour, turning to pale putty. Those were the worst days.
But on other days we tolerated each other quite well. He didn’t seem mortally
offended when I talked to him, as he had at the start. Today appeared to be a
pain-free day. When Mrs Traynor came out to tell us that the cleaners would be
another twenty minutes, I made us both another drink and we took a slow stroll
around the garden, Will sticking to the path and me watching my satin pumps
darken in the damp grass.
‘Interesting choice of footwear/ Will said.
They were emerald green. I had found them in a charity shop. Patrick said
they made me look like a leprechaun drag queen.
‘You know, you don’t dress like someone from round here. I quite look
forward to seeing what insane combination you’re going to turn up in next.’
‘So how should “someone from round here” dress?’
He steered a little to the left to avoid a bit of branch on the path. ‘Fleece. Or, if
you’re my mother’s set, something from Jaeger or Whistles.’ He looked at me.
‘So where did you pick up your exotic tastes? Where else have you lived?’
‘I haven’t.’
‘What, you’ve only ever lived here? Where have you worked?’
‘Only here.’ I turned and looked at him, crossing my arms over my chest
defensively. ‘So? What’s so weird about that?’
‘It’s such a small town. So limiting. And it’s all about the castle.’ We paused
on the path and stared at it, rising up in the distance on its weird, dome-like hill,
as perfect as if it had been drawn by a child. ‘I always think this is the kind of
place that people come back to. When they’ve got tired of everything else. Or
when they don’t have enough imagination to go anywhere else.’
‘Thanks.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with it per se. But... Christ. It’s not exactly dynamic,
is it? Not exactly full of ideas or interesting people or opportunities. Round here
they think it’s subversive if the tourist shop starts selling place mats with a
different view of the miniature railway.’
I couldn’t help but laugh. There had been an article in the local newspaper the
previous week on exactly that topic.
7
Spring arrived overnight, as if winter, like some unwanted guest, had abruptly
shrugged its way into its coat and vanished, without saying goodbye. Everything
became greener, the roads bathed in watery sunshine, the air suddenly balmy.
There were hints of something floral and welcoming in the air, birdsong the
gentle backdrop to the day.
I didn’t notice any of it. I had stayed at Patrick’s house the evening before. It
was the first time I had seen him for almost a week due to his enhanced training
schedule, but having spent forty minutes in the bath with half a pack of bath
salts, he was so exhausted he could barely talk to me. I had begun stroking his
back, in a rare attempt at seduction, and he had murmured that he was really too
tired, his hand flicking as if he were swatting me away. I was still awake and
staring at his ceiling discontentedly four hours later.
Patrick and I had met while I was doing the only other job I have ever held,
that of trainee at The Cutting Edge, Hailsbury’s only unisex hairdresser’s. He
walked in while Samantha, the proprietor, was busy, asking for a number four. I
gave him what he described afterwards as the worst haircut not only that he had
ever had, but the worst haircut in the history of mankind. Three months later,
realizing that a love of fiddling with my own hair did not necessarily mean that I
was cut out to do anyone else’s, I left and got the job at the cafe with Frank.
When we started going out, Patrick had been working in sales and his
favourite things could have been listed as beer, garage chocolate, talking about
sport and sex (doing, not talking about), in that order. A good night out for us
would probably comprise all four. He was ordinary-looking rather than
handsome, and his bum was podgier than mine, but I liked it. I liked the solidity
of him, the way he felt when I wrapped myself around him. His dad was dead
and I liked the way he acted towards his mother; protective and solicitous. And
his four brothers and sisters were like the Waltons. They actually seemed to like
each other. The first time we went out on a date, a little voice in my head said:
This man will never hurt you, and nothing he had done in the seven years since
had led me to doubt it.
And then he turned into Marathon Man.
Patrick’s stomach no longer gave when I nestled into him; it was a hard,
unforgiving thing, like a sideboard, and he was prone to pulling up his shirt and
hitting it with things, to prove quite how hard it was. His face was planed, and
weathered from his time spent constantly outdoors. His thighs were solid
muscle. That would have been quite sexy in itself, had he actually wanted to
have sex. But we were down to about twice a month, and I wasn’t the kind to
ask.
It was as if the fitter he got, the more obsessed by his own shape he became,
the less interested he was in mine. I asked him a couple of times if he didn’t
fancy me any more, but he seemed pretty definite. ‘You’re gorgeous,’ he would
say. ‘I’m just shattered. Anyway, I don’t want you to lose weight. The girls at the
club - you couldn’t make one decent boob out of all of theirs put together.’ I
wanted to ask how exactly he had come to work out this complex equation, but it
was basically a nice thing to say so I let it go.
I wanted to be interested in what he did, I really did. I went to the triathlon
club nights, I tried to chat to the other girls. But I soon realized I was an anomaly
- there were no girlfriends like me - everyone else in the club was single, or
involved with someone equally physically impressive. The couples pushed each
other on workouts, planned weekends in spandex shorts and carried pictures of
each other in their wallets completing triathlons hand in hand, or smugly
comparing joint medals. It was unspeakable.
‘I don’t know what you’re complaining about,’ my sister said when I told her.
‘I’ve had sex once since I had Thomas.’
‘What? Who with?’
‘Oh, some bloke who came in for a Vibrant Hand-Tied,’ she said. ‘I just
wanted to make sure I still could.’
And then, when my jaw dropped, ‘Oh, don’t look like that. It wasn’t during
working hours. And they were funeral flowers. If they had been wife flowers, of
course I wouldn’t have touched him with a gladioli.’
It’s not that I was some kind of sex maniac - we’d been together a long time,
after all. It’s just that some perverse bit of me had begun to question my own
attractiveness.
Patrick had never minded the fact that I dressed ‘inventively’, as he put it. But
what if he hadn’t been entirely tmthful? Patrick’s job, his whole social life now
revolved around the control of flesh - taming it, reducing it, honing it. What if,
faced with those tight little tracksuited bottoms, my own suddenly seemed
wanting? What if my curves, which I had always thought of as pleasantly
voluptuous, now seemed doughy to his exacting eyes?
These were the thoughts that were still humming messily around my head as
Mrs Traynor came in and pretty much ordered Will and me to go outside. ‘I’ve
asked the cleaners to come and do a special spring clean, so I thought perhaps
you could enjoy the nice weather while they’re all in there.’
Will’s eyes met mine with the faintest lift of his eyebrows. ‘It’s not really a
request, is it, Mother?’
‘I just think it would be good if you took some air,’ she said. ‘The ramp is in
place. Perhaps, Louisa, you might take some tea out there with you?’
It wasn’t an entirely unreasonable suggestion. The garden was beautiful. It
was as if with the slight lifting of temperatures everything had suddenly decided
to look a little bit greener. Daffodils had emerged as if from nowhere, their
yellowing bulbs hinting at the flowers to come. Buds burst from brown branches,
perennials forcing their way tentatively through the dark, claggy soil. I opened
the doors and we went outside, Will keeping his chair on the York stone path. He
gestured towards a cast-iron bench with a cushion on it, and I sat there for some
time, our faces lifted to the weak sunshine, listening to the sparrows squabbling
in the hedgerow.
‘What’s up with you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re quiet.’
‘You said you wanted me to be quiet.’
‘Not this quiet. It alarms me.’
‘I’m all right,’ I said. And then, ‘It’s just boyfriend stuff, if you really want to
know.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Running Man.’
I opened my eyes, just to see if he was mocking me.
‘What’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Come on, tell Uncle Will.’
‘No.’
‘My mother is going to have the cleaners running around like lunatics in there
for at least another hour. You’re going to have to talk about something.’
I pushed myself upright, and turned to face him. His house chair had a control
button that elevated his seat so that he could address people at head height. He
didn’t often use it, as it frequently made him dizzy, but it was working now. I
actually had to look up at him.
I pulled my coat around me, and squinted at him. ‘Go on, then, what do you
want to know?’
‘How long have you two been together?’ he said.
‘Bit over six years.’
He looked surprised. ‘That’s a long time.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well.’
