The Enemy Within, page 34
‘So then I had to get a message through to my bosses at Scotland Yard to say my cover in London might have been blown, and they took the decision to pull me out of where I’d been staying in case I’d been compromised. It didn’t make any difference to me – I was out of the country anyway – but everyone’s been running around like headless chickens ever since they did the inventory and found there was stuff missing.’
‘Right.’ I crossed over to the chest of drawers by the bed, rummaging through the jumpers in the bottom one until my fingers found the box of bullets in its plastic wrapping. ‘They’ve probably been looking for these, too.’ I would have liked to throw them across the room at him, but I didn’t dare. Instead I plopped the package down on the carpet in front of him and retreated to a safe distance.
‘Oh, hell,’ he said once he’d unwrapped it. ‘You must have been terrified when you saw these.’
I was. I had been ever since. I didn’t say so though; just shrugged.
‘They’re not real, you know.’ He tossed the box casually down on the carpet, and I couldn’t help flinching, and being annoyed that he had noticed the movement. ‘Just blanks. These ones. All for show.’
I suppose I ought to have been relieved, but I wasn’t ready for that either. ‘These ones?’ I asked pointedly.
‘Yeah.’ He was avoiding my eye now. ‘We had to let a few real ones through, just so they could test the goods on offer, but don’t worry, these ones – nearly all the ones that went to Ireland, actually – they don’t work. Useless.’
‘Nearly all,’ I said in as measured a voice as I could manage.
He shook his head, his face grim. ‘Sometimes you have to…well, you have to take a risk to try to prevent a bigger one. We had to make sure the big deal went ahead so everyone was in place for us to make the arrests. Don’t be looking at me like that. Those decisions are taken way above my level.’
‘And you were only obeying orders,’ I repeated, even more sneeringly than last time.
‘Look.’ He gave me a pleading glance as he tapped the top of the computer. ‘That’s what this was all about. It was my idea. People don’t have a clue about these things, and that means they’ll believe anything that comes out of them. No questions asked. It meant we could tweak things just enough to make sure nothing major that was brought in would work properly. And then, when it didn’t, everyone assumed it had to be their fault, because a computer’s so clever and so modern, it must be them that’s getting it wrong. It’s a grand trick. God knows how long we’ll be able to get away with it for.’
It was definitely his turn to be the smug one now. I gave as indifferent a shrug as I could manage, but it was greeted with a shrewd glance. ‘Reckoned without you, though, didn’t I? I didn’t know you knew how to work one of these. And besides, I thought I’d wiped everything from it.’
‘Not quite.’ I thought it was best not to mention Shafiq under the circumstances. ‘You left just enough evidence behind. I take it the Arabic text was for the Libyans at the other end?’
He exhaled, impressed. ‘Christ, the Met should have recruited you instead of me, Tommy. You’d make CID in no time.’
I gave him as withering a look as I could manage. ‘No, thank you. I know which side I’m on.’
He sat back down wearily at the table. ‘Do you now? Even after you’ve seen what the other side do?’
He’d got me there. I sighed, and thumped down into the chair on the other side of the table. ‘No. I don’t know. It’s complicated.’
‘Life is, Tommy.’
I couldn’t argue with that. However much I wanted to.
Instead, after a few seconds silence I found myself asking the question I had been determined not to ask. ‘Why did you leave me?’
He spread his hand across his eyes again, pressing his fingertips into the corners of the lids. ‘I hated doing it, Tommy. I just couldn’t see any way out. We had this deal set up; it had taken us months of negotiations with both sides, and they were expecting me to fly out to meet them, and it would have screwed up the whole thing if I hadn’t turned up…’
‘In Malta.’
