Me Before You: A Novel

on a big floppy sunhat and we walked up to the castle with Thomas to feed the ducks. I don’t think she really wanted to go out, but Mum insisted that we all needed some fresh air. This, in my mother’s vocabulary, meant she was itching to get into the bedroom and air it and change the bedding. Thomas skipped and hopped ahead of us, clutching a plastic bag full of crusts, and we negotiated the meandering tourists with an ease born of years of practice, ducking out of the way of swinging backpacks, separating around posing couples and rejoining on the other side. The castle baked in the high heat of summer, the ground cracked and the grass wispy, like the last hairs on the head of a balding man. The flowers in the tubs looked defeated, as if they were already half preparing for autumn.
    Lou and I didn’t say much. What was there to say?
    As we walked past the tourist car park I saw her glance under her brim at the Traynors’ house. It stood, elegant and red-brick, its tall blank windows disguising whateverlife-changing drama was being played out in there, perhaps even at this moment.
    ‘You could go and talk to him, you know,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait here for you.’
    She looked at the ground, folded her arms across her chest, and we kept walking. ‘There’s no point,’ she said. I knew the other bit, the bit she didn’t say aloud.
He’s probably not even there
.
    We did a slow circuit of the castle, watching Thomas roll down the steep parts of the hill, feeding the ducks that by this stage in the season were so well stuffed they could barely be bothered to come over for mere bread. I watched my sister as we walked, seeing her brown back exposed by her halter-neck top, her stooped shoulders, and I realized that even if she didn’t know it yet, everything had changed for her. She wouldn’t stay here now, no matter what happened with Will Traynor. She had an air about her, a new air of knowledge, of things seen, places she had been. My sister finally had new horizons.
    ‘Oh,’ I said, as we headed back towards the gates, ‘you got a letter. From the college, while you were away. Sorry – I opened it. I thought it must be for me.’
    ‘You opened it?’
    I had been hoping it was extra grant money.
    ‘You got an interview.’
    She blinked, as if receiving news from some long-distant past.
    ‘Yeah. And the big news is, it’s tomorrow,’ I said. ‘So I thought maybe we should go over some possible questions tonight.’
    She shook her head. ‘I can’t go to an interview tomorrow.’
    ‘What else are you going to do?’
    ‘I can’t, Treen,’ she said, sorrowfully. ‘How am I supposed to think about anything at a time like this?’
    ‘Listen, Lou. They don’t give interviews out like bread for ducks, you eejit. This is a big deal. They know you’re a mature student, you’re applying at the wrong time of year, and they’re still going to see you. You can’t muck them around.’
    ‘I don’t care. I can’t think about it.’
    ‘But you –’
    ‘Just leave me alone, Treen. Okay? I
can’t do it
.’
    ‘Hey,’ I said. I stepped in front of her so that she couldn’t keep walking. Thomas was talking to a pigeon, a few paces up ahead. ‘This is exactly the time you have to think about it. This is the time when, like it or not, you finally have to work out what you are going to do with the rest of your life.’
    We were blocking the path. Now the tourists had to separate to walk around us – they did so, heads down or eyeing with mild curiosity the arguing sisters.
    ‘I can’t.’
    ‘Well, tough. Because, in case you forgot, you have no job any more. No Patrick to pick up the pieces. And if you miss this interview, then in two days’ time you are headed back down the Job Centre to decide whether you want to be a chicken processor or a lap dancer or wipe some other person’s bum for a living. And believe it or not, because you are now headed for thirty, that’s your life pretty well mapped out. And all of this – everything you’ve learnt over the past six months – will have been a waste of time. All of it.’
    She stared at me, wearing that look of mute fury she wears when she knows I am right and she can’t say anything back. Thomas appeared beside us now and pulled at my hand.
    ‘Mum … you said
bum
.’
    My sister was still glaring at me. But I could see her thinking.
    I turned to my son. ‘No, sweetheart, I said
bun
. We’re going to go home for tea now – aren’t