The Facts of Life (62 page)

‘It was Sally’s,’ Jamie’s grandfather told him. ‘My wife’s. I thought we got rid of that years ago.’ He touched the worn leather seat, ran a finger through the clogged cobwebs that had clouded the speedometer. ‘You can tinker with it if you like but I doubt it still goes after all this time.’

Challenged, and glad of a project, Sam took the thing apart, made a few trips into Rexbridge for spares and tools and began lovingly to reassemble it. One of the bedrooms became briefly toxic with paint fumes. One end of the kitchen table, covered in newspaper, became littered with filthy engine parts he was gradually wirebrushing back to an approximation of their old glory. With the first days of spring, his work was finished. Jamie was staring out of an upstairs window at the daffodils that seemed to have coloured the garden’s winter palette overnight, when he was startled by what sounded like a rook-scarer exploding followed by the revving of an engine. He came out of the front door just as his grandfather emerged from the studio, to find Sam performing a lap of honour around the house, grinning like a child with a new toy.

Touched at the trouble Sam had taken, Jamie’s grandfather dismissed his suggestion of selling it off to a collector and said his efforts had as good as purchased it. He declined Sam’s offer of a thank-you ride so Sam took Jamie out, covered in a rug and tucked down in the sidecar. Jamie would have felt safer riding pillion, wrapped around the driver, but the seat was far too small for two. Bouncing along, his head on a level with Sam’s waist, convinced they would be stopped any minute for not wearing helmets, he was terrified the sidecar would become detached somehow and hurtle off into a dyke or a field below the road. Here, he thought, was yet another reason for respecting his dead kinswoman. Relieved to be returned home in one piece, he was afraid to hurt Sam’s feelings by refusing to go out again. Sam divined his fear, however, and spared him, buzzing out on his own into Rexbridge or off around the fenland lanes whenever the unstirred atmosphere at The Roundel made him long for sensation or he felt himself beginning to brood.

‘It goes faster with no-one else on board,’ he enthused.

‘I don’t want to know,’ said Jamie, and bought him a magnetic St Christopher to stick on the petrol tank. He also bought him a helmet and, for further protection, gave him his big leather jacket, bought in an ultra-macho biker store in New York but never previously worn on anything faster than the 31 bus to Earl’s Court. Sam’s excursions brought Jamie relief too, used as he had begun to grow again to the pleasures of solitude, but he liked it when Sam returned, cheeks pink and cold. The feel of him bulked up by the jacket occasionally stoked up his testosterone levels so depleted by drugs and infection.

Sam made enquiries around local building contractors but there was far less building going on there than in the city, and firms were far stricter about who they employed and the terms on which they employed them. Jamie’s grandfather paid Sam to build him some new bookshelves then, satisfied with his handiwork, asked him to repair the studio’s guttering. Miriam found him work next, repointing the walls of the older house.

‘I know it’s Alison’s responsibility really,’ she apologised, ‘but poor Angel barely earns enough to buy clothes and food and it would be criminal to let the place fall apart.’

Sam was grateful for the money and happy to do work which didn’t take him away from Jamie. Jamie viewed their intervention ambivalently, however. He felt sure they were only paying up so they could somehow negate the problem of Sam being his lover by turning him into a kind of estate handyman. When he shared his doubts, Alison told him not to be so paranoid.

‘The work needs doing,’ she said reasonably. ‘It’s nicer to pay somebody we know and love than have your peace and quiet invaded by a load of strangers with noisy radios and friends in the villages they can gossip to.’

‘So you
are
embarrassed by us. You’re trying to keep us quiet now!’

‘Jamie. Think a little.’ Alison sat on the arm of Jamie’s chair and stroked his hair off his face. ‘Does that honestly seem likely?’

‘Suppose not,’ he conceded, after a moment, but his doubts remained.

‘As a matter of fact,’ she went on, ‘I’m not as poor as Ol’ Big Hair seems to think. When she’s paid for the repointing – which she should have paid for years ago in any case – I’ll see if I can get Sam to fix some of those rotten windows upstairs.’