I leant over and adjusted a rug across him. It was deceptive, the sunshine - it
promised more than it could actually deliver. I thought of Patrick, up at 6.30
sharp this morning to go for his morning run. Perhaps I should take up running,
so that we would become one of those Lycra-clad couples. Perhaps I should buy
frilly underwear and look up sex tips online. I knew I would do neither.
‘What does he do?’
‘He’s a personal trainer.’
‘Hence the running.’
‘Hence the running.’
‘What’s he like? In three words, if it makes you uncomfortable.’
I thought about it. ‘Positive. Loyal. Obsessed with body fat ratios.’
‘That’s seven words.’
‘Then you got four for free. So what was she like?’
‘Who?’
‘Alicia?’ I looked at him like he had looked at me, directly. He took a deep
breath and gazed upwards to a large plane tree. His hair fell down into his eyes
and I fought the urge to push it to one side for him.
‘Gorgeous. Sexy. High maintenance. Surprisingly insecure.’
‘What does she have to be insecure about?’ The words left my mouth before I
could help myself.
He looked almost amused. ‘You’d be surprised,’ he said. ‘Girls like Lissa
trade on their looks for so long they don’t think they have anything else.
Actually, I’m being unfair. She’s good with stuff. Things - clothes, interiors. She
can make things look beautiful.’
I fought the urge to say anyone could make things look beautiful if they had a
wallet as deep as a diamond mine.
‘She could move a few things around in a room, and it would look completely
different. I never could work out how she did it.’ He nodded towards the house.
‘She did this annexe, when I first moved in.’
I found myself reviewing the perfectly designed living room. I realized my
admiration of it was suddenly slightly less uncomplicated than it had been.
‘How long were you with her?’
‘Eight, nine months.’
‘Not that long.’
‘Long for me.’
‘How did you meet?’
‘Dinner party. Areally awful dinner party. You?’
‘Hairdresser’s. I was one. He was my client.’
‘Hah. You were his something extra for the weekend.’
I must have looked blank because he shook his head and said softly, ‘Never
mind.’
Inside, we could hear the dull drone of the vacuum cleaner. There were four
women in the cleaning company, all wearing matching housecoats. I had
wondered what they would find to do for two hours in the little annexe.
‘Do you miss her?’
I could hear them talking amongst themselves. Someone had opened a
window, and occasional bursts of laughter filtered out into the thin air.
Will seemed to be watching something in the far-off distance. ‘I used to.’ He
turned to me, his voice matter-of-fact. ‘But I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve
decided that she and Rupert are a good match.’
I nodded. ‘They’ll have a ridiculous wedding, pop out an ankle biter or two, as
you put it, buy a place in the country, and he’ll be shagging his secretary within
five years/ I said.
‘You’re probably right.’
I was warming to my theme now. ‘And she will be a little bit cross with him
all the time without really knowing why and bitch about him at really awful
dinner parties to the embarrassment of their friends, and he won’t want to leave
because he’ll be scared of all the alimony.’
Will turned to look at me.
‘And they will have sex once every six weeks and he will adore his children
while doing bugger all to actually help look after them. And she will have
perfect hair but get this kind of pinched face -’ I narrowed my mouth ‘- through
never saying what she actually means, and start an insane Pilates habit or maybe
buy a dog or a horse and develop a crush on her riding instructor. And he will
take up jogging when he hits forty, and maybe buy a Harley-Davidson, which
she will despise, and every day he will go to work and look at all the young men
in his office and listen in bars to who they pulled at the weekend or where they
went on a jolly and feel like somehow - and he will never be quite sure how - he
got suckered.’
I turned.
Will was staring at me.
‘Sorry,’ I said, after a moment. ‘I don’t really know where that came from.’
‘I’m starting to feel just the tiniest bit sorry for Running Man.’
‘Oh, it’s not him,’ I said. ‘It’s working at a cafe for years. You see and hear
everything. Patterns, in people’s behaviour. You’d be amazed at what goes on.’
‘Is that why you’ve never got married?’
I blinked. ‘I suppose so.’
I didn’t want to say I had never actually been asked.
It may sound as though we didn’t do much. But, in truth, the days with Will were
subtly different - depending on his mood and, more importantly, how much pain
he was in. Some days I would arrive and I could see from the set of his jaw that
he didn’t want to talk to me - or to anyone - and, noting this, I would busy
myself around the annexe, trying to anticipate his needs so that I didn’t have to
bother him by asking.
There were all sorts of things that caused him pain. There were the general
aches that came with loss of muscle - there was so much less holding him up,
despite Nathan’s best attempts at physio. There was stomach pain from digestive
problems, shoulder pain, pain from bladder infections - an inevitability,
apparently, despite everyone’s best efforts. He had a stomach ulcer from taking
too many painkillers early on in his recovery, when he apparently popped them
like Tic Tacs.
Occasionally, there were pressure sores, from being seated in the same
position for too long. A couple of times Will was confined to bed, just to let them
heal, but he hated being prone. He would lie there listening to the radio, his eyes
glittering with barely suppressed rage. Will also got headaches - a side effect, I
thought, of his anger and frustration. He had so much mental energy, and nothing
to take it out on. It had to build up somewhere.
But the most debilitating was a burning sensation in his hands and feet;
relentless, pulsing, it would leave him unable to focus on anything else. I would
prepare a bowl of cold water and soak them, or wrap cold flannels around them,
hoping to ease his discomfort. A stringy muscle would flicker in his jaw and
occasionally he would just seem to disappear, as if the only way he could cope
with the sensation was to absent himself from his own body. I had become
surprisingly used to the physical requirements of Will’s life. It seemed unfair that
despite the fact he could not use them, or feel them, his extremities should cause
him so much discomfort.
Despite all this, Will did not complain. This was why it had taken me weeks to
notice he suffered at all. Now, I could decipher the strained look around his eyes,
the silences, the way he seemed to retreat inside his own skin. He would ask,
simply, ‘Could you get the cold water, Louisa?’ or ‘I think it might be time for
some painkillers.’ Sometimes he was in so much pain that his face actually
leached colour, turning to pale putty. Those were the worst days.
But on other days we tolerated each other quite well. He didn’t seem mortally
offended when I talked to him, as he had at the start. Today appeared to be a
pain-free day. When Mrs Traynor came out to tell us that the cleaners would be
another twenty minutes, I made us both another drink and we took a slow stroll
around the garden, Will sticking to the path and me watching my satin pumps
darken in the damp grass.
‘Interesting choice of footwear/ Will said.
They were emerald green. I had found them in a charity shop. Patrick said
they made me look like a leprechaun drag queen.
‘You know, you don’t dress like someone from round here. I quite look
forward to seeing what insane combination you’re going to turn up in next.’
‘So how should “someone from round here” dress?’
He steered a little to the left to avoid a bit of branch on the path. ‘Fleece. Or, if
you’re my mother’s set, something from Jaeger or Whistles.’ He looked at me.
‘So where did you pick up your exotic tastes? Where else have you lived?’
‘I haven’t.’
‘What, you’ve only ever lived here? Where have you worked?’
‘Only here.’ I turned and looked at him, crossing my arms over my chest
defensively. ‘So? What’s so weird about that?’
‘It’s such a small town. So limiting. And it’s all about the castle.’ We paused
on the path and stared at it, rising up in the distance on its weird, dome-like hill,
as perfect as if it had been drawn by a child. ‘I always think this is the kind of
place that people come back to. When they’ve got tired of everything else. Or
when they don’t have enough imagination to go anywhere else.’
‘Thanks.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with it per se. But... Christ. It’s not exactly dynamic,
is it? Not exactly full of ideas or interesting people or opportunities. Round here
they think it’s subversive if the tourist shop starts selling place mats with a
different view of the miniature railway.’
I couldn’t help but laugh. There had been an article in the local newspaper the
previous week on exactly that topic.
me before you, 07
7
Spring arrived overnight, as if winter, like some unwanted guest, had abruptly
shrugged its way into its coat and vanished, without saying goodbye. Everything
became greener, the roads bathed in watery sunshine, the air suddenly balmy.