He gave a mirthless laugh. ‘Yeah, you know that. Of course you know that too. I won’t even ask how. Yes – in Malta. I knew it was coming up, I knew I had to be there, but with everything you were going through grieving for Clarrie I just couldn’t say I had to go away and be out of touch for God knows how long. I just couldn’t think of any excuse that wouldn’t sound like I was abandoning you…’
‘So you just did it instead!’ The snotty tears took both of us by surprise, and only heightened my exasperation with both myself and him. Liam reached out a hand across the table towards me, saw me recoil and thought better of it.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘So sorry. I got trapped. I couldn’t see any other way out. I couldn’t think of any way to protect you. I tried to get out of going, asked my bosses if I could come up with some excuse to postpone the whole thing. They thought I’d gone mad. Pointed out it wasn’t just the British state that had hundreds and thousands in cash and man-hours invested in the operation.’
‘Who else?’ I said, furiously wiping my nose and eyes. I usually have a loo roll handy on the bedside table, but I’d run out.
‘I can’t say, Tommy. I really can’t.’ He spread his hands in apology. ‘Put it this way: there’s a lot of people all over the world very pleased with how things went.’
Given it was Libya we were talking about, and the way Ronnie Reagan was always talking about Colonel Gaddafi, I guessed America must have been involved. Where else – Israel maybe? It seemed incredible that, sat here in my bedsit, I could have been on the fringes of a whole global operation.
‘And you were actually the one out there at the centre of it? The middleman?’
Despite everything, I couldn’t help being impressed. That must have taken some bravery.
He grimaced. ‘It had to be me. I’d already been out to Malta before to set things up, so it was my face they knew. It wasn’t my favourite part of the job. Like I say – very nasty people on both sides. We fobbed them off with that box of tricks for so long, until last month, when we managed to set up a deal that was so major the big guns on both sides had to get personally involved. Then we swooped in and picked them all up in one go. I waved the boat off from Gozo, and it was squeaky-bum time for the next few hours, until I got the call to say everything had gone off OK and everyone was safely behind bars.’
‘Everyone? I only read about the crew on the Mary Ann.’
‘Yeah, well, you would.’ He made a lip-zipping gesture.
His reticence prompted an obvious question. ‘Why are you telling me all this?’
He shrugged, and for the first time seemed to relax into his chair. ‘Why not? You deserve the truth.’
‘But won’t it get you in trouble?’
‘Probably not any more.’
The penny dropped. ‘You’ve left the job?’
‘Packed it in with the SDS – that’s the undercover unit; they call it the Special Demonstration Squad – after the operation in the Med. Didn’t have a choice about it. Too many people knew Liam Delaney’s name and face. They gave me a temporary secondment to personal protection while they worked out what they were going to do with me. That was why I was at the hotel that night. But I’ve resigned. I can’t do it any more. Any of it. As of tonight, I’m an ex-copper.’
‘Why?’
His hand went back up to pinch the bridge of his nose again. ‘I’ve been living a lie, Tommy. And it’s not the one I was being paid to live. There’s no place for someone like me in the police force. Someone like us.’
Every single run-in I’d ever had with the law said he wasn’t wrong.
‘D’you know what my inspector said to me when he ordered me to stick with you?’ said ex-Sergeant Coyle sadly. ‘He said “The only thing we’ve ever known for certain about Wildeblood is that he’s a shit-stabber, so if that means you have to bend over and think of England to find out what he’s up to, you fucking well do it.” And then he laughed, and everyone else on the team laughed too. And I sat there panicking and thinking, Oh god; they know; how can they possibly know? I’ve been trying so hard to hide it. That’s no way to live. You showed me that, Tommy.’
I shrugged, touched despite my best efforts. ‘I certainly never could.’
‘Yeah.’ He gave a sad smile. ‘I’m going to try to be more like you in future. But it isn’t easy.’
‘Not always.’ Not even often, if I was honest, but I didn’t want to put him off.
‘He tried to talk me out of resigning, tonight – my guvnor. Told me I was an “exemplary officer”, giving it all that about the operation last month and finding you, too. And he asked me why I was really leaving. And I just gabbled something about wanting a change and trying something new, and the fact is it never even occurred to me that I could actually tell him the truth until I was long out of there and on my way over here. That’s how deep I’ve pushed it down.’
