How to Be Good

‘I bet you didn’t even mean that.’

‘I did mean it. I meant it with all my heart. But that’s as far as it goes. The outer limits of our hospitality.’

‘But you said…’

‘Molly. There was nothing to talk about. Brian couldn’t come to live here. He’s not our family.’

‘But he could be.’

‘No. He couldn’t.’ I look at David, who looks right back at me. He’s not about to help me out.

‘Molly, this is our family. You, me, Daddy, Tom. That’s it. Not GoodNews, not Brian, not Monkey, nobody else. Tough. There’s nothing you can do about it. These are the people we have to worry about first.’

‘Why?’ Finally, a contribution from my husband. Not a helpful contribution, but a contribution nevertheless.

‘Why? Why? David, we’re barely able to look after ourselves. We’re almost broke, partly because you refuse to work. Tom’s been stealing things from people at school…’ I can feel a hot torrent of words building up inside me, and could no more prevent this torrent from coming out of my mouth than I could stop myself from vomiting if I were ill. ‘Molly’s turning into a prig, I’ve had an affair…’

‘What’s a prig? What’s an affair?’

‘It means Mummy’s had a boyfriend,’ says Tom, without missing a second of the television programme he is watching.

‘You and I have been on the verge of divorce for months, although now we’ve made the decision to lock ourselves in and throw away the key, thus condemning each other to what might be a lifetime of frustration and mutual loathing. And you ask why we have to look after each other first? Because life’s fucking hard enough as it is, that’s why, and…’

‘Katie, stop. You’re upsetting the kids.’

‘Good. Maybe they should be upset. Maybe they shouldn’t go through life thinking that everything’s OK, everything’s great, everything’s so great, in fact, that it doesn’t matter who we give money to or who we take in, because it does matter. I wish it didn’t. I wish we were competent enough to handle lives other than our own, but we’re not. And I’ll tell you something for nothing. All my life I have wanted to help people. That’s why I wanted to be a doctor. And because of that I work ten-hour days and I get threatened by junkies and I constantly let people down because I promise them hospital appointments that never come and I give them drugs that never work. And having failed at that, I come home and fail at being a wife and a mother. Well, I haven’t got the energy to fail at anything else. And if that means that Brian goes on living in sheltered accommodation, or Monkey has to sleep rough, well, so be it. Too bad. If in twenty years’ time, we’re all still speaking, and Molly’s not an anorexic, and Tom’s not inside, and I’m not hooked on tranquillizers, and you’re not an alcoholic, and you and I are still together, well, that’ll be a bloody miracle in itself. I’m not asking for any more than that. And if on top of all that we manage to buy a few copies of the Big Issue, and take them to the recycling centre, then hurrah for us. Haven’t we done well? Hurrah for us. Hur-rah-for-us! Hur-rah-for-us. Come on! Join in!’

Nobody does.

It’s over, now. I’ve emptied the contents of my throat all over the family, and there’s nothing left.

‘You’re not really going to get divorced, are you?’ Molly asks. She’s crying, but then, that was the idea.

‘Not if you’re good,’ I tell her. It’s a terrible thing to say, I know that. But it’s weirdly appropriate too.

15

For the first time in months and months I have to go to a bookshop, to buy a birthday present for my father. I don’t know what to get him, and he doesn’t know what he wants, so I wander around aimlessly. I used to spend a lot of time in bookshops; I used to know what most of the books were, what they meant, but now I’m simply perplexed and vaguely panicky. I pick up a novel by a young woman writer and read the blurb: perhaps I would like this, I think. I was halfway through Captain Corelli’s Mandolin when I moved out of Janet’s, and even though no further progress has been made, there is a possibility that I may well wish to have another go at reading a novel some time in the new Mille

Biographies. Would he like a biography? Hitler? Montgomery? Dickens? Jack Nicklaus? The woman out of Eastenders who ran the pub? But Dad’s not much of a pub man, I think, so he’s not likely to… Jesus, Katie. It wasn’t a real pub. The point of this book is that the woman used to be in Eastenders. Dad doesn’t watch Eastenders. That’s why you’re not going to buy him this book. I find a reassuringly present-sized biography of God on the ‘Staff Picks’ table, and just as I am about to take it to the till, I see the book about Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s artist sister, the woman who, according to the book review I read, lived a rich and beautiful life. So I buy that, too, to see how it’s done. And when David and GoodNews have finished ‘How to be Good’, we can sit down and compare notes.

David has gone back to writing company brochures. He is no longer interested in his novel, and even if he were angry any more—which he isn’t—he would not be able to vent his spleen in the local paper, because he has been displaced, dethroned, out-raged: there is a new, and even angrier, Angriest Man in Holloway now—which is as it should be, I suppose. If the new columnist were not angrier than David at his angriest, then he would be the Second Angriest Man in Holloway, and that would look a bit feeble on the page. And anyway, people get angrier all the time. It was inevitable that David’s anger levels would end up looking a bit late 90s. He was never going to hang on to the title for ever, just like Martina was never going to remain Wimbledon champion for ever. Younger, meaner people come along. The new chap has just called for the closure of all public parks, on the grounds that they are magnets for gays, dogs, alcoholics and children; we have to hold up our hands in defeat. The better man has won.

In the old days, David’s failure to have remained angry enough to keep his job would have made him furious—furious enough to become angry enough to keep his job. This David, though, just shrinks back into himself a little more. He has offered the paper a different sort of column, one based on the book he is writing with GoodNews, but no one was interested. He is properly depressed now, I think, and if he were to come to see me in the surgery I would prescribe something. But he won’t. He still spends all his spare time with GoodNews, scribbling notes for ‘How to be Good’, although spare time is much harder to find now—there are a lot of brochures to be written.