فصل 23

23

Exactly ten days later, Will’s father disgorged us from the car at Gatwick Airport, Nathan wrestling our luggage on to a trolley, and me checking and checking again that Will was comfortable – until even he became irritated.

‘Take care of yourselves. And have a good trip,’ Mr Traynor said, placing a hand on Will’s shoulder. ‘Don’t get up to too much mischief.’ He actually winked at me when he said this.

Mrs Traynor hadn’t been able to leave work to come too. I suspected that actually meant she hadn’t wanted to spend two hours in a car with her husband.

Will nodded but said nothing. He had been disarmingly quiet in the car, gazing out of the window with his impenetrable stare, ignoring Nathan and me as we chatted about traffic and what we already knew we had forgotten.

Even as we walked across the concourse I wasn’t sure we were doing the right thing. Mrs Traynor had not wanted him to go at all. But from the day he agreed to my revised plan, I knew she had been afraid to tell him he shouldn’t. She seemed to be afraid of talking to us at all that last week. She sat with Will in silence, talking only to the medical professionals. Or busied herself in her garden, cutting things down with frightening efficiency.

‘The airline is meant to meet us. They’re meant to come and meet us,’ I said, as we made our way to the check-in desk, flicking through my paperwork.

‘Chill out. They’re hardly going to post someone at the doors,’ Nathan said.

‘But the chair has to travel as a “fragile medical device”. I checked with the woman on the phone three times. And we need to make sure they’re not going to get funny about Will’s on-board medical equipment.’

The online quad community had given me reams of information, warnings, legal rights and checklists. I had subsequently triple-checked with the airline that we would be given bulkhead seats, and that Will would be boarded first, and not moved from his power chair until we were actually at the gates. Nathan would remain on the ground, remove the joystick and turn it to manual, and then carefully tie and bolster the chair, securing the pedals. He would personally oversee its loading to protect against damage. It would be pink-tagged to warn luggage handlers of its extreme delicacy. We had been allocated three seats in a row so that Nathan could complete any medical assistance that Will needed without prying eyes. The airline had assured me that the armrests lifted so that we wouldn’t bruise Will’s hips while transferring him from the wheelchair to his aircraft seat. We would keep him between us at all times. And we would be the first allowed off the aircraft.

All this was on my ‘airport’ checklist. That was the sheet in front of my ‘hotel’ checklist but behind my ‘day before we leave’ checklist and the itinerary. Even with all these safeguards in place, I felt sick.

Every time I looked at Will I wondered if I had done the right thing. Will had only been cleared by his GP for travel the night before. He ate little and spent much of every day asleep. He seemed not just weary from his illness, but exhausted with life, tired of our interference, our upbeat attempts at conversation, our relentless determination to try to make things better for him. He tolerated me, but I got the feeling that he often wanted to be left alone. He didn’t know that this was the one thing I could not do.

‘There’s the airline woman,’ I said, as a uniformed girl with a bright smile and a clipboard walked briskly towards us.

‘Well, she’s going to be a lot of use on transfer,’ Nathan muttered. ‘She doesn’t look like she could lift a frozen prawn.’

‘We’ll manage,’ I said. ‘Between us, we will manage.’

It had become my catchphrase, ever since I had worked out what I wanted to do. Since my conversation with Nathan in the annexe, I had been filled with a renewed zeal to prove them all wrong. Just because we couldn’t do the holiday I’d planned did not mean that Will could not do anything at all.

I hit the message boards, firing out questions. Where might be a good place for a far weaker Will to convalesce? Did anyone else know where we could go? Temperature was my main consideration – the English climate was too changeable (there was nothing more depressing than an English seaside resort in the rain). Much of Europe was too hot in late July, ruling out Italy, Greece, the South of France and other coastal areas. I had a vision, you see. I saw Will, relaxing by the sea. The problem was, with only a few days to plan it and go, there was a diminishing chance of making it a reality.

There were commiserations from the others, and many, many stories about pneumonia. It seemed to be the spectre that haunted them all. There were a few suggestions as to places we could go, but none that inspired me. Or, more importantly, none that I felt Will would be inspired by. I did not want spas, or places where he might see other people in the same position as he was. I didn’t really know what I wanted, but I scrolled backwards through the list of their suggestions and knew that nothing was right.

It was Ritchie, that chat-room stalwart, who had come to my aid in the end. The afternoon that Will was released from hospital, he typed:

Give me your email address. Cousin is travel agent. I have got him on the case.

