couldn’t see the attraction. I suspected there would never be a point in my life when I wouldn’t prefer somebody else to do it.
But on a day like today, when Will was confined to bed, and the world seemed to have stilled outside, I could also see there was a kind of meditative pleasure in working my way from one end of the annexe to the other. While I dusted and polished, I took the radio from room to room with me, keeping the volume low so that I didn’t disturb Will. Periodically I poked my head round the door, just to see that he was breathing, and it was only when we got to one o’clock and he still hadn’t woken up that I started to feel a little anxious.
I filled the log basket, noting that several inches of snow had now settled. I made Will a fresh drink, and then knocked. When I knocked again, I did so loudly.
‘Yes?’ His voice was hoarse, as if I had woken him.
‘It’s me.’ When he didn’t respond, I said, ‘Louisa. Am I okay to come in?’
‘I’m hardly doing the Dance of the Seven Veils.’
The room was shadowed, the curtains still drawn. I walked in, letting my eyes adjust to the light. Will was on one side, one arm bent in front of him as if to prop himself up, as he had been before when I looked in. Sometimes it was easy to forget he would not be able to turn over by himself. His hair stuck up on one side, and a duvet was tucked neatly around him. The smell of warm, unwashed male filled the room – not unpleasant, but still a little startling as part of a working day.
‘What can I do? Do you want your drink?’
‘I need to change position.’
I put the drink down on a chest of drawers, and walked over to the bed. ‘What … what do you want me to do?’
He swallowed carefully, as if it were painful. ‘Lift and turn me, then raise the back of the bed. Here … ’ He nodded for me to come closer. ‘Put your arms under mine, link your hands behind my back and then pull back. Keep your backside on the bed and that way you shouldn’t strain your lower back.’
I couldn’t pretend this wasn’t a bit weird. I reached around him, the scent of him filling my nostrils, his skin warm against mine. I could not have been in any closer unless I had begun nibbling on his ear. The thought made me mildly hysterical, and I struggled to keep myself together.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ I took a breath, linked my hands, and adjusted my position until I felt I had him securely. He was broader than I had expected, somehow heavier. And then, on a count of three, I pulled back.
‘Jesus,’ he exclaimed, into my shoulder.
‘What?’ I nearly dropped him.
‘Your hands are bloody freezing.’
‘Yes. Well, if you bothered to get out of bed, you’d know that it’s actually snowing outside.’
I was half joking, but now I realized his skin was hot under his T-shirt – an intense heat that seemed to come from deep within him. He groaned slightly as I adjusted him against the pillow, and I tried to make my movements as slow and gentle as possible. He pointed out the remote control device that would bring his head and shoulders up. ‘Not too much, though,’ he murmured. ‘A bit dizzy.’
I turned on the bedside light, ignoring his vague protest, so that I could see his face. ‘Will – are you okay?’ I had to say it twice before he answered me.
‘Not my best day.’
‘Do you need painkillers?’
‘Yes … strong ones.’
‘Maybe some paracetamol?’
He lay back against the cool pillow with a sigh.
I gave him the beaker, watched him swallow.
‘Thank you,’ he said afterwards, and I felt suddenly uneasy.
Will never thanked me for anything.
He closed his eyes, and for a while I just stood in the doorway and watched him, his chest rising and falling under his T-shirt, his mouth slightly open. His breathing was shallow, and perhaps a little more laboured than on other days. But I had never seen him out of his chair, and I wasn’t sure whether it was something to do with the pressure of lying down.
‘Go,’ he muttered.
I left.
I read my magazine, lifting my head only to watch the snow settle thickly around the house, creeping up the window sills in powdery landscapes. Mum sent me a text message at 12.30pm, telling me that my father couldn’t get the car down the road. ‘Don’t set out for home without ringing us first,’ she instructed. I wasn’t sure what she thought she was going to do – send Dad out with a sledge and a St Bernard?
I listened to the local news on the radio, the motorway snarl-ups, train stoppages and temporary school closures that the unexpected blizzard had brought with it. I went back into Will’s room, and looked at him again. I didn’t like his colour. He was pale, high points of something bright on each cheek.
