Bookends

by Jane Green

  I pray and I pray, and I offer a few disjointed lines from the Lord’s Prayer, half remembered from school assembly all those years ago, in the hope that this will appease any God that may be up there. I even offer myself up for sacrifice.

  ‘I will do anything,’ I pray, ‘anything you want, as long as you make Si well.’

  After a while there is nothing more to be said, and I climb under the covers in bed, closing my eyes and praying for a quick and dreamless sleep, but nobody hears that particular prayer, and I lie wide awake for hours, thinking about Si and wondering how I’m going to cope.

  The phone rings at eight o’clock the next morning. Si tells me to get my skates on, as he’ll be picking me up in fifteen minutes to go to the clinic. I ring the bookshop and leave a message on the answer phone, telling Lucy I’m going to be in late as I’m not feeling well and am off to the doctors, but that I’ll call her later. I figure that after the test, when the results come back negative, I can always explain my late start away with a stomach bug.

  Si sounded suspiciously cheerful when he phoned, and when he eventually arrives I look at him with concern, my head slightly cocked to one side, and I ask gently, ‘How are you?’

  ‘Oh God,’ he moans, raising his eyes to the heavens. ‘Don’t you start already.’

  ‘What? What have I done?’

  ‘That sympathetic look. The cocked head. “How are you?” ’ He imitates cruelly, accurately, and I apologize and laugh.

  And all the way to the clinic Si seems in great spirits. If I didn’t know better, I would think we were going out for breakfast, or for a walk in the park, and we talk about everything but the main event until we actually arrive.

  Even then, looking for a meter, driving around until Si spots someone leaving and nips in to steal their space, even then we both avoid talking about it. It’s only as we reach the building, as we climb slowly up the steps to the entrance and ring on the doorbell, because it’s so early, only then does my breath catch in my throat, does the colour drain from Si’s face.

  We are shown into a front-facing waiting room. Slightly shabby, rather gloomy. I note that piled on a coffee table are old, faded copies of Hello!, OK!, various glossy magazines, and I wonder whether it helps people take their mind off the results, to read these magazines, or whether they are far too frightened to pick them up in the first place.

  A nurse comes in. Australian. She is bustling, matter-of-fact, smiling, and I think that whoever employed her is a wise person indeed, for she is exactly the sort to make you feel comfortable. Despite her youth she clucks like a mother hen, even while handing Si a form on a clipboard to fill in.

  He picks up the pen to complete the form and I see that he is shaking. Normally, knowing how much Si loves forms, I would giggle with him over the questions. Many’s the time Si has saved junk mail, only because it contains a questionnaire, and for years he would make me save the surveys in the glossy magazines, because he just loves answering those questions.

  But this form is different. And now is not the time to comment, to make a joke, to say anything at all. He ticks the boxes silently, chewing on his lower lip slightly, which surprises me, as I have never seen him do this before. When he is done, he stands up and hands it to the nurse just outside the door.

  ‘The doctor won’t be a moment, love,’ she says. ‘He’ll come out and get you in a second.’

  And less than a minute later a door at the other end of the waiting room opens, and a young, dark-haired man in a white coat comes out, clutching the clipboard and looking at Si with a smile. The doctor.

  ‘Please come in.’ Si stands up and just as he turns to go he holds my gaze and I nod because there is still nothing to say, and he walks to the door, which shuts behind him.

  Now I understand why they have copies of the magazines. I flick through Hello!, glancing at the photographs but barely taking them in, tapping my right foot quickly on the floor, a nervous habit that hasn’t plagued me for ten years.

  The door of the clinic opens again, and a girl comes in, young, pretty, trendy, and the nurse hands her the clipboard and she sits opposite me, head down, deep in concentration, and she looks so calm, so together, I wonder what circumstances might have brought someone like her here.

  But of course, I mentally kick myself. AIDS, HIV, does not necessarily choose its victims because of their sex or their sexuality. I am reminded of a story I heard a long time ago, when we had just left university, when everyone laughed at the government campaign, the warnings of a worldwide epidemic. Not us, we thought. Never us.