I had rung the number he gave me and spoken to a middle-aged man with a broad Yorkshire accent. When he told me what he had in mind, a little bell of recognition rang somewhere deep in my memory. And within two hours, we had it sorted. I was so grateful to him that I could have cried.

‘Think nothing of it, pet,’ he said. ‘You just make sure that bloke of yours has a good time.’

That said, by the time we left I was almost as exhausted as Will. I had spent days wrangling with the finer requirements of quadriplegic travel, and right up until the morning we left I had not been convinced that Will would be well enough to come. Now, seated with the bags, I gazed at him, withdrawn and pale in the bustling airport, and wondered again if I had been wrong. I had a sudden moment of panic. What if he got ill again? What if he hated every minute, as he had with the horse racing? What if I had misread this whole situation, and what Will needed was not an epic journey, but ten days at home in his own bed?

But we didn’t have ten days to spare. This was it. This was my only chance.

‘They’re calling our flight,’ Nathan said, as he strolled back from the duty free. He looked at me, raised an eyebrow, and I took a breath.

‘Okay,’ I replied. ‘Let’s go.’

The flight itself, despite twelve long hours in the air, was not the ordeal I had feared. Nathan proved himself dextrous at doing Will’s routine changes under cover of a blanket. The airline staff were solicitous and discreet, and careful with the chair. Will was, as promised, loaded first, achieved transfer to his seat with no bruising, and then settled in between us.

Within an hour of being in the air I realized that, oddly enough, above the clouds, provided his seat was tilted and he was wedged in enough to be stable, Will was pretty much equal to anyone in the cabin. Stuck in front of a screen, with nowhere to move and nothing to do, there was very little, 30,000 feet up, that separated him from any of the other passengers. He ate and watched a film, and mostly he slept.

Nathan and I smiled cautiously at each other and tried to behave as if this were fine, all good. I gazed out of the window, my thoughts as jumbled as the clouds beneath us, unable yet to think about the fact that this was not just a logistical challenge but an adventure for me – that I, Lou Clark, was actually headed to the other side of the world. I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see anything beyond Will by then. I felt like my sister, when she had first given birth to Thomas. ‘It’s like I’m looking through a funnel,’ she had said, gazing at his newborn form. ‘The world has just shrunk to me and him.’

She had texted me when I was in the airport.

You can do this. Am bloody proud of you xxx

I called it up now, just to look at it, feeling suddenly emotional, perhaps because of her choice of words. Or perhaps because I was tired and afraid and still finding it hard to believe that I had even got us this far. Finally, to block my thoughts, I turned on my little television screen, gazing unseeing at some American comedy series until the skies around us grew dark.

And then I woke to find that the air stewardess was standing over us with breakfast, that Will was talking to Nathan about a film they had just watched together, and that – astonishingly, and against all the odds – the three of us were less than an hour away from landing in Mauritius.

I don’t think I believed that any of this could actually happen until we touched down at Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam International Airport. We emerged groggily through Arrivals, still stiff from our time in the air, and I could have wept with relief at the sight of the operator’s specially adapted taxi. That first morning, as the driver sped us towards the resort, I registered little of the island. True, the colours seemed brighter than England, the sky more vivid, an azure blue that just disappeared and grew deeper and deeper to infinity. I saw that the island was lush and green, fringed with acres of sugar cane crops, the sea visible like a strip of mercury through the volcanic hills. The air was tinged with something smoky and gingery, the sun so high in the sky that I had to squint into the white light. In my exhausted state it was as if someone had woken me up in the pages of a glossy magazine.

But even as my senses wrestled with the unfamiliar, my gaze returned repeatedly to Will, to his pale, weary face, to the way his head seemed oddly slumped on his shoulders. And then we pulled into a palm-tree-lined driveway, stopped outside a low framed building and the driver was already out and unloading our bags.

We declined the offer of iced tea, of a tour around the hotel. We found Will’s room, dumped his bags, settled him into his bed and almost before we had drawn the curtains, he was asleep again. And then there we were. I had done it. I stood outside his room, finally letting out a deep breath, while Nathan gazed out of the window at the white surf on the coral reef beyond. I don’t know if it was the journey, or because this was the most beautiful place I had ever been in my life, but I felt suddenly tearful.

‘It’s okay,’ Nathan said, catching sight of my expression. And then, totally unexpectedly, he walked up to me and enveloped me in a huge bear hug. ‘Relax, Lou. It’s going to be okay. Really. You did good.’

