I thought the story (‘Slim’) would be effective on radio, where the withholding of the trigger-word might even ensnare listeners with no desire to empathize. Radio 4 took an interest, Martin Jarvis recorded it, and it was scheduled for broadcast late on a weekday evening.
I became restless several days in advance. I certainly didn’t want to listen to my story while it was broadcast, but it seemed silly to stay in and not listen to it. The logic was, then, that I would go out and be in some sanctioned public place when my story went out on its mission to galvanize lazy perceptions of illness.
I was in need of that quaint commodity ‘gay space’. When I looked at Time Out’s gay listings for that evening, the only possible venue was the Market Tavern in Vauxhall, where there was a Body Positive evening. (It had to be a club rather than a pub because of the restrictions then in force about opening hours.) Body Positive was the support group for people who were HIV-positive. The ironical appropriateness of the venue was surplus to my requirements, but it was that or nothing. I would be in a room with a bunch of gay men who knew a lot more than I did about the reality of being unwell at the time my momentous little story was transmitted.
With the sort of neatness that I try to avoid when writing fiction, I met a man at the Body Positive evening, in what must have been the most stubbornly unatmospheric venue in London, who quietly dismantled the bachelor persona that didn’t suit me, though I didn’t myself know how to shed it.
Michael Jelicich was twenty-three and from New Zealand. He was tall (6'4") and dark, with elongated hands and feet that made him look like an El Greco. His ancestry was half Yugoslav — in those days we hadn’t learned to subdivide that national identity. I’m reminded of him when I see photographs of Goran Ivaniševi, who is Croatian, though Ivaniševi was still playing tennis as an amateur when I met Michael. He had been diagnosed as positive shortly before he left Auckland for London. The trip was long planned and he went through with it.
I must have made some impression on him that night at the Market Tavern, but he went home with someone else, Bill McLoughlin, who became a friend of us both. We pronounced his name differently to distinguish him from other Bills we knew, calling him Beel because of his fluency in Spanish. He had spent a lot of time in South America.
He had been in Peru at a time of great unrest, thanks to the Shining Path group. Once Beel was sitting in a café when a tear-gas grenade was lobbed through the doorway. Hardly even thinking, he threw it out again into the street.
Shortly afterwards a military policeman made an entrance, demanding to know who had thrown the gas grenade back. Beel raised his hand. ‘Why did you do that?’ he shouted.
‘Those things really kill the froth on a cappuccino,’ said Beel.
There was a moment’s incredulous pause, then the policeman grinned. ‘Yes, they do that, don’t they?’ he said. A Hemingway story, really, with a tiny added element of campiness, but when Beel was doing the telling I believed it. I can still almost believe it, on the basis that Beel’s Spanish, extremely good but English-accented, indicated someone it might be a mistake to brutalize.
I’m a bit vague about when Beel died, though he made it through a good stretch of the 1990s. Michael went home with him because Beel had only recently been diagnosed and thought he would never be able to hold someone close again, let alone have sex. I assume there was desire on Michael’s part as well as concern — the impulses can overlap. Michael was matter-of-fact about his own needs as well as other people’s. The exotic surname Jel-ic-ich was pronounced Jealous Itch, but that was just a handy mnemonic. It was the opposite of a character sketch.
Michael’s health broke down rather rapidly, given his youth and generally healthy lifestyle — he didn’t drink or smoke, and vegetarianism had been his preference for years. He had HIV-positive friends who swore by a macrobiotic diet to keep them healthy, and he went along with that experimentally, but his basic feeling was that it didn’t make sense to add extra difficulties to the business of feeding yourself when you had no energy and hardly ever felt hungry anyway. He reasoned that if he wasn’t going to be able to eat more than a few mouthfuls he should eat food with concentrated sustaining power, and if M&S Chicken Kiev wasn’t macrobiotic then that was just too bad. When I started to cook for him he asked me not to consult him about what we were having. He had so little appetite that it seemed wise to hold it back for the actual food, not waste it on menus.
I remember, though, that he read some testimony about the HIV-curative properties of hydrogen peroxide, and we thought we’d give it a try. For a while we added it to drinking water, starting with just a few drops then building up to a dose that would scour the virus from his blood. I drank it too, to keep him company — but then he would get sick and our H2O2 regime stopped being a priority. The bottle from Boots and the medicine dropper lost their importance. I worried at first that we were drinking hair bleach, but he knew perfectly well that what was loosely called ‘peroxide’ was mixed with ammonium hydroxide. If I ever saw him adding ammonia NH3 to his glass I should intervene at once.
While he was well enough he worked at a little salon called Ficarazzi on High Holborn, and later at the branch of the Hebe chain on the Strand. Both premises were in easy walking distance of Gray’s Inn, and I would often bring him lunch there. It was only when I read him a story based on a weekend we had spent in Brighton that he realized I was embarrassed by my lover being a hairdresser. Was he disappointed in me? I don’t see how he could have been anything else.
He was very much at ease with himself. His small vocabulary of adjectives — ‘stunning’ his favourite positive, ‘tragic’ its negative counterpart — was up to the task of conveying his subtle responses. If there was an element of cliché in his character he would embrace it, or find a way of setting it off. Liking Simple Minds, Talk Talk and U2 might not be the most maverick choices available, but who was he to resist the classics?
He bought The Joshua Tree when it came out and played it constantly on the Ficarazzi sound system. He did his best haircuts ever that week. Coincidence? You decide.
When I took to riding a motorbike (certainly to my own surprise and perhaps to other people’s), he said that personally he preferred mopeds, and planned to choose a purple one for himself, one whose motor resembled a hairdryer as closely as possible. He loved it when people didn’t notice his jokes, and never made my mistake of repeating them as often as it took for them to be acknowledged, if not necessarily enjoyed.
For a while he lived on New North Road in nether Islington, and then, after a hospital stay, in Acton, where his non-rent-charging landlord was a volunteer he had met while he was there, an altruistic set-up with its own set of complications. The only place we could be properly private was a flat in Surrey Quays that he was lent towards the end of 1987, where the price of privacy was cold and damp. Michael had never seen snow falling until he came to London the previous year, and had loved it, but didn’t enjoy cold in its less ornamental aspects.
Of course, living in Gray’s Inn meant I couldn’t offer Michael any sort of home. He wasn’t exactly welcome as a visitor while Dad was on the premises, but that was perfectly consistent. Welcome was not something he claimed to offer when it came to that side of my life. Mum’s stiffness in his presence was more of a surprise to me. I had expected her to see right away that Michael, without being a needy personality in the slightest, was a person in need, and that was a category to which she had always responded.
I reasoned that she was so easily intimidated herself she didn’t realize that her manner could be off-putting in its own right. Surely she could see that Michael didn’t even know what to call her? Using her first name without invitation was taking a liberty, but being expected to say ‘Lady Mars-Jones’ was a joke. She herself disliked having a grand title, one that only meant she was married to a man who had a certain job, but if she didn’t see how alienating it was to someone without status and from another part of the world then she might as well have been glorying in it.