Beverley Knight

Beverley Knight · on someone they love

Beverley Knight on Tyrone, and the Christmas she drove him to hospital

Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.

Beverley Knight met Tyrone in their late twenties, at an R&B night in a London club. He spotted her, wanted her to perform at an event he was booking, and asked for her number. They had lunch the next day and, as she tells it, were inseparable from then until he died. By the time they met he was already a long way into living with HIV, and had been in hospital several times. At Christmas 2002 he became very ill. She noticed his speech slurring and his vision going — he needed glasses, and he began to sound drunk, which she knew he was not. His body seemed to be shutting down. She left her parents over the Christmas period, got in her car and drove him to hospital in west London, where he was admitted. The consultant told them the prognosis was poor. He would not survive it. Treatment might extend his life by a couple of months; without it, he was looking at perhaps a couple of weeks. Tyrone said he did not want treatment. What she says about that is short and unguarded: she had to accept it, and it nearly killed her. She was there when he died — in the next room. He died in 2003. It happened at the same time as she was promoting an album that was being rejected by people she had expected to understand it. She describes facing that without the person she would have leaned on, and everything spiralling from there. Tyrone was not a public figure. He is named here only as she names him, and nothing has been added to what she said. Nothing here is medical advice. HIV treatment today is very effective: someone on treatment with an undetectable viral load cannot pass the virus on. If you want a test, the NHS can arrange one, and results take days at a clinic or minutes with a home kit.

• HIV