‘What did he tell you?’
Si glances at the girl still filling in her form, then back at me. ‘Look, shall we go for a walk? He said at least forty minutes, and I can’t talk in here, I need some air.’
‘Good idea.’ I grab my coat and we walk out into the cold crisp air.
‘So?’ I say, taking Si’s arm and falling into step.
‘So nothing I didn’t know already. We established the risk factor, that I’m high risk, having been exposed to the virus, and then we talked about the impact if I’m positive. How I would deal with it, what I would do in terms of counselling, what’s available to me, plus all the practical stuff like how it affects things like insurance and foreign travel.’
‘Was that it?’
‘No. He also said all the stuff that they say now. That HIV is a virus, not an instant death sentence, and that people can live completely normal lives, and there are drugs that blah blah blah.’
I stop and look at him. ‘Blah blah blah? Now there’s an interesting medical definition.’
‘I’m sorry.’ A big sigh. ‘It’s just that I’ve heard it all before, and I know it’s true, but it still means that I am probably not going to see old age, and that when I die it will be horrible and painful and degrading, and even though I know that being positive doesn’t mean instant death, all I keep thinking about is Jake. At the end.’
‘Oh, Si,’ I groan, stroking his arm, because I cannot think of anything else to say. And eventually I look at him with worried eyes. ‘And what if you are positive?’
‘If I’m positive, then I’ll go to counselling and I’ll take whatever drugs I have to take and I’ll deal with it. Come on. Let’s go back.’
We go back, and again, as we ascend those steps, that feeling of gloom overtakes me, but my heart doesn’t jump into my mouth this time. That doesn’t happen for a little while longer. We sit in the waiting room, and I manage to entice Si back to a semblance of his normal self by showing him a picture of Courtney Cox in a particularly disgusting dress, and in the middle of our laughter the surgery door opens and the same doctor appears.
He comes over to us and again says, ‘Please come in.’ And although the words themselves are completely innocuous, although they have no power to harm, there is something about his expression, his lack of smile, the sympathy lurking just behind his eyes, that makes my heart start to pound, and my breathing tight and sharp.
‘Back in a sec, my darling,’ Si says, winking at me, putting on his old self in a bid to cover the fear, then, just as he goes, he leans down and kisses my cheek, and that is when I feel the tears burning, but I will not let them out. I will be strong for Si.
And anyway, I have never been the best judge of emotions. Perhaps I imagined this. Perhaps the doctor has the same expression whatever the verdict. I look up, and the girl, the trendy, pretty girl who is presumably now waiting for her results, smiles at me.
‘Awful, isn’t it?’ she says softly, and I nod, not daring myself to speak, because her sympathy will ensure the tears come thick and fast if I so much as open my mouth.
She smiles at me in sympathy, and I think: she knows. She looked up when the doctor came out, she saw his expression, and she is thinking the same thing as me. I flick the pages of the magazine, furiously, blinking back the tears, not seeing anything at all, and when I reach the end, I flick back to the beginning again, my foot tapping all the while.
Twenty minutes go by, and then the door opens and Si reappears, smiling brightly, and, if I didn’t know him as well as I do, I would think that the smile means everything is fine, but I know that smile. That is his false smile. His forced smile. He is stuffing leaflets into his pocket, and I stand up and follow him down the stairs and into the cold sunshine, and all the while he keeps smiling.
‘Si?’ I stand in front of him on the pavement, and only then does his smile start to fade.
‘Positive,’ he whispers, and I put my arms around him and feel his stiffness, his resistance, but whether he needs this or not, I need to do it.
‘Regent’s Park?’ I whisper, because it’s not far, and because I know he loves the rose garden, and because I sense that he needs to be reminded of things that he loves, and that it is far better for him to be out amidst beauty than at home alone.
We get in the car, not saying anything, and drive to Regent’s Park, then walk through the gate, around the small boating lake and into the park. All the while Si does not speak.
My arm is linked through his, and I squeeze him tightly, reassuring myself that he is still there, the same old Si, and although the temptation is to keep looking at him, to check if he’s okay, I know this would infuriate the hell out of him and so I resist.
And finally, when we reach the rose garden, Si gestures towards a bench and we sit down, and he starts to speak.
‘I have to make an appointment with a counsellor,’ he says, drawing the leaflets out from his pocket and looking at them blankly. ‘And I have to go for regular check-ups, my CD4 count and Viral Load Tests. I have to go back in a week for the first round of tests. And my diet probably needs looking at, although he said there were courses I could do to learn about all of this stuff, to get support, and…’ He stops, sighing.
I say nothing, just stroke his arm.
‘Oh, Cath,’ he says, and his voice sounds incredibly sad. ‘How can my life have changed so drastically in one day? How can everything have been fine yesterday morning, and everything be so awful today? How can we even be sitting here talking about T-cells, and check-ups, and drugs, I mean, why me? Why did this have to happen to me?’
‘Nothing has changed,’ I say, putting my arms around him. ‘You are exactly the same person sitting here today as you were yesterday. And you’ll be exactly the same person tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. The only thing that’s changed is that you’ve caught a virus, and you have to be more careful with your health.
‘But Si,’ I continue, ‘you have friends who love you and, touch wood’ – I slip off a glove to stroke the bench – ‘your health. It’s a virus, Si, It’s not the end of the world.’
And then we both sit there, holding hands, looking out over the park, and we stay there for a very long time.
Chapter twenty-six
I call Lucy in the shop, and luckily I do sound terrible, and she thinks I’m ill before I even have a chance to deliver a made-up excuse. She tells me to tuck up in bed and not to worry about anything, which is what I wanted to hear, as I need to spend the rest of the day with Si, but it nevertheless strikes me as slightly ironic, given that I’m the one who is absolutely fine. In shock, certainly, but fine.
But Si is fine too. Or should that be too fine. After we leave the rose garden he tells me he really feels okay about this; he says that, bizarre as it may seem, it somehow already feels a part of him, feels like his destiny, and it’s not the worst thing in the world that can happen, and he really can deal with it.
I don’t know what to do with Si today. He is too calm, too quiet, and I suggest lunch, even offering to treat him at the Ivy, which would normally be his idea of heaven (although God knows how we’d ever get in at such short notice), and he just says no, he’s fine.
I drag him down to Marylebone High Street and we find a small café and tuck ourselves away in the corner, ordering cappuccinos and baguettes, but as soon as the food arrives I know that I have no appetite, that I couldn’t eat this if you forced me, and of course Si pushes it away as soon as it arrives.
So we sit and drink our coffee, and I pull out the lettuce from the baguette and shred it slowly on to the tabletop, and then Si draws out the leaflets again and this time we really look at them, read them, read about courses for the recently diagnosed, the importance of regular check-ups, the life expectancy growing longer and longer.