Kid Gloves Read online

  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.

  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. Perhap
s 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.

  It’s true, though, in its way, that he trained me. He made me something I wasn’t before, not lovable (cuddly toy) but love-able. Capable of responding without reservations.

  In the last section that we filmed he describes Henderson, the Auckland suburb where he grew up: the orchards, the primary school, the mountain range. When Beverley can’t see the mountains, rain is on the way and it’s time to get the washing in off the line. He falls peaceably silent. The camera, going for an arty effect far beyond my actual competence as a video operator, focusses on the slow bounce of his foot in its bedsock.

  In 1989 people thought of the world as being well connected by its media, but the time difference between London and Auckland made phone calls impractical, and we relied on the postal service almost as much as people had in the nineteenth century. To start with I wrote letters, but Michael talked me into trying his own preferred medium, the tape cassette. Thrifty and unsentimental, he would listen to my voice on a tape, then record over it and send it back. His style was loose and free-ranging – he might go on chatting to me while blood was being taken, then say afterwards that the stocky male nurse who had done the procedure was ‘very you’. There came a time when he had radiotherapy on a Kaposi’s sarcoma lesion in his mouth, which made his beard fall out in a geometrically square patch. He sent me a photograph of the damage, perhaps to prepare me in the event of our seeing each other b
efore it could grow back, though he always discouraged me from making the trip, saying he only wanted to see me if he could show me around and have some fun himself. Perhaps he just sent me the mortifying photo because, unsentimental again, he had to deal with it, so why shouldn’t I?

  When Michael’s family phoned me at the beginning of May to say that he was dying, there were still a couple of his tapes in the post. It was too much for me to listen to them when they arrived, and I never have, which feels like the right decision. I like the feeling that there are unexplored bits of Michael left over, which I could in theory dip into at any time, and so I will never run out.

  The most painful moment in my whole relationship with Dad came the day after Michael’s death. Mum phoned me in Highbury to express her condolences. Then she pronounced a formula I had always hated, without being able to find an effective way to expose it in all its awfulness.

  Dad would like a word.

  It wasn’t quite that a grown man was using his wife as a switchboard operator, to place a call for him. That would just be inconsiderate and patronizing. It was so much worse: he was using her as an unacknowledged warm-up act, to guarantee a reception he couldn’t rely on without her help.

  Oi, mate! Earn your own intimacy. Intimacy is not transferable. No piggyback, no hitch-hiking. On your bike, your honour. There’s no Plus One.

  Question: how is it different for a son to use his mother as a conduit of information to the patriarch (‘Oh by the way, Mae West is Dead comes out next week, there will probably be some reviews’, ‘Mario died last night, while I was there. I’m fine’) and for a father to use his wife to establish contact with a son without being expected to beg …?