Me-Before-You-by-Jojo-Moyes

When we reached the bottom concourse, Nathan murmured, ‘I think we
should probably get something from one of these stalls, you know. It’s been a
few hours now since we ate anything.’ He glanced down at Will, so I knew who
it was he was really referring to.
‘Fine,’ I said, brightly. I took a little breath. ‘I love a bit of crackling. Let’s go
to the old hog roast.’
We ordered three buns with pork, crackling and apple sauce, and sheltered
under the striped awning while we ate them. I sat down on a small dustbin, so
that I could be at the same level as Will, and helped him to manageable bites of
meat, shredding it with my fingers where necessary. The two women who served
behind the counter pretended not to look at us. I could see them monitoring Will
out of the corners of their eyes, periodically muttering to each other when they
thought we weren’t looking. Poor man, I could practically hear them saying.
What a terrible way to live. I gave them a hard stare, daring them to look at him
like that. I tried not to think too hard about what Will must be feeling.
The rain had stopped, but the windswept course felt suddenly bleak, its brown
and green surface littered with discarded betting slips, its horizon flat and empty.
The car park had thinned out with the rain, and in the distance we could just hear
the distorted sound of the tannoy as some other race thundered past.
‘I think maybe we should head back,’ Nathan said, wiping his mouth. ‘I mean,
it was nice and all, but best to miss the traffic, eh?’
‘Fine,’ I said. I screwed up my paper napkin, and threw it into the bin. Will
waved away the last third of his roll.
‘Didn’t he like it?’ said the woman, as Nathan began to wheel him away
across the grass.
‘I don’t know. Perhaps he would have liked it better if it hadn’t come with a
side order of rubberneck,’ I said, and chucked the remnants hard into the bin.
But getting to the car and back up the ramp was easier said than done. In the
few hours that we had spent at the racecourse, the arrivals and departures meant
that the car park had turned into a sea of mud. Even with Nathan’s impressive
might, and my best shoulder, we couldn’t get the chair even halfway across the
grass to the car. His wheels skidded and whined, unable to get the purchase to
make it up that last couple of inches. Mine and Nathan’s feet slithered in the
mud, which worked its way up the sides of our shoes.