There were hints of something floral and welcoming in the air, birdsong the
gentle backdrop to the day.
I didn’t notice any of it. I had stayed at Patrick’s house the evening before. It
was the first time I had seen him for almost a week due to his enhanced training
schedule, but having spent forty minutes in the bath with half a pack of bath
salts, he was so exhausted he could barely talk to me. I had begun stroking his
back, in a rare attempt at seduction, and he had murmured that he was really too
tired, his hand flicking as if he were swatting me away. I was still awake and
staring at his ceiling discontentedly four hours later.
Patrick and I had met while I was doing the only other job I have ever held,
that of trainee at The Cutting Edge, Hailsbury’s only unisex hairdresser’s. He
walked in while Samantha, the proprietor, was busy, asking for a number four. I
gave him what he described afterwards as the worst haircut not only that he had
ever had, but the worst haircut in the history of mankind. Three months later,
realizing that a love of fiddling with my own hair did not necessarily mean that I
was cut out to do anyone else’s, I left and got the job at the cafe with Frank.
When we started going out, Patrick had been working in sales and his
favourite things could have been listed as beer, garage chocolate, talking about
sport and sex (doing, not talking about), in that order. A good night out for us
would probably comprise all four. He was ordinary-looking rather than
handsome, and his bum was podgier than mine, but I liked it. I liked the solidity
of him, the way he felt when I wrapped myself around him. His dad was dead
and I liked the way he acted towards his mother; protective and solicitous. And
his four brothers and sisters were like the Waltons. They actually seemed to like
each other. The first time we went out on a date, a little voice in my head said:
This man will never hurt you, and nothing he had done in the seven years since
had led me to doubt it.
And then he turned into Marathon Man.
Patrick’s stomach no longer gave when I nestled into him; it was a hard,
unforgiving thing, like a sideboard, and he was prone to pulling up his shirt and
hitting it with things, to prove quite how hard it was. His face was planed, and
weathered from his time spent constantly outdoors. His thighs were solid
muscle. That would have been quite sexy in itself, had he actually wanted to
have sex. But we were down to about twice a month, and I wasn’t the kind to
ask.
It was as if the fitter he got, the more obsessed by his own shape he became,
the less interested he was in mine. I asked him a couple of times if he didn’t
fancy me any more, but he seemed pretty definite. ‘You’re gorgeous,’ he would
say. ‘I’m just shattered. Anyway, I don’t want you to lose weight. The girls at the
club - you couldn’t make one decent boob out of all of theirs put together.’ I
wanted to ask how exactly he had come to work out this complex equation, but it
was basically a nice thing to say so I let it go.
I wanted to be interested in what he did, I really did. I went to the triathlon
club nights, I tried to chat to the other girls. But I soon realized I was an anomaly
- there were no girlfriends like me - everyone else in the club was single, or
involved with someone equally physically impressive. The couples pushed each
other on workouts, planned weekends in spandex shorts and carried pictures of
each other in their wallets completing triathlons hand in hand, or smugly
comparing joint medals. It was unspeakable.
‘I don’t know what you’re complaining about,’ my sister said when I told her.
‘I’ve had sex once since I had Thomas.’
‘What? Who with?’
‘Oh, some bloke who came in for a Vibrant Hand-Tied,’ she said. ‘I just
wanted to make sure I still could.’
And then, when my jaw dropped, ‘Oh, don’t look like that. It wasn’t during
working hours. And they were funeral flowers. If they had been wife flowers, of
course I wouldn’t have touched him with a gladioli.’
It’s not that I was some kind of sex maniac - we’d been together a long time,
after all. It’s just that some perverse bit of me had begun to question my own
attractiveness.
Patrick had never minded the fact that I dressed ‘inventively’, as he put it. But
what if he hadn’t been entirely tmthful? Patrick’s job, his whole social life now
revolved around the control of flesh - taming it, reducing it, honing it. What if,
faced with those tight little tracksuited bottoms, my own suddenly seemed
wanting? What if my curves, which I had always thought of as pleasantly
voluptuous, now seemed doughy to his exacting eyes?
These were the thoughts that were still humming messily around my head as
Mrs Traynor came in and pretty much ordered Will and me to go outside. ‘I’ve
asked the cleaners to come and do a special spring clean, so I thought perhaps
you could enjoy the nice weather while they’re all in there.’
Will’s eyes met mine with the faintest lift of his eyebrows. ‘It’s not really a
request, is it, Mother?’
‘I just think it would be good if you took some air,’ she said. ‘The ramp is in
place. Perhaps, Louisa, you might take some tea out there with you?’
It wasn’t an entirely unreasonable suggestion. The garden was beautiful. It
was as if with the slight lifting of temperatures everything had suddenly decided
to look a little bit greener. Daffodils had emerged as if from nowhere, their
yellowing bulbs hinting at the flowers to come. Buds burst from brown branches,
perennials forcing their way tentatively through the dark, claggy soil. I opened
the doors and we went outside, Will keeping his chair on the York stone path. He
gestured towards a cast-iron bench with a cushion on it, and I sat there for some
time, our faces lifted to the weak sunshine, listening to the sparrows squabbling
in the hedgerow.
‘What’s up with you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re quiet.’
‘You said you wanted me to be quiet.’
‘Not this quiet. It alarms me.’
‘I’m all right,’ I said. And then, ‘It’s just boyfriend stuff, if you really want to
know.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Running Man.’
I opened my eyes, just to see if he was mocking me.
‘What’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Come on, tell Uncle Will.’
‘No.’
‘My mother is going to have the cleaners running around like lunatics in there
for at least another hour. You’re going to have to talk about something.’
I pushed myself upright, and turned to face him. His house chair had a control
button that elevated his seat so that he could address people at head height. He
didn’t often use it, as it frequently made him dizzy, but it was working now. I
actually had to look up at him.
I pulled my coat around me, and squinted at him. ‘Go on, then, what do you
want to know?’
‘How long have you two been together?’ he said.
‘Bit over six years.’
He looked surprised. ‘That’s a long time.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well.’
I leant over and adjusted a rug across him. It was deceptive, the sunshine - it
promised more than it could actually deliver. I thought of Patrick, up at 6.30
sharp this morning to go for his morning run. Perhaps I should take up running,
so that we would become one of those Lycra-clad couples. Perhaps I should buy
frilly underwear and look up sex tips online. I knew I would do neither.
‘What does he do?’
‘He’s a personal trainer.’
‘Hence the running.’
‘Hence the running.’
‘What’s he like? In three words, if it makes you uncomfortable.’
I thought about it. ‘Positive. Loyal. Obsessed with body fat ratios.’
‘That’s seven words.’
‘Then you got four for free. So what was she like?’
‘Who?’
‘Alicia?’ I looked at him like he had looked at me, directly. He took a deep
breath and gazed upwards to a large plane tree. His hair fell down into his eyes
and I fought the urge to push it to one side for him.
‘Gorgeous. Sexy. High maintenance. Surprisingly insecure.’
‘What does she have to be insecure about?’ The words left my mouth before I
could help myself.
He looked almost amused. ‘You’d be surprised,’ he said. ‘Girls like Lissa
trade on their looks for so long they don’t think they have anything else.
Actually, I’m being unfair. She’s good with stuff. Things - clothes, interiors. She
can make things look beautiful.’
I fought the urge to say anyone could make things look beautiful if they had a
wallet as deep as a diamond mine.
‘She could move a few things around in a room, and it would look completely
different. I never could work out how she did it.’ He nodded towards the house.
‘She did this annexe, when I first moved in.’
I found myself reviewing the perfectly designed living room. I realized my
admiration of it was suddenly slightly less uncomplicated than it had been.
‘How long were you with her?’
‘Eight, nine months.’
‘Not that long.’
‘Long for me.’
‘How did you meet?’
‘Dinner party. Areally awful dinner party. You?’
‘Hairdresser’s. I was one. He was my client.’
‘Hah. You were his something extra for the weekend.’
I must have looked blank because he shook his head and said softly, ‘Never
mind.’