‘It gets easier,’ I said grudgingly.
‘I hope so.’ He made a fist and knocked gently on the table.
The TV flickered away in silence behind us.
‘I should go.’
‘OK.’ I didn’t want him to. But he wasn’t the man I wanted to stay, either.
He stood up, put his woolly hat back on and chucked the package of fake bullets into the box with the computer in it, ready to lift it up and take it with him as he walked back out of my life.
‘Of course you know the funny thing, don’t you?’ I said, as I got to my feet myself.
He looked at me quizzically. ‘What?’
‘That’s what you did end up doing. What your inspector told you to.’
He stared at me, and this time it was his eyes that were filling with water. ‘That wasn’t for him, Tommy.’
I tried to give an indifferent shrug. It didn’t convince either of us.
‘You can’t think that, Tommy. Please. It wasn’t only obeying orders. You mustn’t ever think that. That’s why I came over here tonight, to explain to you. It was…that night on the beach – it was everything to me. Everything.’
He had no idea how true that might be. And even with everything else that had happened between us, he had to be told. He deserved that much.
‘You’d better sit down, Ryan,’ I said slowly. ‘There’s something else we need to talk about, too.’
EPILOGUE
OCTOBER 1985
I’d got there early – stupidly early – and I did a couple of circuits of the block to kill some time. It was the last place in the world I wanted anyone to spot me standing outside. Imagine someone starting a conversation, asking me why I was there on that particular day? I really hadn’t thought this through properly.
He was a few minutes early too, but he was still spluttering apologies as he hurried up from the station. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry; you know what the Circle Line’s like.’ And without pausing, or even glancing around to check if anyone was looking, he greeted me with a big hug, which I warmly returned. We were getting braver with this stuff.
‘That’s my hat,’ he said as we separated.
‘Sorry,’ I winced. It was too warm for the red bobble hat, or maybe it was just anxiety that was making my head sweat. I’d grabbed it as I left the flat, partly as a last-minute disguise, partly because I wanted something of his with me. Two reasons, both equally pathetic.
‘It’s fine. It suits you.’
He was in his uniform, a scratchy blue nylon affair with tabs and epaulettes that make him look like a fancy-dress TJ Hooker. He was on nights this fortnight, guarding one of the big construction sites over in Docklands, and we hadn’t even been sure he would make it in time for my appointment. But there he was. And it was time to go in.
‘Hey.’ He grabbed my arm as I reached out to open the door, pulling me round to face him in the shelter of the building’s entranceway. ‘Wait a second and listen. Whatever happens in there, we’ll get through it. OK? Together. You and me can get through anything. We’ve proved that.’
‘I know.’ I leaned in and pressed my woolly forehead against his bare one and looked into those big brown eyes. ‘Thank you. I love you, Ryan.’
‘I love you too. Now c’mon.’ He reached out and pulled the door open, and we went into the clinic together.
They were running a bit late, the receptionist said, which was quite an achievement given it was 9.30 in the morning and the place had only just opened. But we went over and took seats in the waiting room anyway, carefully avoiding eye contact with either of the other two men sitting there. I glanced at the piles of dog-earned magazines on the coffee table. There was a tatty copy of Melody Maker at the top of one of them: a picture of Bob Geldof raising his fist in the air at Live Aid over a background of the thousands and thousands of people who had been in the crowd at Wembley. Next to it was a much more recent New Statesman with a cartoon of Neil Kinnock on the front, brushing Derek Hatton and a bunch of other people I didn’t recognise into a giant dustpan. I didn’t pick either of them up. The flowers in the vase in the middle of the table were looking a bit tired and droopy. Jill, one of the receptionists, brought them in fresh from her garden every Monday.
