athan

They thought we couldn’t tell. They finally got back from the wedding around lunchtime the following day and Mrs Traynor was so mad she could barely even speak.

‘You could have rung,’ she said.

She had stayed in just to make sure they arrived back okay. I had listened to her pacing up and down the tiled corridor next door since I got there at 8am.

‘I must have called or texted you both eighteen times. It was only when I managed to call the Dewars’ house and somebody told me “the man in the wheelchair” had gone to a hotel that I could be sure you hadn’t both had some terrible accident on the motorway.’

‘“The man in the wheelchair”. Nice,’ Will observed.

But you could see he wasn’t bothered. He was all loose and relaxed, carried his hangover with humour, even though I had the feeling he was in some pain. It was only when his mum started to have a go at Louisa that he stopped smiling. He jumped in and just said that if she had anything to say she should say it to him, as it had been his decision to stay overnight, and Louisa had simply gone along with it.

‘And as far as I can see, Mother, as a 35-year-old man I’m not strictly answerable to anybody when it comes to choosing to spend a night at a hotel. Even to my parents.’

She had stared at them both, muttered something about ‘common courtesy’ and then left the room.

Louisa looked a bit shaken but he had gone over and murmured something to her, and that was the point at which I saw it. She went kind of pink and laughed, the kind of laugh you do when you know you shouldn’t be laughing. The kind of laugh that spoke of a conspiracy. And then Will turned to her and told her to take it easy for the rest of the day. Go home, get changed, maybe catch forty winks.

‘I can’t be walking around the castle with someone who has so clearly just done the walk of shame,’ he said.

‘Walk of shame?’ I couldn’t keep the surprise from my voice.

‘Not that walk of shame,’ Louisa said, flicking me with her scarf, and grabbed her coat to leave.

‘Take the car,’ he called out. ‘It’ll be easier for you to get back.’

I watched Will’s eyes follow her all the way to the back door.

I would have offered you seven to four just on the basis of that look alone.

He deflated a little after she left. It was as if he had been holding on until both his mum and Louisa had left the annexe. I had been watching him carefully now, and once his smile left his face I realized I didn’t like the look of him. His skin held a faint blotchiness, he had winced twice when he thought no one was looking, and I could see even from here that he had goosebumps. A little alarm bell had started to sound, distant but shrill, inside my head.

‘You feeling okay, Will?’

‘I’m fine. Don’t fuss.’

‘You want to tell me where it hurts?’

He looked a bit resigned then, as if he knew I saw straight through him. We had worked together a long time.

‘Okay. Bit of a headache. And … um … I need my tubes changed. Probably quite sharpish.’

I had transferred him from his chair on to his bed and now I began getting the equipment together. ‘What time did Lou do them this morning?’

‘She didn’t.’ He winced. And he looked a little guilty. ‘Or last night.’

‘What?’

I took his pulse, and grabbed the blood pressure equipment. Sure enough, it was sky high. When I put my hand on his forehead it came away with a faint sheen of sweat. I went for the medicine cabinet, and crushed some vasodilator drugs. I gave them to him in water, making sure he drank every last bit. Then I propped him up, placing his legs over the side of the bed, and I changed his tubes swiftly, watching him all the while.

‘AD?’

‘Yeah. Not your most sensible move, Will.’

Autonomic dysreflexia was pretty much our worst nightmare. It was Will’s body’s massive overreaction against pain, discomfort – or, say, an un-emptied catheter – his damaged nervous system’s vain and misguided attempt to stay in control. It could come out of nowhere and send his body into meltdown. He looked pale, his breathing laboured.

‘How’s your skin?’

‘Bit prickly.’

‘Sight?’

‘Fine.’

‘Aw, man. You think we need help?’

‘Give me ten minutes, Nathan. I’m sure you’ve done everything we need. Give me ten minutes.’

He closed his eyes. I checked his blood pressure again, wondering how long I should leave it before calling an ambulance. AD scared the hell out of me because you never knew which way it was going to go. He had had it once before, when I had first started working with him, and he had ended up in hospital for two days.

‘Really, Nathan. I’ll tell you if I think we’re in trouble.’

He sighed, and I helped him backwards so that he was leaning against his bedhead.

He told me Louisa had been so drunk he hadn’t wanted to risk letting her loose on his equipment. ‘God knows where she might have stuck the ruddy tubes.’ He half laughed as he said it. It had taken Louisa almost half an hour just to get him out of his chair and into bed, he said. They had both ended up on the floor twice. ‘Luckily we were both so drunk by then I don’t think either of us felt a thing.’ She had had the presence of mind to call down to reception, and they had asked a porter to help lift him. ‘Nice chap. I have a vague memory of insisting Louisa give him a fifty-pound tip. I knew she was properly drunk because she agreed to it.’