Inside, we could hear the dull drone of the vacuum cleaner. There were four
women in the cleaning company, all wearing matching housecoats. I had
wondered what they would find to do for two hours in the little annexe.
‘Do you miss her?’
I could hear them talking amongst themselves. Someone had opened a
window, and occasional bursts of laughter filtered out into the thin air.
Will seemed to be watching something in the far-off distance. ‘I used to.’ He
turned to me, his voice matter-of-fact. ‘But I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve
decided that she and Rupert are a good match.’
I nodded. ‘They’ll have a ridiculous wedding, pop out an ankle biter or two, as
you put it, buy a place in the country, and he’ll be shagging his secretary within
five years/ I said.
‘You’re probably right.’
I was warming to my theme now. ‘And she will be a little bit cross with him
all the time without really knowing why and bitch about him at really awful
dinner parties to the embarrassment of their friends, and he won’t want to leave
because he’ll be scared of all the alimony.’
Will turned to look at me.
‘And they will have sex once every six weeks and he will adore his children
while doing bugger all to actually help look after them. And she will have
perfect hair but get this kind of pinched face -’ I narrowed my mouth ‘- through
never saying what she actually means, and start an insane Pilates habit or maybe
buy a dog or a horse and develop a crush on her riding instructor. And he will
take up jogging when he hits forty, and maybe buy a Harley-Davidson, which
she will despise, and every day he will go to work and look at all the young men
in his office and listen in bars to who they pulled at the weekend or where they
went on a jolly and feel like somehow - and he will never be quite sure how - he
got suckered.’
I turned.
Will was staring at me.
‘Sorry,’ I said, after a moment. ‘I don’t really know where that came from.’
‘I’m starting to feel just the tiniest bit sorry for Running Man.’
‘Oh, it’s not him,’ I said. ‘It’s working at a cafe for years. You see and hear
everything. Patterns, in people’s behaviour. You’d be amazed at what goes on.’
‘Is that why you’ve never got married?’
I blinked. ‘I suppose so.’
I didn’t want to say I had never actually been asked.
It may sound as though we didn’t do much. But, in truth, the days with Will were
subtly different - depending on his mood and, more importantly, how much pain
he was in. Some days I would arrive and I could see from the set of his jaw that
he didn’t want to talk to me - or to anyone - and, noting this, I would busy
myself around the annexe, trying to anticipate his needs so that I didn’t have to
bother him by asking.
There were all sorts of things that caused him pain. There were the general
aches that came with loss of muscle - there was so much less holding him up,
despite Nathan’s best attempts at physio. There was stomach pain from digestive
problems, shoulder pain, pain from bladder infections - an inevitability,
apparently, despite everyone’s best efforts. He had a stomach ulcer from taking
too many painkillers early on in his recovery, when he apparently popped them
like Tic Tacs.
Occasionally, there were pressure sores, from being seated in the same
position for too long. A couple of times Will was confined to bed, just to let them
heal, but he hated being prone. He would lie there listening to the radio, his eyes
glittering with barely suppressed rage. Will also got headaches - a side effect, I
thought, of his anger and frustration. He had so much mental energy, and nothing
to take it out on. It had to build up somewhere.
But the most debilitating was a burning sensation in his hands and feet;
relentless, pulsing, it would leave him unable to focus on anything else. I would
prepare a bowl of cold water and soak them, or wrap cold flannels around them,
hoping to ease his discomfort. A stringy muscle would flicker in his jaw and
occasionally he would just seem to disappear, as if the only way he could cope
with the sensation was to absent himself from his own body. I had become
surprisingly used to the physical requirements of Will’s life. It seemed unfair that
despite the fact he could not use them, or feel them, his extremities should cause
him so much discomfort.
Despite all this, Will did not complain. This was why it had taken me weeks to
notice he suffered at all. Now, I could decipher the strained look around his eyes,
the silences, the way he seemed to retreat inside his own skin. He would ask,
simply, ‘Could you get the cold water, Louisa?’ or ‘I think it might be time for
some painkillers.’ Sometimes he was in so much pain that his face actually
leached colour, turning to pale putty. Those were the worst days.
But on other days we tolerated each other quite well. He didn’t seem mortally
offended when I talked to him, as he had at the start. Today appeared to be a
pain-free day. When Mrs Traynor came out to tell us that the cleaners would be
another twenty minutes, I made us both another drink and we took a slow stroll
around the garden, Will sticking to the path and me watching my satin pumps
darken in the damp grass.
‘Interesting choice of footwear/ Will said.
They were emerald green. I had found them in a charity shop. Patrick said
they made me look like a leprechaun drag queen.
‘You know, you don’t dress like someone from round here. I quite look
forward to seeing what insane combination you’re going to turn up in next.’
‘So how should “someone from round here” dress?’
He steered a little to the left to avoid a bit of branch on the path. ‘Fleece. Or, if
you’re my mother’s set, something from Jaeger or Whistles.’ He looked at me.
‘So where did you pick up your exotic tastes? Where else have you lived?’
‘I haven’t.’
‘What, you’ve only ever lived here? Where have you worked?’
‘Only here.’ I turned and looked at him, crossing my arms over my chest
defensively. ‘So? What’s so weird about that?’
‘It’s such a small town. So limiting. And it’s all about the castle.’ We paused
on the path and stared at it, rising up in the distance on its weird, dome-like hill,
as perfect as if it had been drawn by a child. ‘I always think this is the kind of
place that people come back to. When they’ve got tired of everything else. Or
when they don’t have enough imagination to go anywhere else.’
‘Thanks.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with it per se. But... Christ. It’s not exactly dynamic,
is it? Not exactly full of ideas or interesting people or opportunities. Round here
they think it’s subversive if the tourist shop starts selling place mats with a
different view of the miniature railway.’
I couldn’t help but laugh. There had been an article in the local newspaper the
previous week on exactly that topic.
‘You’re twenty-six years old, Clark. You should be out there, claiming the
world as your own, getting in trouble in bars, showing off your strange wardrobe
to dodgy men ... ’
‘I’m happy here,’ I said.
‘Well, you shouldn’t be.’
‘You like telling people what they should be doing, don’t you?’
‘Only when I know I’m right,’ he said. ‘Can you adjust my drink? I can’t quite
reach it.’
I twisted his straw round so that he could reach it more easily and waited
while he took a drink. The faint cold had turned the tips of his ears pink.
He grimaced. ‘Jesus, for a girl who made tea for a living you make a terrible
cup.’
‘You’re just used to lesbian tea,’ I said. ‘All that lapsang souchong herbal
stuff.’
‘Lesbian tea!’ He almost choked. ‘Well, it’s better than this stair varnish.
Christ. You could stand a spoon up in that.’
‘So even my tea is wrong.’ I sat down on the bench in front of him. ‘So how is
it okay for you to offer an opinion on every single thing I say or do, and yet
nobody else gets to say anything at all?’
‘Go on, then, Louisa Clark. Give me your opinions.’
‘On you?’
He gave a theatrical sigh. ‘Do I have a choice?’
‘You could cut your hair. It makes you look like some kind of vagrant.’
‘Now you sound like my mother.’
‘Well, you do look bloody awful. You could shave, at least. Isn’t all that facial
hair starting to get itchy?’
He gave me a sideways look.
‘It is, isn’t it? I knew it. Okay - this afternoon I am going to take it all off.’
‘Oh no.’
‘Yes. You asked me for my opinion. This is my answer. You don’t have to do
anything.’
‘What if I say no?’
‘I might do it anyway. If it gets any longer I’ll be picking bits of food out of it.
And, frankly, if that happens I’ll have to sue you for undue distress in the
workplace.’
He smiled then, as if I had amused him. It might sound a bit sad, but Will’s
smiles were so rare that prompting one made me feel a bit light-headed with
pride.
‘Here, Clark,’ he said. ‘Do me a favour?’
‘What?’
‘Scratch my ear for me, will you? It’s driving me nuts.’
‘If I do you’ll let me cut your hair? Just a bit of a trim?’
‘Don’t push your luck.’
‘Shush. Don’t make me nervous. I’m not great with scissors.’
