me before you

"I found you not at the end of my storybook but at an odd part in the middle It’s dog eared and the corners are worn from reading it over and over again and although you didn’t turn out to be my happy ending you’ll always be my favourite chapter "

"‘I liked the shorthand we seemed to fall into when nobody was around, the easy intimacy that had sprung up between us.’ "

My gaze slid slowly sideways from my glowing telly until I gazed at him surreptitiously in the dim light of the cabin.’

‘Very chivalrous of you, Nate’

‘It didn’t make me resemble corpse wearning a shroud’

‘And slowly I saw Will re-emerge.’

‘Then still a little damp, I climbed in beside him.’

‘As dusk fell, the three of us talked of our childhoods...’

‘I began to walk towards the bed then flinched at a sudden crash of thunder.’

‘... at the pink seashell nails that would always have to be trimmed by sb else’

‘Beyond the neatly trimmed hedge cars drove past with a newfound caution, pedestrians slipped and squealed on the pavements.’

‘Camilla’s eyes grow a little steely as she detailed...’

‘We would stop at a small beach near a rocky outcrop, just out of the view of the main hotel.’

‘I was so oddly reassured by how they felt in my own that I kept them, gazing at them, at the calluses that told of a life not entirely lived behind desk.’

"‘We never got to the bottom of what had prompted Louisa to stay - Will just said ‘family issues’ - but she was a busy little thing.’ "

‘that southern part of the island was renowned for sea breezes and, out of season, the resort temeratures rarely rose past the early twenties’

‘Just... a little daunted about cancelling this lot’

‘He didn’t want to be seen to be complying, in some way.’

‘He seemed curiously absent, as if the Will I knew had gone on a brief trip somewhere else and left only a shell.’

She was already imagining all sorts of possible and undesirable consequences

This had been Will’s domain - this globe these wide shores

I had popped by their house on friday, on my return, to show Will my spoils and to make sure his own passport was still valid.

"It’s like I’m looking through a funnel "

"That if the girl failed with her ranches "

"He policed himself rigidly so that he didn’t say anything about running or marathons, and laughed whenever he caught the conversation veering in that direction. "

"The airline had assured me that the armrests lifted so that we wouldn’t bruise Will’s hips. I couldn’t tell her the truth - the truth that just a handful of us knew."

He was funny, attentive.

She would be wearing pale wisps of something lacy – underwear for women who didn’t need anything actually supported, and which cost more than my weekly salary.

"I think I’ll ... ’ She seemed even more tense than usual, her eyes darting towards the corridor, from where we could hear the low murmur of voices. "

From the time he hit adolescence, I always had to fight the feeling that in his eyes I had somehow done something wrong.

I didn’t think Will could be affected by anything that I did.

I made my first claim for Jobseeker’s Allowance.

"I liked the way he turned his face and looked at me with amusement, like I had somehow turned out to be so much more than he had expected. "

Beside me, Will was asleep under the covers, his mouth slightly open, his elbow bent at right angles in front of him.

Luckily, they seemed to have anticipated the sheer terror felt by people like me.

It made sense of everything, after all – Mrs Traynor’s anxiety that I shouldn’t leave Will alone for very long, his antipathy to having me there, the fact that for large stretches of time I didn’t feel like I was doing anything useful at all.

We had been standing here on the brow of the aptly named Windy Hill for almost forty minutes, and I could no longer feel my feet.

The mood of the room was tasteful, and peaceful – a Scandinavian bachelor pad.

‘Why, does that need a bloody badge too?’

In the corner a glass-fronted cabinet revealed neat stacks of shrink-wrapped bales.

‘The last time I ate out anywhere was a birthday party for four-year-olds at Hailsbury’s only indoor bowling alley, and there wasn’t a thing there that wasn’t covered in batter.

I sat squashed between Patrick and a man whose name appeared to be the Rutter, staring periodically at the horse brasses pinned to the oak beams above my head and the photographs of the castle that punctuated the joists,

My modest wages had been a little bedrock of housekeeping money, enough to help see the family through from week to week.

I had realized pretty quickly that I was essentially being instructed to befuddle old people into switching energy suppliers, and told Syed, my personal ‘adviser’ that I couldn’t do it.

The phrase “written on behalf of” is ... humiliating.’

I looked at Will and I saw the baby I held in my arms, dewily besotted, unable to believe that I had created another human being.

When I did, he would be sitting in his chair looking out into the bleak garden.

‘Blimey,’ I said.

He stared for a bit at my cutting in, fingered the blinds that I had put up myself, and put a hand on my shoulder.

