My Friend Henry

His laughing face appears before my eyes, a dancing Halloween pumpkin, as I get a flash of my friend Henry, who has died of AIDS. One minute he was there, the next gone. His widow feels compelled to share with me every graphic detail of the end – the tumours in his stomach eating him from the inside out, the constant vomiting.

I miss him, and the missing is like a stab. And it sneaks up repeatedly, out of nowhere, while I'm stirring soup, say, and so the shock of Henry's dead is a blow to the guts once more and then I get a stomach ache, like I'm going to be sick but it's not that kind of pain and so I have to endure it, with the wind in the trees his laughter, the tapping branches his footsteps, coming to bring us some news, a joke.

His daughter, of course, has the same big smile when she calls round to me, looking for books, and I want to scream at her and ask her how she can carry on laughing and doesn't she miss him, but she's only six and so I let it go and busy myself finding her something to read instead.