Her jaw was so rigid that a little muscle was visible just underneath her cheekbone. I wondered if she actually hated me then.
‘I want Will to want to live too,’ I said, finally.
‘We do understand that,’ Mr Traynor said. ‘And we do appreciate your determination. And discretion.’ I wondered whether that word was in relation to Will, or something else entirely, and then he stood up and I realized that it was my signal to leave. Georgina and her mother still sat on the sofa, saying nothing. I got the feeling there was going to be a whole lot more conversation once I was out of the room.
‘Right, then,’ I said. ‘I’ll draw you up the paperwork as soon as I’ve worked it all out in my head. It will be soon. We haven’t much … ’
Mr Traynor patted my shoulder.
‘I know. Just let us know what you come up with,’ he said.
Treena was blowing on her hands, her feet moving involuntarily up and down, as if marching on the spot. She was wearing my dark-green beret, which, annoyingly, looked much better on her than it did on me. She leant over and pointed at the list she had just pulled from her pocket, and handed it to me.
‘You’re probably going to have to scratch number three, or at least put that off until it gets warmer.’
I checked the list. ‘Quadriplegic basketball? I’m not even sure if he likes basketball.’
‘That’s not the point. Bloody hell, it’s cold up here.’ She pulled the beret lower over her ears. ‘The point is, it will give him a chance to see what’s possible. He can see that there are other people just as badly off as him who are doing sports and things.’
‘I’m not sure. He can’t even lift a cup. I think these people must be paraplegic. I can’t see that you could throw a ball without the use of your arms.’
‘You’re missing the point. He doesn’t have to actually do anything, but it’s about widening his horizons, right? We’re letting him see what other handicapped people are doing.’
‘If you say so.’
A low murmur rose in the crowd. The runners had been sighted, some distance away. If I went on to tiptoes, I could just make them out, probably two miles away, down in the valley, a small block of bobbing white dots forcing their way through the cold along a damp, grey road. I glanced at my watch. We had been standing here on the brow of the aptly named Windy Hill for almost forty minutes, and I could no longer feel my feet.
‘I’ve looked up what’s local and, if you didn’t want to drive too far, there’s a match at the sports centre in a couple of weeks. He could even have a bet on the result.’
‘Betting?’
‘That way he could get a bit involved without even having to play. Oh look, there they are. How long do you think they’ll take to get to us?’
We stood by the finish. Above our heads a tarpaulin banner announcing the ‘Spring Triathlon Finish Line’ flapped wanly in the stiff breeze.
‘Dunno. Twenty minutes? Longer? I’ve got an emergency Mars Bar if you want to share.’ I reached into my pocket. It was impossible to stop the list flapping with only one hand. ‘So what else did you come up with?’
‘You said you wanted to go further afield, right?’ She pointed at my fingers. ‘You’ve given yourself the bigger bit.’
‘Take this bit then. I think the family think I’m free-loading.’
‘What, because you want to take him on a few crummy days out? Jesus. They should be grateful someone’s making the effort. It’s not like they are.’
Treena took the other piece of Mars Bar. ‘Anyway. Number five, I think it is. There’s a computer course that he could do. They put a thing on their head with, like, a stick on it, and they nod their head to touch the keyboard. There are loads of quadriplegic groups online. He could make lots of new friends that way. It would mean he doesn’t always have to actually leave the house. I even spoke to a couple on the chatrooms. They seemed nice. Quite –’ she shrugged ‘– normal.’
We ate our Mars Bar halves in silence, watching as the group of miserable-looking runners drew closer. I couldn’t see Patrick. I never could. He had the kind of face that became instantly invisible in crowds.
She pointed at the bit of paper.
‘Anyway, head for the cultural section. There’s a concert specially for people with disabilities here. You said he’s cultured, right? Well, he could just sit there and be transported by the music. That’s meant to take you out of yourself, right? Derek with the moustache, at work, told me about it. He said it can get noisy because of the really disabled people who yell a bit, but I’m sure he’d still enjoy it.’
I wrinkled my nose. ‘I don’t know, Treen –’
‘You’re just frightened because I said “culture”. You only have to sit there with him. And not rustle your crisp packet. Or, if you fancied something a bit saucier … ’ She grinned at me. ‘There’s a strip club. You could take him to London for that.’
‘Take my employer to watch a stripper?’
‘Well, you say you do everything else for him – all the cleaning and feeding and stuff. I can’t see why you wouldn’t just sit by him while he gets a stiffy.’
‘Treena!’
‘Well, he must miss it. You could even buy him a lap dance.’
Several people around us in the crowd swivelled their heads. My sister was laughing. She could talk about sex like that. Like it was some kind of recreational activity. Like it didn’t matter.
‘And then on the other side, there are the bigger trips. Don’t know what you fancied, but you could do wine tasting in the Loire … that’s not too far for starters.’
‘Can quadriplegics get drunk?’
‘I don’t know. Ask him.’
I frowned at the list. ‘So … I’ll go back and tell the Traynors that I’m going to get their suicidal quadriplegic son drunk, spend their money on strippers and lap dancers, and then trundle him off to the Disability Olympics –’
Treena snatched the list back from me. ‘Well, I don’t see you coming up with anything more bloody inspirational.’
