How to Be Good

by Nick Hornby

  ‘Did you enjoy that?’

  ‘I did. Very much.’

  ‘Really? Very much?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you hate the theatre.’

  ‘I think . . . I think I thought I hated the theatre. It was, it was a prejudice I hadn’t examined properly.’

  ‘You want to be careful.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘If you start examining your prejudices carefully there’ll soon be nothing left of you.’

  He smiles pleasantly and we walk on. We’re looking for a cab, which is what we always do after a night in the West End – Tube in, treat ourselves coming home – and I suddenly feel the need to see a yellow taxi light right this second, because I’m tired, and disoriented, and the thought of having to battle on escalators with a lot of drunks fills me with dread.

  And then something odd happens, and it becomes clear that something odd has happened to David, that the change in him is a result of something other than introspection and self-will. What happens is this. We pass a homeless kid in a doorway huddled up in a sleeping bag and David feels in his pockets, presumably for some change. (Let me be fair to David: he always does this. He does not, miraculously, Have Views on the homeless.) He doesn’t find anything, and he asks me for my purse, with many apologies, and another explanation as to why he thought he had his wallet with him when he didn’t. I don’t think about what I’m doing – why should I? – and give it to him, and he proceeds to give the kid everything that’s in there – about eighty pounds in notes, because I went to the cashpoint today, and three or four pounds in change. As far as I know, we’re left with nothing.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  I snatch the notes from the kid’s hands. A passing couple holding a programme from the Stoppard play stop when they see me taking money from a homeless person, and I want to tell them I’m a doctor. David takes the money off me, gives it to the boy again and tries to hustle me along the street. I resist.

  ‘David, what are you doing? We haven’t even got the Tube fare home.’

  ‘I kept a fiver back.’

  ‘I wanted to get a taxi.’ The couple is still watching me, and I don’t like the whine in my voice.

  ‘I’ll bet this chap would love to get a taxi,’ says David with a maddening sweetness in his voice. ‘But he can’t.’

  ‘Well, where’s he going to go in a bloody taxi?’ I shout. ‘He hasn’t got anywhere to go. That’s why he’s sleeping here.’ I don’t understand why I’m like this, but then, I don’t understand why David’s like that.

  ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ says the male half of the theatre couple.

  ‘My husband’s just given away everything we own,’ I tell him.

  ‘That is just not true,’ says David. ‘Our house? The money in our joint account? The money in our savings account? We won’t even notice this tomorrow.’

  Two or three other people have gathered to watch, and I realize that this is an argument I can’t win – not here, not now – so we walk towards the Underground station.

  ‘You can’t go round giving eighty quid to homeless people!’ I hiss.

  ‘I am aware that I cannot go around giving eighty quid to every homeless person. I just wanted to do it that one time. See how it felt.’

  ‘And how did it feel?’

  ‘Good.’

  I don’t get any of this. ‘When were you ever interested in being good?’

  ‘I wasn’t talking about being good. I was talking about feeling good.’

  ‘Well . . . Get drunk. Get stoned. Have sex. Don’t give all our bloody money away.’

  ‘I’m tired of all those things. I was stuck. I need to do something different.’

  ‘What’s happened to you? What happened when you went away? Where did you go?’

  ‘Nothing bloody happened to me.’ The old David, back with a bang. ‘Just because I wanted to see a play and gave a few quid to a street kid? Jesus.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry. I know my behaviour must seem confusing.’

  ‘Will you tell me what’s been going on?’

  ‘I don’t know if I can.’

  We reach Leicester Square Tube station and try to put the five pound note into the ticket machine, but it’s too crumpled, and the machine spits it out again. We take our place in the queue behind two hundred Scandinavian tourists and three hundred British drunks. And I still want to be in a taxi.

  On the way back – no seats on the Tube, not until we get to King’s Cross, anyway – David becomes absorbed in the theatre programme, almost certainly in an attempt to deflect further questions. We pay the babysitter by raiding the emergency fund in the kitchen jar, and then David says he’s tired and wants to go straight to bed.

