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unsuitable for the tabloid cosh, and he began to develop a new style, still direct, still a treat to read, but making room for analysis and irony and the complex arithmetic of the real world.
    The papers changed, too. By mid-summer, he’d given up on the tabloids altogether. Instead, he was writing for some of the weightier broadsheets, not too often and none too regularly, but winning for himself a reputation for solid, authoritative analysis, wedded to a growing contempt for some of society’s better-disguised secrets.
    This contempt occasionally boiled up into something close to fury, and once I got to know him, putting a face and a voice to this scalding prose, I was able to recognize at once where it came from. Wesley wrote this way because, when it mattered, he really cared. Drunk or tired, he’d talk for hours about how much need there was for honesty and tolerance and simple courage, and the fact that the real world wasn’t about any of these things was a frustration he took to the grave. If that sounds like a speech it probably is, but I can hear him saying it now, shaking his head, the voice thickened with red wine and roll-ups, the big eyes wide with wonderment and rage.
    But all of that came later. For now, Wesley was working and well. His career, to his own surprise, was flourishing and he’d begun to believe that he might yet have time to make it as a journalist. What happened next was Derek Aldridge.
    Aldridge I’ve met on a number of occasions, a tall, good-lookingWelshman a few years older than Wesley. Wesley had known him on the paper in Bristol, where the pair of them had briefly shared a flat. Aldridge’s emotional life was as complicated as Wesley’s, though for different reasons. He had a passion for women, evidenced by a string of office conquests, and an early marriage to a girl from the valleys had already ended in the divorce courts.
    Wesley and Aldridge spent a great deal of time together in their Bristol days. They were both loners, contemptuous of the pack, and although there were obvious differences between them, the chemistry seemed to work. Aldridge, according to Wesley, had an awesome sense of direction, knowing exactly where he was headed. Evidently he kept a private schedule, a blueprint for his career, a carefully tabulated list of dates by which he should have achieved certain targets. He showed it to Wesley once, the pair of them drunk, and Wesley memorized most of it and wrote it down when he’d sobered up, amazed at the man’s single-mindedness.
    To Wesley, who believed emphatically in fate, having any kind of life plan was purest folly – where was the mystery? where were the surprises? – but the real point about Aldridge’s schedule was that it all came true. By twenty-seven, he was in Fleet Street. Two years later, he’d made defence correspondent on a big national daily. And by his thirty-fourth birthday, on the dot, he was occupying a desk in a large office on the fourth floor, the newly appointed deputy editor charged with infusing the feature pages with fresh blood.
    One of his first calls went to Wesley. He said he wanted to offer him a job. Wesley, after some thought, asked two questions. One had to do with his health. He hadn’t seen Aldridge for several years. Aldridge might have picked up the rumour or he might not. Either way, it made no odds. Wesley now came as a package deal. Me and my virus. All or nothing. The second question also had to do with the virus. HIV had concentrated his mind wonderfully. He, too, now had a schedule, a series of deadlines he kept in the back of his mind, doubtless shorter than Aldridge’s, but no less important for that. So far, on the freelance market, he’d done well. He’d enjoyed the freedoms, the latitude, the time. He didn’t want any of that to change and the onwardmarch of the virus gave him the right to insist it wouldn’t.
    The two men met for lunch at an expensive restaurant off Covent Garden. Aldridge, according