I found the razors and some shaving foam in the bathroom cabinet, tucked well
back behind the packets of wipes and cotton wool, as if they hadn’t been used in
some time. I made him come into the bathroom, filled a sink with warm water,
got him to tilt his headrest back a little and then placed a hot flannel over his
chin.
‘What is this? You’re going to be a barbershop? What’s the flannel for?’
‘I don’t know,’ I confessed. ‘It’s what they do in the films. It’s like the hot
water and towels when someone has a baby.’
I couldn’t see his mouth, but his eyes creased with faint mirth. I wanted to
keep them like that. I wanted him to be happy - for his face to lose that haunted,
watchful look. I gabbled. I told jokes. I started to hum. Anything to prolong the
moment before he looked grim again.
I rolled up my sleeves and began to lather the shaving foam over his chin, all
the way up to his ears. Then I hesitated, the blade over his chin. ‘Is this the
moment to tell you I’ve only ever done legs before?’
He closed his eyes, and settled back. I began to scrape gently at his skin with
the blade, the silence broken only by the splash as I rinsed the razor in the
basinful of water. I worked in silence, studying Will Traynor’s face as I went, the
lines that ran to the corners of his mouth, lines that seemed prematurely deep for
his age. I smoothed his hair from the side of his face and saw the telltale tracks
of stitches, perhaps from his accident. I saw the mauve shadows that told of
nights and nights of lost sleep, the furrow between his brows that spoke of silent
pain. A warm sweetness rose from his skin, the scent of the shaving cream, and
something that was peculiar to Will himself, discreet and expensive. His face
began to emerge and I could see how easy it must have been for him to attract
someone like Alicia.
I worked slowly and carefully, encouraged by the fact that he seemed briefly
at peace. The thought flashed by that the only time anyone ever touched Will
was for some medical or therapeutic procedure, and so I let my fingers rest
lightly upon his skin, trying to make the movements as far from the
dehumanized briskness that characterized Nathan’s and the doctor’s interactions
with him as possible.
It was a curiously intimate thing, this shaving of Will. I realized as I continued
that I had assumed his wheelchair would be a barrier; that his disability would
prevent any kind of sensual aspect from creeping in. Weirdly, it wasn’t working
like that. It was impossible to be this close to someone, to feel their skin tauten
under your fingertips, to breathe in the air that they breathed out, to have their
face only inches from yours, without feeling a little unbalanced. By the time I
reached his other ear I had begun to feel awkward, as if I had overstepped an
invisible mark.
Perhaps Will was able to read the subtle changes in my pressure on his skin;
perhaps he was just more attuned to the moods of the people around him. But he
opened his eyes, and I found them looking into mine.
There was a short pause, and then he said, straight-faced, ‘Please don’t tell me
you’ve shaved off my eyebrows.’
‘Only the one,’ I said. I rinsed the blade, hoping that the colour would have
drained from my cheeks by the time I turned round. ‘Right,’ I said, finally. ‘Have
you had enough? Won’t Nathan be here in a bit?’
‘What about my hair?’ he said.
‘You really want me to cut it?’
‘You might as well.’
‘I thought you didn’t trust me.’
He shrugged, as far as he could. It was the smallest movement of his
shoulders. ‘If it will stop you moaning at me for a couple of weeks I figure it’s a
small price to pay.’
‘Oh my God, your mum is going to be so delighted,’ I said, wiping a stray dob
of shaving cream.
‘Yes, well, we won’t let that put us off.’
We cut his hair in the living room. I lit the fire, we put on a film - an American
thriller - and I placed a towel around his shoulders. I had warned Will that I was
a bit rusty, but added that it couldn’t look worse than it did already.
‘Thanks for that,’ he said.
I set to work, letting his hair slide through my fingers, trying to remember the
few basics I had learnt. Will, watching the film, seemed relaxed and almost
content. Occasionally he told me something about the film - what else the lead
actor had starred in, where he had first seen it - and I made a vaguely interested
noise (like I do with Thomas when he presents me with his toys), even though all
my attention was actually focused on not mucking up his hair. Finally, I had the
worst of it off, and whipped round in front of him to see how he looked.
‘Well?’ Will paused the DVD.
I straightened up. T’m not sure I like seeing this much of your face. It’s a bit
unnerving.’
Teels cold,’ he observed, moving his head from left to right, as if testing the
feel of it.
‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘I’ll get two mirrors. Then you can see it properly. But don’t
move. There’s still a bit of tidying up to be done. Possibly an ear to slice.’
I was in the bedroom, going through his drawers in search of a small mirror,
when I heard the door. Two sets of brisk footsteps, Mrs Traynor’s voice, lifted,
anxious.
‘Georgina, please don’t.’
The door to the living room was wrenched open. I grabbed the mirror and ran
out of the room. I had no intention of being found absent again. Mrs Traynor was
standing in the living-room doorway, both hands raised to her mouth, apparently
witnessing some unseen confrontation.
‘You are the most selfish man I ever met!’ a young woman was shouting. ‘I
can’t believe this, Will. You were selfish then and you’re worse now.’
‘Georgina.’ Mrs Traynor’s gazed flicked towards me as I approached. ‘Please,
stop.’
I walked into the room behind her. Will, the towel around his shoulders, hair
in soft brown fronds at the wheels of his chair, was facing a young woman. She
had long dark hair, pinned into a messy knot at the back of her head. Her skin
was tanned, and she was wearing expensively distressed jeans and suede boots.
Like Alicia, her features were beautiful and regular, her teeth the astonishing
white of a toothpaste commercial. I knew they were because, her face puce with
anger, she was still hissing at him. ‘I can’t believe it. I can’t believe you would
even think of it. What do you -’
‘Please. Georgina.’ Mrs Traynor’s voice lifted sharply. This is not the time.’
Will, his face impassive, was staring straight ahead of him at some unseen
point.
‘Um ... Will? Do you need any help?’ I said, quietly.
‘Who are you?’ she said, whipping round. It was then that I saw her eyes were
filled with tears.
‘Georgina,’ Will said. ‘Meet Louisa Clark, my paid companion and shockingly
inventive hairdresser. Louisa, meet my sister, Georgina. She appears to have
flown all the way from Australia to shriek at me.’
‘Don’t be facile,’ Georgina said. ‘Mummy told me. She’s told me everything .’
Nobody moved.
‘Shall I give you a minute?’ I said.
‘That would be a good idea.’ Mrs Traynor’s knuckles were white on the arm
of the sofa.
I slid out of the room.
‘In fact, Louisa, perhaps now would be a good time to take your lunch break.’
It was going to be a bus shelter kind of a day. I grabbed my sandwiches from
the kitchen, climbed into my coat and set off down the back path.
As I left, I could hear Georgina Traynor’s voice lifting inside the house. ‘Has
it ever occurred to you, Will, that believe it or not, this might not be just about
you?’
When I returned, exactly half an hour later, the house was silent. Nathan was
washing up a mug in the kitchen sink.
He turned as he saw me. ‘How you doing?’
‘Has she gone?’
‘Who?’
‘The sister?’
He glanced behind him. ‘Ah. That who it was? Yeah, she’s gone. Just skidding
off in her car when I got here. Some sort of family row, was it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I was in the middle of cutting Will’s hair and this
woman came in and just started having a go at him. I assumed it was another
girlfriend.’
Nathan shrugged.
I realized he would not be interested in the personal minutiae of Will’s life,
even if he knew.
‘He’s a bit quiet, though. Nice work with the shave, by the way. Good to get
him out from behind all that shrubbery.’
I walked back into the living room. Will was sitting staring at the television,
which was still paused at the exact moment I had left it.
‘Do you want me to turn this back on?’ I said.
He didn’t seem to hear me for a minute. His head was sunk in his shoulders,
the earlier relaxed expression replaced by a veil. Will was closed off again,
locked behind something I couldn’t penetrate.
He blinked, as if he had only just noticed me there. ‘Sure,’ he said.
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.’
Spring arrived overnight, as if winter, like some unwanted guest, had abruptly
shrugged its way into its coat and vanished, without saying goodbye. Everything
became greener, the roads bathed in watery sunshine, the air suddenly balmy.
