I blushed. He was right. I was sitting feeding Will, while both of us vaguely watched the lunchtime news. The meal was roast beef with mashed potato. His mother had told me to put three sorts of vegetables on the plate, even though he had said quite clearly that he didn’t want vegetables that day. I don’t think there was a meal that I was instructed to prepare that wasn’t nutritionally balanced to within an inch of its life.
‘Why are you trying to sneak carrots into me?’
‘I’m not.’
‘So there are no carrots on that?’
I gazed at the tiny pieces of orange. ‘Well … okay … ’
He was waiting, eyebrows raised.
‘Um … I suppose I thought vegetables would be good for you?’
It was part deference to Mrs Traynor, part force of habit. I was so used to feeding Thomas, whose vegetables had to be mashed to a paste and hidden under mounds of potato, or secreted in bits of pasta. Every fragment we got past him felt like a little victory.
‘Let me get this straight. You think a teaspoon of carrot would improve my quality of life?’
It was pretty stupid when he put it like that. But I had learnt it was important not to look cowed by anything Will said or did.
‘I take your point,’ I said evenly. ‘I won’t do it again.’
And then, out of nowhere, Will Traynor laughed. It exploded out of him in a gasp, as if it were entirely unexpected.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ he shook his head.
I stared at him.
‘What the hell else have you been sneaking into my food? You’ll be telling me to open the tunnel so that Mr Train can deliver some mushy Brussel sprouts to the red bloody station next.’
I considered this for a minute. ‘No,’ I said, straight-faced. ‘I deal only with Mr Fork. Mr Fork does not look like a train.’
Thomas had told me so, very firmly, some months previously.
‘Did my mother put you up to this?’
‘No. Look, Will, I’m sorry. I just … wasn’t thinking.’
‘Like that’s unusual.’
‘All right, all right. I’ll take the bloody carrots off, if they really upset you so much.’
‘It’s not the bloody carrots that upset me. It’s having them sneaked into my food by a madwoman who addresses the cutlery as Mr and Mrs Fork.’
‘It was a joke. Look, let me take the carrots and –’
He turned away from me. ‘I don’t want anything else. Just do me a cup of tea.’ He called out after me as I left the room, ‘And don’t try and sneak a bloody courgette into it.’
Nathan walked in as I was finishing the dishes. ‘He’s in a good mood,’ he said, as I handed him a mug.
‘Is he?’ I was eating my sandwiches in the kitchen. It was bitterly cold outside, and somehow the house hadn’t felt quite as unfriendly lately.
‘He says you’re trying to poison him. But he said it – you know – in a good way.’
I felt weirdly pleased by this information.
‘Yes … well … ’ I said, trying to hide it. ‘Give me time.’
‘He’s talking a bit more too. We’ve had weeks where he would hardly say a thing, but he’s definitely up for a bit of a chat the last few days.’
I thought of Will telling me if I didn’t stop bloody whistling he’d be forced to run me over. ‘I think his definition of chatty and mine are a bit different.’
‘Well, we had a bit of a chat about the cricket. And I gotta tell you –’ Nathan dropped his voice ‘– Mrs T asked me a week or so back if I thought you were doing okay. I said I thought you were very professional, but I knew that wasn’t what she meant. Then yesterday she came in and told me she’d heard you guys laughing.’
I thought back to the previous evening. ‘He was laughing at me,’ I said. Will had found it hilarious that I didn’t know what pesto was. I had told him supper was ‘the pasta in the green gravy’.
‘Ah, she doesn’t care about that. It’s just been a long time since he laughed at anything.’
It was true. Will and I seemed to have found an easier way of being around each other. It revolved mainly around him being rude to me, and me occasionally being rude back. He told me I did something badly, and I told him if it really mattered to him then he could ask me nicely. He swore at me, or called me a pain in the backside, and I told him he should try being without this particular pain in the backside and see how far it got him. It was a bit forced but it seemed to work for both of us. Sometimes it even seemed like a relief to him that there was someone prepared to be rude to him, to contradict him or tell him he was being horrible. I got the feeling that everyone had tiptoed around him since his accident – apart from perhaps Nathan, who Will seemed to treat with an automatic respect, and who was probably impervious to any of his sharper comments anyway. Nathan was like an armoured vehicle in human form.
‘You just make sure you’re the butt of more of his jokes, okay?’
I put my mug in the sink. ‘I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.’
The other big change, apart from atmospheric conditions inside the house, was that Will didn’t ask me to leave him alone quite as often, and a couple of afternoons had even asked me if I wanted to stay and watch a film with him. I hadn’t minded too much when it was The Terminator – even though I have seen all the Terminator films – but when he showed me the French film with subtitles, I took a quick look at the cover and said I thought I’d probably give it a miss.
‘Why?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t like films with subtitles.’
‘That’s like saying you don’t like films with actors in them. Don’t be ridiculous. What is it you don’t like? The fact that you’re required to read something as well as watch something?’
