by Jane Green
‘He needed someone to talk to, and I made sure he knew I’d be listening, and then I planned on bringing him back to my place and seducing him.’
Jesus. What a bitch.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she says. ‘And I agree. It was disgusting behaviour, but I hardly knew Lucy then, and I’d spent ten years thinking about Josh. Ten years thinking that he was the only man who could ever make me happy, and here he was, telling me he was unhappy. God, Cath. I’m only human.’
I don’t say anything, just wait for her to continue.
‘And you know, he was so grateful for my being there. He was so sweet to me, so tender towards me, I really thought it was going to happen.’
‘So what happened?’ I prompt as she lapses into silence, evidently thinking back to that night.
‘It didn’t take long to see that Josh saw me as an old friend who was concerned, who would be there to listen, and that was it. He sat there and talked about his marriage all night. He talked about Lucy, about how much he loved her, how special their relationship was, and how he couldn’t understand why they seemed to be drifting apart since Bookends.’
‘So you didn’t try to seduce him?’
‘Even at the beginning of the evening I still thought I would. I thought it would be the perfect time, but the more he talked the more I realized that he really loved Lucy, and that I’d be wrecking a marriage that had been perfectly happy apart from this one glitch that would soon sort itself out.’
‘But Josh was always in love with you. You know that.’
‘Of course I knew that, which is why I was so convinced I could get him. And you know what, Cath? Maybe I could have done. But I knew it wouldn’t have been fair, and I also knew that he and Lucy were meant to be together. Not him and me. I’d been building this fantasy for ten years, and I understood that night that reality would never match the fantasy.’
I sit there in silence for a while, stunned. Stunned at her honesty, and the courage it must have taken to walk away. And stunned at my behaviour, mine and Si’s, for jumping to conclusions and behaving so appallingly towards her.
‘But you know,’ she says, after a while, ‘life works in very mysterious ways.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I needed to be here now, to meet up with all of you again. Just because Josh wasn’t The One, doesn’t mean that things won’t work out, just not in the way that I’d actually planned… well…’ She is about to say something more but evidently changes her mind, and picks up her drink with a smile and a small shrug.
We sit and talk softly, and another hour goes by, and there is such an air of intimacy, of trust, that when Portia asks about Si, asks how he is, where he is, I almost find myself telling her. But I don’t. Not quite.
We carry on talking, and the conversation moves on to sex, and we start laughing as we remember exploits of old, and then sex becomes safe sex, which becomes AIDS, because that was always Portia’s greatest fear.
And I tell her I have a friend who has just been diagnosed HIV positive. I don’t mention names. I don’t say it is a particularly close friend. I just say a friend. And Portia becomes very quiet. Too quiet. And I suspect she knows, but she won’t say anything.
‘How is your friend taking it?’ she says quietly.
‘Nobody knows yet, except me. And you now, obviously. How is he taking it? Not great. At times I think he’s fine, he’s accepted it, realized that it doesn’t mean, as you said, death. And then he phones me in the middle of the night, drunk, frightened, furious, and I know that he feels it’s the end of the world.’
‘Has he started counselling?’
‘Not really. He’s been to the HIV clinic, and he’s got all the leaflets, but he hasn’t joined a group, although God knows he needs to.’
Portia appears to be deep in thought, and eventually she asks, ‘Cath, do you think he’d talk to a friend of mine?’
‘What for?’
‘I have this friend, Eva. She’s a bit older than us, mid-thirties, but she’s been diagnosed as HIV positive for thirteen years, picked up during her early twenties in New York when she got into a drug scene, and she’s the most amazing woman I know.’
I sit forward in my chair, interested.
‘I think that your friend should meet her, because she’s incredibly inspirational. She turned her life around when she was diagnosed, and she has this extraordinary outlook on having HIV.’
‘How did she turn her life around?’
Portia smiles. ‘It’s a long story, but I think she’s someone he should definitely meet. We should put them in touch with one another, and she could tell him her story herself. I don’t know your friend, obviously, but Eva is a great healer, and it might help to see things from another perspective, turn him around, if you like.’
‘Portia, I don’t know what to say. That would be wonderful.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she says, giving me a sad smile. ‘It’s the least I can do.’
And it’s only the next day that I realize I didn’t even mention Josh and Ingrid, the very reason for meeting her in the first place. Somehow our rediscovered friendship got in the way of the accusations, and I never got around to it. Si said that he would ask, but then said that if Portia was that friendly with Ingrid, which apparently she is, she would hardly tell us the truth, given how close we are to Lucy. So we’re still in the dark, but quite frankly there are far more important things to deal with right now.
And I’m not sure what I expected from Portia, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t expect this from her. Not in a million years did I ever think she would be the one to dive in and rescue Si, but by introducing him to Eva, by offering us help and then immediately coming up with a day and time, this is precisely what she has done.
I told Si what Portia had said, and Si said I could tell her, as long as I swore her to secrecy. Of course she said she already knew it was Si, and that she wouldn’t dream of telling a soul, other than Eva, of course.
And I can’t help but feel that Si and I have been far too unfair on her – have misjudged her enormously, because every time we think she has betrayed us, we end up being wrong. And although Si was right when he kept saying she had come back for a reason and it wouldn’t be a good one, I think she has now redeemed herself.