Will had been afraid when she finally left his room that she wouldn’t actually make it to hers. He’d had visions of her curled up in a little red ball on the stairs.

My own view of Louisa Clark was a little less generous just at that moment. ‘Will, mate, I think maybe next time you should worry a little more about yourself, yeah?’

‘I’m all right, Nathan. I’m fine. Feeling better already.’

I felt his eyes on me as I checked his pulse.

‘Really. It wasn’t her fault.’

His blood pressure was down. His colour was returning to normal in front of me. I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I had been holding.

We chatted a bit, passing the time while everything settled down, discussing the previous day’s events. He didn’t seem a bit bothered about his ex. He didn’t say much, but for all he was obviously exhausted, he looked okay.

I let go of his wrist. ‘Nice tattoo, by the way.’

He gave me a wry look.

‘Make sure you don’t graduate to an “End by”, yeah?’

Despite the sweats and the pain and the infection, he looked for once like there was something else on his mind other than the thing that consumed him. I couldn’t help thinking that if Mrs Traynor had known this, she might not have kicked off as hard as she did.

We didn’t tell her anything of the lunchtime events – Will made me promise not to – but when Lou came back later that afternoon she was pretty quiet. She looked pale, with her hair washed and pulled back like she was trying to look sensible. I kind of guessed how she felt; sometimes when you get hammered till the small hours you feel pretty good in the morning, but really it’s just because you’re still a bit drunk. That old hangover is just toying with you, working out when to bite. I figured it must have bitten her around lunchtime.

But it became clear after a while that it wasn’t just the hangover troubling her.

Will kept on and on at her about why she was being so quiet, and then she said, ‘Yes, well, I’ve discovered it’s not the most sensible thing to stay out all night when you’ve just moved in with your boyfriend.’

She was smiling as she said it, but it was a forced smile, and Will and I both knew that there must have been some serious words.

I couldn’t really blame the guy. I wouldn’t have wanted my missus staying out all night with some bloke, even if he was a quad. And he hadn’t seen the way Will looked at her.

We didn’t do much that afternoon. Louisa emptied Will’s backpack, revealing every free hotel shampoo, conditioner, miniature sewing kit and shower cap she could lay her hands on. (‘Don’t laugh,’ she said. ‘At those prices, Will paid for a bloody shampoo factory.’) We watched some Japanese animated film which Will said was perfect hangover viewing, and I stuck around – partly because I wanted to keep an eye on his blood pressure and partly, to be honest, because I was being a bit mischievous. I wanted to see his reaction when I announced I was going to keep them both company.

‘Really?’ he said. ‘You like Miyazaki?’

He caught himself immediately, saying that of course I would love it … it was a great film … blah, blah, blah. But there it was. I was glad for him, on one level. He had thought about one thing for too long, that man.

So we watched the film. Pulled down the blinds, took the phone off the hook, and watched this weird cartoon about a girl who ends up in a parallel universe, with all these weird creatures, half of whom you couldn’t tell if they were good or bad. Lou sat right up close to Will, handing him his drink or, at one point, wiping his eye when he got something in it. It was quite sweet, really, although a little bit of me wondered what on earth this was going to lead to.

And then, as Louisa pulled up the blinds and made us all some tea, they looked at each other like two people wondering whether to let you in on a secret, and they told me about going away. Ten days. Not sure where yet, but it would probably be long haul and it would be good. Would I come and help?

Does a bear shit in the woods?

I had to take my hat off to the girl. If you had told me four months ago that we’d get Will off on a long-haul holiday – hell, that we would get him out of this house – I would have told you that you were a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Mind you, I’d have a quiet word with her about Will’s medical care before we went. We couldn’t afford a near miss like that again if we were stuck in the middle of nowhere.

They even told Mrs T as she popped by, just as Louisa was leaving. Will said it, like it was no more remarkable than him going for a walk around the castle.

I have to tell you, I was really pleased. That ruddy online poker site had eaten all my money, and I wasn’t even planning on a holiday this year. I even forgave Louisa for being stupid enough to listen to Will when he said he hadn’t wanted her to do his tubes. And believe me, I had been pretty pissed about that. So it was all looking great, and I was whistling when I shouldered my way into my coat, already looking forward to white sands and blue seas. I was even trying to work out if I could tie in a short visit home to Auckland.

And then I saw them – Mrs Traynor standing outside the back door, as Lou waited to set off down the road. I don’t know what sort of a chat they’d had already, but they both looked grim.

I only caught the last line but, to be honest, that was enough for me.

‘I hope you know what you’re doing, Louisa.’