How to Be Good

by Nick Hornby

  So what do I believe? Nothing much, apparently. I believe that there shouldn’t be homelessness, and I’d definitely be prepared to argue with anyone who says otherwise. Ditto battered women. Ditto, I don’t know, racism, poverty and sexism. I believe that the National Health Service is underfunded, and that Red-Nose Day is a sort of OK thing, although slightly annoying, I grant you, when young men dressed as Patsy and Edina from Absolutely Fabulous come up to you in Waitrose and wave buckets in your face. And, finally, I am of the reasonably firm conviction that Tom’s Christmas presents are his, and shouldn’t be given away. There you are. That is my manifesto. Vote for me.

  Three days later the children seem to have forgotten that they ever needed two computers – Molly has lost the little interest she had in the first place, and Tom is spending most of his time on Pokémon – and we receive a letter from the women’s refuge telling us that we have made an enormous difference to some very unhappy young lives. I still believe the other things, though, the things about poverty and Health Service underfunding. You won’t shake me on those – unless, that is, you have any sort of persuasive evidence at all to the contrary.

  David has abandoned his novel, now, as well as his column. ‘No longer appropriate’ – like just about everything else he ever thought or did or wanted to do. During the day, as far as I can tell, he sits in his office reading; late afternoons he cooks, he plays, he helps with homework, he wants to talk about the days that everyone has had . . . in short, he is a model husband and father. I described him as such to Becca the other day, and a picture of a model husband and father came unbidden into my head: this particular model, however, is made of plastic and has his features moulded into a permanent expression of concern and consideration. David has become a sort of happy-clappy right-on Christian version of Barbie’s Ken, except without Ken’s rugged good looks and contoured body.

  And I don’t think that David has become a Christian, although it is hard to fathom precisely what he has become. Asking him directly doesn’t really clarify things. The evening after we get the letter from the women’s refuge, Tom asks – mournfully but rather percipiently, I thought – whether we are all going to have to start going to church.

  ‘Church?’ says David – but gently, not with the explosion of anger and disdain that would have accompanied that word in any context just a few weeks ago. ‘Of course not. Why? Do you want to go to church?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So why did you ask?’

  ‘Dunno,’ Tom says. ‘Just, I thought, that’s what we’d have to do now.’

  ‘Why now?’

  ‘Because we give things away. That’s what they do in church, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not as far as I know.’

  And that’s the end of it; Tom’s fears are assuaged. Later, though, when David and I are on our own, I make my own enquiries.

  ‘That was funny, wasn’t it? Tom thinking we’d have to go to church now?’

  ‘I didn’t understand where all that came from. Just because we gave a computer to someone.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s just that.’

  ‘What else is there?’

  ‘They both know about you giving the money away. And anyway, it’s . . . You asked me if I’d noticed a change of atmosphere. Well, I think they have, too. And they sort of associate it with church, somehow.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose . . . You do give off the air of someone who has undergone a religious conversion.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t.’

  ‘You haven’t become a Christian?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What are you, then?’

  ‘What am I?’

  ‘Yes, what are you? You know, Buddhist or, or . . .’ I try to think of other world religions that might fit the bill, and fail. Moslem doesn’t seem right, nor Hindu . . . Maybe a Hare Krishna offshoot, or something involving self-denial and some podgy guru driving around in an Alfa Romeo?

  ‘I’m nothing. I’ve just seen sense.’

  ‘But what does that mean?’

  ‘We’ve all been living the wrong life, and I want to put that right.’

  ‘I don’t feel I’ve been living the wrong life.’

  ‘I disagree.’

  ‘Oh, is that right?’

  ‘You live the right life during the working week, I suppose. But the rest of the time . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s your sexual conduct, for a start.’

