Me Before You: A Novel

listened to music he wore an expression of intense concentration. Most of the time, it was as if Will were not wholly present, as if there were some part of himstruggling with pain, or memories, or dark thoughts. But with music it was different.
    And then the following day I took him to a wine tasting, part of a promotional event held by a vineyard in a specialist wine shop. I had to promise Nathan I wouldn’t get him drunk. I held up each glass for Will to sniff, and he knew what it was even before he’d tasted it. I tried quite hard not to snort when Will spat it into the beaker (it did look really funny), and he looked at me from under his brows and said I was a complete child. The shop owner went from being weirdly disconcerted by having a man in a wheelchair in his shop to quite impressed. As the afternoon went on, he sat down and started opening other bottles, discussing region and grape with Will, while I wandered up and down looking at the labels, becoming, frankly, a little bored.
    ‘Come on, Clark. Get an education,’ he said, nodding at me to sit down beside him.
    ‘I can’t. My mum told me it was rude to spit.’
    The two men looked at each other as if I were the mad one. And yet he didn’t spit every time. I watched him. And he was suspiciously talkative for the rest of the afternoon – swift to laugh, and even more combative than usual.
    And then, on the way home, we were driving through a town we didn’t normally go to and, as we sat, motionless, in traffic, I glanced over and saw the Tattoo and Piercing Parlour.
    ‘I always quite fancied a tattoo,’ I said.
    I should have known afterwards that you couldn’t just say stuff like that in Will’s presence. He didn’t do small talk, or shooting the breeze. He immediately wanted to know why I hadn’t had one.
    ‘Oh … I don’t know. The thought of what everyone would say, I guess.’
    ‘Why? What would they say?’
    ‘My dad hates them.’
    ‘How old are you again?’
    ‘Patrick hates them too.’
    ‘And he
never
does anything that you might not like.’
    ‘I might get claustrophobic. I might change my mind once it was done.’
    ‘Then you get it removed by laser, surely?’
    I looked at him in my rear-view mirror. His eyes were merry.
    ‘Come on, then,’ he said. ‘What would you have?’
    I realized I was smiling. ‘I don’t know. Not a snake. Or anyone’s name.’
    ‘I wasn’t expecting a heart with a banner saying “mother”.’
    ‘You promise not to laugh?’
    ‘You know I can’t do that. Oh God, you’re not going to have some Indian Sanskrit proverb or something, are you?
What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger
.’
    ‘No. I’d have a bee. A little black and yellow bee. I love them.’
    He nodded, as if that were a perfectly reasonable thing to want. ‘And where would you have it? Or daren’t I ask?’
    I shrugged. ‘Dunno. My shoulder? Lower hip?’
    ‘Pull over,’ he said.
    ‘Why, are you okay?’
    ‘Just pull over. There’s a space there. Look, on your left.’
    I pulled the car into the kerb and glanced back at him. ‘Go on, then,’ he said. ‘We’ve got nothing else on today.’
    ‘Go on where?’
    ‘To the tattoo parlour.’
    I started to laugh. ‘Yeah. Right.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘You
have
been swallowing instead of spitting.’
    ‘You haven’t answered my question.’
    I turned in my seat. He was serious.
    ‘I can’t just go and get a tattoo. Just like that.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Because … ’
    ‘Because your boyfriend says no. Because you still have to be a good girl, even at twenty-seven. Because it’s
too scary
. C’mon, Clark. Live a little. What’s stopping you?’
    I stared down the road at the tattoo parlour frontage. The slightly grimy window bore a large neon heart, and some framed photographs of Angelina Jolie and Mickey Rourke.
    Will’s voice broke into my calculations. ‘Okay. I will, if you will.’
    I turned back to him. ‘You’d get a tattoo?’
    ‘If it persuaded you, just once, to climb out of your little box.’
    I switched off the engine. We sat, listening to it tick its way down, the dull murmur of the cars queuing along the road beside us.
    ‘It’s quite permanent.’
    ‘No “quite” about it.’
    ‘Patrick will hate it.’
    ‘So you keep saying.’
    ‘And we’ll probably get hepatitis from dirty needles. And die slow, horrible, painful deaths.’ I turned to Will. ‘Theyprobably wouldn’t be able to do it now. Not actually right