Holding the Man

by Timothy Conigrave

  We sat on the sand watching the waves rippling in to shore. Talking to him about my fears, my anger, was not easy. There was stuff I felt I could never bring up, for fear John would say I was undermining his positive thinking. But the play had given me courage. ‘Do you think you are going to die from AIDS?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘How does it feel?’

  ‘Scary.’

  We spoke of our fears for ourselves and for each other. How long did we think we had? Was he going to die before me? He wanted to know it all.

  We drove home to Rose Bay. In bed I was awake for many hours, thinking. I wonder what the moment of death will be like? Will I be so bombed on morphine that I won’t even notice? Or will my soul crack me open making its escape? And when John dies, what will it be like, life without him? I want it all to go away. Leave me alone.

  I had written a play called Thieving Boy which had been workshopped but not yet produced. When I applied for a development grant from the Australia Council I went the big guns and asked for everything I wanted: a director (Peter Kingston), five actors for two weeks, publicity costs, and hire of the Belvoir Street Theatre for the reading.

  At school I always left things till the last minute and so it was now. I was due to fly out to Bali next morning to meet John and our friend Peter Craig from Melbourne. I spent the day and night making a clean copy of the script, and typing a covering letter with a budget and the actors’ and my CVs. By the time I finished it was sunrise and the cockatoos were screeching. I showered, bundled myself into a cab for the airport, and asked the driver to pull over when he saw a letter-box so I could post my application.

  I was tired in the way you get when you’ve been out all night, that nauseous kind of tired. As I waited to board the plane, my guts were grumbling. I went to the Men’s and as soon as I sat down, I squirted out diarrhoea. Great. I’ve got Bali belly and I haven’t landed yet. Fortunately I had an aisle seat on the flight.

  The line at Customs moved slowly. I could see John through the doors, waiting at the baggage carousel, looking very tanned with a sharp, short haircut.

  We hailed a bemo and drove to Legian. The air was pungent with the smell of burning wood, copha, and stagnant water. The smell of Asia. ‘It reminds me of Christmas Island,’ John said as we hurtled down narrow bitumen roads overhung by palm trees and lined with open-fronted, bamboo-framed shops.

  The hotel had a large garden, and a swimming-pool with a carved bridge and a Balinese carving on its back wall. The Hindu influence was everywhere: elephant imagery all over an island that had never seen an elephant.

  Next day we headed off to Ubud, past houses with little bamboo platforms on which daily offerings were put to distract evil spirits. At the Attini Homestay we chose a pair of first-floor rooms. The walls were of woven palm fronds, through which you could feel a breeze. We looked over a rich garden of frangipani and bananas. A young Balinese boy was picking off dead flowers and leaves. Beyond that were rice paddies where a man herded ducks. Life was bursting out of the soil.

  The next morning I was woken by an urgent need to shit. I sat on the toilet and after a few squirts the pain became excruciating. I was panting to get my breath. I felt I was going to faint and I leant forward. The next moment was blackness and me underwater in honey. I could hear growling like a wolf. Then John was there, almost crying with panic, yelling, ‘It’s all right, it’s me, John.’

  ‘What’s happening?’ I struggled to consciousness, swimming to the surface. I was lying on the bathroom floor surrounded by little piles of shit. John was naked, yelling, ‘Peter, get in here!’ Peter ran in, followed by the hotel manager. ‘Not drugs, is it?’

  ‘No, he’s just sick.’

  I had hit my head in the fall and had a large bump on my forehead. I felt extremely hot. John told me later that he’d heard the toilet lid slam shut and called out to ask if I was all right. There was no answer, only a strange growling. I was sitting in the corner with my legs out, looking over my shoulder and twitching. It was very scary, he said. Peter reckoned it was probably a mild seizure. Great. I’m losing my brain. John poured me a bath and put gardenia oil in it. I slipped into the pungent water.