‘Feels a bit weird being here on a Thursday,’ I murmured to Ryan, and he hmmed in agreement. We’d both been dutifully turning up to the regular Monday sessions for months now, giving blood samples and the same answers to the same questions about our sex lives. Both our T-cells were holding up fine so far. But when the option had finally come up of getting a test that could tell us definitively one way or the other, I’d jumped at the chance. A lot of people didn’t want to know. And some people – like Ivan, who was now a regular inpatient in the ward where Clarrie had died, a few floors above where we were now – didn’t need to be told. It wasn’t as if knowing could make any difference. But I wanted to know nonetheless. I wanted to stop waking up at 3am, and lying there staring into darkness.
Ryan had opted not to take the test. Not yet. If mine came back positive, we’d agreed we would think again. I think we’d both been freaked out by Rock Hudson dying, and those awful photos of him all wasted with haunted eyes that had been splashed across the tabloids. I think everyone had. But there was plenty of reasons not to want to know, too, or at least not to want anyone else to know: last month a guy in Manchester had been locked up in an isolation hospital out in the countryside because the court ruled he was ‘a risk to the community’. Apparently his parents only found out he had Aids when they read about it in the newspapers. He was my age.
I could feel Ryan’s knee jiggling nervously against my own leg. I knew how he felt. In the fortnight since I had given my sample I’d started biting my nails again, a habit I thought I had kicked as a teenager. I’d started zoning out in the middle of conversations, too. I’d sat through an entire Classroom Practice seminar the other day without taking in a single word. I’d been doomily telling Ryan for days that I already knew what the result was going to be, and even that it was probably no more than I deserved after everything I had got up to in the old days: that was the thing that had finally made him explode the previous afternoon. ‘That’s enough of that, Tommy,’ he had shouted. ‘We already get that from everyone else in the world, why the hell should we do it to ourselves as well?’
I used to think I was going to be the elder statesman telling him everything he needed to know about gay life, but it turned out he had plenty to teach me too.
I glanced down at the leaflet the receptionist had given me when I arrived. WHAT TO DO IF YOU ARE HTLV-III SEROPOSITIVE, it said on the cover in stern capital letters. I decided whatever was inside could wait until I knew if I needed to read it or not. I’d been treated to enough details when I came in to be tested a fortnight before: how there was one test they did in the laboratory which could still give false positives, so they would then do another that would tell them for sure. And how it wouldn’t show up any results from any infection in the past 12 weeks, but I’d told them that wasn’t a problem: it was way longer than that since I’d had sex with anyone other than Ryan, the same went for him, and we made sure everything we did was as safe as possible anyway. It was a whole new world.
I went to stash the leaflet away in my coat pocket, but there was something in there already. ‘Oh, I forgot! This weird letter came this morning.’ I fumbled it out and passed it across to Ryan. ‘Have you got any idea what it’s about?’
‘Australia,’ he commented, looking at the brightly coloured stamps on the envelope as he slid the letter out and unfolded it. ‘Who’s Peter Wright?’
‘That’s what I hoped you might know.’ I was keeping my voice down, conscious of the other patients – no, for God’s sake, Tommy, don’t use that word – the other two people in the room. ‘He says he’s writing a book. Thinks I might be able to help him with it.’
‘OK.’ Ryan had got to the bit I was telling him about. Although the book is almost finished – indeed my publishers are champing at the bit to receive it! – a former colleague has informed me that you may be in possession of information about Harold Wilson which I would very much like to discuss with you as a matter of urgency.
‘Have you heard of him?’ I prompted.
‘Nope.’ Ryan shook his head. ‘Weird. Are you going to call him?’
‘Am I heck, it’d cost a fortune to phone Australia.’ I took the letter back, folded it up and slid it back into its envelope. ‘If it’s that urgent, he can call me. He’s managed to get our address somehow, I’m sure he can track down the phone number too.’