‘I just thought … I don’t know.’ I rubbed at my nose. ‘I’m feeling a bit daunted, to be honest. I have trouble even persuading him to go into the garden.’
‘Well, that’s hardly the attitude, is it? Oh, look. Here they come. We’d better smile.’
We pushed our way through to the front of the crowd and began to cheer. It was quite hard coming up with the required amount of motivating noise when you could barely move your lips with cold.
I saw Patrick then, his head down in a sea of straining bodies, his face glistening with sweat, every sinew of his neck stretched and his face anguished as if he were enduring some kind of torture. That same face would be completely illuminated as soon as he crossed the finish, as if it were only by plumbing some personal depths that he could achieve a high. He didn’t see me.
‘Go, Patrick!’ I yelled, weakly.
And he flashed by, towards the finishing line.
Treena didn’t talk to me for two days after I failed to show the required enthusiasm for her ‘To Do’ list. My parents didn’t notice; they were just overjoyed to hear that I had decided not to leave my job. Management had called a series of meetings at the furniture factory for the end of that week, and Dad was convinced that he would be among those made redundant. Nobody had yet survived the cull over the age of forty.
‘We’re very grateful for your housekeeping, love,’ Mum said, so often that it made me feel a bit uncomfortable.
It was a funny week. Treena began packing for her course, and each day I had to sneak upstairs to go through the bags she had already packed to see which of my possessions she planned to take with her. Most of my clothes were safe, but so far I had recovered a hairdryer, my fake Prada sunglasses and my favourite washbag with the lemons on it. If I confronted her over any of it, she would just shrug and say, ‘Well, you never use it,’ as if that were entirely the point.
That was Treena all over. She felt entitled. Even though Thomas had come along, she had never quite lost that sense of being the baby of the family – the deep-rooted feeling that the whole world actually did revolve around her. When we had been little and she had thrown a huge strop because she wanted something of mine, Mum would plead with me to ‘just let her have it’, if only for some peace in the house. Nearly twenty years on, nothing had really changed. We had to babysit Thomas so that Treena could still go out, feed him so that Treena didn’t have to worry, buy her extra-nice presents at birthdays and Christmas ‘because Thomas means she often goes without’. Well, she could go without my bloody lemons washbag. I stuck a note on my door which read: ‘My stuff is MINE. GO AWAY.’ Treena ripped it off and told Mum I was the biggest child she had ever met and that Thomas had more maturity in his little finger than I did.
But it got me thinking. One evening, after Treena had gone out to her night class, I sat in the kitchen while Mum sorted Dad’s shirts ready for ironing.
‘Mum … ’
‘Yes, love.’
‘Do you think I could move into Treena’s room once she’s gone?’
Mum paused, a half-folded shirt pressed to her chest. ‘I don’t know. I hadn’t really thought about it.’
‘I mean, if she and Thomas are not going to be here, it’s only fair that I should be allowed a proper-sized bedroom. It seems silly, it sitting empty, if they’re going off to college.’
Mum nodded, and placed the shirt carefully in the laundry basket. ‘I suppose you’re right.’
‘And by rights, that room should have been mine, what with me being the elder and all. It’s only because she had Thomas that she got it at all.’
She could see the sense in it. ‘That’s true. I’ll talk to Treena about it,’ she said.
I suppose with hindsight it would have been a good idea to mention it to my sister first.
Three hours later she came bursting into the living room with a face like thunder.
‘Would you jump in my grave so quickly?’
Granddad jerked awake in his chair, his hand reflexively clasped to his chest.
I looked up from the television. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Where are me and Thomas supposed to go at weekends? We can’t both fit in the box room. There’s not even enough room in there for two beds.’
‘Exactly. And I’ve been stuck in there for five years.’ The knowledge that I was ever so slightly in the wrong made me sound pricklier than I had intended.
‘You can’t take my room. It’s not fair.’
‘You’re not even going to be in it!’
‘But I need it! There’s no way me and Thomas can fit in the box room. Dad, tell her!’
Dad’s chin descended to somewhere deep in his collar, his arms folded across his chest. He hated it when we fought, and tended to leave it to Mum to sort out. ‘Turn it down a bit, girls,’ he said.
Granddad shook his head, as if we were all incomprehensible to him. Granddad shook his head at an awful lot these days.
‘I don’t believe you. No wonder you were so keen to help me leave.’
‘What? So you begging me to keep my job so that I can help you out financially is now part of my sinister plan, is it?’
‘You’re so two-faced.’
‘Katrina, calm down.’ Mum appeared in the doorway, her rubber gloves dripping foamy water on to the living-room carpet. ‘We can talk about this calmly. I don’t want you getting Granddad all wound up.’
Katrina’s face had gone blotchy, the way it did when she was small and she didn’t get what she wanted. ‘She actually wants me to go. That’s what this is. She can’t wait for me to go, because she’s jealous that I’m actually doing something with my life. So she just wants to make it difficult for me to come home again.’