It was almost three days before I started to believe him. Will slept for most of the first forty-eight hours – and then, astonishingly, he began to look better. His skin regained its colour and he lost the blue shadows around his eyes. His spasms lessened and he began to eat again, wheeling his way slowly along the endless, extravagant buffet and telling me what he wanted on his plate. I knew he was feeling more like himself when he bullied me into trying things I would never have eaten – spicy creole curries and seafood whose name I did not recognize. He swiftly seemed more at home in this place than I did. And no wonder. I had to remind myself that, for most of his life, this had been Will’s domain – this globe, these wide shores – not the little annexe in the shadow of the castle.

The hotel had, as promised, come up with the special wheelchair with wide wheels, and most mornings Nathan transferred Will into it and we all three walked down to the beach, me carrying a parasol so that I could protect him if the sun grew too fierce. But it never did; that southern part of the island was renowned for sea breezes and, out of season, the resort temperatures rarely rose past the early twenties. We would stop at a small beach near a rocky outcrop, just out of view of the main hotel. I would unfold my chair, place myself next to Will under a palm tree, and we would watch Nathan attempt to windsurf, or waterski – occasionally shouting encouragement, plus the odd word of abuse – from our spot on the sand.

At first the hotel staff wanted to do almost too much for Will, offering to push his chair, constantly pressing cool drinks upon him. We explained what we didn’t need from them, and they cheerfully backed off. It was good, though, during the moments when I wasn’t with him, to see porters or reception staff stopping by to chat with him, or sharing with him some place that they thought we should go. There was one gangly young man, Nadil, who seemed to take it upon himself to act as Will’s unofficial carer when Nathan was not around. One day I came out to find him and a friend gently lowering Will out of his chair on to a cushioned sunbed he had positioned by ‘our’ tree.

‘This better,’ he said, giving me the thumbs up as I walked across the sand. ‘You just call me when Mr Will want to go back in his chair.’

I was about to protest, and tell them they should not have moved him. But Will had closed his eyes and lay there with a look of such unexpected contentment that I just closed my mouth and nodded.

As for me, as my anxiety about Will’s health began to ebb, I slowly began to suspect that I was actually in paradise. I had never, in my life, imagined I would spend time somewhere like this. Every morning I woke to the sound of the sea breaking gently on the shore, unfamiliar birds calling to each other from the trees. I gazed up at my ceiling, watching the sunlight playing through the leaves, and from next door heard the murmured conversation that told me Will and Nathan had already been up long before me. I dressed in sarongs and swimsuits, enjoying the feeling of the warm sun on my shoulders and back. My skin grew freckled, my nails bleached, and I began to feel a rare happiness at the simple pleasures of existing here – of walking on a beach, eating unfamiliar foods, swimming in warm, clear water where black fish gazed shyly from under volcanic rocks, or watching the sun sink fiery red into the horizon. Slowly the past few months began to slip away. To my shame, I hardly thought of Patrick at all.

Our days fell into a pattern. We ate breakfast together, all three of us, at the gently shaded tables around the pool. Will usually had fruit salad, which I fed to him by hand, and sometimes followed up with a banana pancake as his appetite grew. We then went down to the beach, where we stayed – me reading, Will listening to music – while Nathan practised his watersport skills. Will kept telling me to try something too, but at first I said no. I just wanted to stay next to him. When Will insisted, I spent one morning windsurfing and kayaking, but I was happiest just hanging around next to him.

Occasionally if Nadil was around, and the resort was quiet, he and Nathan would ease Will into the warm water of the smaller pool, Nathan holding him under his head so that he could float. He didn’t say much when they did this, but he looked quietly contented, as if his body were remembering long-forgotten sensations. His torso, long pale, grew golden. His scars silvered and began to fade. He grew comfortable without a shirt.

At lunchtime we would wheel our way over to one of the resort’s three restaurants. The surface of the whole complex was tiled, with only a few small steps and slopes, which meant that Will could move in his chair with complete autonomy. It was a small thing, but him being able to get himself a drink without one of us accompanying him meant not so much a rest for me and Nathan as the brief removal of one of Will’s daily frustrations – being entirely dependent on other people. Not that any of us had to move much anywhere. It seemed wherever you were, beach or poolside, or even the spa, one of the smiling staff would pop up with some drink they thought you might like, usually decorated with a fragrant pink flower. Even as you lay on the beach, a small buggy would pass, and a smiling waiter would offer you water, fruit juice, or something stronger.