Si phoned me on the Wednesday afternoon, the day of Portia’s dinner, and said that he couldn’t be bothered and was about to ring to cancel, but somehow – God knows how – I managed to talk him into going, and then sat on tenterhooks, waiting to hear what happened.
When Si got home, he was buzzing. He phoned me immediately, told me that already, after spending an evening with this woman Eva, this woman who was HIV positive, he felt entirely different.
She was tiny, he said. Tiny, dark, very pretty, and the picture of health. She sat there drinking sparkling mineral water, listening to Si, before quietly telling her story.
In 1980, when she was fifteen, she fell in with the dope-smoking crowd at school. No big deal. She did it because everyone else was doing it, and because it made her feel, for the first time, like she belonged. Most people grow out of it, but Eva didn’t, she did the reverse, and within a couple of years she had progressed to speed, and soon, because other people did, and because she fancied one of the boys in her crowd who did, she was using heroin. The remainder of her school days were blurred by the heroin, as were her emotions, and at twenty she took herself off to New York, hoping for a drug-free stay and a fresh start.
Within two days of arriving at JFK she was living with a coke dealer, and using again. This time she started hanging out in ‘shooting galleries’. Grotty rooms in old brownstones in the wrong part of town, havens for the junkies who would score from the dealer on the corner, then go to these rooms as safe places to shoot up. And Eva, the youngest of them all, would be given their leftovers, together with the dirty needles that had been passed around the entire room. And of course she didn’t know. No one did.
Back home
, two years later, Eva went to university. Middle class, bright, she was studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and trying, unsuccessfully, to give up heroin, turning to alcohol on the rare occasions she managed to go without.
And then the ‘tombstone’ adverts appeared. Adverts warning about AIDS and HIV, warning of the dangers of unprotected sex, of not knowing your partners’ sexual history. Of shared needles and drug use.
It couldn’t be me, she thought. Things like that don’t happen to middle-class girls like me. To rule it out, she went to her doctor and requested a test. Two weeks later she went back in for her results. The doctor said, distractedly, you’re positive. Go to the STD clinic at the local hospital.
Twenty-one years old, HIV positive, perhaps she should have felt that her life was over, but Eva didn’t feel that. She didn’t feel anything, her emotions still cushioned by the drugs, the drinking, and it was only a year later, when she lay in bed, thinking about her lifestyle, about how she was treating herself – smoking, drinking, not eating – that she realized she had to make a choice.
She realized that by giving in to HIV, by expecting it to take her life, she was removing all choice, and that, for her, was untenable. She didn’t choose to die, she suddenly realized. She chose to live, and she refused to give in to the fear, because fear, she still says, is the most toxic thing of all.
A year after being diagnosed, Eva set up an illness and recovery group. She threw herself into working with AIDS awareness groups, for various charities, teaching, helping, advising. Then one day she woke up, and, in spite of everything she’d done, everyone she’d taught, she still felt that one day this thing, AIDS, was going to get her.
And that was when she decided it wasn’t. She turned to Buddhism, to believing in one day at a time. She stopped believing there was no point in training in anything worth while because her life was about to end, and started to train in Cranio-Sacral Therapy, finding a spirituality there that had been missing in her life.
And she found a therapist who refused to allow her to become a victim. If she had a cough, her therapist would turn to her and say: ‘So you’ve got a cough? So what?’ He didn’t say it would be the onset of PCP pneumonia. He didn’t say it was a symptom of full-blown AIDS. He said it was just a cough, and you know what? He was right, and she learned that even when you have been diagnosed, not everything is HIV related.
Now, thirteen years on, she is the picture of health. It may not work for everyone, she told Si, as she was coming to the end of her story, but what works for her is to believe she’s fine.
‘And she really is,’ Si told me, in wonder, in awe, and then he said goodbye and put down the phone, because he had the rest of the night to think about what she’d said.
Chapter twenty-nine
‘Cath, my love?’ Si and I are walking Mouse on Primrose Hill, and Si is almost, almost, back to his usual self. Of course he’s not the same, he says that something inside him has shifted, but the clouds have passed and his outlook is sunny again.
He and Eva swapped phone numbers. She said if he ever needed to talk, all he had to do was to pick up the phone, and I know they’ve got together a few times since then.
She took him to Body Positive in Greek Street, where she seemed to know everyone. She introduced him, made him feel welcome, and persuaded him to sign up on the Recently Diagnosed Course.
His first session was last Saturday. He phoned me from Soho Square, just around the corner and said, ‘Cath, wish me luck. I’m going in.’ I laughed and told him I’d keep my fingers crossed, and told him to call as soon as the course was finished.
He called the next morning, because a couple of people also on the course had invited him out for a drink afterwards, and instead of hitting a busy, buzzy bar in Soho, they went to a quiet little pub on the other side of Regent Street, and spent the evening sharing their experiences.
‘Cath,’ he said, sounding brighter than he had for ages, ‘I feel like I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. Christ, I can’t even begin to tell you how much better I feel. How normal I feel, now that I know I have this support.’