There were hints of something floral and welcoming in the air, birdsong the
gentle backdrop to the day.
I didn’t notice any of it. I had stayed at Patrick’s house the evening before. It
was the first time I had seen him for almost a week due to his enhanced training
schedule, but having spent forty minutes in the bath with half a pack of bath
salts, he was so exhausted he could barely talk to me. I had begun stroking his
back, in a rare attempt at seduction, and he had murmured that he was really too
tired, his hand flicking as if he were swatting me away. I was still awake and
staring at his ceiling discontentedly four hours later.
Patrick and I had met while I was doing the only other job I have ever held,
that of trainee at The Cutting Edge, Hailsbury’s only unisex hairdresser’s. He
walked in while Samantha, the proprietor, was busy, asking for a number four. I
gave him what he described afterwards as the worst haircut not only that he had
ever had, but the worst haircut in the history of mankind. Three months later,
realizing that a love of fiddling with my own hair did not necessarily mean that I
was cut out to do anyone else’s, I left and got the job at the cafe with Frank.
When we started going out, Patrick had been working in sales and his
favourite things could have been listed as beer, garage chocolate, talking about
sport and sex (doing, not talking about), in that order. A good night out for us
would probably comprise all four. He was ordinary-looking rather than
handsome, and his bum was podgier than mine, but I liked it. I liked the solidity
of him, the way he felt when I wrapped myself around him. His dad was dead
and I liked the way he acted towards his mother; protective and solicitous. And
his four brothers and sisters were like the Waltons. They actually seemed to like
each other. The first time we went out on a date, a little voice in my head said:
This man will never hurt you, and nothing he had done in the seven years since
had led me to doubt it.
And then he turned into Marathon Man.
Patrick’s stomach no longer gave when I nestled into him; it was a hard,
unforgiving thing, like a sideboard, and he was prone to pulling up his shirt and
hitting it with things, to prove quite how hard it was. His face was planed, and
weathered from his time spent constantly outdoors. His thighs were solid
muscle. That would have been quite sexy in itself, had he actually wanted to
have sex. But we were down to about twice a month, and I wasn’t the kind to
ask.
It was as if the fitter he got, the more obsessed by his own shape he became,
the less interested he was in mine. I asked him a couple of times if he didn’t
fancy me any more, but he seemed pretty definite. ‘You’re gorgeous,’ he would
say. ‘I’m just shattered. Anyway, I don’t want you to lose weight. The girls at the
club - you couldn’t make one decent boob out of all of theirs put together.’ I
wanted to ask how exactly he had come to work out this complex equation, but it
was basically a nice thing to say so I let it go.
I wanted to be interested in what he did, I really did. I went to the triathlon
club nights, I tried to chat to the other girls. But I soon realized I was an anomaly
- there were no girlfriends like me - everyone else in the club was single, or
involved with someone equally physically impressive. The couples pushed each
other on workouts, planned weekends in spandex shorts and carried pictures of
each other in their wallets completing triathlons hand in hand, or smugly
comparing joint medals. It was unspeakable.
‘I don’t know what you’re complaining about,’ my sister said when I told her.
‘I’ve had sex once since I had Thomas.’
‘What? Who with?’
‘Oh, some bloke who came in for a Vibrant Hand-Tied,’ she said. ‘I just
wanted to make sure I still could.’
And then, when my jaw dropped, ‘Oh, don’t look like that. It wasn’t during
working hours. And they were funeral flowers. If they had been wife flowers, of
course I wouldn’t have touched him with a gladioli.’
It’s not that I was some kind of sex maniac - we’d been together a long time,
after all. It’s just that some perverse bit of me had begun to question my own
attractiveness.
Patrick had never minded the fact that I dressed ‘inventively’, as he put it. But
what if he hadn’t been entirely tmthful? Patrick’s job, his whole social life now
revolved around the control of flesh - taming it, reducing it, honing it. What if,
faced with those tight little tracksuited bottoms, my own suddenly seemed
wanting? What if my curves, which I had always thought of as pleasantly
voluptuous, now seemed doughy to his exacting eyes?
These were the thoughts that were still humming messily around my head as
Mrs Traynor came in and pretty much ordered Will and me to go outside. ‘I’ve
asked the cleaners to come and do a special spring clean, so I thought perhaps
you could enjoy the nice weather while they’re all in there.’
Will’s eyes met mine with the faintest lift of his eyebrows. ‘It’s not really a
request, is it, Mother?’
‘I just think it would be good if you took some air,’ she said. ‘The ramp is in
place. Perhaps, Louisa, you might take some tea out there with you?’
It wasn’t an entirely unreasonable suggestion. The garden was beautiful. It
was as if with the slight lifting of temperatures everything had suddenly decided
to look a little bit greener. Daffodils had emerged as if from nowhere, their
yellowing bulbs hinting at the flowers to come. Buds burst from brown branches,
perennials forcing their way tentatively through the dark, claggy soil. I opened
the doors and we went outside, Will keeping his chair on the York stone path. He
gestured towards a cast-iron bench with a cushion on it, and I sat there for some
time, our faces lifted to the weak sunshine, listening to the sparrows squabbling
in the hedgerow.
‘What’s up with you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re quiet.’
‘You said you wanted me to be quiet.’
‘Not this quiet. It alarms me.’
‘I’m all right,’ I said. And then, ‘It’s just boyfriend stuff, if you really want to
know.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Running Man.’
I opened my eyes, just to see if he was mocking me.
‘What’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Come on, tell Uncle Will.’
‘No.’
‘My mother is going to have the cleaners running around like lunatics in there
for at least another hour. You’re going to have to talk about something.’
I pushed myself upright, and turned to face him. His house chair had a control
button that elevated his seat so that he could address people at head height. He
didn’t often use it, as it frequently made him dizzy, but it was working now. I
actually had to look up at him.
I pulled my coat around me, and squinted at him. ‘Go on, then, what do you
want to know?’
‘How long have you two been together?’ he said.
‘Bit over six years.’
He looked surprised. ‘That’s a long time.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well.’
I leant over and adjusted a rug across him. It was deceptive, the sunshine - it
promised more than it could actually deliver. I thought of Patrick, up at 6.30
sharp this morning to go for his morning run. Perhaps I should take up running,
so that we would become one of those Lycra-clad couples. Perhaps I should buy
frilly underwear and look up sex tips online. I knew I would do neither.
‘What does he do?’
‘He’s a personal trainer.’
‘Hence the running.’
‘Hence the running.’
‘What’s he like? In three words, if it makes you uncomfortable.’
I thought about it. ‘Positive. Loyal. Obsessed with body fat ratios.’
‘That’s seven words.’
‘Then you got four for free. So what was she like?’
‘Who?’
‘Alicia?’ I looked at him like he had looked at me, directly. He took a deep
breath and gazed upwards to a large plane tree. His hair fell down into his eyes
and I fought the urge to push it to one side for him.
‘Gorgeous. Sexy. High maintenance. Surprisingly insecure.’
‘What does she have to be insecure about?’ The words left my mouth before I
could help myself.
He looked almost amused. ‘You’d be surprised,’ he said. ‘Girls like Lissa
trade on their looks for so long they don’t think they have anything else.
Actually, I’m being unfair. She’s good with stuff. Things - clothes, interiors. She
can make things look beautiful.’
I fought the urge to say anyone could make things look beautiful if they had a
wallet as deep as a diamond mine.
‘She could move a few things around in a room, and it would look completely
different. I never could work out how she did it.’ He nodded towards the house.
‘She did this annexe, when I first moved in.’
I found myself reviewing the perfectly designed living room. I realized my
admiration of it was suddenly slightly less uncomplicated than it had been.
‘How long were you with her?’
‘Eight, nine months.’
‘Not that long.’
‘Long for me.’
‘How did you meet?’
‘Dinner party. Areally awful dinner party. You?’
‘Hairdresser’s. I was one. He was my client.’
‘Hah. You were his something extra for the weekend.’