In the afternoons, when the temperatures were at their highest, Will would return to his room and sleep for a couple of hours. I would swim in the pool, or read my book, and then in the evening we would all meet again to eat supper at the beachside restaurant. I swiftly developed a taste for cocktails. Nadil had worked out that if he gave Will the correct size straw and placed a tall glass in his holder, Nathan and I need not be involved at all. As dusk fell, the three of us talked of our childhoods and our first boyfriends and girlfriends and our first jobs and our families and other holidays we had had, and slowly I saw Will re-emerge.

Except this Will was different. This place seemed to have granted him a peace that had been missing the whole time I had known him.

‘He’s doing good, huh?’ said Nathan, as he met me by the buffet.

‘Yes, I think he is.’

‘You know –’ Nathan leant towards me, reluctant for Will to see we were talking about him ‘– I think the ranch thing and all the adventures would have been great. But looking at him now, I can’t help thinking this place has worked out better.’

I didn’t tell him what I had decided on the first day, when we checked in, my stomach knotted with anxiety, already calculating how many days I had until the return home. I had to try for each of those ten days to forget why we were actually there – the six-month contract, my carefully plotted calendar, everything that had come before. I had to just live in the moment and try to encourage Will to do the same. I had to be happy, in the hope that Will would be too.

I helped myself to another slice of melon, and smiled. ‘So what’s on later? Are we doing the karaoke? Or have your ears not yet recovered from last night?’

On the fourth night, Nathan announced with only faint embarrassment that he had a date. Karen was a fellow Kiwi staying in the next hotel, and he had agreed to go down to the town with her.

‘Just to make sure she’s all right. You know … I’m not sure if it’s a good place for her to go alone.’

‘No,’ Will said, nodding his head sagely. ‘Very chivalrous of you, Nate.’

‘I think that is a very responsible thing to do. Very civic minded,’ I agreed.

‘I have always admired Nathan for his selflessness. Especially when it comes to the fairer sex.’

‘Piss off, you two,’ Nathan grinned, and disappeared.

Karen swiftly became a fixture. Nathan disappeared with her most evenings and, although he returned for late duties, we tacitly gave him as much time as possible to enjoy himself.

Besides, I was secretly glad. I liked Nathan, and I was grateful that he had come, but I preferred it when it was just Will and I. I liked the shorthand we seemed to fall into when nobody else was around, the easy intimacy that had sprung up between us. 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.

On the penultimate night, I told Nathan that I didn’t mind if he wanted to bring Karen back to the complex. He had been spending nights in her hotel, and I knew it made it difficult for him, walking the twenty minutes each way in order to sort Will out last thing at night.

‘I don’t mind. If it will … you know … give you a bit of privacy.’

He was cheerful, already lost in the prospect of the night ahead, and didn’t give me another thought beyond an enthusiastic, ‘Thanks, mate.’

‘Nice of you,’ said Will, when I told him.

‘Nice of you, you mean,’ I said. ‘It’s your room I’ve donated to the cause.’

That night we got him into mine, and Nathan helped Will into bed and gave him his medication while Karen waited in the bar. In the bathroom I changed into my T-shirt and knickers and then opened the bathroom door and pottered over to the sofa with my pillow under my arm. I felt Will’s eyes on me, and felt oddly self-conscious for someone who had spent most of the previous week walking around in front of him in a bikini. I plumped my pillow down on the sofa arm.

‘Clark?’

‘What?’

‘You really don’t have to sleep over there. This bed is large enough for an entire football team as it is.’

The thing is, I didn’t really even think about it. That was how it was, by then. Perhaps the days spent near-naked on the beach had loosened us all up a little. Perhaps it was the thought of Nathan and Karen on the other side of the wall, wrapped up in each other, a cocoon of exclusion. Perhaps I did just want to be near him. I began to walk towards the bed, then flinched at a sudden crash of thunder. The lights stuttered, someone shouted outside. From next door we heard Nathan and Karen burst out laughing.

I walked to the window and pulled back the curtain, feeling the sudden breeze, the abrupt drop in temperature. Out at sea a storm had exploded into life. Dramatic flashes of forked lightning briefly illuminated the sky, and then, as if in afterthought, the heavy drumbeat roll of a deluge hit the roof of our little bungalow, so fierce that at first it drowned out sound.

‘I’d better close the shutters,’ I said.

‘No, don’t.’

I turned.

