Sandy was predictably appalled when Alison told her Godfreys had sacked Jamie and of the medical indiscretion which had led to his doing so. She was also revolted at Jamie’s willingness to accept this as his proper lot, and went hotfoot to his flat to tell him so, dragging his embarrassed sister in her wake.
‘I honestly don’t care any more,’ he explained to her. ‘I was angry then, but things are turning out all right now.’
‘Listen, you,’ she retorted. ‘You may be crippled with self-hatred and have juicy savings to rely on, but at least let me go for that shit of a doctor. Otherwise he’ll only do it to someone else with a thinner financial cushion. He probably already has.’
So Jamie allowed her to resume solicitor status and proceed on his behalf. Her enquiries, however, revealed that during his relief over the mole analysis, he had signed a release form whose small print agreed to make all results of the medical examination available to both his employer and potential health insurers. There was some small satisfaction, however, in knowing that Dr Penney’s name had been added to the helpline’s medical and legal blacklist, and circulated to the compilers of others.
Protesting, in the face of Sam’s concern, that he was not letting himself go now that he was married and settled down, Jamie stopped going to the gym and let his membership there lapse. Try as they both might to ignore it, he had lost weight and did not seem able to put it back on, at least, not with the kind of muscle that helped him blend in unregarded in the showers. He seemed to be sweating himself away into their marriage bed. When he woke in the night, brine running from every pore, he slipped out of bed, took a quick shower and returned to Sam’s frightened but wordless embrace. They had clean sheets as often as guests in a luxury hotel and pretended it was done for pleasure and not from necessity. Jamie bought himself a metal and black leatherette construction called an abdominal board, on which he was supposed to perform daily sit-ups to preserve what remained of his washboard stomach, but the sit-ups made him breathless, which scared him. So he left the board out for show and made do with leisurely bike rides around Battersea Park or up to the King’s Road.
Around the time that Sandy was trying to make a legal case for unfair dismissal or breach of confidentiality, Alison urged Jamie into attending an HIV support group on the basis that he had started to offload emotional problems on to Sam that could be more comfortably and usefully shouldered by other people in a similar position. Obedient and detached, he had gone to sit in a room lent by the local genito-urinary clinic, where a mainly male group was encouraged by a sweet-faced Welsh facilitator called Geraint to voice its angers and despairs. For the first few weeks, Jamie found himself paralysed by shyness. He saw several faces familiar to him from his old world of saunas and bars, and the sudden lurch from beer-blurred, stylised anonymity to the harshly lit, brutally sober particularity of saying things like, ‘Good evening, I’m Rory and I’m really angry,’ seemed intolerable.
Geraint knew his job well, however. Each week he caught Jamie’s eye as he walked in, offered him a quiet smile of welcome and said, ‘Hello there, Jamie,’ just to show he’d remembered his name. Then, one-day, mid-way through a heated discussion of blame started by a woman infected by her bisexual husband, Geraint took advantage of a brief lull to turn to the corner where Jamie was growing dozy by the radiator and ask, ‘So what about you, Jamie? We haven’t heard from you in a while.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes. What do you think?’
Taken completely by surprise, Jamie blurted out all sorts of things he had not even realised he was feeling. He said he had not told his mother or his grandfather yet because he thought they would blame him and that maybe they’d be right.
‘My grandfather’s generation didn’t sleep around and they’re only just starting to die from natural causes.’
‘Oh no?’ someone piped up. ‘How’d they catch so much syphilis, then?’
‘What about TB?’ someone else added. ‘That was treated like a dirty disease.’
‘Vivien Leigh died of that as late as the sixties,’ the woman pointed out.
‘You should blame your mother before she blames you,’ a younger, American woman insisted. ‘It was all that Free Love and drug-taking that gave you the space to live such a risky life.’
‘But I don’t care about how I was living,’ Jamie cut back in again as the discussion turned into an unexpectedly angry session of recrimination and counter-recrimination. ‘I don’t regret a thing. Not a single fuck. I’d have them all again.’
‘But you’d wear a condom this time, right?’ Geraint asked. He was trying to lighten the tone but Jamie wouldn’t let him.
‘Maybe,’ he said, shrugging. ‘Maybe not.’ This unleashed another storm of disagreement.
The next week he felt he couldn’t go back. Alison was anxious that he still needed the group’s so-called support, but he found there was less to offload on to Sam than there had been. He knew from various indigestible books he had borrowed from Alison that he was meant to be passing from shock to refusal to anger to depression and so on, before reaching acceptance, but all he felt, a lot of the time, was a kind of flatness. He had always imagined this was how he would feel in the minutes following the declaration of atomic war; the rooms and streets around him would be raucous with last minute sex, confessions of crime, love and hatred. Shops would be pointlessly looted and the air would buzz with the forging of frantic bargains with the various available deities, but Jamie had always anticipated that he would just sit quietly by the television, waiting for the first pictures and feeling sort of flat.
