Me Before You (9 page)

I swallowed. ‘I wasn’t going to fix the one of Alicia – I’m not that stupid … I just thought that in a while you might feel –’

‘Oh Christ … ’ He turned away from me, his voice scathing. ‘Spare me the psychological therapy. Just go and read your bloody gossip magazines or whatever it is you do when you’re not making tea.’

My cheeks were aflame. I watched him manoeuvre in the narrow hallway, and my voice emerged even before I knew what I was doing.

‘You don’t have to behave like an arse.’

The words rang out in the still air.

The wheelchair stopped. There was a long pause, and then he reversed and turned slowly, so that he was facing me, his hand on the little joystick.

‘What?’

I faced him, my heart thumping. ‘Your friends got the shitty treatment. Fine. They probably deserved it. But I’m just here day after day trying to do the best job I can. So I would really appreciate it if you didn’t make my life as unpleasant as you do everyone else’s.’

Will’s eyes widened a little. There was a beat before he spoke again. ‘And what if I told you I didn’t want you here?’

‘I’m not employed by you. I’m employed by your mother. And unless she tells me she doesn’t want me here any more I’m staying. Not because I particularly care about you, or like this stupid job or want to change your life one way or another, but because I need the money. Okay? I really need the money.’

Will Traynor’s expression hadn’t outwardly changed much but I thought I saw astonishment in there, as if he were unused to anyone disagreeing with him.

Oh hell
, I thought, as the reality of what I had just done began to sink in.
I’ve really blown it this time
.

But Will just stared at me for a bit and, when I didn’t look away, he let out a small breath, as if about to say something unpleasant.

‘Fair enough,’ he said, and he turned the wheelchair round. ‘Just put the photographs in the bottom drawer, will you? All of them.’

And with a low hum, he was gone.

The thing about being catapulted into a whole new life – or at least, shoved up so hard against someone else’s life that you might as well have your face pressed against their window – is that it forces you to rethink your idea of who you are. Or how you might seem to other people.

To my parents, I had in four short weeks become just a few degrees more interesting. I was now the conduit to a different world. My mother, in particular, asked me daily questions about Granta House and its domestic habits in the manner of a zoologist forensically examining some strange new creature and its habitat. ‘Does Mrs Traynor use linen napkins at every meal?’ she would ask, or ‘Do you think they vacuum every day, like we do?’ or, ‘What do they do with their potatoes?’

She sent me off in the mornings with strict instructions to find out what brand of loo roll they used, or whether the sheets were a polycotton mix. It was a source of great disappointment to her that most of the time I couldn’t actually remember. My mother was secretly convinced that posh people lived like pigs – ever since I had told her, aged six, of a well-spoken school friend whose mother wouldn’t let us play in their front room ‘because we’d disturb the dust’.

When I came home to report that, yes, the dog was definitely allowed to eat in the kitchen, or that, no, the Traynors didn’t scrub their front step every day as my mother did, she would purse her lips, glance sideways at my father and nod with quiet satisfaction, as if I had just confirmed everything she’d suspected about the slovenly ways of the upper classes.

Their dependence on my income, or perhaps the fact that they knew I didn’t really like my job, meant that I also received a little more respect within the house. This didn’t actually translate to much – in my Dad’s case, it meant that he had stopped calling me ‘lardarse’ and, in my mother’s, that there was usually a mug of tea waiting for me when I came home.

To Patrick, and to my sister, I was no different – still the butt of jokes, the recipient of hugs or kisses or sulks. I felt no different. I still looked the same, still dressed, according to Treen, like I had had a wrestling match in a charity shop.

I had no idea what most of the inhabitants of Granta House thought of me. Will was unreadable. To Nathan, I suspected I was just the latest in a long line of hired carers. He was friendly enough, but a bit semi-detached. I got the feeling he wasn’t convinced I was going to be there for long. Mr Traynor nodded at me politely when we passed in the hall, occasionally asking me how the traffic was, or whether I had settled in all right. I’m not sure he would have recognized me if he’d been introduced to me in another setting.

But to Mrs Traynor – oh Lord – to Mrs Traynor I was apparently the stupidest and most irresponsible person on the planet.