‘Throw the doors open.’ Will nodded towards the outside. ‘I want to see it.’

I hesitated, then slowly opened the glass doors out on to the terrace. The rain hammered down on to the hotel complex, dripping from our roof, sending rivers running away from our terrace and out towards the sea. I felt the moisture on my face, the electricity in the air. The hairs on my arms stood bolt upright.

‘Can you feel it?’ he said, from behind me.

‘It’s like the end of the world.’

I stood there, letting the charge flow through me, the white flashes imprinting themselves on my eyelids. It caused my breath to catch in my throat.

I turned back, and walked over to the bed, seating myself on its edge. As he watched, I leant forwards and gently pulled his sun-browned neck towards me. I knew just how to move him now, how I could make his weight, his solidity, work with me. Holding him close to me, I leant across and placed a fat white pillow behind his shoulders before releasing him back into its soft embrace. He smelt of the sun, as if it had seeped deep into his skin, and I found myself inhaling silently, as if he were something delicious.

Then, still a little damp, I climbed in beside him, so close that my legs touched his, and together we gazed out at the blue-white scorch as the lightning hit the waves, at the silvered stair rods of rain, the gently shifting mass of turquoise that lay only a hundred feet away.

The world around us shrank, until it was just the sound of the storm, the mauve blue-black sea, and the gently billowing gauze curtains. I smelt the lotus flowers on the night breeze, heard the distant sounds of clinking glasses and hastily drawn-back chairs, of music from some far-off celebration, felt the charge of nature unleashed. I reached across for Will’s hand, and took it in my own. I thought, briefly, that I would never feel as intensely connected to the world, to another human being, as I did at that moment.

‘Not bad, eh, Clark?’ Will said into the silence. In the face of the storm, his face was still and calm. He turned briefly and smiled at me, and there was something in his eyes then, something triumphant.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not bad at all.’

I lay still, listening to his breathing slow and deepen, the sound of the rain below it, felt his warm fingers entwined with mine. I did not want to go home. I thought I might never go home. Here Will and I were safe, locked in our little paradise. Every time I thought about heading back to England, a great claw of fear gripped my stomach and began to tighten its hold.

It’s going to be okay. I tried to repeat Nathan’s words to myself. It’s going to be okay.

Finally, I turned on to my side, away from the sea, and gazed at Will. He turned his head to look back at me in the dim light, and I felt he was telling me the same thing. It’s going to be okay. For the first time in my life I tried not to think about the future. I tried to just be, to simply let the evening’s sensations travel through me. I can’t say how long we stayed like that, just gazing at each other, but gradually Will’s eyelids grew heavier, until he murmured apologetically that he thought he might … His breathing deepened, he tipped over that small crevasse into sleep, and then it was just me watching his face, looking at the way his eyelashes separated into little points near the corner of his eyes, at the new freckles on his nose.

I told myself I had to be right. I had to be right.

The storm finally blew itself out sometime after 1am, disappearing somewhere out at sea, its flashes of anger growing fainter and then finally disappearing altogether, off to bring meteorological tyranny to some other unseen place. The air slowly grew still around us, the curtains settling, the last of the water draining away with a gurgle. Sometime in the early hours I got up, gently releasing my hand from Will’s, and closed the French windows, muffling the room in silence. Will slept – a sound, peaceful sleep that he rarely slept at home.

I didn’t. I lay there and watched him and I tried to make myself think nothing at all.

Two things happened on the last day. One was that, under pressure from Will, I agreed to try scuba diving. He had been on at me for days, stating that I couldn’t possibly come all this way and not go under the water. I had been hopeless at windsurfing, barely able to lift my sail from the waves, and had spent most of my attempts at water-skiing faceplanting my way along the bay. But he was insistent and, the day before, he arrived back at lunch announcing that he had booked me in for a half-day beginners’ diving course.

It didn’t get off to a good start. Will and Nathan sat on the side of the pool as my instructor tried to get me to believe I would continue to breathe underwater, but the knowledge that they were watching me made me hopeless. I’m not stupid – I understood that the oxygen tanks on my back would keep my lungs working, that I was not about to drown – but every time my head went under, I panicked and burst through the surface. It was as if my body refused to believe that it could still breathe underneath several thousand gallons of Mauritius’s finest chlorinated.

‘I don’t think I can do this,’ I said, as I emerged for the seventh time, spluttering.

James, my diving instructor, glanced behind me at Will and Nathan.

‘I can’t,’ I said, crossly. ‘It’s just not me.’

