Kid Gloves (32 page)

I did on the other hand edit
Mae West Is Dead
that same year,
an anthology of gay fiction published by Faber, providing a mildly
militant introduction, and I don't remember anything being said about that. I imagine Mum kept
the peace between us to a considerable extent, and warned Dad off unsafe subjects. It was kid
gloves all round, some of them elbow-length, in the debutante or drag-queen manner.

In the introduction to the
anthology I made passing reference to Aids, which was just beginning to make headlines in this
country, as a domestic threat rather than an exotic catastrophe. Of course I hedged my bets, in
the journalistic manner, trying to come up with a politically robust statement that nevertheless
wouldn't embarrass me if a cure was found by the time the book was published – a sort of
rhetorical ice sculpture designed to melt discreetly away if conditions improved.

There was no thaw. The Terrence Higgins Trust,
the UK's pioneer Aids organization, held its first meeting in 1983, at Conway Hall, just round
the corner from Gray's Inn. I wasn't based in London at the time, since I had a little temporary
post as a creative writing teacher attached to the University of East Anglia, but the event
seemed important enough for me to return to London that weekend.

I don't know what I wanted from the meeting, some
sort of action plan, I suppose. There was a guest appearance by Mel Rosen, a member of the New
York organization Gay Men's Health Crisis, whose emotive style of public speaking grated on me.
When he said that he had cried more in the last six months than he had in his whole life, I'm
afraid I thought, so what? The link between epidemic and emotional growth seemed so tenuous and
uninteresting. What were we going to
do
?

Mel Rosen died in 1992, aged forty-one. I'm
ashamed that I was so unresponsive when he spoke about the changes in his life. At the time the
consensus was that only a small proportion of people exposed to what we assumed must be a virus
(the organism was years away from being identified) would go on to develop symptoms, and that
not all of those would progress to the full diagnosis, fatal in those days, but that's no
excuse. I had made a decision to be disappointed by the Trust's lack of dynamism. Volunteering
at this point would
be a waste of energy. I probably wanted an excuse not
to give my time to committee meetings. I was big on gestures of solidarity and points of
principle (train fare from Norwich be damned), not so hot on personal involvement. I felt about
Aids activism, at least in its disorganized state then, what Oscar Wilde is supposed to have
said on the subject of socialism. About it taking too many evenings.

Two years of headlines and editorials eroded my
sense of entitlement to distance. I volunteered to be a Buddy for the Trust, doing chores for
sick men and providing a basic level of companionship. The training was rudimentary, no more
than a one-day course made up of medical generalities and counselling tips. We were packed in a
dark and airless room, with many of us sitting on the floor. I remember one fellow inductee
seeming unable to take his eyes off my trousers, which sounds flattering until I explain that he
was gazing at ankle rather than groin level. The trousers had been bought in a sale and had
unfinished hems. They weren't quite long enough to be taken up for neatness.

As if to drive home the point that Aids was not
an issue I could legitimately dodge, the headquarters of the Terrence Higgins Trust at the time
was in Panther House, light industrial premises with an address in Mount Pleasant but
geographically closer to Gray's Inn Road. I was the nearest volunteer by some way, in what was
not much of a residential district. From my parents' front door to the Trust's front line was a
three-minute walk.

Or a ninety-second dash in an emergency. On one
occasion, there was an executive panic about what was going on with the phone line at Panther
House. News was coming in that an Aids patient had tried to discharge himself from hospital
against medical advice, and had been arrested to stop him leaving the premises. This was
obviously an alarming precedent and there
was intensive interest from the
press. The Trust hadn't had time to come up with any kind of official statement. The fear was
that a volunteer whose job was only to provide basic medical advice to the worried, to refer
them to more expert sources, might be reacting off the cuff from Panther House. It seemed
ominous that the number had been engaged for hours.

