by Nick Hornby
‘You have to pay him,’ he says.
‘Out of what? My mystical healing budget?’
‘I don’t care. But you’re not to take advantage of him.’
‘How about this: he treats Mrs Cortenza, and we don’t charge him for board and lodging. Or for electricity. Or for general inconvenience.’
‘You’re not taking him down there every day.’
‘I won’t need to bring him down here every day. I am a perfectly competent doctor, you know. I have managed to prescribe the occasional effective antibiotic.’ But even as I am saying this, I am making a list of my other recidivists. Just imagine: a working life without Mr Arthurs! Or Mrs McBride! Or Barmy Brian Beech, as we call him here, with no affection whatsoever!
GoodNews arrives within fifteen minutes, a quarter-hour which seems as long but no longer than my usual consultations with Mrs Cortenza, but which I am happy to curtail. I get some funny looks from reception, but no vocal objections from anyone.
Mrs Cortenza stares at GoodNews’s eyebrow-brooches with naked hostility.
‘Hello, love,’ says GoodNews. ‘You’re a smasher, aren’t you? What’s your name?’
She continues to stare.
‘This is Mrs Cortenza.’
‘Not that name. Her proper name. Her first name.’
I don’t have a clue, of course. How would I know? I’ve only been seeing her for five years. I scrabble through my notes.
‘Maria.’
‘Maria,’ says GoodNews, and then he says it again, this time in an exaggerated, all-purpose European accent. ‘Marrrrriaaaaa. What are we going to do about Maria, eh? You know that song? West Side Story?’
‘That’s The Sound of Music,’ I tell him. ‘The West Side Story one is different.’ I wonder for a moment whether this will be my only demonstration of expertise throughout the entire consultation.
‘So you’ve had two songs written about you?’ says GoodNews. ‘I’m not surprised. Lovely girl like you.’
Mrs Cortenza smiles shyly. I want to throttle her for being so gullible.
‘So what needs doing here? How can we get Maria dancing again?’
‘She’s got chronic inflammation around most of her joints. Hips, knees. A lot of back pain.’
‘Is she sad?’
‘I should think so, with that lot.’
‘No, I mean, like, mentally.’
‘Is she mentally sad? You mean, sad in her mind as opposed to sad in her knees?’
‘Yeah, all right, I’m not as good at talking as you, Dr Smartypants. But let’s see which one of us can do something for her.’
‘Why, does she have to be unhappy before you can treat her?’
‘It helps if I can really key into that stuff, yeah.’
‘Are you sad, Mrs Cortenza?’ I ask her.
She looks at me. ‘Sad? Sadness?’ Neither her hearing nor her English is perfect, and so it is difficult to know which of these difficulties is responsible for the confusion.
‘Yes. Sadness.’
‘Oh, yes,’ she says, with the relish only the old can bring to such a subject. ‘Very, very sad.’
‘Why?’ says GoodNews.
‘Too many things,’ she says. She gestures at her clothes – she has worn black ever since I have known her – and her eyes fill with tears. ‘My husband,’ she says. ‘My sister. My mother. My father. Too many things.’ One doesn’t want to feel unsympathetic, and it is certainly unhelpful to be prescriptive about grief, but one wonders whether Mrs Cortenza should maybe have come to terms with being an orphan by now. ‘My son,’ she continues.
‘Your son’s dead?’
‘No, no, not dead. Very bad. He move to Archway. He never call me.’
‘Is that enough sadness?’ I ask GoodNews. I didn’t know we had to key into sadness, and suddenly the idea of GoodNews seeing Barmy Brian is a little less attractive. I would imagine that there is a lot of sadness hidden away somewhere in Barmy Brian, and not all of it would be easy to listen to.
‘That all makes sense,’ says GoodNews. ‘I can feel most of that. Explain to her that I will need to touch her shoulders, neck and head.’
‘I understand,’ says Mrs Cortenza, somewhat affronted.
‘Is that OK?’ I ask her.
‘OK. Yes.’
GoodNews sits opposite her and closes his eyes for a while; then he gets up, stands behind her and starts to massage her scalp. He whispers while he’s doing it, but I can’t make out anything he’s saying.
