How to Be Good (30 page)

 

For the last three days, it has been raining and raining and raining – it has been raining harder than anyone can remember. It's the kind of rain you're supposed to get after a nuclear attack: rivers have broken their banks all over the country, and people are wading down High Streets, sandbagging their houses, abandoning their cars, rowing across fields. The traffic all over London has slowed and slowed and then, finally, stopped, and the trains aren't running, and the buses are overstuffed like a human sandwich, with bits of arms and legs hanging out of them. It's dark all day, and there's this relentless, terrible howling noise. If you believe in ghosts, the kinds of ghosts who have been condemned to haunt us because they died terrible, painful deaths or did terrible, painful things to their loved ones, then this is your time, because we would listen to you now. We would have no option but to listen to you, because the evidence is all around us.

The last time it rained like this was in 1947, according to the news, but back then it was just a fluke, a freak of nature; this time around, they say, we are drowning because we have abused our planet, kicked and starved it until it has changed its nature and turned nasty. It feels like the end of the world. And our homes, homes which cost some of us a quarter of a million pounds or more, do not offer the kind of sanctuary that enables us to ignore what is going on out there: they are all too old, and at night the lights flicker and the windows rattle. I'm sure that I am not the only one in this house who wonders where Monkey and his friends are tonight.

Just as we were eating, water started to pour into the kitchen under the French windows; the drain outside, placed incompetently in the dip between the garden and the house, cannot cope. David digs out an old pair of wellingtons and a cycling cape and goes outside to see if anything can be done.

‘It's full of rubbish,' he shouts. ‘And there's water pouring down from the gutter outside Tom's room.'

He clears as much muck from the drain as he can with his hands, and then we all go upstairs to see what can be done with the guttering.

‘Leaves,' David says. He's half out of the sash window, holding on to the frame – which, I can see now, is rotten, and should have been repaired years ago. ‘I could reach them with a stick or something.'

Molly runs off and comes back with a broom, and David kneels on the windowsill, and starts to take wild pokes at the gutter with the handle.

‘Stop, David,' I tell him. ‘It's not safe.'

‘It's fine.'

He's wearing jeans, and Tom and I grab hold of one back pocket each in an attempt to anchor him, while Molly in turn hangs on to us, purposelessly but sweetly. My family, I think, just that. And then, I can do this. I can live this life. I can, I can. It's a spark I want to cherish, a splutter of life in the flat battery; but just at the wrong moment I catch a glimpse of the night sky behind David, and I can see that there's nothing out there at all.

They never told me what it was, and they never told me why they might need someone like me. I probably wouldn't have taken the fucking job if they had, to tell you the truth. And if I'd been clever, I would have asked them on the first day, because looking back on it now, I had a few clues to be going on with: we were all sat around in this staff-room type place, being given all the do's and don't's, and it never occurred to me that I was just about the only male under sixty they'd hired. There were a few middle-aged women, and a lot of old gits, semi-retired, ex-Army types, but there was only one bloke of around my age, and he was tiny – little African geezer, Geoffrey, who looked like he'd run a mile if anything went off. But sometimes I forget what I look like, if you know what I mean. I was sitting there listening to what this woman was saying about flash photography and how close people were allowed to get and all that, and I was more like a head than a body, sort of thing, because if you're listening to what someone's saying that's what you are, isn't it? A head. A brain, not a body. But the point of me – the point of me here, in this place, for this job – is that I'm six foot two and fifteen stone. It's not just that, either, but I look  . . . well, handy, I suppose. I look like I can take care of myself, what with the tattoos and the shaved head and all that. But sometimes I forget. I don't forget when I'm eyeballing some little shitbag outside a club, some nineteen-year-old in a two-hundred-quid jacket who's trying to impress his bird by giving me some mouth; but when I'm watching something on TV, like a documentary or something, or when I'm putting the kids to bed, or when I'm reading, I don't think, you know, fucking hell I'm big. Anyway, listening to this woman, I forgot, so when she told me I'd be in the Southern Fried Chicken Wing looking after number 49,I never asked her 'Why me? Why do you need a big bloke in the Southern?' I just trotted off, like a berk. I never thought for a moment that I was on some sort of special mission.

