“Billy, the guy at the reception desk, got sick. He was the first we knew, we had heard about other people, and we had read the newspapers. But he started turning up for work looking wretched, and taking time off. Frank thought he was on drugs and was going to fire him. And then he realized what it was. I remember him coming into my office saying ‘Billy’s got AIDS.’ The poor guy was crying in Frank’s office. We took him home. Frank kept him on the payroll and paid his medical bills, but he deteriorated really fast, he died of pneumonia. We couldn’t believe it had happened. We went to the funeral and met his family. And then it happened all around us. You know the story, everybody knows the story. And because AIDS was all so public, so much a part of the news, we felt that it belonged out there somewhere. The more we read about it, and—I know this sounds strange—the more people we knew who were infected and dying, the less we believed it could have anything to do with us. We were under no illusions about it: if it got you, you were gone. But we thought that it had passed us by—that we had been together for two or three years, and this meant we had missed all those opportunities to become infected.

“I noticed Frank’s weight going down, but he was trying to lose weight anyway. I noticed him not finishing his meals. And I knew at some stage, months before any diagnosis, that he had a problem. And I suppose he knew too. And we carried on. I hoped that he would put off going to a doctor for as long as possible. We never talked about it. He must have known that I knew. We would even speculate about friends who we thought might be sick. But Frank was sick. He knew that if there was an important piece of business someone else should go. He worked from his desk. He took over the writing side of things, the mailing lists and the legal stuff. I still thought that he might go to a doctor and be told that it was something else. I let myself imagine that it was something else.