  A student from our university who had had two lovers. One, a long-term relationship of two years, and then, just after they broke up, a summer fling with a boy a couple of years older.

  And then, a year or so later, she started to feel ill. Nothing serious, just tiredness, a few headaches, swollen glands. The doctor offered her an HIV test, just so they could rule out the possibility, he said with a smile, just so they could firmly discount it, and she laughed, because how on earth could she possibly have HIV?

  The test came back positive. It seems the summer fling had unknowingly contracted it from someone who had slept with someone who had caught it from who knows where.

  I don’t remember the girl’s name. I remember she was a friend of a friend, not someone I actually knew, but someone I could well have known. Someone who would have been at the same balls, the same parties, walked down the corridors of the same halls of residence.

  Someone, in fact, much like me. And mostly I remember being shocked that someone like me could contract HIV, because of course that wasn’t supposed to happen.

  But we now know it does happen. I sneak furtive peeks at this girl, this girl scribbling on the clipboard, and I know that she is just as susceptible as Si. And then I check my watch.

  Twenty minutes. Why is this taking so long? And, just as I think that, the door opens and Si walks back into the waiting room.

  ‘Well?’ I try to gauge the result from his expression, but there is no result, not for another hour or so.

  Si shrugs, and we huddle together for privacy, as the door has now opened again and the waiting room no longer feels quite so safe. ‘He was lovely,’ he says, almost in a whisper. ‘Not at all what I expected. He’s worked with people with HIV and AIDS for five years, and was very calm, very matter-of-fact. I almost feel normal.’

  ‘What did he tell you?’

  Si glances at the girl still filling in her form, then back at me. ‘Look, shall we go for a walk? He said at least forty minutes, and I can’t talk in here, I need some air.’

  ‘Good idea.’ I grab my coat and we walk out into the cold crisp air.

  ‘So?’ I say, taking Si’s arm and falling into step.

  ‘So nothing I didn’t know already. We established the risk factor, that I’m high risk, having been exposed to the virus, and then we talked about the impact if I’m positive. How I would deal with it, what I would do in terms of counselling, what’s available to me, plus all the practical stuff like how it affects things like insurance and foreign travel.’

  ‘Was that it?’

  ‘No. He also said all the stuff that they say now. That HIV is a virus, not an instant death sentence, and that people can live completely normal lives, and there are drugs that blah blah blah.’

  I stop and look at him. ‘Blah blah blah? Now there’s an interesting medical definition.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ A big sigh. ‘It’s just that I’ve heard it all before, and I know it’s true, but it still means that I am probably not going to see old age, and that when I die it will be horrible and painful and degrading, and even though I know that being positive doesn’t mean instant death, all I keep thinking about is Jake. At the end.’

  ‘Oh, Si,’ I groan, stroking his arm, because I cannot think of anything else to say. And eventually I look at him with worried eyes. ‘And what if you are positive?’

  ‘If I’m positive, then I’ll go to counselling and I
’ll take whatever drugs I have to take and I’ll deal with it. Come on. Let’s go back.’

  We go back, and again, as we ascend those steps, that feeling of gloom overtakes me, but my heart doesn’t jump into my mouth this time. That doesn’t happen for a little while longer. We sit in the waiting room, and I manage to entice Si back to a semblance of his normal self by showing him a picture of Courtney Cox in a particularly disgusting dress, and in the middle of our laughter the surgery door opens and the same doctor appears.

  He comes over to us and again says, ‘Please come in.’ And although the words themselves are completely innocuous, although they have no power to harm, there is something about his expression, his lack of smile, the sympathy lurking just behind his eyes, that makes my heart start to pound, and my breathing tight and sharp.

  ‘Back in a sec, my darling,’ Si says, winking at me, putting on his old self in a bid to cover the fear, then, just as he goes, he leans down and kisses my cheek, and that is when I feel the tears burning, but I will not let them out. I will be strong for Si.

