It was all slow. All so fast. A rapid start and a slow end, or was it really the other way round. Mora haste more haste. Less speed less speed. Somebody nobody knows spends a birthday under an assumed name in a hospital. Somebody he met the day before sends a card and a note. A packet of biscuits and a newspaper. That is how a birthday comes and goes. If you didn't look so ill you would look quite well wouldn't you. People just carry on the same, it hardly matters what you say to them. The past seems to fly along with the present, to hold and enfold. To live in quiet spaces in your mind until one day it is all you have. He doesn't wnt to tell his family he is ill until he is really ill. There is a strange inevitability in the way he deals with that. It is very different from the way the youth deal with it all. The response would be so different. Rush off now because you have to go to Leo's. I have to get back to think of the dogs but I will remember you for a long time isolated in the blue cubicle, surrounded behind the glass windows by the ncient cackling of the old ladies. Dinner and tea arrive on cardboard plates. You lie on the bed, thin and greying and covered in red marks, under an assumed name in case the newspapers find you are here. Your birthday, two visitors you have never met before, who gave you a card, no more. No family. You do not want to tell them you are ill until you are very ill. You never got around to telling them you gay, and now you cannot get around to telling them you have AIDS. So you can lie in the blue cubicle. You can lie in your thin bed. You can lie to your family. You can lie to yourself now if you want to.
The bare room has no adornments. Nothing of your own. Nothing. No clock. No watch. nothing at all. A television only picks up BBC1. No name on your bed. No notes. Guarded against the outside world. You said you felt good, you just looked bad. A card and a packet of biscuits. You went to your dentist. He referred you to a dentist in Truro. He took a blood sample without asking you, and a few days later called you in and said "you have AIDS". No more. No follow up. No help. No information. "You have AIDS", now go away please and die quietly. Ten months later you finally got to a clinic and got some facts. That was what the compassionate world had for you. The facts of AIDS read from a tabloid press. The pain, the fear, the prejudice, to be told you are dying. All unnecessarily I was going to bring you some grapes but wasn't sure. Now I am sure.
Hurry. Hurry, We barely have enough milk to give you.
Nothing around you. Mind full of spaces of the past. Fear that your family will reject you. So you lie in your bed, eating bad food, all alone with a disabled television and a cardboard cup. That is what it is to have a birthday. And as you talked I heard you say "it is only a disease you know". It is only a disease. That is all there is to it. So I will bring some fruit tonight. I can get some grapes down the road. It is omly a disease.