The Enemy Within, page 19
‘What, here?’ Conor had a thick accent, much more sing-song than Liam’s. I guessed he came from south of the border.
‘No,’ I clarified. ‘I don’t think he’ll be coming today. I just… I’ve been trying to get hold of him this week, and he’s not answering his phone.’ This was becoming more humiliating by the minute.
Conor shook his head. ‘I’ve not seen him since the meeting last Tuesday.’ He gave me another nod. ‘He’s a good man, your Liam.’
I appreciated that your. ‘I think so.’
‘Wait now. He did say he was off away on business.’
‘Business?’ It didn’t make any sense: Liam worked for the GLC, what business would take him out of London?
But Conor was nodding. He turned and called across to another member of the group, who was swigging from a can of beer, and looked to be offering advice about carrying the banners which wasn’t entirely welcome. ‘Sean! Come over here a minute. This man’s asking after Liam. Didn’t he say he was going away?’
Sean, an older, balder man, turned and made his way over to us, looking slightly unsteady on his feet. He’d obviously started celebrating early. ‘What now?’
‘Liam,’ repeated Conor impatiently. ‘Didn’t he say he had some business to take care of?’
Sean narrowed his eyes and looked me up and down. ‘Who’s asking?’
Conor gestured towards me. ‘This is Tommy.’
‘Ah!’ Suspicion gave way to a wide smile. ‘You’re the boyfriend!’
It was the nicest thing I’d heard in a long while, even if it was accompanied by a waft of beery breath. It meant Liam must have been telling people about me. ‘That’s right.’
‘He’s a great man, your Liam. A great man.’ Sean came forward and slung an arm around my shoulders, putting an unexpected weight on me as he tottered slightly off balance. I caught Conor and Paud rolling their eyes at each other.
‘Thanks.’ I didn’t know quite what else to say.
‘Doing his bit for the cause.’
‘How d’you mean? Oh, the community centre?’
Both Sean and Conor looked at me blankly. ‘In Holloway?’ I prompted.
The penny dropped with Paud first. ‘Oh, that’s an Irish in Britain Representation Group thing, not Irish Gays in London.’
‘Right.’ I sighed, thinking, as I often did in those days, of that scene in The Life of Brian.
‘Hey, it looks like things might be going to kick off soon,’ Paud continued, looking over towards the edge of the park. ‘God alone knows who they’ve got organising it this year – they’ve not got a clue what they’re doing. I’m going to see if I can bag us a spot near the front.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Conor. And they were off, smiling slightly apologetically, leaving me with Sean, who seemed to have decided I was his new best friend. His beery breath was not helping my already shaky state. A possible way to extract myself from his grasp occurred to me, and I eased the bottle of whisky out of my jeans pocket. I’d already had a couple of slugs on the journey here. But nothing like what he appeared to have put away.
I unscrewed the lid and took a swig before offering it to him, because I didn’t much fancy his sloppy seconds. As if by magic, the weight was lifted from my shoulders. ‘Thank you very much!’
He held the bottle up in a toast and said something in Irish that I didn’t quite catch. I tried to get away with a smile and a nod, but Sean wasn’t having it. He made me repeat each syllable after him: Chock-Ache-Are-La. And when I’d finally said it to his satisfaction, he made me take another swig anyway. I tried not to think about his washback as the warm liquid went down my throat, but it was threatening to come back up anyway.
‘He’s a great man – Liam,’ he repeated, as I moved as subtly as I could back out of grabbing range. ‘Doing what has to be done.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Taking the war to England. It’s like he says.’
‘What is?’ I must have misheard. I had to have misheard.
Sean was gazing glassy-eyed across the park as he repeated Liam’s words: ‘“The only way to make the British sit up and take notice is to bomb them into it.”’ He turned and focused on me, or rather on what I was holding. ‘Shall we have another wee nip of that?’
I thrust the bottle towards him. ‘Here. Keep it.’
Turned out I should have taken one of Mark’s buckets after all. I only just made it to the nearest tree to be sick behind it.