  ‘Will you talk to me tomorrow?’

  ‘If I can think of anything to say. Anything to say that will make sense to you, anyway.’

  ‘What are our sleeping arrangements, anyway?’

  ‘I’d like you to sleep with me. But no pressure.’

  I’m not sure I do want to sleep with David, because of Stephen, and because of being in a mess, and all that stuff, but it’s not just David I don’t want to sleep with. There’s this other man, too, the one who likes the theatre and gives money away and tries to be nice to people, and I’m not sure I want to sleep with him either, because I don’t really know him, and he is beginning to give me the creeps. To dislike one husband may be regarded as unfortunate, but to dislike both looks like carelessness.

  But be careful what you wish for . . . I didn’t want David to be David any more. I wanted things to be structurally the same – I just didn’t want that voice, that tone, that permanent scowl. I wanted him to like me, and now he does. I go upstairs to our bedroom.

  You may not want to know about how lovemaking got underway in the old days – the pre-Stephen, post-kids old days, rather than the old-old days, when lovemaking meant something different – but I’m going to tell you anyway. We would both be reading in bed, and if I fancied sex, my hand would wander idly down towards his crotch, and if he fancied sex his hand would wander idly over towards one of my nipples (invariably the right nipple, because he sleeps on my left and it was clearly easier for him to reach across me than to go for the near side, which would involve an uncomfortable bend of the arm). And if the other party was in the mood, it would carry on from there, and books, magazines or newspapers would eventually be placed on the appropriate bedside tables. And OK, you wouldn’t want to see characters re-enacting this routine in a porn video, unless you actively dislike porn videos, but it worked for us.

  Tonight, however, is different. I reach for my book and David begins kissing the back of my neck tenderly; then he pulls me over and attempts to give me a big swoony kiss on the mouth, like a horizontal (and, let’s face it, slightly overweight) Clark Gable. It’s as if he has been reading an article in a woman’s magazine of the 1950s about reintroducing romance into marriage, and I’m not at all sure that I want romance reintroduced into my marriage. I was happy enough with David’s button-pushing routine, which at least had the virtue of efficiency; now he is looking at me as though this were our first time in bed together, and we were about to embark on the most memorable interior journey of our lives.

  I push him away a little so that I can look at him.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I want to make love to you.’

  ‘Yes, well, fine. Get on with it. There doesn’t have to be all this fuss.’ I can hear how I sound – like Joyce Grenfell in 9½Weeks – and I hate it, because I’m not some sexless bluestocking lie-back-and-think-of-England type. But the truth is that we’d have been finished by now if this was the old David. I’d have come, he’d have come and the lights would be off.

  ‘But I want to make love to you. Not just have sex.’

  ‘And what does that involve?’

  ‘Communication. Intensity. I don’t know.’

  My heart sinks. The advantages of turning forty for me include: not
having to change nappies, not having to go to places where people dance, and not having to be intense with the person I live with.

  ‘Please try it my way,’ says David pitifully. So I do. I look into his eyes, I kiss him the way he wants to be kissed, we take a long time over everything and, at the end (no orgasm for me, incidentally), I lie on his chest while he strokes my hair. I get through it, just about, but I don’t see the point of it.

  The following morning, David spends most of breakfast humming, smiling, and trying to relate to his children, who seem as perplexed as I am, Tom especially.

  ‘What have you got today, Tom?’

  ‘School.’

  ‘Yes, but what at school?’

  Tom looks at me anxiously, as if I can somehow intercede, prevent his father from asking perfectly harmless conversational questions. I stare back at him and try to convey unfeasibly complicated messages with my eyes: ‘It’s not my fault, I don’t know what’s going on, just tell him your timetable and eat your cereal, he’s undergone a complete character transformation . . .’ That sort of look, the sort that would require several eyes, and eyebrows with the agility of a teenage Eastern European acrobat.

