No laughter today, and no Sylvie either. Leonard was alone in a place that diagnosed and treated ‘communicable diseases’. Communicable diseases indeed. Everyone knew that this clinic did not deal with measles, mumps or the latest strain of flu.

He had arrived at nine o’clock, hoping to be in and out before anyone else turned up, but with seven people already seated in the waiting area, he had badly misjudged. He hesitated in the doorway, but guilt and responsibility, together with the now unbearable torment of not knowing his HIV status, propelled him forward. He approached the elder of two receptionists, and a minute later was directed to a seat with a sheaf of questions to complete.

This was his third visit to the clinic. On the other occasions, it was to treat something he’d picked up — a dose of gonorrhoea the first time, and a nasty seeping lesion the second. As he settled himself in a seat, he recalled his mother’s belief that good luck ran in threes; he desperately hoped that bad luck followed a different maths.

When first he’d attended here, he assumed that the detailed questionnaire would eliminate the need for an embarrassing face-to-face interview. He was painfully disabused of this when the questionnaire was used to shape a shockingly intrusive interrogation. Apparently, the state required reporting of certain diseases, including nearly all the STDs, and mandatory reporting itself required a detailed narrative around each occurrence of any of the mandated conditions. On both previous occasions he had experienced the interview as torture. He expected worse today.

Two of the people in the waiting area, much the same age as Andrew, were wearing identical wedding rings; Leonard wondered what possibly could have brought them here. The man was dressed in a suit, the girl in a stylish skirt and jacket; their arms were linked and they were talking together in hushed voices. At one point the wife removed a thread from her husband’s collar. It was such an easy, intimate gesture that Leonard thought it impossible that this could be a couple in which one member had brought an STD to the marital bed after illicit sex elsewhere. They looked so close and loving — like him and Sylvie, he supposed. But then, like him and Sylvie, appearances might be deceptive.

This was not the case with the others in the room. There was a long-limbed gaunt man, probably a good deal younger than Leonard, but with a face carved by deep wrinkles, he could have been mistaken for seventy. He had coated his face in thick, clay-coloured make-up, which, rather than concealing the great cracks, set them in greater relief. He was dressed in jeans and a frilly jacket, and on his feet were red stilettos. His hair, bleached the colour of straw, was piled in a nest on the top of his head. He was intent on his nails, removing them carefully one by one, and putting them into a matchbox.