‘Will?’ I said softly.
He didn’t stir.
‘Will?’
I began to feel the faint stirrings of panic. I said his name twice more, loudly. There was no response. Finally, I leant over him. There was no obvious movement in his face, nothing I could see in his chest. His breath. I should be able to feel his breath. I put my face down close to his, trying to detect an out breath. When I couldn’t, I reached out a hand and touched his face gently.
He flinched, his eyes snapping open, just inches from my own.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, jumping back.
He blinked, glancing around the room, as if he had been somewhere far from home.
‘It’s Lou,’ I said, when I wasn’t sure if he had recognized me.
His expression was one of mild exasperation. ‘I know.’
‘Do you want some soup?’
‘No. Thank you.’ He closed his eyes.
‘More painkillers?’
There was a faint sheen of sweat on his cheekbone. I put my hand out, his duvet felt vaguely hot and sweaty. It made me nervous.
‘Is there something I should be doing? I mean, if Nathan can’t get here?’
‘No … I’m fine,’ he murmured, and closed his eyes again.
I went through the folder, trying to work out if I was missing something. I opened the medical cabinet, the boxes of rubber gloves and gauze dressings, and realized I had no idea at all what I should do with any of it. I rang the intercom to speak to Will’s father, but the ringing sound disappeared into an empty house. I could hear it echoing beyond the annexe door.
I was about to ring Mrs Traynor when the back door opened, and Nathan stepped in, wrapped in layers of bulky clothing, a woollen scarf and hat almost obscuring his head. He brought with him a whoosh of cold air and a light flurry of snow.
‘Hey,’ he said, shaking the snow off his boots and slamming the door behind him.
It felt like the house had suddenly woken from a dreamlike state.
‘Oh, thank God you’re here,’ I said. ‘He’s not well. He’s been asleep most of the morning and he’s hardly drunk anything. I didn’t know what to do.’
Nathan shrugged off his coat. ‘Had to walk all the way here. The buses have stopped running.’
I set about making him some tea, as he went to check on Will.
He reappeared before the kettle had even finished boiling. ‘He’s burning up,’ he said. ‘How long has he been like this?’
‘All morning. I did think he was hot, but he said he just wanted to sleep.’
‘Jesus. All morning? Didn’t you know he can’t regulate his own temperature?’ He pushed past me and began rummaging around in the medicine cabinet. ‘Antibiotics. The strong ones.’ He held up a jar and emptied one into the pestle and mortar, grinding it furiously.
I hovered behind him. ‘I gave him a paracetamol.’
‘Might as well have given him an Opal Fruit.’
‘I didn’t know. Nobody said. I’ve been wrapping him up.’
‘It’s in the bloody folder. Look, Will doesn’t sweat like we do. In fact he doesn’t sweat at all from the point of his injury downwards. It means if he gets a slight chill his temperature gauge goes haywire. Go find the fan. We’ll move that in there until he cools down. And a damp towel, to put around the back of his neck. We won’t be able to get him to a doctor until the snow stops. Bloody agency nurse. They should have picked this up in the morning.’
Nathan was crosser than I’d ever seen him. He was no longer really even talking to me.
I ran for the fan.
It took almost forty minutes for Will’s temperature to return to an acceptable level. While we waited for the extra-strong fever medication to take effect, I placed a towel over his forehead and another around his neck, as Nathan instructed. We stripped him down, covered his chest with a fine cotton sheet, and set the fan to play over it. Without sleeves, the scars on his arms were clearly exposed. We all pretended I couldn’t see them.
Will endured all this attention in near silence, answering Nathan’s questions with a yes or no, so indistinct sometimes that I wasn’t sure if he knew what he was saying. I realized, now I could see him in the light, that he looked really, properly ill and I felt terrible for having failed to grasp it. I said sorry until Nathan told me it had become irritating.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘You need to watch what I’m doing. It’s possible you may need to do this alone later.’
