Kid Gloves (33 page)

When I took to riding a
motorbike (certainly to my own surprise and perhaps to other people's), he said that personally
he preferred mopeds, and planned to choose a purple one for himself, one whose motor resembled a
hairdryer as closely as possible. He loved it when people didn't notice his jokes, and never
made my mistake of repeating them as often as it took for them to be acknowledged, if not
necessarily enjoyed.

For a while he lived on New North Road in nether
Islington, and then, after a hospital stay, in Acton, where his non-rent-charging landlord was a
volunteer he had met while he was there, an altruistic set-up with its own set of complications.
The only place we could be properly private was a flat in Surrey Quays that he was lent towards
the end of 1987, where the price of privacy was cold and damp. Michael had never seen snow
falling until he came to London the previous year, and had loved it, but didn't enjoy cold in
its less ornamental aspects.

Of course, living in Gray's Inn meant I couldn't
offer Michael any sort of home. He wasn't exactly welcome as a visitor while Dad was on the
premises, but that was perfectly consistent. Welcome was not something he claimed to offer when
it came to that side of my life. Mum's stiffness in his presence was more of a surprise to me. I
had expected her to see right away that Michael, without being a needy personality in the
slightest, was a person in need, and that was a category to which she had always responded.

I reasoned that she was so easily intimidated
herself she didn't realize that her manner could be off-putting in its own right. Surely she
could see that Michael didn't even know what to call her? Using her first name without
invitation was taking a liberty, but being expected to say ‘Lady Mars-Jones' was a joke. She
herself disliked having a grand title, one that only meant she was married to a man who had a
certain job, but if she didn't see how alienating it was to someone without status
and from another part of the world then she might as well have been glorying
in it.

It can't have been like that, from her side of
things. I was busy sending out on all frequencies the message that it was quite impossible for
me to acquire HIV, jamming the family's listening apparatus with a blanketing reassurance, while
also expecting my mind to be read and my intentions clear. And from Sheila's point of view, I
imagine, Michael's sweet droll presence was just the mask a virus wore when it entered her house
with intent to bereave. He personified death, and not just a general death – his own, of course,
but mine too.

Naturally she fought against being on first-name
terms with that. As a debilitated young man far from home, with nothing to rely on except the
small surprises he could spring with his scissors (for as long as he was still well enough to
ply them) he also represented absolute vulnerability. Perhaps she was sending out some jamming
signals of her own, to prevent unbearable possibilities from tracking her down.

Eventually I said, ‘Do you mind asking Michael to
call you “Sheila”? “Lady Mars-Jones” is a bit of a mouthful.' And she said, ‘Of course. Silly of
me not to think of it.'

Even ‘Sheila' he found a bit of a mouthful,
perhaps because of its antipodean usage (even if Australian rather than New Zealand) to mean
woman
generically. In conversation with me he styled her ‘Shee', this being what Bobby
Grant on
Brookside
, as played by Ricky Tomlinson, called his wife, Sheila (Sue
Johnston). Michael preferred grim British soap operas to sunny Australian ones, and
EastEnders
made
Neighbours
look pretty silly.
Brookside
was
sometimes so wonderfully gloomy that it made his problems seem quite minor.

He was in the UK on a two-year visa. Unlike (as
it seemed) all his friends Michael didn't have ‘patriality', the right of residence that Kiwis
enjoy as long as they have had the forethought
to equip themselves with at
least one British grandparent. It wasn't legal for him to make his home here, and of course
there was no mechanism, no civil partnership nor extended Foucauldian form of adoption, that
would let me top him up conveniently with the rights he lacked.

The only form in which I could show commitment
was to buy a flat for us to live in, for however short a time. HIV was doing what no other
agency had achieved, by making me set up on my own. The timing wasn't great – the summer of 1988
was the last time that two earners could claim tax relief on a single mortgage, so yuppy couples
on a deadline were blocking the doors of estate agents' premises. My insecure freelance income
was outclassed, required to compete against mature salaries hunting in pairs.

