The Travelling Hornplayer

by Barbara Trapido

  At lunch, where I feel obliged to put in an appearance, the Opus Dei picks on Benedict to carve, which he does, though he is the family’s only vegetarian. In place of roast leg of lamb and gravy, Benedict eats a mound of coarsely grated, oily looking Cheddar along with his roast potatoes and two veg and a little slosh of mint sauce. This is Mrs Ball’s idea of vegetarian cuisine. Then I take note of the china. Sunday best china, with a broad border of blackberry fool, interrupted, here and there, with white medallions and lots of gilt. Meissen china, I think. Click! Mice and china.

  ‘Pretty plates,’ I say.

  The Old Thing smiles at me. ‘They ought to be with my dear sister,’ she says and she sighs. Her sister, she tells me – her much older sister – left home very suddenly, soon after the end of the war, after which her portrait had its face turned to the wall. ‘A matter of the heart I believe,’ she says. ‘I was a very small girl at the time. Do you have a sister, Stella?’

  I never think about the Italian half-sister, the cot death person, but right now I feel the stigma of being an only child. And perhaps I feel the need to compete?

  ‘I had a sister who died,’ I say and then I feel cheap, remembering Ellen.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ says the Old Thing, touching my arm.

  Mid-morning, on Monday, there is a telephone call for me from Dr Sachs’s receptionist. She says will I hold, because the doctor would like a word with me.

  ‘Stella,’ says the voice of my saviour, my Jewish medicine man, ‘I would like you to come and see me tomorrow morning. Eleven o’clock?’ he says. ‘Can you come up to the hospital?’ He has a colleague he would like to have see me as well, he says. He gives me the address. I’m just to go to reception and ask for him, he says.

  I spend the day feeling light in the head. My burden is lifted. Dr Sachs will see me, not at his surgery in the city, but at the hospital. Things are moving for me. They are really moving fast. By supper time the next day my problem will be over. That is to say, my most immediate problem. And once that is over, I will feel strong and sorted. I will phone my grandmother and arrange to stay with her in Hampstead. I will even be brave and confront Izzy, who will be at my parents’ house until Wednesday, I’m pretty sure. He will have nowhere else to go till he starts Inter-railing, since he knows nobody south of the Scottish Borders.

  I will speak to my parents with a sort of distant adult dignity. Izzy will tell me that he longs for me, that he needs me, that he tosses at night without me, that he knows I know about Grania and that he’s terribly sorry – but Grania is nothing to him and it will never happen again. And shall he and I go Inter-railing after all? Yes? And shall we start from the week after next? Yes?

  I go into Newcastle with Pen and his father early in the morning. I say that I have some shopping to do. I sit in the back while we drive in almost complete silence. Pen drops me off at the shops and arranges to pick me up at the railway station because that is a place I know. He says they will return for me at exactly six o’clock. He asks if I’m sure that I will find enough things to do all day. If not, he will arrange for his mother to collect me, along with Helen and Agatha. I tell him it’s no problem. I will have lots to do.

  The Opus Dei follows this up with some predictably bigoted witticism about women, time and shopping. I wonder when it is that the Old Thing spends time shopping – other than to buy up half of Tesco’s to stuff down the family’s throat.

  ‘I’ll get my legs waxed if time hangs heavy,’ I say. I feel pleased with my repartee as I step out of the Rover. Only after I have waved them off does it occur to me that the old boy won’t have heard. He never hears a single word that I say.

  When they have gone, I take a taxi to the hospital, where I find Dr Sachs. Instead of directing me to a chair, he suggests that we go for a walk. We walk away from the building and down a grassed slope towards a wooden bench, where he directs me to sit down. All the while I have babbled at him about how good it is of him to see me so soon, and how much better I am feeling about everything, all thanks to him.

  ‘Stella,’ he says finally, once we are seated. ‘Prepare yourself. I have the results of your blood test.’ I turn sharply and stare at him. ‘You’ve tested HIV positive,’ he says.

  My heart drops eight centimetres in my chest. My lungs have no air. After a moment I recover myself. I speak with confidence. ‘But that’s impossible,’ I say. ‘There’s a mistake.’ Then I start to cry – Dragon Lady’s tears. No sound or movement, just a well of water that brims over and splashes onto my jeans. I do not cry because I believe Dr Sachs, but merely because I am deflated by the indignity and muddle of it. I cry for reasons of anticlimax.

