After You (Me Before You #2)(11)

‘You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?’

I turned onto my side, wincing.

‘I do. And don’t.’

‘Well, you know what Will would have said. You had a deal. You can’t back out of it.’

‘Okay. That’s it, Treen. We’re done with this conversation.’

‘Fine. Thom’s just coming out of the changing rooms. See you Friday!’ she said, as if we had just been talking about music, or where she was going on holiday, or soap.

And I was left staring at the ceiling.

You had a deal.

Yeah. And look how that turned out.

For all Treena moaned at me, in the weeks that had passed since I’d come home I had made some progress. I’d stopped using the cane, which had made me feel around eighty-nine years old, and which I had managed to leave behind in almost every place I’d visited since coming home. Most mornings I took Granddad for a walk around the park, at Mum’s request. The doctor had instructed him to take daily exercise but when she had followed him one day she had found he was simply walking to the corner shop to buy a bumper pack of pork scratchings and eating them on a slow walk home.

We walked slowly, both of us with a limp and neither of us with any real place to be.

Mum kept suggesting we do the grounds of the castle ‘for a change of scene’, but I ignored her, and as the gate shut behind us each morning Granddad nodded firmly in the direction of the park. It wasn’t just because this way was shorter, or closer to the betting shop. I think he knew I didn’t want to go back there. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t sure I would ever be ready.

We did two slow circuits of the duck pond, and sat on a bench in the watery spring sunshine to watch the toddlers and their parents feeding the fat ducks, and the teenagers smoking, yelling and whacking each other; the helpless combat of early courtship. We took a stroll over to the bookie’s so Granddad could lose three pounds on an each-way bet on a horse called Wag The Dog. Then, as he crumpled up his betting slip and threw it into the bin, I said I’d buy him a jam doughnut from the supermarket.

‘Oh fat,’ he said, as we stood in the bakery section.

I frowned at him.

‘Oh fat,’ he said, pointing at our doughnuts, and laughed.

‘Oh. Yup. That’s what we’ll tell Mum. Low-fat doughnuts.’

Mum said his new medication made him giggly. I had decided there were worse things that could happen to you.

Granddad was still giggling at his own joke as we queued at the checkout. I kept my head down, digging in my pockets for change. I was thinking about whether I would help Dad with the garden that weekend. So it took me a minute to grasp what was being said in whispers behind me.

‘It’s the guilt. They say she tried to jump off a block of flats.’

‘Well, you would, wouldn’t you? I know I couldn’t live with myself.’

‘I’m surprised she can show her face around here.’

I stood very still.

‘You know, poor Josie Clark is still mortified. She goes to confession every single week, and you know that woman is as blameless as a line of clean laundry.’

Granddad was pointing at the doughnuts and mouthing at the checkout girl: ‘Oh fat.’

She smiled politely. ‘Eighty-six pence, please.’

‘The Traynors have never been the same.’

‘Well, it destroyed them, didn’t it?’

‘Eighty-six pence, please.’

It took me several seconds to register that the checkout girl was looking at me, waiting. I pulled a handful of coins from my pocket. My fingers fumbled as I tried to sort through them.

‘You’d think Josie wouldn’t dare leave her in sole charge of her granddaddy, wouldn’t you?’

‘You don’t think she’d …’

‘Well, you don’t know. She’s done it the once, after all …’

My cheeks were flaming. My money clattered onto the counter. Granddad was still repeating, ‘OH FAT. OH FAT,’ at the bemused checkout girl, waiting for her to get the joke. I pulled at his sleeve. ‘Come on, Granddad, we have to go.’

‘Oh fat,’ he insisted, again.

‘Right,’ she said, and smiled kindly.

‘Please, Granddad.’ I felt hot and dizzy, as if I might faint. They might still have been talking but my ears were ringing so loudly I couldn’t tell.

‘Bye-bye,’ he said.

‘Bye then,’ said the girl.

‘Nice,’ said Granddad, as we emerged into the sunlight. Then, looking at me: ‘Why you crying?’

So here is the thing about being involved in a catastrophic, life-changing event. You think it’s just the catastrophic life-changing event that you’re going to have to deal with: the flashbacks, the sleepless nights, the endless running over events in your head, asking yourself if you had done the right thing, said the things you should have said, whether you could have changed things, had you done it even a degree differently.

My mother had told me that being with Will at the end would affect the rest of my life, and I had thought she meant me, psychologically. I’d thought she meant the guilt I would have to learn to get over, the grief, the insomnia, the weird, inappropriate bursts of anger, the endless internal dialogue with someone who wasn’t even there. But now I saw it wasn’t just me: in a digital age, I would be that person for ever. Even if I managed to wipe the whole thing from my memory, I would never be allowed to disassociate myself from Will’s death. My name would be tied to his for as long as there were pixels and a screen. People would form judgements about me, based on the most cursory knowledge – or sometimes no knowledge at all – and there was nothing I could do about it.