1989, page 4
‘You could always sell it to me,’ Allie said, rising to put her bowl in the dishwasher.
Rona chuckled. ‘You don’t pay enough. I can think of at least three newsdesks who’d outbid you.’
‘Fair enough. All the more for you to lavish on me.’
Although Ace Lockhart’s swingeing staff reductions had cut the newsroom to the bare bones, he’d listened to whoever had persuaded him that the library represented an irreplaceable asset. Admittedly, these days it was only staffed between noon and eight in the evening, the duties shared by one and a half librarians. They struggled to keep up with the cuttings, but at least the archive remained. For now.
An afternoon of poring over the files gave Allie a working knowledge of what had been written in the UK media about HIV and AIDS since the first cases had been identified. It left her fingers black with newsprint and her heart filled with a slow burn of rage at the virulent homophobia and lack of empathy she’d encountered. Whether it was the tabloids with their lurid ‘gay plague’ headlines, or the broadsheets with their equally censorious faux-scientific condemnations, this was a disease whose coverage blamed the victims for their own fate. Even in Manchester, with its gay village at the heart of the city’s nightlife, its citizens had been told by their chief of police that people with AIDS were ‘swirling in a human cesspit of their own making’.
There were even lowlifes who seized AIDS as a pulpit to preach their hatred. It was God’s revenge on gay men, a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah, sent to punish them for their deviant ways. The only flaw in their argument, as Allie always enjoyed pointing out, was that, taken to its logical conclusion, it established that God was not only a woman, but a lesbian, since lesbians were the lowest group on the totem pole of risk.
It was a riposte she always delivered with a note of savagery. For Allie herself had lost one of her closest and dearest friends to AIDS only eighteen months before. She’d bonded with Marcus on their journalism training scheme and they’d stayed close, their connection only strengthening when her feelings for Rona forced her to examine her own sexuality. Marcus was darkly funny, endlessly smart and constantly embarrassed by his own kindnesses. He’d been a talented subeditor, rising to the position of deputy night editor on a regional daily in the Midlands when he’d fallen ill with a strain of pneumonia most commonly found in sheep. Less than six months later, Allie had read a poem at his funeral. So the pile of AIDS clippings felt like a very personal slap in the face.
The slap to the other cheek was that the efforts of pharmaceutical researchers like Jess earned barely a paragraph. The attempts to find drugs that would either cure HIV or temper the effects of full-blown AIDS clearly provoked little interest from newsdesks. There was a certain level of ghoulish fascination with the obscure and humiliating conditions that afflicted AIDS patients, and, inevitably, the occasional heroic celebrity who actually hugged one of the twentieth-century lepers. But other than that? It was simply, as one of her cynical colleagues back in Glasgow had called it, ‘God’s pruning fork’.
By the end of the afternoon, Allie had worked up a head of righteous anger. If there was a story here, she was going to find it. She set the duty librarian to researching Rona’s request and called Alix. ‘Hey, girl, how are you doing?’ Allie opened.
‘Been better, been worse,’ Alix said. In the background was the faint clash of electric guitars. ‘You still on for dinner at mine on Sunday?’
‘Wouldn’t miss it. I’m not ringing to call it off. I’ve got other motives.’
Alix laughed, a deep throaty chuckle. ‘Nothing new there, then. What can I do for you, Burns?’
‘I want to follow up on the conversation we had a few weeks back about the AIDS rehab facility. But first, how’s your friend Matt doing?’
The guitars stopped on a discord and Allie heard two indistinct male voices argue under Alix’s deep sigh. ‘He’s not great, to be honest. They’re talking about weeks at the most.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I know. Why are you asking?’
‘What you said about the Scottish patients moving down from Edinburgh? I want to take a look at it.’
‘What’s your angle?’ Alix was her friend, but that didn’t mean she was a pushover for whatever story Allie wanted to chase.
Now a drum break rattled faintly in Allie’s ear. ‘I want to find out what’s going on. What’s driving the exodus? Is Manc being dangled as a kind of Great White Hope, or is it that Edinburgh is so shit for them? I want the story behind the bare facts, Alix.’
