The Facts of Life (47 page)

Not only had he found Sam just in time, he had dared, like a fool, to lower his guard, having found him, and feel safe, immune to his old bachelor fears. The mark might have been there for weeks, for all he knew. In his new reassurance, he had stopped his former obsessive monitoring of skin tone and weight gain. He only found the thing because he had caught athlete’s foot after the two of them had been swimming in a public baths one weekend. Upending one foot and then the other to shake fungicide over them, he found a mark, below his toes, slightly larger than a fifty pence piece, raised a little above the surrounding skin, the colour of a recent blackberry stain. He could not tell if the soreness was caused by the athlete’s foot which had made some of the skin between his toes crack. He tried to hide it from Sam but found he couldn’t and thrust it out for his inspection in bed one evening.

‘Was that there before?’ he asked.

‘Course,’ Sam said. ‘It’s just a mole.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Well I
think
it was there before. I quite like it.’

Jamie watched in alarm as Sam lowered his bristled chin to kiss the thing. While content to use condoms at Jamie’s insistence, he seemed utterly without anxiety, either from ignorance or bravado. Jamie tried to take shelter beneath his lover’s confidence but his own fear leaked through and chilled him by degrees.

‘If you’re so worried, take it to a doctor,’ Sam said.

‘But I’m never ill.’

‘So? You’re not ill now. But go if it makes you stop worrying. I hate you like this.’

Sam made it sound so simple, but to Jamie the very act of taking the blemish to someone qualified to pronounce on it gave his fear a fleshly dimension he would not countenance.

Then Fate took the initiative out of his hands. The syndicate was changing its employees’ private health insurance arrangements and all personnel were required to have a health check with a doctor approved by the insurers – hence his visit to Dr Penney. This was, they had all been assured, purely a formality. Steeling himself, Jamie called at Dr Penney’s well-appointed consulting rooms one lunch hour, allowed the first part of the examination to run its unruffled course then pulled off shoe and sock and asked, ‘Should I be worried about this?’

Dr Penney frowned and prodded.

‘Tender?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Rather.’

‘And it’s new?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mmm. It’s only a mole but it’s rather big. Probably nothing to worry about, but I think we should whisk it off just the same. Lie on the couch over there.’

And he and his nurse had removed the mole then and there under local anaesthetic, leaving Jamie with a neat row of stitches, a temporary limp and a tremendous sense of relief.

‘Berk,’ Sam jeered kindly when Jamie finally spoke the thought that had been going through his mind for weeks. ‘Told you it was nothing. Now peel us another orange.’

Only days later, Dr Penney had telephoned the office to ask him to call back, ‘on a matter of some urgency’.

‘How’re the stitches?’ he asked, waving Jamie into his seat. He was a smartly dressed, irredeemably plain man and, Jamie thought, wryly, rather young to have power over life and death. He probably specialised in health insurance work because it paid well, was impersonal and strictly limited in the strains it could place upon his medical knowledge and social inhibitions.

‘Fine,’ Jamie told him. ‘A bit sore, but they’re holding. I’ve kept them out of water, like you said. I just wash round them with a flannel.’

‘Good. Good.’ Dr Penney opened a file then closed it again, as though fearful of revealing a second too early what lay hidden there. He evidently felt extremely uncomfortable about what he was about to say.

‘Do you have a regular GP? I see these notes date from when you were still at school.’

‘Not really. I’m never ill,’ Jamie said.

‘So I see. Right. Good. Well. The prognosis on the mole we removed was fine. Quite benign but probably just as well that we took it off, since it was getting large and causing you discomfort.’ Dr Penney tidied one of his firmly ironed cuffs, patting the gold link, then met Jamie’s eye again.

‘Yes?’ Jamie prompted him.

‘But there’s other news that’s less good, I’m afraid.’

‘Ah.’

‘I’m afraid I’ll have to refuse you for the health insurance and I don’t think you’ll be covered any longer by the former policy except for accidents and routine operations. Not for sickness.’

Jamie’s mouth ran suddenly dry.