  Bali is magical. Everyone is an artist: a carver, a painter, a dancer or a singer. Walking into town we would pass a number of gamelan orchestras rehearsing while young boys learned to dance, the music mixing with the sound of frogs, crickets and geckos. At night we’d sit on the balcony watching fireflies playing over the rice paddies. In the monkey forest the monkeys were tame enough to sit on our arms and the babies had mohawk hairdos. They’d steal your bag if you weren’t careful. The Temple of the Dead was being prepared for a ceremony. The men decorated the temple in cloth and the women made offerings of fruit and squid.

  But all these memories are coloured by my stinky diarrhoea and the cramp and nausea I felt every time I smelt oily food. When I got back to Sydney the doctor asked for a poo sample. The results showed I had camphelo bacter.

  My doctor flipped through my file. ‘Your haemoglobin is good. Your T-cell count is 370.’ He saw my shock. ‘What was it last time?’ He flipped another page, ‘540.’

  ‘Why has it dropped so much?’

  ‘We sometimes get maverick readings. And the time of day can affect them. But we should assume it’s accurate.’

  ‘That means I’m now out of the normal range, doesn’t it?’

  He felt the glands all over my body, listened to my chest, took my blood pressure and pulse, and looked at my tongue. ‘You have some leukoplakia on the side of your tongue. He held up a hand-mirror and I could see the striations. ‘We think it’s Epstein-Barr virus, which is the virus that causes glandular fever. When it presents as oral hairy leukoplakia it’s considered an AIDS-defining illness.’

  I thought about what he had just said. ‘So I now have AIDS?’ That’s a big thought. ‘What about AZT?’

  ‘You have to have less than 200 T-cells to be eligible.’

  ‘What am I supposed to do, sit back and watch the virus chew up my immune system?’

  The registrar at the hospital had a totally different story. ‘The leukoplakia makes you eligible. Your doctor should know that.’ Fuck. ‘I’d like to ask you some questions, do an examination, take some blood, and then I’ll write you a script for the hospital pharmacy.’

  AZT causes a number of side effects. Initially I had a strange taste in my throat, like parmesan cheese. Then I started to become anaemic, but not badly enough to be transfused, so I had to put up with breathlessness. Then my T-cells dropped even further, first to 270 and then to 180. I began to feel blue. It wasn’t anger, it wasn’t depression, it was just blue.

  At a meeting at work one day I found it hard to concentrate. I felt achy in my joints and my heart was racing. Within half an hour I felt shithouse. As the meeting ended I said, ‘I don’t feel very well. I think I’ve got a fever.’

  ‘You look very red, like you’re sunburnt.’ Sounds like what John had in Florence. God, I feel like shit.

  Later, my doctor asked, ‘How long have you been on Bactrim?’

  ‘About two weeks.’

  ‘You’d better stop it and we’ll see if the reaction calms down.’

  ‘What about my prophylaxis for PCP?’

  ‘We’ll put you on Dapsone, which has been used in treating leprosy. Unfortunately it’s not a hundred percent effective. We do see breakthroughs. Would you like some Panadol to bring down your fever?’

  ‘You can have your sister’s old room.’ Mum ushered me into the room with psychedelic fleur-de-lys wallpaper. ‘The letter is on the shelf above the bed. See you after your shower.’ I sank into the quilted coverlet. It felt secure.

  Oh, the letter! I bounced up and retrieved a business envelope with the Red Cross symbol on it. It’s probably a request for a blood donation.

  Dear Mr Conigrave,

  With regard to your donation of blood in June 1981, your donation was pooled with nineteen others and given to
a patient. That person has now gone on to full-blown AIDS. As part of our Lookback scheme we would like you to test for HIV and let us know the result. All information will be kept confidential. Please call Nurse Fowles if you have any queries. We thank you for your co-operation.

  This changed a few things. It could mean that I had been infected for nine years instead of five. Shortened things a bit. I had had that strange viral illness back in 1981 – could have been my sero-conversion. It would probably mean that I had infected John.

  I went outside. Mum and Dad sat drinking wine and nibbling peanuts. Dad read the letter and with a concerned look handed it to Mum. She sighed.

  ‘It’s awful to think that I may have infected someone.’

  ‘In 1981 we didn’t know there was an AIDS virus,’ Mum comforted. ‘You didn’t know you were infected.’

  ‘What if the family try to sue me?’

