‘They’re calling our flight,’ Nathan said, as he strolled back from the duty free. He looked at me, raised an eyebrow, and I took a breath.
‘Okay,’ I replied. ‘Let’s go.’
The flight itself, despite twelve long hours in the air, was not the ordeal I had feared. Nathan proved himself dextrous at doing Will’s routine changes under cover of a blanket. The airline staff were solicitous and discreet, and careful with the chair. Will was, as promised, loaded first, achieved transfer to his seat with no bruising, and then settled in between us.
Within an hour of being in the air I realized that, oddly enough, above the clouds, provided his seat was tilted and he was wedged in enough to be stable, Will was pretty much equal to anyone in the cabin. Stuck in front of a screen, with nowhere to move and nothing to do, there was very little, 30,000 feet up, that separated him from any of the other passengers. He ate and watched a film, and mostly he slept.
Nathan and I smiled cautiously at each other and tried to behave as if this were fine, all good. I gazed out of the window, my thoughts as jumbled as the clouds beneath us, unable yet to think about the fact that this was not just a logistical challenge but an adventure for me – that I, Lou Clark, was actually headed to the other side of the world. I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see anything beyond Will by then. I felt like my sister, when she had first given birth to Thomas. ‘It’s like I’m looking through a funnel,’ she had said, gazing at his newborn form. ‘The world has just shrunk to me and him.’
She had texted me when I was in the airport.
You can do this. Am bloody proud of you xxx
I called it up now, just to look at it, feeling suddenly emotional, perhaps because of her choice of words. Or perhaps because I was tired and afraid and still finding it hard to believe that I had even got us this far. Finally, to block my thoughts, I turned on my little television screen, gazing unseeing at some American comedy series until the skies around us grew dark.
And then I woke to find that the air stewardess was standing over us with breakfast, that Will was talking to Nathan about a film they had just watched together, and that – astonishingly, and against all the odds – the three of us were less than an hour away from landing in Mauritius.
I don’t think I believed that any of this could actually happen until we touched down at Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam International Airport. We emerged groggily through Arrivals, still stiff from our time in the air, and I could have wept with relief at the sight of the operator’s specially adapted taxi. That first morning, as the driver sped us towards the resort, I registered little of the island. True, the colours seemed brighter than England, the sky more vivid, an azure blue that just disappeared and grew deeper and deeper to infinity. I saw that the island was lush and green, fringed with acres of sugar cane crops, the sea visible like a strip of mercury through the volcanic hills. The air was tinged with something smoky and gingery, the sun so high in the sky that I had to squint into the white light. In my exhausted state it was as if someone had woken me up in the pages of a glossy magazine.
But even as my senses wrestled with the unfamiliar, my gaze returned repeatedly to Will, to his pale, weary face, to the way his head seemed oddly slumped on his shoulders. And then we pulled into a palm-tree-lined driveway, stopped outside a low framed building and the driver was already out and unloading our bags.
We declined the offer of iced tea, of a tour around the hotel. We found Will’s room, dumped his bags, settled him into his bed and almost before we had drawn the curtains, he was asleep again. And then there we were. I had done it. I stood outside his room, finally letting out a deep breath, while Nathan gazed out of the window at the white surf on the coral reef beyond. I don’t know if it was the journey, or because this was the most beautiful place I had ever been in my life, but I felt suddenly tearful.
‘It’s okay,’ Nathan said, catching sight of my expression. And then, totally unexpectedly, he walked up to me and enveloped me in a huge bear hug. ‘Relax, Lou. It’s going to be okay. Really. You did good.’
It was almost three days before I started to believe him. Will slept for most of the first forty-eight hours – and then, astonishingly, he began to look better. His skin regained its colour and he lost the blue shadows around his eyes. His spasms lessened and he began to eat again, wheeling his way slowly along the endless, extravagant buffet and telling me what he wanted on his plate. I knew he was feeling more like himself when he bullied me into trying things I would never have eaten – spicy creole curries and seafood whose name I did not recognize. He swiftly seemed more at home in this place than I did. And no wonder. I had to remind myself that, for most of his life, this had been Will’s domain – this globe, these wide shores – not the little annexe in the shadow of the castle.
The hotel had, as promised, come up with the special wheelchair with wide wheels, and most mornings Nathan transferred Will into it and we all three walked down to the beach, me carrying a parasol so that I could protect him if the sun grew too fierce. But it never did; that southern part of the island was renowned for sea breezes and, out of season, the resort temperatures rarely rose past the early twenties. We would stop at a small beach near a rocky outcrop, just out of view of the main hotel. I would unfold my chair, place myself next to Will under a palm tree, and we would watch Nathan attempt to windsurf, or waterski – occasionally shouting encouragement, plus the odd word of abuse – from our spot on the sand.
At first the hotel staff wanted to do almost too much for Will, offering to push his chair, constantly pressing cool drinks upon him. We explained what we didn’t need from them, and they cheerfully backed off. It was good, though, during the moments when I wasn’t with him, to see porters or reception staff stopping by to chat with him, or sharing with him some place that they thought we should go. There was one gangly young man, Nadil, who seemed to take it upon himself to act as Will’s unofficial carer when Nathan was not around. One day I came out to find him and a friend gently lowering Will out of his chair on to a cushioned sunbed he had positioned by ‘our’ tree.
‘This better,’ he said, giving me the thumbs up as I walked across the sand. ‘You just call me when Mr Will want to go back in his chair.’
I was about to protest, and tell them they should not have moved him. But Will had closed his eyes and lay there with a look of such unexpected contentment that I just closed my mouth and nodded.