Joel

The doctor looked up from his notes;

“It’s fairly late in the term now. I’ll write a letter. I think you need to skip this academic year – rest as much as you can – you’ll be absolutely fine for September”

He scribbled something down, then he started shuffling his papers together and looked at me again

“Amazing place your college. Do you realise you had the first reported case of scurvy in the British Isles for two hundred years? We got an article in The Lancet on the strength of it”

I did realise; it was one of my friends; he was very confused poor thing – he couldn’t make up his mind if he was gay or straight; a bloke in jeans, or a diva in a sequined evening dress. At one of the last parties I’d been to before going away, he’d changed five times – dress, jeans, dress, and so on. I think possibly that was why he’d forgotten to eat properly, and went for nine months on nothing but Findus crispy pancakes, until one day he’d woken up with blood coming out of his mouth, and my college had made the non-academic headlines again.

He got up, walked over to the door, and opened it for me;

“So. Go home and go to bed, and we’ll see you in six weeks”

As I went out of the hospital and onto the noisy Euston Road I looked around for the bus stop. I knew exactly where I was going and it wasn’t home to bed, it was where I always went when big things happened – the only place I felt safe.

Sitting on the top deck, I tried to work out when I’d first got sick – it had been ages. I couldn’t tell exactly because I couldn’t think straight. It had started off soon after we’d come back form the island – that made sense now, the doctor had said they weren’t sure if it was glandular fever, or something I’d picked up there.

Whatever it was though, I was tired of it, tired of the fever and the sore throat and the exhaustion. My legs and arms felt so heavy sometimes I could scarcely walk. My brain had stopped working too. I’d even managed to get run over by a bicycle on the Kentish Town Road. I had looked – really – but I hadn’t seen it, and I’d stepped out, and then the next thing I knew I was flat on my back on the tarmac, with an angry man in an anorak standing over me telling me how stupid I was.

I was glad in a way that I had something, and that I wasn’t going mad. My tutor hadn’t believed I was sick – he thought I was making it up, and by the time I’d had the blood test I had begun to wonder if he wasn’t right after all.

I also cried a lot for no good reason, and got drunk on almost nothing. After my twenty-first birthday dinner, Joel had had to practically lift me into the taxi, and then out again at the other end, pushing me up the stairs and putting me to bed. I’d had no memory of anything when I'd woken up the next morning.

I’d phoned Joel to let him know I was coming, and he was waiting for me. The stairs to his door seemed like Everest – I thought I’d never get to the top,and then, finally, I was, and there was the door, open, with Joel leaning against it in his socks, his hair all rumpled and messy. He held out his arms, and we stood there – me clinging tightly to him, while he put his thin spindly arms around me in a fierce hug. Then I started crying - sobbing my heart out, and he stroked my hair and kissed the top of my head, and he began talking gently to me as he always did;

“Shhh…shh…you’ll be ok, I promise. I’ll be here to look after you always. There’s no need to cry. We’ll do it together. We’ll get through it and out the other side. It’s ok – I’ll be here for you”

I always went there when horrible things happened, and he always said the same things to me, and they worked. It was as simple as that. After a while I calmed down, and he took my hand and led me into his bedroom. He made me sit on one of the beds, and then went over to the desk to find the rizlas. While he rolled a joint, he began telling me about the letter he’d had from T.. Apparently he’d started going out with a girl in America; her dad was a rancher or something, and then he started to make silly jokes about shotgun weddings and cowboys, and I began to feel a bit more cheerful, and joined in.

By the time we’d finished the joint, it didn’t seem so bad after all. I’d spend as much time as I could with Joel – maybe we could go to the country or something – and then we’d both get better and things could get back to normal.

I did what the doctors said and I went to bed. It was incredibly boring. I read a million books and from time to time changed my hair colour, but apart from that I couldn’t do anything much. It wasn’t until March that I began to think life might start again soon. You could definitely see things were beginning to happen to the trees, though the weather was still pretty horrible. Even the sun was doing me a favour, when it bothered to come out, by setting later and later.

Each morning I looked in the newspaper to see how many more minutes there’d be of daylight – it was all looking quite promising. I felt certain somehow that with the spring, I’d be able to spend more and more time out of bed, until perhaps early summer when I’d be back to normal again. I was so looking forward to it – my life had dwindled to almost nothing – just the odd phone call or visit to Joel.

Then suddenly, one afternoon, the phone rang, and it wasn’t Joel. It was his brother, Stephen. He sounded so tired – I suppose he must have been in shock – as he gently told me that Joel had died the night before. I can remember almost every word; Joel had had a really bad headache and had gone to bed – and he hadn’t woken up. Something to do with his heart having a weakness – the same thing their father had died of before Joel was even born.

At first I’d thought he was joking. Who the fuck dies when they are twenty? No one! It was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. He must be joking – it didn’t make sense. Joel had been ill – he’d had a thrombosis, and then a month or so later another one – but he’d been in hospital – they’d said there was nothing to worry about if he took his medicine and stopped smoking – and he’d done both those things, so how could he possibly die?

I thought of our late night dash once, to the twenty four hour chemist in Picadilly Circus in Stephen’s car to renew the prescription – Bob Dylan playing all the way – it was the only thing Stephen ever put on in his car. We’d all sung along to Hurricane as we sped through the streets.

I’d even been to see him at the Royal Free the first time it had happened. I had got out of bed especially, and he hadn’t looked ill, just embarrassed at the fuss, and the crowds of people who clustered around his bed. We’d joked around a bit and I’d pinned a badge on his tshirt that said Out to Lunch. I knew deep down it couldn’t be a joke, but didn’t understand what else it could be. People didn’t die – not people our age, not when you were seeing doctors.

Poor Stephen – the bottom of his world had just fallen out, and all I could do was argue with him, as if it could have done any good. I don’t think I was really expecting him to give up and say “ok – you’re right – he can’t be dead in that case” – and of course he didn’t – he just kept quietly repeating the same thing, as if he were talking to a child – that Joel was dead – that he’d died in his sleep – that maybe the next day I should call Marnie – she was going away as soon as she could arrange it, but he was sure she’d love me to call first

I don’t have any memory of saying goodbye, or putting the phone down. I went back into my bedroom and I didn’t know what to do next. I looked at my face in the mirror – the whole day had become so surreal – I don’t know what I was expecting to see, but I remember being surprised that I looked just the same as I’d done that morning. I didn’t understand how that could be, because the most important thing in my whole life had just ended and nothing would ever be the same again.