Emma Pinch talks to the writer who wants people to understand that the face of HIV is the one that looks back in the mirror

IT WAS one of those nights, says Cate, which would be stamped on her memory for ever. The kids had sausage and mash for tea, and argued over whose turn it was to help wash up. She put them in the bath – they swished the bath foam over the sides – and tucked them in bed with a story. She gathered up clothes for the laundry basket, recapped the toothpaste, and laid out damp towels to dry.

And while that thoroughly ordinary domestic scene was being played out, one thought was repeating itself across her mind: Tomorrow I find out if I’m going to die.

Cate Jacobs was 32 and had been working as a volunteer at Liverpool’s Sahir House, providing support to people affected by HIV. There she’d met her partner, Martin, who was HIV positive.

“It was 1994 and there were a lot of myths about how you could contract HIV back then, but I felt pretty clued up in terms of effects and routes of transmission. I was reasonably confident I wouldn’t contract it, as long as we were careful and protected ourselves,” says Cate. “We never took risks.”

Then, just once, a condom split.

She put the aches and feverishness and deep fatigue she suffered some months later down to flu. But, as the months passed, a worm of doubt kept niggling in her mind.

“I’d had constant nagging doubts, since it happened, but both of us thought that realistically you couldn’t catch it from one split condom,” says Cate, who lives in Liverpool city centre.

“I did suggest to doctors I went for a test because of what had happened and that my partner was HIV positive. But even they insisted the risk would be very small.”

Eventually, six months after the accident, she decided she had to put her mind at rest and took herself up to the Liverpool Royal Hospital for a same-day test. She couldn’t wait for the result as she had to pick her two under-10s up from school, and said she’d come back for it the next day.

“Martin was becoming ill so I didn’t tell him,” she says. “It felt like one more thing I didn’t want him to worry about.

“But it was one of those nights which will be indelibly stamped on my memory for the rest of my life. What the children were wearing, what we had for tea. Everything was normal except the little bruise on the inside of my arm where they’d taken the sample of blood.