The Facts of Life (59 page)

Putting some of his new books on the shelves in his room, he fell eagerly on an old address book of his dating from around his sixteenth birthday, long since discarded as being too painfully in need of editing. He flicked through the pages for what seemed like hours, hungrily scanning his younger handwriting for names of men who might have done the deed, desperate now that his fate be born of human choice, not of a mere crime of hospital inefficiency.

Sandy was throwing a birthday party and Alison was in no mood to go. After six months in a wheelchair, her old journalist friend, Guy, whom she had barely seen since the Gay Pride march, had finally been swept away by an attack of MAI, a rare form of tuberculosis.

‘So typical,’ he had croaked mirthlessly, as she sat at his bedside in the ward Jamie had recently left. ‘We spend our lives trying to be different – eating and wearing things nobody else would dream of, decorating our houses in unheard of ways – and now what? Now we manage to be chic and rarefied even in death. TB? Nothing so
du peuple
! We even manage to suffer from the virus in different ways from each other. This is
customised
lurgy …’

He had died on Monday and was cremated on Thursday, too late for Sandy to cancel Saturday’s party.

‘It’s my birthday,’ she declared a few hours before, when Alison rang her ostensibly to discuss helpline rotas but actually to see whether she could find the courage to excuse herself from going. ‘And I shan’t have it turned into a wake. You dress up, girl, get yourself a lift so you can drink yourself stupid, and you
party
! And no black.
Schwarz
is absolutely
verboten
. The only black Guy would have allowed is underwear.’

By the time Bald Billy drove over from Greenwich to pick her up, Alison had tried on and rejected some five outfits. She answered the door to Billy in an old school suit of Jamie’s she had tarted up with a red silk scarf and a flashy diamanté clip.

‘Well? What do you think?’ she asked him warily, sensing he was about to pass judgement anyway. Billy’s window-dressing had won prizes. Tonight he had come out entirely in Hare Krishna orange. He had even found the time to dye some plimsolls tangerine.

‘No,’ he said after a moment’s consideration.

‘You no like?
Tell
me, Billy!’

‘You’re a girl, Alison. Wear that lot and you give out
quite
the wrong signals.’

‘I thought it was sort of Barbara Stanwyck.’

‘Precisely.’ Billy stole a mandarin from the fruitbowl and began peeling it.

‘Okay,’ Alison sighed. ‘Have we got time?’

He nodded.

‘Right,’ she said, returning to her bedroom and throwing off the suit. ‘I’m a girl. I’m a girl. Damn it, I
am
!’

She snatched up a little red dress with skinny shoulder straps, pulled it over her head and cinched in her waist with a black belt. Then she put on lipstick to match.

‘Lose the belt,’ Billy told her in the hall.

‘But –’

‘Simplicity is all and anyway it makes you look like a centaur from behind. But the dress is good.’ He stood back. ‘Here,’ he said, taking a heavy steel chain from his neck and fastening it round hers. ‘I’ve taken the chill off it for you. Now
that
looks fabulous!’

‘You’re sure? I feel like a fire extinguisher. Billy, can’t we stay in and watch TV? I’ll cook.’

Billy rejected one of her coats with a little mutter of shocked distaste and grabbed another one for her.

‘Do you know how long it took to get these shoes the right colour?’ he asked her wearily.

Sandy shared a big, battered house in the considerable shadow of Arsenal football stadium with three other women. She had bought it in her earning days as a solicitor and, now that she earned nothing, needed lodgers to help her pay the mortgage. The lodgers changed regularly, so, assuming they had friends, there was always a good chance of meeting new faces at Sandy’s parties. The fact that Alison usually found herself in the basement kitchen with the same old crowd, hiding from all the new people upstairs, did not stop her, even tonight, from entering the house with a certain sense of anticipation.

