How to Be Good (29 page)

‘We're going to talk,' says Molly seriously. ‘We're going to talk about whether Brian is coming to live with us.'

‘OK.' I sit down at the table. ‘Can I talk first?'

‘If you want.'

‘He's not. And I've told him.'

‘That's not fair!'

I am not going to say that life is unfair. I refuse.

‘I know. I'm sorry. I've promised him that he can have roast chicken with us the next time we have it.'

‘I bet you didn't even mean that.'

‘I did mean it. I meant it with all my heart. But that's as far as it goes. The outer limits of our hospitality.'

‘But you said . . .'

‘Molly. There was nothing to talk about. Brian couldn't come to live here. He's not our family.'

‘But he could be.'

‘No. He couldn't.' I look at David, who looks right back at me. He's not about to help me out.

‘Molly, this is our family. You, me, Daddy, Tom. That's it. Not GoodNews, not Brian, not Monkey, nobody else. Tough. There's nothing you can do about it. These are the people we have to worry about first.'

‘Why?' Finally, a contribution from my husband. Not a helpful contribution, but a contribution nevertheless.

‘Why? Why? David, we're barely able to look after ourselves. We're almost broke, partly because you refuse to work. Tom's been stealing things from people at school . . .' I can feel a hot torrent of words building up inside me, and could no more prevent this torrent from coming out of my mouth than I could stop myself from vomiting if I were ill. ‘Molly's turning into a prig, I've had an affair . . .'

‘What's a prig? What's an affair?'

‘It means Mummy's had a boyfriend,' says Tom, without missing a second of the television programme he is watching.

‘You and I have been on the verge of divorce for months, although now we've made the decision to lock ourselves in and throw away the key, thus condemning each other to what might be a lifetime of frustration and mutual loathing. And you ask why we have to look after each other first? Because life's fucking hard enough as it is, that's why, and . . .'

‘Katie, stop. You're upsetting the kids.'

‘Good. Maybe they should be upset. Maybe they shouldn't go through life thinking that everything's OK, everything's great, everything's so great, in fact, that it doesn't matter who we give money to or who we take in, because it does matter. I wish it didn't. I wish we were competent enough to handle lives other than our own, but we're not. And I'll tell you something for nothing. All my life I have wanted to help people. That's why I wanted to be a doctor. And because of that I work ten-hour days and I get threatened by junkies and I constantly let people down because I promise them hospital appointments that never come and I give them drugs that never work. And having failed at that, I come home and fail at being a wife and a mother. Well, I haven't got the energy to fail at anything else. And if that means that Brian goes on living in sheltered accommodation, or Monkey has to sleep rough, well, so be it. Too bad. If in twenty years' time, we're all still speaking, and Molly's not an anorexic, and Tom's not inside, and I'm not hooked on tranquillizers, and you're not an alcoholic, and you and I are still together, well, that'll be a bloody miracle in itself. I'm not asking for any more than that. And if on top of all that we manage to buy a few copies of the
Big Issue
, and take them to the recycling centre, then hurrah for us. Haven't we done well? Hurrah for us. Hur-rah-for-us! Hur-rah-for-us. Come on! Join in!'

Nobody does.

It's over, now. I've emptied the contents of my throat all over the family, and there's nothing left.

‘You're not really going to get divorced, are you?' Molly asks. She's crying, but then, that was the idea.

‘Not if you're good,' I tell her. It's a terrible thing to say, I know that. But it's weirdly appropriate too.