‘I don’t think talking to Mattie is a good idea, Allie. He’s got lesions on his brain now. A lot of the time, he’s not lucid. He doesn’t know who I am, or where he is.’
Allie had suspected as much. ‘I get that, Alix. What I was wondering was whether you’d made connections with any of the Edinburgh lads? Or staff. Doctors, nurses, who might talk to me. Off the record, if that’s the only way of getting them to talk.’
A crash of cymbals. Distracted, Alix muttered. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake. I need to sort these bloody children out. Let me think about it, Burns. I don’t want to throw anyone to the wolves.’
Allie stared at the dead phone in her hand. Just when exactly had she become one of the wolves?
5
Allie pulled up outside Alix’s studio. The only clue to what went on inside the squat brick building in the low-rent street behind the city’s high-security prison was a small metal plaque that read SOUND AND FISSION above a graph with a jagged line like a life support machine on a hospital soap.
They’d spoken late the previous evening, Alix intense and protective, Allie reassuring and driven. In the end, Allie had been just persuasive enough. Now, Alix came striding out bang on time, hair tripling the size of her head, a long leather coat swirling around her. She got into the car and leaned in to brush a kiss across Allie’s cheek. ‘Sorry I made it so hard for you,’ she said.
‘Don’t be. It’s OK to be careful.’
‘I totally trust you on my own account, Burns. But other people are more fragile than me. These guys? A lot of them have already been rejected by their families and colleagues. They don’t want to be judged all over again.’ Alix gave her an apologetic smile.
Allie nodded her understanding. ‘So, I need directions. Prestwich, yeah?’
It took them just over twenty minutes to reach the HIV facility. The two-storey Victorian building was set in the grounds of a small general hospital. If it had been built from stone, it would have had the Gothic air of Castle Dracula, but the Accrington red brick made it look more like something created by a pre-teen in Lego. Turrets and balconies gave it an unexpected glamour that belied what lay within. It might have been a minor resort hotel or a convalescent home. What it did not look like was a place where people came to die.
Alix led the way inside to a cramped reception area, clearly carved out from a much bigger space. The walls were painted a bilious mustard, the only decoration the familiar tombstone poster that urged, AIDS. Don’t Die of Ignorance. Allie thought the people coming here were well past the point where that would have been a useful message. The middle-aged woman behind the desk clearly knew Alix. ‘Hello, love. I’ll just give the ward a bell and check Matt’s up for a visit.’
‘Thanks, Denise. Is Dr Rob around?’
Denise picked up the phone and dialled. ‘He is. Did you want to see him?’ Then she held up a finger and spoke into the handset. ‘Julie, it’s Denise at the front desk. How’s young Matt today? Alix is here to see him.’ She listened and nodded. ‘Thanks, love.’ She replaced the receiver and smiled. ‘Up you go. Is your friend going with you?’
‘Yes, if that’s OK,’ Allie said.
‘You’ll have to sign in, love.’ Denise pushed a clipboard towards her. ‘Alix knows the drill.’ She turned back to Alix. ‘I’ll tell Dr Rob you’re looking for a word.’
Once they were past the reception area, all the visual signals indicated that this was definitely a hospital setting. That, and the smell of disinfectant that left only the faintest traces of what it was hiding. They emerged from the lift to face a nurses’ station. Alix waggled her fingers in a wave to the nurse on duty and carried on down the hall. At the end of the corridor, they turned into a high-ceilinged room with a pentagonal bay window. On either side of the room was a bed; in both beds, a man propped up on pillows. At first glance, they seemed quite old. But when Allie looked more closely, she saw they were young men gaunt with illness and pain. One had the familiar purple blemishes of Kaposi’s sarcoma, a cancer whose rarity had been trounced by AIDS. The other man had some sort of rash on his throat and cheeks.
Alix made for the one with the skin irritation. A smile spread thin on his face. ‘Alix,’ he said, his voice faint and scratchy. ‘What’s new, babe?’
‘This is my friend Allie. I told you about her?’
He studied Allie. ‘Yeah, you did.’ His voice trailed off and he frowned. His face cleared and he nodded. ‘You’re the hack, right?’
