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MARCH 1989: Infectious Diseases Ward, St Thomas’ Hospital, London South Bank

I don’t belong here. I’m the only woman, apart from the receptionist, and everyone else must know I’m healthy, not even at risk. Do they resent me being here?

I keep my gaze low, staring at the shoes I bought a month ago from New Look. I realise now that they were on sale for a good reason—they’re too chunky and make my feet look hoof-like. But I keep staring because I can’t look at the men sitting around me. I can see them twitching and fidgeting from the periphery of my vision and can’t bear their anxiety, not on top of my own.

Dean’s been gone forty minutes and I’m trying to keep my panic leashed. Just because he’s been gone for so long doesn’t mean the news is bad. Maybe the doctor’s giving him a lecture on looking after himself better. Maybe he needs it.

I would normally read a book to kill this awful, slowly creeping time, but it feels disrespectful, like a declaration that my life is so easy and carefree that I can relax in the fantasy of fiction. So I wait, and do nothing, trying to stay calm on the outside while inside I’m all frantic, zig-zagging thoughts, my brain like a kicked ants nest.

What a miserable room this is—paint peeling, two of the ugly plastic chairs broken and held together with tape. Ten years of Dad’s rants about Maggie Thatcher and what she’s done to this country flit through my mind. The miners’ strike raged all around us in Northumberland when I was in my teens, and I couldn’t work out why Dad wanted so badly to keep sending men down into darkness and danger. But I do hate Thatcher now. For the spending cuts, for leaving rooms like this to rot so that people who are already at the bottom of society can feel just that little bit shittier.

I don’t remember much of religious studies, so I can’t remember exactly what purgatory is meant to be, but it might be an NHS waiting room. Somewhere people get stuck, a middle ground between what you used to know and whatever is waiting. The right results allow you to proceed into a heaven that the healthy take for granted. The wrong results and hello, hell.

The doors to the consultation rooms fly open, one wobbling on its hinges. It’s a young black guy who arrived twenty minutes ago, long after Dean. He’s wearing a grin which he wipes from his face when he sees the gloom of everyone else. The doctors must have given him the all-clear and the knot around my heart tightens.

But it still doesn’t prove anything. Maybe the doctors found another reason for Dean’s non-stop throat infections, fevers, and diarrhoea. Something fixable. Maybe he’s prescribing a course of antibiotics which will have Dean back to his old self in days.

Well, months realistically. Dean weighed himself this morning—he was ten stone and three pounds. A year ago, he was thirteen and a half stone. I do some maths and work out that a quarter of him is gone. I can’t bear to lose any more.

I check my watch again. Fifty minutes now. There are a few others like me, I think, companions waiting for friends or boyfriends rather than their own appointments. I’m frightened of them. I’m frightened of the things they know that I don’t.

I try to anchor my mind right here, to stop it from sailing forward into the frightening future that doesn’t exist, not yet. Last year, I went on two dates with a fidgety guy who worked in publishing and smoked too much. I can’t remember his surname or where we went on our dates, but I can remember a quote he told me an American politician once said. Something about our lives being filled with disasters, most of which never happen.

The swinging doors creak open slowly and I look up. Dean steps through and there’s something wrong with his eyes. Not just how big they look in his head now that he’s so skinny. They look unfocused. Like that time he crashed his BMX into our neighbour’s wall and got a concussion.

His eyes find mine and the moment they connect—two perfect mirrors of khaki—I know.

The future is here.

MAY 1989: Kobler Clinic, St Stephen’s Hospital, Westminster

I had to fight to get Dean registered for this place. You have to fight for everything in this mean, miserable country. Dentist appointments, decent schools, housing that isn’t riddled with damp. Dad says it wasn’t always like this, though Mam sometimes interrupts before he gets onto his Thatcher hobby horse and says that she can’t personally remember the seventies being the Garden of Eden.

For a month after his test came back positive, the Dean I knew disappeared. When we were kids, I often heard Mam describe the two of us to guests: “Dean’s the lively one, Jen’s the serious one.” Serious was obviously code for boring, and I was boring compared to scampering, joking Dean. If we’d been closer in age, I’d probably have resented him, but I was five years older and fell in love with him just like everyone else. We even looked like we’d come from two different families—he was big, always teetering on the edge of chubbiness, while I was all long bones, nicknamed “the stick insect” by the girls at school.

All Dean’s whippersnapper spirit disappeared after the results. We looked like brother and sister at last, now that he was so thin. I tried to pull him out of the depression he fell into, like trying to drag someone wounded from an air crash. I told him there was still hope and new medicines were surely being developed. He said I didn’t understand, that I hadn’t been to the gay bars and seen the skeletal old men skulking in corners, hadn’t been to the funerals of three friends. He was right.

