“No, it isn’t. There are plenty of straight patients on this floor.”
“It’s the reason,” he insisted.
I came closer to him now and sat down on a chair. Despite the trauma that the disease had done to his face and body, I could tell that, when he had been healthy, he would have been a good-looking boy. His dark hair, which was cropped close to his skull now, complemented his eyes, which were bright blue and could not be dulled by the worst efforts of the disease.
“Do you remember when we were kids,” he said eventually, turning to me again, “the time we took the sleigh up to Ratchet Hill on Christmas morning? You said that if we held on to the sides as tightly as we could, then we’d be OK? But you fell off and sprained your ankle and Mom blamed me for it and I was grounded for a week?”
“I don’t think that was me,” I said gently. “Was that your brother, Philip? Are you thinking about your brother?”
He turned his head and stared at me for a moment and frowned. “Oh yes,” he said, turning away again. “I thought you were James. You’re not James, are you?”
“No, I’m Cyril,” I said.
“Does your ankle still get sore in cold weather?”
“No,” I told him. “No, it healed. It’s fine now.”
“Good.”
A nurse came in and ignored us both as she took a reading from one of the monitors, then changed his IV bag before leaving again. As she did so, I glanced toward the bedside table where copies of The Sound and the Fury and Catch-22 were piled one on top of the other.
“You’re a reader,” I said.
“Of course,” he replied. “I told you, I study Literature.”
“Did you want to write? Like Ignac?”
“No, I wanted to teach. I still do.”
“Anne Tyler’s from Baltimore, isn’t she?” I asked, and he nodded. “I’ve read a few of her books. I liked them very much.”
“I met her once,” he said. “I worked part-time in a bookshop when I was in high school. She came in to buy some Christmas presents and I went bright red I was so in awe of her.”
I smiled and then, to my horror, I saw tears beginning to stream down his face.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You should go. You don’t want to see me making a fool of myself.”
“It’s fine,” I told him. “And you’re not making a fool of yourself. I can’t begin to imagine what you’re going through. Can you…” I hesitated, uncertain whether I should even ask. “Do you want to tell me what brought you here?”
“It’s ironic really,” he said. “They say that you’re most at risk of catching AIDS if you’re promiscuous. Guess how many people I’ve had sex with?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
“One.”
“Christ,” I said.
“One, and even then it was only once. I’ve had sex one single time in my entire life and that’s what brought me here.”
I said nothing. What was there to say?
“I was still a virgin when I came to New York,” he continued. “I was such a shy kid. Back in high school I had crushes on practically every guy I knew, but I never acted on any of them and never told anyone that I was gay. They would have beaten me up if they’d known. They would have killed me. That’s why I wanted to study here. I thought that maybe I could find a new life for myself. But it wasn’t easy. For the first six months, I stayed in my dorm room, jerking off, frightened to go to any clubs or bars. And then one night I did. I just decided, Fuck it. And it felt so good once I was inside. I felt like I belonged somewhere for the first time in my life. I’ll never forget that sensation. How difficult it was to walk through the doors and how easy it felt once I was inside. Like I was where I was supposed to be. And then some guy took me home, the first guy who talked to me. He wasn’t even hot. Jesus, he was old. Old enough to be my father. I wasn’t even attracted to him. But I was so desperate to get laid, to lose it, you know? And frightened of staying in a club where I didn’t even understand the rules. So I went home with him and we had sex. It lasted about twenty minutes. And then I threw my clothes back on and ran back home. I didn’t even know his name. And that was it. That’s how I got it.” He took a long breath and shook his head. “Isn’t that just the worst thing you ever heard?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, reaching out and putting my hand under the tarpaulin to take his in mine. His skin felt paper-thin and I feared that if I squeezed too hard I would hear his fingers break beneath the pressure. “The universe is a fucked-up place.”
“Will you tell Mom I’m sorry when you see her?” he asked. “Tell her that if I could go back I’d never have done it?”
“I’m not James,” I said quietly, squeezing his hand. “I’m Cyril.”
“Do you promise you’ll tell her?”
“I promise.”
“Good.”
I took my hand back and he shifted a little in the bed. “Are you tired?” I asked.
“I am,” he said. “I think I’ll get some sleep. Will you come back and see me again?”
“I will,” I told him. “I can come in tomorrow if you like?”
“I have classes in the morning,” he said, his eyes starting to close now. “Let’s catch up on Saturday.”
“I’ll come back to see you tomorrow,” I said, standing up and watching over him for a few minutes as he drifted off to sleep.
Emily
The noises emerging from Ignac’s room told me that he and Emily were at home and my heart sank deeper than the Titanic on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. I made sure to close the front door with as much force as I could and coughed a few times to give them notice that I was back, and my reward was a series of giggles followed by a hushed silence as I made my way into the kitchen.
Five minutes later, sitting at the table with a cup of coffee and flicking through a copy of Rolling Stone that Bastiaan had left there, I glanced up as Emily came in, barefoot and wearing one of Ignac’s shirts open halfway down her chest, revealing a little more of her breasts than I really needed to see. Her denim shorts were cut off high up the thigh and the top button was noticeably open while her hair, which she normally wore up on her head in a messy bird’s nest, was hanging loose around her shoulders.
“Hey, Mr. Avery,” she said in a sing-song voice, wandering over to open the fridge.
“Please, call me Cyril,” I told her.
“I can’t say that name,” she said, waving her hand in the air and pulling a face as if I’d made some perverted request of her. “It’s a weird name. Every time I hear it I think Cyril the Squirrel.”
I turned around with a jolt, recalling how Bridget Simpson had insisted on calling me by that very name some twenty-eight years earlier in the Palace Bar on Westmoreland Street. Bridget, Mary-Margaret and Behan were all dead now, of course, and Julian? Well, I had no idea where Julian was.
“What?” she asked, turning around. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. You’re not having some type of stroke, are you? It’s not uncommon in men your age.”