 

I took this job because I promised Lisa I'd give up the night work at the club. It wasn't so much the hours – ten till three Monday to Thursday, ten till five Friday and Saturday, club closed on Sunday. OK, they fucked the weekends up, and I never saw the kids in the morning, but I could pick them up from school, give them their tea, and Lisa didn't have to worry about childcare or anything. She works in a dentist's near Harley Street, decent job, nice boss, good pay, normal hours, and with me being off all day, we could manage. I mean, it wasn't ideal, 'cos I never really saw her – by the time the kids were down and we'd had something to eat, it was time for me to put the monkey-suit on and go out. But we both sort of knew it was just a phase, and I'd do something else eventually, although fuck knows what. Never really thought about that. She asks me sometimes what I'd do if I had the choice, and I always tell her I'd be Tiger Woods – millions of dollars a week, afternoons knocking a golf ball about in places like Spain and Florida, gorgeous blonde girlfriends (except I never mention that bit). And she says, no, seriously, and I say, I am being serious, and she says, no, you've got to be realistic. So I say, well what's the point of this game, then? You're
asking me what I'd do if I had the choice, and I tell you, and then you tell me I haven't got the fucking choice. So what am I supposed to say? And she says, but you're too old to be a professional golfer – and she's right, I'm thirty-eight now – and you smoke too much. (Like you can't play fucking golf if you smoke.) Choose something else. And I say, OK, then, I'll be fucking Richard Branson. And she says, well you can't just start by being Richard Branson. You have to do something first. And I say, OK, I'll be a bouncer first. And she gives up.

I know she means well, and I know she's trying to get me to think about my life, and about getting older and all that, but the truth is, I'm thirty-eight, I've got no trade and no qualifications, and I'm lucky to get a job headbutting cokeheads outside a club. She's great. Lisa, and if you think about it, even her asking the question shows that she loves me and thinks the world of me, because she really does think I've got choices, and someone else is going to have as much faith in me as she does. She wants me to say, oh, I'd like to run a DIY shop, or I'd like to be an accountant, and the next day she'd come back with a load of leaflets, but I don't want to run a DIY shop, and I don't want to be an accountant. I know what my talent is: my talent is being big, and I'm making the most of it. If anyone asks her what I do, she says I'm a security consultant, but if I'm around when she says it, I laugh and say I'm a bouncer. I don't know what she'd say now. Probably that I'm an art expert. You watch. Give her two weeks and she'll be on at me to write to
Antiques Roadshow
. I don't know what world she lives in sometimes. I think it's something to do with the dentist's. She meets all these people, and they're loaded, and as thick as me, half of them, and she gets confused about what's possible and what's not.

But like I said, it wasn't the hours at the club. There were a couple of nasty moments recently, and I told her about them because they frightened me, so of course she did her nut, and I promised her I'd pack it in. See, the trouble is now, it doesn't matter how handy you are. I mean, half of those kids who went down Casablanca's, I literally could pick them up by the neck with one hand, and when you can do that  . . . Put it this way, I didn't need to change my underpants too often. (I do anyway, though, every day, in case you're thinking I'm an unhygienic bastard.) But now everyone's tooled up. No one says, I'm going to have you. They all say, I'm going to cut you, or I'm going to stab you, and I'm going, yeah, yeah, and then they show you what they've got, and you think, fucking hell, this isn't funny any more. Because how can you look after yourself if someone's got a knife? You can't. Anyway, about a month ago I threw this nasty little piece of work out of the club because he'd pushed it too far with a girl who was in there with her mates. And to be honest I probably slapped him once more than was strictly necessary, because he really got on my fucking nerves. And the next thing I know, he's got this  . . . this thing, this  . . . I've never seen anything like it before, but it was a sort of spike, about six inches long, sharp as fuck and rusty, and he starts jabbing it at me and telling me that I was dead. I was lucky, because he was scared, and he was holding this thing all wrong so it
was pointing down at the ground instead of towards me, so I kicked his hand as hard as I fucking could and he dropped it, and I jumped on him. We called the police and they nicked him, but when they'd gone I knocked off. I'd had enough. I know what people think: they think that if that's the sort of job you choose, you're asking for whatever you get, and you probably want it, too, because you're a big ape who likes hurting people. Well, bollocks. I don't like hurting people. For me, a good night at Casablanca's is one where nothing's happened at all. I mean, OK, I'll probably have to stop a couple of people coming in because they're underage, or bombed out of their brains, but I see my job as allowing people to have a good time without fear of arseholes. Really, I do. I mean, OK, I'm not Mother Teresa or anything, I'm not doing good works or saving the world, but it's not such,a shitty job if you look at it like that. But I'm a family man. I can't have people waving rusty spikes at me at two in the morning. I don't want to die outside some poxy club. So I told Lisa about it, and we talked, and I packed it in. I was lucky, because I was only out of work for a fortnight. They wouldn't let me draw the dole because I'd left my previous employment voluntarily. 'But this geezer had a rusty spike,' I said. 'Well, you should have taken it up with your employers,' she said. Like they would have offered me a desk job. Or given the kid with a spike a written warning. It didn't matter much, though, 'cos I found this one pretty much straight away, at an employment bureau. The money's a lot less, but the hours are better. I was well chuffed. How hard can it be, I thought, standing in front of a painting?