‘Yeah. That’s quite…spooky,’ said Ryan suspiciously, but he didn’t push it. We both had bigger things to worry about. The door to the doctor’s office was opening. The nice young lady doctor was standing there looking in my direction. She had a smile plastered across her face, and I couldn’t for the life of me tell if it was a real one or not.
‘Right.’ I crossed over to the chest of drawers by the bed, rummaging through the jumpers in the bottom one until my fingers found the box of bullets in its plastic wrapping. ‘They’ve probably been looking for these, too.’ I would have liked to throw them across the room at him, but I didn’t dare. Instead I plopped the package down on the carpet in front of him and retreated to a safe distance.
‘Oh, hell,’ he said once he’d unwrapped it. ‘You must have been terrified when you saw these.’
I was. I had been ever since. I didn’t say so though; just shrugged.
‘They’re not real, you know.’ He tossed the box casually down on the carpet, and I couldn’t help flinching, and being annoyed that he had noticed the movement. ‘Just blanks. These ones. All for show.’
I suppose I ought to have been relieved, but I wasn’t ready for that either. ‘These ones?’ I asked pointedly.
‘Yeah.’ He was avoiding my eye now. ‘We had to let a few real ones through, just so they could test the goods on offer, but don’t worry, these ones – nearly all the ones that went to Ireland, actually – they don’t work. Useless.’
‘Nearly all,’ I said in as measured a voice as I could manage.
He shook his head, his face grim. ‘Sometimes you have to…well, you have to take a risk to try to prevent a bigger one. We had to make sure the big deal went ahead so everyone was in place for us to make the arrests. Don’t be looking at me like that. Those decisions are taken way above my level.’
‘And you were only obeying orders,’ I repeated, even more sneeringly than last time.
‘Look.’ He gave me a pleading glance as he tapped the top of the computer. ‘That’s what this was all about. It was my idea. People don’t have a clue about these things, and that means they’ll believe anything that comes out of them. No questions asked. It meant we could tweak things just enough to make sure nothing major that was brought in would work properly. And then, when it didn’t, everyone assumed it had to be their fault, because a computer’s so clever and so modern, it must be them that’s getting it wrong. It’s a grand trick. God knows how long we’ll be able to get away with it for.’
It was definitely his turn to be the smug one now. I gave as indifferent a shrug as I could manage, but it was greeted with a shrewd glance. ‘Reckoned without you, though, didn’t I? I didn’t know you knew how to work one of these. And besides, I thought I’d wiped everything from it.’
‘Not quite.’ I thought it was best not to mention Shafiq under the circumstances. ‘You left just enough evidence behind. I take it the Arabic text was for the Libyans at the other end?’
He exhaled, impressed. ‘Christ, the Met should have recruited you instead of me, Tommy. You’d make CID in no time.’
I gave him as withering a look as I could manage. ‘No, thank you. I know which side I’m on.’
He sat back down wearily at the table. ‘Do you now? Even after you’ve seen what the other side do?’
He’d got me there. I sighed, and thumped down into the chair on the other side of the table. ‘No. I don’t know. It’s complicated.’
‘Life is, Tommy.’
I couldn’t argue with that. However much I wanted to.
Instead, after a few seconds silence I found myself asking the question I had been determined not to ask. ‘Why did you leave me?’
He spread his hand across his eyes again, pressing his fingertips into the corners of the lids. ‘I hated doing it, Tommy. I just couldn’t see any way out. We had this deal set up; it had taken us months of negotiations with both sides, and they were expecting me to fly out to meet them, and it would have screwed up the whole thing if I hadn’t turned up…’
‘In Malta.’
