“Alestra and I could move up there and we could let the basement, which is almost self-contained.”
Trish shook her head. She redecorated the room as a library.
The whole family came for Christmas, as usual. Doug wasn’t looking well. His happiness was clearly faked. He had bought expensive presents for all the children, but watching them opening presents he almost cried. On Boxing Day as Trish bundled up to go out for her walk he grabbed his jacket and said he would come too.
They walked along the canal bank in silence for a while. “What’s wrong?” Trish asked.
“I’m not sure whether I should tell you.”
“You should definitely tell me,” Trish said. “Whatever it is. I’m your mother.”
“I have AIDS,” Doug said. “It’s so unfair. I was clean. I got off the smack, you know I did, I came here to do it. But sometime back then, sharing needles…” he trailed off.
Trish could hardly take it in. “I thought it was a gay plague,” she said, and thought at once of Mark. She had never told any of the children about that. It felt like an invasion of Mark’s privacy.
“It’s passed through blood, apparently, and if you share needles you can get it that way.” Doug stared out over the gray water. A brightly painted canal barge passed them, moving slowly north. A little white terrier on the deck barked at them.
“Are you sick?”
“I’m on drugs that are supposed to help, but they just seem to make me sicker. It’s an immune deficiency, which means that if I catch anything at all it could just kill me, like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“Oh Doug!” Trish opened her arms and hugged him. “What a horrible thing. What are you going to do? Do you want to come home?”
“I want to write songs for AIDS awareness, and raise money for helping people who have it, and for a cure,” he said. “If I have time. While I can. If I—when I get sick, I’d like to come home.”
“How long will it be?” Trish asked.
“Impossible to tell.” Doug ground his teeth. “I’ll let you know when I know. And I’m going to tell the others too, even though Helen will fuss and Cathy will have a fit. There’s a lot of stigma about AIDS that there shouldn’t be, and I’m going to be public about it, so they’ll know anyway. But I wanted to tell them myself.”
“I’m proud of you,” Trish said. “You’re being so brave and responsible.”
“You’re crying, Mum,” Doug pointed out.
“Shouldn’t I be crying, hearing that my son has an incurable illness?”
That evening when the children were in bed, Doug told the others. Helen and Don had gone home, so he had to break it to her separately the next day.
It took him three years to die. For the first two of those years he was constantly in the public eye, writing and performing for AIDS charities. Then, in August 1992 he got sick and came home. It was like being under siege, reporters constantly camped on the doorstep. Alestra was just about to leave for university, and hated being photographed and seeing her picture in the tabloids.
“It’s my fault,” Doug said. “I made myself news, and I can’t turn that off because I don’t like it. I’ll have to go into hiding.”
“I’ll come with you,” Trish said.
“It’ll mean giving up your classes and everything.”
“Not for long. And you’re more important.”
They didn’t go far. Doug went into a hospice in Grange-over-Sands. It was run by Buddhists, but after she got used to the oddity of seeing nurses in orange robes that didn’t seem strange. Trish stayed nearby in a guest house. The hospice had a central courtyard with sand neatly raked around stones in a Zen pattern. All the rooms opened onto a cloister that ran around this courtyard. The cloister was full of benches. The courtyard had a glass roof. “I expect in a warm place it would be open to the sky, but they made concessions to the weather,” Trish said.
They could also sit on benches in front of the hospice, where they could see Morecambe and the nuclear power station over the water—often they could see Lancaster’s microclimate and a sharp-edge of rain that was falling there while in Grange the sun shone. Doug was taking painkillers and the pain came through all the same. He played the guitar until he was too weak. They walked slowly into the village and watched ducks in the duck pond, some of them ridiculous colors. Trish went home sometimes to collect things they needed and see Bethany; Doug stayed where he was.
In those strange months in Grange, Trish noticed that she was becoming forgetful. She would lose words—she’d be in the middle of saying something and forget how she had meant to end her sentence. She’d forget what something was called, or the name of an author. Once she forgot the word “Korea” and had to say “That peninsula near China, where there was a war in the Fifties.” She remembered her mother and felt a cold dread.