The Facts of Life

by Patrick Gale

  ‘Your friend Miss Toye has quite a fan club here,’ he joked. ‘When Mulroney Park comes on, they practically take the phones off the hook. They were very impressed that my grandfather had had an affair with the woman. It made me quite proud of you.’

  His grandfather gave a strained smile and promptly changed tack.

  ‘You say you’ll be out in a few days?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. They need the bed. I’ll be very weak for a bit. I had to give up my job in the record shop. They’d have me back, I think – they, er, they have no prejudices either – but I’ll need the rest. I sleep for hours. I’d probably nod off behind the counter.’

  ‘You must come home to The Roundel. Be quiet there. Your flat is no good. You need to get out of the city. I think The Roundel’s special … It’s a healing place. I’ve nothing much on. Nothing I can’t postpone or cancel.’

  ‘Grandpa, I –’

  ‘I can take care of you, Jamie.’

  ‘Are you rescuing me, then?’

  ‘Yes.’ The old man smiled at last, surprised at the unexpected truth. His tone was wry, as though making a sly reference to an old family joke. ‘Yes. I will rescue you.’

  ‘I’ll … I’ll have to talk to Sam about it this evening.’

  ‘Oh. Of course. I’d forgotten. Talk to him by all means. Perhaps he has plans for you.’

  ‘Can I call you tomorrow?’

  He nodded. On rising he still made no move to touch Jamie or embrace him. Why should he? Theirs had never been a relationship of touch and a sudden change now, even after their recent estrangement, would ring false. But he held him with his big, dreamer’s eyes for a moment and Jamie once again pictured him as a young man, resolute, passionate, fighting against the degradation thrust upon him by foreigners and against the insidious bacillus in his lungs.

  Shattered from the unexpected encounter, he slid into a deep sleep where he sat, upright against the pillows. He dreamed of water again but this time it was a river. He was lying back on cushions in a shallow boat and a young, dark-haired man he knew to be his grandfather was vigorously punting them upstream in dazzling summer sunshine. He felt very tired in the boat but utterly safe, utterly trusting.

  Influenced perhaps by the afterglow of the dream, he had expected Sam to feel jealous of his grandfather’s suggested intervention. He had forgotten Sam’s earlier enthusiasm for the house and his suggestion that they all go to live there.

  ‘Fine,’ Sam said at once. ‘I’ve a couple of weeks to go on site. Alison and I were worried about you being at home on your own. Go. Will it be warm enough?’

  ‘Sure,’ Jamie nodded. ‘There’s central heating. If the house gets cold I can always go and sleep in the studio. He’s got a sofa-bed in the main room over there.’

  So it was decided. Jamie left the hospital and was driven home by a hospital volunteer. He spent a shattering afternoon packing a suitcase, amazed and furious at how long it took him. Then he allowed his grandfather to rescue him from urban temptation and unwholesomeness. Alison ascertained there was a clinic in Rexbridge he could attend as an outpatient and had the ward sister contact it to send on his details. Sandy made relevant enquiries to check that the local GP, should Jamie need him, was not on any blacklists. Miriam, meanwhile, having got so into the swing of visiting the ward every morning, applied to the volunteer coordinator and was delighted to be asked if she would give watercolour classes to any patients who had a yen to learn.

  Rather than making do with teenage leftovers, Jamie was to establish himself at The Roundel for the first time in his adult life, surrounding himself with his favourite clothes and discs and books. He was no sooner over the threshold than he realised he was going to be there for longer than the fortnight agreed with Sam. The old house claimed him. His grandfather’s cleaner had been in. The place was sweet with the lavender and petrol smell of furniture wax, its air still tangy with glass cleaner. Rugs bore the satisfying marks of recent hoovering. Woodwork glowed.