For the first time in months and months I have to go to a bookshop, to buy a birthday present for my father. I don't know what to get him, and he doesn't know what he wants, so I wander around aimlessly. I used to spend a lot of time in bookshops; I used to know what most of the books were, what they meant, but now I'm simply perplexed and vaguely panicky. I pick up a novel by a young woman writer and read the blurb: perhaps I would like this, I think. I was halfway through
Captain Corelli's Mandolin
when I moved out of Janet's, and even though no further progress has been made, there is a possibility that I may well wish to have another go at reading a novel some time in the new Millennium. But when I try to decide whether this might be the book for me, I realize that I no longer have the capability to do so. How am I supposed to know whether I would enjoy it or not? How does one tell? I would enjoy a shoulder massage. I would enjoy a week lying by a swimming pool in the sun, sleeping. I would enjoy a large gin and tonic, as long as I didn't have to do anything after I had drunk it. I would enjoy some chocolate. But a book . . . This one is about a girl who, after being forced by political persecution to leave her African homeland, comes to live in Bromley, where she meets and falls in love with a young white racist skinhead ballet dancer. ‘It is as if
Billy Elliott
had mated with
Wild Swans
to produce
Romeo and Juliet
,' says a review on the back. I put the book down again – not because it sounds like tosh, but because I have not been forced to leave my African homeland, and I do not live in Bromley. Really! Really and truly! That is the logic I use to help me make up my mind! This means, of course, that there is very little to separate me from Poppy, the family cat that was found in the road – although I have managed to remain three- rather than two-dimensional, and I still have my own viscera. Poppy liked being stroked, just as I enjoy
shoulder massages; Poppy enjoyed fish, just as I enjoy chocolate. Poppy also loved sleeping in the sun, and she would have put this novel down if she had picked it up in a bookshop, for exactly the same reasons. I become so alarmed by the comparison that I buy the book immediately, even before I have found anything for Dad. I will not turn into a pet. I will not.

Biographies. Would he like a biography? Hitler? Montgomery? Dickens? Jack Nicklaus? The woman out of
Eastenders
who ran the pub? But Dad's not much of a pub man, I think, so he's not likely to . . . Jesus, Katie. It wasn't a real pub. The point of this book is that the woman used to be in
Eastenders
. Dad doesn't watch
Eastenders
. That's why you're not going to buy him this book. I find a reassuringly present-sized biography of God on the ‘Staff Picks' table, and just as I am about to take it to the till, I see the book about Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf's artist sister, the woman who, according to the book review I read, lived a rich and beautiful life. So I buy that, too, to see how it's done. And when David and GoodNews have finished ‘How to be Good', we can sit down and compare notes.

 

David has gone back to writing company brochures. He is no longer interested in his novel, and even if he were angry any more – which he isn't – he would not be able to vent his spleen in the local paper, because he has been displaced, dethroned, out-raged: there is a new, and even angrier, Angriest Man in Holloway now – which is as it should be, I suppose. If the new columnist were not angrier than David at his angriest, then he would be the Second Angriest Man in Holloway, and that would look a bit feeble on the page. And anyway, people get angrier all the time. It was inevitable that David's anger levels would end up looking a bit late 90s. He was never going to hang on to the title for ever, just like Martina was never going to remain Wimbledon champion for ever. Younger, meaner people come along. The new chap has just called for the closure of all public parks, on the grounds that they are magnets for gays, dogs, alcoholics and children; we have to hold up our hands in defeat. The better man has won.

In the old days, David's failure to have remained angry enough to keep his job would have made him furious – furious enough to become angry enough to keep his job. This David, though, just shrinks back into himself a little more. He has offered the paper a different sort of column, one based on the book he is writing with GoodNews, but no one was interested. He is properly depressed now, I think, and if he were to come to see me in the surgery I would prescribe something. But he won't. He still spends all his spare time with GoodNews, scribbling notes for ‘How to be Good', although spare time is much harder to find now – there are a lot of brochures to be written.

After much heart-searching, GoodNews has been given three months to find somewhere to live. He says he appreciates that he has been a burden on us; we are, after all, a middle-class nuclear family, he knows that, and he should respect our, y'know, our nuclearness. We know we are being insulted, but we don't care very much – or at least, I don't. David agonizes about it every night just before we go to sleep, wonders aloud whether we want to be nuclear, whether we should become a denuclearized zone, but much of his conviction has gone.

