Page 80 of Gwen and Art Are Not in Love

The first time Arthur truly woke up – opened his eyes and understood exactly who and where he was – he knew something was off, but couldn’t quite place it. Things began to make sense when he turned his head very slightly, ears ringing with the effort, and saw a tangle of red plaits on the pillow next to him. His head hurt. His chest hurt. It was hard to pinpoint everything else that hurt, but he knew it tallied up to be almost all of him.

‘You’re in my bed,’ he said, noticing that his voice came out strangely quiet and raspy. Gwen shifted, then turned over to look at him.

‘Correct,’ she said, frowning. She was fully clothed and pink in the cheeks.

‘Are you lost?’ Arthur said, trying to clear his throat and then closing his eyes tightly, as cruel, aimless pain shotthrough every part of his body, sending strange patterns of light skittering across his eyelids.

‘I thought Sidney needed a break. He’s been sitting in that chair staring at you non-stop. I don’t think he was even blinking.’ She sat upright, careful not to jostle him.

‘Your reputation will be torn asunder,’ Arthur said with great effort, opening his eyes again and watching as she slid gingerly from the bed and went to fetch him a cup of water; he tried to reach for it and realised that his hands weren’t obeying him. He didn’t understand how he could be so bone-tired when he’d only just woken up, his limbs heavy and weak. Gwen tried to press the cup to his lips but he choked and spluttered, feeling cold water slide down his neck. It wasn’t unpleasant. In fact – he could hardly feel it at all.

‘Too late for that, everyone thinks we’ve been at it all summer,’ Gwen said, giving up on the water entirely. ‘As long as I don’t walk out of here pregnant, I think I’ll be fine.’

‘Come on then,’ Arthur croaked. ‘Lift up your skirts. May as well do the whole thing properly.’ He had meant it to be a joke, but it was coming out strangely quiet and unconvincing. He couldn’t really feel his hands now, which he thought might be a bit of a concern.

‘Arthur,’ Gwen said, but it sounded as if she were talking to him from very far away. He couldn’t tell if he’d closed his eyes, or if everything had simply gone dark around him. Somewhere nearby, it sounded as if a cat might be purring. ‘Art, are you all right?’

‘They were … they gave me a message,’ he said, with no idea what he was talking about.

‘Art,’ Gwen said again, sounding quite panicked. ‘Look at me.’ He tried – nobody could say he didn’ttry –but he couldn’t quite reach her any more.

Bridget didn’t try to make Arthur drink anything. She certainly didn’t climb into his bed. She sat in the chair next to it, not reading or writing or even indulging in a little humming; simply staring straight ahead as if she’d vanished to some other plane of existence, with Lucifer asleep on her lap. After five minutes of observing this through half-closed eyes Arthur was about to announce himself awake when she spoke instead.

‘You are very bad at pretending to be asleep.’

‘No I’m not,’ Arthur said, his throat dry. ‘I’ve been awake for an hour.’

‘No you haven’t,’ said Bridget, raising an eyebrow at him.

‘No,’ Arthur agreed. ‘I haven’t.’

Bridget got to her feet, displacing Lucifer. ‘I’ll fetch Sidney,’ she said, rubbing her eyes.

‘Bridget,’ Arthur said just as she reached the door. ‘Did I dream it, or did you …? The other night Gwen was talking to me, when I was half asleep, she said you went back to the inn and – knocked some heads together.’

‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘She said you found one of the guys who did it and cracked him open like a walnut.’

‘That’s an exaggeration,’ Bridget said, opening the door and pausing. ‘He wasn’t that tough to crack. Like an egg, maybe. A really puny little egg.’

Arthur laughed and winced, and then a thought struck him.

‘They wanted to tell me something,’ he said. What they’d told him was insubstantial, already floating away from him. ‘Did he say anything?’

‘No. Do you mean they said that to you … to get you to come outside?’ Bridget said. ‘To rob you?’

‘No, it was … I don’t know what it was,’ Arthur said. He tried to reach for the thought one last time, and then almost instantly fell asleep.

Arthur only noticed that Gabriel was in the room at all because he moved so quickly trying to leave it.

‘Coward,’ he said, turning to look at him. He felt hot all over; he wondered if the shutters had been left open, if he was trapped in an unrelenting patch of afternoon sun, but then he realised far too slowly that it was, in fact, the middle of the night. That accounted for the darkness, and the quiet, and the fact that Gabriel was standing there in his nightclothes looking grim about the mouth. Lucifer was curled at the foot of the bed, seeming unconcerned.

‘You’ve got a fever,’ Gabriel said. ‘They’ve been sedating you. It seems to come and go.’

‘What’s wrong with me?’ Arthur asked, and he was irritated to hear how small and scared he sounded. He couldn’t stop shivering. It was extremely embarrassing.

‘Broken ribs. You took some very serious blows to the head, and they thought maybe your skull – but the swelling seems to have gone down. Your wrist was broken. The one you broke when we were children. The physician said he set it better this time, but it might … it might not be much use to you, broken twice. Your legs seemed to just be badlybruised. Your nose was broken, and you bled quite a lot.’ He made as if to take a step towards the bed, then thought better of it. He looked excruciatingly uncomfortable, his eyes darting from the floor to the ceiling to the door, but never landing on Arthur. ‘It was your head – at first they said you might die. And then that you might not be able to talk. Or walk. Or do anything, really. You managed to speak to Gwen and Bridget coherently a couple of weeks ago, but then – then you got that fever. They don’t know why.’