James turned his back on the two men, tapped me on the shoulder and gestured towards the open water. ‘Some people actually find it easier out there,’ he said quietly.

‘In the sea?’

‘Some people are better thrown in at the deep end. Come on. Let’s go out on the boat.’

Three-quarters of an hour later, I was gazing underwater at the brightly coloured landscape that had been hidden from view, forgetting to be afraid that my oxygen might fail, that against all evidence I would sink to the bottom and die a watery death, even that I was afraid at all. I was distracted by the secrets of a new world. 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, with gently swaying anemones filtering the gentle currents of their tiny, unseen haul. I saw distant landscapes, twice as brightly coloured and varied as they were above land. I saw caves and hollows where unknown creatures lurked, distant shapes that shimmered in the rays of the sun. I didn’t want to come up. I could have stayed there forever, in that silent world. It was only when James started gesticulating towards the dial of his oxygen tank that I realized I didn’t have a choice.

I could barely speak when I finally walked up the beach towards Will and Nathan, beaming. My mind was still humming with the images I had seen, my limbs somehow still propelling me under the water.

‘Good, eh?’ said Nathan.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I exclaimed to Will, throwing my flippers down on the sand in front of him. ‘Why didn’t you make me do that earlier? All that! It was all there, all the time! Just right under my nose!’

Will gazed at me steadily. He said nothing, but his smile was slow and wide. ‘I don’t know, Clark. Some people just won’t be told.’

I let myself get drunk that last night. It wasn’t just that we were leaving the next day. It was the first time I had felt truly that Will was well and that I could let go. I wore a white cotton dress (my skin had coloured now, so that wearing white didn’t automatically make me resemble a corpse wearing a shroud) and a pair of silvery strappy sandals, and when Nadil gave me a scarlet flower and instructed me to put it in my hair I didn’t scoff at him as I might have done a week earlier.

‘Well, hello, Carmen Miranda,’ Will said, when I met them at the bar. ‘Don’t you look glamorous.’

I was about to make some sarcastic reply, and then I realized he was looking at me with genuine pleasure.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You’re not looking too shabby yourself.’

There was a disco at the main hotel complex, so shortly before 10pm – when Nathan left to be with Karen – we headed down to the beach with the music in our ears and the pleasant buzz of three cocktails sweetening my movements.

Oh, but it was so beautiful down there. The night was warm, carrying on its breezes the scents of distant barbecues, of warm oils on skin, of the faint salt tang of the sea. Will and I stopped near our favourite tree. Someone had built a fire on the beach, perhaps for cooking, and all that was left was a pile of glowing embers.

‘I don’t want to go home,’ I said, into the darkness.

‘It’s a hard place to leave.’

‘I didn’t think places like this existed outside films,’ I said, turning so that I faced him. ‘It has actually made me wonder if you might have been telling the truth about all the other stuff.’

He was smiling. His whole face seemed relaxed and happy, his eyes crinkling as he looked at me. I looked at him, and for the first time it wasn’t with a faint fear gnawing away at my insides.

‘You’re glad you came, right?’ I said, tentatively.

He nodded. ‘Oh yes.’

‘Hah!’ I punched the air.

And then, as someone turned the music up by the bar, I kicked off my shoes and I began to dance. It sounds stupid – the kind of behaviour that on another day you might be embarrassed by. But there, in the inky dark, half drunk from lack of sleep, with the fire and the endless sea and infinite sky, with the sounds of the music in our ears and Will smiling and my heart bursting with something I couldn’t quite identify, I just needed to dance. I danced, laughing, not self-conscious, not worrying about whether anybody could see us. I felt Will’s eyes on me and I knew he knew – that this was the only possible response to the last ten days. Hell, to the last six months.

The song ended, and I flopped, breathless, at his feet.

‘You … ’ he said.

‘What?’ My smile was mischievous. I felt fluid, electrified. I barely felt responsible for myself.

He shook his head.

I rose, slowly, on to my bare feet, walked right up to his chair and then slid on to his lap so that my face was inches from his. After the previous evening, it somehow didn’t seem like such a leap to make.

‘You . … ’ His blue eyes, glinting with the light of the fire, locked on to mine. He smelt of the sun, and the bonfire, and something sharp and citrussy.

I felt something give, deep inside me.

‘You … are something else, Clark.’

