I can’t give 100 per cent attention to anything – part of me is thinking about my health.
I had been pushed into yet another corner, this time for keeps … The perception that knowing you’re dying makes you feel more alive is an error. I thought: this is not true, then I realised the enormity. The artist and film-maker Derek Jarman remembered his HIV diagnosis, in 1986: ‘A new class of lifetime pariahs’, Susan Sontag called them in Aids and Its Metaphors: ‘the future ill’. You were ill, but you might not feel it yet. Men dying in the time it takes to catch and throw off a cold: ‘One Thursday,’ David France writes in How to Survive a Plague, ‘sexy Tommy McCarthy from the classifieds department stayed out late at an Yma Sumac concert. Non-human illnesses: men dying from the blights of sheep, of birds, of cats, diseases no man had ever died of before. A cancer meant to be slow-moving, to manifest benignly in elderly men from the Mediterranean, which burrowed from the outside in: from marks on the skin, to the stomach and lungs. Tuberculosis of the stomach, of the bone marrow. Dementia in men of twenty: brains that shrank and withered.
Nightsweats, shingles, thrush, diarrhoea, sores that crowded into mouths and made it impossible to eat. Bodies that quickly became unintelligible to themselves. At first there was only confusion, incomprehension.
