‘Waterloo? No! No, no, the Elephant and Castle.’
Phil shrugged elaborately and his eyes didn’t move from the plate. ‘I thought it was Waterloo.’ His tiny mouth had to stretch to take a bite out of a chunk of bread that was the colour of brown shoes. ‘In an old warehouse or something.’
Michael began to trace the criss-cross patterns of green on the waterproof tablecloth. I’ve never said in an old warehouse or anything else. Certainly not in the arches underneath an elevated railway.
‘Yeah, an old warehouse. Near the Old Kent Road.’
Phil nodded now, very carefully, very slowly.
Michael pressed together his thick veined hands.
My boyfriend is pumping me for my work address so he can give it to animal rights demonstrators. My boyfriend of thirteen years wants to betray me. Henry has such a nice smile, doesn’t he?
‘So how is the gorgeous Henry?’ The emphasis on the ‘is’ somehow made it plain that Michael had been reminded of Henry by the previous topic, that there was a connection between them.
‘He’s fine, thank you,’ said Phil, coolly.
He doesn’t even care that I’ve guessed.
Michael struck back. It was a bit like playing tennis. ‘You know many couples in our situation would be busy reassuring each other that they practised safe sex with their lovers. They’d talk about whether they should be using condoms with each other. But …’
Michael considered letting his voice trail delicately away, but you play tennis to win. ‘But we don’t have to, do we Phil? We don’t make love.’
It was only then, finally, that Michael realized he needed a new life.
After California, Michael spent the next ten years missing sexual opportunities. As these years were 1976 to 1986, missing opportunities probably saved his life.
Everyone else was going at it like ferrets, not knowing there was something brand-new in the world. By the time Michael emerged from purdah, he and the world knew things had changed, and were taking precautions.
But it was already too late for several dear friends. They rolled on all unknowing for many years, all through the eighties into the nineties, though they were, like Shrödinger’s cat, already dead mathematically. They had the virus. Or rather, it had them.
If you can have sex with anyone in the world, you need to know as a matter of urgency, if they can make you ill. Answering this question presented Michael with several interesting methodological difficulties.
If he experimented on himself and it made him ill, that would indeed be a result, but it would rather defeat the purpose. On the other hand, experimenting on someone else did raise certain ethical questions.
It was also methodologically suspect. Michael would first have to ensure that whoever was being tested was HIV negative to begin with. Proving HIV negative status is extremely difficult. Antibodies take three months to show up after infection. That means a second test is necessary three months after the first. During those three months, you have to know absolutely that the person has avoided all risk of exposure to the virus. That means no kissing. If there are any doubts, you have to test again three months after that.
If the subject was, say, a nun who never had sex with anyone, Michael would first have to find the one Angel in the world who could seduce her, and then persuade her that she needed an HIV test. This scenario seemed unlikely.
Perhaps his own Angel could sleep with another Angel with Aids. And then be tested twice, once while the infected Angel was still in the world, and again, once he had left it to see if the virus remained behind.
But that meant the slate would be cleaned whenever the carrying Angel disappeared. And even perhaps when his own experimental Angel dipped in and out of existence.
Both the infecting Angel and his victim would have to remain in the world for an uninterrupted three months.
Well, Michael could rent a house somewhere out of the way, Scotland maybe, and have them live there under iron orders to sleep with no one else. It was a little bit like keeping experimental dogs in kennels. There was no doubt that science was easier when you did it to animals.
But Angels are not people. What if their immune systems worked differently? Suppose Angels could infect people but not each other?
Michael considered testing with a less serious virus. He could conjure up an Angel with a severe cold, sleep with him, and see if he caught anything. Or call up a copy with diphtheria on his moustache and swab his own lips and grow a culture.
But HIV was a retrovirus. It copied itself into the RNA of your cells, and took over their reproductive function. It becomes you, and you are real. Suppose over the three months it worked its magic, the virus became so entwined with your non-miraculous body that it gained a real life?
The more he thought, the more difficult and absurd it all became.
Then he remembered that one of his many lost opportunities had grown up to be an expert on Aids. Her name was Margaret White, but Michael had known her in school as Bottles. They had been friends during Michael’s brief period of popularity before his last trip to California.
At sixteen, Michael was just American enough to find it easier to meet strangers and stay sunny and positive about things. He was invited to parties. He was likely to succeed, and grumpy jealous spotty pale blokes grumbled about him behind his back.
Michael was in the school theatre club and was big and strong and handsome and could act. There were more girls in drama club than blokes, so they did a production of Anouilh’s Antigone: lots of juicy female roles. Michael played the old, heart-torn tyrant. He moved with a combination of bullish swagger and slight arthritic limp that left the audience astonished. Michael had conjured up the king.
His sport was long-distance running. The beefiness he inherited from his father was yet to develop; he maintained an easy luxurious swing to the way he moved. He combined beauty with a certain shy sweetness that did not threaten or repel, and his black eyes reminded people of a particularly friendly, lively spaniel. Indeed, he was very good with animals. He worked for the local vet part-time and had decided to become a veterinarian.
The nicest thing about Michael was that he was no snob.
Bottles was the unkind nickname given to a big-breasted girl who existed on the social margins. She was tall, big-boned, a little ungainly, with a certain daffy spinning to her eyes. Her classmates whispered about her with a fascinated prurience, because at sixteen, Bottles was living the life of grown woman. She looked 22, had adult boyfriends with cars, and spent weekends in clubs. Rumour was accepted as fact: Bottles did a strip show in the local pub.
Michael got to know Bottles on a school trip to Windsor Castle, an attempt to steep them in the mystique of royalty. They met over a joke.
As they got off the train at one of Windsor’s stations, Bottles said to him, cheerily, ‘My goodness, two train stations. Is that so the Queen can get away in case there’s a revolution?’
It was 1976 and there was little to make any hungry secondary-scholar feel wild, free and funny. Bottle’s top was cut low, and her breasts were squashed together, showing pale skin and a hint of blue veins. She had been sent home recently for the unheard-of thing of piercing her nostril with an earring.
‘I mean, do you suppose the Queen goes to the toilet in public? I’m being serious. There she is, waving to crowds and suddenly she gets caught short. Can she say, sorry everyone, I need a pit stop? Or does she just have to wait until she gets home?’
To a sixteen-year-old in the run-up to the Jubilee, this was scandalously original. Bottles began to walk in a clenched, constricted way