Read Thunder in the Blood for Free Online

him.
    ‘I’ve fallen in love with you,’ he said quietly. ‘You’re supposed to have guessed. Your line of work…’
    I blinked. ‘What?’
    ‘Love. I’ve fallen in love with you.’ He paused. ‘I’ve thought about some of the other words, but love comes closest.’
    ‘Why?’ I said. ‘When?’
    I winced at the questions. They sounded, at best, infantile, but I was trying to catch my breath, wondering why on earth I hadn’t picked up the signals, seen the smoke in the wind, headed off this appalling scene. Intelligence, for God’s sake. Analysis. What a joke. I withdrew my hand, reaching for my drink.
    ‘You’re pissed,’ I said gently.
    ‘No.’
    ‘It’s the heat.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Summer flu.’
    Rory gazed at me for a moment. ‘Fuck off,’ he said softly. ‘At least allow me to do it properly.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Make a fool of myself.’
    ‘You’re not.’ I reached across the table again and took hishand. ‘You’re a lovely man. You’ve got a lovely wife and great kids and you shouldn’t be living up here. Miles away from them.’
    Rory nodded, thinking about it. His hand was warm in mine. ‘And you?’ he said.
    ‘I’ve got a terrible memory. Famous for it.’
    ‘Meaning?’
    ‘You never said it.’
    He looked at me for a long time, unconvinced. I’d never seen him so deflated, so utterly forlorn. He looked about twelve. Or seventy.
    ‘Yeah,’ he muttered at last. ‘I never said it. You’re right.’
    We went back to Fulham on his motor bike. Outside the flat, he pulled into the kerb and waited for me to get off. I stood on the pavement, shaking out my hair, offering him the spare helmet.
    ‘Thanks,’ I said.
    Rory took the helmet and attached it to the back pannier. He hadn’t killed the engine and he was trying his best not to look at me. I stepped towards him, calm at last, back in control. This was a friendship I didn’t want to lose. There’d been a misunderstanding. He’d simply got things out of perspective. A little time and it would all sort itself out. I put my hand on his arm.
    ‘Do you want to come up?’ I said. ‘Coffee? Something to eat?’ I shrugged. ‘Whatever?’
    He stood upright, straddling the machine, adjusting the buckle on his own helmet. He looked, if anything, angry. ‘Christ no,’ he said, his voice muffled. ‘God forbid!’

3
    I didn’t see Rory again for nearly four years and by that time events had taken both Wesley and me by the scruff of the neck. In my case, it meant what my bosses termed ‘a career adjustment’. In Wesley’s case, it was rather more serious.
    The fifteenth of June 1987 was the day it first occurred to Wesley that an early death might be less than physically pleasant. Dying before his time was something he’d almost come to terms with, but somehow he’d never got round to translating the graph lines and the paragraphs of cold prose into a physical reality. The last thing he seems to have expected was pain.
    By now, he was keeping a diary in earnest. Lots of HIV positives do it. It’s meant to be a help and I suspect it probably is, a private cupboard for storing the darker and less acceptable nightmares. Wesley kept his on a series of lined pads, which he later filed in the same ring binders I’ve raided for some of the earlier material. There are four of them in all. I had a chance to read them before he died and we discussed some of the key bits. What follows is the closest I can get to the way it must have felt for him. Reproducing the entries themselves, for June and July 1987, would be pointless. He was so ill, and so frightened, he could scarcely manage to complete a sentence.
    It began with a headache and a general feeling of nausea. Wesley had been away, in southern Ireland, spending some of Aldridge’s features budget on a big, ambitious story about drug smuggling. He’d driven round the coves of West Cork and Kerry, armed with leads from contacts he’d made in a number of North London pubs. He