Me Before You(63)
Author: Jojo Moyes

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.