  And anyway, I have never been the best judge of emotions. Perhaps I imagined this. Perhaps the doctor has the same expression whatever the verdict. I look up, and the girl, the trendy, pretty girl who is presumably now waiting for her results, smiles at me.

  ‘Awful, isn’t it?’ she says softly, and I nod, not daring myself to speak, because her sympathy will ensure the tears come thick and fast if I so much as open my mouth.

  She smiles at me in sympathy, and I think: she knows. She looked up when the doctor came out, she saw his expression, and she is thinking the same thing as me. I flick the pages of the magazine, furiously, blinking back the tears, not seeing anything at all, and when I reach the end, I flick back to the beginning again, my foot tapping all the while.

  Twenty minutes go by, and then the door opens and Si reappears, smiling brightly, and, if I didn’t know him as well as I do, I would think that the smile means everything is fine, but I know that smile. That is his false smile. His forced smile. He is stuffing leaflets into his pocket, and I stand up and follow him down the stairs and into the cold sunshine, and all the while he keeps smiling.

  ‘Si?’ I stand in front of him on the pavement, and only then does his smile start to fade.

  ‘Positive,’ he whispers, and I put my arms around him and feel his stiffness, his resistance, but whether he needs this or not, I need to do it.

  ‘Regent’s Park?’ I whisper, because it’s not far, and because I know he loves the rose garden, and because I sense that he needs to be reminded of things that he loves, and that it is far better for him to be out amidst beauty than at home alone.

  We get in the car, not saying anything, and drive to Regent’s Park, then walk through the gate, around the small boating lake and into the park. All the while Si does not speak.

  My arm is linked through his, and I squeeze him tightly, reassuring myself that he is still there, the same old Si, and although the temptation is to keep looking at him, to check if he’s okay, I know this would infuriate the hell out of him and so I resist.

  And finally, when we reach the rose garden, Si gestures towards a bench and we sit down, and he starts to speak.

  ‘I have to make an appointment with a counsellor,’ he says, drawing the leaflets out from his pocket and looking at them blankly. ‘And I have to go for regular check-ups, my CD4 count and Viral Load Tests. I have to go back in a week for the first round of tests. And my diet probably needs looking at, although he said there were courses I could do to learn about all of this stuff, to get support, and…’ He stops, sighing.

  I say nothing, just stroke his arm.

  ‘Oh, Cath,’ he says, and his voice sounds incredibly sad. ‘How can my life have changed so drastically in one day? How can everything have been fine yesterday morning, and everything be so awful today? How can we even be sitting here talking about T-cells, and check-ups, and drugs, I mean, why me? Why did this have to happen to me?’

  ‘Nothing has changed,’ I say, putting my arms around him. ‘You are exactly the same person sitting here today as you were yesterday. And you’ll be exactly the same person tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. The only thing that’s changed is that you’ve caught a virus, and you have to be more careful with your health.

  ‘But Si,’ I continue, ‘you have friends who love you and, touch wood’ – I slip off a glove to stroke the bench – ‘your health. It’s a virus, Si, It’s not the end of the world.’

  And then we both sit there, holding hands, looking out over the park, and we stay there for a very long time.

  Chapter twenty-six

  I call Lucy in the shop, and luckily I do sound terrible, and she thinks I’m ill before I even have a chance to deliver a made-up excuse. She tells me to tuck up in bed and not to worry about anything, which is what I wanted to hear, as I need to spend the rest of the day with Si, but it nevertheless strikes me as slightly ironic, given that I’m the one who is absolutely fine. In shock, certainly, but fine.

  But Si is fine too. Or should that be too fine. After we leave the rose garden he tells me he really feels okay about this; he says that, bizarre as it may seem, it somehow already feels a part of him, feels like his destiny, and it’s not the worst thing in the world that can happen, and he really can deal with it.

