How to Be Good

by Nick Hornby

  ‘No!’ GoodNews shouts. ‘No, no, no! YOU fuck off! YOU fuck off!’

  And then he slams the phone down and walks out.

  ‘Aren’t you going to talk to him?’ I ask David.

  ‘What am I going to say?’

  ‘I don’t know. Try to make him feel better.’

  ‘He shouldn’t have said that. I’m very disappointed in him. We’re supposed to be above all that.’

  ‘But we’re not, are we?’

  ‘I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about me and him.’

  ‘That’s the trouble, isn’t it? You were human all the time. You just forgot.’

  I go to talk to him. He’s lying on his bed, chewing furiously, staring at the ceiling.

  ‘I’m sorry I swore in front of the kids.’

  ‘That’s OK. They’ve heard that word a lot from their father.’

  ‘In the old days?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. In the old days.’ It had never occurred to me that David no longer swears in front of the children. That’s a good thing, surely? OK, some would argue that this has been a Pyrrhic victory, achieved only by having a man with turtles for eyebrows coming to live with us for what seems like years, and at a cost to all semblance of a normal family life, but I choose to accentuate the positive.

  ‘You shouldn’t beat yourself up about it,’ I tell him. ‘I mean, I only heard your side of the argument, but she seems pretty unreasonable. What was all that stuff about seventy pence?’

  ‘Her bloody Simon LeBon poster. She’s never forgotten it.’

  ‘I gathered that.’

  ‘Katie, I can’t stand her. She’s awful. Always has been, always will be. Cantata! What a bloody idiot.’

  With enormous self-control I pass up the opportunity for first-name-calling.

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘No it’s not. She’s my sister.’

  ‘But she’s doing OK without you.’

  ‘I don’t know that.’

  ‘If she needed you, you would have heard from her. Despite the unfortunate Simon LeBon poster incident.’

  ‘Do you think?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I still feel I’m a failure though. You know, it’s love this, and love that, and I fucking hate her. Excuse my language.’

  And in my opinion, he’s right. He is a failure, and self-interest requires that I let him know. Who are these people, that they want to save the world and yet they are incapable of forming proper relationships with anybody? As GoodNews so eloquently puts it, it’s love this and love that, but of course it’s so easy to love someone you don’t know, whether it’s George Clooney or Monkey. Staying civil to someone with whom you’ve ever shared Christmas turkey – now there’s a miracle. If GoodNews could pull that one off with his warm hands, he could live with us for ever.

  ‘But think of all the people you help who do need you,’ I tell him. ‘Isn’t that worth more?’

  ‘D’you think?’

  ‘Of course.’

  And thus GoodNews is encouraged to wreak yet more havoc, by someone who should know better. But – irony upon irony – I know I’m doing the right thing.

  It is easy to track Nigel down. David is a member of his Old Boys’ Association, and within minutes he has a mobile phone number.

  We are all allowed to listen to the subsequent conversation, so confident is David of a warm and possibly even tearful welcome.

  ‘Hello, is that Nigel?’

  ‘– ’

  ‘This is David Grant.’ He gives a small smile of anticipation.

  ‘– ’

  ‘David Grant. From school.’

  ‘– ’

  ‘Yes. That’s right. Ha ha. How are you?’

  ‘– ’

  ‘Good, good.’

  ‘– ’

  ‘Fine, thank you. What are you up to these days?’

  ‘– ’

  ‘Right, right. Excellent.’

  ‘– ’

  ‘Gosh.’

  ‘– ’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘– ’

  ‘Really? Well done. Listen –’

  ‘– ’

  ‘That’s a lot of megabytes.’

  ‘– ’

  ‘That’s a lot of turnover.’

  ‘– ’

  ‘That’s a lot of airmiles. Listen –’

  ‘– ’

  ‘Really? Congratulations.’

  ‘– ’

  ‘No, fifteen years is nothing nowadays. Look at Michael Douglas and . . .’