He gave a mirthless laugh. ‘Yeah, you know that. Of course you know that too. I won’t even ask how. Yes – in Malta. I knew it was coming up, I knew I had to be there, but with everything you were going through grieving for Clarrie I just couldn’t say I had to go away and be out of touch for God knows how long. I just couldn’t think of any excuse that wouldn’t sound like I was abandoning you…’
‘So you just did it instead!’ The snotty tears took both of us by surprise, and only heightened my exasperation with both myself and him. Liam reached out a hand across the table towards me, saw me recoil and thought better of it.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘So sorry. I got trapped. I couldn’t see any other way out. I couldn’t think of any way to protect you. I tried to get out of going, asked my bosses if I could come up with some excuse to postpone the whole thing. They thought I’d gone mad. Pointed out it wasn’t just the British state that had hundreds and thousands in cash and man-hours invested in the operation.’
‘Who else?’ I said, furiously wiping my nose and eyes. I usually have a loo roll handy on the bedside table, but I’d run out.
‘I can’t say, Tommy. I really can’t.’ He spread his hands in apology. ‘Put it this way: there’s a lot of people all over the world very pleased with how things went.’
Given it was Libya we were talking about, and the way Ronnie Reagan was always talking about Colonel Gaddafi, I guessed America must have been involved. Where else – Israel maybe? It seemed incredible that, sat here in my bedsit, I could have been on the fringes of a whole global operation.
‘And you were actually the one out there at the centre of it? The middleman?’
Despite everything, I couldn’t help being impressed. That must have taken some bravery.
He grimaced. ‘It had to be me. I’d already been out to Malta before to set things up, so it was my face they knew. It wasn’t my favourite part of the job. Like I say – very nasty people on both sides. We fobbed them off with that box of tricks for so long, until last month, when we managed to set up a deal that was so major the big guns on both sides had to get personally involved. Then we swooped in and picked them all up in one go. I waved the boat off from Gozo, and it was squeaky-bum time for the next few hours, until I got the call to say everything had gone off OK and everyone was safely behind bars.’
‘Everyone? I only read about the crew on the Mary Ann.’
‘Yeah, well, you would.’ He made a lip-zipping gesture.
His reticence prompted an obvious question. ‘Why are you telling me all this?’
He shrugged, and for the first time seemed to relax into his chair. ‘Why not? You deserve the truth.’
‘But won’t it get you in trouble?’
‘Probably not any more.’
The penny dropped. ‘You’ve left the job?’
‘Packed it in with the SDS – that’s the undercover unit; they call it the Special Demonstration Squad – after the operation in the Med. Didn’t have a choice about it. Too many people knew Liam Delaney’s name and face. They gave me a temporary secondment to personal protection while they worked out what they were going to do with me. That was why I was at the hotel that night. But I’ve resigned. I can’t do it any more. Any of it. As of tonight, I’m an ex-copper.’
‘Why?’
His hand went back up to pinch the bridge of his nose again. ‘I’ve been living a lie, Tommy. And it’s not the one I was being paid to live. There’s no place for someone like me in the police force. Someone like us.’
Every single run-in I’d ever had with the law said he wasn’t wrong.
‘D’you know what my inspector said to me when he ordered me to stick with you?’ said ex-Sergeant Coyle sadly. ‘He said “The only thing we’ve ever known for certain about Wildeblood is that he’s a shit-stabber, so if that means you have to bend over and think of England to find out what he’s up to, you fucking well do it.” And then he laughed, and everyone else on the team laughed too. And I sat there panicking and thinking, Oh god; they know; how can they possibly know? I’ve been trying so hard to hide it. That’s no way to live. You showed me that, Tommy.’
I shrugged, touched despite my best efforts. ‘I certainly never could.’
‘Yeah.’ He gave a sad smile. ‘I’m going to try to be more like you in future. But it isn’t easy.’
‘Not always.’ Not even often, if I was honest, but I didn’t want to put him off.
‘He tried to talk me out of resigning, tonight – my guvnor. Told me I was an “exemplary officer”, giving it all that about the operation last month and finding you, too. And he asked me why I was really leaving. And I just gabbled something about wanting a change and trying something new, and the fact is it never even occurred to me that I could actually tell him the truth until I was long out of there and on my way over here. That’s how deep I’ve pushed it down.’
‘It gets easier,’ I said grudgingly.
