Jane Green - Bookends

‘You’re sure you’re okay?’

I nod, heading for the door.

‘Cath?’ I turn just as I’m stepping out. ‘You know that if you ever need to talk, you can just pick up the phone or come over.’

‘You know, James, you’re amazing. I don’t know what to say, thank you just doesn’t seem enough.’

He smiles. ‘Don’t be silly, that’s what friends are for,’ and he leans forward and kisses my cheek, squeezing my arm at the same time. I walk into the street and go home to phone Si, having completely forgotten that I was supposed to have proposed dinner.

The nights are not good. Si seems to get far more frightened at night, and among the many books he’s bought are first-person stories of people living with AIDS, or people who have lost loved ones to AIDS.

He reads, nightly, about watching people you love die a horrible, painful death. He reads about people who go blind, contract tuberculosis, Kaposi’s sarcoma. And when he reads these stories, although he says it helps him to feel not quite so alone, he cannot help the terror striking.

During the daytime I’m there, on the end of the phone, to keep him sane, to remind him of what the doctor told him at the clinic: that at last there are effective treatments, that the average prognosis, before people became ill, used to be ten to twelve years, but that now, with these new treatments, that has been significantly extended.

You, I say repeatedly to Si, will be around for years . Twenty or thirty at least . And I don’t just say this to make him feel better, I say it because I genuinely believe it. I say it because if Si refuses to be positive about this, then someone else will have to do it for him and that someone will be me.

So, as I say, the daytimes are not quite so bad. During the day we even manage to have occasional conversations in which the words HIV or AIDS don’t even figure. But it’s during the night that he gets the fear. During the night when he phones me up, either crying softly, or the weight of the fear pressing down on him so much he can hardly speak, just needing to know that someone is there for him.

Lucy asked me yesterday if everything was okay with Si, because he hasn’t returned her calls. What could I say? I told her that he was fine, very busy, and that I hadn’t spoken to him much either, and then I busied myself with ringing a wholesaler to stop her asking any more questions.

And I ring Si when I get home and ask him whether he’s thought any more about telling Josh and Lucy. This, apparently, is one of the issues the doctor brought up in his first counselling session. Whom he should tell, and how.

Si has decided, he tells me, that he does want Josh and Lucy to know because we, after all (and at this point he puts on a cheesy American accent), are his family of choice . He hasn’t, on the other hand, decided quite how to tell them, but is thinking of throwing some kind of dinner party, a miniature version of the film Peter’s Friends , to break the news. Except, he says, right now he can’t think of anything more terrifying.

His real family, he says, do not need to know. They live far away, they wouldn’t understand, and it took them years to come to terms with the fact that he’s gay, never mind being diagnosed as having HIV to boot. ‘What would be the point?’ he says. ‘If I’m not ill, what’s to tell?’ And I believe him when he says he is doing the right thing.

He has not taken drastic steps to change his life, not yet. He has not done any of the courses, or started regular counselling, but he has been to the clinic, had his CD4 count checked to measure the strength of his immune system, and had his first Viral Load Test to measure the amount of virus in the blood.

At the moment his Viral Load is huge, but apparently that is to be expected, given that he has contracted the virus so recently, or at least any time between July and October. It will take a while for his immune system to settle down. But, all in all, so far, so good. He is fine.

After the tests at the clinic, walking up the street, he told me he saw Portia. Another time he would have spoken to her, another time when he had not been leaving the HIV clinic, had forgiven her the affair with Josh.

That day, he said, he couldn’t face her. He didn’t have the patience or the will to pretend to be nice, to be normal, and he didn’t want her asking what he was doing there.

Was it definitely her, I asked? Yes, he laughed. There’s no mistaking Portia, so he ducked into a doorway at the hospital and turned his back until she had passed, praying he didn’t feel a tap on his shoulder; praying he hadn’t been spotted.

‘I suppose, at some point,’ he says wearily, ‘everyone will have to know. How do you explain sudden rigorous hygiene, washing your hands every time you touch an animal, or washing fruit and vegetables scrupulously?’

‘You could always try telling them you’re pregnant,’ I offer, grateful for the laughter that ensues.

It is a Thursday night and Si has come over to watch Portia’s series. We have ordered a Chinese takeaway, as we have always done, and Si is bemoaning the fact that we’ve slipped these last few weeks and have, you might say, somewhat lost the plot.

‘How much do you want to bet,’ Si smirks, just as the titles start, ‘there’s a new character called John, or Joe, or Jason, something like that, and he’s a local estate agent with a crush on Katy? Oh, and he’s a fabulously talented artist on the side.’

‘Oh fuck off.’ I throw a cushion at him and he ducks, chuckling, but it’s true, the thought has occurred to me, particularly because I have managed successfully to avoid Portia for quite a few weeks now, not returning her calls, pretending to be out when I listen to her voice on my answer machine. She may well take her revenge via the television programme.

And then we both settle down to watch. Jacob and Lisa are having marriage problems, but, astoundingly, Jacob hasn’t turned to Mercedes’s arms for comfort.

‘Well, he couldn’t in the TV series, could he?’ Si sniffs. ‘Mercedes is an angel who could never do anything as evil as split up a marriage.’

No, in the series Mercedes is there to offer support to Jacob, a shoulder to lean on, although naturally everyone gets the wrong impression.

‘Oh shit.’ I turn to Si in the commercial break. ‘Have we got it horribly wrong? Do you think we’ve completely misinterpreted everything?’

‘Jesus,’ Si says, turning to me. ‘I don’t know. I mean, Portia would never portray herself as the marriage wrecker on TV, but…’ he says, tailing off.

‘Then again,’ he says, ‘what was she doing at Josh and Lucy’s all the time? Remember all those times you pitched up to see Lucy, and Portia was sitting at the kitchen table, being all smug?’

‘Yeah. Good point.’

Si makes a worried face at me. ‘God, I hope we weren’t wrong. I’d feel awful if we were. I mean, I was so rude to her when she phoned up that night we were babysitting.’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t worry,’ I say breezily. ‘I’m sure she’ll get her revenge on the show. Sssh, sssh, here it comes.’

For the next fifteen minutes we sit there transfixed as Jacob makes a pass at Lena, the gorgeous Danish au pair, after they both find themselves in the kitchen in the middle of the night, both unable to sleep.

‘Jeeee-sus,’ Si whistles, as we watch them tumble to the floor in a fit of passion.

‘No way,’ I whisper. ‘Josh and Ingrid? It can’t be.’

And Si raises an eyebrow.

‘Well, it could be,’ I mutter reluctantly.

‘Bugger,’ Si says, getting up to go to the loo during the next commercial break. ‘You know what this means, don’t you?’