As a gesture to mourning, an old photograph of Guy puffing a drunken kiss at the camera over a birthday cake had been blown up to poster size and coloured,
à la
Warhol, with vibrant crayons. Glued on the hall wall above a table draped with a pseudo altar cloth and cluttered with Mexican prayer candles, it was already fluttering with tokens of remembrance people had pinned to it. There were red ribbons, inevitably, but also chocolate wrappers, a condom full of Smarties, a rubber snake, a pink carnation, a sombre polaroid snapshot taken during the picnic at the last Gay Pride, with Guy in his
OUR DEATHS YOUR SHAME
baseball cap, and a gaudy postcard of Plymouth Hoe.

Sandy ran out to greet them, a bottle in either hand, already in bare feet because she had been dancing.

‘Damn you!’ she shouted over the music, after duly admiring Billy’s plimsolls and snatching his exquisitely wrapped birthday parcel. ‘I wanted
me
to be the only one in a dress. Look at you!’

‘Ah but I’m a girl,’ Alison said.

‘I know, babe. I
know
!’

‘Well look
at you
. It’s so …’ Words failed Alison.

‘Like it?’ Sandy revolved on the spot to show off her incongruous blue satin ball gown. ‘Found it in Help the Aged. I’ve come as your mother, incidentally.’ Alison gave her a playful slap and received a kiss in return. ‘No Boys?’ Sandy asked.

Alison shook her head.

‘Nothing can winkle Jamie out of the fens so Sam’s gone up to join him there.’

‘Jamie sent me a card, though.’

‘You’re honoured. I never get one.’

Sandy was distracted by the arrival of a recent ex of hers, new girlfriend in tow. Bald Billy was already in the living room, showing off his plimsolls, so Alison slipped downstairs to the kitchen. The grimy basement had been transformed like the rest of the house by a quantity of candles burning in jam jars and flower pots. It would be quite in character for a Sandy party for the evening to end with someone spectacularly catching fire and having to be rushed to casualty. Someone nobody had ever liked much. Sure enough, the gang were all in the kitchen, eating the cocktail sausages and mustard dip that no-one could be bothered to pass around upstairs. Sean and Nick stood, shyly entwined, by the door, inseparable even before anyone had found time to get drunk and predatory. Guy’s widowed Buddy, Steve, looking incomplete without the wheelchair to push, was chatting to several colleagues from the helpline and Belgian Agnes. Belgian Agnes had brought along yet another man she had found at the Islamic Institute. He stared about him and clung to her as to a life raft. As Alison came in there were hugs all round because Guy’s funeral was still fresh in their minds and, without anyone saying as much, they all knew she was in need of hugging and suspected Jamie’s would be next.

Although she had made a point of still speaking to him every day and had sent him a couple of Red Cross parcels of magazines, books and chocolates, she had not seen Jamie since he left hospital. His departure to The Roundel had brought a temporary alleviation of pressure, allowing her to flex her spirit and check for sprains. She was shocked to find herself suffering a kind of revulsion with his sickness or, more accurately, a kind of dissatisfaction with its progress. Daring, now there was distance between them, to stand back mentally from their situation and examine her reactions, she found that his recovery had cheated her of something, and the long months ahead, months of checking he was still relatively well and of waiting for him to decline again, were a deadening prospect. Of course this reaction appalled her. She was grateful, truly, for his rescue from death’s jaws, which according to the doctors had been a very close thing. She prayed, moreover, with honest selfishness, that he might be spared for another year, two years even. His so nearly dying had been a kind of rehearsal. She saw that now. It gave them all a chance to test their love for him like so many unfinished ships in a dock.

What disturbed her most was her being forced to accept that his death, whenever it came, would not destroy her. She would survive. She had already found ways of coping. He had been close as a limb to her for as long as she could remember, but nobody died of amputation these days. With careful deployment of what fate left her, the healing stump might not even show too much. Like the sensible widow, she would make new friends who had never known what she had lost and would accept her as she was, brotherless. Brotherlessness; that, she knew now, would hurt. Sometimes she dared to hope that Sam might stay around, play a brotherly role, but most of the time she knew the hope was vain. In both senses. With Jamie gone, the tentative roots Sam had put down would be groundless and he would be swept away from her by the same mysterious urban current that had first washed him into her path.