  Tired after the drive, weary too of his grandfather’s watchfulness, Jamie made himself a cup of tea then took himself off to bed with the radio and a new copy of Hello. He unpacked the idol from the suitcase and set her in the middle of the bedroom mantel-shelf so she could command the room. The bed was made up with fresh sheets that smelled of soap. There was a small pile of mail at the bedside. He set the magazine aside and opened the envelopes. Several contained get-well cards from local acquaintances who doubtless knew he had been ill but had no idea what with. Alison might, he reflected, have allowed it to be assumed that the pneumonia was a result of weak lungs inherited from his grandfather. There were the usual sorts of stale letters addressed to one’s childhood home – school newsletters appealing for retirement presents and contributions to building funds, a flier advertising reductions in the Rexbridge store where he had bought his pinstripe suit.

  He saved the most interesting-looking envelope until last. The stamp was German and, as he tore out the thin sheet of paper, he inevitably fell to thinking of Germans he had been to bed with and to whom he might rashly have granted his address in younger and less guarded times. Prepared for unconvincing expressions of enduring affection or roundabout requests for invitations to stay, he was nonetheless disappointed to find a formal, typewritten note on official paper. The notepaper bore the name of the hospital where he had been taken for his leg to be mended after his skiing accident. He remembered sleepless nights in a half-empty ward, an awkward visit from a representative of his holiday insurance company and one from the friends he had been skiing with, who were embarrassed at being obliged to return home without him. He remembered the very specific pain and then the intolerable itching of the stitched gash in his calf, encased in plaster. His tourist’s German had improved a little during his recuperation – forced as he was to resort to German gossip magazines for his entertainment in lieu of further visitors or anything to read in English – but it was insufficient to master the formal sentences in the letter. He understood We regret, dear sir, it is our duty to inform you and blood and a reference to a firm of lawyers in Bonn. Assuming it was some tedious technicality arising from his long since settled insurance claim, he placed it on one side and returned to reading an article about the health minister’s daughter and her plans for transforming Godfreys’s mansion once they returned from their Jamaican honeymoon.

  It was only the next morning that, feeling stronger, buoyed up by a change of scene, he tracked down Alison’s old German dictionary and began to piece the sense of the letter together. It had nothing to do with holiday insurance. He was being respectfully informed that, in the wake of a national scare, residual supplies of HIV-infected blood had been traced to the hospital’s bank, dating from before the period in which he had been admitted to its casualty department. They saw from their records that he had received a transfusion following severe loss of blood during his accident and subsequent operation to repair the bone. It was thus faintly possible that he had been placed at risk of accidental infection. They would strongly advise his applying for an HIV test at once. They added, in an elliptical slur on his nature, that it was, of course, so long ago now that any unfortunate infection showing up in his blood could most probably be traced to more than one possible source. While the hospital was declaring itself immune from legal blame, having since been closed down, re-opened and privatised with new staff, any enquiries of a legal nature might be referred to a firm in Bonn who were representing the government department directly responsible for the testing of blood supplies. Et cetera.

  Jamie read and reread the letter, in whose margins he had scribbled his stumbling translation, astonished that it could say so much in so few words and with so little attempt to dress up its message in softening conditional clauses or sympathetic expressions. Then he took it to the fireplace and set fire to it in the grate, watched by the inscrutable idol. He thought about this news when Alison rang during a quiet moment in her office in the afternoon, thought about it again when Sam rang
sweetly to say nothing in particular after work. He thought about it especially when, with the utmost caution and deliberation, his grandfather asked him over supper whether there was any chance that he might have passed the virus on to anybody he knew. He decided, however, to tell nobody. Not Sam. Not anyone.

  There had been much talk of innocent victims. Iniquitous talk implying, by its choice of epithets, that the majority of people were, on the contrary, entirely to blame for their HIV infections or, worse, entirely deserving of them. Jamie knew with a strong, irrational certainty, that his infection had come from the blood transfusion, but far from feeling the helplessness of outraged innocence, he felt the anger and shame of betrayed trust. He was indignant at the letter’s implications, feeling like a soldier coming round in a field hospital to find he had been bayonetted ignominiously in the back while fleeing a battleground. To die from such a cause – and he was dying, he knew, despite the talk of living and continuance he felt obliged to offer Alison and Sandy – to die thus was somehow more painful, futile and less honourable than to die from an old-fashioned sexual infection. He did not want to become like the women and children on the ward, surrounded by vengeful kin, isolated by his new blamelessness from the one thing that might give his death a value.