I didn’t feel I could protest. But I found it hard not to feel squeamish as Nathan peeled down the waist of Will’s pyjama bottoms, revealing a pale strip of bare stomach, and carefully removed the gauze dressing around the little tube in his abdomen, cleaning it gently and replacing the dressing. He showed me how to change the bag on the bed, explained why it must always be lower than Will’s body, and I was surprised at how matter-of-fact I was about walking out of the room with the pouch of warm fluid. I was glad that Will wasn’t really watching me – not just because he would have made some sharp comment, but because I felt that me witnessing some part of this intimate routine would in some way have embarrassed him too.
‘And that’s it,’ Nathan said. Finally, an hour later, Will lay dozing, lying on fresh cotton sheets and looking, if not exactly well, then not scarily ill.
‘Let him sleep. But wake him after a couple of hours and make sure you get the best part of a beaker of fluids into him. More fever meds at five, okay? His temperature will probably shoot up again in the last hour, but nothing more before five.’
I scribbled everything down on a notepad. I was afraid of getting anything wrong.
‘Now you’re going to need to repeat what we just did, this evening. You’re okay with that?’ Nathan wrapped himself up like an Inuit and headed out into the snow. ‘Just read the folder. And don’t panic. Any problems, you just call me. I’ll talk you through it all. I’ll get back here again if I really have to.’
I stayed in Will’s room after Nathan left. I was too afraid not to. In the corner was an old leather armchair with a reading light, perhaps dating from Will’s previous life, and I curled up on it with a book of short stories that I had pulled from the bookcase.
It was strangely peaceful in that room. Through the crack in the curtains I could see the outside world, blanketed in white, still and beautiful. Inside it was warm and silent, only the odd tick and hiss of the central heating to interrupt my thoughts. I read, and occasionally I glanced up and checked Will sleeping peacefully and I realized that there had never been a point in my life before where I had just sat in silence and done nothing. You don’t grow up used to silence in a house like mine, with its never-ending vacuuming, television blaring, and shrieking. During the rare moments that the television was off, Dad would put on his old Elvis records and play them at full blast. A cafe too is a constant buzz of noise and clatter.
Here, I could hear my thoughts. I could almost hear my heartbeat. I realized, to my surprise, that I quite liked it.
At five, my mobile phone signalled a text message. Will stirred, and I leapt out of the chair, anxious to get it before it disturbed him.
No trains. Is there any chance you could stay over tonight?
Nathan cannot do it. Camilla Traynor.
I didn’t really think about it before I typed back.
No problem.
I rang my parents and told them that I would stay over. My mother sounded relieved. When I told her I was going to get paid for sleeping over, she sounded overjoyed.
‘Did you hear that, Bernard?’ she said, her hand half over the phone. ‘They’re paying her to sleep now.’
I could hear my father’s exclamation. ‘Praise the Lord. She’s found her dream career.’
I sent a text message to Patrick, telling him that I had been asked to stay at work and I would ring him later. The message came back within seconds.
Going cross-country snow running tonight.
Good practice for Norway! X P.
I wondered how it was possible for someone to get so excited at the thought of jogging through sub-zero temperatures in a vest and pants.
Will slept. I cooked myself some food, and defrosted some soup in case he wanted some later. I got the log fire going in case he felt well enough to go into the living room. I read another of the short stories and wondered how long it was since I had bought myself a book. I had loved reading as a child, but I couldn’t remember reading anything except magazines since. Treen was the reader. It was almost as if by picking up a book I felt like I was invading her patch. I thought about her and Thomas disappearing to university and realized I still didn’t know whether it made me feel happy or sad – or something a bit complicated in between.
Nathan rang at seven. He seemed relieved that I was staying over.
‘I couldn’t raise Mr Traynor. I even rang their landline number, but it went straight through to answerphone.’
‘Yeah. Well. He’ll be gone.’
‘Gone?’
I felt a sudden instinctive panic at the idea that it would be just Will and me in the house all night. I was afraid of getting something fundamental wrong again, of jeopardizing Will’s health. ‘Should I call Mrs Traynor, then?’
There was a short silence on the other end of the phone. ‘No. Best not.’