  My sexual conduct . . . For a moment I forget that for the last twenty years I have had a monogamous relationship with my husband, punctuated only recently by a brief and rather hapless affair (and what happened to him, by the way? A couple of unreturned phone calls seem to have dampened his ardour considerably). The phrase enables me to see myself as someone who may have to check herself into one of those sex addiction clinics that Hollywood stars have to go to, someone who, despite her best intentions, cannot keep her pants on. It’s quite a thrilling picture, but its main purpose, I can see, is to convince me that David is being preposterous; the truth is that I am a married woman who was sleeping with someone else just a couple of weeks ago. David’s language might be pompous, but there is, I suppose, a case to answer.

  ‘You’ve never wanted to talk about that.’

  ‘There isn’t much to talk about, is there?’

  I think about whether this is true and decide that it is. I could waffle on about context, but he knows about that already; the rest of it makes for a short and banal little story without much resonance.

  ‘So what else do I do wrong?’

  ‘It’s not what you do wrong. It’s what we all do wrong.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘We don’t care enough. We look after ourselves and ignore the weak and the poor. We despise our politicians for doing nothing, and think that this is somehow enough to show we care, and meanwhile we live in centrally heated houses that are too big for us. . .’

  ‘Hey, hold on . . .’ Our dream – before DJ GoodNews came into our lives, was to move out of our poky terraced house and into something that gave us room to turn around in without knocking a child over in the process. Now, suddenly, we are rattling around in Holloway’s equivalent of Graceland. But I am allowed to say none of this, because David has the bit between his teeth.

  ‘We have a spare bedroom, and a study, and meanwhile people are sleeping outside on pavements. We scrape perfectly edible food into our compost maker, and meanwhile people at the end of our road are begging for the price of a cup of tea and a bag of chips. We have two televisions, we did have three computers until I gave one away – and even that was a crime, apparently, reducing the number of computers available to a family of four by one third. We think nothing of spending ten pounds each on a takeaway curry . . .’

  I plead guilty to this. I thought David was going to say ‘. . . forty pounds a head on a meal in a smart restaurant’, which we have done, on occasions – occasions which have, of course, prompted all sorts of doubts and qualms. But ten pounds on a takeaway? Yes, guilty, I admit it: I have frequently thought nothing of spending ten pounds on a takeaway, and it has never occurred to me that my thoughtlessness was negligent or culpable in any way. One has to respect David for this thoroughness, at least.

  ‘We spend thirteen pounds on compact discs which we already own in a different format . . .’

  ‘That’s you, not me.’

  ‘. . . We buy films for our children that they’ve already seen at the cinema and never watch again . . .’ There ensues a long list of similar crimes, all of which sound petty and, in any other household, completely legal, but which suddenly seem, with David’s spin on them, selfish and despicable. I drift off for a while.

  ‘I’m a liberal’s worst nightmare,’ David says at the end of his litany, with a smile that could be described, were one feeling uncharitable or paranoid, as malicious.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I think everything you
think. But I’m going to walk it like I talk it.’

  On Sunday my mother and father visit for lunch. They don’t come very often – usually we all have to go there – and when they do come I have somehow allowed myself to turn the day into An Occasion, thus inflicting on my children the misery that was inflicted on me during equivalent Occasions in my childhood: combed hair, the best clothes they possess, assistance in tidying up, attendance at table compulsory for the whole of the meal, even though my mother talks so much that the last mouthful of Viennese Whirl does not disappear down her throat for what seems like hours after the rest of us have finished. And, of course, a roast dinner, which my brother and I detested (very possibly because it was invariably detestable: gristly, dry lamb, overcooked cabbage, lumpy Bisto, greasy and disintegrating roast potatoes, the usual 1960s wartime fare), but which Tom and Molly love. Unlike either of my parents, David and I can cook; unlike either of my parents, we very rarely bother to waste this skill on our children.

  Finally the clothes argument is over, the tidying has been done, my parents have arrived, and we are drinking our dry sherry and eating our mixed nuts in the living room. David has just gone into the kitchen to carve the beef and make the gravy. Moments later – much too soon to have achieved the tasks he disappeared to do – he comes back.

  ‘Roast beef and roast potatoes? Or frozen lasagne?’

  ‘Roast beef and roast potatoes,’ the kids yell happily, and my mum and dad chuckle.