I couldn’t console him emotionally, so I tried to help him practically. I started reading-up on AIDS at the library—they get all the latest newspapers and magazines, some from America. I found a telephone advice line where a kind-voiced man told me the Kobler Clinic was the best place for Dean, that it had opened a couple of years back as a specialist clinic dedicated to AIDS and HIV patients with access to more experimental drugs than anywhere else in England. And so, dozens of pleading phone calls later, here we are.

It was worth the fight. You can practically smell the money spent here. Comfortable chairs with cushions, nice peachy paint that looks like it wasn’t sent in a job lot from the Soviet Union, Radio 1 pop music in the background on hidden speakers.

I think of the men in that last waiting room—most of them black, half looking beaten down by life—and wonder if they know places like this exist. Sometimes the unfairness of this country makes me want to scream. That doesn’t stop me taking advantage of it, though, when I work out how to pull the levers and make the system work for me or Dean.

There’s a framed photo of Princess Di on the wall next to reception—this place is so fancy she actually opened it, came here in real life. She has that strange little smile on her face and that helmet of hair that looks like lemon candy floss. If I had ever met her, I wonder if I could have resisted the urge to poke it. Mam worships Princess Di and even Dad—who generally thinks the Bolsheviks had the right idea about monarchies—admits she does good things. Though he usually adds that “it’s easy to be charitable when you’ve got more money than most countries.”

I think of Mam and Dad a lot in these waiting rooms. They deserve to know what’s happening. I think Dean’s wrong. I think they’d get over him being gay. All they’d care about was his health. I just wish I knew a way to be sure. I hate lying to them that everything’s fine. Last month, they travelled down from Northumberland to visit, and I had to say Dean had been sent last minute to Dover to report on a ferry strike for his newspaper. In fact, he hid at an ex-boyfriend’s house a mile down the road. Dean hasn’t worked for months—he’s too sick, too often. We’re surviving—but only just—on my temp’s salary.

I still don’t know what to do while I wait. There are photocopied leaflets about HIV and AIDS in a rack on the wall, but I’ve read them all. There are a few glossy magazines lying around, too. Gay Times and Hello! mostly. God knows what looks I’d get if I picked up Gay Times, and it just seems wrong to flick through Hello! and gawp at pictures of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore’s new baby. As cheerful as the staff try and make this place, it’s still full of men with death sentences hanging over their heads.

Mostly I just look into thin air. I’m aware of the other people waiting. Some I know are patients immediately. You can see their skulls through their thin skin, or the maroon blotches of lesions peeking out from under sleeves or collars. Sometimes you can hear the virus in their deep hacking coughs, and I have to remind myself of all I’ve learnt and that this is not an airborne disease. Then there are the other companions waiting on their own Deans to emerge from the doors that separate the waiting room from the consultation rooms, that three-inch thin border between the land of the healthy and the land of the condemned.

Actually it’s not as simple as that. A lot of the companions probably have the virus even if they aren’t sick yet. When they look up at a man struggling to breathe because he’s coughing so hard, when they see arms as thin as drainpipes, they’re looking into their future.

Over the speakers, Madonna is singing her latest song, the first one I’ve ever liked. The opening is the best bit. She actually sings it well, not in that old helium squawk. She croons that life is a mystery, and we all have to stand alone.

But Dean doesn’t have to stand alone. There are people here who do, I know. But I don’t have enough room in my heart for all of them. It’s already so full it aches.

I’m on the verge of tears and have to fight them off—what right do I have to cry? I’m saved by Dean emerging from the consultation rooms, smiling.

He almost scurries to me, faster than I’ve seen him move in weeks.

“They said I can start on AZT. I’m a good candidate,” he says, and there’s light in his eyes. I hug him and try to forget the articles I’ve read questioning whether AZT is really a miracle drug and the lists of horrifying side-effects.

“Did they say how many T-cells you have?” I ask.

Dean frowns and pulls out a piece of paper shoved carelessly into his pocket.

“Ninety,” he says. “Not bad.” He hands the paper to me as if it were homework and I a strict parent.

I don’t remind him that he should have a thousand T-cells per microlitre of blood, that they are the soldiers of the immune system. I don’t explain again that the shortfall is what’s left his body defenceless against disease.

Sometimes I think he should understand more of what he’s going through; sometimes I think that maybe it’s better he doesn’t. There are so many things in my head that I don’t say, and I think for the right reasons, but I don’t know. I don’t know. It feels like Madonna’s right, for me at least. I stand alone.