‘Very hot!’ Mrs Cortenza says suddenly.
‘That’s good,’ says GoodNews. ‘The hotter the better. Things are happening.’
He’s right. Things are happening. Maybe it’s just the momentary intensity of the experience, maybe it’s just the collective concentration, but it seems to me that the room has become warmer, much warmer, and for a moment it seems to become brighter, too. I don’t want to feel this heat, and I don’t want to notice how the wattage of the one bulb in the ceiling seems to have increased from its dim forty to a dazzling one hundred; feeling and seeing these things seems akin to feeling and seeing a whole lot of other, more complicated things, and I’d really rather not, if you don’t mind. So I shall forget about them, as best I can.
What will prove more difficult to forget is this: after a few minutes of gentle massage and attendant ambient disturbance, Mrs Cortenza stands up, stretches herself gingerly and says to GoodNews, ‘Thank you. Is much better now. Much much better.’ And she nods to me – I may be paranoid, but the nod seems quite cool, a way of telling me how negligible her problems were, and how easy to fix if I had any kind of expertise – and walks out at about five times the speed she walked in.
‘So,’ I say. ‘You can cure old age. Well done. Hurrah for you. There should be a few quid in that somewhere.’
‘Nah, she’s not cured,’ says GoodNews. ‘Of course she’s not cured. Her body’s fucked. But life will be much better for her.’ I can see that he’s pleased, genuinely pleased – not for himself, but for Mrs Cortenza, and I feel small and petty and hopeless.
*
‘You can tell me now,’ I say before he leaves. ‘The children aren’t here. What’s the secret?’
‘I don’t know what the secret is. That wasn’t what I couldn’t tell you.’
‘So tell me what you couldn’t tell me.’
‘Drugs.’
‘What do you mean, drugs? Drugs what?’
‘That’s how it started. E. That’s what I think, anyway. I was doing loads, and it was all that “I love you, you’re my friend” stuff in clubs every Friday night, and . . . I’m like one of those American comic-book guys. Spiderman and all them. It changed my molecular make-up. Gave me superpowers.’
‘Ecstasy gave you superpowers.’
‘I reckon.’ He shrugs. ‘Weird, innit? I mean, there’s you at university and all that finding out about, like, your thigh-bone’s connected to your knee-bone or whatever you do there. And there’s me down the clubs dropping a few. And we’ve come out at the same place. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I still think there’s a place for what you do.’
‘Thank you. That’s very generous of you.’
‘No, no problem. I’ll see you back at the ranch.’
Later, I sit watching Molly in the bath, looking for and failing to find any traces of her eczema.
‘Molly. Do you remember when you went to see GoodNews?’
‘Yes. Course.’
‘Do you remember what he said to you? Did he ask you anything?’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. Did he ask you how you were feeling?’
‘Ummmm. Oh, yes. He asked me if I was feeling sad.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘I said I felt a bit sad sometimes.’
‘What about?’
‘I’m sad about Grandma Parrot.’ David’s mother, who died last year, so-called because she had a stone parrot on her gatepost.
‘Yes. That was sad.�
��
‘And Poppy.’ Family cat, killed shortly after Grandma Parrot. Molly’s proximity to these deaths was much closer than we would have wanted, in an ideal world. Grandma Parrot collapsed when she was visiting us, and although she didn’t actually die until later that night, in hospital, it was clear that she wasn’t well when she was taken away; and – foolishly, in retrospect – we organized a search party for the missing Poppy. Molly and I found her up (and in, and all over) the road. I wish she had seen neither casualty.
‘That was sad, too.’
‘And your baby.’
‘My baby?’
‘The baby that died.’
‘Oh. That baby.’
I had a miscarriage, eighteen months or so before I had Tom. A run-of-the-mill, ten-week, first-baby miscarriage, distressing at the time, almost completely forgotten about now; I cannot for the life of me recall telling Molly about it, but clearly I must have done, and she has remembered and mourned, in her own way.
‘Did that make you sad?’
‘Yes. Of course. That was my brother or sister.’
