Me Before You (29 page)

Most of us on here have hit a definite hump at some point in our lives. It may be that your friend has hit his. Don’t let him push you away. Stay positive. And remind him that it is not his place to decide both when we enter and depart this world, but that of the Lord. He decided to change your friend’s life, in His own wisdom and there may be a lesson in it that He –

I scanned down to the next one.

Dear Bee,

There is no way around it, being a quad can suck. If your guy was a bit of a player too, then he is going to find it extra hard. These are the things that helped me. A lot of company, even when I didn’t feel like it. Good food. Good docs. Good meds, depression meds when necessary. You didn’t say where you were based, but if you can get him talking to others in the SCI community it may help. I was pretty reluctant at first (I think some part of me didn’t want to admit I was actually a quad) but it does help to know you’re not alone out there.

Oh, and DON’T let him watch any films like
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
. Major downer!

 

Let us know how you get on.

 

All best,

Ritchie

I looked up
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
. ‘The story of a man who suffers a paralysing stroke, and his attempts to communicate with the outside world,’ it said. I wrote the title down on my pad, uncertain whether I was doing so to make sure Will avoided it, or so I remembered to watch it.

The next two answers were from a Seventh-day Adventist, and a man whose suggested ways in which I could cheer Will up were certainly not covered by my working contract. I flushed and hurriedly scrolled down, afraid that someone might glance at the screen from behind me. And then I hesitated on the next reply.

Hi Busy Bee,

Why do you think your friend/charge/whatever needs his mind changing? If I could work out a way of dying with dignity, and if I didn’t know it would devastate my family, I would take it. I have been stuck in this chair eight years now, and my life is a constant round of humiliations and frustrations. Can you really put yourself in his shoes? Do you know how it feels to not even be able to empty your bowels without help? To know that forever after you are going to be stuck in your bed/unable to eat, dress, communicate with the outside world without someone to help you? To never have sex again? To face the prospect of sores, and ill health and even ventilators? You sound like a nice person, and I’m sure you mean well. But it may not be you looking after him next week. It may be someone who depresses him, or even doesn’t like him very much. That, like everything else, is out of his control. We SCIs know that very little is under our control – who feeds us, dresses us, washes us, dictates our medication. Living with that knowledge is very hard.

So I think you are asking the wrong question. Who are the AB to decide what our lives should be? If this is the wrong life for your friend, shouldn’t the question be: How do I help him to end it?

 

Best wishes,

Gforce, Missouri, US

I stared at the message, my fingers briefly stilled on the keyboard. Then I scrolled down. The next few were from other quadriplegics, criticizing Gforce for his bleak words, protesting that they had found a way forward, that theirs was a life worth living. There was a brief argument going on that seemed to have little to do with Will at all.

And then the thread dragged itself back to my request. There were suggestions of antidepressants, massage, miracle recoveries, stories of how members’ own lives had been given new value. There were a few practical suggestions: wine tasting, music, art, specially adapted keyboards.

‘A partner,’ said Grace31 from Birmingham. ‘If he has love, he will feel he can go on. Without it, I would have sunk many times over.’

That phrase echoed in my head long after I had left the library.

Will came out of hospital on Thursday. I picked him up in the adapted car, and brought him home. He was pale and exhausted, and stared out of the window listlessly for the whole journey.

‘No sleep in these places,’ he explained, when I asked him if he was okay. ‘There’s always someone moaning in the next bed.’

I told him he would have the weekend to recover, but after that I had a series of outings planned. I told him I was taking his advice and trying new things, and he would have to come with me. It was a subtle change in emphasis, but I knew that was the only way I could get him to accompany me.

In fact, I had devised a detailed schedule for the next couple of weeks. Each event was carefully marked on my calendar in black, with red pen outlining the precautions I should take, and green for the accessories I would need. Every time I looked at the back of my door I felt a little glimmer of excitement, both that I had been so organized, but also that one of these events might actually be the thing that changed Will’s view of the world.

As my Dad always says, my sister is the brains of our family.

The art gallery trip lasted a shade under twenty minutes. And that included driving round the block three times in search of a suitable parking space. We got there, and almost before I had closed the door behind him he said all the work was terrible. I asked him why and he said if I couldn’t see it he couldn’t explain it. The cinema had to be abandoned after the staff told us, apologetically, that their lift was out of order. Others, such as the failed attempt to go swimming, required more time and organization – the ringing of the swimming pool beforehand, the booking of Nathan for overtime, and then, when we got there, the flask of hot chocolate drunk in silence in the leisure centre car park when Will resolutely refused to go in.

The following Wednesday evening, we went to hear a singer he had once seen live in New York. That was a good trip. When he 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 him struggling 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. ‘They probably wouldn’t be able to do it now. Not actually right 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.’