Brought up in WC1, and in an august enclave to
boot, I wasn't particularly realistic about where I could afford to live. An early Terrence
Higgins Trust meeting had been held in a basement on Highbury Fields, and I was duly impressed
with the amenities of the area. I could afford a three-bedroomed flat in Finsbury Park or a
two-bedroomed one in Highbury. Journeys from Highbury were shorter, to the West End to see
films, to Gray's Inn by number 19 bus, and it was hard to make out that I needed a third bedroom
when soon enough I would be living alone.

It was August when we moved in. ‘Shee' gave us a
cast-iron cooking-pot, still in service in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and
Michael's mother, Beverley (who had visited that summer), gave us a chopping-board made of a
distinctive New Zealand hardwood. It cracked and then split a good long time ago, losing the
inset metal handle, but I'll go on using it as long as there's enough square-inch-age left
intact to accommodate a spring onion.

Michael had his own bedroom, and mainly slept on
the
futon there. He put pin-ups on the wall with Blu-tack, large-format
photos from the gay free-sheets, innocuous furry nudes. I must have looked dismayed at this
revelation of preference, for him to spell out so clearly the obvious truth: if he had wanted a
lover covered in coconut matting he would have found one. There were applicants.

He spent a lot of time knitting at a modest level
of craft, making what he called ‘peggy squares', alternately black and brightly coloured, to be
sewn together into a patchwork quilt. He explained that knitting was only half an activity, and
so was watching television, but between them they made up a state of satisfaction. He would sit
on the sofa knitting with his long right leg crossed over, bobbing his bed-socked size twelve
foot in slow tempo, keeping time with something I couldn't hear.

We weren't entirely swallowed up by domesticity.
Through Edmund White, with whom I'd written a book of HIV-related stories, I was put in touch
with Kitty Mrosovsky who lived near us, in Arsenal near the stadium (before it moved away). She
had recently been diagnosed as positive, and needed someone to talk to. Michael came along to
meet her once, and was touchingly protective of her, considering an age gap of perhaps fifteen
years and a great difference of character – Kitty was academic and temperamentally nervous, a
pianist and writer whose first novel had been published by a firm that had instantly gone bust,
so that her career as a fiction writer was launched and sunk almost simultaneously. On the way
home Michael said that he thought the stage Kitty was going through, when you know your health
is being secretly ruined but nothing definite has yet happened, was the hardest of the lot to
deal with. In HIV terms, he felt like her older brother.

He was scheduled to leave in early January of
1989. In December he suggested that we hire a video camera to record
highlights of the Christmas period. This felt quite adventurous – the equipment was
expensive and no-one we knew owned one. It was all very futuristic. I was impressed that the
shop where we hired it not only took a deposit but a frame capture from its CCTV system as
evidence of what we looked like.

As always with Michael, there was a lot of good
sense behind the idea. He and I had been saying goodbye almost from the moment we met. There was
no need to make a meal of the actual parting. The video camera would keep us looking outwards
rather than in, and would have a usefulness to a wider circle. Tim's son, Ebn, was three and a
half, and we saw quite a lot of him (Michael cut his hair). It seemed a good idea to get plenty
of footage of this beguiling boy on separate cassettes, so that one could be given to Tim and
his partner Pam, and one to my parents documenting their first grandchild. Another tape was for
Michael to pass on to his family as a record of his London life. He always said he had been
happier in London with Aids than in Auckland without. Another tape was designated as my souvenir
of him.