  ‘I think so, too,’ says David, and disappears again.

  ‘He’s a tease, your dad, isn’t he?’ says my mum to Tom and Molly – an appropriate response to what she has just seen and heard in just about any domestic situation but ours. David isn’t a tease. He wasn’t a tease before (he hated my parents’ visits, and would never have been able to muster the kind of cheery goodwill necessary for joshing everyone along), and he certainly isn’t a tease since his sense of humour disappeared into DJ GoodNews’s fingertips along with his back pain. I excuse myself and go into the kitchen, where David is transferring everything we have spent the last couple of hours cooking into the largest Le Creuset casserole dish we own.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I ask calmly.

  ‘I can’t do this,’ he says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can’t sit here and eat this while there are people out there with nothing. Have we got any paper plates?’

  ‘No, David.’

  ‘We have. We had loads left over from the Christmas party.’

  ‘I’m not talking about the plates. You can’t do this.’

  ‘I have to.’

  ‘I . . . I understand if you can’t eat it.’ (I don’t understand at all, of course, but I’m trying to talk him off the ledge.) ‘You could refuse, and . . . and . . . tell us all why.’ There is no point in worrying just yet about the excruciating lunch ahead of us, the embarrassment and bewilderment as my poor mother and father (Tories both, but neither of them actively evil, in the accepted non-David use of the word) receive a lecture about their wicked, wicked ways. In fact I vow to myself that if we get as far as the lunch, if this food is actually served on to actual plates and people (by which I mean people I know, God forgive me) actually sit down to eat it, I will not worry at all; I will listen to David’s views with sympathy and interest. I watch while David crams the Delia-style roast potatoes into the dish. The painstakingly achieved crunchy golden shells start to crumble as he attempts to wedge them down the side of the joint.

  ‘I have to give this away,’ says David. ‘I went to the freezer to get the stock out and I saw all that stuff in there and . . . I just realized that I can’t sustain my position any more. The homeless . . .’

  ‘FUCK YOUR POSITION! FUCK THE HOMELESS!’ Fuck the homeless? Is this what has become of me? Has a Guardian-reading Labour voter ever shouted those words and meant them in the whole history of the liberal metropolitan universe?

  ‘Katie! What’s going on?’ My parents and my children have gathered in the doorway to watch; my father, still every inch of him a headmaster despite the decade of retirement, is red-faced with anger.

  ‘David’s gone mad. He wants to give our lunch away.’

  ‘To whom?’

  ‘Tramps. Alkies. Drug addicts. People who have never done an honest day’s work in their lives.’ This is a desperate and blatant appeal to win my father over to my side, and I’m not proud of it, but I want my roast lunch. I WANT MY ROAST LUNCH.

  ‘Can I come, Daddy?’ says Molly, whom I am learning to despise.

  ‘Of course,’ says David.

  ‘Please, David,’ I say again. ‘Please let us have a nice lunch.’

  ‘We can have a nice lunch. Just, not this lunch.’

  ‘Why can’t they have the other lunch?’

  ‘I want to give them the hot one.’

  ‘We can make the other stuff hot. The lasagne. We’ll microwave it and take it down this afternoon. Family outing.’

  David pauses. We have, I feel, reached the moment in the movie when the armed but scared criminal pointing the gun at the unarmed policewoman begins to doubt the wisdom of what he is doing; the scene always ends with him throwing the gun on the ground and bursting into tears. In our version, David will take the lasagne out of the freezer tray and burst into tears. Who says that you can’t make authentic British thrillers? What could be more thrilling than that?

  David thinks. ‘It’s more convenient for them, lasagne, isn’t it?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘ ’Cos you don’t have to carve it.’

  ‘No. You could just take the ladle.’

  ‘Yeah. Or even the, you know, the metal spatula.’

  ‘If you want.’

  He stares at the joint and the beaten-up roast potatoes for a moment longer.

  ‘OK, then.’

  My mum and dad and I breathe the sigh of the unarmed policewoman, and we sit down to eat in silence.

