Me Before You: A Novel

the library, looking things up on the internet.
    There was a whole world available to me from that PC, layer upon layer of it, and it had begun to exert a siren call.
    It had started with the thank-you letter. A couple of days after the concert, I told Will I thought we should write and thank his friend, the violinist.
    ‘I bought a nice card on the way in,’ I said. ‘You tell me what you want to say, and I’ll write it. I’ve even brought in my good pen.’
    ‘I don’t think so,’ Will said.
    ‘What?’
    ‘You heard me.’
    ‘You don’t
think
so? That man gave us front of house seats. You said yourself it was fantastic. The least you could do is thank him.’
    Will’s jaw was fixed, immovable.
    I put down my pen. ‘Or are you just so used to people giving you stuff that you don’t feel you have to?’
    ‘You have no idea, Clark, how frustrating it is to rely on someone else to put your words down for you. The phrase “written on behalf of” is … humiliating.’
    ‘Yeah? Well it’s still better than a great big fat nothing,’ I grumbled. ‘
I’m
going to thank him, anyway. I won’t mention your name, if you really want to be an arse about it.’
    I wrote the card, and posted it. I said nothing more about it. But that evening, Will’s words still echoing around my head, I found myself diverting into the library and, spying an unused computer, I logged on to the internet. I looked up whether there were any devices that Will could use to do his own writing. Within an hour, I hadcome up with three – a piece of voice recognition software, another type of software which relied on the blinking of an eye, and, as my sister had mentioned, a tapping device that Will could wear on his head.
    He was predictably sniffy about the head device, but he conceded that the voice recognition software might be useful, and within a week we managed, with Nathan’s help, to install it on his computer, setting Will up so that with the computer tray fixed to his chair, he no longer needed someone else to type for him. He was a bit self-conscious about it initially, but after I instructed him to begin everything with, ‘Take a letter, Miss Clark,’ he got over it.
    Even Mrs Traynor couldn’t find anything to complain about. ‘If there is any other equipment that you think might be useful,’ she said, her lips still pursed as if she couldn’t quite believe this might have been a straightforwardly good thing, ‘do let us know.’ She eyed Will nervously, as if he might actually be about to wrench it off with his jaw.
    Three days later, just as I set off for work, the postman handed me a letter. I opened it on the bus, thinking it might be an early birthday card from some distant cousin. It read, in computerized text:
Dear Clark,
    This is to show you that I am not an entirely selfish arse. And I do appreciate your efforts.
    Thank you.
    Will
    I laughed so hard the bus driver asked me if my lottery numbers had come up.
    After years spent in that box room, my clothes perched on a rail in the hallway outside, Treena’s bedroom felt palatial. The first night I spent in it I spun round with my arms outstretched, just luxuriating in the fact that I couldn’t touch both walls simultaneously. I went to the DIY store and bought paint and new blinds, as well as a new bedside light and some shelves, which I assembled myself. It’s not that I’m good at that stuff; I guess I just wanted to see if I could do it.
    I set about redecorating, painting for an hour a night after I came home from work, and at the end of the week even Dad had to admit I’d done a really good job. He stared for a bit at my cutting in, fingered the blinds that I had put up myself, and put a hand on my shoulder. ‘This job has been the making of you, Lou.’
    I bought a new duvet cover, a rug and some oversized cushions – just in case anyone ever stopped by, and fancied lounging. Not that anyone did. The calendar went on the back of the new door. Nobody saw it except for me. Nobody else would have known what it meant, anyway.
    I did feel a bit bad about the fact that once we had put Thomas’s camp bed up next to Treena’s in the box room, there wasn’t actually any floor space left, but then I rationalized – they didn’t even really live here any more. And the box room was somewhere they were only going to sleep. There was no point in the larger room being empty for weeks on end.
    I went to work each day, thinking about other places I