  I called the AIDS Council legal officer, who told me I had nothing to worry about. Cases that were succeeding only went back as far as 1984 and it was only the Blood Bank that was being sued, not the donors. Armed with this knowledge I rang Nurse Fowles at the Red Cross. I told her I had tested positive in 1985.

  She seemed a little flustered. ‘Thank you. Thank you for your co-operation and your honesty. Could you give that result to us in writing?’

  ‘Can I ask if any of the other donors has come up positive?’

  She hesitated. ‘No. Not so far. We’ve made contact with sixteen others, you’re number seventeen and you’re the only one. I’m sorry if this has upset you.’

  I sat there, my mind swimming with thoughts of the man I had infected and the boyfriend I had infected. I was comfortable with the thought that John had infected me, but it was awful to think I may have infected him. As though I have killed the man I love.

  I never wrote the letter.

  Chapter NINE

  Thieving Boy

  I came home from work to find a letter from the Australia Council. I took a deep breath and ripped the envelope open.

  ‘We are glad to inform you that your application for funding was successful …’

  ‘I got it! I don’t believe it. So fantastic.’

  ‘Good boy.’ John gave me a congratulatory hug. ‘I’m proud of you.’

  ‘I’m proud of me.’

  A few days later Peter Kingston and I sat in the Café Tropicana planning the workshop. We decided to have some fun, hire the people we wanted to work with. We wanted Ben Franklin, Gia Carides, David Field, Valerie Bader and Yves Stening. It was my job to approach their agents, book a rehearsal space for two weeks and hire Belvoir Street Theatre for the performance.

  On the first day of the workshop we decided to work outside, in a church garden beneath leafy poplars and a large elm. We read the script and the actors laughed a lot, which was very encouraging. We talked about what we liked and what we didn’t like, exploring the elements that didn’t work. Most of the comments were positive, and criticism was offered considerately. I remembered a director’s advice at a young playwrights’ conference a few years before: ‘It’s arrogant to think that your work is unchangeable. Don’t resist, don’t be defensive, try what is suggested.’ I went home each night with the cast’s thoughts, and returned next day with rewritten scenes I had photocopied on the way in.

  John Stone the dramaturg said, ‘It’s impressive how fast you write. But these aren’t just quick changes, they’re good writing.’

  I started to become very tired. I was working too hard and caught a cold. Cold-and-flu tablets made me feel okay for a couple of days. But then I developed a dry barking cough.

  On the Thursday, four nights before the performance, I felt like shit and threw myself into bed thinking, I’ll get up in an hour and finish those scenes. I woke up much later feeling very hot. My temperature was 39.4°. I thought I’d better go to the hospital. John dropped me at Casualty while he went to park.

  The woman behind the counter asked me to take a seat. The waiting area had hard orange plastic benches and was sealed off from Casualty by bulletproof windows and an electronic door. I guess it’s to keep out the drunks and addicts. I sat trying not to faint. I lay down but immediately thought I was going to throw up, so I went back to the counter. ‘Excuse me. I’m sorry, but I’m feeling really sick. How much longer do I have to wait?’

  ‘We’ll be with you in a moment.’

  Eventually a young nurse came to get me. I followed him into a cave full of people groaning. I caught a glimpse of someone bleeding through the curtains, and then someone swore at a nurse and a kidney dish crashed to the floor. The nurse took me into a cubicle and hooked me up to a machine that monitored blood pressure and pulse. He asked lots of questions. What operations had I had? When was I diagnosed positive? Had I moved my bowels today? I fell asleep and woke when John returned.

  The registrar from the ward told us, ‘The sputum you’ve been bringing up doesn’t seem to contain anything, so we’d like to do an induced sputum. Get the stuff at the bottom.’

  John rubbed my arm. ‘Poor Tim.’

  The nebuliser was wheeled in and they asked me to breathe through the cardboard tube. I coughed uncontrollably but nothing came up. After a number of attempts I finally brought up a gob and spat it into a jar.

  ‘We’ve got a bed for you up in the ward.’

