needed to look at him to work out what he wanted. Patrick, opposite, ate with his head down, cutting the smoked salmon into small pieces and spearing them with his fork. He left his bread.
‘So, Patrick,’ Will said, perhaps sensing my discomfort. ‘Louisa tells me you’re a personal trainer. What does that involve?’
I so wished he hadn’t asked. Patrick launched into his sales spiel, all about personal motivation and how a fit body made for a healthy mind. Then he segued into his training schedule for the Xtreme Viking – the temperatures of the North Sea, the body fat ratios needed for marathon running, his best times in each discipline. I normally tuned out at this point, but all I could think of now, with Will beside me, was how inappropriate it was. Why couldn’t he have just said something vague and left it at that?
‘In fact, when Lou said you were coming, I thought I’d take a look at my books and see if there was any physio I could recommend.’
I choked on my champagne. ‘It’s quite specialist, Patrick. I’m not sure you’d really be the person.’
‘I can do specialist. I do sports injuries. I have medical training.’
‘This is not a sprained ankle, Pat. Really.’
‘There’s a man I worked with a couple of years ago had a client who was paraplegic. He’s almost fully recovered now, he says. Does triathlons and everything.’
‘Fancy,’ said my mother.
‘He pointed me to this new research in Canada that says muscles can be trained to remember former activity. If you get them working enough, every day, it’s like a brain synapse – it can come back. I bet you if we hooked you up with a really good regime, you could see a difference in your muscle memory. After all, Lou tells me you were quite the action man before.’
‘Patrick,’ I said loudly. ‘You know nothing about it.’
‘I was just trying to –’
‘Well don’t. Really.’
The table fell silent. Dad coughed, and excused himself for it. Granddad peered around the table in wary silence.
Mum made as if to offer everyone more bread, and then seemed to change her mind.
When Patrick spoke again, there was a faint air of martyrdom in his tone. ‘It’s just research that I thought might be helpful. But I’ll say no more about it.’
Will looked up and smiled, his face blank, polite. ‘I’ll certainly bear it in mind.’
I got up to clear the plates, wanting to escape the table. But Mum scolded me, telling me to sit down.
‘You’re the birthday girl,’ she said – as if she ever let anyone else do anything, anyway. ‘Bernard. Why don’t you go and get the chicken?’
‘Ha-ha. Let’s hope it’s stopped flapping around now, eh?’ Dad smiled, his teeth bared in a kind of grimace.
The rest of the meal passed off without incident. My parents, I could see, were completely charmed by Will. Patrick, less so. He and Will barely exchanged another word. Somewhere around the point where Mum served up the roast potatoes – Dad doing his usual thing of trying to steal extras – I stopped worrying. Dad was asking Will all sorts, about his life before, even about the accident, and he seemed comfortable enough to answer him directly. In fact, I learnt a fair bit that he’d never told me. His job, for example, sounded pretty important, even if he played it down. He bought and sold companies and made sure he turned a profit while doing so. It took Dad a few attempts to prise out of him that his idea of profit ran into six or seven figures. I found myself staring at Will, trying to reconcile the man I knew with this ruthless City suit that he now described. Dad told him about the company that was about to take over the furniture factory, and when he said the name Will nodded almost apologetically, and said that yes, he knew of them. Yes, he would probably have gone for it too. The way he said it didn’t sound promising for Dad’s job.
Mum just cooed at Will, and made a huge fuss of him. I realized, watching her smile, that at some stage during the meal he had just become a smart young man at her table. No wonder Patrick was pissed off.
‘Birthday cake?’ Granddad said, as she began to clear the dishes.
It was so distinct, so surprising, that Dad and I stared at each other in shock. The whole table went quiet.
‘No,’ I walked around the table and kissed him. ‘No, Granddad. Sorry. But it is chocolate mousse. You like that.’
He nodded in approval. My mother was beaming. I don’t think any of us could have had a better present.
The mousse arrived on the table, and with it a large, square present, about the size of a telephone directory, wrapped in tissue.
‘Presents, is it?’ Patrick said. ‘Here. Here’s mine.’ He smiled at me as he placed it in the middle of the table.
I raised a smile back. This was no time to argue, after all.
‘Go on,’ said Dad. ‘Open it.’
I opened theirs first, peeling the paper carefully away so that I didn’t tear it. It was a photograph album, and on every page there was a picture from a year in my life. Me as a baby; me and Treena as solemn, chubby-faced girls; me on my first day at secondary school, all hairclips and oversized skirt. More recently, there was a picture of me and Patrick, the one where I was actually telling him to piss off. And me, dressed in a grey skirt, my first day in my new job. In between the pages were pictures of our family by Thomas, letters that Mum had kept from school trips, my childish handwriting telling of days on the beach, lost ice creams and thieving gulls. I flicked through, and only hesitated briefly when I saw the girl with the long, dark flicked-back hair. I turned the page.