Dean weighed nine stone and ten pounds this morning.

AUGUST 1989: Kobler Clinic

My fifth visit and I’m beginning to feel like I belong here. Clarissa, the receptionist, always booms “Hi!” in my direction when she sees me. Her smile doesn’t falter when she sees Dean, though he looks worse every time we come in.

How do they do it, these underpaid staff? How do they keep going? I can hardly bear witnessing one person wasting away. They must see hundreds every week.

There’s no more scurrying from Dean. He’s too thin now and always tired. It’s probably the AZT, which causes so many problems that I wonder if it should be called a medicine at all. He doesn’t have lesions, not yet, and he’s not had the big bout of pneumonia that often marks the end.

But the summer is dying.

Growing up in Northumberland, I used to love winter; nothing made me happier than a sparkling blanket of snow. For a few hours it made even our crappy hometown look pretty. Now I’m dreading the cold and all the viruses winter unleashes.

While I wait for Dean to get his bloods taken and finish a full check-up, I think about the conversation we had on the bus this morning. I said something stupid, that I should never have told him to move to London to live with me.

“What do you mean?”

“If you’d stayed home, you’d never have caught it.”

“Oh God, Jen. Are you serious?” Dean laughed but it turned into a cough. “I thought you knew the science—you read all the bloody pamphlets. I didn’t catch it in London.”

“But you must have!”

“You know it takes five years to incubate,” he said, visibly enjoying this turning of the tables. “I came to London three years ago.”

“Sometimes it incubates faster. There are cases where people—”

He cut me off. “No, Jen. I’ve always been safe here. Always. I knew enough by the time I came down.”

“But you were only 18.” I felt stupid as soon as I said it out loud. “How could you have met anyone back home?” I thought of our grim little ex-mining town with its plague of unemployment and roaming rabbles of drunks looking for fights. Not a place I could imagine any gay person living, though I supposed Dean proved that wrong.

Dean shot me a strange little smile. “Do you really want to know?” He said this quietly, so nobody around us could overhear.

I stared at him, suddenly afraid of what he might say. What if he’d been attacked? Or, worse, molested by an uncle or a cousin? “Is it horrible?”

“Maybe a bit, but not as bad as what you’re thinking,” he said. “Do you remember when I worked late shifts at the butcher’s in town?”

“Vaguely.”

“Well, we didn’t have late shifts. We always closed by six. I was terrified you or Mam would drop by to surprise me one day and find it shut.”

I couldn’t work out where this was going. I’d known Dean was gay since he was thirteen—he told me one night after we watched an episode of Dallas which Patrick Duffy spent mostly shirtless. That was why I’d told him to move to London with me. I thought I was going to help him find a life, not a death.

“So where were you if you weren’t at the shop?”

“Stockton Park.”

“Stockton Park!” I squawked the words, like a parrot. “But kids play there.”

“During the day. At night men play.”

My brain was still reeling from this new information when I realised something worse. “Weren’t you fourteen when you worked at the butcher’s?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t tell them that.” I knew it was a joke, but I didn’t laugh. I thought about that stranger who’d had sex with my beautiful little brother when he was still a kid. I wanted to find him, slap him, scream in his face that he’d murdered Dean.

Then I realised it might be too late. He was probably dead already.

I didn’t ask Dean any more questions.

“Hello there.” I must have zoned out because I’m startled by the stranger who just walked across the waiting room to me. It’s that short, handsome man who arrives with a much older companion, one even thinner and frailer than Dean.

“Hello,” I say, forcing a smile onto my face.

“You are also waiting, I think,” he says with a pronounced but pleasant accent.

“Yep. I’m getting pretty good at it, actually.”

“Oh, me too,” he says. “Perhaps we could become professionals?”

“But there’s already a job called waiter.” He laughs, more loudly than the joke deserved.

“Perhaps we could sit and wait together?” He asks.

For a moment, I’m so surprised I forget my manners. I’ve gotten used to nobody in London being friendly but, then, this man clearly isn’t a Londoner. I nod at the seat beside me, and he sits. His arm twitches, as if he was about to hold out his hand and then feared I wouldn’t take it. So many people still don’t understand how this virus works. I hold mine out instead, and we shake—his hand is soft and warm. When he lets go, a silly part of me wishes he wouldn’t.

“My name is Thiago.” Big smile, teeth American perfect.

“I’m Jennifer. I’m going to take a wild guess and say you’re not British.”

“Your wild guess is correct. Originally I am from Colombia.”