By slow degrees he stopped sitting around ‘waiting to die’, as Sam put it in an angry moment, and began making a conscious effort to get out and do things he had never done before. He joined the local library and began to devour novels so famous he was almost ashamed to be seen reading them in public. He took boats to see the huge silver shells of the Thames Barrier, to pant round the palm house at Kew and to sail through Docklands to Greenwich. He went greyhound racing, gave Sam four hundred pounds and made him place it all on fruitless bets. He sat, detached and observant, through afternoon screenings of punitive subtitled films and even persuaded Sam to sit through a new production of King Lear, which neither of them greatly enjoyed or entirely understood. He reached a point, however, when he felt he had exhausted the possibilities of at least the reasonable items on his mental list of Things To Do Before Sickness Sets In. All the discovery and self-improvement started to feel suspiciously like activities to ward off fear – cosmic waiting room syndrome. If he was truly to do as Geraint urged and live with the virus rather than wait for it to swallow his life away – live with it simply, contentedly even, as one might learn to live with a silver streak in one’s hair or a new scar on one’s cheek – he had to reenter daily life. But how? He stopped reading Jane Austen and forced himself to read new novels, harsh with realities. He read about psychotic killers, incest, cannibalism, insanity. He read novels about sick people, men with cancer, mothers with AIDS.
‘The trouble is,’ he tried to explain to Sam, ‘they’re all written for people who are well and feel bad about it. You know how they’ll end before you begin.’
He preferred, he decided, novels that ended with a betrothal or a birth, and returned to his voyage through the works of Jane Austen, George Eliot and Mrs Gaskell. Unlike the rude health of others, which he still found hard to take on bad days, convincingly happy endings were not an insult. They had never seemed more important.
The last melancholy days of summer shaded into a dazzling autumn. Sam’s work finished at the new hospital and he took Jamie to admire the gleaming building, lit up as the carpet fitters, painters and electricians worked through the night to meet the contractor’s deadline. Sam followed a tip from some friends and moved to work on a new riverside housing estate in Wandsworth, which meant they would be granted more precious minutes in bed in the mornings. After a week of dramatic storms, the clocks went back, autumn hardened prematurely into winter and Jamie decided it was time to take a job again.
Rather than lose face by returning to the City now that his bridges with that area of his past had been so satisfactorily burned, he opted instead for working in the classical department of a big West End music shop. His early training had left him with a fairly broad musical knowledge and his former salary had allowed him to acquire enough experience of the best performers and recordings to bluff credibly where his knowledge wore thin. As Alison had found in applying to Pharos, the mere mention of his grandfather’s name during the interview did the rest.
Work was now an entirely different experience. He could wear whatever he liked. He could drink tea in bed with Sam before he set out and admit to having done so once he got there – although such domestic details, however enviable, were tame compared with the adventures recounted by some of his colleagues. His personality was no longer split between his work self and the self he expressed elsewhere. He now felt he was truly himself most of the time. The only exceptions, jarring with the new, cautiously preserved equilibrium of his days, were encounters with his mother. To Alison’s dismay, he now shunned his grandfather and The Roundel. Ironically, the memory of his grandfather’s disgust remained a useful goad, spurring him on to rid his life of pretence and wasted social effort.
When Jamie told Alison that he and Sam had a regular, careful sex life still, he was being economical with the truth. For a while after Sam had tested negative, they had had no sex life at all.
‘It didn’t make any difference before,’ Sam told the health worker. ‘Why should it now?’
‘Just be prepared,’ she said. ‘That’s all. With some couples it’s not a problem, with others, it’s like a layer of permafrost slicing the bed in two.’
Sure enough, the frost descended that first evening. They had a romantic night in. Curled on the sofa together, the fridge full of beer for Sam and fruit juice for Jamie, they guzzled an Indian takeaway and quietly watched two horror videos in a row. One of Sam’s closely guarded secrets was that, despite his bravado, scary films reduced him to vulnerable jelly. Nervous hand-clutching during the second, nastier film, led to reassuring fondling until, with the video pouring forth its shrieks and scenes of gore to an empty room, they were rolling around on top of the bed, trying to kiss and kick jeans off at the same time.
Then Sam found his cock deflating as swiftly and finally as if his mother had burst in from the balcony and threatened it with a rusty breadknife.
‘Maybe it’s just the beer,’ Jamie suggested, trying not to add stage-fright to humiliation by peering at the cause of their frustration. ‘It can happen to anyone.’
But it had never happened to him and it had never happened to Sam, however much he drank. It happened to Sam again, the next evening. Again he tried to ignore it, setting about pleasuring Jamie with his hand, in a kind of fury. The third time, Jamie stopped him, forcing him simply to lie close and cross in his arms. There was nothing to discuss. However near they lay, his condition had placed them in categories as radically discrete as separate cages. The abrupt refusal of his lover’s body to penetrate his own, or even put itself in a position where it might be called upon to do so, made Jamie feel branded INFECTIOUS in a way no number of medical insurance rejections could have done.