‘I just don’t really like foreign films.’
‘Everything after Local Bloody Hero has been a foreign film. D’you think Hollywood is a suburb of Birmingham?’
‘Funny.’
He couldn’t believe it when I admitted I’d never actually watched a film with subtitles. But my parents tended to stake ownership of the remote control in the evenings, and Patrick would be about as likely to watch a foreign film as he would be to suggest we take night classes in crochet. The multiplex in our nearest town only showed the latest shoot’em ups or romantic comedies and was so infested with catcalling kids in hoodies that most people around the town rarely bothered.
‘You have to watch this film, Louisa. In fact, I order you to watch this film.’ Will moved his chair back, and nodded towards the armchair. ‘There. You sit there. Don’t move until it’s over. Never watched a foreign film. For Christ’s sake,’ he muttered.
It was an old film, about a hunchback who inherits a house in the French countryside, and Will said it was based on a famous book, but I can’t say I’d ever heard of it. I spent the first twenty minutes feeling a bit fidgety, irritated by the subtitles and wondering if Will was going to get shirty if I told him I needed the loo.
And then something happened. I stopped thinking about how hard it was listening and reading at the same time, forgot Will’s pill timetable, and whether Mrs Traynor would think I was slacking, and I started to get anxious about the poor man and his family, who were being tricked by unscrupulous neighbours. By the time Hunchback Man died, I was sobbing silently, snot running into my sleeve.
‘So,’ Will said, appearing at my side. He glanced at me slyly. ‘You didn’t enjoy that at all.’
I looked up and found to my surprise that it was dark outside. ‘You’re going to gloat now, aren’t you?’ I muttered, reaching for the box of tissues.
‘A bit. I’m just amazed that you can have reached the ripe old age of – what was it?’
‘Twenty-six.’
‘Twenty-six, and never have watched a film with subtitles.’ He watched me mop my eyes.
I glanced down at the tissue and realized I had no mascara left. ‘I hadn’t realized it was compulsory,’ I grumbled.
‘Okay. So what do you do with yourself, Louisa Clark, if you don’t watch films?’
I balled my tissue in my fist. ‘You want to know what I do when I’m not here?’
‘You were the one who wanted us to get to know each other. So come on, tell me about yourself.’
He had this way of talking where you could never quite be sure that he wasn’t mocking you. I was waiting for the pay-off. ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why do you want to know all of a sudden?’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. It’s hardly a state secret, your social life, is it?’ He had begun to look irritated.
‘I don’t know … ’ I said. ‘I go for a drink at the pub. I watch a bit of telly. I go and watch my boyfriend when he does his running. Nothing unusual.’
‘You watch your boyfriend running.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you don’t run yourself.’
‘No. I’m not really –’ I glanced down at my chest ‘– built for it.’
That made him smile.
‘And what else?’
‘What do you mean, what else?’
‘Hobbies? Travelling? Places you like to go?’
He was beginning to sound like my old careers teacher.
I tried to think. ‘I don’t really have any hobbies. I read a bit. I like clothes.’
‘Handy,’ he said, dryly.
‘You asked. I’m not really a hobby person.’ My voice had become strangely defensive. ‘I don’t do much, okay? I work and then I go home.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘On the other side of the castle. Renfrew Road.’
He looked blank. Of course he did. There was little human traffic between the two sides of the castle. ‘It’s off the dual carriageway. Near the McDonald’s.’
He nodded, although I’m not sure he really knew where I was talking about.
‘Holidays?’
‘I’ve been to Spain, with Patrick. My boyfriend,’ I added. ‘When I was a kid we only really went to Dorset. Or Tenby. My aunt lives in Tenby.’
‘And what do you want?’
‘What do I want what?’
‘From your life?’
I blinked. ‘That’s a bit deep, isn’t it?’
‘Only generally. I’m not asking you to psychoanalyse yourself. I’m just asking, what do you want? Get married? Pop out some ankle biters? Dream career? Travel the world?’
There was a long pause.
I think I knew my answer would disappoint him even before I said the words aloud. ‘I don’t know. I’ve never really thought about it.’
On Friday we went to the hospital. I’m glad I hadn’t known about Will’s appointment before I arrived that morning, as I would have lain awake all night fretting about having to drive him there. I can drive, yes. But I say I can drive in the same way that I say I can speak French. Yes, I took the relevant exam and passed. But I haven’t used that particular skill more than once a year since I did so. The thought of loading Will and his chair into the adapted minivan and carting him safely to and from the next town filled me with utter terror.
For weeks I had wished that my working day involved some escape from that house. Now I would have done anything just to stay indoors. I located his hospital card amongst the folders of stuff to do with his health – great fat binders divided into ‘transport’, ‘insurance’, ‘living with disability’ and ‘appointments’. I grabbed the card and checked that it had today’s date. A little bit of me was hoping that Will had been wrong.