‘Why not?’ he croaked, knowing, as he asked, what he was about to hear, he had rehearsed the scene so often during his wakeful nights.

‘Your blood showed evidence of a contact with the HIV virus. Now this doesn’t mean you’re sick. It doesn’t even mean you have AIDS. As yet we know very little. There are no dangerous symptoms or anything. This simply means you’ve been in contact –’

‘Please,’ Jamie broke in, standing. ‘Spare me the spiel.’

‘I think you should speak to a counsellor. I can refer you –’

‘Just … Just spell it out for me. Just once,’ Jamie insisted. ‘I’m HIV positive, aren’t I?’

‘Yes.’

‘Which means, insofar as medicine has anything but deaths to go by, that at some stage, in the near or distant future, barring a miracle, I’ll develop AIDS.’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘Oh come
on
! Probable. Say it’s probable.’

Jamie pushed back his chair impatiently. Dr Penney stood too now, backing off slightly behind his desk, as though fearing Jamie might be about to hit him. Or bite him.

‘Are you married?’ Jamie asked him.

‘Yes,’ the doctor blurted.

‘Children?’

‘Two. Boy and a girl.’ Dr Penney gestured spasmodically at a silver frame on a corner of his desk.

‘Then I suspect,’ Jamie told him, ‘that I may be in a position to know far more about this subject than you.’

And he left.

He had not been back at his desk an hour – plunging with automatic efficiency into the streams of figures and risk appraisals – when Nick Godfreys arrived at his elbow asking if he might have a word in private. In his inner sanctum, which was furnished like a bright twelve-year-old’s idea of how a senior executive’s office should be, he assumed a sickening impersonation of man-to-manliness.

‘Brian Penney just called me, Jamie,’ he said, swivelling his chair. ‘I can’t say how sorry I am.’

‘He
told
you?’ Jamie felt suddenly clear-headed with rage.

‘He was right to. As our medical adviser, he has to apprise me of anything that might endanger my staff. Look, I’m afraid we’ll have to let you go. Obviously there’s no need to work out your notice. You’ll have the rest of this year’s salary in full. And, er, I’ll tell the others you’ve been headhunted.’

‘Well thanks, Nick. That’s big of you.’

‘The least we can do,’ Godfreys went on, impervious to the sarcasm. He shook his head, phonily rueful. ‘I can’t say how sorry I am. You’ve done some great work. We’ll miss you. You’ll be in my prayers.’

‘That’s it?’ Jamie asked. ‘I just stop. Now?’

Godfreys lowered his voice as though discreetly pointing out an unzipped trouser fly.

‘I think it would be best,’ he said.

Jamie left immediately, with no goodbyes and no explanations. There was nothing of his to clear from his desk that could not be slipped into his jacket pockets – a few pens, a chic calculator Miriam had given him as a starting-work present. It was mid-afternoon, so he had the unwonted experience of being able to sit on the train home. He held himself tightly in check, his mind watchfully numb, until he was able to lean the door to the flat firmly closed behind him. He slipped off his jacket then wandered across the flat removing tie, shirt, shoes, trousers, letting them lie where they fell, until, naked, he dropped heavily on to his bed and blocked out the daylight with the duvet and an armful of pillow.

He had never known the hard anguish of bereavement, but he cried now as for a friend’s death. He shook with anger at the injustice of it all, moaned into the mattress, fell asleep, exhausted, the sheet below his face drenched with brine and snot, only to wake again, remember why he was there and begin to cry afresh. Trauma worked on him like a drug: the afternoon and early evening dissolved in spasms of shocked self-pity and merciful blanks of temporary obliteration.

When Sam arrived, grimy from work, and let himself in with the key he had only held for three weeks or so, he saw the discarded clothes and Jamie’s sleeping form outlined by the bedding. He took a quick shower then slid into bed as well. Expecting a sleepily loving embrace, he found himself tugged instead into a kind of battle as Jamie, eyes half-glued with congealing tears, incoherently explained the situation. Desperate, confused, Jamie lashed out at him, tried to drive him away, with all the querulous urgency of a parent persuading a playful child away from a precipice.