It had started with the photo frames. Nothing in that house escaped Mrs Traynor’s notice, and I should have known that the smashing of the frames would qualify as a seismic event. She quizzed me as to exactly how long I had left Will alone, what had prompted it, how swiftly I had cleared the mess up. She didn’t actually criticize me – she was too genteel even to raise her voice – but the way she blinked slowly at my responses, her little
hmm-hmm
, as I spoke, told me everything I needed to know. It came as no surprise when Nathan told me she was a magistrate.

She thought it might be a good idea if I didn’t leave Will for so long next time, no matter how awkward the situation,
hmm
? She thought perhaps the next time I dusted I could make sure things weren’t close enough to the edge so that they might accidentally get knocked to the floor,
hmm
? (She seemed to prefer to believe that it had been an accident.) She made me feel like a first-class eejit, and consequently I became a first-class eejit around her. She always arrived just when I had dropped something on the floor, or was struggling with the cooker dial, or she would be standing in the hallway looking mildly irritated as I stepped back in from collecting logs outside, as if I had been gone much longer than I actually had.

Weirdly, her attitude got to me more than Will’s rudeness. A couple of times I had even been tempted to ask her outright whether there was something wrong.
You said that you were hiring me for my attitude rather than my professional skills
, I wanted to say.
Well, here I am, being cheery every ruddy day. Being robust, just as you wanted. So what’s your problem?

But Camilla Traynor was not the kind of woman you could have said that to. And besides, I got the feeling nobody in that house ever said anything direct to anyone else.

‘Lily, our last girl, had rather a clever habit of using that pan for two vegetables at once,’ meant
You’re making too much mess
.

‘Perhaps you’d like a cup of tea, Will,’ actually meant
I have no idea what to say to you
.

‘I think I’ve got some paperwork that needs sorting out,’ meant
You’re being rude, and I’m going to leave the room
.

All pronounced with that slightly pained expression, and the slender fingers running up and down the chain with the crucifix. She was so held in, so restrained. She made my own mother look like Amy Winehouse. I smiled politely, pretended I hadn’t noticed, and did the job I was paid to do.

Or at least, I tried.

‘Why the hell are you trying to sneak carrots on to my fork?’

I glanced down at the plate. I had been watching the female television presenter and wondering what my hair would look like dyed the same colour.

‘Uh? I didn’t.’

‘You did. You mashed them up and tried to hide them in the gravy. I saw you.’

I blushed. He was right. I was sitting feeding Will, while both of us vaguely watched the lunchtime news. The meal was roast beef with mashed potato. His mother had told me to put three sorts of vegetables on the plate, even though he had said quite clearly that he didn’t want vegetables that day. I don’t think there was a meal that I was instructed to prepare that wasn’t nutritionally balanced to within an inch of its life.

‘Why are you trying to sneak carrots into me?’

‘I’m not.’

‘So there are no carrots on that?’

I gazed at the tiny pieces of orange. ‘Well … okay … ’

He was waiting, eyebrows raised.

‘Um … I suppose I thought vegetables would be good for you?’

It was part deference to Mrs Traynor, part force of habit. I was so used to feeding Thomas, whose vegetables had to be mashed to a paste and hidden under mounds of potato, or secreted in bits of pasta. Every fragment we got past him felt like a little victory.

‘Let me get this straight. You think a teaspoon of carrot would improve my quality of life?’

It
was
pretty stupid when he put it like that. But I had learnt it was important not to look cowed by anything Will said or did.

‘I take your point,’ I said evenly. ‘I won’t do it again.’

And then, out of nowhere, Will Traynor laughed. It exploded out of him in a gasp, as if it were entirely unexpected.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ he shook his head.

I stared at him.

‘What the hell else have you been sneaking into my food? You’ll be telling me to open the tunnel so that Mr Train can deliver some mushy Brussel sprouts to the red bloody station next.’

I considered this for a minute. ‘No,’ I said, straight-faced. ‘I deal only with Mr Fork. Mr Fork does not look like a train.’

Thomas had told me so, very firmly, some months previously.

