How to Be Good (14 page)

‘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 have 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?

I no longer have the answers to any of these questions. All I know is that I don't want this party, and I don't want to put my neighbours through this, and I wish David and GoodNews were interested in starting up an Internet company so that they could make millions of pounds to spend on Page Three girls and swimming pools and cocaine and designer suits. People would understand that. That wouldn't upset the neighbours.

 

David and GoodNews tell the kids about the party the next morning at breakfast. Molly is curious; Tom sits at the table playing on his Gameboy and eating his cereal in between lives, apparently
uninterested. I sit between the two of them while the men lean side-by-side with their backs to the work surface, answering questions. It is impossible not to notice how the dynamic in this household has changed, how my place now is with the children. And I don't mean that in the maternal sense, either; rather, I am reminded of going to large family parties when I was fourteen or fifteen, when there was always confusion as to whether I should sit with my younger cousins or with my aunts and uncles at mealtimes.

‘Are we going to get a homeless person to stay, too?' Molly asks.

‘Of course,' says David.

‘Haven't we got ours already?' I say, with meaningful looks at all the relevant parties.

‘So who else will get one?'

‘Anyone who wants one,' says David, and his reply makes me snort with laughter.
Anyone who wants one
 . . . It's Christmas, and this year everyone wants a homeless person, just as a couple of years ago everyone wanted a Buzz Lightyear. But at the homeless shop they never go out of stock.

‘Would you like to tell us what's so funny, Katie?'

That's what he says, I swear. And he even sounds like a teacher: stern, vaguely distracted, following a script that was written a hundred years ago.

‘That's not the line,' I say. I suddenly feel that, as I am the oldest child, it is incumbent on me to be the naughtiest. ‘The line is, “Would you like to share the joke with the whole class?” '

‘What are you talking about?'

‘I get it,' says Tom. ‘Don't you get it, Dad? You're the teacher and Mum's being naughty.'

‘Don't be silly.'

‘It's true,' says Tom. ‘That's what you sound like.'

‘Well, I'm very sorry. I don't mean to. Anyway. Is everybody happy about this?'

‘I've got a question.' Sitting at the table with the kids, and being told off like a kid, has liberated me; my disenfranchisement has empowered me.

‘Yes, Katie.'

‘What happens if a homeless person moves into a neighbour's house and cleans them out?' It takes a child to say the unsayable.

‘What do you mean?'

‘I mean . . . well, that. What if we assist in moving a thief into our neighbour's house? Someone who's broke and desperate with a drug habit?'

‘You're stereotyping the homeless, Katie. I'm really not sure that's the right way to go.'

‘I appreciate what I'm doing, David. It's just, you know . . . The stereotype of a football fan is someone who gets drunk and breaks bottles over people's heads. And I know it's a stereotype, and I know lots of people who go to Arsenal who aren't like that. Just . . . There might actually be one or two who are. And I'm not sure I'd like to tell Ros and Max that they have to live with them.'