The children seem pretty depressed, too. They were shaken by my outburst, and I have had to talk to them about my boyfriend, and they watch their parents with panic-filled eyes each time we eat, or go out together anywhere. We have only had one argument in the last few days, David and I – about a grillpan – and the kids needed counselling afterwards. I suspect that after a few months of dullness they will forget our woes, but right now I feel sorry for them, and I wish that we had not contrived to make them feel so insecure.

Me, I don't think I'm depressed. That's not the right word. I'm daunted. I no longer think about whether I want a divorce or not – the nice vicar took that option away from me. It is just beginning to register that those post-divorce fantasies I had before I was married were untenable, and that I am likely to remain married at least until the children are adults. So that's . . . Fifteen years? By which time I will be in my mid-fifties, and one part of life – the Kris
Kristofferson part – will be a long way behind me. But there is a sort of virtue in having no choices remaining, I think. It certainly clarifies the mind. And there is always the possibility that David and I will be able to say to each other one day ‘Do you remember when we nearly packed it in?', and we will laugh at the sheer idiocy of these last few months. It is, I cannot help feeling, a remote possibility, but it is there nonetheless. I'm sure it's right, that thing about leaving the knife in when you've been stabbed. Maybe I should check it out again. Just to be sure.

 

We are cooking my father's birthday dinner, and my mother has called to say that he has given up red meat. David buys a free-range chicken, and it is nearly ready when Molly asks us what we are eating.

‘Hooray!' she says, with more excitement than the menu really warrants.

‘I didn't know you liked chicken that much.'

‘I don't. But it means that Brian can come for dinner.'

‘It's Grandpa's birthday.'

‘Yes. But chicken. You promised.'

I had forgotten my promise. When I made it, it seemed like the best and easiest deal I could possibly strike; now it is preposterous, unreasonable, a deal with God made by an atheist at a time of crisis, forgotten when the crisis has passed.

‘Brian can't come tonight.'

‘He has to. That's why he's not living with us, because he was allowed to come whenever we're having chicken.'

‘Grandpa won't like Brian.'

‘Why did you promise, if you were going to break it straightaway?'

Because I didn't mean it. Because I did it to get myself out of a hole. Because we have done enough for Brian, even though we have done almost nothing, and even though he is a sad and pathetic man who will devour any crumb of comfort that is thrown at him, like a duck in winter.

‘I didn't mean birthdays.'

‘Did you tell him that birthdays didn't count?'

‘Molly's right,' says David. ‘We can't just go around making promises to people like Brian and then breaking them when it is inconvenient.'

‘Brian is not coming to my father's birthday dinner,' I say. Of course he isn't. It's obvious, surely? It's common sense.

‘You're a liar, then,' Molly says.

‘Fine.'

‘You don't even care you're a liar.'

‘No.'

‘OK. Well, I'll be a liar, too, whenever I feel like it.'

I suddenly realize that David's part in the chicken debacle might not be entirely innocent.

‘You bought that chicken deliberately,' I say to him.

‘Deliberately? Well, it wasn't an unconscious purchase, if that's what you mean.'

‘You know that's not what I mean.'

‘OK. I wasn't entirely unaware of your promise to Brian and Molly when I put it in the trolley.'

‘So you were trying to catch me out?'

‘It didn't occur to me that you would need catching out. It didn't occur to me that your offer was anything but genuine.'

‘Liar.'

‘So what you're saying is I should have realized that you didn't really mean it? Even though you said you meant it with all your heart?'

‘Is this really what it's all come down to, David? Playing games with chicken dinners?'

‘It rather looks like it. I don't know what else is left. I couldn't get you to do anything else. I'd rather hoped we'd drawn the last line in the sand.'

‘I just want my dad to have a nice birthday. Is that too much to ask?'