‘Did my mother put you up to this?’

‘No. Look, Will, I’m sorry. I just … wasn’t thinking.’

‘Like that’s unusual.’

‘All right, all right. I’ll take the bloody carrots off, if they really upset you so much.’

‘It’s not the bloody carrots that upset me. It’s having them sneaked into my food by a madwoman who addresses the cutlery as Mr and Mrs Fork.’

‘It was a joke. Look, let me take the carrots and –’

He turned away from me. ‘I don’t want anything else. Just do me a cup of tea.’ He called out after me as I left the room, ‘And don’t try and sneak a bloody courgette into it.’

Nathan walked in as I was finishing the dishes. ‘He’s in a good mood,’ he said, as I handed him a mug.

‘Is he?’ I was eating my sandwiches in the kitchen. It was bitterly cold outside, and somehow the house hadn’t felt quite as unfriendly lately.

‘He says you’re trying to poison him. But he said it – you know – in a good way.’

I felt weirdly pleased by this information.

‘Yes … well … ’ I said, trying to hide it. ‘Give me time.’

‘He’s talking a bit more too. We’ve had weeks where he would hardly say a thing, but he’s definitely up for a bit of a chat the last few days.’

I thought of Will telling me if I didn’t stop bloody whistling he’d be forced to run me over. ‘I think his definition of chatty and mine are a bit different.’

‘Well, we had a bit of a chat about the cricket. And I gotta tell you –’ Nathan dropped his voice ‘– Mrs T asked me a week or so back if I thought you were doing okay. I said I thought you were very professional, but I knew that wasn’t what she meant. Then yesterday she came in and told me she’d heard you guys laughing.’

I thought back to the previous evening. ‘He was laughing
at
me,’ I said. Will had found it hilarious that I didn’t know what pesto was. I had told him supper was ‘the pasta in the green gravy’.

‘Ah, she doesn’t care about that. It’s just been a long time since he laughed at anything.’

It was true. Will and I seemed to have found an easier way of being around each other. It revolved mainly around him being rude to me, and me occasionally being rude back. He told me I did something badly, and I told him if it really mattered to him then he could ask me nicely. He swore at me, or called me a pain in the backside, and I told him he should try being without this particular pain in the backside and see how far it got him. It was a bit forced but it seemed to work for both of us. Sometimes it even seemed like a relief to him that there was someone prepared to be rude to him, to contradict him or tell him he was being horrible. I got the feeling that everyone had tiptoed around him since his accident – apart from perhaps Nathan, who Will seemed to treat with an automatic respect, and who was probably impervious to any of his sharper comments anyway. Nathan was like an armoured vehicle in human form.

‘You just make sure you’re the butt of more of his jokes, okay?’

I put my mug in the sink. ‘I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.’

The other big change, apart from atmospheric conditions inside the house, was that Will didn’t ask me to leave him alone quite as often, and a couple of afternoons had even asked me if I wanted to stay and watch a film with him. I hadn’t minded too much when it was
The Terminator –
even though I have seen all the Terminator films – but when he showed me the French film with subtitles, I took a quick look at the cover and said I thought I’d probably give it a miss.

‘Why?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t like films with subtitles.’

‘That’s like saying you don’t like films with actors in them. Don’t be ridiculous. What is it you don’t like? The fact that you’re required to read something as well as watch something?’

‘I just don’t really like foreign films.’

‘Everything after
Local Bloody Hero
has been a foreign film. D’you think Hollywood is a suburb of Birmingham?’

‘Funny.’

He couldn’t believe it when I admitted I’d never actually watched a film with subtitles. But my parents tended to stake ownership of the remote control in the evenings, and Patrick would be about as likely to watch a foreign film as he would be to suggest we take night classes in crochet. The multiplex in our nearest town only showed the latest shoot’em ups or romantic comedies and was so infested with catcalling kids in hoodies that most people around the town rarely bothered.

‘You have to watch this film, Louisa. In fact, I order you to watch this film.’ Will moved his chair back, and nodded towards the armchair. ‘There. You sit there. Don’t move until it’s over. Never watched a foreign film. For Christ’s sake,’ he muttered.