Freddie Mercury (39 page)

We were lucky at Covent Garden because I knew one of the box office staff and so should Freddie decide that there was something he wanted to see at the last moment, tickets were not a problem. In those days, prior to computer ticketing, a block of ten of the best seats in the house were always left available should any VIP require seats. These seats were kept on hold until the last minute when the box office knew they would always be able to get rid of them. These seats were generally front row of the grand tier, best seats in the house. This means of acquiring seats is definitely no longer available, thanks to the inevitable computer.

Which brings me on to my number five on the significant moment
list. This next and last just goes to show that like life, my time with Freddie was not always a bed of roses. This is more a chain of events than a single situation and it is as sad a memory as it is an important one, although the outcome brought about an incredible strengthening of our relationship.

It concerns one of the most important tenets of Freddie’s life, the question of trust. And I have to say, my own life, for trust is a two-way street. In hindsight, the build-up to this situation occurred over quite a long period but in essence I began to feel an unsettling shift in our relationship. I can’t put my finger on the moment and so I can’t say when the process started but I remember it building up to a moment when after much soul-searching I told Freddie in the middle of 1989 that I thought it was better that I left Garden Lodge.

At the time, as it was happening, I didn’t know what was going wrong but it finally occurred to me that there was so much that I wasn’t being told, I was beginning to feel very marginalised in the household.

There were bits of information which I was hearing which under ordinary circumstances I would have been privy to. I felt like the untried apprentice about whom someone once joked, “They’re just like mushrooms. Feed ’em shit ‘n’ keep ’em in the dark!”

To be specific, I was being deliberately kept in the dark about Freddie’s appointments at the hospital or with the doctor. Nothing of life-or-death importance but Freddie’s whereabouts was information I would have usually known and been told about both by Freddie as well as by Joe and Jim, because everyone in the house would always assume that the others knew equally what any single person knew. As far as we ‘staff’ were concerned, although Freddie hated the ultimate confrontations that could arise in a household such as his, he would let petty situations develop and simmer and would rather enjoy watching them brew. It was one of his ways of controlling the drama, rather like his way in business in general. If relationships were too hunky dory and too cosy between all of ‘us’, he would often get to feel left out, as though there was some big conspiracy against him being hatched. Being the master puppeteer, he always knew that it could fall to him to pour oil on the ruffled waters and to emerge the ostensibly sympathetic shoulder to cry on at the opportune moment. A master.

At that point, I really could not understand why I was being
excluded from being told this medical information. I have to re-emphasise here that Freddie was doing his utmost to play the health question very close to his chest. I had no alternative but to come to the blind conclusion that whatever Freddie was suffering from, it was indeed very serious. I suppose, deep in the back of my mind, I had suspected that Freddie had Aids but the forward parts of the mind, the positive-thinking parts, tell one the opposite story. That he hadn’t…

But, then, what had he got?

This unbearable situation continued and looked like doing so as I was unable to summon up the boldness or find the right moment to approach Freddie and ask him privately what it was that was the matter with him. In the end, I went through Joe, Jim and Mary. I just had to tell them, “Look… There is no point in my being here if I don’t know what’s going on, I cannot plan anything in my own life and I simply shouldn’t be here.”

It transpired that Freddie suspected that it had been through me that certain information as to the state and causes of his health problems were being leaked to the press and to others. Freddie had heard something which had come back to him via an eighth or ninth party which could only have come from a source within Garden Lodge, something to do with a visit to a hospital which he had made earlier on in the year and which should have been entirely confidential.

Joe and Jim reacted to my unease by being conciliatory … “Are you sure that’s what you want to do? Are you really sure?” Things like that.

I was absolutely sure. What I was even more than sure of was that I was so unhappy that I really needed to leave. After all that we had been through together over the past ten years and the relationships we had all built up, I felt that it was being eroded for some mystery that I was being kept away from. It was distressing and cruel. As I had hoped, the message got to Freddie and he came down into the kitchen one day not long after, before Terry had come in for the morning and when Joe and Jim had either gone – or been sent – out, I’m not sure which. He was sitting down at the kitchen table and I was by the moveable butcher’s block in the middle of the kitchen and he said, “What’s all this rubbish about you going?”

So, I tried to explain what I was feeling and he actually told me what it was he thought had been going on. As far as he was aware, he thought that I had been telling one of my best friends outside the
inner circle what was going on in the house and that this had become the subject of gossip.

Once his suspicions were all out in the open, I knew immediately that there was a glimmer of hope in salvaging the situation because, very basically, I knew that I had not and would never have blab-mouthed so carelessly. It was not in my nature. I knew if I could spend ten minutes trying to explain and convince Freddie of this, things would be okay.

We talked. I told him, “Okay, maybe when I started work with the band, because everything was so new and wonderful and glamorous, of course I told my friends what a wonderful life it was. But,” I continued, “after all the years of knowing you, I fully appreciate what your privacy means to you and you know I would never invade it. You know I would do anything for you, anything you asked …”

It must have been about this moment in the conversation that Freddie must have had a change of heart. He turned to me and said, “Well, you know I’m very sick. But that’s the end of the conversation. There’s just no more to say.”

He didn’t have to say anything else. I had already lost some friends to Aids so I understood fully what he was saying. It was 1989, after all. Freddie, also, knew that he had no need to elaborate.

The tension eased visibly, immediately, but I was still not a hundred per cent sure that I should be staying. Obviously, something was leaking out of the house and however much I racked my brains, I couldn’t be sure of every single word that I’d ever said to every single person about my life. I even began to doubt myself.