  ‘– ’

  ‘Is she?’

  ‘– ’

  ‘Does she?’

  ‘– ’

  ‘That’s a lot of magazine covers.’

  ‘– ’

  ‘Did she? Well, I’m sure Rod must be heartbroken. He probably doesn’t want to talk about it, ha ha . . . Anyway, I just wanted to catch up. And now I have. Bye, Nigel!’

  And he hangs up. I look at him, and for a moment I see a flash of the man I used to know: angry, contemptuous, eaten up with envy and discontent.

  ‘You didn’t invite him to dinner.’

  ‘No. I’m not sure it’s much of a thing for him any more, the bullying.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. And I didn’t know whether he’d get on with Barmy Brian.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And he’s a pig. I’d have ended up thumping him again if he came round here.’

  ‘Like I thumped Christopher?’ says Tom cheerfully.

  ‘Exactly,’ David says.

  ‘There are some people you just have to hit, aren’t there?’ says Tom. ‘You just can’t help it.’

  David doesn’t say anything, but the absence of an anguished correction is, I can’t help feeling, significant. It seems a shame that some sort of epiphanic moment should come during a conversation between my husband and my son about perpetrating violence, but I’ll take epiphanic moments where I can find them.

  ‘Who are you going to try next?’ I ask David as we are getting ready for bed.

  ‘I dunno,’ he says morosely. ‘Because that didn’t work, did it?’

  ‘I’m not entirely sure what it was intended to achieve. But probably it didn’t, no.’

  David sits down heavily on the not-quite dirty clothes that cover our bedroom chair. There are so many clothes that he ends up all lop-sided, slanting towards the window like a house-plant starved of light.

  ‘I know you think it’s all stupid.’

  ‘What? Phoning people up who don’t remember you to apologize for something they’ve forgotten you ever did?’

  ‘Not just Nigel Richards. All of it.’

  I don’t say anything. I just sigh, which is as good a way of answering the question as any.

  ‘Well, so do I,’ he says. ‘I think it’s incredibly stupid. Pointless. Pathetic.’

  ‘You’re just feeling discouraged. You’ve had a knockback. Apologize to someone else. That poor bastard whose life you used to make a misery on the local paper. That friend of your mum’s you refused to invite to our wedding.’

  ‘I’m not talking about apologies. I’m talking about everything. Feeding the poor. Telling everyone to give their money away. Writing that book. It’s all mad, I know that. I’ve known it for a while. I just haven’t let on.’

  When GoodNews and David got on the phone earlier in the evening, it seemed like just another sweet, misguided and totally pointless scheme, and now it is clear that it was in fact a pivotal moment in familial history. It’s like the Berlin Wall coming down: you couldn’t see it happening, but then it seems clear that all the internal contradictions made the fall inevitable. It was always going to happen, just as David was eventually going to see that it was all mad. It feels strange, thinking that we are on the verge of returning to our old life. Sarcasm, bitterness, bad novels, a spare bedroom and one less mouth to feed . . . I have mixed feelings about it, if I am honest. For a while, things were interesting
, special even.

  ‘GoodNews told me about your flat battery,’ says David. ‘Well, I’ve got one, too. There’s nothing there. That first flush I felt . . . It’s all disappeared, and now I just feel nothing. That’s why I can see how stupid it all looks. Like you can. And everybody else who’s depressed and can’t understand what they’re supposed to be doing with their lives.’

  I don’t say anything. Tomorrow maybe I’ll try to find a phone number for the organization that provides counselling for people who have been brainwashed by cults; I’m sure that depression of this kind is an entirely normal consequence of having your whole reason for living taken away from you.

  ‘That’s why I’m not going to give up,’ David continues. ‘I can’t afford to. What am I going to do? Go back to writing nasty columns for the local newspaper about old people on buses? Ha! I don’t think so. No, it’s like a . . . well, it’s like a marriage. You’ve got to work at it and hope the feeling comes back. And even if it doesn’t, I know I’m doing something. Not just sitting around moaning and being mean.’