And he told me about the course: about having to wear a name tag, which everyone groaned about, but which seemed to break the ice; about sitting in a circle and introducing your neighbour to the rest of the group, having to find out when they were diagnosed, plus a couple of other, silly things that made everyone laugh.
They were told about Body Positive as an organization; about HIV, the immune system, the tests that they would come to expect. And towards the end of the day they gradually shared their stories, their feelings, and for the first time Si saw that he was absolutely not alone.
They were told what would happen on the rest of the course: about meeting dentists, dieticians, complementary therapists; about dealing with transmission, reinfection and the practicalities of living with HIV.
He decided today that he will start treating himself to a weekly massage, and has already booked his first one at the Brick Lane Natural Health Centre, which only surprises me because, in the past, he’s always taken the piss out of people who actually believe in that stuff. Yet another thing that has changed.
For a Saturday, Primrose Hill isn’t too crowded, the darkness of the sky with the impending threat of rain evidently putting people off, and Mouse is happy to run around looking for fellow four-legged playmates.
We huff and puff our way up the hill (well, me, because Si’s a damn sight fitter), and when we reach the top I collapse, as usual, on one of the benches and beg for mercy as Si agrees to give me five minutes’ rest.
‘Has Portia told you about Marcus?’ he says, after we’ve been sitting for a while.
‘Portia, your new best friend?’ This is somewhat sarcastic, I know, but ever since Portia introduced Si to Eva, she’s been promoted from evil wicked witch of North London to Saint Portia the Heavenly Angel. I’m not jealous, it just pisses me off slightly.
‘Now, now. She’ll never take your place, Cath. But she has this friend, Marcus, and he’s got an apartment in Tenerife, and apparently he lets his friends use it when he’s not there.
‘He’s offered it to Portia in a couple of weeks, but she can’t go, too much work, so she thought I might like to go.’
‘It sounds amazing! Who would you go with?’
‘Actually, I thought I might go on my own…’
I shoot him a worried look, but he starts laughing. ‘No, no, don’t worry, I’m not going to sink into a deep depression and throw myself off a cliff or anything. Actually I’d just love some peace and quiet, and I think the sea would be incredibly healing for me.’
‘Si, come on, you’d be lonely as hell.’
‘You know, six months ago I would have agreed with you, but everything’s changed now, and, bizarre as this sounds, given all that’s happened, I feel incredibly serene at the moment.
‘I just want to go by myself, read my self-help books, sunbathe and sit on the terrace at night, breathing in the smell of the pine forest and listening to the sea.’
I snort with laughter. ‘Pine forest? As if! God, Si. Ever the Romantic.’
‘Only this time there’s no man involved. Nor is there likely to be.’
‘Si, being HIV positive doesn’t preclude relationships, you know. It just means you have to practise safe sex.’
‘Do I know it doesn’t preclude relationships? Darling, you’re talking to the expert. I’ve been through the whole safe sex issue with the counsellor, and it’s not the practicalities, it’s just that it’s the very last thing on my agenda right now. I need to heal myself, and until I’m whole I won’t be ready for anything else.’
I press my palm on to his forehead. ‘Simon Nelson, are you sure you’re feeling all right?’
‘Oh ha bloody ha. Meanwhile, how about moving that big bum of yours and getting some exercise?’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ I mutter, ‘I see that some things, like insults, never change.’
We c
arry on walking round the field, Si picking up sticks and branches that are just beginning to fall off the trees, and throwing them for an ecstatic Mouse.
‘There’s something else I’ve been meaning to tell you,’ he says. ‘About telling the others. I think it’s time I told them, now that I’m doing the course and I’m coming to terms with it. What do you think?’
‘I think that if you’re ready, and you’re sure, it would be the right thing to do. How are you planning to do it?’ I don’t tell him that Lucy and Josh know that something is up, even though they haven’t got a clue what it is. They know because when Si was in ‘the darkness’, as he put it, he cut himself off from everyone except me.
And even now, since Eva and the course, he’s still been reluctant to see them. He’s changed, he says, and he doesn’t want them to see the change until he’s ready for it.
‘I’ve decided to hold a dinner party,’ he announces grandly. ‘Well, actually I thought it would just be us, you, me, Josh and Lucy. I thought when I’m back from Tenerife, but definitely before Christmas. Give me a chance to dust off Queen Delia, because God knows she hasn’t seen the light of day for a while.’ Si stops and looks at me, anxiety clouding his expression. ‘Cath, do you think it’s a good idea?’
‘That you tell them? God, yes! Definitely.’
He sighs. ‘The thing is that I’m sure Lucy will be fine with it, but what about Josh? You know how straight he is, I think this might completely freak him out, and I couldn’t bear it if he did one of those numbers where suddenly he’d start dragging Max away or something because he thinks I’m infectious.’
‘Sounds like heaven to me,’ I mutter, but then I compose myself because Si is genuinely worried. ‘First of all I’m sure Josh wouldn’t react like that, and secondly, even if he did, do you really care what that unfaithful sod thinks?’
‘I suppose not. Anyway, I may as well get it over and done with before I go away. Do you really think I’m doing the right thing?’