Naturally enough this was the most intimate.
Lying exhausted on his futon, Michael still managed to give a guided tour of his gallery of
hunks on the wall, the commentary including not just names (of course there was a Brad, but also
a Petey and a Wilf) but their professions and the cars they drove. In another sequence he is
lying against the naked chest (hairy, as it happens) of one of our friends. He strokes it and
comments on the difference from what he's used to. He says he could never have a lover after me.
I should know by now that there's nothing more characteristic of Michael than to make me relax,
to get me completely defenceless, and then say something just ever so slightly edged. He says,
‘It took me two years to get you trained. I couldn't go through
all that
again.' The camera shakes because my shoulders are laughing.

It's true, though, in its way, that he trained
me. He made me something I wasn't before, not
lovable
(cuddly toy) but
love-able
. Capable of responding without reservations.

In the last section that we filmed he describes
Henderson, the Auckland suburb where he grew up: the orchards, the primary school, the mountain
range. When Beverley can't see the mountains, rain is on the way and it's time to get the
washing in off the line. He falls peaceably silent. The camera, going for an arty effect far
beyond my actual competence as a video operator, focusses on the slow bounce of his foot in its
bedsock.

In 1989 people thought of the world as being well
connected by its media, but the time difference between London and Auckland made phone calls
impractical, and we relied on the postal service almost as much as people had in the nineteenth
century. To start with I wrote letters, but Michael talked me into trying his own preferred
medium, the tape cassette. Thrifty and unsentimental, he would listen to my voice on a tape,
then record over it and send it back. His style was loose and free-ranging – he might go on
chatting to me while blood was being taken, then say afterwards that the stocky male nurse who
had done the procedure was ‘very you'. There came a time when he had radiotherapy on a Kaposi's
sarcoma lesion in his mouth, which made his beard fall out in a geometrically square patch. He
sent me a photograph of the damage, perhaps to prepare me in the event of our seeing each other
before it could grow back, though he always discouraged me from making the trip, saying he only
wanted to see me if he could show me around and have some fun himself. Perhaps he just sent me
the mortifying photo because, unsentimental again, he had to deal with it, so why shouldn't
I?

When Michael's family phoned
me at the beginning of May to say that he was dying, there were still a couple of his tapes in
the post. It was too much for me to listen to them when they arrived, and I never have, which
feels like the right decision. I like the feeling that there are unexplored bits of Michael left
over, which I could in theory dip into at any time, and so I will never run out.

The most painful moment in my whole relationship
with Dad came the day after Michael's death. Mum phoned me in Highbury to express her
condolences. Then she pronounced a formula I had always hated, without being able to find an
effective way to expose it in all its awfulness.

Dad would like a word.

It wasn't quite that a grown man was using his
wife as a switchboard operator, to place a call for him. That would just be inconsiderate and
patronizing. It was so much worse: he was using her as an unacknowledged warm-up act, to
guarantee a reception he couldn't rely on without her help.

Oi, mate! Earn your own intimacy. Intimacy is not
transferable. No piggyback, no hitch-hiking. On your bike, your honour. There's no Plus One.

Question: how is it different for a son to use
his mother as a conduit of information to the patriarch (‘Oh by the way,
Mae West is
Dead
comes out next week, there will probably be some reviews', ‘Mario died last night,
while I was there. I'm fine') and for a father to use his wife to establish contact with a son
without being expected to beg …?

Not now! There'll be plenty of time for questions
later. Can't you see I'm getting up a good old head of steam?

There seems to have been something in the nature
of the Mars-Jones family that preferred to go the long way round, avoiding the obvious
communicative route in favour of letting information filter through indirectly. Might this be
characteristic
of British families in general? Anglo-Welsh families?
Families with three sons in them? Do strings of rhetorical questions advertise a wish to change
the subject?

There was also the possibility that Mum had told
him that he couldn't get out of saying something to me, so that in a moment of assertiveness she
was more or less frogmarching him all the way to the receiver. There is always the possibility
of this sort of ramification: that it was for her benefit that he was going to say something for
my benefit.

When Dad came on the line I braced myself for
evasiveness. I hardly dared think what status he was going to accord Michael's death, how he
would square the circle, in terms of offering condolence without granting approval.