Me Before You: A Novel

now.’
    ‘Probably not. But shall we just go and check?’
    Two hours later we exited the tattoo parlour, me eighty pounds lighter and bearing a surgical patch over my hip where the ink was still drying. Its relatively small size, the tattoo artist said, meant that I could have it lined and coloured in one visit, so there I was. Finished. Tattooed. Or, as Patrick would no doubt say, scarred for life. Under that white dressing sat a fat little bumblebee, culled from the laminated ring binder of images that the tattoo artist had handed us when we walked in. I felt almost hysterical with excitement. I kept reaching around to peek at it until Will told me to stop, or I was going to dislocate something.
    Will had been relaxed and happy in there, oddly enough. They had not given him a second look. They had done a few quads, they said, which explained the ease with which they had handled him. They were surprised when Will said he could feel the needle. Six weeks earlier they had finished inking a paraplegic who had had trompe l’oeil bionics inked the whole way down one side of his leg.
    The tattooist with the bolt through his ear had taken Will into the next room and, with my tattooist’s help, laid him down on a special table so that all I could see through the open door were his lower legs. I could hear the two men murmuring and laughing over the buzz of the tattooing needle, the smell of antiseptic sharp in my nostrils.
    When the needle first bit into my skin, I chewed my lip, determined not to let Will hear me squeal. I kept my mind on what he was doing next door, trying to eavesdrop on his conversation, wondering what it was he was having done. When he finally emerged, after my own had been finished, he refused to let me see. I suspected it might be something to do with Alicia.
    ‘You’re a bad bloody influence on me, Will Traynor,’ I said, opening the car door and lowering the ramp. I couldn’t stop grinning.
    ‘Show me.’
    I glanced down the street, then turned and peeled a little of the dressing down from my hip.
    ‘It’s great. I like your little bee. Really.’
    ‘I’m going to have to wear high-waisted trousers around my parents for the rest of my life.’ I helped him steer his chair on to the ramp and raised it. ‘Mind you, if your mum gets to hear you’ve had one too … ’
    ‘I’m going to tell her the girl from the council estate led me astray.’
    ‘Okay then, Traynor, you show me yours.’
    He gazed at me steadily, half smiling. ‘You’ll have to put a new dressing on it when we get home.’
    ‘Yeah. Like that never happens. Go on. I’m not driving off until you do.’
    ‘Lift my shirt, then. To the right. Your right.’
    I leant through the front seats, and tugged at his shirt, peeling back the piece of gauze beneath. There, dark against his pale skin was a black and white striped ink rectangle, small enough that I had to look twice before I realized what it said.
Best before: 19 March 2007
    I stared at it. I half laughed, and then my eyes filled with tears. ‘Is that the –’
    ‘Date of my accident. Yes.’ He raised his eyes to the heavens. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, don’t get maudlin, Clark. It was meant to be funny.’
    ‘It is funny. In a crappy sort of way.’
    ‘Nathan will enjoy it. Oh, come on, don’t look like that. It’s not as if I’m ruining my perfect body, is it?’
    I pulled Will’s shirt back down and then I turned and fired up the ignition. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what any of this meant. Was this him coming to terms with his state? Or just another way of showing his contempt for his own body?
    ‘Hey, Clark, do me a favour,’ he said, just as I was about to pull away. ‘Reach into the backpack for me. The zipped pocket.’
    I glanced into the rear-view mirror, and put the handbrake on again. I leant through the front seats and put my hand in the bag, rummaging around according to his instructions.
    ‘You want painkillers?’ I was inches from his face. He had more colour in his skin than at any time since he came back from hospital. ‘I’ve got some in my –’
    ‘No. Keep looking.’
    I pulled out a piece of paper and sat back. It was a folded ten-pound note.
    ‘There you go. The emergency tenner.’
    ‘So?’
    ‘It’s yours.’
    ‘For what?’
    ‘That tattoo.’ He grinned at me. ‘Right up until you were in that chair, I didn’t think for a minute you were going to actually do it.’

16
    There was no way