Jamie was loath to admit it, but he was jealous sometimes of the place Sam had begun to carve, in his own right, in his family’s heart. If he was dozing upstairs and Miriam or Alison rang, he would lie there listening to the bluff ease with which Sam now took their calls and chatted with them, resenting it and not knowing why. Now that his grandfather could no longer avoid Sam indefinitely, the two of them had begun to talk as well, sporadically. Their relations were not helped, however, by Sam reasserting his rights to much of Jamie’s time his grandfather had been enjoying alone. Jamie’s grandfather plainly resented the change, but could not voice his resentment without openly recognising the reason
why
Sam had a prior claim on Jamie’s time. They were stiff with one another and uncomprehending. His grandfather affected to find Sam’s Plymouth accent impenetrable, while Sam claimed the other’s ‘German’ manner was forbidding.

‘It’s like being back in school,’ he protested. ‘I look at him and I don’t know what to say.’

Sam’s loving restoration of the motorbike, however, and the older man’s subsequent gift of it, marked a turning-point between them. At first they had called each other nothing at all, contenting themselves with ‘you’ to one another’s faces and with Grumps and Your Associate respectively behind one another’s backs, but Jamie knew that he could not in all honesty continue to claim that his grandfather treated his lover as an employee once they were on first name terms. Sam was the only one of Jamie’s friends ever to be allowed to refer to the great man as anything other than Mr Pepper. It happened quite suddenly. ‘What’s this then, Edward?’ Sam asked one evening, when a piece of music had caught his attention. Jamie looked up, surprised, thinking a fourth person had walked into the room.

Sam would gaily broach the unbroachable subjects too: ‘So you were too young to know any Nazis personally?’ he asked, and, ‘If you’re Jewish, how come Jamie isn’t?’ and, another time which had really made Jamie cringe, ‘So what did you do in the war, then, Edward?’

Sam and Edward talked as equals in a way that Jamie and his grandfather could never begin to do. Sam began to go over to the studio on his own and borrowed discs and tapes to play, listening to them with a perseverance that made Jamie suspect his grandfather of seriously undertaking his lover’s musical education.

‘Just don’t start taking piano lessons from him,’ he warned.

As well as telling him what to listen to or how to listen to it, his grandfather began to tell Sam things about Jamie. Jamie was, after all, their most solid common ground, however much the older man fought shy of understanding the younger ones’ relations.

‘You never said you sang,’ Sam confronted Jamie after supper one evening.

‘I don’t.’

‘But you
did
.’

‘It’s not important.’

‘Sing for me, then.’ Sam grinned, as though expecting tricks from a dog.

‘I can’t. Not any more. It would be embarrassing.’

‘Edward thinks it would help strengthen your lungs again. He says he used to sing when he was getting over TB.’ Jamie threw a glance across the hall to his grandfather who was frowning beneath a standard lamp over one of the glossy magazines Jamie was addicted to and which he found so shockingly superficial.

‘Oh does he now?’

His grandfather nodded without looking up from his article.

‘I was talking to Dr Marshall about it,’ he said, turning a page. ‘I think the regular breathing and controlled exhalation might help you overcome your shortness of breath.’

‘I can do breathing exercises without singing,’ Jamie snorted. ‘I do them when I go for my walks.’

His grandfather and Sam exchanged a glance that spoke of private understanding and his grandfather shrugged patiently.

‘As you see fit,’ he sighed.

Jamie understood, then, what it was he so resented in Sam’s slowly developing intimacy with his relatives. It was nothing as ordinary as jealousy – it had been in his power, after all, to keep Sam away from them and he had chosen not to. Rather, what upset him was that their behaviour implied that Sam was now easier to talk to than
he
was; he had become the sick person over whose bed and head and wheelchair people talked, and Sam had become the cheery nurse to whom visitors at the bedside preferred to direct their conversation.