I try to think of a response, but I know nothing about Colombia except stupid drugs jokes and that it’s meant to be very dangerous. I keep both thoughts to myself.

“You come here with your brother, correct?” Thiago asks, rescuing me. Nobody has ever assumed that before—yet more proof of how the disease has changed him.

“Yes. He’s called Dean.”

“That is very nice. Dean is lucky to have a sister who cares about him in this way. I think my brothers would not do this for me.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “But you’re doing it for… ah… your…”

Thiago again rescues me. “My partner, Robert. For eight years now, ever since I arrived into London.”

My expression must betray surprise because Thiago grins. “He isn’t as old as he looks now and, maybe, I’m not as young as I look. I’m thirty-three and Robert’s fifty.”

That’s a hard punch to the stomach, but I try not to show it on my face. I’d have guessed Robert was in his late sixties. Will Dean look like an old man soon?

“Is he taking AZT?” This is the first time I’ve had a chance to talk to someone in real life about all of this and I suddenly realise how much I’ve longed to.

Thiago nods. “Six months now.”

“I think it’s worse than the disease,” I blurt out. That thought’s boiled inside me for weeks, but I haven’t dared say it out loud. Since Dean started taking those pills, he’s been even more nauseous than before, throwing up after even tiny meals. He’s lost four stone since he first got sick. I’m not sure he’ll survive losing much more.

“No, don’t think like that,” Thiago says gently. “Before Robert started the AZT, I thought he could die any moment. Every cough, I thought, ‘This is the last cough.’ Do you know how many T-cells he had six months ago? Sixteen. He said they were nearly down to a football team.”

I laugh and then glance around, afraid our amusement is an affront to everyone else.

“Now he has sixty,” Thiago continues. “That is five football teams!”

“That’s amazing,” I say and mean it. Objectively, it’s a pitifully low number, but I know enough of the science to understand that any increase is a minor miracle.

“His chest is much better now and no new lesions,” Thiago says.

“But the pills make Dean so sick. He’s losing weight, not gaining it back.”

“Ah, yes. Robert was like that too, at first. Ginger tea helped. Try it. Try to hold onto hope. There is always hope.”

That’s when I see Dean approaching, face so dejected that the tiny bubble that just inflated in my chest bursts.

“They don’t think it’s working,” Dean says, and I forget Thiago is even there.

Dean weighed nine stone and four pounds this morning.

OCTOBER 1989: Kobler Clinic

When I walk into the clinic, I spot Thiago immediately. He sees me too, and flashes a floodlight of a smile while Dean checks in.

“He looks better,” Thiago says once Dean’s gone into the consultation area. Today, there is a sweet middle-aged woman volunteering, making tea and coffee for anyone waiting. Thiago has coffee, says that drinking tea would betray his Colombian heritage. I say I’ll have coffee, too. I have no problem being disloyal to England.

“If he looks better, it’s thanks to you,” I tell Thiago. “You were right about ginger tea. Since he started drinking that, he’s stopped puking.”

“Puking?”

I always find it strange which words have managed to escape the vast net of Thiago’s vocabulary. “Um—vomiting.”

“Ah. Yes, good. You may thank my mother, actually. She was the one who gave me the advice.”

“Your mother knows about this?”

“Why, yes, certainly she knows,” Thiago answers, eyes sparking with mischief. “She knows about my sick girlfriend, Roberta. Though I have disappointed her by saying Roberta is not suffering from morning sickness.”

I smile while shaking my head sympathetically, a confusing combination even to me. “I suppose it’s hard to come out of the closet in Colombia.”

“I think it is hard to come out anywhere. Especially now. I feel sad for the young ones. Everyone thinks we will all catch AIDS and die. That’s the future they’re growing up into.”

I find myself wondering about Thiago. When I first met him, I’d presumed he had the virus too. But he looks so well, and wouldn’t he have to go and have tests done too if he was positive? The second time we met I wondered if I should ask him but worried it was rude. Now we’ve met each other too many times, and I feel embarrassed to ask, as if I’d forgotten his name and it was too awkward to admit now.

Instead, I ask how Robert has been doing and Thiago sighs. “Not so good. He has been coughing more and having the night sweats again. Does Dean have the night sweats?”

I nod. “Every night. We have to wash his sheets every day.”

“Well, at least you don’t share his bed. Sometimes, I worry Robert will wake one morning and find he has drowned me in my sleep.”

I laugh and Thiago’s smile flashes in return. I always thought dark humour was uniquely British for some reason, but Thiago’s taught me otherwise.

We talk for a while of our lives outside of the waiting room—although I always feel like Thiago gets the worse end of this deal.