  ‘So you’re going to go round knocking on people’s doors and telling them to give away all their savings even though you don’t believe in it?’

  ‘It’s not exactly that I don’t believe in it. More like, I dunno, I don’t not believe in it.’

  ‘And is that enough?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t suppose so.’ He looks at me. ‘You tell me.’

  ‘What do I know about it?’

  ‘Aren’t we both doing the same thing?’

  ‘Are we?’

  ‘How passionately do you believe in our marriage?’

  ‘How passionately do you believe in our marriage?’

  It’s a fair question, I suppose, the one I have just angled back to David like a tennis player at the net, using the pace and the spin that he put on the ball to my advantage. Any marriage counsellor would support my right to ask it, but I know it’s a cheat. That’s the thing with failing relationships. You can always refuse to answer any question by repeating it. ‘Do you love me?’ ‘Do you want a divorce?’ ‘Are you happy?’ Your partner is invariably as ambivalent as you are, and if he or she is human – that is to say, cowardly but at the same time somehow full of moral self-righteousness – then he or she will not commit themselves through any expression of passion or commitment. After all, the absence of passion or commitment is the reason why the relationship is failing, surely? So in my experience it is both easy and advisable to reduce any serious discussion to a farcical stalemate almost immediately. Years can go by before you have to make a decision.

  What is atypically pathetic in this case is that David isn’t even really asking me to talk properly about us. He’s using the marriage rhetorically, as an analogy, and yet still I won’t be drawn. How feeble can you get?

  ‘OK, OK,’ I say, all of a rush. ‘I don’t feel passionately about the marriage at all. I’m just too frightened to pack it in. Too much depends on it. I don’t want to be the bad guy.’

  ‘Exactly,’ says David soberly. ‘Well that’s just . . .’

  ‘Hold on, hold on. Exactly? That’s all? You don’t mind me saying that? You knew all the time?’

  ‘Katie, in the last couple of months you’ve had an affair and you moved out of our house. You’re not exactly a blushing bride, are you? The point is, what are we going to do when we’re both so, so . . . soul-dead? Me, I feel like I’ve come too far down one road to go back. And maybe you feel like that about our marriage. And that means that whatever we do is going to be really, really hard, much harder than it would be for anyone else who knew what they wanted and why. We’ve both got flat batteries, but we’ve still got to drive the car somehow. And I haven’t got a clue how to do that. Have you?’

  I shake my head. I don’t like these sorts of talks. I prefer the ‘Do you love me?/Do you love me?’ kind, because they can go on for ever, and they never achieve anything, and nobody ever says anything worth thinking about ever again.

  We make love that night, our first time for ages. We both agree afterwards that it’s nice to feel some warmth, even if that warmth is located in the genitalia rather than the soul. But maybe something will catch.

  ‘How passionately do you believe in our marriage?’ I ask him just before I fall asleep. It’s the right time for the question: my head is on his chest, and I’m asking because I want to know, not because I’m trying to get out of answering something he’s asked me.

  ‘Do you really want to talk about this now?’

  ‘Is it a long answer?’

  ‘No, not really. OK. I can’t think of any good reason for giving up on it. Just like I can’t think of any good reason for giving up the other stuff.’

  ‘So I’m a charity case?’

  ‘You’re not, no. But the marriage is. The marriage is like one of those dogs you see in RSPCA posters. Thin. Pathetic.’

  ‘Patches of skin showing through the fur. Pus-filled eyes. Cigarette burns.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  I was attempting to be frivolous, and for a moment I ache for David to share in the frivolity, to pick up the daft image and run with it, but he doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t.

  ‘Anyway. That’s what I think of the marriage.’

  ‘What? It should be put down? Its owners should be prosecuted?’

  ‘No, no. I mean, you know. I couldn’t leave it in this state.’

  ‘So you’re going to nurse it back to health and then go.’