  ‘I dunno,’ says Tom. ‘Maths, I expect. English. Ummmmm . . .’ He glances at David to see whether he has provided sufficient detail, but David is still smiling at him expectantly. ‘Games, maybe.’

  ‘Anything you need any help with? I mean, your old man’s not Brain of Britain, but he’s not bad at English. Writing and all that.’ And he chuckles, we know not why.

  Tom no longer looks anxious; the anxiety has been replaced by something akin to terror. I almost find myself feeling sorry for David – it’s sad, after all, that what certainly appears to be a genuine attempt to convey warmth and concern should be met with such naked mistrust – but ten years of ill-temper are not easily forgotten, and David has been grumpy for as long as Tom has been alive.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Tom, clearly unconvinced. ‘I’m all right at writing, thanks. You can help me with games, if you want.’

  It’s Tom’s little joke, and it’s not a bad one – I laugh, anyway – but these are different times.

  ‘Sure,’ says David. ‘Do you want to, I don’t know, kick a ball around after school?’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ says Tom.

  ‘Good,’ says David.

  David knows what ‘yeah, right’ means; he has heard the expression several times a day for the last couple of years, and it has never before prompted the word ‘good’. The words ‘sarcastic little bastard’, ‘ungrateful little sod’ or simply ‘shut up’ yes; ‘good’, no. So why would he choose to ignore the tone and meaning that he knows Tom wishes to convey and plough on regardless? I am beginning to suspect that there is a sinister medical explanation for David’s behaviour.

  ‘I’ll go out and buy a new pair of trainers today,’ he adds, for good measure. Tom and I look at each other, and then attempt to prepare for the day ahead as if it were like any other.

  Stephen leaves a message for me at work. I ignore it.

  When I get back from work there are two children and an adult playing Cluedo on the kitchen table and a dozen messages on the answerphone. The phone rings again as I’m taking my coat off, but David makes no attempt to pick it up, and everyone listens to Nigel, David’s editor at the paper, attempting to attract the attention of the Angriest Man in Holloway.

  ‘I know you’re there, David. Pick the fucking phone up.’

  The children giggle. David shakes the dice.

  ‘Why aren’t you answering?’

  ‘Daddy’s given up work,’ says Molly proudly.

  ‘I haven’t given up work. I’ve just given up that work.’

  Nigel is still chuntering away in the background. ‘Pick up . . . Pick up, you bastard.’

  ‘You’ve given up the column? Why?’

  ‘Because I’m not angry any more.’

  ‘You’re not angry any more?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘About anything?’

  ‘No. It’s all gone.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know. But it’s gone. You can tell, can’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I can tell.’

  ‘So I can’t write a column about being angry any more.’

  I sigh, heavily.

  ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’

  I thought I would be pleased, too. If, a few weeks ago, someone had offered to grant me one wish, I think I would probably have chosen to wish for exactly this, because I would not have been able to think of anything else, not even money, that could have improved the quality of my life – our lives – so dramatically. Oh, I’d have mumbled something about cures for cancer or world peace, of course, but secretly I’d have been hoping that the genie wouldn’t let me do the good person thing. Secretly I’d have wanted the genie to say, ‘No, you’re a doctor, you do enough for the world already, what with the boils and everything. Choose something for yourself.’ And I would have said, after a great deal of thought, ‘I would like David not to be angry any more. I would like him to recognize that his life is OK, that his children are wonderful, that he has a loyal and loving and – sod it – a not unattractive or unintelligent wife, and enough money for babysitters and meals out and the mortgage . . . I would like all his bile gone, every inch, or ounce, or millilitre of it.’ (I imagine David’s bile to be in that difficult state between liquid and solid, like almost-set concrete.) And the genie would have rubbed his stomach, and hey presto! David is a happy person.