‘But –’
‘Look, Lou, he often … he often goes somewhere else when Mrs T stays over in town.’
It took me a minute or two to grasp what he was saying.
‘Oh.’
‘It’s just good that you’re there, that’s all. If you’re sure Will’s looking better, I’ll be back first thing in the morning.’
There are normal hours, and then there are invalid hours, where time stalls and slips, where life – real life – seems to exist at one remove. I watched some television, ate, and cleared up the kitchen, drifting around the annexe in silence. Finally, I let myself back into Will’s room.
He stirred as I closed the door, half lifting his head. ‘What time is it, Clark?’ His voice was slightly muffled by the pillow.
‘Quarter past eight.’
He let his head drop, and digested this. ‘Can I have a drink?’
There was no sharpness to him now, no edge. It was as if being ill had finally made him vulnerable. I gave him a drink, and turned on the bedside light. I perched on the side of his bed, and felt his forehead, as my mother might have done when I was a child. He was still a little warm, but nothing like he had been.
‘Cool hands.’
‘You complained about them earlier.’
‘Did I?’ He sounded genuinely surprised.
‘Would you like some soup?’
‘No.’
‘Are you comfortable?’
I never knew how much discomfort he was in, but I suspected it was more than he let on.
‘The other side would be good. Just roll me. I don’t need to sit up.’
I climbed across the bed and moved him over, as gently as I could. He no longer radiated a sinister heat, just the ordinary warmth of a body that had spent time under a duvet.
‘Can I do anything else?’
‘Shouldn’t you be heading home?’
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I’m staying over.’
Outside, the last of the light had long been extinguished. The snow was still falling. Where it caught the porch glow through the window it was bathed in a pale-gold, melancholy light. We sat there in peaceful silence, watching its hypnotic fall.
‘Can I ask you something?’ I said, finally. I could see his hands on top of the sheet. It seemed so strange that they should look so ordinary, so strong, and yet be so useless.
‘I suspect you’re going to.’
‘What happened?’ I kept wondering about the marks on his wrists. It was the one question I couldn’t ask directly.
He opened one eye. ‘How did I get like this?’
When I nodded, he closed his eyes again. ‘Motorbike accident. Not mine. I was an innocent pedestrian.’
‘I thought it would be skiing or bungee jumping or something.’
‘Everyone does. God’s little joke. I was crossing the road outside my home. Not this place,’ he said. ‘My London home.’
I stared at the books in his bookshelf. Among the novels, the well-thumbed Penguin paperbacks, were business titles: Corporate Law, TakeOver, directories of names I did not recognize.
‘And there was no way you could carry on with your job?’
‘No. Nor the apartment, the holidays, the life … I believe you met my ex-girlfriend.’ The break in his voice couldn’t disguise the bitterness. ‘But I should apparently be grateful, as for some time they didn’t think I was going to live at all.’
‘Do you hate it? Living here, I mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is there any way you might be able to live in London again?’
‘Not like this, no.’
‘But you might improve. I mean, Nathan said there are loads of advances in this kind of injury.’
Will closed his eyes again.
I waited, and then I adjusted the pillow behind his head, and the duvet around his chest. ‘Sorry,’ I said, sitting upright. ‘If I ask too many questions. Do you want me to leave?’
‘No. Stay for a bit. Talk to me.’ He swallowed. His eyes opened again and his gaze slid up to mine. He looked unbearably tired. ‘Tell me something good.’
I hesitated a moment, then I leant back against the pillows beside him. We sat there in the near dark, watching the briefly illuminated flakes of snow disappear into the black night.
‘You know … I used to say that to my Dad,’ I said, finally. ‘But if I told you what he used to say back, you’d think I was insane.’
‘More than I do?’
‘When I had a nightmare or was sad or frightened about something, he used to sing me … ’ I started to laugh. ‘Oh … I can’t.’
‘Go on.’
‘He used to sing me the “Molahonkey Song”.’
‘The what?’
‘The “Molahonkey Song”. I used to think everyone knew it.’
‘Trust me, Clark,’ he murmured, ‘I am a Molahonkey virgin.’