‘I want us to fuck so badly,’ Sam groaned, at last beginning to break free of Jamie’s restraining hug to run his fingers across his chest and down between his legs. He leaned over, encircled the base of Jamie’s dick in finger and thumb then ran his tongue slowly up its shaft. Jamie shuddered, smiling despite himself.
‘Go on,’ Sam whispered. ‘Fuck me. Just this once. Fuck me. I don’t care.’
‘No,’ said Jamie, laughing but adamant.
‘Why not? Just once.’ Sam reached out with his mouth once more and, with a supreme effort, Jamie rolled aside, evading this most persuasive kiss.
‘You know why not.’
Sam flopped back onto the pillows, tugging the duvet up around him with a wounded grunt.
‘Fucking stupid test,’ he said. ‘Poxy thing. I don’t know why you made me take it if this was going to happen.’
‘You wanted to, remember? It was your idea. They’re not even a hundred percent accurate.’
‘I know.’
‘So? Stop fretting. Maybe you’re positive too and it just didn’t show up yet.’
The bitterness in Jamie’s tone silenced them both
The following Saturday morning, Sam confessed that, talking in terms of a mythical girlfriend, he had opened out to a man at work who had experienced similar problems with his wife because he had been terrified of making her pregnant again. They had resorted, apparently, to toys.
‘Toys?’ Jamie asked, picturing pink rabbits and water pistols.
‘Oh, you know. Toys!’ Sam tried to sound as though he used them all the time. ‘At least then we could do something. Let’s go shopping.’
And so, at that time of the weekend when other couples were browsing for new sofabeds or sensible shoes for the children, they had headed into Soho and braved the fluorescent-lit cellar of a marital aid shop. They picked, chuckling, over negligées edged in mock ostrich feather and packets of condoms flavoured with peppermint or tandoori chicken, then went on to garish displays whose very frankness silenced their chatter: vibrators, dildos, butt-plugs, harnesses, douche kits, uniforms, stimulant lubricants, whips and handcuffs. Jamie was amused and, beneath his amusement, guiltily excited.
‘What d’you want, then?’ he murmured, as Sam fingered a huge set of rubber genitalia that purported to be modelled on those of a famous porn star, down to their very veins, ‘realistic’ curly tufts of brown nylon hair and shifting, gelatinous balls. Sam raised the thing to his nose and sniffed its shaft judiciously, like a chef tasting a sauce.
‘I dunno,’ he said and set it back on the shelf. ‘I can’t be doing with all that bondage crap and as for the rest of it, well, it’s all so big.’
‘Just what I was thinking,’ Jamie said. ‘Would it make you feel a tad inadequate, or just left out of the party?’ Sam shoved him in the ribs.
‘Piss off,’ he said. ‘And it’s all so …’ He pulled a face. ‘So pink.’
Just then Jamie saw a woman nestling a thick, dildo-shaped package into her basket amongst more innocuous weekly food shopping, and was inspired.
‘Come on then,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a better idea.’
Back out on Berwick Street, Jamie led Sam along the market, past displays of cut-price underwear, naughty nighties, Christmas wrapping and cordless kettles, to a fruit and veg stall whose electric lights made its heaps of produce glow in the drizzle on their lush bed of emerald nylon turf.
‘Yes,’ he said, as the stallholder turned to serve him. ‘I think this’ll do nicely,’ and he picked out a thick, gnarled carrot, some ten inches long. ‘And these.’ He selected two similarly generous courgettes and a wispy-tipped parsnip. ‘Oh, and a pound of those nice fat grapes to eat afterwards. The black ones.’
The stallholder weighed up the grapes, rubbing her mittened hands for warmth as she eyed the scales.
She thinks we’re just mild-mannered vegetarians, Jamie thought.
‘What’s this, then?’ Sam reached down and held up a big green plantain.
‘People chop them up and fry ’em,’ she said. ‘I think.’
‘We’ll take that too, then,’ Sam said, having understood without even catching Jamie’s eye.
‘And my vegetable love did grow,’ Jamie murmured, a hand thrust in his pocket, as they walked back to the tube, surprised to find himself as excited as he used to feel in the minutes before a first assignation.
They fell to experimenting on one another as soon as they got home. Jamie gave top marks to the carrot, Sam, once he had got over a certain bashfulness, voted for the plantain. They spent a happy afternoon window-shopping on the King’s Road like any other Saturday couple, but disgraced themselves in a superior supermarket by loudly scorning the display of outrageously expensive vegetables, intentionally picked during dwarfish immaturity.
That evening, as Sam was pleasuring Jamie with an unexpectedly erotic stick of frilly leaved celery still chilled from the fridge, his impotence left him as suddenly as it had arrived. Catching Jamie’s look of greedy surprise as Sam stopped what he was doing to fumble on the bedside table for the tandoori chicken condoms, he mumbled that he didn’t see why the celery should have all the fun. When he came, for the first time after days of frustrated non-participation, he slipped into a faint like sudden death. In the full minute before Sam’s eyelids flickered open again, Jamie felt hot panic boil up within him.