  And hey presto! David is a happy person, or at least, a calm person, here, now, in the real world, and all I do is sigh. The thing is, of course, I don’t really want the hey presto! part. I am a rationalist, and I don’t believe in genies, or sudden personality changes. I wanted David’s anger to vanish only after years and years in therapy.

  ‘I am pleased,’ I say, unconvincingly. ‘I just wish you’d had the courage to tell Nigel.’

  ‘Nigel’s an angry man,’ David says sadly. ‘He wouldn’t understand.’ This last observation at least is incontrovertible, given that Nigel has just ended his attempt to attract David’s attention with a volley of abuse. He even used the C-word, although we all pretended we hadn’t heard it.

  ‘Why don’t you play Cluedo with us, Mummy?’

  And I do, until tea time. And after tea, we play Junior Scrabble. We are the ideal nuclear family. We eat together, we play improving board games instead of watching television, we smile a lot. I fear that at any moment I may kill somebody.

  5

  At lunchtime the next day, Becca and I walk up the road to get a sandwich, and I tell her about GoodNews, and the theatre, and the street kid, and even about the lovemaking. (‘Ugh!’ she says. ‘Your own husband? How disgusting!’) And then, suddenly, she grabs my arm.

  ‘Katie! My God!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Shit!’

  ‘What? You’re frightening me.’

  ‘David’s sick.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Change of personality. And did you say something about a headache?’

  My stomach lurches. This is text-book stuff. This is the sinister medical explanation for his behaviour. David almost certainly has a brain tumour. How could I have been so oblivious? I run back to work and phone him.

  ‘David. I don’t want you to panic, but please listen carefully and do exactly what I say. You probably have a brain tumour. You have to go to hospital and have a CAT scan, urgently. We can get you the referral here, but . . .’

  ‘Katie . . .’

  ‘Please listen. We can get you the referral here, but . . .’

  ‘Katie, there’s nothing wrong with me.’

  ‘Well, let’s hope not. But these are classic symptoms.’

  ‘Are you saying this because I’ve started to be nice to you?’

  ‘Well, yes. And then there was the theatre.’

  ‘You think that if I enjoyed a play I must have a brain tumour?
’

  ‘And the money. And the sex the other night.’

  There’s a long pause.

  ‘Katie, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘And that’s the other thing. You keep apologizing all the time. David, I think you may be very ill.’

  ‘It’s so sad.’

  ‘It might not be. But I do think . . .’

  ‘No, no. Not that. It’s so sad that the only explanation you can come up with for all this is that I’m about to die. I’m really not, I promise. We should talk.’

  And he puts the phone down.

  David won’t discuss his tumour until we are alone, and even then I don’t really grasp what he’s saying.

  ‘He didn’t use cream,’ is how he chooses to begin.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘DJ GoodNews. He didn’t use cream.’

  ‘Right. So . . .’ I attempt to locate the import of this clearly important announcement, and fail.

  ‘So . . . Molly was right? Is that it?’

  ‘Oh. Yes. Sure. Absolutely. She was right all along. But don’t you see? He just used his hands.’

  ‘Right. No cream, then.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘OK. Thank you for telling me. I’ve . . . I’ve got a clearer picture of the whole thing now.’

  ‘That’s what all this is about. How it all started, anyway.’

  ‘All what?’

  David gestures outwards impatiently, at everything in the world.

  ‘All . . . well, me. This. The money the other night. The . . . the problem with my column. All of it. The change of . . . I don’t know, the change of atmosphere. You’ve presumably noticed the change in atmosphere? I mean, that’s why you thought I was ill, right? Well. That’s . . . That’s where it all comes from.’

  ‘It all comes from your friend GoodNews not using cream?’

  ‘Yeah. Sort of. I mean, no cream was . . . That was the . . . Oh, I can’t explain this. I thought I could and I can’t.’ I cannot recall David ever being like this – inarticulate, agitated, acutely embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry.’