‘I am,’ Allie said, offering a hand to shake. Matt raised his arm and dropped his fingers into hers.
‘Remember I told you Allie wants to write about the Scotch lads that have ended up here?’
Matt tipped his chin in a nod. ‘You need to talk to Jamesie.’ One finger raised, pointing to the other bed. ‘He’s from Edinburgh.’
‘That’s right,’ a throaty rasp came from the other bed. ‘What’s your interest, pal?’
Allie drifted across the room. ‘My name’s Allie Burns. I’m a reporter. I used to work in Glasgow but now I’m based here in Manchester.’
‘Who do you work for? I mean, none of the papers has a good word for guys like us. I don’t want to get tricked into saying shit that’ll get twisted.’ His accent was Edinburgh. Not the posh bray of privately educated lawyers and politicians, but the sprawling vowels and slurred consonants of the housing schemes.
‘I’m an investigative reporter.’ It wasn’t exactly a lie. ‘I want to write about why people with HIV and AIDS are leaving Scotland. I suspect there’s a story there about a lack of provision in the Scottish system. I work for the Sunday Globe. But I don’t twist stuff. That’s the whole point of doing the investigations. It’s to get behind the lies and the corruption, not to make it worse.’
A short bark of laughter, then an explosion of coughing. ‘Fuck,’ he groaned at the end of it. ‘What’s in it for me?’
‘I’ll be honest,’ Allie said, pulling up a visitor’s chair to Jamesie’s bedside. ‘I suspect I’m too late to the party to be any use to you. But if we can shame the authorities into doing more to prevent the spread, and to treat people that haven’t dodged the bullet better than they have been doing? Well, that’s kind of a legacy.’
‘Legacy. Fuck. My legacy’s probably passing this disease on to all the guys that have sucked me off. Or everybody I’ve ever shared a needle with.’
He wasn’t wrong, she thought. ‘You didn’t know you were passing on anything more than a bit of fun. It’s not your fault this disease came out the woodwork.’
Jamesie gave an approximation of a shrug. ‘Mibbes. But I can’t blame anybody else for getting hooked on the smack. That was down to me.’
It wasn’t the time or the place for Allie to protest about the confluence of social circumstances and government policies that had contributed to the epidemic of shooting up drugs. Instead, she said, ‘I wish I could make it easier for folk to avoid getting drawn into that black hole. But what I can do is try to change how people like you get treated. You could help me with that. What have you got to lose, talking to me?’
A bitter laugh that turned into a clatter of coughing. Jamesie shook like a rat in a terrier’s teeth. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ he moaned at the end of the spasm. ‘Aye, all right. Ask away.’
Allie reached out and patted his arm. ‘Thanks. So how did you end up here?’
There were few surprises. Leaving school with no qualifications, unemployment, drugs, petty theft, hepatitis B, then a bunch of weird symptoms that didn’t fit any obvious pattern. Finally, the diagnosis. HIV+. ‘It didn’t make me special in Muirhouse,’ Jamesie said. ‘Sometimes it felt like half of north Edinburgh was staggering about, either stoned or sick. Or both.’
‘What about treatment?’
He shook his head. ‘There isn’t any treatment, is there? Not once you’ve got full-blown AIDS. They can’t make us better. All they can do is warehouse us in places like this. But there’s not nearly enough places like this. In Edinburgh, I couldn’t get into rehab or any other treatment after I was diagnosed. There were no beds. No spaces. What clinics there are, they’re bursting at the seams. We’re just dumped on a scrapheap. If you’ve not got family or pals to look after you, it’s just curtains. And guys like me, we don’t have anybody that wants to take care of us. No cuddles from Princess Diana for the likes of us. So I came down here, where nobody knew I was HIV positive. I thought I could escape that feeling that I had a target on my back.’
He sighed. ‘I cut right back on the heroin. I even got a wee job, working in a café. But I couldn’t hack it. The drugs, man. They’re even cheaper down here, and my life was shit. So I stopped trying. Started using again. Then I got sick. And here I am. One of the lucky ones.’ Another bitter laugh, this time without the paroxysm of coughing. ‘That’s what they tell me. I’ve got a place here. I don’t have to lie in my own piss and shit in a scummy bedsit, waiting to die.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t feel very fucking lucky. You know how old I am?’