  6

  None of us feels like eating that night – not that there is much to eat anyway. I had planned to microwave the frozen lasagne, but there is none left. It has already been driven to Finsbury Park, where it was served up in paper plates to the winos who hang out on benches just inside the gates on Seven Sisters Road. (David dished it out on his own while the rest of us sat in the car. Molly wanted to go with him, but I wouldn’t let her – not, if I am honest, because I thought she was in any danger, but because she is nauseating enough at the moment as it is. I was worried that if I had to watch her feeding the poor like an eight-year-old Dickensian charity lady I would begin to hate her too much to provide proper maternal care.)

  When we get back home, I excuse myself and go and lie down in the bedroom with the Sunday papers, but I can’t read them. The stories no longer refer to me me me, but to David, and the sorts of things he would Do Something About. After a little while I find that I am beginning to see news stories not in terms of information, but in terms of potential trouble for my family, and for the contents of my bank account and freezer. One article, about a group of Afghan refugees holed up in a church in Bethnal Green, I actually tear out and throw away, because it contains enough misery and hardship to starve us all.

  I look at the gaping hole in the newspaper and suddenly feel very tired. We cannot live like this. Not true, of course, because we can, comfortably – less comfortably than before, maybe, but comfortably nonetheless – we will not starve, no matter how much lasagne is given away. OK, then. So. We can, but I don’t want to. This is not the life I chose for myself. Except that is not true, either, because I did choose, I suppose, when I said that I would marry David for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live: this, obviously, is now more relevant than it has ever been, because he may well be sick, and poverty may well be approaching fast.

  What did I think I was choosing, when I married David? What do any of us think we are choosing? If I try to recapture now the semi-formed fantasies I had then, I’d say they erred
on the side of prosperity and health. I suppose I thought that we would be poor but happy to begin with – meaning that we would be living in a small cute flat, and spending a lot of time watching TV or drinking halves of beer in pubs, and making do with our parents’ hand-me-down furniture. In other words, the difficulties I was prepared to tolerate in the early years of my marriage were essentially romantic in their nature, inspired by the clichés of young married life as depicted in TV comedies – or possibly, given that most TV comedies are more sophisticated and complex than my fantasies, by building society advertisements. Then later on, I thought, one set of difficulties (the difficulties posed by watching TV in a small flat, and by eating baked beans on toast) would be replaced by another: the difficulties that arose when you had two lovely, bright and healthy children. There would be muddy football boots and teenage daughters hogging the phone and husbands who had to be torn from the TV to do the washing-up . . . Golly gosh, there would be no end to those sorts of problems, and I was under no illusions: muddy football boots would be awfully trying! I was prepared, though. I wasn’t green. I wasn’t born yesterday. There was no way I was going to buy white rugs . . .

  What you don’t ever catch a glimpse of on your wedding day – because how could you? – is that some days you will hate your spouse, that you will look at him and regret ever exchanging a word with him, let alone a ring and bodily fluids. Nor is it possible to foresee the desperation and depression, the sense that your life is over, the occasional urge to hit your whining children, even though hitting them is something you knew for a fact you would never ever do. And of course you don’t think about having affairs, and when you get to that stage in life when you do (and everyone gets there sooner or later), you don’t think of the sick feeling you get in your stomach when you’re conducting them, their inherent unhappiness. And nor do you think about your husband waking up in the morning and being someone you don’t recognize. If anyone thought about any of these things, then no one would ever get married, of course they wouldn’t; in fact, the impulse to marry would come from the same place as the impulse to drink a bottle of bleach, and those are the kinds of impulses we try to ignore, rather than celebrate. So we can’t afford to think about these things because getting married – or finding a partner whom we will want to spend our lives with and have children by – is on our agenda. It’s something we know we will do one day, and if you take that away from us then we are left with promotions at work and the possibility of a winning lottery ticket, and it’s not enough, so we kid ourselves that it is possible to enter these partnerships and be faced only with the problems of mud removal, and then we become unhappy and take Prozac and then we get divorced and die alone.