‘I hope so.’ He made a fist and knocked gently on the table.
The TV flickered away in silence behind us.
‘I should go.’
‘OK.’ I didn’t want him to. But he wasn’t the man I wanted to stay, either.
He stood up, put his woolly hat back on and chucked the package of fake bullets into the box with the computer in it, ready to lift it up and take it with him as he walked back out of my life.
‘Of course you know the funny thing, don’t you?’ I said, as I got to my feet myself.
He looked at me quizzically. ‘What?’
‘That’s what you did end up doing. What your inspector told you to.’
He stared at me, and this time it was his eyes that were filling with water. ‘That wasn’t for him, Tommy.’
I tried to give an indifferent shrug. It didn’t convince either of us.
‘You can’t think that, Tommy. Please. It wasn’t only obeying orders. You mustn’t ever think that. That’s why I came over here tonight, to explain to you. It was…that night on the beach – it was everything to me. Everything.’
He had no idea how true that might be. And even with everything else that had happened between us, he had to be told. He deserved that much.
‘You’d better sit down, Ryan,’ I said slowly. ‘There’s something else we need to talk about, too.’
EPILOGUE
OCTOBER 1985
I’d got there early – stupidly early – and I did a couple of circuits of the block to kill some time. It was the last place in the world I wanted anyone to spot me standing outside. Imagine someone starting a conversation, asking me why I was there on that particular day? I really hadn’t thought this through properly.
He was a few minutes early too, but he was still spluttering apologies as he hurried up from the station. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry; you know what the Circle Line’s like.’ And without pausing, or even glancing around to check if anyone was looking, he greeted me with a big hug, which I warmly returned. We were getting braver with this stuff.
‘That’s my hat,’ he said as we separated.
‘Sorry,’ I winced. It was too warm for the red bobble hat, or maybe it was just anxiety that was making my head sweat. I’d grabbed it as I left the flat, partly as a last-minute disguise, partly because I wanted something of his with me. Two reasons, both equally pathetic.
‘It’s fine. It suits you.’
He was in his uniform, a scratchy blue nylon affair with tabs and epaulettes that make him look like a fancy-dress TJ Hooker. He was on nights this fortnight, guarding one of the big construction sites over in Docklands, and we hadn’t even been sure he would make it in time for my appointment. But there he was. And it was time to go in.
‘Hey.’ He grabbed my arm as I reached out to open the door, pulling me round to face him in the shelter of the building’s entranceway. ‘Wait a second and listen. Whatever happens in there, we’ll get through it. OK? Together. You and me can get through anything. We’ve proved that.’
‘I know.’ I leaned in and pressed my woolly forehead against his bare one and looked into those big brown eyes. ‘Thank you. I love you, Ryan.’
‘I love you too. Now c’mon.’ He reached out and pulled the door open, and we went into the clinic together.
They were running a bit late, the receptionist said, which was quite an achievement given it was 9.30 in the morning and the place had only just opened. But we went over and took seats in the waiting room anyway, carefully avoiding eye contact with either of the other two men sitting there. I glanced at the piles of dog-earned magazines on the coffee table. There was a tatty copy of Melody Maker at the top of one of them: a picture of Bob Geldof raising his fist in the air at Live Aid over a background of the thousands and thousands of people who had been in the crowd at Wembley. Next to it was a much more recent New Statesman with a cartoon of Neil Kinnock on the front, brushing Derek Hatton and a bunch of other people I didn’t recognise into a giant dustpan. I didn’t pick either of them up. The flowers in the vase in the middle of the table were looking a bit tired and droopy. Jill, one of the receptionists, brought them in fresh from her garden every Monday.