Because ... because it seems to me that there is a line being blurred here between what is work and what is ... ’ he shrugged, ‘... normal.’

Will, despite all his bluster, had been vulnerable.

Did you know, she once drove backwards into a bollard and swore it was the bollard’s fault

I was never entirely sure that they bore any resemblance to real life.

I don’t fancy ... all that ... bouncing.’

Buds burst from brown branches, perennials forcing their way tentatively through the dark, claggy soil.

The men were wiry, brandishing obscure and expensive sports layers that boasted extra ‘wicking’ properties, or lighter-than-air bodyweights.

Im gonna cut right to the chase

He left his bread.

He stands there, enjoying the brief flashback, rubbing the water from his hair with a towel.

Around us the room was dark and still, the windowpanes rattling gently as they were buffeted by the wind and rain.

‘And they will have sex once every six weeks and he will adore his children while doing bugger all to actually help look after them.

I walked up the hill, dodging this season’s hovering early few as they clutched their neoprene bumbags and well-thumbed tourist guides, their cameras already poised to capture mementoes of the castle in spring.

There were tales of bungee jumping for quadriplegics, of swimming, canoeing, even horse riding, with the aid of a special frame.

‘These –’ he held up another bottle ‘– are the antibiotics he has every two weeks for his catheter change.

It’s not as if there were crowds of chanting racehorse fans, threatening riots if Charlie’s Darling didn’t make it back in third, rioting stable-girls who needed penning in and keeping out.

I listened to the local news on the radio, the motorway snarl-ups, train stoppages and temporary school closures that the unexpected blizzard had brought with it.

It is full of cobbled streets and teetering apartment blocks and gay men and orthodox Jews and women of a certain age who once looked like Brigitte Bardot.

The girls wore no make-up, and had the ruddy complexions of those who thought nothing of jogging for miles through icy conditions.

Mum shut her eyes for a moment, as if composing herself before she spoke.

There is nothing more disappointing than creating a new border only to see it fail to flourish, or to watch a row of beautiful alliums destroyed overnight by some slimy culprit.

He curses inwardly as he spies the other suited people standing on the edge of the kerb.

In the corner was an old leather armchair with a reading light, perhaps dating from Will’s previous life, and I curled up on it with a book of short stories that I had pulled from the bookcase.

‘A curtsy will be fine.’

In the centre of the room stood a black wheelchair, its seat and back cushioned by sheepskin.

Daffodils had emerged as if from nowhere, their yellowing bulbs hinting at the flowers to come.

I wasn’t yet convinced that I could get Will to go much further afield, and even with Nathan’s help the thought of an overnight visit seemed daunting.

I dawdled a little in the reception area, flicking through the magazines in the newsagent’s, lingering over chocolate bars.

Sometimes I wondered if it was a defence mechanism, whether the only way to cope with his life was to pretend it wasn’t him it was happening to.

But it’s quite hard not to feel a bit deficient in the Department of Brain Cells, growing up next to a younger sister who was not just moved up a year into my class, but then to the year above.

Even Syed, who wore the grimly cheerful demeanour of someone who had shoehorned the most unlikely candidates into a job, was starting to sound a little weary.

‘This is a long-held desire of yours, is it, Nathan?

‘And we need to get this due diligence thing worked out before Martin gets in –’ He glances up at the screeching sound, the rude blare of a horn.

I couldn’t see what they were from here, but it all gave off a faint scent of disinfectant.

Unemployment had been a concept, something droningly referred to on the news in relation to shipyards or car factories.

I did my chores, then hung around in the kitchen, wondering if I was brave enough to eavesdrop.

There are places where the changing seasons are marked by migrating birds, or the ebb and flow of tides.

Dad had had his car written off by an uninsured driver two years previously, and somehow this had been enough for the whole teetering edifice that was my parents’ finances to finally collapse.

She made me feel like a first-class eejit, and consequently I became a first-class eejit around her.

Or busied herself in her garden, cutting things down with frightening efficiency.

My voice emerged as a squawk.

‘Your previous employer says you are a “warm, chatty and life-enhancing presence”.’

‘So how many races will it take to ensure we’ve fulfilled your long-held ambitions?’

This slope is treacherous

"Forever going with the flow But you're friction"

I held out a hand with the slightly damp envelope I had gripped in shock the entire journey home.

Patrick was beginning to look exasperated.

I thought of Treena’s boss, a taut-faced serial divorcee who monitored how many times my sister went to the loo and had been known to make barbed comments if she considered her to have exceeded reasonable bladder activity.

He extracted his arm from the cushions and squinted at his watch.

Shaven-headed man disappeared and Patrick turned back to me, apparently still pondering Will’s fate.

