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visitors was his mother, a small, timid woman of whom he saw very little. She lived out on the coast in Essex, and Wesley had never told her a word about his HIV. Mark, alarmed enough to phone her, had been less than specific and when she arrived, the consultant obliged Wesley with a vague reference to viral pneumonia. She stayed for half an hour, her woollen gloves folded on her lap, telling Wesley how terrible the trains were.
    Another visitor was Aldridge. He sat by the bed for the best part of an afternoon, reviewing the prospects for Wesley’s Irish drugs story, trying to mask how shocked he felt, what a difference a week could make to someone he thought he knew well. At the end of the visit, the nurses wheeling the screens into place around the bed, he bent quickly to Wesley’s ear and promised to return as soon as he could, but Wesley reached up, caught a fold of his jacket and shook his head. He didn’t want Aldridge to see himthis way. He’d get better, quicker, on his own. Time, he muttered as Aldridge turned away. Just give me a bit of time.
    The tests, at first, revealed nothing. The consultant, aware of Wesley’s HIV, told him that it could be any of a dozen infections. His immune system wasn’t working too well. Some bug, resident or otherwise, had got the upper hand for a while. Wesley thought about it, the hot dark spaces of his body crawling with infection. He felt, he said, a sense of betrayal. Not by fate. Not by the guy in New York. But by the feeble chemistry of his own system. Sitting in a bath in the tiny tiled room at the end of the ward, he looked down at his pale flesh, astonished at how thin he’d become. As he tried to shave, his eyes followed the razor in the mirror, exploring unfamiliar territory, the skin tauter, thinner. Even the bone beneath, he told me later, felt raw to the touch.
    After the first bout of fever came the depression. Wesley lay in the bed, quite still, a needle in his arm dripping yet more antibiotics. When the trolleys from the kitchen appeared, clattering down the ward, he shut his eyes and turned his head into the pillow. The smell of food, any food, made him want to vomit and he tried to visualize other things, scenes from his recent trip to Ireland, the shape of a fold of land, the twists and turns of a particular conversation, peat smoke shredding in the wind, fat little parcels of cloud bellying in from the Atlantic. Once or twice he tried to read, picking up a paper, letting his eyes wander down the page, unable, for the first time in his life, to make sense of any of it. This failure of concentration compounded the physical hurt, and by the tenth day he was wondering whether there was any point in carrying on. Part of him, an old man already, had had enough. But there was another part, too, that was still angry, still hurt, still determined to get better.
    A week later, the doctors no wiser, the fever returned and with it came yet more tests. Semi-delirious, Wesley tried to concentrate on counting the tiles in the ceiling while the nurse coated his upper body in KY jelly and a technician arrived with an ultrasound scanner. The pictures of his spleen and liver, though, revealed nothing, so the consultant decided to do a liver biopsy, half a syringe of local anaesthetic and two fine wires inserted through the body wall while Wesley lay immobile, on his side, forbidden to move for hour after hour. The following day, still inthe dark, they wheeled him away for a CT scan, inching his body through a big white plastic arch, building up a 3D picture of his stomach. Back in bed, surrounded by bottles of Badoit, Wesley felt worse than ever. Every bit of him hurt. The bits that touched the pillow hurt. The bits beneath the sheet hurt. The bits in contact with the mattress hurt. Even the soles of his feet hurt. Unable to sleep, he simply lay there, thinking about the next hour, and the hour after that, and all he felt was dread.
    Next morning, the consultant arrived. It was