Me Before You: A Novel

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, Willlay 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