  Putting some of his new books on the shelves in his room, he fell eagerly on an old address book of his dating from around his sixteenth birthday, long since discarded as being too painfully in need of editing. He flicked through the pages for what seemed like hours, hungrily scanning his younger handwriting for names of men who might have done the deed, desperate now that his fate be born of human choice, not of a mere crime of hospital inefficiency.

  52

  Sandy was throwing a birthday party and Alison was in no mood to go. After six months in a wheelchair, her old journalist friend, Guy, whom she had barely seen since the Gay Pride march, had finally been swept away by an attack of MAI, a rare form of tuberculosis.

  ‘So typical,’ he had croaked mirthlessly, as she sat at his bedside in the ward Jamie had recently left. ‘We spend our lives trying to be different – eating and wearing things nobody else would dream of, decorating our houses in unheard of ways – and now what? Now we manage to be chic and rarefied even in death. TB? Nothing so du peuple! We even manage to suffer from the virus in different ways from each other. This is customised lurgy …’

  He had died on Monday and was cremated on Thursday, too late for Sandy to cancel Saturday’s party.

  ‘It’s my birthday,’ she declared a few hours before, when Alison rang her ostensibly to discuss helpline rotas but actually to see whether she could find the courage to excuse herself from going. ‘And I shan’t have it turned into a wake. You dress up, girl, get yourself a lift so you can drink yourself stupid, and you party! And no black. Schwarz is absolutely verboten. The only black Guy would have allowed is underwear.’

  By the time Bald Billy drove over from Greenwich to pick her up, Alison had tried on and rejected some five outfits. She answered the door to Billy in an old school suit of Jamie’s she had tarted up with a red silk scarf and a flashy diamanté clip.

  ‘Well? What do you think?’ she asked him warily, sensing he was about to pass judgement anyway. Billy’s window-dressing had won prizes. Tonight he had come out entirely in Hare Krishna orange. He had even found the time to dye some plimsolls tangerine.

  ‘No,’ he said after a moment’s consideration.

  ‘You no like? Tell me, Billy!’

  ‘You’re a girl, Alison. Wear that lot and you give out quite the wrong signals.’

  ‘I thought it was sort of Barbara Stanwyck.’

  ‘Precisely.’ Billy stole a mandarin from the fruitbowl and began peeling it.

  ‘Okay,’ Alison sighed. ‘Have we got time?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Right,’ she said, returning to her bedroom and throwing off the suit. ‘I’m a girl. I’m a girl. Damn it, I am!’

  She snatched up a little red dress with skinny shoulder straps, pulled it over her head and cinched in her waist with a black belt. Then she put on lipstick to match.

  ‘Lose the belt,’ Billy told her in the hall.

  ‘But –’

  ‘Simplicity is all and anyway it makes you look like a centaur from behind. But the dress is good.’ He stood back. ‘Here,’ he said, taking a heavy steel chain from his neck and fastening it round hers. ‘I’ve taken the chill off it for you. Now that looks fabulous!’

  ‘You’re sure? I feel like a fire extinguisher. Billy, can’t we stay in and watch TV? I’ll cook.’

  Billy rejected one of her coats with a little mutter of shocked distaste and grabbed another one for her.

  ‘Do you know how long it took to get these shoes the right colour?’ he asked her wearily.

  Sandy shared a big, battered house in the considerable shadow of Arsenal football stadium with three other women. She had bought it in her earning days as a solicitor and, now that she earned nothing, needed lodgers to help her pay the mortgage. The lodgers changed regularly, so, assuming they had friends, there was always a good chance of meeting new faces at Sandy’s parties. The fact that Alison usually found herself in the basement kitchen with the same old crowd, hiding from all the new people upstairs, did not stop her, even tonight, from entering the house with a certain sense of anticipation.