I did the only thing I could think of. I leant forward, and I placed my lips on his. He hesitated, just for a moment, and then he kissed me. And just for a moment I forgot everything – the million and one reasons I shouldn’t, my fears, the reason we were here. I kissed him, breathing in the scent of his skin, feeling his soft hair under my fingertips, and when he kissed me back all of this vanished and it was just Will and me, on an island in the middle of nowhere, under a thousand twinkling stars.

And then he pulled back. ‘I … I’m sorry. No –’

My eyes opened. I lifted a hand to his face and let it trace his beautiful bones. I felt the faint grit of salt under my fingertips. ‘Will … ’ I began. ‘You can. You –’

‘No.’ It held a hint of metal, that word. ‘I can’t.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I don’t want to go into it.’

‘Um … I think you have to go into it.’

‘I can’t do this because I can’t … ’ he swallowed. ‘I can’t be the man I want to be with you. And that means that this –’ he looked up into my face ‘– this just becomes … another reminder of what I am not.’

I didn’t let go of his face. I tipped my forehead forward so that it touched his, so that our breath mingled, and I said, quietly, so that only he could have heard me, ‘I don’t care what you … what you think you can and can’t do. It’s not black and white. Honestly … I’ve talked to other people in the same situation and … and there are things that are possible. Ways that we can both be happy … ’ I had begun to stammer a little. I felt weird even having this conversation. I looked up and into his eyes. ‘Will Traynor,’ I said, softly. ‘Here’s the thing. I think we can do –’

‘No, Clark –’ he began.

‘I think we can do all sorts of things. I know this isn’t a conventional love story. I know there are all sorts of reasons I shouldn’t even be saying what I am. But I love you. I do. I knew it when I left Patrick. And I think you might even love me a little bit.’

He didn’t speak. His eyes searched my own, and there was this huge weight of sadness within them. I stroked the hair away from his temples, as if I could somehow lift his sorrow, and he tilted his head to meet the palm of my hand, so that it rested there.

He swallowed. ‘I have to tell you something.’

‘I know,’ I whispered. ‘I know everything.’

Will’s mouth closed on his words. The air seemed to still around us.

‘I know about Switzerland. I know … why I was employed on a six-month contract.’

He lifted his head away from my hand. He looked at me, then gazed upwards at the skies. His shoulders sagged.

‘I know it all, Will. I’ve known for months. And, Will, please listen to me …’ I took his right hand in mine, and I brought it up close to my chest. ‘I know we can do this. I know it’s not how you would have chosen it, but I know I can make you happy. And all I can say is that you make me … you make me into someone I couldn’t even imagine. You make me happy, even when you’re awful. I would rather be with you – even the you that you seem to think is diminished – than with anyone else in the world.’

I felt his fingers tighten a fraction around mine, and it gave me courage.

‘If you think it’s too weird with me being employed by you, then I’ll leave and I’ll work somewhere else. I wanted to tell you – I’ve applied for a college course. I’ve done loads of research on the internet, talking to other quads and carers of quads, and I have learnt so much, so much about how to make this work. So I can do that, and just be with you. You see? I’ve thought of everything, researched everything. This is how I am now. This is your fault. You changed me.’ I was half laughing. ‘You’ve turned me into my sister. But with better dress sense.’

He had closed his eyes. I placed both my hands around his, lifted his knuckles to my mouth, and I kissed them. I felt his skin against mine, and knew as I had never known anything that I could not let him go.

‘What do you say?’ I whispered.

I could have looked into his eyes forever.

He said it so quietly, that for a minute I could not be sure I had heard him correctly.

‘What?’

‘No, Clark.’

‘No?’

‘I’m sorry. It’s not enough.’

I lowered his hand. ‘I don’t understand.’

He waited before he spoke, as if he were struggling, for once, to find the right words. ‘It’s not enough for me. This – my world – even with you in it. And believe me, Clark, my whole life has changed for the better since you came. But it’s not enough for me. It’s not the life I want.’

Now it was my turn to pull away.

‘The thing is, I get that this could be a good life. I get that with you around, perhaps it could even be a very good life. But it’s not my life. I am not the same as these people you speak to. It’s nothing like the life I want. Not even close.’ His voice was halting, broken. His expression frightened me.

I swallowed, shaking my head. ‘You … you once told me that the night in the maze didn’t have to be the thing that defined me. You said I could choose what it was that defined me. Well, you don’t have to let that … that chair define you.’