‘Can I see?’ Will said.
‘It’s not been … the best year,’ Mum told him, as I flicked through the pages in front of him. ‘I mean, we’re fine and everything. But, you know, things being what they are. And then Granddad saw something on the daytime telly about making your own presents, and I thought that was something that would … you know … really mean something.’
‘It does, Mum.’ My eyes had filled with tears. ‘I love it. Thank you.’
‘Granddad picked out some of the pictures,’ she said.
‘It’s beautiful,’ said Will.
‘I love it,’ I said again.
The look of utter relief she and Dad exchanged was the saddest thing I have ever seen.
‘Mine next.’ Patrick pushed the little box across the table. I opened it slowly, feeling vaguely panicked for a moment that it might be an engagement ring. I wasn’t ready. I had barely got my head around having my own bedroom. I opened the little box, and there, against the dark-blue velvet, was a thin gold chain with a little star pendant. It was sweet, delicate, and not remotely me. I didn’t wear that kind of jewellery, never had.
I let my eyes rest on it while I worked out what to say. ‘It’s lovely,’ I said, as he leant across the table and fastened it around my neck.
‘Glad you like it,’ Patrick said, and kissed me on the mouth. I swear he’d never kissed me like that in front of my parents before.
Will watched me, his face impassive.
‘Well, I think we should eat pudding now,’ Dad said. ‘Before it gets too hot.’ He laughed out loud at his own joke. The champagne had boosted his spirits immeasurably.
‘There’s something in my bag for you too,’ Will said, quietly. ‘The one on the back of my chair. It’s in orange wrapping.’
I pulled the present from Will’s backpack.
My mother paused, the serving spoon in her hand. ‘You got Lou a present, Will? That’s ever so kind of you. Isn’t that kind of him, Bernard?’
‘It certainly is.’
The wrapping paper had brightly coloured Chinese kimonos on it. I didn’t have to look at it to know I would save it. Perhaps even create something to wear based on it. I removed the ribbon, putting it to one side for later. I opened the paper, and then the tissue paper within it, and there, staring at me was a strangely familiar black and yellow stripe.
I pulled the fabric from the parcel, and in my hands were two pairs of black and yellow tights. Adult-sized, opaque, in a wool so soft that they almost slid through my fingers.
‘I don’t believe it,’ I said. I had started to laugh – a joyous, unexpected thing. ‘Oh my God! Where did you get these?’
‘I had them made. You’ll be happy to know I instructed the woman via my brand-new voice recognition software.’
‘Tights?’ Dad and Patrick said in unison.
‘Only the best pair of tights ever.’
My mother peered at them. ‘You know, Louisa, I’m pretty sure you had a pair just like that when you were very little.’
Will and I exchanged a look.
I couldn’t stop beaming. ‘I want to put them on now,’ I said.
‘Jesus Christ, she’ll look like Max Wall in a beehive,’ my father said, shaking his head.
‘Ah Bernard, it’s her birthday. Sure, she can wear what she wants.’
I ran outside and pulled on a pair in the hallway. I pointed a toe, admiring the silliness of them. I don’t think a present had ever made me so happy in my life.
I walked back in. Will let out a small cheer. Granddad banged his hands on the table. Mum and Dad burst out laughing. Patrick just stared.
‘I can’t even begin to tell you how much I love these,’ I said. ‘Thank you. Thank you.’ I reached out a hand and touched the back of his shoulder. ‘Really.’
‘There’s a card in there too,’ he said. ‘Open it some other time.’
My parents made a huge fuss of Will when he left.
Dad, who was drunk, kept thanking him for employing me, and made him promise to come back. ‘If I lose my job, maybe I’ll come over and watch the footie with you one day,’ he said.
‘I’d like that,’ said Will, even though I’d never seen him watch a football match.
My mum pressed some leftover mousse on him, wrapping it in a Tupperware container, ‘Seeing as you liked it so much.’
What a gentleman, they would say, for a good hour after he had gone. A real gentleman.
Patrick came out to the hallway, his hands shoved deep in his pockets, as if perhaps to stop the urge to shake Will’s own. That was my more generous conclusion.
‘Good to meet you, Patrick,’ Will said. ‘And thank you for the … advice.’
‘Oh, just trying to help my girlfriend get the best out of her job,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’ There was a definite emphasis on the word my.
‘Well, you’re a lucky man,’ Will said, as Nathan began to steer him out. ‘She certainly gives a good bed bath.’ He said it so quickly that the door was closed before Patrick even realized what he had said.
