Me Before You: A Novel

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 likea 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