Me Before You(91)
Author: Jojo Moyes

‘Evening.’

My head shot up. Nathan was standing there, filling the little kitchen with his bulk. He had his backpack over his shoulder.

‘I just came to drop off some prescription meds for when he gets back. You … okay?’

I wiped briskly at my eyes. ‘Sure. Sorry. Just … just a little daunted about cancelling this lot.’

Nathan swung his backpack off his shoulder and sat down opposite me. ‘It’s a pisser, that’s for sure.’ He picked up the folder, and began flicking through. ‘You want a hand tomorrow? They don’t want me at the hospital, so I could stop by for an hour in the morning. Help you put in the calls.’

‘That’s kind of you. But no. I’ll be fine. Probably simpler if I do it all.’

Nathan made tea, and we sat opposite each other and drank it. I think it was the first time Nathan and I had really talked to each other – at least, without Will between us. He told me about a previous client of his, C3/4 quadriplegic with a ventilator, who had been ill at least once a month for the whole time he worked there. He told me about Will’s previous bouts of pneumonia, the first of which had nearly killed him, and from which it had taken him weeks to recover.

‘He gets this look in his eye … ’ he said. ‘When he’s really sick. It’s pretty scary. Like he just … retreats. Like he’s almost not even there.’

‘I know. I hate that look.’

‘He’s a –’ he began. And then, abruptly, his eyes slid away from me and he closed his mouth.

We sat holding our mugs. From the corner of my eye I studied Nathan, looking at his friendly open face that seemed briefly to have closed off. And I realized I was about to ask a question to which I already knew the answer.

‘You know, don’t you?’

‘Know what?’

‘About … what he wants to do.’

The silence in the room was sudden and intense.

Nathan looked at me carefully, as if weighing up how to reply.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m not meant to, but I do. That’s what … that’s what the holiday was meant to be about. That’s what the outings were all about. Me trying to change his mind.’

Nathan put his mug on the table. ‘I did wonder,’ he said. ‘You seemed … to be on a mission.’

‘I was. Am.’

He shook his head, whether to say I shouldn’t give up, or to tell me that nothing could be done, I wasn’t sure.

‘What are we going to do, Nathan?’

It took him a moment or two before he spoke again. ‘You know what, Lou? I really like Will. I don’t mind telling you, I love the guy. I’ve been with him two years now. I’ve seen him at his worst, and I’ve seen him on his good days, and all I can say to you is I wouldn’t be in his shoes for all the money in the world.’

He took a swig of his tea. ‘There have been times when I’ve stayed over and he’s woken up screaming because in his dreams he’s still walking and skiing and doing stuff and just for those few minutes, when his defences are right down and it’s all a bit raw, he literally can’t bear the thought of never doing it again. He can’t bear it. I’ve sat there with him and there is nothing I can say to the guy, nothing that is going to make it any better. He’s been dealt the shittiest hand of cards you can imagine. And you know what? I looked at him last night and I thought about his life and what it’s likely to become … and although there is nothing I’d like more in the world than for the big guy to be happy, I … I can’t judge him for what he wants to do. It’s his choice. It should be his choice.’

My breath had started to catch in my throat. ‘But … that was before. You’ve all admitted that it was before I came. He’s different now. He’s different with me, right?’

‘Sure, but –’

‘But if we don’t have faith that he can feel better, even get better, then how is he supposed to keep the faith that good things might happen?’

Nathan put his mug on the table. He looked straight into my eyes.

‘Lou. He’s not going to get better.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘I do. Unless there is some massive breakthrough in stem cell research, Will is looking at another decade in that chair. Minimum. He knows it, even if his folks don’t want to admit it. And this is half the trouble. She wants to keep him alive at any cost. Mr T thinks there is a point where we have to let him decide.’

‘Of course he gets to decide, Nathan. But he has to see what his actual choices are.’

‘He’s a bright guy. He knows exactly what his choices are.’

My voice lifted in the little room. ‘No. You’re wrong. You tell me he was in the same place before I came. You tell me he hasn’t changed his outlook even a little bit just through me being here.’

‘I can’t see inside his head, Lou.’

‘You know I’ve changed the way he thinks.’

‘No, I know that he will do pretty much anything to make you happy.’

I stared at him. ‘You think he’s going through the motions just to keep me happy?’ I felt furious with Nathan, furious with them all. ‘So if you don’t believe any of this can do any good, why were you going to come at all? Why did you even want to come on this trip? Just a nice holiday, was it?’

‘No. I want him to live.’

‘But –’

‘But I want him to live if he wants to live. If he doesn’t, then by forcing him to carry on, you, me – no matter how much we love him – we become just another shitty bunch of people taking away his choices.’

Nathan’s words reverberated into the silence. I wiped a solitary tear from my cheek and tried to make my heart rate return to normal. Nathan, apparently embarrassed by my tears, scratched absently at his neck, and then, after a minute, silently handed me a piece of kitchen roll.

‘I can’t just let it happen, Nathan.’

He said nothing.

‘I can’t.’

I stared at my passport, sitting on the kitchen table. It was a terrible picture. It looked like someone else entirely. Someone whose life, whose way of being, might actually be nothing like my own. I stared at it, thinking.

‘Nathan?’

‘What?’

‘If I could fix some other kind of trip, something the doctors would agree to, would you still come? Would you still help me?’