  As a gesture to mourning, an old photograph of Guy puffing a drunken kiss at the camera over a birthday cake had been blown up to poster size and coloured, à la Warhol, with vibrant crayons. Glued on the hall wall above a table draped with a pseudo altar cloth and cluttered with Mexican prayer candles, it was already fluttering with tokens of remembrance people had pinned to it. There were red ribbons, inevitably, but also chocolate wrappers, a condom full of Smarties, a rubber snake, a pink carnation, a sombre polaroid snapshot taken during the picnic at the last Gay Pride, with Guy in his OUR DEATHS YOUR SHAME baseball cap, and a gaudy postcard of Plymouth Hoe.

  Sandy ran out to greet them, a bottle in either hand, already in bare feet because she had been dancing.

  ‘Damn you!’ she shouted over the music, after duly admiring Billy’s plimsolls and snatching his exquisitely wrapped birthday parcel. ‘I wanted me to be the only one in a dress. Look at you!’

  ‘Ah but I’m a girl,’ Alison said.

  ‘I know, babe. I know!’

  ‘Well look at you. It’s so …’ Words failed Alison.

  ‘Like it?’ Sandy revolved on the spot to show off her incongruous blue satin ball gown. ‘Found it in Help the Aged. I’ve come as your mother, incidentally.’ Alison gave her a playful slap and received a kiss in return. ‘No Boys?’ Sandy asked.

  Alison shook her head.

  ‘Nothing can winkle Jamie out of the fens so Sam’s gone up to join him there.’

  ‘Jamie sent me a card, though.’

  ‘You’re honoured. I never get one.’

  Sandy was distracted by the arrival of a recent ex of hers, new girlfriend in tow. Bald Billy was already in the living room, showing off his plimsolls, so Alison slipped downstairs to the kitchen. The grimy basement had been transformed like the rest of the house by a quantity of candles burning in jam jars and flower pots. It would be quite in character for a Sandy party for the evening to end with someone spectacularly catching fire and having to be rushed to casualty. Someone nobody had ever liked much. Sure enough, the gang were all in the kitchen, eating the cocktail sausages and mustard dip that no-one could be bothered to pass around upstairs. Sean and Nick stood, shyly entwined, by the door, inseparable even before anyone had found time to get drunk and predatory. Guy’s widowed Buddy, Steve, looking incomplete without the wheelchair to push, was chatting to several colleagues from the helpline and Belgian Agnes. Belgian Agnes had brought along yet another man she had found at the Islamic Institute. He stared about him and clung to her as to a life raft. As Alison came in there were hugs all round because Guy’s funeral was still fresh in their minds and, without anyone saying a
s much, they all knew she was in need of hugging and suspected Jamie’s would be next.

  Although she had made a point of still speaking to him every day and had sent him a couple of Red Cross parcels of magazines, books and chocolates, she had not seen Jamie since he left hospital. His departure to The Roundel had brought a temporary alleviation of pressure, allowing her to flex her spirit and check for sprains. She was shocked to find herself suffering a kind of revulsion with his sickness or, more accurately, a kind of dissatisfaction with its progress. Daring, now there was distance between them, to stand back mentally from their situation and examine her reactions, she found that his recovery had cheated her of something, and the long months ahead, months of checking he was still relatively well and of waiting for him to decline again, were a deadening prospect. Of course this reaction appalled her. She was grateful, truly, for his rescue from death’s jaws, which according to the doctors had been a very close thing. She prayed, moreover, with honest selfishness, that he might be spared for another year, two years even. His so nearly dying had been a kind of rehearsal. She saw that now. It gave them all a chance to test their love for him like so many unfinished ships in a dock.

  What disturbed her most was her being forced to accept that his death, whenever it came, would not destroy her. She would survive. She had already found ways of coping. He had been close as a limb to her for as long as she could remember, but nobody died of amputation these days. With careful deployment of what fate left her, the healing stump might not even show too much. Like the sensible widow, she would make new friends who had never known what she had lost and would accept her as she was, brotherless. Brotherlessness; that, she knew now, would hurt. Sometimes she dared to hope that Sam might stay around, play a brotherly role, but most of the time she knew the hope was vain. In both senses. With Jamie gone, the tentative roots Sam had put down would be groundless and he would be swept away from her by the same mysterious urban current that had first washed him into her path.