‘You never told me you were giving him bed baths.’
We had gone back to Patrick’s house, a new-build flat on the edge of town. It had been marketed as ‘loft living’, even though it overlooked the retail park, and was no more than three floors high.
‘What does that mean – you wash his dick?’
‘I don’t wash his dick.’ I picked up the cleanser that was one of the few things I was allowed to keep at Patrick’s place, and began to clean off my make-up with sweeping strokes.
‘He just said you did.’
‘He’s teasing you. And after you going on and on about how he used to be an action man, I don’t blame him.’
‘So what is it you do for him? You’ve obviously not been giving me the full story.’
‘I do wash him, sometimes, but only down to his underwear.’
Patrick’s stare spoke volumes. Finally, he looked away from me, pulled off his socks and hurled them into the laundry basket. ‘Your job isn’t meant to be about this. No medical stuff, it said. No intimate stuff. It wasn’t part of your job description.’ A sudden thought occurred to him. ‘You could sue. Constructive dismissal, I think it is, when they change the terms of your job?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. And I do it because Nathan can’t always be there, and it’s horrible for Will to have some complete stranger from an agency handling him. And besides, I’m used to it now. It really doesn’t bother me.’
How could I explain to him – how a body can become so familiar to you? I could change Will’s tubes with a deft professionalism, sponge bathe his naked top half without a break in our conversation. I didn’t even balk at Will’s scars now. For a while, all I had been able to see was a potential suicide. Now he was just Will – maddening, mercurial, clever, funny Will – who patronized me and liked to play Professor Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle. His body was just part of the whole package, a thing to be dealt with, at intervals, before we got back to the talking. It had become, I supposed, the least interesting part of him.
‘I just can’t believe … after all we went through … how long it took you to let me come anywhere near you … and here’s some stranger who you’re quite happy to get up close and personal with –’
‘Can we not talk about this tonight, Patrick? It’s my birthday.’
‘I wasn’t the one who started it, with talk of bed baths and whatnot.’
‘Is it because he’s good looking?’ I demanded. ‘Is that it? Would it all be so much easier for you if he looked like – you know – a proper vegetable?’
‘So you do think he’s good looking.’
I pulled my dress over my head, and began peeling my tights carefully from my legs, the dregs of my good mood finally evaporating. ‘I can’t believe you’re doing this. I can’t believe you’re jealous of him.’
‘I’m not jealous of him.’ His tone was dismissive. ‘How could I be jealous of a cripple?’
Patrick made love to me that night. Perhaps ‘made love’ is stretching it a bit. We had sex, a marathon session in which he seemed determined to show off his athleticism, his strength and vigour. It lasted for hours. If he could have swung me from a chandelier I think he would have done so. It was nice to feel so wanted, to find myself the focus of Patrick’s attention after months of semi-detachment. But a little part of me stayed aloof during the whole thing. I suspected it wasn’t for me, after all. I had worked that out pretty quickly. This little show was for Will’s benefit.
‘How was that, eh?’ He wrapped himself around me afterwards, our skin sticking slightly with perspiration, and kissed my forehead.
‘Great,’ I said.
‘I love you, babe.’
And, satisfied, he rolled off, threw an arm back over his head, and was asleep within minutes.
When sleep still didn’t come, I got out of bed and went downstairs to my bag. I rifled through it, looking for the book of Flannery O’Connor short stories. It was as I pulled them from my bag that the envelope fell out.
I stared at it. Will’s card. I hadn’t opened it at the table. I did so now, feeling an unlikely sponginess at its centre. I slid the card carefully from its envelope, and opened it. Inside were ten crisp £50 notes. I counted them twice, unable to believe what I was seeing. Inside, it read:
Birthday bonus. Don’t fuss. It’s a legal requirement. W.
14
May was a strange month. The newspapers and television were full of headlines about what they termed ‘the right to die’. A woman suffering from a degenerative disease had asked that the law be clarified to protect her husband, should he accompany her to Dignitas when her suffering became too much. A young football player had committed suicide after persuading his parents to take him there. The police were involved. There was to be a debate in the House of Lords.
I watched the news reports and listened to the legal arguments from pro-lifers and esteemed moral philosophers, and didn’t quite know where I stood on any of it. It all seemed weirdly unrelated to Will.
We, in the meantime, had gradually been increasing Will’s outings – and the distance that he was prepared to travel. We had been to the theatre, down the road to see the morris dancers (Will kept a straight face at their bells and hankies, but he had gone slightly pink with the effort), driven one evening to an open-air concert at a nearby stately home (more his thing than mine), and once to the multiplex where, due to inadequate research on my part, we ended up watching a film about a girl with a terminal illness.