THREE
So that ended up being the first Pride March in eight years I didn’t go on. I didn’t miss much: it was a bit of a wash-out by all accounts, although I did hear there was a lot of fun going on afterwards in the swimming pool at the University of London Union, where it all ended up that afternoon.
By that point, though, I was long since home and back in my bed. The journey home had been horrendous: I was feeling so rough I couldn’t face the stuffiness of the Tube, so I opted to go by bus instead, with the thought that I could sit at the back, close to the fresh air, and be able to hop off quick if I felt like spewing again. But that meant two different buses, with lengthy waits for each of them, and a long walk at the other end. I actually had to sit down on a wall at one point because I thought I might be going to faint. I was rewarded with a sticky bum from the lime trees that lined all the roads in that area and made the pavements so gross in the summer. And that meant my best jeans were ruined, on top of everything else.
I at least managed to stop off at the corner shop to buy some orange juice before I got back, which was lucky because, other than tea and coffee, I had nothing in to drink at all. All the glasses were dirty in the sink, so I poured half the carton into a mug instead, dumped it down on the table by the bed and lay down fully clothed, staring up at the mouldy patch on the ceiling and willing it to stop swimming before my eyes. It was hot and airless in the flat, but once I was lying down I couldn’t bring myself to get up again and open the window. So instead, I just lay there and finally let myself think what I’d been refusing to let myself think for days now.
‘I’m really ill.’ I said the words out loud into the empty room. I laid my palm on my forehead; it felt warm, but then so did my hand. How were you meant to judge if you’re running a temperature if you actually were running a temperature? A proper grown-up would have had a thermometer, kept in a well-stocked medicine cabinet. I had a half-empty packet of paracetamol, another of aspirin and a crusty bottle of cough mixture next to the baked beans and tuna in my single kitchen cabinet.
I wanted my mum. For her medical expertise, and not just for the obvious, primal reason that we all want our mums when we’re poorly. Except that, obviously, I couldn’t explain to her what might really be wrong with me. I would die of shame just broaching the subject with her. Although if this was what I was afraid of, I was going to have to face up to the fact that I was going to die anyway.
With some effort I rolled over and reached for the leaflet that I knew was on the table by the bed. I’d been using it as a bookmark. It was about two-thirds of the way through The Dark by James Herbert, its doomy initials in white-on-red protruding above the pages: A.I.D.S. I extracted it and cast the book aside, not even caring about losing my place. I knew what the leaflet said well enough – I’d read it enough times – but I read it once more in an attempt, far too late, to hammer the words into my thick skull.
How can you reduce your threat of getting A.I.D.S?
Have sex with fewer men
Avoid anal sex, except perhaps with your regular partner(s)
Avoid sex with men who have had sex in high-risk areas (especially the USA) in the last three years
Have sex only with men who have few other sexual partners
Since the virus has been found even in saliva, perhaps the only safe sex is mutual masturbation, body rubbing and dry kissing.
It was so unfair. I had done 1 and 3, although I supposed that ‘fewer’ in my case was a relative term. How the hell was I supposed to know about 4 for certain? And how could anyone possibly manage to stick to 5 in the throes of any passion worth having?
Which left 2. And my mind went straight back to the beach nine nights ago, and Liam looking up at me saying yes, I’m sure, yes. But I’d thought with all my heart that he was my regular partner, or at least he was going to be. For God’s sake, hadn’t he just that very minute told me he loved me?
Yes, and you haven’t seen or heard from him since, said the nasty, judgemental voice that still lives in my head. I used to hear from it a lot when I was a kid. It sounds a bit like my father, and a lot of my teachers at school. In recent years I’ve got pretty good at drowning it out, most of the time.
Now, though, in my feverish state, it was back, and it was determined to be heard. Liam was the very definition of a man with ‘few other sexual partners’, I told it. Was he? the answer came back. Seems like there was a lot he wasn’t bothering to tell you about.