  ‘It can’t be me because I’ve only ever slept with my boyfriend,’ I say.

  ‘Tell me about him,’ says Dr Sachs quietly.

  ‘He’s Scottish,’ I say, ‘from Dundee. But his father was Lebanese. He’s an art student in Edinburgh. He’s just graduated. He’s very good. He’s—’ I stop and look at him. Suddenly I’m quite angry. ‘Just because he’s Scottish,’ I say. ‘Just because everyone’s seen Trainspotting—’ Then I start shaking. After quite a long time, I say, ‘This isn’t happening to me, is it? Tell me it’s a mistake. Well, I know it’s a mistake.’

  ‘Either of you ever use drugs intravenously?’ he says.

  ‘No,’ I say, perhaps too quickly. Then I say, ‘Well, not me anyway. And – well – I’m pretty sure not him. Certainly not ever while I’ve known him. I mean, why should he? He’s so good. He’s brilliant. All he does is paint and—’ And what, Stella? Paint and what? And fuck? I wince. My voice begins to lose its certainty. ‘He smokes,’ I say. ‘He drinks lager, that’s all.’

  ‘Unprotected sex?’ says Dr Sachs.

  ‘Only with him,’ I say.

  ‘Could the boy be promiscuous?’ Dr Sachs says. ‘Was he sexually active before you met him?’

  There is an ant busy with a crumb in the grass at my feet. We are sitting not far from a litter bin and there is a small hoard of rubbish that has missed its target. I watch the ant as it staggers over a mountainous tussock.

  ‘Yes,’ I say eventually. ‘Yes, he could have been.’ Then I say, ‘I didn’t know you got ants as far north as this.’

  We sit for a while, saying nothing. Then he says, ‘Stella, I’m so sorry.’ I watch the ant till it begins to wobble in the distortions caused by my tears.

  ‘I’d like to explain to you, if I may, what this means,’ he says. ‘I don’t know how you envisage it, Stella, but it may not be anything like as bad as you imagine.’

  I shrug. ‘So it means that I’m one of the living dead,’ I say. My mind’s eye is staring hard at those shuffling, emaciated young men with hollow eyes and facial sores who haunt Waverley Station at night, usually hobbling on steel crutches.

  You’ll see the same one for a few weeks, then he’s thinner, then he’s gone.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ I say, ‘I’m not even the right sex.’

  ‘Point A,’ says Dr Sachs. ‘This is a heterosexual condition, Stella.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ I say. ‘Well, I’ll try telling that to the buddy boys. At least they sometimes have each other. They won’t want me. Nobody will want me, will they? Nobody will want to wipe up after me. They won’t be swabbing up my diarrhoea. They won’t be helping me to bring up phlegm.’

  Dr Sachs waits to make sure that I have finished. ‘Point B,’ he says quietly. ‘Stella, you don’t have Aids. Please. You do know there’s a difference?’

  ‘I know that one of them leads to the other,’ I say.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ he says. ‘Not if you’re careful. Not if you’re lucky. It may be you could feel no ill-effects for over twenty years. It’s not unknown. You will, in all likelihood, feel quite well enough for something like ten to twelve. In that time there will almost certainly be a significant breakthrough in research. It’s very likely to be before you’re too much affected.’

  Too much affected. For just a moment on our walk back t
o the building, my mind blossoms into a self-important fervour, as I see myself as the heroine of my own operatic tragedy. But then, just as suddenly, I feel alone and frightened and sordid, and I shudder uncontrollably and say, ‘No!’ fairly quietly, but out loud. Dr Sachs takes my arm. Then we are in the vestibule. ‘Your GP has faxed your notes to me, by the way,’ he says. ‘I’ll arrange for you to be admitted as soon as possible, Stella. Naturally, in the circumstances, there is no problem about terminating the pregnancy.’

  By now I have almost forgotten that this is why I came. It has become something of a sub-plot, overtaken by the greater crisis. When I say nothing, he says, ‘Now I’m going to hand you over to the medical social worker. But come back to me when she’s finished with you. We’ll have a talk about drug therapy. And Stella, you must feel free to contact me whenever you want to talk. Absolutely whenever. All right? The next few days are going to be extremely difficult for you.’

