“That’s not true,” I said, surprised by his words. “It was me who looked up to you. You were everything I wanted to be.”
“So were you,” he said. “You were kind and thoughtful and decent. You were my friend. At least that’s what I thought. I didn’t hang out with you for fourteen years because I wanted someone following me around like a puppy. It was because I liked being around you.”
“My friendship was genuine,” I said. “I couldn’t help how I felt. If I had told you—”
“That day in the church, when you tried to jump me—”
“I didn’t try to jump you,” I said.
“Sure you did. And you said that you’d been in love with me ever since we were children.”
“I didn’t know what I was talking about,” I said. “Look, I was young, I was inexperienced. And I was frightened at what I was getting myself into.”
“So you’re saying that you made it all up?” he asked. “That you didn’t have those feelings for me at all?”
“No, of course not. I did have those feelings for you. I still do. But that wasn’t why I was friends with you. I was friends with you because you made me feel happy.”
“And because you wanted to fuck me. Well, I bet you don’t want to fuck me anymore, do you?”
I winced at the bitter way he said it and, more so, because of course it was true. How many times during my teenage years and beyond had I fantasized about him, imagined what it would be like if somehow the two of us could be together, if I could lure him back to my flat, get him drunk and hope that he might reach for me in a moment of weakness when there was no girl around to satisfy his needs. Hundreds, probably. Thousands. I could hardly deny that a large part of our friendship was, for me at least, based on a lie.
“I couldn’t help how I felt,” I repeated.
“You could have talked to me about it,” he said. “Much earlier. I would have understood.”
“But you wouldn’t have,” I said. “I know you wouldn’t have. Nobody did back then. Not in Ireland. Even today it’s still illegal, for Christ’s sake, to be gay in Ireland, do you realize that? And it’s 1987 now, not 1940. You wouldn’t have. You say that now but that’s because it’s now. You wouldn’t have,” I insisted.
“I went to one of your groups, you know,” he said, raising a hand to silence me. “When I was first diagnosed with HIV. I went to a group in Brooklyn run by some priest and there were eight or nine guys in the room, all of them at different stages of the disease, and each one looked closer to death than the one next to him, and they were holding hands and sharing stories about fucking strangers in bathhouses and saunas and cruising and all that shit, and I looked around and do you know something, it made me absolutely sick to realize that I was even there, to think that I had anything in common with any of those degenerates.”
“What makes you so different?” I asked. “You fucked any girl that moved.”
“It’s completely different.”
“How? Explain it to me.”
“Because that’s normal.”
“Oh fuck normal,” I said. “I thought you had a bit more originality than that. Weren’t you supposed to be the rebellious one?”
“I never claimed to be,” he said, trying to sit up. “I just liked girls, that’s all. You wouldn’t understand.”
“You fucked a lot of girls. I fucked a lot of guys. So what?”
“It’s different,” he insisted, practically spitting out the words.
“Calm down,” I said, glancing up at one of the monitors attached to his body. “Your blood pressure is getting too high.”
“Fuck my blood pressure,” he said. “Maybe it can kill me before this disease does. The point is, I sat there in Brooklyn while this priest poured out his platitudes and told us all that we had to make peace with the world and with God while we were still alive, and I looked around at the other people in the group and do you know something, it was as if they were happy to be dying. There they were, grinning away at each other and showing their scars and bruises and discolorations and talking about boys they’d screwed in the toilets at some queer club, and all I wanted to do was push them up against the wall, one by one, and smash their fucking faces in. Put them out of their misery forever. I never went back. I felt like planting a fucking bomb at the place. You see the irony of this, don’t you?” he said finally after a lengthy pause when he seemed to struggle to get some control over his emotions again.
“What?” I asked. “What’s the irony?”
“Well, by rights it should be the other way round, shouldn’t it?” he asked. “You should be lying in this bed rotting away from the inside out and I should be sitting over there, looking down at you with puppy-dog eyes and wondering where I’m going for dinner when I can eventually get the fuck out of this room.”
“That’s not what I’m thinking,” I said.
“Sure you are.”
“No, I’m not,” I insisted.
“Then what are you thinking? Because I know for sure that’s what I’d be thinking if I was in your place.”
“That I wish we could go back in time, both of us, and do things better or differently. We’ve both been fucked over by our natures, can’t you see that? Seriously, Julian, sometimes I wished I was a fucking eunuch. It would have made life a lot easier. And if you don’t want me here, well what about having someone you love come over? Where’s your family? Why don’t you tell them?”
“Because I don’t want them to know. There’s hardly anyone left anyway. My mother’s long gone. Max died a few years ago.”
“No! How?”
“Heart attack. And other than that there was only Alice and Liam, and I don’t want my sister knowing anything about this.”
“I wondered when her name would come up,” I said tentatively. “Can we talk about her?”
He gave a bitter smile. “We can,” he said. “But be careful what you say. I may be lying in this hospital bed, but there’s still no one on this planet whom I love more than her.”
“What I did all those years ago,” I said, “It was terrible. You don’t have to tell me. It’s something that I’ve had to live with. I hate myself for it.”
“No, you don’t. That’s just a thing that people say.”
“I do.”
“Well, at least you apologized,” he said. “When you wrote to her afterward, I mean, and threw yourself on her mercy and begged her forgiveness for humiliating her in front of three hundred people, including the President of Ireland, not to mention ruining her entire life. The second guy who had done that in a couple of years. Oh no, wait, I’m wrong, amn’t I? Because you never wrote to her at all. You just left her there. You weren’t even man enough to say sorry. And you knew what she’d been through before when she’d been stood up at the altar by that fucker Fergus. You knew all about that. Only this time she got as far as the altar but not out the other side of the reception. Jesus Christ, how could you have done it? Do you have no decency, Cyril?”
“You made me do it,” I said.