But I knew he saw the headlines too. He had begun using the computer more since we got the new software, and he had worked out how to move a mouse by dragging his thumb across a trackpad. This laborious exercise enabled him to read the day’s newspapers online. I brought him in a cup of tea one morning to find him reading about the young football player – a detailed feature about the steps he had gone through to bring about his own death. He blanked the screen when he realized I was behind him. That small action left me with a lump somewhere high in my chest that took a full half-hour to go away.
I looked up the same piece at the library. I had begun to read newspapers. I had worked out which of their arguments tended to go deeper – that information wasn’t always at its most useful boiled down to stark, skeletal facts.
The football player’s parents had been savaged by the tabloid newspapers. How Could They Let Him Die? screamed the headlines. I couldn’t help but feel the same way. Leo McInerney was twenty-four. He had lived with his injury for almost three years, so not much longer than Will. Surely he was too young to decide that there was nothing left to live for? And then I read what Will had read – not an opinion piece, but a carefully researched feature about what had actually taken place in this young man’s life. The writer seemed to have had access to his parents.
Leo, they said, had played football since he was three years old. His whole life was football. He had been injured in what they termed a ‘million to one’ accident when a tackle went wrong. They had tried everything to encourage him, to give him a sense that his life would still hold value. But he had retreated into depression. He was an athlete not just without athleticism, but without even the ability to move or, on occasion, breathe without assistance. He gleaned no pleasure from anything. His life was painful, disrupted by infection, and dependent on the constant ministrations of others. He missed his friends, but refused to see them. He told his girlfriend he wouldn’t see her. He told his parents daily that he didn’t want to live. He told them that watching other people live even half the life he had planned for himself was unbearable, a kind of torture.
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. When I read that, I sat in the library and stuck the balls of my hands in my eyes until I could breathe without sobbing.
Dad lost his job. He was pretty brave about it. He came home that afternoon, got changed into a shirt and tie and headed back into town on the next bus, to register at the Job Centre.
He had already decided, he told Mum, that he would apply for anything, despite being a skilled craftsman with years of experience. ‘I don’t think we can afford to be picky at the moment,’ he said, ignoring Mum’s protestations.
But if I had found it hard to get employment, prospects for a 55-year-old man who had only ever held one job were harder. He couldn’t even get a job as a warehouseman or a security guard, he said, despairingly, as he returned home from another round of interviews. They would take some unreliable snot-nosed seventeen-year-old because the government would make up their wages, but they wouldn’t take a mature man with a proven work record. After a fortnight of rejections, he and Mum admitted they would have to apply for benefits, just to tide them over, and spent their evenings poring over incomprehensible, fifty-page forms which asked how many people used their washing machine, and when was the last time they had left the country (Dad thought it might have been 1988). I put Will’s birthday money into the cash tin in the kitchen cupboard. I thought it might make them feel better to know they had a little security.
When I woke up in the morning, it had been pushed back under my door in an envelope.
The tourists came, and the town began to fill. Mr Traynor was around less and less now; his hours lengthened as the visitor numbers to the castle grew. I saw him in town one Thursday afternoon, when I walked home via the dry cleaner’s. That wouldn’t have been unusual in itself, except for the fact he had his arm around a red-haired woman who clearly wasn’t Mrs Traynor. When he saw me he dropped her like a hot potato.
I turned away, pretending to peer into a shop window, unsure if I wanted him to know that I had seen them, and tried very hard not to think about it again.
On the Friday after my dad lost his job, Will received an invitation – a wedding invitation from Alicia and Rupert. Well, strictly speaking, the invitation came from Colonel and Mrs Timothy Dewar, Alicia’s parents, inviting Will to celebrate their daughter’s marriage to Rupert Freshwell. It arrived in a heavy parchment envelope with a schedule of celebrations, and a fat, folded list of things that people could buy them from stores I had never even heard of.
‘She’s got some nerve,’ I observed, studying the gilt lettering, the gold-edged piece of thick card. ‘Want me to throw it?’
‘Whatever you want.’ Will’s whole body was a study in determined indifference.
I stared at the list. ‘What the hell is a couscoussier anyway?’
Perhaps it was something to do with the speed with which he turned away and began busying himself with his computer keyboard. Perhaps it was his tone of voice. But for some reason I didn’t throw it away. I put it carefully into his folder in the kitchen.
Will gave me another book of short stories, one that he’d ordered from Amazon, and a copy of The Red Queen. I knew it wasn’t going to be my sort of book at all. ‘It hasn’t even got a story,’ I said, after studying the back cover.
‘So?’ Will replied. ‘Challenge yourself a bit.’