This realisation was all it took to bring Jamie to a decision regarding his future, or lack of it. Without telling Sam, he contacted Geraint, the facilitator at the HIV support group he had been to in London, and asked to be sent the relevant forms for making both his will and his living will. In the one he left everything to Sam; car, flat, contents, everything, with the exception of some money and the idol, which he left to Alison. In the other, he made it quite clear that, in the event of his next life-threatening illness, he had no desire to receive treatment or medication beyond what was needed to make him comfortable. He still lacked the courage to stop taking the experimental drug he was currently prescribed, fearful of the mysterious symptoms that might replace side-effects which, however unpleasant, were at least a known and predictable evil. He intended to take the forms to a solicitor in Rexbridge and have his signatures witnessed by strangers. There was no need to trouble Sam with the matter before the relevant emergency arose.

One night he was sitting up in bed rereading the papers to make sure he had mentioned everything that was necessary. Sam was downstairs with his grandfather. The telephone rang. Sam answered and talked for a while, indistinctly, then hung up. Insidious as an outbreak of fire on a hearthside rug, an argument developed between the two men. Their words were indecipherable at first, with only a new aggressive punchiness in their phrasing betraying a change in mood, then their voices were raised and Jamie began to hear more clearly.

‘Well what would
you
fucking call it?!’ Sam suddenly shouted.

‘Horror. Tragedy, by all means,’ his grandfather shouted back. ‘But only that.’

‘
Only
that?’

‘No-one is being murdered. A disease is not a murder.’

‘It
is
when they sit on their arses and watch it spreading.’

‘They? Always this mythical They.’

Jamie sat bolt upright, straining his ears and pushing the papers beneath a magazine. Even at this distance he could feel their anger as an electric stiffening of the air, and was relieved once he heard the front door slam. Even when he had tried to make him leave, all those months before, Sam had been angered but not this furious. Jamie had no doubt that if his grandfather had stayed in the house, Sam would have lashed out at him with something harder than words. In confirmation of his fears, he heard Sam kicking out at furniture, shouting to the empty hall.

‘Fuck!’ he yelled and Jamie heard something fly across the floor with a splintering sound. ‘Fuck!’ Glass smashed.

‘Sam?’ Jamie called out. ‘Sam?’

Gone were the days when Jamie could spring out of bed. He set his feet carefully on the floor, shuffling them into the slippers Miriam had insisted he start wearing about the house, pulled his towelling gown about him and rolled forward into an uneasy standing position. Hardly waiting for the dizziness to pass, he made for the landing and, clutching the banister, headed downstairs.

It was only a bottle and the coffee table. Just as Jamie rounded the foot of the stairs, Sam muttered under his breath, lashing out at a big chunk of glass with his toe, sending it skittering across the floor through the puddle of red wine.

‘Stupid old git,’ he spat.

‘Sam?’

‘Fuck!’ Sam kicked at the armchair, though less vigorously.

‘What the hell happened? What did he say?’ Jamie had to sit down. He sank on to the sofa, pulling his feet up out of the draught. Sam was muttering to himself, pacing. He began to clear up the glass.

‘Leave that for a bit,’ Jamie told him. ‘The floor’s stained already. It won’t show.’

‘Someone’ll cut themselves,’ Sam insisted crossly, then swore again, dropping a chunk of glass as he cut his finger.

‘Leave it. Here. Come and tell me.’

The pain cut through Sam’s temper. He stared down as blood oozed from his finger tip and splashed into the wine. He put his finger in his mouth and sucked.

‘I nearly punched him,’ he mumbled, his mouth full, finally making eye contact.

‘I’m glad you didn’t.’ Jamie patted the sofa beside him. Shamed now, Sam came to sit.

‘Hug,’ Jamie told him. Sam hugged him.

‘You’ll get cold,’ he said.

‘No I won’t. What happened?’

Sam sighed, exasperated at the memory.

‘Well that was Alison who rang earlier. I thought you were asleep. Sorry.’

‘That’s okay.’

Sam pulled Jamie to lean against his chest, hugging him with his legs for warmth as he talked.

‘She was in a right state. She’s just had Sandy on the phone. The lease is up for renewal on the helpline office and the rent’s going up by nearly double. They’re forcing them out on the street.’