He looked about as fed up as I had ever seen him.

Karen swiftly became a fixture

Will’s mother had given us eighty pounds as a ‘float’.

I stood and watched them go, suddenly transfixed, unable to suppress a flurry of excitement at the tails suddenly streaming out behind them, the frantic efforts of the brightly coloured men atop them, all jostling for position.

I was just contemplating whether to actually tug at my forelock, when the door opened and I jumped.

‘Yes, well, if you’re going to be foul, Will, I think it’s best if Miss Clark does talk directly to Nathan.’

As we moved through the foyer of the Symphony Hall, where clusters of smart people stood with handbags and programmes in one hand, gin and tonics in the other, I saw this response pass through them in a gentle ripple which followed us to the stalls.

There is an explosion as everything fragments.

There was a faint frown on his face, and he swallowed twice, hard.

It was made for a more frugal generation and I always had to say a secret prayer that the zip would make it up past my waist, but it gave me the outline of a 1950s starlet, and it was a ‘results’ dress,

I fumbled with the receiver, trying to set it back in its cradle, and snapped my notepad shut.

I was nearly dizzy with fumes by the time I had finished.

I saw the mauve shadows that told of nights and nights of lost sleep, the furrow between his brows that spoke of silent pain

"I showed Nathan the next morning, the two of us stooping furtively over our coffees in the kitchen as if we were doing something properly clandestine. "

Mum just cooed at Will, and made a huge fuss of him.

And I could tell Dad had been instructed not to comment on my outfit as I walked out of the house, my gait awkward in the too-tight skirt.

it is not the grown man – the galumphing, unshaven, stinking, opinionated offspring – you see before you, with his parking tickets and unpolished shoes and complicated love life.

Whenever I looked at it I felt a germ of excitement building – both at the thought of my first ever long-haul trip, but also at the thought that this might just be it.

As he told me this, I mused that if Treena and I had been given the freedom of the castle, all to ourselves, we would have been air punching with disbelief and getting giddy all over the place.

Her daughter, curled up next to her on the sofa, just glowered – the kind of face Mum used to warn me would stick in place if the wind changed.

Frank was, as Dad put it, as queer as a blue gnu.

He grinned.

The air slowly grew still around us, the curtains settling, the last of the water draining away with a gurgle.

‘So when are you going to finish this hatchet job, then?’

I closed my eyes and lay my head against the headrest, and we sat there together for a while longer, two people lost in remembered music, half hidden in the shadow of a castle on a moonlit hill.

‘Hence the running.’

With hindsight her behaviour seemed even colder, her actions imbued with some sinister intent.

Huge hives all over your face is always a good look, right?’

I looked over my shoulder at the car park, seeing the hunched figure of Will, Nathan pulling vainly at the handles of his chair.

The champagne had boosted his spirits immeasurably.

He stopped then and looked at me for a moment, and I wondered whether he had sussed my inadequate attempts to work out who he might be.

‘I think horse racing falls into the “except incest and morris dancing” category.’

Granddad shook his head, as if we were all incomprehensible to him.

I’ve put you on our insurance.

Heavy curtains draped elegantly from fat mahogany curtain poles, and the floors were carpeted with intricately decorated Persian rugs.

As Dad says of Mum, there’s more fat on a kirby grip.

I was starting to lag behind.

I could already picture her growing up within it, her hair in two neat blonde plaits as she sat astride her first fat pony on the lawn.

I was about to ring Mrs Traynor when the back door opened, and Nathan stepped in, wrapped in layers of bulky clothing, a woollen scarf and hat almost obscuring his head.

I hesitated a moment before I opened the door, leaning against it with my hip so that I could balance the tray in my hands

Because rearranging limp dahlias into buckets of water requires so much physical and mental effort, doesn’t it, Treen?’

‘Does Mrs Traynor use linen napkins at every meal?’

The older women, in kitten heels, wore structured suits, boxed shoulders with silk linings in contrasting colours, and hats that looked as if they defied gravity.

I missed his insults, his crabbiness – their absence just added to the looming sense of threat that hung over me.

You wouldn’t believe the maintenance, apparently.

He turned to me, his voice matter-of-fact.

Now he was just Will – maddening, mercurial, clever, funny Will – who patronized me and liked to play Professor Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle.

"We did a slow circuit of the castle, watching Thomas roll down the steep parts of the hill, feeding the ducks that by this stage in the season were so well stuffed they could barely be bothered to come over for mere bread. "

His expression was one of mild exasperation.

‘Don’t get up to too much mischief.’

I trudged up the drive, my footsteps muffled and my toes already numb, shivering under my too-thin Chinese silk coat.