  I feel as though I am already on one of those automatic airport walkways, being drawn inexorably away from him. Away from all the nice, normal people who laugh and work and play and go to parties and concerts and have sex. I am a part of the leper colony. I know now that I can never, of course, confront Izzy. Or speak to my grandmother. Or to my parents. Never. Easier the people that mean nothing to me. Easier by a mile.

  Dr Sachs stretches out a hand and puts it on my shoulder. He says, ‘Don’t let this stop you playing the cello, Stella. That’s very important. And really, this needn’t affect your career as a music student, you know. Let us try taking this one day at a time.’ He looks at his watch. ‘Come back to my room when Mrs Jarvis is finished with you,’ he says. ‘We’ll talk about drug therapy.’

  I nod. I don’t even tell him that I no longer have my cello. Aunt Rosie’s beautiful cello; the cello that my dad buried in the woods and then dug up again. So what? There is a weevil in my cello case. Gall and wormwood. Everything I love will turn to ash.

  ‘Meanwhile I’ll get on to the boy,’ he says and he pulls out a pad. ‘I’ll need a contact address, Stella, and a phone number if possible.’ I gawp at him with renewed horror which he reads as incomprehension. ‘Your young man,’ he says. ‘He’ll need help.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say and I hesitate. I can almost not bear to yield up my parents’ telephone number. ‘This will be completely confidential?’ I say. Then I give it to him, along with that of the university administration. ‘And then there’s Grania,’ I say. I explain. He writes it down.

  ‘Good,’ he says. ‘I’ll see you in half an hour.’

  The medical social worker is a disaster. First, she asks me how I feel about myself, which causes me one response only and that is to grab great handfuls of Kleenex from the box on her table and say, ‘I hope the hospital gets these discount price.’

  ‘Feel free,’ says the disaster. I tell her, unpleasantly, that I have never felt so free.

  She tells me, first, that she has a duty to inform me that there is now a test available to me which can detect antibodies in the offspring of an infected mother but, unfortunately, not yet in utero. The test can be done at two months after birth, she says, and – in a case such as mine, where the infection is recent – the odds are extremely good. There’s a seventy per cent chance, she says, that the baby will not be infected. It has also recently been estimated that this chance is dramatically increased if the pregnant mother takes AZT. I stare at her as if she is a mad-woman.

  ‘These are options,’ she tells me, ‘just in case you should wish to proceed with the pregnancy.’ I blow my nose extremely loud, as a sort of fuck-you gesture. Then I try counting down in fives from one hundred in my head. This is an area where, unlike my friend Michelle, I have never quite achieved fluency. This time I falter on sixty-five.

  ‘Is your partner HIV?’ says the medical social worker.

  I tell her I don’t have one. ‘The conception was immaculate,’ I say.

  She ignores this. She says that she mentions it merely to warn me, lest my situation strike me as ‘liberating’. It is highly dangerous for me to risk re-infection with the virus from any infected person, she says. It’s absolutely not on. I decide she could do a good double act with Pen’s sister Julia.

  Then she tells me the good news. I may have regular sexual relations with my partner, she says, just so long as I do so in a ‘responsible’ manner – that is to say, no mouth-to-mouth kissing, no contact with saliva or menstrual blood, no oral, anal or penetrative sex without heavy-duty condoms, ever.

  After a while she gets quite skittish. ‘And no accidentally shared toothbrushes,’ she says. Do I imagine it, or does she wag a finger at me? I begin to wonder if the woman has been at the bottle. Finally, she dispatches me with a bundle of leaflets.

  ‘Good luck,’ she says.

  By the time I leave Mrs Jarvis, I see no point in returning to Dr Sachs. My mind is quite made up. I am resolved. That which hath made her drunk hath made me bold. I dump the leaflets in a hospital litter-bin in the forecourt. Pregnancy or no, I have concluded, the whole thing is quite obviously unacceptable. I take a taxi into the town centre and play with the testers at the make-up counter in Fenwick’s. I spray myself with something called ‘Ananya’ and I paint my mouth to look like Maureen O’Hara’s in The Quiet Man. This is one of my dad’s favourite films. Then I treat myself to lunch in a crowded café. I leave a sexy lipstick mouth on the edge of my espresso cup. I feel high. I feel powerful. I imagine that I am insinuating myself among the revelling populace like the Mask of the Red Death.