  I don’t know what to do with Si today. He is too calm, too quiet, and I suggest lunch, even offering to treat him at the Ivy, which would normally be his idea of heaven (although God knows how we’d ever get in at such short notice), and he just says no, he’s fine.

  I drag him down to Marylebone High Street and we find a small café and tuck ourselves away in the corner, ordering cappuccinos and baguettes, but as soon as the food arrives I know that I have no appetite, that I couldn’t eat this if you forced me, and of course Si pushes it away as soon as it arrives.

  So we sit and drink our coffee, and I pull out the lettuce from the baguette and shred it slowly on to the tabletop, and then Si draws out the leaflets again and this time we really look at them, read them, read about courses for the recently diagnosed, the importance of regular check-ups, the life expectancy growing longer and longer.

  And when we have finished the leaflets I pull my diary from my bag and rip out a clean page, and we write down the places Si is going to contact this afternoon when he leaves me, the support centres he will visit, the places he will turn to for help.

  ‘Doubtless the doctor at the clinic will go through all of this with me next week,’ he sighs at one point, but I ignore him because I can see that this is helping, to actually do something practical, to make a list, and even if it is not helping Si, it is helping me.

  Eventually we leave and Si drops me off. I practically beg him to let me come over in the evening, but he says he will be fine.

  ‘You won’t do… well… you know…’ I can’t help but ask the question.

  ‘Anything stupid?’ he says, grinning. ‘No, Cath. I’m fine. Well, I’m not, but I’m certainly not unfine enough to down a bottle of paracetamol, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  ‘Will you ring me later?’

  He nods. ‘And sweets? I don’t know how to tell Josh and Lucy. I know I have to, but I need to do it in my own time, in my own way. Is that okay?’

  ‘God, yes!’ I’m mortified that he thinks I would take it upon myself to tell them, almost as if this were mere gossip.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you, my love. Listen, I’m going to go home and run a nice hot bath, and I promise I’ll ring you afterwards.’

  *

  He does ring, and he says that after he dropped me off he took the long route home, via a bookshop – not, obviously Bookends, as he couldn’t face seeing Lucy – and picked up some books about HIV and AIDS, and is planning to curl up for the rest of the afternoon and read them.

  I do the same thing in my flat. I curl up on the sofa and open a novel I’ve been meaning to rea
d for weeks. I scan the first page, desperate for some form of escapism, desperate for something to take me out of myself, but every time I reach the bottom of page four I realize I haven’t got a clue what I’ve just read, and I have to start all over again.

  Eventually I put the book down and run a bath myself, wondering how I’m going to kill the hours before bedtime, wishing today had never happened, wishing I could have a Groundhog Day experience, relive today, make everything normal again.

  I do manage to kill some of the hours before bedtime. Some, but not all. I speak to Si a couple more times and he sounds fine, says he’s going to have an early night, a quiet night, give himself time to digest everything.

  But I can’t sleep, and when, at twenty past one in the morning, the phone rings, it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest, and I pick up the phone to hear jagged sobs at the other end.

  ‘Ssh, ssh.’ I try to soothe, feeling Si’s pain as if it were my own.

  ‘I don’t want this to be happening,’ he sobs, his voice blurred with alcohol. ‘Why is this happening to me? What have I ever done? Why me?’

  ‘I’m coming over,’ I say, and, without giving him the time to say no, I pull a coat over my pyjamas, shove my feet into boots, grab my car keys, and I’m out the door.

  Six minutes later I’m on his doorstep, and he opens the door, his T-shirt wet with tears, his face puffy and blotchy, hiccuping as he tries to stop crying, and I put my arms around him and start crying too.

  I stay the night, although we don’t really sleep. We sit up, still talking, still trying to make sense of it all, and eventually, at around seven, we both fall asleep on the sofa.

  Obviously I can’t go into work the next day. Lucy offers to come round in the evening with home-made tomato soup and Lemsips, but I tell her that whatever this flu-thing is, it’s probably contagious and I’ll be fine.