Someone was needed to get there fast, to pass on
the required message: Say nothing – tell them to call the press officer. I must have been at the
top of the list. From Gray's Inn Square I could have shouted out of the window and had a fair
chance of being heard.

I raced to Panther House and shouted incoherently
through the entryphone. It took a little while to persuade those within the fortress that I
wasn't some hectoring anti-gay passer-by, and when I was let in everyone was rather nonplussed.
Arrest? What arrest? Phone calls, what phone calls? Eventually someone thought to check the
phone. It turned out that the last person to hang up had returned the receiver to its cradle on
the slant, putting the line out of service. People had been sitting around with cups of tea,
making the most of the opportunity for undisturbed workplace smoking (in those bad old days),
wondering vaguely why everything had gone so quiet.

When the Trust changed address, it was to come
even closer, not letting me off the hook. The new premises on Gray's Inn Road were barely a
hundred yards from where I lived. If there was another emergency of the same type – providing I
was at home and the Gray's Inn Road gate from the Square was open, as was normal during business
hours – reaction time could significantly be whittled down.

I had no thought, when I volunteered as a Buddy,
that I would be gaining experience exploitable in writing. It was partly that I hadn't written
fiction for quite a few years at that point – I was generally assumed to be suffering from
writer's block, something
I only fully realized when I was tactfully asked
to review a book on the subject for the
Independent on Sunday
, as Susan Sontag might
have been assigned a book on cancer or Gorbachev one on birthmarks.

In any case I didn't see how Aids could be
adequately fictionalized. Over time I changed my mind, and began to feel that the word itself,
with its then conventional ‘full caps', was the main obstacle, a visual shout that was likely to
drown out with its repetitions any story in which it featured. Once I had realized it was
possible to write an arresting opening sentence while re-placing the syndrome with the euphemism
‘Slim', in a character's plausible register, the rest of the story more or less wrote itself.

I showed my story to the person I was buddying at
the time, Philip Lloyd-Bostock, wanting his blessing although as far as I knew I hadn't used any
of his personal details. It was still somehow an abstract invasion of privacy. He raised no
objection, though it must have been disheartening to read an outsider's recasting of his
desperate situation, when he himself was trying to finish an autobiographical novel. It was
published after his death as
The Centre of the Labyrinth
.

I thought the story (‘Slim') would be effective
on radio, where the withholding of the trigger-word might even ensnare listeners with no desire
to empathize. Radio 4 took an interest, Martin Jarvis recorded it, and it was scheduled for
broadcast late on a weekday evening.

I became restless several days in advance. I
certainly didn't want to listen to my story while it was broadcast, but it seemed silly to stay
in and not listen to it. The logic was, then, that I would go out and be in some sanctioned
public place when my story went out on its mission to galvanize lazy perceptions of illness.

I was in need of that quaint commodity ‘gay
space'. When I looked at
Time Out
's gay listings for that evening, the only
possible venue was the Market Tavern in Vauxhall, where there was a Body
Positive evening. (It had to be a club rather than a pub because of the restrictions then in
force about opening hours.) Body Positive was the support group for people who were
HIV-positive. The ironical appropriateness of the venue was surplus to my requirements, but it
was that or nothing. I would be in a room with a bunch of gay men who knew a lot more than I did
about the reality of being unwell at the time my momentous little story was transmitted.

With the sort of neatness that I try to avoid
when writing fiction, I met a man at the Body Positive evening, in what must have been the most
stubbornly unatmospheric venue in London, who quietly dismantled the bachelor persona that
didn't suit me, though I didn't myself know how to shed it.

Michael Jelicich was twenty-three and from New
Zealand. He was tall (6'4") and dark, with elongated hands and feet that made him look like an
El Greco. His ancestry was half Yugoslav – in those days we hadn't learned to subdivide that
national identity. I'm reminded of him when I see photographs of Goran Ivaniševi, who is
Croatian, though Ivaniševi was still playing tennis as an amateur when I met Michael. He had
been diagnosed as positive shortly before he left Auckland for London. The trip was long planned
and he went through with it.