‘But it does define me, Clark. You don’t know me, not really. You never saw me before this thing. I loved my life, Clark. Really loved it. I loved my job, my travels, the things I was. I loved being a physical person. I liked riding my motorbike, hurling myself off buildings. I liked crushing people in business deals. I liked having sex. Lots of sex. I led a big life.’ His voice had lifted now. ‘I am not designed to exist in this thing – and yet for all intents and purposes it is now the thing that defines me. It is the only thing that defines me.’

‘But you’re not even giving it a chance,’ I whispered. My voice didn’t seem to want to emerge from my chest. ‘You’re not giving me a chance.’

‘It’s not a matter of giving you a chance. I’ve watched you these six months becoming a whole different person, someone who is only just beginning to see her possibilities. You have no idea how happy that has made me. I don’t want you to be tied to me, to my hospital appointments, to the restrictions on my life. I don’t want you to miss out on all the things someone else could give you. And, selfishly, I don’t want you to look at me one day and feel even the tiniest bit of regret or pity that –’

‘I would never think that!’

‘You don’t know that, Clark. You have no idea how this would play out. You have no idea how you’re going to feel even six months from now. And I don’t want to look at you every day, to see you naked, to watch you wandering around the annexe in your crazy dresses and not … not be able to do what I want with you. Oh, Clark, if you had any idea what I want to do to you right now. And I … I can’t live with that knowledge. I can’t. It’s not who I am. I can’t be the kind of man who just … accepts.’

He glanced down at his chair, his voice breaking. ‘I will never accept this.’

I had begun to cry. ‘Please, Will. Please don’t say this. Just give me a chance. Give us a chance.’

‘Sshhh. Just listen. You, of all people. Listen to what I’m saying. This … tonight … is the most wonderful thing you could have done for me. What you have told me, what you have done in bringing me here … knowing that, somehow, from that complete arse I was at the start of this, you managed to salvage something to love is astonishing to me. But –’ I felt his fingers close on mine ‘– I need it to end here. No more chair. No more pneumonia. No more burning limbs. No more pain and tiredness and waking up every morning already wishing it was over. When we get back, I am still going to go to Switzerland. And if you do love me, Clark, as you say you do, the thing that would make me happier than anything is if you would come with me.’

My head whipped back.

‘What?’

‘It’s not going to get any better than this. The odds are I’m only going to get increasingly unwell and my life, reduced as it is, is going to get smaller. The doctors have said as much. There are a host of conditions encroaching on me. I can feel it. I don’t want to be in pain any more, or trapped in this thing, or dependent on everyone, or afraid. So I’m asking you – if you feel the things you say you feel – then do it. Be with me. Give me the end I’m hoping for.’

I looked at him in horror, my blood thumping in my ears. I could barely take it in.

‘How can you ask me that?’

‘I know, it’s –’

‘I tell you I love you and I want to build a future with you, and you ask me to come and watch you kill yourself?’

‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean it to sound blunt. But I haven’t got the luxury of time.’

‘Wha– what? Why, are you actually booked in? Is there some appointment you’re afraid of missing?’

I could see people at the hotel stopping, perhaps hearing our raised voices, but I didn’t care.

‘Yes,’ Will said, after a pause. ‘Yes, there is. I’ve had the consultations. The clinic agreed that I am a suitable case for them. And my parents agreed to the thirteenth of August. We’re due to fly out the day before.’

My head had begun to spin. It was less than a week away.

‘I don’t believe this.’

‘Louisa –’

‘I thought … I thought I was changing your mind.’

He tilted his head sideways and gazed at me. His voice was soft, his eyes gentle. ‘Louisa, nothing was ever going to change my mind. I promised my parents six months, and that’s what I’ve given them. You have made that time more precious than you can imagine. You stopped it being an endurance test –’

‘Don’t!’

‘What?’

‘Don’t say another word.’ I was choking. ‘You are so selfish, Will. So stupid. Even if there was the remotest possibility of me coming with you to Switzerland … even if you thought I might, after all I’ve done for you, be someone who could do that, is that all you can say to me? I tore my heart out in front of you. And all you can say is, “No, you’re not enough for me. And now I want you to come watch the worst thing you can possibly imagine.” The thing I have dreaded ever since I first found out about it. Do you have any idea what you are asking of me?’

I was raging now. Standing in front of him, shouting like a madwoman. ‘Fuck you, Will Traynor. Fuck you. I wish I’d never taken this stupid job. I wish I’d never met you.’ I burst into tears, ran up the beach and back to my hotel room, away from him.

His voice, calling my name, rang in my ears long after I had closed the door.