Me Before You: A Novel

above.
    Everything that is sensible, or smart, Katrina did first, despite being eighteen months younger than me. Every book I ever read she had read first, every fact I mentioned at the dinner table she already knew. She is the only person I know who actually likes exams. Sometimes I think I dress the way I do because the one thing Treena can’t do is put clothes together. She’s a pullover and jeans kind of a girl. Her idea of smart is ironing the jeans first.
    My father calls me a ‘character’, because I tend to say the first thing that pops into my head. He says I’m like my Aunt Lily, who I never knew. It’s a bit weird, constantly being compared to someone you’ve never met. I would come downstairs in purple boots, and Dad would nod at Mum and say, ‘D’you remember Aunt Lily and her purple boots, eh?’ and Mum would cluck and start laughing as if at some secret joke. My mother calls me ‘individual’, which is her polite way of not quite understanding the way I dress.
    But apart from a brief period in my teens, I never wanted to look like Treena, or any of the girls at school; Ipreferred boys’ clothes till I was about fourteen, and now tend to please myself – depending on what mood I am in on the day. There’s no point me trying to look conventional. I am small, dark-haired and, according to my dad, have the face of an elf. That’s not as in ‘elfin beauty’. I am not plain, but I don’t think anyone is ever going to call me beautiful. I don’t have that graceful thing going on. Patrick calls me gorgeous when he wants to get his leg over, but he’s fairly transparent like that. We’ve known each other for coming up to seven years.
    I was twenty-six years old and I wasn’t really sure what I was. Up until I lost my job I hadn’t even given it any thought. I supposed I would probably marry Patrick, knock out a few kids, live a few streets away from where I had always lived. Apart from an exotic taste in clothes, and the fact that I’m a bit short, there’s not a lot separating me from anyone you might pass in the street. You probably wouldn’t look at me twice. An ordinary girl, leading an ordinary life. It actually suited me fine.
    ‘You must wear a suit to an interview,’ Mum had insisted. ‘Everyone’s far too casual these days.’
    ‘Because wearing pinstripes will be vital if I’m spoon-feeding a geriatric.’
    ‘Don’t be smart.’
    ‘I can’t afford to buy a suit. What if I don’t get the job?’
    ‘You can wear mine, and I’ll iron you a nice blouse, and just for once don’t wear your hair up in those –’ she gestured to my hair, which was normally twisted into two dark knots on each side of my head ‘– Princess Leia things. Just try to look like a normal person.’
    I knew better than to argue with my mother. And I could tell Dad had been instructed not to comment on my outfit as I walked out of the house, my gait awkward in the too-tight skirt.
    ‘Bye love,’ he said, the corners of his mouth twitching. ‘Good luck now. You look very … businesslike.’
    The embarrassing thing was not that I was wearing my mother’s suit, or that it was in a cut last fashionable in the late 1980s, but that it was actually a tiny bit small for me. I felt the waistband cutting into my midriff, and pulled the double-breasted jacket across. As Dad says of Mum, there’s more fat on a kirby grip.
    I sat through the short bus journey feeling faintly sick. I had never had a proper job interview. I had joined The Buttered Bun after Treena bet me that I couldn’t get a job in a day. I had walked in and simply asked Frank if he needed a spare pair of hands. It had been his first day open and he had looked almost blinded by gratitude.
    Now, looking back, I couldn’t even remember having a discussion with him about money. He suggested a weekly wage, I agreed, and once a year he told me he’d upped it a bit, usually by a little more than I would have asked for.
    What did people ask in interviews anyway? And what if they asked me to do something practical with this old man, to feed him or bath him or something? Syed had said there was a male carer who covered his ‘intimate needs’ (I shuddered at the phrase). The secondary carer’s job was, he said, ‘a little unclear at this point’. I pictured myself wiping drool from the old man’s mouth, maybe asking loudly, ‘DID HE WANT A CUP OF TEA?’
    When Granddad had first begun his recovery from hisstrokes he hadn’t