Ms Straight worked in publishing, had a nice, and I mean nice, bijou house in Clapham, and needed a project. Moi.
So I packed my bags and left Louise again. She cried and so did I.
I lasted a couple of years with Ms Straight, cleaned up my act and got a job in publishing too. I made a few good contacts through her, had a fair degree in English, loved reading, and somehow knew what looked right on the page. It wasn’t the biggest or most prestigious publishing house in London, but it suited me. I still had the job until. Well, like I said before, we’ll come to that.
Of course I kept in touch with Louise. I knew by then that I had an addictive personality, and I was addicted to her. We’d been together for years, and had become, to our mutual surprise, good friends. No more sex. That had gone out of the window long before. No. Friends. Friends with mutual interests, private jokes, and memories that no one else shared.
Of course Ms Straight hated it. She thought that when I was with Louise I was off the straight and narrow. And she was right. But not as badly as before. Never as bad as that, ever again.
Then we split up too, and I was left with my clothes, some books, some records, and a Ford Sierra. Not a lot to show for a life, but we all have different goals.
Louise took me back, of course. She’d got a new place to live by then. She was on her own, apart from Percy, and I moved into the spare room.
It was that summer that Louise had the accident that in time was going to kill her. And if I’d been around it would probably never have happened.
She was doing freelance PR by then. Still in the music business, but video and travel too.
One of her clients was a travel agent who, by way of a bonus, offered her a week in Spain for two. It was at short notice, and I couldn’t go. I was working a deadline on a book edit, with a particularly obnoxious and pernickity author, and there was no way I could get time off.
None of her other friends could make it either. It was literally go the next morning or not at all. So she went. On her own.
Hey, this was the eighties. What could happen?
Shit happened. Like it often does.
She had a great time. Fell in with the hotel owner and his family, and got real friendly.
Then on the last morning of her stay, with her bags packed, and whilst she was waiting for the coach to pick her up for the trip to the airport, she went for one last stroll along the beach she’d come to love.
And Nemesis, in the shape of a big, black dog came loping along the beach towards her.
At first she thought he was just being playful, and as an animal lover, she joined in. Maybe he was, but he got too excited and bit her. Twice. Once on the face and once on the foot.
Louise was terrified and ran into the water to escape. The dog didn’t follow her. He ran up and down on the seashore for a minute, then split. Louise came out of the water, went back to the hotel, dried herself off, changed, put plasters on her bites and came home.
No anti-tetanus. No antibiotics. Nothing.
She was okay for a couple of weeks, then started to go strange. Now you’ve got to remember that Louise was always strange. Eccentric. And the older she got, the more eccentric she became. I didn’t mind. I’m eccentric myself, and I was used to her.
Then one night, after a particularly early start, I came home to find her lying nude on her bed. She hadn’t touched the breakfast dishes, and Percy was screaming to be fed.
I moaned like hell as I fed him, and she came into the kitchen, still naked, and collapsed.
I wasn’t very sympathetic. After a hard day at the office, all I was ready for was to crash out in front of the TV with an Indian take-away.
‘Are you pissed?’ I said unkindly after I’d picked her up and put her in a chair.
‘No.’
‘What then? Why aren’t you dressed?’
She suddenly looked scared. ‘Don’t know. I’m fine.’
‘No you’re not.’
‘I am.’
And suddenly, with the sure and certain knowledge obtained from all the years I’d known her, I realized that something was seriously wrong.
‘Louise,’ I said. ‘What day is it?’
It was a Thursday. A day of infamy.
‘Monday,’ she said.
‘And you haven’t been on the booze, or anything else?’
‘No. I told you.’
‘Lou,’ I said. ‘Get some clothes on. I’m going to take you to the hospital.’
‘No,’ she screamed, and ran and locked herself in her bedroom. This wasn’t the Louise I knew, so when she refused to answer my knocks, I called her doctor. I apologized, told him what had happened, and that she wouldn’t unlock her door.
He wasn’t a bad bloke, and came straight round. Louise had always been fond of him, and after a few minutes’ conversation through the locked door, she opened it. By then she’d pulled on a dress, and put on some lipstick. But most of it was on her chin, and the dress was on back to front. When I saw that, I knew that something bad, something well beyond my ken, was happening.
And I was right.
The doctor called an ambulance, then left. That was all he could do.
I went to the hospital with Louise. The paramedic asked her for her name, address and date of birth. She didn’t have a clue. She was getting worse. I gave him the information, and stayed at the hospital all night. No one could or would tell me what was wrong. Eventually I cornered a consultant in one of the corridors, and he told me. Meningitis. Another day and she would have been dead.
She was off her head for more than a week. She didn’t know me. She didn’t know her family. She didn’t know her friends. Then, just as the fever broke, complications set in.
The meningitis had weakened a valve in her heart, and she needed immediate surgery. They operated right away, and put in a new valve.
I went to visit the same night and I could hear her screaming as I got out of the lift. I didn’t know how I knew that it was her, but I did. I’d never heard a sound like it before or since. Primeval. Animal. My blood temperature fell like a stone.
I was sure she was going to die that night. But she was made of sterner stuff. I’d always known that Louise was tough, but I had no conception exactly how tough that was.
She pulled through, and left hospital a month later. I was down as next-of-kin and the consultant called me into his office the day she was discharged.
‘Does she smoke?’ he asked.
I nodded.
‘Not any more. Does she drink?’
I nodded again.
‘Keep it moderate.’
There was about as much chance of that as flying down to Rio without a plane, but I didn’t say so.
Louise had to keep going back to the hospital as an outpatient. Three times a week to have her blood checked, and she had so many needle holes in her arms that she looked like a junkie.
They hurt her a lot there. It wasn’t their fault, but each time she came back I could see the pain in her eyes like a shadow on the sun.
Then the doctors decided she needed a heart transplant. And all because the Spanish authorities pumped untreated sewage into the sea, and that damned dog had chewed on her.
So the waiting began for a suitable donor. A wait that was going to take three long years, and every day her condition deteriorated.
And looking back, the worst thing is that when you’re with someone who is seriously ill, terminally ill in fact, you get used to it. Get to take it for granted, and in the end you treat it as normal.
At least until the worst happens.
And the worst happened just after Easter in 1991. Louise was bad. And then the call came that a suitable donor heart had turned up. It belonged to a twenty-one-year-old man who had died in a car crash.