‘Well, kind of.’ I want to tell her that it’s OK really without getting into some huge thing about souls and foetuses and all sorts of other areas that eight-year-olds should be spared for as long as possible. I change the subject. ‘Anything else?’
‘I think I was sad about you and Daddy, too.’
‘Why were you sad about us?’
‘Because you might get divorced. And you’ll definitely die.’
‘Oh, Molly.’
I know there are loads and loads of replies to this, but for a moment they seem fundamentally untruthful, and I can’t bring myself to play the requisite parental consolation game. We might get divorced; we’ll definitely die. This seems, in my suddenly world-weary and bleak frame of mind, a precise and accurate summation of the situation, and I don’t feel like telling Molly anything different. Instead, I reach forward and touch her forehead, like GoodNews might do, in a doomed attempt to draw these thoughts out of her. It feels to me as though this is the only physical contact I can allow myself; anything more would result in an unstoppable torrent of grief and despair.
‘I don’t worry about any of that now,’ says Molly brightly, as if it is her job to console me, rather than the other way around.
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Really. GoodNews made it all go away.’
After the kids have gone to bed, I don’t want to join GoodNews and David downstairs, so I sit in the bedroom for a while, and I think. My conversation with Molly has made it impossible for me not to think, even though not-thinking is currently my favourite mode of being. And what I think, I suppose, is this: we live what an awful lot of people would regard as a normal life. There are some – rock singers, novelists, young columnists in the newspapers, those who affect to think of anything involving children and day-jobs and package holidays as a long and agonizing spiritual death – who would regard us as beneath contempt, such has been our wholehearted embrace of some sort of conservative lifestyle ideal. And there are others, and you know who they are, who would regard us as being impossibly lucky, blessed, spoiled by our upbringing and our skin colour and our education and our income. I have no quarrel with the second bunch at all – how could I have? I know what we’ve got, and what we haven’t had to experience. But the other lot . . . I don’t know. Because it seems to me that normal life, or the kind of ‘normal’ life that these people despise, already has plenty in it that prevents an agonizing spiritual death, and plenty in it that is simply agonizing, and who are these people to judge anyone?
What has happened to Molly in her first eight years? More or less nothing. We have protected her from the world as best we can. She has been brought up in a loving home, she has two parents, she has never been hungry, and she receives an education that will prepare her for the rest of her life; and yet she is sad, and that sadness is not, when you think about it, inappropriate. The state of the relationship between her parents makes her anxious; she has lost a loved one (and a cat); and she has realized that such losses are going to be an unavoidable part of her life in the future. It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don’t need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.
And the other thing I think is that I have failed my daughter. Eight years old, and she’s sad . . . I didn’t want that. When she was born I was certain I could prevent it, and I have been unable to, and even though I see that the task I set myself was unrealistic and unachievable, it doesn’t make any difference: I have still participated in the creation of yet another confused and fearful human being.
I have sat on my own in the dark long enough; it is time to rejoin my normal life. So I go downstairs, to eat with my husband and the live-in guru with the eyebrow-brooches, and to talk about how everyone who lives in our street should invite a homeless kid into their house for a year.
They’re serious; I realize that straight away. Plans are already sufficiently advanced that they have drawn up a list of the houses in the street, with as much information about the inhabitants therein as David possesses. Neither of them take any notice of me as I walk into the kitchen, so I stand behind David and listen and read over his shoulder. The list looks like this:
1. Not known.
3. Not known.
5. Not known.
7. Old lady. (Old man also? No difference, if sharing bed)
9. Not known
11. Richard, Mary, Daniel, Chloe
13. Nice Asian family. (4?)
15. Not known
17. Not known
19. Wendy and Ed
21. Martina
23. Hugh
25. Simon and Richard
27. Not-nice Asian family (6? + Alsatian)
29. Ros and Max
31. Annie and Pete + 2
33. Roger and Mel + 3
35. For sale
And the same for the other side of the street. For a moment, I am distracted by the obvious pattern of our acquaintance – we know who lives next to us, and opposite us, but we know almost nothing of the people who live sixty or seventy yards away – until the sheer lunacy of the conversation draws me back into the room.