His tone was mulish.

I liked the fuggy bacon-scented warmth of the cafe, the little bursts of cool air as the door opened and closed, the low murmur of conversation and, when quiet, Frank’s radio singing tinnily to itself in the corner.

Bright – but not bright enough not to get herself up the duff, as Dad occasionally muttered.

He had located a rusty nail, barely half an inch emerging from some hurriedly finished woodwork in the back lobby, and, pressing his wrist against it, had reversed backwards and forwards until his flesh was sliced to ribbons.

that had happened to me on this route: where Dad taught me to ride a bike without stabilizers; where Mrs Doherty with the lopsided wig used to make us Welsh cakes; where Treena stuck her hand into a hedge when she was eleven and disturbed a wasp’s nest

We watched in silence as they filed out of the vehicle and into the old fortress in a single, obedient line, primed to stare at the ruins of another age.

He was the kind of man you might see watching cricket in a Panama hat, and had apparently overseen the management of the castle since retiring from his well-paid job in the city.

I felt suddenly overwhelmed.

I’ll forfeit any money owed to me.

A whirl of thick white flakes emerged from an iron-grey infinity, almost obscuring Granta House, blotting out sound, and slowing the world to an unnatural pace.

His father, a well-padded, gentle-looking man, usually came in as I was leaving.

It made my skin prickle and my palms dampen.

She put two on, he parried, lifting a third and fourth from the serving dish.

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.

I lay in bed until my thoughts darkened and solidified to the point where I couldn’t bear the weight of them, and at eight thirty I came back downstairs and sat silently watching television, perched on the other side of Granddad,

After years spent in that box room, my clothes perched on a rail in the hallway outside, Treena’s bedroom felt palatial.

Which might seem perverse if you know that for most of the last hundred pages I was dissolved in tears.

"He held up a jar and emptied one into the pestle and mortar, grinding it furiously. "

‘I don’t think we can afford to be picky at the moment,’ he said, ignoring Mum’s protestations.

I had lost in Year 7, and that a clammy, official hand would reach out as I passed through its Victorian pillared doors, demanding £3,853 in fines.

I am not plain, but I don’t think anyone is ever going to call me beautiful.

Well, I must've bumped my head cause I don't dance the same no more

Nathan stepped over to the ticket office and explained our plight to the woman inside

I asked, while Mum walked Thomas around the garden, showing him the frogs in the tiny pond.

Three days later, just as I set off for work, the postman handed me a letter.

Usually, after ten minutes or so he would make it clear that he was weary of my presence.

I realized as I continued that I had assumed his wheelchair would be a barrier; that his disability would prevent any kind of sensual aspect from creeping in.

This is a charming novel fizzing with quirky detail’

"It’s our first proper holiday together, and there is literally not one single trip in these that doesn’t involve either throwing yourself off something or –’ she pretends to shudder ‘– wearing fleece.’ "

I pulled my scarf up over my nose and wished I had worn something more suitable than ballet pumps and a velvet minidress.

‘Can that thing get a puncture?’

In honour of the occasion I was wearing my blue quilted minidress

When they told me at the hospital that Will would live, I walked outside into my garden and I raged.

He was rapt, suddenly unselfconscious.

Her smile glinted under the recessed lighting.

We’re in the middle of a bloody recession

To Patrick, and to my sister, I was no different – still the butt of jokes, the recipient of hugs or kisses or sulks.

A large, Georgian rectory, its tall windows partly obscured by showers of pale wisteria, its drive a caramel pea shingle, it was the perfect house for a colonel.

Her eyes were red-rimmed, as if she were about to cry.

Perhaps he would have liked it better if it hadn’t come with a side order of rubberneck,’ I said, and chucked the remnants hard into the bin.

I had to gather my thoughts so that I didn’t feel instinctively resentful.

"He watched each race, but he was silent, his head retracted into the high collar of his jacket. "

‘Although you might want to wear ... something a bit less revealing.’

The Viking was spoken about with reverence, those who had competed bearing their injuries like veterans of some distant and particularly brutal war.

I’m just amazed that you can have reached the ripe old age of – what was it?’

‘It’s not as if we’ve left him in there to rot.

He pushed past me and began rummaging around in the medicine cabinet.

The morning sagged and decided to last for several years.

"I discarded outfit number three – a pair of yellow wide-legged trousers – already anticipating Will’s Rupert Bear references, and instead put on my fourth option, a vintage dress in dark-red satin. "

she scolds.

With Will I sensed a vast internal hinterland, a world he wouldn’t give me even a glimpse of.

