Me Before You: A Novel

the moment – something I had never mastered – he pointed out that if youcan’t move your arms and legs, you haven’t actually got a lot of choice.
Making me read books or magazines, and then talk about them.
Knowledge is power, Clark
, he would say. I hated this at first; it felt like I was at school, being quizzed on my powers of memory. But after a while I realized that, in Will’s eyes, there were no wrong answers. He actually liked me to argue with him. He asked me what I thought of things in the newspapers, disagreed with me about characters in books. He seemed to hold opinions on almost everything – what the government was doing, whether one business should buy another, whether someone should have been sent to jail. If he thought I was being lazy, or parroting my parents’ or Patrick’s ideas, he would just say a flat, ‘No. Not good enough.’ He would look so disappointed if I said I knew nothing about it; I had begun to anticipate him and now read a newspaper on the bus on the way in, just so I felt prepared. ‘Good point,
Clark,’ he would say, and I would find myself beaming. And then give myself a kick for allowing Will to patronize me again.
Getting a shave. Every two days now, I lathered up his jaw and made him presentable. If he wasn’t having a bad day, he would lean back in his chair, close his eyes, and the closest thing I saw to physical pleasure would spread across his face. Perhaps I’ve invented that. Perhaps I saw what I wanted to see. But he would be completely silent as I gently ran the blade across his chin, smoothing and scraping,and when he did open his eyes his expression had softened, like someone coming out of a particularly satisfactory sleep. His face now held some colour from our time spent outside; his was the kind of skin that tanned easily. I kept the razors high up in the bathroom cabinet, tucked behind a large bottle of conditioner.
Being a bloke. Especially with Nathan. Occasionally, before the evening routine, they would go and sit at the end of the garden and Nathan would crack open a couple of beers. Sometimes I heard them discussing rugby, or joking about some woman they had seen on the television, and it wouldn’t sound like Will at all. But I understood he needed this; he needed someone with whom he could just be a bloke, doing blokey things. It was a small bit of ‘normal’ in his strange, separate life.
Commenting on my wardrobe. Actually, that should be raising an eyebrow at my wardrobe. Except for the black and yellow tights. On the two occasions I had worn those he hadn’t said anything, but simply nodded, as if something were right with the world.
    ‘You saw my dad in town the other day.’
    ‘Oh. Yes.’ I was hanging washing out on a line. The line itself was hidden in what Mrs Traynor called the Kitchen Garden. I think she didn’t want anything as mundane as laundry polluting the view of her herbaceous borders. My own mother pegged her whites out almost as a badge ofpride. It was like a challenge to her neighbours:
Beat this, ladies!
It was all Dad could do to stop her putting a second revolving clothes dryer out the front.
    ‘He asked me if you’d said anything about it.’
    ‘Oh.’ I kept my face a studied blank. And then, because he seemed to be waiting, ‘Evidently not.’
    ‘Was he with someone?’
    I put the last peg back in the peg bag. I rolled it up, and placed it in the empty laundry basket. I turned to him.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘A woman.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Red-haired?’
    ‘Yes.’
    Will thought about this for a minute.
    ‘I’m sorry if you think I should have told you,’ I said. ‘But it … it didn’t seem like my business.’
    ‘And it’s never an easy conversation to have.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘If it’s any consolation, Clark, it’s not the first time,’ he said, and headed back into the house.
    Deirdre Bellows said my name twice before I looked up. I was scribbling in my notepad, place names and question marks, pros and cons, and I had pretty much forgotten I was even on a bus. I was trying to work out a way of getting Will to the theatre. There was only one within two hours’ drive, and it was showing
Oklahoma!
It was hard to imagine Will nodding along to ‘Oh What A Beautiful Morning’, but all the serious theatre was in London. And London still seemed like an impossibility.
    Basically, I could now get Will out of the house, but we had pretty much reached the end of what was available within an hour’s radius,