Bears in Mourning

Suicide rates go down in wartime. Isn't that a fascinating fact? Except that I can never work out what it means. Does it mean that people with a self-destructive streak volunteer for dangerous jobs or missions, so they don't need to go to the trouble of topping themselves – they're either killed or cured? Or does it mean that people forget to be self-obsessed when there's a genuine crisis out there in the world?

You'd think there'd be a lot of Aids-related suicides, but there aren't. It can't just be a matter of being British, not wanting to make a fuss, all that. There must be a few people who freak out when they're diagnosed HIV-positive out of a clear blue sky; they're the most likely to lay hands on themselves. But anyone who's already shown symptoms must at least have considered the possibility. Knowing the worst can even calm people down, in a certain sense.

It's different for people who are really sick. They're faced with a series of days only fractionally better or worse than the one before, and suicide is such an all-or-nothing business. It's really tricky deciding what individual trial finally tips a life over into being not worth the living, and then sticking to your decision. It's like a problem in algebra. What is x, such that x plus 1 is unbearable?

But how do the survivors feel if someone does commit suicide in the middle of a war? That was the problem for the Bears – that was what we were dropped in. We knew damn well that Victor wasn't physically sick. He couldn't have taken an HIV test without our knowing. It seemed to us that he'd just thrown away a body that any of our sick friends, any dwindling Bear, would have jumped at. OK, so Victor was short of puff, no great shakes when it came to running up stairs. There are plenty of skinny people who could have learned to put up with that.

We were angry. Didn't Victor know there was a war on? We Bears had given bouquets that had appeared at the graveside stripped of their messages. We had laboured to clean the bathrooms of the dead, so that their heirs found nothing so much as a stain to alarm them – and had had our names forgotten however many times we were introduced to them. We had held our candles high at Trafalgar Square vigils, year after year, forming helpful compositional groups on cue, for press photographs that never got published. And there was Victor beautiful in his coffin, plump in his coffin, his poison-blued face hardly presenting a challenge to the undertaker's cosmetician.

Everywhere we look we see Aids. We can be driving along, not thinking of anything. We stop at the traffic lights and there's a cyclist waiting there too, foot flexed on the pedal, ready to shoot off first. The picture of health. Except that he's wearing a mask to filter the city air that makes us think of an oxygen mask, and there's a personal stereo fastened by a strap to his bicep that reminds us of a drip feed – as if he was taking music intravenously.

So how could Victor see anything but Aids? What gave him the right to follow his obsession with his father so far? Somehow while we were all busy he found the time to invent his own illness. Wasn't Aids good enough for him? We loved his flesh, but it was unnatural that he died with it unmelted. Dying fat is an obscenity, these days. You're not supposed to be able to take it with you.