Allie knew whatever guess she hazarded would be way off. All she could do was make a joke of it. ‘Sixty-five?’ she said.
He gave a harsh bark of approval. ‘Aye, right. I’m twenty-four. And I’m going to be dead before I’m twenty-five.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Allie said, meaning it. ‘Nobody deserves this.’
‘You wouldn’t think so, to read what you bastards write in the papers. We’re the lowest of the low, junkies sharing needles. Even in here. Wait till you hear this. Some of the staff wanted to run a poster campaign – “Don’t jack up with a Jock.” Is that not racist, or what?’
Shocked, Allie was quick to respond. ‘At the very least, it’s insensitive. I told you, that’s not the kind of story I’m writing.’ She looked around the room. ‘I hear there are a quite a few of you down here from Edinburgh.’
‘I came down with three other guys. We were wanting away. Wanting to be some place nobody could point the finger at us all the time. I kind of hoped that there might be clinics where I could get medication that would stop me getting the full-on AIDS. You’re always hearing rumours like that.’ He shook his head, sadness in his eyes. ‘But it’s just bullshit. Once you’ve got the HIV, it’s a death sentence. The only question is how long it takes you to get to the finishing line. Do you run or do you crawl? And that, my friend, is a lucky bag.’
It was hard to argue against that analysis. ‘So how are your mates doing?’
Jamesie looked away, staring out at the trees stark against the winter sky. ‘One dead, one down the hall, and one doing whatever it takes to get by out there on the streets.’ He glanced quickly at her then away again. ‘Not exactly a great strike rate. And we’re just the tip of the iceberg. Last count, there were five other guys from Edinburgh in here.’ He shook his head. ‘We’re here because there’s nothing for us there. How are you going to change that?’
Allie had no answer. But she was spared by a voice from behind her.
‘And since you can’t change it, what the hell are you doing here?’
6
The man standing behind her was clearly a doctor. The white coat and the stethoscope were the giveaway. Allie gave him her best smile. ‘Hi. I’m guessing you’re Dr Rob?’
‘It’s Doctor Butler. You’re a journalist, is that right?’ There was no welcome in his voice or his expression.
Allie began to explain her reason for being there, but she’d barely managed the first sentence before Alix had joined them. ‘She’s one of the good guys, Doc,’ she butted in.
He didn’t look convinced. ‘No such thing, when it comes to hacks.’ Butler looked weary, dark smudges under his eyes and a downward turn to his mouth that had the air of permanence. He didn’t look old enough to seem so defeated. ‘Your tribe are not welcome here,’ he added.
‘I appreciate why you feel so hostile—’
‘Hostile? You think this is hostile?’ he scoffed. ‘You people are the experts in hostile. You’re the ones who dubbed my unit “the Plague House”. You’re the ones who knocked on doors along this street asking people how they felt about having drug addicts and male prostitutes spreading the AIDS virus in their community.’
‘I don’t condone that,’ Allie insisted. ‘But we’re not all the same. I don’t condemn the whole medical profession because some doctors and nurses refuse to treat people who are HIV positive. Look, I’m a lesbian, I know all about homophobia. And I’ve already lost one of my dearest friends to AIDS.’
‘She’s telling the truth,’ Alix weighed in. ‘Give her a chance, Doc.’
‘I’m not even here to write about your clinic specifically,’ Allie added.
‘Then what are you doing in my clinic if you’re not here to find a cheap headline?’ His belligerence was fading now. Allie thought that had more to do with weariness than taking her at face value.
‘I won’t deny that I’m pursuing a story. That’d be pointless. But it’s not about this place, except in relation to the number of people with HIV and AIDS turning up here from Edinburgh. As you can probably tell from my accent, I’m Scottish. And I was genuinely shaken to hear that the treatment facilities in Edinburgh are so oversubscribed that desperate people are uprooting their whole lives in a bid to get treatment. That’s the story I want to write. The failure of my people’ – here, Allie clamped a palm to her chest – ‘that my people are letting guys like Jamesie down.’ There was genuine dismay in her voice and she saw it hit home.