I must have looked blank because he shook his head and said softly, ‘Never
mind.’
Inside, we could hear the dull drone of the vacuum cleaner. There were four
women in the cleaning company, all wearing matching housecoats. I had
wondered what they would find to do for two hours in the little annexe.
‘Do you miss her?’
I could hear them talking amongst themselves. Someone had opened a
window, and occasional bursts of laughter filtered out into the thin air.
Will seemed to be watching something in the far-off distance. ‘I used to.’ He
turned to me, his voice matter-of-fact. ‘But I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve
decided that she and Rupert are a good match.’
I nodded. ‘They’ll have a ridiculous wedding, pop out an ankle biter or two, as
you put it, buy a place in the country, and he’ll be shagging his secretary within
five years/ I said.
‘You’re probably right.’
I was warming to my theme now. ‘And she will be a little bit cross with him
all the time without really knowing why and bitch about him at really awful
dinner parties to the embarrassment of their friends, and he won’t want to leave
because he’ll be scared of all the alimony.’
Will turned to look at me.
‘And they will have sex once every six weeks and he will adore his children
while doing bugger all to actually help look after them. And she will have
perfect hair but get this kind of pinched face -’ I narrowed my mouth ‘- through
never saying what she actually means, and start an insane Pilates habit or maybe
buy a dog or a horse and develop a crush on her riding instructor. And he will
take up jogging when he hits forty, and maybe buy a Harley-Davidson, which
she will despise, and every day he will go to work and look at all the young men
in his office and listen in bars to who they pulled at the weekend or where they
went on a jolly and feel like somehow - and he will never be quite sure how - he
got suckered.’
I turned.
Will was staring at me.
‘Sorry,’ I said, after a moment. ‘I don’t really know where that came from.’
‘I’m starting to feel just the tiniest bit sorry for Running Man.’
‘Oh, it’s not him,’ I said. ‘It’s working at a cafe for years. You see and hear
everything. Patterns, in people’s behaviour. You’d be amazed at what goes on.’
‘Is that why you’ve never got married?’
I blinked. ‘I suppose so.’
I didn’t want to say I had never actually been asked.
It may sound as though we didn’t do much. But, in truth, the days with Will were
subtly different - depending on his mood and, more importantly, how much pain
he was in. Some days I would arrive and I could see from the set of his jaw that
he didn’t want to talk to me - or to anyone - and, noting this, I would busy
myself around the annexe, trying to anticipate his needs so that I didn’t have to
bother him by asking.
There were all sorts of things that caused him pain. There were the general
aches that came with loss of muscle - there was so much less holding him up,
despite Nathan’s best attempts at physio. There was stomach pain from digestive
problems, shoulder pain, pain from bladder infections - an inevitability,
apparently, despite everyone’s best efforts. He had a stomach ulcer from taking
too many painkillers early on in his recovery, when he apparently popped them
like Tic Tacs.
Occasionally, there were pressure sores, from being seated in the same
position for too long. A couple of times Will was confined to bed, just to let them
heal, but he hated being prone. He would lie there listening to the radio, his eyes
glittering with barely suppressed rage. Will also got headaches - a side effect, I
thought, of his anger and frustration. He had so much mental energy, and nothing
to take it out on. It had to build up somewhere.
But the most debilitating was a burning sensation in his hands and feet;
relentless, pulsing, it would leave him unable to focus on anything else. I would
prepare a bowl of cold water and soak them, or wrap cold flannels around them,
hoping to ease his discomfort. A stringy muscle would flicker in his jaw and
occasionally he would just seem to disappear, as if the only way he could cope
with the sensation was to absent himself from his own body. I had become
surprisingly used to the physical requirements of Will’s life. It seemed unfair that
despite the fact he could not use them, or feel them, his extremities should cause
him so much discomfort.
Despite all this, Will did not complain. This was why it had taken me weeks to
notice he suffered at all. Now, I could decipher the strained look around his eyes,
the silences, the way he seemed to retreat inside his own skin. He would ask,
simply, ‘Could you get the cold water, Louisa?’ or ‘I think it might be time for
some painkillers.’ Sometimes he was in so much pain that his face actually
leached colour, turning to pale putty. Those were the worst days.
But on other days we tolerated each other quite well. He didn’t seem mortally
offended when I talked to him, as he had at the start. Today appeared to be a
pain-free day. When Mrs Traynor came out to tell us that the cleaners would be
another twenty minutes, I made us both another drink and we took a slow stroll
around the garden, Will sticking to the path and me watching my satin pumps
darken in the damp grass.
‘Interesting choice of footwear/ Will said.
They were emerald green. I had found them in a charity shop. Patrick said
they made me look like a leprechaun drag queen.
‘You know, you don’t dress like someone from round here. I quite look
forward to seeing what insane combination you’re going to turn up in next.’
‘So how should “someone from round here” dress?’
He steered a little to the left to avoid a bit of branch on the path. ‘Fleece. Or, if
you’re my mother’s set, something from Jaeger or Whistles.’ He looked at me.
‘So where did you pick up your exotic tastes? Where else have you lived?’
‘I haven’t.’
‘What, you’ve only ever lived here? Where have you worked?’
‘Only here.’ I turned and looked at him, crossing my arms over my chest
defensively. ‘So? What’s so weird about that?’
‘It’s such a small town. So limiting. And it’s all about the castle.’ We paused
on the path and stared at it, rising up in the distance on its weird, dome-like hill,
as perfect as if it had been drawn by a child. ‘I always think this is the kind of
place that people come back to. When they’ve got tired of everything else. Or
when they don’t have enough imagination to go anywhere else.’
‘Thanks.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with it per se. But... Christ. It’s not exactly dynamic,
is it? Not exactly full of ideas or interesting people or opportunities. Round here
they think it’s subversive if the tourist shop starts selling place mats with a
different view of the miniature railway.’
I couldn’t help but laugh. There had been an article in the local newspaper the
previous week on exactly that topic.
‘You’re twenty-six years old, Clark. You should be out there, claiming the
world as your own, getting in trouble in bars, showing off your strange wardrobe
to dodgy men ... ’
‘I’m happy here,’ I said.
‘Well, you shouldn’t be.’
‘You like telling people what they should be doing, don’t you?’
‘Only when I know I’m right,’ he said. ‘Can you adjust my drink? I can’t quite
reach it.’
I twisted his straw round so that he could reach it more easily and waited
while he took a drink. The faint cold had turned the tips of his ears pink.
He grimaced. ‘Jesus, for a girl who made tea for a living you make a terrible
cup.’
‘You’re just used to lesbian tea,’ I said. ‘All that lapsang souchong herbal
stuff.’
‘Lesbian tea!’ He almost choked. ‘Well, it’s better than this stair varnish.
Christ. You could stand a spoon up in that.’
‘So even my tea is wrong.’ I sat down on the bench in front of him. ‘So how is
it okay for you to offer an opinion on every single thing I say or do, and yet
nobody else gets to say anything at all?’
‘Go on, then, Louisa Clark. Give me your opinions.’
‘On you?’
He gave a theatrical sigh. ‘Do I have a choice?’
‘You could cut your hair. It makes you look like some kind of vagrant.’
‘Now you sound like my mother.’
‘Well, you do look bloody awful. You could shave, at least. Isn’t all that facial
hair starting to get itchy?’
He gave me a sideways look.
‘It is, isn’t it? I knew it. Okay - this afternoon I am going to take it all off.’
‘Oh no.’
‘Yes. You asked me for my opinion. This is my answer. You don’t have to do
anything.’
‘What if I say no?’
‘I might do it anyway. If it gets any longer I’ll be picking bits of food out of it.
And, frankly, if that happens I’ll have to sue you for undue distress in the
workplace.’
He smiled then, as if I had amused him. It might sound a bit sad, but Will’s
smiles were so rare that prompting one made me feel a bit light-headed with
pride.
‘Here, Clark,’ he said. ‘Do me a favour?’
‘What?’
‘Scratch my ear for me, will you? It’s driving me nuts.’
‘If I do you’ll let me cut your hair? Just a bit of a trim?’