  They wheeled the bed up to the seventeenth floor where I was placed in a room with five other guys. The ward was eerily silent, the others asleep or watching television with earplugs in. Down the corridor I could hear trolleys crashing. A strange chemical smell mixed with smelly feet and farty bedclothes. The silence was broken by a man groaning in pain and then by another very thin man using a urine bottle.

  ‘Pretty scary,’ John said quietly.

  ‘Very scary. I never want to be like that.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  I told the doctor, ‘I’m in the middle of a workshop of a play of mine and tomorrow is the last day’s rehearsal. I want to be there.’

  ‘Tim, you are very sick. It’s important you look after yourself.’

  ‘What about Monday? It’s the performance.’

  ‘If you feel all right by then, I’ll be happy for you to go.’

  John kissed me goodbye and I pulled the blankets up to my face like a child scared of monsters. The man in the bed across from me had the purple shadows of Kaposi’s sarcoma on his face and body, like footprints of the devil. How did he get around in the world?

  I slept the sleep of the dead, waking occasionally to use the bottle.

  In the morning, after a hospital breakfast, I rang Peter Kingston with the news.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he told me. ‘What do you want me to tell the others?’

  ‘I guess you can tell them I have AIDS, but ask them not to tell anyone else.’

  Later that day, after a lunch that resembled cat vomit, the registrar came in. ‘We’ve grown nothing on your sputum but I’m not convinced it’s not PCP, so we’d like to do a bronchoscopy this afternoon.’

  A nurse came and gave me a pre-med of morphine to suppress my cough, and atropine to dry out secretions. I sat in the bed, slowly becoming drowsy. ‘I’m off my face,’ I said to no one in particular.

  A trolley rolled up beside the bed and two nurses slid me onto it. They wheeled me through hallways and lifts. I drifted on a cloud of morphia down white corridors and into the theatre, where I finally fell asleep.

  When I woke I was back in the ward. A nurse stood over me. ‘You shouldn’t have any food or drink for half an hour, your throat is numb and you might choke. You’ve got some visitors.’

  Peter Kingston, John Stone and John were there waving. John had a big bunch of bird-of-paradise. He leant down to kiss me, almost sticking me in the eye with one of the flowers. ‘How’d it go?’

  ‘Didn’t feel a thing. I still don’t. I’m off my face.’

  ‘Rehearsals went well today,’ said Peter. ‘Everything’s ready to go.’

  The regist
rar walked in and asked to be left alone with me, but I asked John to stay.

  ‘The doctor who did your bronchoscopy said he saw the cysts that are consistent with PCP. I’d like to start you on Pentamidine. It’s fairly toxic so we’ll need to monitor your creatine level daily. You may notice a strange metallic taste in your mouth. It will also cause your blood pressure and blood sugar to drop.’

  ‘Sounds like a party drug.’

  The doctor left the room. I looked at John, who attempted a smile. John Stone and Peter came back in. ‘Well guys, it’s PCP.’

  I spent most of the weekend vomiting. I felt it with every cell of my body, a cold clammy nausea. My body became so cold my teeth chattered. But through all this the cough seemed to be subsiding. My hopes of seeing the performance were raised.

  On Monday night I was standing in the bathroom trying to shave, my legs wobbly. What was normally a simple task was now very difficult. I was feeling dizzy. The need to vomit hit me out of the blue and I threw up in the sink.

  ‘Fuck it.’ I sat on the toilet seat and buzzed the nurse. ‘I don’t think I can go.’

  ‘We could organise a wheelchair.’

  ‘Knowing my luck I’d vomit all over myself in the foyer.’

  It was a hard decision to make, to miss my own party with three hundred friends and industry people, but I was feeling so bad I knew people would see something was wrong. And they would talk. I rang Peter at the theatre. ‘I can’t do it. I can’t stop chucking. What should we tell people?’

  ‘That you have really bad gastro.’

  ‘I hate this. Can’t believe I’m not going to see it.’

  ‘Pretty tough, but it’s important you get well.’

  I have AIDS. I’m not afraid of dying but I don’t want to be in pain. I want as much time as I can get. What’s that? Six months? Three years? Will I ever see my play produced? Everything needs to be reassessed now.