Alison began to find the considerate tone of friends hard to bear. She extricated herself from Nick and Sean’s little pool of sweetness and, taking a washing-up bowl of crisps, went in search of oblivious strangers. She offered them to acrid solicitors who envied Sandy her freedom even as they decried her folly in giving up her legal career. She offered them to the lodgers, but found they were discussing the validity of the class struggle and moved on when one of them gave her a look that dismissed her as the Snack-bearing Bourgeoise from Hell. She offered them to some men downing quantities of fruit juice, flushed from dancing, then she realised the men were boys, young enough to have been brought by their parents. Finally she saw that the same man had put his hand in the crisp bowl in each group, and that he was still following her.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘You take them. You’re obviously hungry and they’re getting heavy,’ and she looked at him properly for the first time.

‘Hi,’ he said. He nodded slowly as though the mere fact of her speaking to him at last represented an opinion with which he was in fulsome agreement. ‘Bruce,’ he added.

She saw a long, Greek nose, dark eyes, and unkempt blond hair that looked almost yellow against his tan. Late twenties. Early thirties allowing for the candles’ flattery.

‘Alison,’ she said, not offering her hand because his were now full.

‘You a friend of the hostess?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I’m a girl.’

‘Oh. Thank God.’

He was American. Judging from the depth of his tan he was fresh from somewhere hotter than Finsbury Park.

‘Why haven’t I met you before?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know anyone here.’

‘No?’

‘I’m a friend of Abby’s. We arranged to meet here.’

‘Oh.’

‘But you guys haven’t met yet, I guess.’

‘Sorry. I wouldn’t know her from Adam.’ Sandy was passing. Alison broke off to catch at her sleeve. ‘Bruce wants to know if Abby’s here,’ she shouted.

‘Who?’ Sandy laughed.

‘Abby. I don’t know her either.’

Sandy turned to Bruce, glanced back at Alison then said, as she was drawn away again, ‘Stick with Alison. I’m sure she’s a
much
better lay.’

Alison felt herself grin foolishly.

‘With friends like her –’ she began. ‘Listen. Don’t you want to try phoning this Abby to see if she’s all right?’

What’s come over me
? she thought as she spoke.
Why must I treat everybody nowadays as if they’re in a state of incipient social trauma? The poor woman’s probably two-timing him with his best friend or skiving off for a quiet night in with the cat and a tin of chocolate brownies
.

‘No,’ Bruce said, bringing his mouth close to her ear to be heard over the music. She felt the warmth of him. ‘But I would like to get somewhere quiet so we can talk properly.’

He steered her out through the crowd, then she led the way up to the landing where there was a sofa buried beneath discarded coats and yet another dangerous clutch of guttering candles. Clearing the coats onto the floor so they could sit, she uncovered a bottle of wine. Bruce opened it with a Swiss Army penknife and refilled their glasses. He had passed the crisps to someone else along the way.

‘Geeze this is so embarrassing,’ he said, after they had raised glasses and pulled simultaneous faces at the nastiness of the wine. ‘I feel like some lousy gate-crasher.’

‘That doesn’t matter. Sandy encourages gate-crashers, as long as they bring bottles. One of her best friends began life as a gate-crasher in this very house.’

‘You?’

She nodded.

‘My brother and I had just been to a terrible wedding. God, I hate weddings! Don’t you?’

He nodded. So far so good.

‘Anyway,’ she went on. ‘We were passing and the party was going with a swing and we were both pretty drunk so Jamie – that’s my brother – Jamie dragged me back to an off-licence and in we came, armed with bottles. I only found out afterwards he was after one of the blokes we’d just seen coming in here.’ Bruce laughed uncertainly. ‘He’s like that,’ she added. ‘Impulsive. I hate parties. I didn’t want to come out tonight in fact. I was all set to stay in with the cat and a tin of chocolate brownies. Actually I don’t have a cat but you get the idea.’