This Sunday morning, with no particular destination in mind, Leonard had set off soon after breakfast. Clad in overcoat and blue beret, he strode briskly and rhythmically eastward. His head ached constantly these days, his poor brain seizing pain as if it were its only friend; it was particularly insistent this morning. After about two hours, he found himself somewhere in Caulfield or Carnegie. The sun glared with a piercing wintry white, he pulled his beret lower, and although he should have been heading back, he ambled on. There had been a couple of spring-like days recently, but today the weather had returned to winter — a relatively mild winter, according to the weather bureau, yet it had felt perpetually cold to him. He had no idea how he would make it to the end of the year, much less the end of his life.

Things with Sylvie had settled, but apart from her letter project, she had little need of him. She had changed these past months, had become more independent, perhaps having decided she could no longer depend on him. She didn’t seem unhappy, despite what had happened between them, just different. Andrew hadn’t needed him for years. And Winston, who had promised him a lifetime, had tossed him out like old milk.

Every day found him in a perpetual tussle with memory. He knew that if he tried not to think about Winston he would suffer less, but at the same time he wanted to remember all that he once had in order to feel less alone. Perhaps the worst of it was he’d become so accustomed to his parallel lives that, with one suddenly shut down, he felt strange to himself. His routines were different, his emotional world was different, his working days were different; he might well have been exiled to another life.

He was gradually coming to terms with the changes when his old life had intruded in the worst possible way. A man he could hardly remember, a man with whom he’d had a short affair not long before he met Winston, this man was ‘doing the right thing’ by contacting former sexual partners to let them know he had tested positive for HIV. From the little Leonard could glean during the brief telephone call, the man actually had full-blown AIDS.

Neither Winston nor he had taken the test. Winston had had only a handful of sexual partners in his entire life; as for himself, the men infected with AIDS were promiscuous homosexuals (definitely not him), and bisexuals (not him either). As to what he was: some men frequent prostitutes, others watch porn, others are turned on by women’s feet, or knickers, or rolls of fat; he was a married man who was turned on by sex with other men.