MOMENTS OF BEING

One afternoon this Spring I was looking through Owen's books and found he had Hermione Lee's masterly biography of my favourite author Virginia Woolf. Opening it my eyes fell on the book's publication date, 1996. I was gobsmacked. Could it really be ten years since I read it? And more importantly could it really be ten years since two of my closest friends, Martin Taylor and Steve O'Connor died? Since then I have been thinking about them a lot. If I had been asked before this memory-jog I could not have told you actually when they died - a few years ago would have been my best reply. But ten years? It seems like yesterday but as well of course, it seems like years and years ago.

Martin died in the summer as I recall and Steve died, we found out later, on Christmas Eve. Over that Christmas I was reading the Woolf biography and had reached the time when she was hit by the death of her sister Vanessa's lover Roger Fry following soon after the death of close friend Lytton Strachey as well as the suicide of Dora Carrington. I found the thoughts of Virginia at this time in her and my life strangely comforting... as if someone knew what I was going through and was expressing the particular loss I felt in a far more eloquent way than I ever could. In essence, Virginia likened the deaths of longtime friends to a walk on a clifftop which one takes every day. One day you turn around to find that your familiar path, so often walked, has crumbled into the sea and you are stranded on a promentary that you have to precariously edge along to get back to where you feel secure again. The loss of friends - particularly those you have known for a long time - robs you of your context and a whole shared history is gone. I felt this about Martin and Steve and I still feel it to this day. After ten years I still sometimes see a play or film and think "I would love to talk to Martin about that" or wonder would Steve still be crazy for Oasis and LOUIE LOUIE by The Kingsmen? How would he have responded to my Type II Diabetes diagnosis when he had always refused to talk about his Type I that he had known of since an early age?

I met Steve at secondary school and was indeed the only school friend I still kept in contact with, having moved away from the area the same summer as having left St. Edmunds. In 1978 I met Martin when he too started work at Claude Gill Books in Piccadilly. I was on the shop floor and he was the goods-in clerk and we soon struck up a friendship based on our love of film, a friendship that was shared too with a fellow-Geordie school friend of his, Judith who also worked there. I remember being vaguely jealous of him, his assured personality and unabashed gayness were traits I always aspired to. Steve had a strained family life, living with his Asian stepfather who he couldn't abide so would often invite himself up to Enfield for the weekend to escape that environment. This soon also included Christmas where we could run amock as my Ma used to go back to Ireland. The ritual was I get the food, Steve get the drink.

Down the years and changes occured to us all - I started work for Flashbacks and bounced along happily enough living for films, music and by then theatre. Martin worked in the Department of Printed Books at the Imperial War Museum and met and moved in with Peter, a gay policeman which dwindled into a marriage until he met and moved in with David an actor. He started working with me on Saturdays at the shop where we would yapp away all day - when he wasn't bobbing about at Marshall Street Baths. In 1989 he achieved a long-held dream when Constable published his anthology of love poems by the trench poets of WWI. Steve worked in various jobs until finally working literally around the corner from his block of flats on North End Road market on a stall selling bags. Occasionally a girlfriend would be on the scene but invariably that would peter out. Things didn't improve on the family front when he found out through an aunt that his mother who had died when he was young had been married before and he had a father and two step-sisters he had never met. Steve also became an occasional fixture at Flashbacks working the odd day - cash in hand of course. But through it all there they were: Martin for theatre and films, Steve for film and concerts, countless phone calls talking about everything and nothing. Misunderstandings would lead to a few weeks of not-speaking then we'd pick up where we left off. You know... friend stuff.

At the start of 1990 Steve had a bad motorbike crash about 5 minutes after dropping me off at Andrew and Freddy's flat in Abbey Road which took him a long time to recover from. A few years later Martin appeared one afternoon at Marble Arch where I was helping a friend run her actors agency and told me he was HIV+. Strangely I cannot remember how I reacted - I think I hugged him while trying not to cry in front of him. However he seemed to work out a way of living with it.

One day I got a call from Steve's aunt telling me that Steve was in hospital. He had taken tablets and tried to cut his arms when his latest girlfriend said she just wanted to be friends. I went to see him and found him in fine form - retelling the incident and laughing over the stupidity of it all. As I was leaving the girl turned up and looked genuinely distressed at what he had done. The job with my friend was slowly driving me mad through inertia and the unacknowledged stagnation of our friendship. Then a few months after our last theatre visit to see the National Theatre's A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC with Judi Dench, Martin was admitted to hospital for pneumonia. He seemed to get better then had a relapse. He died aged 39. Andrew accompanied me to the touching humanist service held for his cremation where I had an emotional reunion with Judith.

Things went from bad to worse with the friend and after a blazing early-hours row I quit and started back at the shop again. In December Steve asked to borrow some money which of course I agreed to but told him I needed it by the next week for presents etc. A week went by and no money and no answer when I rang. Finally he called to apologise and to tell me he was in trouble. He had helped another stallholder chase a black guy who had robbed off his stall. They caught him and beat him up. The police were called, Steve was charged with assault and was due to appear in court in January. I told him he was a stupid bugger but that I was sure it wouldn't be so bad. I asked him if he was still coming up for Christmas and he said he would ring me nearer the day. Steve turned up at the shop on my last day off before Christmas and left the money that was owed but I never heard from him. I bought extra food in case and waited at the shop on Christmas Eve for the call. Nothing and no reply when I rang him.

Late on December 27th the phone rang. It was Steve's aunt telling me through tears that he had been found dead in the flat. The step-father had found him that afternoon when he had returned from the friends he spent Christmas with. It appeared he had gone into a diabetic coma before he could inject himself with his Insulin. He was 36.

She asked me what I knew of his movements so I told her I had expected him but I assumed he didn't contact me because he thought I would still be pissed about the money. She then dropped a bombshell. He had worked the stall on Christmas Eve morning and had double-checked before leaving that the step-father was definately spending the next 2 days with friends. He later told the other stallholders he was finishing early to go up to Enfield to stay a few days with his mate Chris so not to try and call him. The aunt was inconsolable that Steve should die as he did especially as he was always so careful with his injections. I remember putting the phone down and just sitting and staring at the wall, knowing Steve had done it deliberatly.

Unlike the celebration of Martin's life at his cremation, Steve's was utter vile. A stupid old bastard of a priest who I swear was drunk, dropping the pages from his prayer book and stumbling through a religious service that was totally redundant of any humanity or soul. The only consolation I had on that dark, dank depressing late winter afternoon was that Steve would have been pissing himself laughing had he been watching it. I had been collared by the aunt outside who told me that the official gathering afterwards was being held back at the house but she and all Steve's workmates were having an unofficial one at a pub in Earls Court. Amazingly I attended neither. I did however manage to have a few words with the girl he had once tried to top himself over and who had become, along with her mother, good friends to him. She told me that Steve had been scared he would be sent to prison at the hearing in January and she would never believe he had died through an accident. That makes two of us.

Some people are surprised when I tell them I don't mind spending Christmas alone. I explain it away as having something to do with once working on Christmas Day at First Call and that this had robbed the day of any particular mystique. But maybe it is because I remember when ten years ago my familiar clifftop walk was altered forever.