It can’t have been like that, from her side of things. I was busy sending out on all frequencies the message that it was quite impossible for me to acquire HIV, jamming the family’s listening apparatus with a blanketing reassurance, while also expecting my mind to be read and my intentions clear. And from Sheila’s point of view, I imagine, Michael’s sweet droll presence was just the mask a virus wore when it entered her house with intent to bereave. He personified death, and not just a general death — his own, of course, but mine too.
Naturally she fought against being on first-name terms with that. As a debilitated young man far from home, with nothing to rely on except the small surprises he could spring with his scissors (for as long as he was still well enough to ply them) he also represented absolute vulnerability. Perhaps she was sending out some jamming signals of her own, to prevent unbearable possibilities from tracking her down.
Eventually I said, ‘Do you mind asking Michael to call you “Sheila”? “Lady Mars-Jones” is a bit of a mouthful.’ And she said, ‘Of course. Silly of me not to think of it.’
Even ‘Sheila’ he found a bit of a mouthful, perhaps because of its antipodean usage (even if Australian rather than New Zealand) to mean woman generically. In conversation with me he styled her ‘Shee’, this being what Bobby Grant on Brookside, as played by Ricky Tomlinson, called his wife, Sheila (Sue Johnston). Michael preferred grim British soap operas to sunny Australian ones, and EastEnders made Neighbours look pretty silly. Brookside was sometimes so wonderfully gloomy that it made his problems seem quite minor.
He was in the UK on a two-year visa. Unlike (as it seemed) all his friends Michael didn’t have ‘patriality’, the right of residence that Kiwis enjoy as long as they have had the forethought to equip themselves with at least one British grandparent. It wasn’t legal for him to make his home here, and of course there was no mechanism, no civil partnership nor extended Foucauldian form of adoption, that would let me top him up conveniently with the rights he lacked.
The only form in which I could show commitment was to buy a flat for us to live in, for however short a time. HIV was doing what no other agency had achieved, by making me set up on my own. The timing wasn’t great — the summer of 1988 was the last time that two earners could claim tax relief on a single mortgage, so yuppy couples on a deadline were blocking the doors of estate agents’ premises. My insecure freelance income was outclassed, required to compete against mature salaries hunting in pairs.
Brought up in WC1, and in an august enclave to boot, I wasn’t particularly realistic about where I could afford to live. An early Terrence Higgins Trust meeting had been held in a basement on Highbury Fields, and I was duly impressed with the amenities of the area. I could afford a three-bedroomed flat in Finsbury Park or a two-bedroomed one in Highbury. Journeys from Highbury were shorter, to the West End to see films, to Gray’s Inn by number 19 bus, and it was hard to make out that I needed a third bedroom when soon enough I would be living alone.
It was August when we moved in. ‘Shee’ gave us a cast-iron cooking-pot, still in service in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and Michael’s mother, Beverley (who had visited that summer), gave us a chopping-board made of a distinctive New Zealand hardwood. It cracked and then split a good long time ago, losing the inset metal handle, but I’ll go on using it as long as there’s enough square-inch-age left intact to accommodate a spring onion.
Michael had his own bedroom, and mainly slept on the futon there. He put pin-ups on the wall with Blu-tack, large-format photos from the gay free-sheets, innocuous furry nudes. I must have looked dismayed at this revelation of preference, for him to spell out so clearly the obvious truth: if he had wanted a lover covered in coconut matting he would have found one. There were applicants.
He spent a lot of time knitting at a modest level of craft, making what he called ‘peggy squares’, alternately black and brightly coloured, to be sewn together into a patchwork quilt. He explained that knitting was only half an activity, and so was watching television, but between them they made up a state of satisfaction. He would sit on the sofa knitting with his long right leg crossed over, bobbing his bed-socked size twelve foot in slow tempo, keeping time with something I couldn’t hear.
We weren’t entirely swallowed up by domesticity. Through Edmund White, with whom I’d written a book of HIV-related stories, I was put in touch with Kitty Mrosovsky who lived near us, in Arsenal near the stadium (before it moved away). She had recently been diagnosed as positive, and needed someone to talk to. Michael came along to meet her once, and was touchingly protective of her, considering an age gap of perhaps fifteen years and a great difference of character — Kitty was academic and temperamentally nervous, a pianist and writer whose first novel had been published by a firm that had instantly gone bust, so that her career as a fiction writer was launched and sunk almost simultaneously. On the way home Michael said that he thought the stage Kitty was going through, when you know your health is being secretly ruined but nothing definite has yet happened, was the hardest of the lot to deal with. In HIV terms, he felt like her older brother.
He was scheduled to leave in early January of 1989. In December he suggested that we hire a video camera to record highlights of the Christmas period. This felt quite adventurous — the equipment was expensive and no-one we knew owned one. It was all very futuristic. I was impressed that the shop where we hired it not only took a deposit but a frame capture from its CCTV system as evidence of what we looked like.
As always with Michael, there was a lot of good sense behind the idea. He and I had been saying goodbye almost from the moment we met. There was no need to make a meal of the actual parting. The video camera would keep us looking outwards rather than in, and would have a usefulness to a wider circle. Tim’s son, Ebn, was three and a half, and we saw quite a lot of him (Michael cut his hair). It seemed a good idea to get plenty of footage of this beguiling boy on separate cassettes, so that one could be given to Tim and his partner Pam, and one to my parents documenting their first grandchild. Another tape was for Michael to pass on to his family as a record of his London life. He always said he had been happier in London with Aids than in Auckland without. Another tape was designated as my souvenir of him.
Naturally enough this was the most intimate. Lying exhausted on his futon, Michael still managed to give a guided tour of his gallery of hunks on the wall, the commentary including not just names (of course there was a Brad, but also a Petey and a Wilf) but their professions and the cars they drove. In another sequence he is lying against the naked chest (hairy, as it happens) of one of our friends. He strokes it and comments on the difference from what he’s used to. He says he could never have a lover after me. I should know by now that there’s nothing more characteristic of Michael than to make me relax, to get me completely defenceless, and then say something just ever so slightly edged. He says, ‘It took me two years to get you trained. I couldn’t go through all that again.’ The camera shakes because my shoulders are laughing.