‘Don’t push your luck.’
‘Shush. Don’t make me nervous. I’m not great with scissors.’
I found the razors and some shaving foam in the bathroom cabinet, tucked well
back behind the packets of wipes and cotton wool, as if they hadn’t been used in
some time. I made him come into the bathroom, filled a sink with warm water,
got him to tilt his headrest back a little and then placed a hot flannel over his
chin.
‘What is this? You’re going to be a barbershop? What’s the flannel for?’
‘I don’t know,’ I confessed. ‘It’s what they do in the films. It’s like the hot
water and towels when someone has a baby.’
I couldn’t see his mouth, but his eyes creased with faint mirth. I wanted to
keep them like that. I wanted him to be happy - for his face to lose that haunted,
watchful look. I gabbled. I told jokes. I started to hum. Anything to prolong the
moment before he looked grim again.
I rolled up my sleeves and began to lather the shaving foam over his chin, all
the way up to his ears. Then I hesitated, the blade over his chin. ‘Is this the
moment to tell you I’ve only ever done legs before?’
He closed his eyes, and settled back. I began to scrape gently at his skin with
the blade, the silence broken only by the splash as I rinsed the razor in the
basinful of water. I worked in silence, studying Will Traynor’s face as I went, the
lines that ran to the corners of his mouth, lines that seemed prematurely deep for
his age. I smoothed his hair from the side of his face and saw the telltale tracks
of stitches, perhaps from his accident. I saw the mauve shadows that told of
nights and nights of lost sleep, the furrow between his brows that spoke of silent
pain. A warm sweetness rose from his skin, the scent of the shaving cream, and
something that was peculiar to Will himself, discreet and expensive. His face
began to emerge and I could see how easy it must have been for him to attract
someone like Alicia.
I worked slowly and carefully, encouraged by the fact that he seemed briefly
at peace. The thought flashed by that the only time anyone ever touched Will
was for some medical or therapeutic procedure, and so I let my fingers rest
lightly upon his skin, trying to make the movements as far from the
dehumanized briskness that characterized Nathan’s and the doctor’s interactions
with him as possible.
It was a curiously intimate thing, this shaving of Will. I realized as I continued
that I had assumed his wheelchair would be a barrier; that his disability would
prevent any kind of sensual aspect from creeping in. Weirdly, it wasn’t working
like that. It was impossible to be this close to someone, to feel their skin tauten
under your fingertips, to breathe in the air that they breathed out, to have their
face only inches from yours, without feeling a little unbalanced. By the time I
reached his other ear I had begun to feel awkward, as if I had overstepped an
invisible mark.
Perhaps Will was able to read the subtle changes in my pressure on his skin;
perhaps he was just more attuned to the moods of the people around him. But he
opened his eyes, and I found them looking into mine.
There was a short pause, and then he said, straight-faced, ‘Please don’t tell me
you’ve shaved off my eyebrows.’
‘Only the one,’ I said. I rinsed the blade, hoping that the colour would have
drained from my cheeks by the time I turned round. ‘Right,’ I said, finally. ‘Have
you had enough? Won’t Nathan be here in a bit?’
‘What about my hair?’ he said.
‘You really want me to cut it?’
‘You might as well.’
‘I thought you didn’t trust me.’
He shrugged, as far as he could. It was the smallest movement of his
shoulders. ‘If it will stop you moaning at me for a couple of weeks I figure it’s a
small price to pay.’
‘Oh my God, your mum is going to be so delighted,’ I said, wiping a stray dob
of shaving cream.
‘Yes, well, we won’t let that put us off.’
We cut his hair in the living room. I lit the fire, we put on a film - an American
thriller - and I placed a towel around his shoulders. I had warned Will that I was
a bit rusty, but added that it couldn’t look worse than it did already.
‘Thanks for that,’ he said.
I set to work, letting his hair slide through my fingers, trying to remember the
few basics I had learnt. Will, watching the film, seemed relaxed and almost
content. Occasionally he told me something about the film - what else the lead
actor had starred in, where he had first seen it - and I made a vaguely interested
noise (like I do with Thomas when he presents me with his toys), even though all
my attention was actually focused on not mucking up his hair. Finally, I had the
worst of it off, and whipped round in front of him to see how he looked.
‘Well?’ Will paused the DVD.
I straightened up. T’m not sure I like seeing this much of your face. It’s a bit
unnerving.’
Teels cold,’ he observed, moving his head from left to right, as if testing the
feel of it.
‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘I’ll get two mirrors. Then you can see it properly. But don’t
move. There’s still a bit of tidying up to be done. Possibly an ear to slice.’
I was in the bedroom, going through his drawers in search of a small mirror,
when I heard the door. Two sets of brisk footsteps, Mrs Traynor’s voice, lifted,
anxious.
‘Georgina, please don’t.’
The door to the living room was wrenched open. I grabbed the mirror and ran
out of the room. I had no intention of being found absent again. Mrs Traynor was
standing in the living-room doorway, both hands raised to her mouth, apparently
witnessing some unseen confrontation.
‘You are the most selfish man I ever met!’ a young woman was shouting. ‘I
can’t believe this, Will. You were selfish then and you’re worse now.’
‘Georgina.’ Mrs Traynor’s gazed flicked towards me as I approached. ‘Please,
stop.’
I walked into the room behind her. Will, the towel around his shoulders, hair
in soft brown fronds at the wheels of his chair, was facing a young woman. She
had long dark hair, pinned into a messy knot at the back of her head. Her skin
was tanned, and she was wearing expensively distressed jeans and suede boots.
Like Alicia, her features were beautiful and regular, her teeth the astonishing
white of a toothpaste commercial. I knew they were because, her face puce with
anger, she was still hissing at him. ‘I can’t believe it. I can’t believe you would
even think of it. What do you -’
‘Please. Georgina.’ Mrs Traynor’s voice lifted sharply. This is not the time.’
Will, his face impassive, was staring straight ahead of him at some unseen
point.
‘Um ... Will? Do you need any help?’ I said, quietly.
‘Who are you?’ she said, whipping round. It was then that I saw her eyes were
filled with tears.
‘Georgina,’ Will said. ‘Meet Louisa Clark, my paid companion and shockingly
inventive hairdresser. Louisa, meet my sister, Georgina. She appears to have
flown all the way from Australia to shriek at me.’
‘Don’t be facile,’ Georgina said. ‘Mummy told me. She’s told me everything .’
Nobody moved.
‘Shall I give you a minute?’ I said.
‘That would be a good idea.’ Mrs Traynor’s knuckles were white on the arm
of the sofa.
I slid out of the room.
‘In fact, Louisa, perhaps now would be a good time to take your lunch break.’
It was going to be a bus shelter kind of a day. I grabbed my sandwiches from
the kitchen, climbed into my coat and set off down the back path.
As I left, I could hear Georgina Traynor’s voice lifting inside the house. ‘Has
it ever occurred to you, Will, that believe it or not, this might not be just about
you?’
When I returned, exactly half an hour later, the house was silent. Nathan was
washing up a mug in the kitchen sink.
He turned as he saw me. ‘How you doing?’
‘Has she gone?’
‘Who?’
‘The sister?’
He glanced behind him. ‘Ah. That who it was? Yeah, she’s gone. Just skidding
off in her car when I got here. Some sort of family row, was it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I was in the middle of cutting Will’s hair and this
woman came in and just started having a go at him. I assumed it was another
girlfriend.’
Nathan shrugged.
I realized he would not be interested in the personal minutiae of Will’s life,
even if he knew.
‘He’s a bit quiet, though. Nice work with the shave, by the way. Good to get
him out from behind all that shrubbery.’
I walked back into the living room. Will was sitting staring at the television,
which was still paused at the exact moment I had left it.
‘Do you want me to turn this back on?’ I said.
He didn’t seem to hear me for a minute. His head was sunk in his shoulders,
the earlier relaxed expression replaced by a veil. Will was closed off again,
locked behind something I couldn’t penetrate.
He blinked, as if he had only just noticed me there. ‘Sure,’ he said.
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.’
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