‘By my reckoning there are at least forty spare bedrooms in this street,’ David is saying. ‘Isn’t that incredible? Forty spare bedrooms, and thousands of people out there without a bed? I’d never even thought of it in that way before. I mean, when I see empty houses it pisses me off, but empty houses aren’t really the issue, are they? If there are forty spare bedrooms in this street, then our postcode alone should be able to take care of most of the homeless kids out there.’
‘We should be aiming at filling, say, ten of them,’ says GoodNews. ‘I’d be happy with ten.’
‘Really?’ David looks a little disappointed, as if persuading only ten of his neighbours to house someone they didn’t know was the sort of terrible compromise he wasn’t prepared to make. This, then, is what we have come to: the spiritual healer who can’t get along with dishwashers is now the hard-nosed realist in my house, and my husband is the wide-eyed optimist. ‘Wouldn’t ten mean, I don’t know, that we’d lost the argument? ’Cos it’s pretty unanswerable, surely, if we pitch it right.’
‘Some people just won’t get it,’ says GoodNews.
‘Some people might need the spare rooms for other things,’ I say.
‘Like what?’ David asks, slightly aggressively. He used to use exactly these tones when he wanted to challenge me in the old days – about why I wanted to teach the kids about other forms of religion, say (he didn’t want them to know about any), or why I wanted to go and hear Maya Angelou read (‘What, you’re a black feminist now?’). I had forgotten how wearing these tones were.
‘You used to work in one of ours, for example.’
‘OK, so five out of the forty are used as offices.’
‘And what about if people h
ave their parents to stay?’
‘God, you’re literal-minded.’
‘What’s literal-minded about saying that people have parents?’
‘It’s not that. It’s the spirit. You have none.’
‘Thank you.’
‘None of these things are real problems. You’re just being negative.’
‘You have no idea about these people’s lives. You don’t even know their names.’ I gesture at the paper in front of them. ‘But you’re happy to tell me what’s a real problem for them and what isn’t. What gives you the right?’
‘What gives them the right to own half-empty houses when there are all these people out there in cardboard boxes?’
‘What gives them the right? Their bloody mortgages, that’s what gives them the right. These are their homes, David. And it’s not like they’re enormous homes, either. Why don’t you pick on Bill Gates? Or Tom Cruise? How many spare bedrooms have they got?’
‘If they lived around the corner, I would pick on them. But they don’t. And we don’t need them, because there’s plenty of room for everyone right here. You’re just frightened of the embarrassment.’
‘That’s not true.’ But it is, of course, completely true. I am terrified of the embarrassment, of which there will be lorryloads. I can hear the diesel engines rumbling towards us even as we speak. ‘How do you plan to go about this, anyway?’
‘I don’t know. Door-to-door.’
‘What about a party?’ says GoodNews brightly. ‘We’ll have a party here, and you can speak to everyone, and . . . and it’ll be great.’
‘Brilliant,’ says David, with the air of someone who knows he’s in the presence of genius.
‘Brilliant,’ I say, with the air of someone who wants to put her head in the oven. But that sort of air doesn’t interest them in the slightest.
OK: so they’re wrong, clearly. And also completely mad. It’s just that I can’t quite work out why. What is the difference between offering spare bedrooms to evacuees in 1940 and offering spare bedrooms to the homeless in 2000? You might point out that the evacuees were in mortal danger; David and GoodNews would point out that the street kids have a lower life expectancy than the rest of us. You might argue that in 1940 the nation was united in its desire to look after its own; they would say that it is precisely this spirit we need now, for similar reasons. You could laugh at them, and say they were pious and sanctimonious, holy fools, moral blackmailers, zealots; they would tell you that they don’t care what you think of them, that there is a greater good at stake. And do we have a moral right to keep a spare bedroom as a junk room, or a music room, or for overnight guests who never come, when it is February and freezing and wet and there are people on the pavements? Why isn’t a standing order with Shelter enough? And what if my husband, or GoodNews, or both of them, turned out to be Jesus, or Gandhi, or Bob Geldof? What if the country had been crying out for this kind of energy, and they revolutionized the way we thought about private property, and homelessness was never again a problem in London, or Britain, or the Western World? What about my embarrassment then?