I read my magazine, lifting my head only to watch the snow settle thickly around the house, creeping up the window sills in powdery landscapes.

There was a faint sheen of sweat on his cheekbone.

I could feel the tension creeping upwards from my shins.

In the silence, broken only by the exaggerated oosh shoo of my own breath, I watched shoals of tiny iridescent fish, and larger black and white fish that stared at me with blank, inquisitive faces,

I glanced down to see the two pieces of material that joined at the side of my right leg had torn apart, sending frayed pieces of silk thread shooting upwards in an ungainly fringe.

I saw Patrick then, his head down in a sea of straining bodies, his face glistening with sweat, every sinew of his neck stretched and his face anguished as if he were enduring some kind of torture.

I couldn’t help but notice that his leg was becoming weirdly sinewy.

At this point I would eke out the little annexe’s domestic tasks, washing tea towels that weren’t dirty,

I wasn’t sure what she thought she was going to do – send Dad out with a sledge and a St Bernard?

His smile was a sly thing, breaking in from the side of his face.

He had tried to commit suicide twice by starving himself until hospitalized, and when returned home had begged his parents to smother him in his sleep.

‘This is the spare,’ he said.

Patrick launched into his sales spiel, all about personal motivation and how a fit body made for a healthy mind.

Dad, I realized, was wearing the tartan slippers with the paint splodges.

"Will stirred, and I leapt out of the chair, anxious to get it before it disturbed him. "

I began to feel the faint stirrings of panic.

The second outfit was a very severe black dress, cut on the bias and stitched with white collar and cuffs, which I had made myself.

She was wearing a jacket I hadn’t seen before, and strappy sandals.

Granta House was on the other side of Stortfold Castle, close to the medieval walls, on the long unpavemented stretch that comprised only four houses and the National Trust shop, bang in the middle of the tourist area.

He pulls his collar up around his neck and strides down the street towards the junction, from where he is most likely to hail a taxi.

So after supper she and Treena would strip Mum and Dad’s bed and put on a new set of sheets, together with a mattress protector, just in case Thomas had an accident.

temperatures slid higher, the castle car parks would become studded with vehicles, the local pubs chalk up an increase in requests for a ploughman’s lunch and, within a few sunny Sundays, we had morphed again from being

I don’t know where it came from, this urge to subvert.

And he was suspiciously talkative for the rest of the afternoon – swift to laugh, and even more combative than usual.

I had been having trouble sleeping, and had found that actually getting up was marginally preferable to lying in my bed batting away the swirling mess of my thoughts.

He had been injured in what they termed a ‘million to one’ accident when a tackle went wrong.

The car park had thinned out with the rain, and in the distance we could just hear the distorted sound of the tannoy as some other race thundered past.

And it’s all on tarmac.’

‘He’s teasing you.

‘And it’s incredibly tedious,’ Will said.

But my parents tended to stake ownership of the remote control in the evenings,

that summer was veiled in a thin layer of sadness; it gently smothered everything we did, muting mine and my sister’s tendencies to the dramatic, and cancelling our usual summer routines of brief holidays

We looked at the turnstile, and then back at Will’s chair, and then Nathan and I looked at each other.

Or shoes you bought from a charity shop that have butterflies on the toes but never quite grip the heel at the back, thereby explaining why they were a knock-down £1.99.

There would be burnished, stick-legged thoroughbreds, their jockeys in billowing bright silks, careening past.

They wore little badges on red thread, marking them out as special.

I had always thought the fortnightly meetings of the Hailsbury Triathlon Terrors must be a publican’s worst nightmare.

She bought me a pair of bright-turquoise glittery wellies – they were quite unusual back then – kids used to just have those green ones, or maybe red if you were lucky.

the writer who produced this emotional typhoon, knows very well that Me Before You ... is a ‘real weepy’.

drown out tyre

Nathan exuded an air of unflappability.

My son, although we never said as much, was in the most untenable of situations.

We were high above the little town now, me puffing on the uphill stretches, trying and failing to stop my heart racing every time a car came past.

He had since acquired a business partner, Ginger Pete, offering personal training to clients over a 40-mile area, and two liveried vans on the HP.

I had been let go after one of the doughnut girls caught me debating the varying merits of the free toys with a four-year-old.

‘I feel like there’s always a third person vying for your attention.’

I saw the vulnerabilities, the love, the history.

But the same thin wail began again at two.

Does that sound wanky?’

Everything became greener, the roads bathed in watery sunshine, the air suddenly balmy.

My winnings.

And then a faint wistfulness.

"She withdrew her hand from mine as soon as humanly possible, but I felt her eyes linger upon me, as if she were already assessing me. "