‘That’s not fair.’ I actually spoke the words out loud, as if by vocalising them I could force them to be true. If Liam hadn’t told me everything about all his political activities, that was because I deliberately hadn’t asked. Not after my embarrassment over the man in the pub. And, to be fair, he was prickly about that whole area too: look at how he had reacted over the church thing. We would have got round to it. Once we got to know each other a bit better.
Political activities? It’s not exactly knocking on doors wearing a rosette, is it? That was definitely my father speaking. The IRA were right up there with the Russians and Tony Benn for him. He was always ranting about the ‘bloody Paddies’. I didn’t think I’d ever seen him so furious as when Lord Mountbatten was blown up. He could work himself into a purple-faced rage just thinking about it. I’d been living back in Reading at the time, working at the hospital while cramming for my A levels at night school, and there were a couple of Sunday lunches where I’d had to get up and go for a walk round the block to give us both a chance to cool down.
Had Liam really not told me? Or had I just not wanted to listen? He’d talked about growing up with soldiers in the streets, and his friend getting shot after he stole a car, and, if I’m honest, all I’d thought was how sexy and exotic it all made him sound. But surely he’d said that was why he left, to get away from the violence? Or did he? No, that’s what I’d chosen to hear. What he’d actually said was that the British Army shooting his friend was the reason he had come over to the mainland.
Taking the war to England.
No. It wasn’t possible. Not the man I’d grown so close to over the past few weeks, the man who’d been so understanding and sensitive when it came to Clarrie, the man who had jumped to Sarah’s defence that weekend in Derbyshire. The idea of him with a gun in his hand – let alone firing it in anger – was just inconceivable. There was no way Liam, my Liam, could be capable of violence towards anyone.
Or could he? What else had he said that very first day I met him? It’s Britain’s Vietnam, Tommy. But if it goes on for another fifteen years, or another hundred years, we’re going to drive out the imperialist forces in the end, just like India, and Malaya, and Kenya, and Rhodesia did before us. And there wasn’t a single one of those victories that had been achieved without an awful lot of blood being shed along the way.
‘Oh God.’ I brought my hand up to my burning forehead again, wishing I could calm the maelstrom of thoughts that were swirling around behind it – just think straight for a moment. Did I really have the right to be surprised by any of this? If Liam was bringing the war to England, it wasn’t a war that he had started. Like he said, there had been British soldiers firing guns on the streets of Northern Ireland for a decade and a half now. Didn’t the people there have the right to defend themselves? And in defending themselves against an invading army, didn’t it follow that they must have the right to take the fight onto that army’s own territory too? That was well within the rules of war, the Geneva Conventions and all that stuff. One side’s army was allowed to – obliged to – strike at military targets on the other side. You couldn’t argue with that.
Except it wasn’t just military targets, was it? How were last year’s Christmas shoppers at Harrods a military target? What sort of a military target was my friend Luke, a kid in the wrong lavs at the wrong time? What made Clarrie and me, cowering in a cellar in Soho, military targets? I screwed my aching eyes tight shut, remembering the terror of that night. The feeling that we might be wiped out at any second, blown to pieces as part of a war we had no hand in.
And it wasn’t as if even the most carefully targeted attacks didn’t result in innocent deaths, either. Unbidden, a picture came into my mind: dead horses, half a dozen of them, lying on blood-sodden tarmac in the middle of the tranquility of the very park I had been in earlier that day. They had taken the bodies of the soldiers away, but they had left the horses lying where they had dropped, limbs splayed crazily, like puppets whose strings had been suddenly cut. They had shown them on the news. And they said they hadn’t all been killed when the bomb went off, but that some of them had been so badly injured that the vets who rushed there from the stables where they had lived had no choice but to put them out of their misery.
What did it say about me that I had no idea how many soldiers had actually died, but I remembered the horses? The dead ones, and the one that survived – Sefton the Park Horse, they had called him. He had been taken on Nationwide once he was better, and they had shown his scars and the x-rays of the nails embedded deep in his flesh. And I had sat there thinking, ‘What sort of a person could do that to an animal?’ Which I suspect was more thought than I had ever given to most of the human beings who got listed night after night after night on the news for being blown up or shot or slaughtered in any manner of other horrible ways that were euphemistically described as becoming ‘another victim of the Troubles.’