‘Feels a bit weird being here on a Thursday,’ I murmured to Ryan, and he hmmed in agreement. We’d both been dutifully turning up to the regular Monday sessions for months now, giving blood samples and the same answers to the same questions about our sex lives. Both our T-cells were holding up fine so far. But when the option had finally come up of getting a test that could tell us definitively one way or the other, I’d jumped at the chance. A lot of people didn’t want to know. And some people – like Ivan, who was now a regular inpatient in the ward where Clarrie had died, a few floors above where we were now – didn’t need to be told. It wasn’t as if knowing could make any difference. But I wanted to know nonetheless. I wanted to stop waking up at 3am, and lying there staring into darkness.
Ryan had opted not to take the test. Not yet. If mine came back positive, we’d agreed we would think again. I think we’d both been freaked out by Rock Hudson dying, and those awful photos of him all wasted with haunted eyes that had been splashed across the tabloids. I think everyone had. But there was plenty of reasons not to want to know, too, or at least not to want anyone else to know: last month a guy in Manchester had been locked up in an isolation hospital out in the countryside because the court ruled he was ‘a risk to the community’. Apparently his parents only found out he had Aids when they read about it in the newspapers. He was my age.
I could feel Ryan’s knee jiggling nervously against my own leg. I knew how he felt. In the fortnight since I had given my sample I’d started biting my nails again, a habit I thought I had kicked as a teenager. I’d started zoning out in the middle of conversations, too. I’d sat through an entire Classroom Practice seminar the other day without taking in a single word. I’d been doomily telling Ryan for days that I already knew what the result was going to be, and even that it was probably no more than I deserved after everything I had got up to in the old days: that was the thing that had finally made him explode the previous afternoon. ‘That’s enough of that, Tommy,’ he had shouted. ‘We already get that from everyone else in the world, why the hell should we do it to ourselves as well?’
I used to think I was going to be the elder statesman telling him everything he needed to know about gay life, but it turned out he had plenty to teach me too.
I glanced down at the leaflet the receptionist had given me when I arrived. WHAT TO DO IF YOU ARE HTLV-III SEROPOSITIVE, it said on the cover in stern capital letters. I decided whatever was inside could wait until I knew if I needed to read it or not. I’d been treated to enough details when I came in to be tested a fortnight before: how there was one test they did in the laboratory which could still give false positives, so they would then do another that would tell them for sure. And how it wouldn’t show up any results from any infection in the past 12 weeks, but I’d told them that wasn’t a problem: it was way longer than that since I’d had sex with anyone other than Ryan, the same went for him, and we made sure everything we did was as safe as possible anyway. It was a whole new world.
I went to stash the leaflet away in my coat pocket, but there was something in there already. ‘Oh, I forgot! This weird letter came this morning.’ I fumbled it out and passed it across to Ryan. ‘Have you got any idea what it’s about?’
‘Australia,’ he commented, looking at the brightly coloured stamps on the envelope as he slid the letter out and unfolded it. ‘Who’s Peter Wright?’
‘That’s what I hoped you might know.’ I was keeping my voice down, conscious of the other patients – no, for God’s sake, Tommy, don’t use that word – the other two people in the room. ‘He says he’s writing a book. Thinks I might be able to help him with it.’
‘OK.’ Ryan had got to the bit I was telling him about. Although the book is almost finished – indeed my publishers are champing at the bit to receive it! – a former colleague has informed me that you may be in possession of information about Harold Wilson which I would very much like to discuss with you as a matter of urgency.
‘Have you heard of him?’ I prompted.
‘Nope.’ Ryan shook his head. ‘Weird. Are you going to call him?’
‘Am I heck, it’d cost a fortune to phone Australia.’ I took the letter back, folded it up and slid it back into its envelope. ‘If it’s that urgent, he can call me. He’s managed to get our address somehow, I’m sure he can track down the phone number too.’
‘Yeah. That’s quite…spooky,’ said Ryan suspiciously, but he didn’t push it. We both had bigger things to worry about. The door to the doctor’s office was opening. The nice young lady doctor was standing there looking in my direction. She had a smile plastered across her face, and I couldn’t for the life of me tell if it was a real one or not.
