Will was silent for a moment. I watched him, wondering where he really was. When we had these conversations he became like the boy in my class, the boy who had distanced himself from us by venturing away.
‘So where else have you liked?’
‘Trou d’Eau Douce bay, Mauritius. Lovely people, beautiful beaches, great diving. Um … Tsavo National Park, Kenya, all red earth and wild animals. Yosemite. That’s California. Rock faces so tall your brain can’t quite process the scale of them.’
He told me of a night he’d spent rock climbing, perched on a ledge several hundred feet up, how he’d had to pin himself into his sleeping bag, and attach it to the rock face, because to roll over in his sleep would have been disastrous.
‘You’ve actually just described my worst nightmare, right there.’
‘I like more metropolitan places too. Sydney, I loved. The Northern Territories. Iceland. There’s a place not far from the airport where you can bathe in the volcanic springs. It’s like a strange, nuclear landscape. Oh, and riding across Central China. I went to this place about two days’ ride from the Capital of Sichuan province, and the locals spat at me because they hadn’t seen a white person before.’
‘Is there anywhere you haven’t been?’
He took another sip of soup. ‘North Korea?’ He pondered. ‘Oh, I’ve never been to Disneyland. Will that do? Not even Eurodisney.’
‘I once booked a ticket to Australia. Never went, though.’
He turned to me in surprise.
‘Stuff happened. It’s fine. Perhaps I will go one day.’
‘Not “perhaps”. You’ve got to get away from here, Clark. Promise me you won’t spend the rest of your life stuck around this bloody parody of a place mat.’
‘Promise me? Why?’ I tried to make my voice light. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I just … can’t bear the thought of you staying around here forever.’ He swallowed. ‘You’re too bright. Too interesting.’ He looked away from me. ‘You only get one life. It’s actually your duty to live it as fully as possible.’
‘Okay,’ I said, carefully. ‘Then tell me where I should go. Where would you go, if you could go anywhere?’
‘Right now?’
‘Right now. And you’re not allowed to say Kilimanjaro. It has to be somewhere I can imagine going myself.’
When Will’s face relaxed, he looked like someone quite different. A smile settled across his face now, his eyes creasing with pleasure. ‘Paris. I would sit outside a cafe in Le Marais and drink coffee and eat a plate of warm croissants with unsalted butter and strawberry jam.’
‘Le Marais?’
‘It’s a little district in the centre of Paris. It is full of cobbled streets and teetering apartment blocks and g*y men and orthodox Jews and women of a certain age who once looked like Brigitte Bardot. It’s the only place to stay.’
I turned to face him, lowering my voice. ‘We could go,’ I said. ‘We could do it on the Eurostar. It would be easy. I don’t think we’d even need to ask Nathan to come. I’ve never been to Paris. I’d love to go. Really love to go. Especially with someone who knows his way around. What do you say, Will?’
I could see myself in that cafe. I was there, at that table, maybe admiring a new pair of French shoes, purchased in a chic little boutique, or picking at a pastry with Parisian red fingernails. I could taste the coffee, smell the smoke from the next table’s Gauloises.
‘No.’
‘What?’ It took me a moment to drag myself away from that roadside table.
‘No.’
‘But you just told me –’
‘You don’t get it, Clark. I don’t want to go there in this – this thing.’ He gestured at the chair, his voice dropping. ‘I want to be in Paris as me, the old me. I want to sit in a chair, leaning back, my favourite clothes on, with pretty French girls who pass by giving me the eye just as they would any other man sitting there. Not looking away hurriedly when they realize I’m a man in an overgrown bloody pram.’
‘But we could try,’ I ventured. ‘It needn’t be –’
‘No. No, we couldn’t. Because at the moment I can shut my eyes and know exactly how it feels to be in the Rue des Francs Bourgeois, cigarette in hand, clementine juice in a tall, cold glass in front of me, the smell of someone’s steak frites cooking, the sound of a moped in the distance. I know every sensation of it.’
He swallowed. ‘The day we go and I’m in this bloody contraption, all those memories, those sensations will be wiped out, erased by the struggle to get behind the table, up and down Parisian kerbs, the taxi drivers who refuse to take us, and the wheelchair bloody power pack that wouldn’t charge in a French socket. Okay?’
His voice had hardened. I screwed the top back on the vacuum flask. I examined my shoes quite carefully as I did it, because I didn’t want him to see my face.
‘Okay,’ I said.
‘Okay.’ Will took a deep breath.
Below us a coach stopped to disgorge another load of visitors outside the castle gates. We watched in silence as they filed out of the vehicle and into the old fortress in a single, obedient line, primed to stare at the ruins of another age.
It’s possible he realized I was a bit subdued, because he leant into me a little. And his face softened. ‘So, Clark. The rain seems to have stopped. Where shall we go this afternoon. The maze?’
‘No.’ It came out more quickly than I would have liked, and I caught the look Will gave me.
‘You claustrophobic?’
‘Something like that.’ I began to gather up our things. ‘Let’s just go back to the house.’
The following weekend, I came down in the middle of the night to fetch some water. I had been having trouble sleeping, and had found that actually getting up was marginally preferable to lying in my bed batting away the swirling mess of my thoughts.
I didn’t like being awake at night. I couldn’t help but wonder whether Will was awake, on the other side of the castle, and my imagination kept prising my way into his thoughts. It was a dark place to go to.
Here was the truth of it: I was getting nowhere with him. Time was running out. I couldn’t even persuade him to take a trip to Paris. And when he told me why, it was hard for me to argue. He had a good reason for turning down almost every single longer trip I suggested to him. And without telling him why I was so anxious to take him, I had little leverage at all.