‘Course I would.’ He stood, rinsed his mug and hauled his backpack over his shoulder. He turned to face me before he left the kitchen. ‘But I’ve got to be honest, Lou. I’m not sure even you are going to be able to pull this one off.’
23
Exactly ten days later, Will’s father disgorged us from the car at Gatwick Airport, Nathan wrestling our luggage on to a trolley, and me checking and checking again that Will was comfortable – until even he became irritated.
‘Take care of yourselves. And have a good trip,’ Mr Traynor said, placing a hand on Will’s shoulder. ‘Don’t get up to too much mischief.’ He actually winked at me when he said this.
Mrs Traynor hadn’t been able to leave work to come too. I suspected that actually meant she hadn’t wanted to spend two hours in a car with her husband.
Will nodded but said nothing. He had been disarmingly quiet in the car, gazing out of the window with his impenetrable stare, ignoring Nathan and me as we chatted about traffic and what we already knew we had forgotten.
Even as we walked across the concourse I wasn’t sure we were doing the right thing. Mrs Traynor had not wanted him to go at all. But from the day he agreed to my revised plan, I knew she had been afraid to tell him he shouldn’t. She seemed to be afraid of talking to us at all that last week. She sat with Will in silence, talking only to the medical professionals. Or busied herself in her garden, cutting things down with frightening efficiency.
‘The airline is meant to meet us. They’re meant to come and meet us,’ I said, as we made our way to the check-in desk, flicking through my paperwork.
‘Chill out. They’re hardly going to post someone at the doors,’ Nathan said.
‘But the chair has to travel as a “fragile medical device”. I checked with the woman on the phone three times. And we need to make sure they’re not going to get funny about Will’s on-board medical equipment.’
The online quad community had given me reams of information, warnings, legal rights and checklists. I had subsequently triple-checked with the airline that we would be given bulkhead seats, and that Will would be boarded first, and not moved from his power chair until we were actually at the gates. Nathan would remain on the ground, remove the joystick and turn it to manual, and then carefully tie and bolster the chair, securing the pedals. He would personally oversee its loading to protect against damage. It would be pink-tagged to warn luggage handlers of its extreme delicacy. We had been allocated three seats in a row so that Nathan could complete any medical assistance that Will needed without prying eyes. The airline had assured me that the armrests lifted so that we wouldn’t bruise Will’s hips while transferring him from the wheelchair to his aircraft seat. We would keep him between us at all times. And we would be the first allowed off the aircraft.
All this was on my ‘airport’ checklist. That was the sheet in front of my ‘hotel’ checklist but behind my ‘day before we leave’ checklist and the itinerary. Even with all these safeguards in place, I felt sick.
Every time I looked at Will I wondered if I had done the right thing. Will had only been cleared by his GP for travel the night before. He ate little and spent much of every day asleep. He seemed not just weary from his illness, but exhausted with life, tired of our interference, our upbeat attempts at conversation, our relentless determination to try to make things better for him. He tolerated me, but I got the feeling that he often wanted to be left alone. He didn’t know that this was the one thing I could not do.
‘There’s the airline woman,’ I said, as a uniformed girl with a bright smile and a clipboard walked briskly towards us.
‘Well, she’s going to be a lot of use on transfer,’ Nathan muttered. ‘She doesn’t look like she could lift a frozen prawn.’
‘We’ll manage,’ I said. ‘Between us, we will manage.’
It had become my catchphrase, ever since I had worked out what I wanted to do. Since my conversation with Nathan in the annexe, I had been filled with a renewed zeal to prove them all wrong. Just because we couldn’t do the holiday I’d planned did not mean that Will could not do anything at all.
I hit the message boards, firing out questions. Where might be a good place for a far weaker Will to convalesce? Did anyone else know where we could go? Temperature was my main consideration – the English climate was too changeable (there was nothing more depressing than an English seaside resort in the rain). Much of Europe was too hot in late July, ruling out Italy, Greece, the South of France and other coastal areas. I had a vision, you see. I saw Will, relaxing by the sea. The problem was, with only a few days to plan it and go, there was a diminishing chance of making it a reality.
There were commiserations from the others, and many, many stories about pneumonia. It seemed to be the spectre that haunted them all. There were a few suggestions as to places we could go, but none that inspired me. Or, more importantly, none that I felt Will would be inspired by. I did not want spas, or places where he might see other people in the same position as he was. I didn’t really know what I wanted, but I scrolled backwards through the list of their suggestions and knew that nothing was right.
It was Ritchie, that chat-room stalwart, who had come to my aid in the end. The afternoon that Will was released from hospital, he typed:
Give me your email address. Cousin is travel agent. I have got him on the case.
I had rung the number he gave me and spoken to a middle-aged man with a broad Yorkshire accent. When he told me what he had in mind, a little bell of recognition rang somewhere deep in my memory. And within two hours, we had it sorted. I was so grateful to him that I could have cried.
‘Think nothing of it, pet,’ he said. ‘You just make sure that bloke of yours has a good time.’
That said, by the time we left I was almost as exhausted as Will. I had spent days wrangling with the finer requirements of quadriplegic travel, and right up until the morning we left I had not been convinced that Will would be well enough to come. Now, seated with the bags, I gazed at him, withdrawn and pale in the bustling airport, and wondered again if I had been wrong. I had a sudden moment of panic. What if he got ill again? What if he hated every minute, as he had with the horse racing? What if I had misread this whole situation, and what Will needed was not an epic journey, but ten days at home in his own bed?
But we didn’t have ten days to spare. This was it. This was my only chance.