  ‘Oh, no. I wouldn’t do that. Because if it was healthy . . .’

  ‘It’s OK. I was joking.’

  ‘Oh. I’m not very good at spotting that sort of thing any more, am I?’

  ‘Not great, no.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  It’s funny, but of all the apologies made over the last few months, this one seems the most pitiful, and the crime the least forgivable.

  Brian has been moved to sheltered accommodation, which he hates.

  ‘It’s all full of old dears. They’ve got these emergency buzzers and they go off every five minutes. Every time they fall over. And they’re always falling over. I shouldn’t be in there. I don’t fall over hardly ever. I mean, I have done. Everyone has, haven’t they?’

  I tell him that, yes, everybody has fallen over at some time.

  ‘I mean, I’ll bet you’ve fallen over, and you’re a doctor. You’ve probably been to college and all that.’

  I tell him that, yes, I’ve been to college, and even seven years of further education has not prevented me from losing my footing occasionally – thus confirming his suspicion, that it is age rather than intelligence which tends to govern the ability to stand upright, and even though he was never university material, he shouldn’t be in sheltered accommodation with a lot of faller-overs.

  ‘Well, there you are.’

  ‘But you’re eating better.’

  ‘The food’s all right. They send it round. Meals on Wheels. So they know what should be hot and so on and so forth.’

  ‘Good.’

  We lapse into silence. At the last count, I had fifteen patients waiting outside, but it is as if we are both waiting for a bus. Brian looks up at the ceiling and begins to whistle.

  ‘Is there anything else?’ The ‘else’ is a kindness on my part. It is my way of pretending that there was a good reason for Brian’s visit in the first place, that he wasn’t just wasting my time.

  ‘Not really.’ He goes back to whistling his tune.

  ‘Well. It was nice to see you again. And I’m glad to hear that you’re feeling better.’

  I stand up, for added emphasis, and smile.

  ‘I’ve come for my dinner,’ says Brian matter-of-factly. ‘You said.’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’ It’s eleven o’clock in the morning. ‘I meant an evening meal. Some time.’

  ‘I’ll wait. I won’t get in the way.’

  ‘Brian, you can’t wait in here. People won’t want you in here if I ask them to get
undressed.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. I never thought of that. I wouldn’t want to see them undressed either. You’ve got fat people, haven’t you? I don’t like them very much. I’ll wait outside.’

  ‘Brian . . . I’m not going to finish work until six.’

  ‘That’s OK.’

  So he waits for seven hours in the waiting area, and then comes home with me.

  I have already called David to warn him, and when Brian and I get home there is a chicken in the oven, and several vegetables steaming away on the hotplates, and the table is laid, and there are even flowers. All my nearest and dearest know who Barmy Brian is, just as they know the names of every one of my heartsink patients, and I have told David that if either of my children attach an adjective, any adjective, to his first name in his presence, then he or she will not be eating en famille for a statutory minimum two years, including Christmas Day and birthdays.

  Brian takes off his coat, sits down and watches Sabrina the Teenage Witch with the children, while I make the gravy.

  ‘What’s going on here, then?’

  ‘It’s Sabrina the Teenage Witch,’ Tom mumbles.

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  Tom looks at me nervously.

  ‘That’s the name of the programme,’ I tell him.

  ‘Oh, I see. Say it again.’

  ‘Sabrina the Teenage Witch,’ Tom enunciates.

  Brian laughs, long and hard.

  ‘Haven’t you ever heard of it?’ I ask him.

  ‘Nooooo,’ he says, as if even now he doubts whether such a programme really exists. ‘But she’s only a teenager?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And she’s already a witch? Blimey.’

  We all smile politely.

  ‘That’s too young. Don’t you think?’

  ‘That’s sort of the point of the programme,’ says Tom. ‘ ’Cos most witches aren’t teenagers.’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Let them watch the programme, Brian.’

  ‘I’m so sorry. Just wanted to get a couple of things straight in my head before I settle down to it.’