  Then I dawdle from one chemist’s shop to another, buying packets of pills. I buy packs of heavy-duty Panadol in several branches of Boots. I buy a range of own-brand paracetamol that comes, sometimes in red and white, sometimes in turquoise and white capsules. I buy some of the economy range, which comes either in circular white tablets or in dull biscuit-coloured lozenges.

  By the time I look at my watch and realize that it is 5.45 p.m., I have twenty-five packs of own-brand paracetamol, twelve packs of Panadol, eight packs of Migraleve in chrome yellow and six packs in bright pink. I have five packs of Nurofen and nine of ibuprofen. Along the way, I have bought a large zip-up sponge bag into which I have cast the whole hoard, and the sponge bag is in the Kenyan basket. It is at this point that I buy a bottle of brandy, for the first time in my life, with which to wash the whole lot down. I dismiss the idea of buying a bargain five-pair pack of knickers from a street trader that I pass on my way to the taxi rank, since, as I tell myself gaily, I am not going to need any knickers where I’m going.

  The plan is to keep myself awake until the small hours and then to down the cocktail on the veranda of Pen’s boathouse before falling slowly sideways into the lake.

  I make a dash for a taxi, which takes me to the railway station, though I end up seven minutes late for Pen and the Opus Dei. The latter is slightly champing at the bit, but he manages a toxic smile.

  ‘So where are all the bags and boxes, young lady?’ he says.

  ‘Sorry?’ I say.

  ‘Where are your purchases?’ he says.

  ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘actually I bought jewellery.’ And so I did. In the sponge bag I have stashed my rainbow-bright dragon hoard. I have treated myself, at last, to my own necklace of boiled sweets and I don’t plan to share them with anyone.

  At supper I am in jaunty mood. I sit beside Benedict and ask him all about ants and bees. I banter with Ambrose about whether or not priests are required to confess acts of masturbation. I volunteer, over coffee, to coiff the Old Thing’s hair – an offer to which she submits with surprising eagerness. After that, I sit on the forest-green sofa beside the Opus Dei and I tell him that, in my opinion, he needs a larger collar size. Then I get up and sing.

  I sing ‘Gott soll allein, mein Herze haben’ and, when it transpires that Julia can play the piano, she becomes my willing accompanist. I am so high that I almost give the game away when I sing Dido’s lament. It seems so divinely suitable to my situation that I s
ing it fantastically well. I know that I am a complete and total knockout.

  ‘When I am laid in earth, may my wrongs create no trouble . . .’ By the time I get up to go to bed I have become quite fond of them all, especially Julia, who is now my sidekick.

  When the clock strikes 3.45 a.m., I’m fully dressed and sitting cross-legged on my bed. I get up and check my basket. I pee without flushing the lavatory. Then I make my way downstairs. The front door lock is more of a struggle than I’d anticipated, but I manage it without too much noise, and then I’m away – over the grass and through the shrubbery and down the ably landscaped slope, towards the lake.

  I have no torch, but I’ve brought with me the candle in the silver candlestick and the box of matches. I place this on the little table on the boathouse veranda. I light the candle, which blows out repeatedly, until I submerge it in an old jam jar I find in a dark corner. Then I begin to arrange my pills into colourcoded heaps. It takes me quite a while to get them out of their fiddly foil packaging, by which time I realize, to my slight alarm, that there is already a tiny glimmer of light on the horizon. I stuff five turquoise and white capsules into my mouth, uncap the bottle of brandy and take a hefty swig.

  Bulk swallowing is harder than I anticipate, and only three of the capsules go down. It crosses my mind to regret that I’ve left the builder’s sexy T-shirt under my bed and that I haven’t ripped up all the stupid, abortive letters to Izzy. Also that poor little Aggie will be all too aware of the corpse dredged from the lake. Suddenly, there is a beam of light shining in my face. Then it moves to expose the colour-coded dragon’s hoard on the table.