Me Before You

Steven turned from the fire. I could see him studying me, perhaps conscious of the new lines around my eyes, the way my mouth seemed set these days into a thin line of anxiety. He looked at the little gold cross, now ever present around my neck. I didn’t like it when he looked at me like that. I could never escape the feeling that I was being compared to someone else.

‘I’m just being realistic.’

‘You sound … you sound like you’re already expecting it to happen.’

‘I know my son.’

‘Our son.’

‘Yes. Our son.’ More my son, I found myself thinking. You were never really there for him. Not emotionally. You were just the absence he was always striving to impress.

‘He’ll change his mind,’ Steven said. ‘There’s still a long way to go.’

We stood there. I took a long sip of my drink, the ice cold against the warmth given out by the fire.

‘I keep thinking … ’ I said, staring into the hearth. ‘I still keep thinking that I’m missing something.’

My husband was still watching me. I could feel his gaze on me, but I couldn’t meet it. Perhaps he might have reached out to me then. But I think we had probably gone too far for that.

He took a sip of his drink. ‘You can only do what you can do, darling.’

‘I’m well aware of that. But it’s not really enough, is it?’

He turned back to the fire, poking unnecessarily at a log until I turned and quietly left the room.

As he had known I would.

When Will first told me what he wanted, he had to tell me twice, as I was quite sure I could not have heard him correctly the first time. I stayed quite calm when I realized what it was he was proposing, and then I told him he was being ridiculous and I walked straight out of the room. It’s an unfair advantage, being able to walk away from a man in a wheelchair. There are two steps between the annexe and the main house, and without Nathan’s help he could not traverse them. I shut the door of the annexe and I stood in my own hallway with the calmly spoken words of my son still ringing in my ears.

I’m not sure I moved for half an hour.

He refused to let it go. Being Will, he always had to have the last word. He repeated his request every time I went in to see him until I almost had to persuade myself to go in each day. I don’t want to live like this, Mother. This is not the life I chose. There is no prospect of my recovery, hence it is a perfectly reasonable request to ask to end it in a manner I see fit. I heard him and could well imagine what he had been like in those business meetings, the career that had made him rich and arrogant. He was a man who was used to being heard, after all. He couldn’t bear it that in some way I had the power to dictate his future, that I had somehow become mother again.

It took his attempt to make me agree. It’s not that my religion forbade it – although the prospect of Will being consigned to hell through his own desperation was a terrible one. (I chose to believe that God, a benign God, would understand our sufferings and forgive us our trespasses.)

It’s just that the thing you never understand about being a mother, until you are one, is that 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. You see all the people he has ever been all rolled up into one.

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. I saw the toddler, reaching for my hand, the schoolboy weeping tears of fury after being bullied by some other child. I saw the vulnerabilities, the love, the history. That’s what he was asking me to extinguish – the small child as well as the man – all that love, all that history.

And then on 22 January, a day when I was stuck in court with a relentless roll call of shoplifters and uninsured drivers, of weeping angry ex-partners, Steven walked into the annexe and found our son almost unconscious, his head lolling by his armrest, a sea of dark, sticky blood pooling around his wheels. 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. I cannot to this day imagine the determination that kept him going, even though he must have been half delirious from the pain. The doctors said he was less than twenty minutes from death.

It was not, they observed with exquisite understatement, a cry for help.