He tells me about his job as a translator of South American poetry while I tell him what little there is to say about temping as a PA in the City of London. He tells me about growing up in a nice house in Bogota with servants, though he says they were close enough to the barrios that on quiet nights he heard gunshots. I tell him about our cramped little council house and how, on weekend nights, you could hear people vomiting in our back garden after drinking too much.

We’re both laughing when Thiago’s facial expression slides into solemnity. Robert’s walking our way, slowly, and I don’t need to know him well to read his expression. He has news, and it isn’t good.

Thiago doesn’t say goodbye, just squeezes my hand quickly, then strides over to Robert and takes his arm. They talk in low, intimate voices. I try to eavesdrop, can’t help myself, but I can’t make out their words. They begin to make their way towards the exit, Robert gripping Thiago’s arm, when the older man turns.

“Thank you for looking after this one for me,” he calls to me, surprisingly loud. He has a BBC voice—rich, deep, somehow chocolaty. It isn’t the voice of a dying man, and for a moment, I glimpse who he must have been not so long ago. Sharp blue eyes and a smile as bright as Thiago’s. He was probably a very well-preserved fifty before the disease began to whittle him away. They must have looked good together.

Thiago winks at me. Somehow it’s a melancholy wink. I didn’t know such a thing was possible. Then they leave, very slowly. Painfully slowly, Robert’s walk an old man’s shuffle.

I’m on the edge of tears once they are gone but hide them when Dean emerges from his consultation, grinning.

“It’s working,” he says, holding out his sheet of paper triumphantly. “My T-cells are up.”

I look at the paper. 140 T-cells. He weighs nine stone and six pounds.

NOVEMBER 1989: Kobler Clinic

Dean’s doing well enough to find my fussing irritating, so I leave him to check in with Clarissa and look for Thiago.

He isn’t here. I’m a little surprised by how sharp my disappointment is. Last time we met, I almost asked for his phone number. I thought it might be nice to meet him in the real world, really have time to talk. But Robert and Dean were on the same appointment schedule, so I decided I could wait a bit longer.

I resign myself to another hour of tedium and worry before noticing a new pamphlet: “AZT and You – the Latest Research.”

I take a copy and read. I’ve absorbed enough medical jargon to be able to scan it quickly: latest study confirms AZT only delays the onset of AIDS-related illnesses… long-term benefits remain uncertain… improvements appear temporary…

The world slowly greys. I read again, more slowly, looking for any good news. A Dr. Lynch is quoted: “This is the only drug that has proven any effectiveness in combating this virus. It’s a start. We’re a long way from a cure, but AZT makes me think it’s possible we’ll soon find medications that turn HIV from a fatal condition to something chronic but manageable.”

“Possible.” How possible?

“Soon.” How soon?

An awful premonition creeps over me. There will be a gap between AZT and the new medicines, a crack Dean will fall through. I wish I could talk to Thiago. Thiago would know how to defuse this ticking time bomb of despair.

I walk over to reception and Clarissa looks up, smiling. “I’m sure Dean won’t be long,” she says, her tone as bright as ever.

“Actually,” I say, awkwardly. “I wanted to ask about another person. Thiago. He comes in with Robert. They usually come in at the same time as us, so I was wondering if they rescheduled.”

For the first time Clarissa’s smile looks fake, like it’s been carved onto her face and it hurts. “I’m sorry but I can’t talk about other patients.”

“No, I understand that. But it’s not actually a patient I’m asking about. It’s the person he comes in with. Thiago. We’re friends. Can you just let me know if they’ve got an appointment later today?”

Clarissa’s smile fades away altogether, and I realise how much I’ve grown to depend on it. “They don’t have an appointment.”

“They don’t have any appointment today, at all?”

“They don’t have an appointment,” Clarissa says, repeating her words exactly. And I see it in her eyes. She wants me to understand something.

The carpet beneath my feet suddenly feels too soft, as if it might give away beneath my feet and I’ll plummet into some unknown new depth.

My eyes are prickling when I hear Dean’s voice at my side. “Sis!”

I turn and Dean’s smiling, and I try to smile back though it feels like a ghastly mask on my face.

“Good results,” Dean says, jubilant. “My T-cells are booming.”

I pull him into a hug. I can feel his shoulder blades, sharp under my arms. He’s still skinny but feels less breakable than a month ago. And I am happy for him, so happy, but I’m also afraid because I don’t think it can last—one day he really will break. I hold on even though I feel him pulling away because I don’t want him to see that I’m crying. I wonder how much he weighs today, and what he’ll weigh when this is over.