Me Before You: A Novel

‘I would very much like to nip home and change my clothes, if you wouldn’t mind staying with him. I don’t really want Will to be left alone right now.’
    After she’d gone I went in, closing the door behind me, and sat down beside him. He seemed curiously absent, as if the Will I knew had gone on a brief trip somewhere else and left only a shell. I wondered, briefly, if that was how it was when people died. Then I told myself to stop thinking about death.
    I sat and watched the clock tick and heard the occasional murmuring voices outside and the soft squeak of shoes on the linoleum. Twice a nurse came in and checked various levels, pressed a couple of buttons, took his temperature, but still Will didn’t stir.
    ‘He is … okay, isn’t he?’ I asked her.
    ‘He’s asleep,’ she said, reassuringly. ‘It’s probably the best thing for him right now. Try not to worry.’
    It’s an easy thing to say. But I had a lot of time to think, in that hospital room. I thought about Will and the frightening speed with which he had become dangerously ill. I thought about Patrick, and the fact that even as I had collected my things from his flat, unpeeled and rolled up my wall calendar, folded and packed the clothes I had laid so carefully in his chest of drawers, my sadness was never the crippling thing I should have expected. I didn’t feeldesolate, or overwhelmed, or any of the things you should feel when you split apart a love of several years. I felt quite calm, and a bit sad and perhaps a little guilty – both at my part in the split, and the fact that I didn’t feel the things I probably should. I had sent him two text messages, to say I was really, really sorry, and that I hoped he would do really well in the Xtreme Viking. But he hadn’t replied.
    After an hour, I leant over, lifted the blanket from Will’s arm, and there, pale brown against the white sheet, lay his hand. A cannula was taped to the back of it with surgical tape. When I turned it over, the scars were still livid on his wrists. I wondered, briefly, if they would ever fade, or if he would be permanently reminded of what he had tried to do.
    I took his fingers gently in mine and closed my own around them. They were warm, the fingers of someone very much living. I was so oddly reassured by how they felt in my own that I kept them there, gazing at them, at the calluses that told of a life not entirely lived behind a desk, at the pink seashell nails that would always have to be trimmed by somebody else.
    Will’s were good man’s hands – attractive and even, with squared-off fingers. It was hard to look at them and believe that they held no strength, that they would never again pick something up from a table, stroke an arm or make a fist.
    I traced his knuckles with my finger. Some small part of me wondered whether I should be embarrassed if Will opened his eyes at this point, but I couldn’t feel it. I felt with some certainty that it was good for him to have his hand in mine. Hoping that in some way, through thebarrier of his drugged sleep, he knew this too, I closed my eyes and waited.
    Will finally woke up shortly after four. I was outside in the corridor, lying across the chairs, reading a discarded newspaper, and I jumped when Mrs Traynor came out to tell me. She looked a little lighter when she mentioned he was talking, and that he wanted to see me. She said she was going to go downstairs and ring Mr Traynor.
    And then, as if she couldn’t quite help herself, she added, ‘Please don’t tire him.’
    ‘Of course not,’ I said.
    My smile was charming.
    ‘Hey,’ I said, peeping my head round the door.
    He turned his face slowly towards me. ‘Hey, yourself.’
    His voice was hoarse, as if he had spent the past thirty-six hours not sleeping but shouting. I sat down and looked at him. His eyes flickered downwards.
    ‘You want me to lift the mask for a minute?’
    He nodded. I took it and carefully slid it up over his head. There was a fine film of moisture where it had met his skin, and I took a tissue and wiped gently around his face.
    ‘So how are you feeling?’
    ‘Been better.’
    A great lump had risen, unbidden, to my throat, and I tried to swallow it. ‘I don’t know. You’ll do anything for attention, Will Traynor. I bet this was all just a –’
    He closed his eyes, cutting me off in mid-sentence. When he opened them again, they held a hint of an apology. ‘Sorry, Clark. I don’t think I can do witty