I know that I never ever told one single person about Freddie’s illness, not even my best friends, not even when they pestered me about their suspicions, for the topic was almost common gossip on every street corner because of the continual press speculation. As far as I’m concerned, it is the prerogative of any person suffering from any illness to tell only whomsoever they wish. It is no one else’s place to pass on any private information like this and the right to impart such information is only the right of the sufferer. I knew, however, that my constant lie, which I told when pressed about Freddie’s health, would catch up with me eventually but I persisted with what seemed like a mantra, “No, he’s fine, he’s just a bit under the weather.” Or, “Just a liver complaint, dear.”

I knew that true friends would be there when the time came and would understand why I felt I had to lie. One of my regrets, however, is that Freddie never knew the amount and depth of concern which was being expressed for him by people in all walks of life and at all times of day. I knew but I could never tell him that I knew that they knew because he never wanted the subject broached.

A short while after this conversation, time enough for both Freddie and I to acclimatise to a new state of openness, Freddie asked me whether or not I still wanted to leave. It was an incredible request from a man who had spent his life avoiding such confrontations. It says something about the relationship we had that he found himself able to ask.

I replied, “Well, you don’t really need me here.”

“But I do need you,” he said. “I want you to stay.” At that point, I was very overcome with emotion. I then felt really guilty that I had made Freddie do this. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. We merely hugged.

I then took on more of the responsibilities of caring for him and suddenly the grey lowering skies of the last few months lifted as far as my relationship with him was concerned.

Not long after this episode, I remember a day which for me represents the final cementing of our ultimate relationship. It was late Spring in 1991, the magnolia blossom on the trees was in full bloom. I was suffering yet another attack of gout, this time in my ankle. I had first developed gout some years before. For people who’ve never experienced this ailment, I won’t even try to explain the pain and its intensity. The day in question was one of those when Freddie had decided he wanted to sit out in the garden and due to my illness, I wasn’t able to get very far without the aid of a walking stick. Freddie arranged for two of the big wicker chairs from the conservatory to be brought out into the garden, along with one of the accompanying stools, and placed beneath the magnolias. It must have made quite a picture, both of us invalids sitting in the capacious armchairs, each with our afflicted foot supported on the footstool, the sunlight playing down through the leaves and flowers above us. He had an arrangement of magazines put out and drinks so that we wouldn’t have to move anywhere. We spent a couple of hours there, talking about nothing in particular. However, after three hours, he got bored with the idyllic setting and its carefully arranged props and went back inside.

I have to say that it was not until after he died that I found out how the information which had so threatened the integrity of my relationship with Freddie was getting out of the house. The gossip was being passed on, without doubt, and the unwitting carrier turned out to be Joe. I think, totally unknowingly, when Joe went to the gym every day, he was going as much as to a social club as for a workout. In amongst his acquaintances at the gym was someone who was later discovered to be a reporter for the
Daily Mirror.
So, while Joe was having conversations with his friends, information was being gleaned from what he was saying and, from between the lines, elaborated upon as it was passed on like a horrible game of Chinese whispers.

S
ometime in September 1991, Joe and I had been given British Telecom pagers so that we could keep in constant touch all the time we weren’t together in the house. For example I might be out shopping and Joe could be at the gym and we could maintain the secure knowledge of being in touch should anything untoward happen at home and we were needed immediately. The pagers were never actually needed but for our peace of mind and for Freddie’s, they were worth their weight in gold. He was visibly deteriorating. Just a little piece of plastic with a couple of microchips made all the difference.

From about the end of September onwards, it must be remembered that Freddie’s eyesight was failing. It was why he hadn’t been going out quite so frequently. At Bonhams one day, where there was a flight of white marble steps leading to the street in Montpellier Square, he missed his footing and only just in time grabbed hold of my arm. It was the first time he realised that he couldn’t gauge the tread of the step. His sense of perspective had gone. I suppose it takes something unexpected like this incident for a person to be pulled up sharply and forced to evaluate the extent to which their own physical decline had progressed. For Freddie, part of the great joy of being alive was being able to see. This was a major setback in his will to carry on. He knew he was never going to beat his disease but he was determined to fight it with all his strength.

Freddie had flown back from Switzerland on Saturday, November 9, 1991, having made up his mind that he was no longer going to take any of the drugs that were keeping him alive. He was not going to have any more of the Gancyclovir, Septrin and all the others. He accepted that he would have to continue to take the painkillers. Up
until this point, he had been on Dihydrocodeine (DF118) but the doctors, after discussion, considered he would be better off having Diamorphine as he needed it. After the first dose, Freddie found that he was extremely nauseous and so an anti-emetic was also prescribed. Again, Joe and I were taught the amounts and frequency of the doses. The anti-emetic worked up to a point but right until the end, Freddie had difficulty tolerating the morphine.

Some months prior to this date, Freddie had been admitted as an overnight patient to the Cromwell Hospital in Cromwell Road just around the corner in order to have a Hickman line implanted. This simple operation involved a canula being inserted into a vein in the neck. Then the rubber tube at the head of the canula is implanted under the skin and emerges through the skin on the upper left pectoral to which can then be attached an infusion valve. The only physical evidence of the presence of this canula is a tiny scar on the lower part of the neck in the clavicle region. This insertion facilitated easier administration of the medications. It solved the problem of having a nurse on hand to insert venflons every time access to a vein was required. At this time, such access was at least twice a day. No patient’s vein system could tolerate this invasion for long. This Hickman line access point could remain in situ for any amount of time up to a year. Extreme care was needed where hygiene was concerned as any stray infection had an open access to the body. Such stray infections could cause radical reactions even in a matter of seconds.