‘This isn’t your problem,’ he kept saying. ‘There’s no need to get involved. Just clear out. I don’t need you. You’re probably still fine. Just back out now. Go. Fuck off. It’s not your problem.’

As Sam later tried to explain to Alison, an abiding problem of adult life was the embarrassment of choice. Able to do this, that or the other, one could rarely make a decision without the suspicion that one of the rejected choices might have proved happier.

‘Then something narrows the choices,’ he said. ‘Or takes them away altogether, and suddenly it’s all so simple. As simple as when you were a kid.’

With hindsight he liked to feel that his decision had been arrived at with an almost heroic sureness of purpose. In fact the process was longer and messier. There were days of arguing when they were together, worrying when they were apart and one purgatorial evening when Jamie locked him out and refused to answer the telephone. He spent the night wandering smugly curtained Chelsea streets and failing to sleep on benches and doorsteps, unable to understand Jamie’s total rejection of him. After this dark night of the soul, Sam caught Jamie unawares in the thin morning light, returning from the newsagents with milk and orange juice. They confronted one another on the pavement, haggard with care and sleeplessness.

‘She told you, didn’t she?’ Sam said, catching him by the shoulder. ‘She fucking told you what I did and that’s why you don’t want me around any more.’

‘Alison? She’s told me nothing.’

Jamie watched, bewildered, as Sam summoned up the words.

‘I did time, all right? Two years.’

Jamie’s mind reeled.

‘Prison?’ he asked, trying to take the information in.

‘Yes. I did time,’ Sam repeated. ‘Not long.’

‘What for?’

‘GBH. There was no excuse. No reason. I was drunk.’

‘Oh.’ Jamie shifted his weight from one foot to another, confused by this unexpected intelligence and, even more, by how unimportant it had become. ‘That doesn’t matter, Sam,’ he said slowly. ‘That’s not why I can’t have you –’

But Sam cut in, pushing him hard on the chest with the flat of a hand in his frustration.

‘Why does this have to be so
fucking
hard to say,’ he groaned, turning aside and glowering at a woman passing with a baby-buggy.

‘What?’

‘I need you,’ Sam insisted, looking back at him. ‘Ask me to walk away now and you might as well expect me to chop off my own feet. I – I just don’t have a choice.’

Loath as ever not to have the last word, Jamie drew breath to speak, then, as if frightened he might be swept off on another crying jag, shut his mouth again and fumblingly pulled Sam to him and held on hard.

The helpline was currently squeezed into a grim ‘suite’ of three tiny rooms in an office block left redundant and virtually unlettable by the onward sweep of new technology. The small organisation was constantly in danger of being moved on. It lurched from one ad-hoc lease and funding crisis to another, despite the desperate public need which the hours of meticulously logged calls would have made baldly apparent to any junior health minister or minor royal who cared to enquire. Though still officially existing to help with any enquiries of a sexual nature, from girls worried they were pregnant to cheating husbands in need of a discreet clap clinic, its work was increasingly AIDS-based. An already derisory government grant had just been halved following the production of highly suspect figures which, it was claimed, proved that any danger of an epidemic among respectable, white heterosexuals had been forestalled. The fact that most homosexuals, drug users, sex workers and African immigrants paid taxes too was, as usual, conveniently ignored. The helpline badly needed space so that London callers could hang up the telephone and come to be counselled face to face, but any such expansion would involve health and safety regulations and their consequent, impossible cost. In one room there were telephones, just five of them, ranged on a big trestle table along with a jumble of medical reference books, drug guides and directories of useful addresses and telephone numbers. The numbers most often passed on to callers were chalked on a blackboard under headings: Doctors, Hospitals, Law, Housing, Drugs. Volunteers had scribbled some inevitable graffiti up there too, the most enduring of which was a plaintive, ‘Whatever happened to herpes?’ The second room, wittily labelled
RECOVERY
in flowery writing with rabbits and bluebirds drawn around it, housed two old council-issue sofas, a coffee machine, an assortment of mugs and a bowl of goldfish Sandy had donated because she said pets were soothing and an office cat impractical.