I must have made some impression on him that
night at the Market Tavern, but he went home with someone else, Bill McLoughlin, who became a
friend of us both. We pronounced his name differently to distinguish him from other Bills we
knew, calling him Beel because of his fluency in Spanish. He had spent a lot of time in South
America.

He had been in Peru at a time of great unrest,
thanks to the Shining Path group. Once Beel was sitting in a café when a tear-gas grenade was
lobbed through the doorway. Hardly even thinking, he threw it out again into the street.

Shortly afterwards a
military policeman made an entrance, demanding to know who had thrown the gas grenade back. Beel
raised his hand. ‘Why did you do that?' he shouted.

‘Those things really kill the froth on a
cappuccino,' said Beel.

There was a moment's incredulous pause, then the
policeman grinned. ‘Yes, they do that, don't they?' he said. A Hemingway story, really, with a
tiny added element of campiness, but when Beel was doing the telling I believed it. I can still
almost believe it, on the basis that Beel's Spanish, extremely good but English-accented,
indicated someone it might be a mistake to brutalize.

I'm a bit vague about when Beel died, though he
made it through a good stretch of the 1990s. Michael went home with him because Beel had only
recently been diagnosed and thought he would never be able to hold someone close again, let
alone have sex. I assume there was desire on Michael's part as well as concern – the impulses
can overlap. Michael was matter-of-fact about his own needs as well as other people's. The
exotic surname Jel-ic-ich was pronounced Jealous Itch, but that was just a handy mnemonic. It
was the opposite of a character sketch.

Michael's health broke down rather rapidly, given
his youth and generally healthy lifestyle – he didn't drink or smoke, and vegetarianism had been
his preference for years. He had HIV-positive friends who swore by a macrobiotic diet to keep
them healthy, and he went along with that experimentally, but his basic feeling was that it
didn't make sense to add extra difficulties to the business of feeding yourself when you had no
energy and hardly ever felt hungry anyway. He reasoned that if he wasn't going to be able to eat
more than a few mouthfuls he should eat food with concentrated sustaining power, and if M&S
Chicken Kiev wasn't macrobiotic then that was just too bad. When I started to cook for him he
asked me not to
consult him about what we were having. He had so little
appetite that it seemed wise to hold it back for the actual food, not waste it on menus.

I remember, though, that he read some testimony
about the HIV-curative properties of hydrogen peroxide, and we thought we'd give it a try. For a
while we added it to drinking water, starting with just a few drops then building up to a dose
that would scour the virus from his blood. I drank it too, to keep him company – but then he
would get sick and our H
₂
O
₂
regime stopped being a priority. The bottle
from Boots and the medicine dropper lost their importance. I worried at first that we were
drinking hair bleach, but he knew perfectly well that what was loosely called ‘peroxide' was
mixed with ammonium hydroxide. If I ever saw him adding ammonia NH
₃
to his glass I
should intervene at once.

While he was well enough he worked at a little
salon called Ficarazzi on High Holborn, and later at the branch of the Hebe chain on the Strand.
Both premises were in easy walking distance of Gray's Inn, and I would often bring him lunch
there. It was only when I read him a story based on a weekend we had spent in Brighton that he
realized I was embarrassed by my lover being a hairdresser. Was he disappointed in me? I don't
see how he could have been anything else.

He was very much at ease with himself. His small
vocabulary of adjectives – ‘stunning' his favourite positive, ‘tragic' its negative counterpart
– was up to the task of conveying his subtle responses. If there was an element of cliché in his
character he would embrace it, or find a way of setting it off. Liking Simple Minds, Talk Talk
and U2 might not be the most maverick choices available, but who was he to resist the
classics?

He bought
The Joshua Tree
when it came
out and played it constantly on the Ficarazzi sound system. He did his best haircuts ever that
week. Coincidence? You decide.