The French House by Alexander Nick

Author:Alexander, Nick [Alexander, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780857896346
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd
Published: 2013-03-31T22:00:00+00:00

ANGELS VS. DOCTORS

Despite all the wine, I don’t sleep well that night. The bed remains freezing and clammy, but when I try to warm myself against Victor, I find that I get hot and sweaty, so the only thing I can do is alternate constantly between the two. At some point during the night, my back starts to ache as well, which I blame on Distira’s ancient sprung mattress. It’s only when Victor gets up in the morning that it finally dawns on me what all of these symptoms really add up to: influenza.

‘Just stay in bed, pumpkin,’ Victor says, touching my forehead. ‘I’ll go see what Clappier says and report back.’

I insist that, no, I will get up and join them shortly, but it only takes a trip to the bathroom to convince me otherwise. I can barely stand up, let alone participate in the rebuilding of walls. And so, feeling guilty on top of everything else, I return to bed.

Mid-morning, I’m awoken from a bad dream by Distira. She hands me a cup of warm grog, which I accept gratefully. It tastes of lemon, honey and something bitter – paracetamol perhaps. She stands at the window, her hair glowing around the edges due to the harsh light of the snowscape beyond, and then, once I have finished, she silently takes the cup from my grasp and lumbers from the room.

When I wake up, the daylight has long since fled and the room is bathed in moonlight. The next thing that I’m aware of is someone stroking my forehead, and I turn to see Victor, his face white with brick-dust, perched on the edge of the bed.

‘Are you OK, pumpkin?’ he asks me.

‘No, I’m not. I have flu,’ I mumble, realising as I do so that a sore throat has now added itself to my miserable panoply of symptoms.

‘You’re really hot. But that’s a good thing. It’s your body fighting the virus. Can I do anything? Can I get you anything?’

I shake my head. ‘I just need to sleep,’ I say, my eyes already closing.

‘Are you sure you want this window open?’ Victor asks. ‘It’s freezing in here.’

I want to tell him that I haven’t opened the window, and no, I don’t want it open, but sleep is already sucking me under again, so I only manage to stay awake long enough to say, ‘’s freezing,’ and to vaguely hear the sound of it being closed.

From that point on, I fold completely into a world of nightmares and tormented sleep, of achy joints and endless quantities of perspiration that feel sometimes unbearably hot, but almost as often cold and clammy. Victor is next to me in the bed, and then he isn’t, and it is sometimes day, and sometimes night. Someone is feeding me soup, or water, or grog, or I am wishing that they were, or wishing that they would go away and leave me be.

One morning, I wake to an empty bed and head to the bathroom.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.