‘That's been the question all the time. Or a version of it.'

We end up compromising. The night after my father's birthday dinner, we cook another roast chicken, and we invite Brian round,
and thus the spirit of the Brian treaty is upheld. Stuffing our faces with meat and three vegetables on consecutive nights may seem like a peculiar way to make the world a better place, but it seems to work for us.

 

OK, Vanessa Bell. She was a painter, so, you know, easier for her to live a beautiful life than it is for someone who has to deal with Mrs Cortenza and Barmy Brian and all the Holloway junkies. And she had children by more than one man, which might have made things a bit richer than they might otherwise have been. And the men she knocked around with were, it is only fair to say, more interesting and more talented than David and Stephen. They tended to be writers and painters and what have you, rather than people who wrote company brochures. And even though they didn't have money, they were posh, whereas we're not. It must be easier to live beautiful lives when you're posh.

So, what I'm beginning to think – and I'm only halfway through the book, but I'm sure the second half will be more of the same – is that Vanessa Bell isn't going to be too much help. OK, my brother may well end up filling his pockets with stones and jumping into the river, just as her sister did, but beyond that . . . Anyway, who lives a rich and beautiful life that I know? It's no longer possible, surely, for anyone who works for a living, or lives in a city, or shops in a supermarket, or watches TV, or reads a newspaper, or drives a car, or eats frozen pizzas. A nice life, possibly, with a huge slice of luck and a little spare cash. And maybe even a good life, if . . . Well, let's not go into all that. But rich and beautiful lives seem to be a discontinued line.

What helps is not Vanessa Bell, but reading about Vanessa Bell. I don't want to be like Poppy the squashed cat any more. Ever since I moved back into the house after my stay at Janet's, I have had the nagging feeling that I miss something, without quite being able to describe precisely what that something was. It's not my former flatmates, or the chance of sleeping on my own in a bed (because, like I said, David and I fit, or have learned to fit, and sharing a duvet with him is frequently a comfort rather than a hardship), but
something else, something that is clearly not important enough to me, in both senses: it should be more important to me than it is, because I miss it, and yet life is clearly not impossible without it, because I have been managing to survive despite its absence – in other words, it's some spiritual equivalent of fruit, which I am bad about eating. And it is only when I have shut the bedroom door for the third or fourth time on my husband and children in order to find out precisely how Vanessa Bell's life was better than my own that I work it out. It is the act of reading itself I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn't stale, that hasn't been breathed by my family a thousand times already. Janet's bedsit seemed enormous when I moved into it, enormous and quiet, but this book is so much bigger than that. And when I've finished it I will start another one, and that might be even bigger, and then another, and I will be able to keep extending my house until it becomes a mansion, full of rooms where they can't find me. And it's not just reading, either, but listening, hearing something other than my children's TV programmes and my husband's pious drone and the chatter chatter chatter in my head.

What happened to me? However did I get it into my head that I was too busy for all this stuff? Maybe I can't live a rich and beautiful life, but there are rich and beautiful things for sale all around me, even on the Holloway Road, and they are not an extravagance because if I buy some of them then I think I might be able to get by, and if I don't then I think I might go under. I need a Discman and some CDs and half-a-dozen novels urgently, total cost maybe three hundred pounds. Three hundred pounds for a mansion! Imagine asking a building society manager for three hundred pounds! He'd give you cash out of his own pocket. And I could shave even that pitiful amount down. I could go to the library, and I could borrow the CDs . . . but I need the Discman. I don't want anyone else to hear what I am hearing, and I want to be able to block out every last trace of the world I inhabit, even if it is just for half-an-hour a day. And yes, yes: just think how many cataract operations or bags of rice could be bought for three hundred
pounds. And just think how long it would take a twelve-year-old Asian girl to earn that in her sweatshop. Can I be a good person and spend that much money on overpriced consumer goods? I don't know. But I do know this: I'd be no good without them.