And now it was my turn to stare death in the face. Just a few weeks – days! – ago I’d been happily going along minding my own business, just like Luke in that Wimpy bar, without realising I might have my own little timebomb ticking away, counting down inside me. I was sweating all over. The gloss paper of the leaflet felt slippery in my hands. There was a phone number at the bottom: The Terrence Higgins Trust Helpline, 8pm-10pm Every Day. I reached for my alarm clock and fumbled it round so I could see the hands: it was only half-past three. I had more than four hours to wait. I should probably try to get some sleep – see if that would make me feel better.
I closed my eyes, but it didn’t help. The heat of the room felt oppressive. With some effort, I undid my jeans and shucked them off without getting up, and tugged my suddenly restrictive t-shirt off over my head. I lay there on top of sheets that felt rumpled and stale for I don’t know how much longer before deciding I absolutely had to have some fresh air after all. My head swam as I stood up and staggered over to the window, throwing it open wide, just making it the few steps back before falling onto the bed.
Now there was a new irritant added to the mix: the heavy bass thump of reggae music pumping out from some nearby garden. I closed my eyes again and tried to block it out, and I must have succeeded because I fell into a fitful sleep haunted by images of broken glass and flying nails. I surfaced long enough to take a few desperate gulps of juice to calm a throat that felt like desert sand, and looked at the clock, but it was still only just after five, so I buried my head again in the cool side of the pillow and the next time I was conscious enough to register the time it was already half-past nine.
To call the helpline I would have to get up, get dressed, and make it all the way to the phone box at the end of the road: there was no way I could make this particular call from the phone in the communal hallway, where any of my neighbours might hear. At that moment it felt about as possible as going to the moon. So I closed my eyes again, and the next time I opened them everything was pitch black and the only thing to be heard was the voice in my head.
This is where it ends, it told me, over and over again. This is where you’ve been headed all along.
And I found myself thinking back to every man, or rather – because the faces swam somewhere beyond the reach of my memory – every cock I’d touched and sucked and taken, all the way back to the Dilly, in toilet cubicles and alleyways and cheap hotel rooms and sad bachelor flats and the backs of cars, all the way back to that man in the big house with the wife he’d got out of the way and the kids he wouldn’t even admit to having. And I tried to tell myself what I always told myself: that I’d been doing what I had to do to survive. And all the voice in my head had to do was repeat that word: survive!
Would it have made any difference if I had never run away and ended up in London? Be honest. It wasn’t like I would be back in Reading right now, sitting in suburbia with a wife and 2.4 children. I’d been on this path since long before I even knew the Dilly existed. Since the changing rooms at school. Since the geography field trip, when a lad who had never so much as looked in my direction before, and certainly not afterwards, led me the wrong way into the woods and grabbed at me to fumble urgently inside my trousers. Since the socks and underwear pages of the Brian Mills Catalogue. Since Jesus stripped of his garments in the Illustrated Children’s Bible. Since I was six and Miss Willis told us all to line up in pairs to walk down to the church for the Harvest Festival and my friend George angrily pulled his hand away rather than hold it like he’d always been happy to do before. I’d spent so many years telling myself and anyone else that was willing to listen that there was nothing wrong with me, that I didn’t need anyone’s pity or anyone’s scorn, and now it turned out that all those police and priests and politicians had been right all along.
The Gay Plague. That was what they were calling it. The death of the last-born. Revenge on the sinners. Except that if that was the case, how come it was killing haemophiliacs too? What exactly had they done to piss God off? The lord might be a jealous and vengeful god, but he also seemed to be a weirdly imprecise one, chucking his thunderbolts about willy-nilly. Maybe that was what Liam’s churchgoing was all about. Confessing his sins in the hope of dodging the bullet with his name on it.
