Me Before You: A Novel

in stem cell research, Will is looking at another decade in that chair. Minimum. He knows it, even if his folks don’t want to admit it. And this is half the trouble. She wants to keep him alive at any cost. Mr T thinks there is a point where we have to let him decide.’
    ‘Of course he gets to decide, Nathan. But he has to see what his actual choices are.’
    ‘He’s a bright guy. He knows exactly what his choices are.’
    My voice lifted in the little room. ‘No. You’re wrong.You tell me he was in the same place before I came. You tell me he hasn’t changed his outlook even a little bit just through me being here.’
    ‘I can’t see inside his head, Lou.’
    ‘You know I’ve changed the way he thinks.’
    ‘No, I know that he will do pretty much anything to make you happy.’
    I stared at him. ‘You think he’s going through the motions just to keep me happy?’ I felt furious with Nathan, furious with them all. ‘So if you don’t believe any of this can do any good, why were you going to come at all? Why did you even want to come on this trip? Just a nice holiday, was it?’
    ‘No. I want him to live.’
    ‘But –’
    ‘But I want him to live if
he
wants to live. If he doesn’t, then by forcing him to carry on, you, me – no matter how much we love him – we become just another shitty bunch of people taking away his choices.’
    Nathan’s words reverberated into the silence. I wiped a solitary tear from my cheek and tried to make my heart rate return to normal. Nathan, apparently embarrassed by my tears, scratched absently at his neck, and then, after a minute, silently handed me a piece of kitchen roll.
    ‘I can’t just let it happen, Nathan.’
    He said nothing.
    ‘I can’t.’
    I stared at my passport, sitting on the kitchen table. It was a terrible picture. It looked like someone else entirely. Someone whose life, whose way of being, might actually be nothing like my own. I stared at it, thinking.
    ‘Nathan?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘If I could fix some other kind of trip, something the doctors would agree to, would you still come? Would you still help me?’
    ‘Course I would.’ He stood, rinsed his mug and hauled his backpack over his shoulder. He turned to face me before he left the kitchen. ‘But I’ve got to be honest, Lou. I’m not sure even you are going to be able to pull this one off.’

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