So. We had the induction hour, and then we were led through the gallery to our positions. On the way I was trying to work out whether I'd ever been in an art gallery before or not. You'd think I'd remember, but the trouble is, art galleries look exactly like you think they're going to look – a load of corridors with pictures hanging on them and people wandering around. So how would I know if I've been to one before? It feels like I have, but maybe I've just seen one on the telly, or in the films – there's that bit in
Dressed to Kill
, isn't there, where that bloke's trying to pick her up, and they keep seeing each other in different rooms. I can say this for sure, though: I've never had a good time in one. If I have ever been, it was on a school trip, and I was bored out of my skull, like on just about every school trip I was taken. The only one I remember now is when we went to some Roman ruins somewhere, and I nicked a few stones out of this mosaic thing. I stood on the edge and loosened a few with my foot, and while the teacher was talking, I crouched down as if to do up my shoelace and slipped a few in my pocket. And when we got back on the coach, I showed all the other lads what I'd done, and it turned out they'd all done exactly the same, and we were holding half the fucking floor in our hands. And the next thing we knew the bloke in charge of the place was chasing the coach down the street, and we all had to go to the front and put what we'd nicked into a carrier bag. We got in a lot of trouble for that. Anyway, what I reckon is we
did go to an art gallery somewhere, and I don't remember because nobody walked off with a painting.

The thing is, this gallery's like the normal sort of gallery for the first few rooms – pictures of fruit and all that, and then it starts to go weird. First we went through a couple of rooms where the pictures aren't pictures of anything, just splodges, and then when we get to our bit, the new exhibition, there aren't many pictures at all. There are bits of animals all over the place, and a tent, and ping-pong balls floating on air currents, and a small house made of concrete, and videos of people reading poetry. It looks more like a school open day than an art gallery. You know, biology here, science there, English over at the back, media studies next to the toilets  . . .

'I could have done any of these myself,' said this miserable old git called Tommy who'd already moaned once about the length of the coffee breaks. 'Yeah, you could now, you old cunt,' I said to him. 'Now you've seen them. Anyone could now. But you didn't think of it. So you're too late.' I was pleased with that. I pinched it off of a teacher at school, apart from the 'you old cunt' bit. That's mine. We were reading this poem at school, and some kid said exactly the same thing as Tommy – 'I could have done that.' Because it was an easy poem. It was short, and we knew all the words, and it didn't rhyme. And the teacher said, 'No, you couldn't. You could now, because you could just copy it out. But you didn't think of it.' I thought that was smart. Anyway, Tommy hasn't spoken to me since I called him an old cunt, and I'm glad.

I don't give a fuck about whether it's art, or who could do it. The thing is, it isn't boring, our gallery. The other rooms, with the pictures of cows in, they're boring. But our rooms, with the actual cows in, all cut up, they're not. There's got to be a lesson in there somewhere, hasn't there? It wouldn't work for everything, though, I can see that. I mean, it works for cows and tents and small houses, but it wouldn't work for, like, the fucking river. You'd still have to do a painting of that.

Anyway. Our group was getting smaller and smaller, because the woman taking us to our positions was sort of dropping us off, like we were in her bus. And it turned out that I was the last passenger. Like when me and Lisa went on a dodgy package holiday to Spain, years and years ago, before the kids came, and there was a coach to pick us all up at the airport, and every other bastard got dropped off at their hotel before we did, because it turned out that our hotel was two miles from the fucking beach. My painting was sort of the same thing as that. It was off to the side, in a room all of its own, and there was a curtain across the entrance, so it was separate from the others. Outside, there was a sign that said: 'WARNING! This room contains an exhibit of a controversial nature. Please do not enter if you feel you might be offended. Over 18s only'. The woman didn't say anything about that. She just ignored it – never asked me if I might be offended.

'You're in here,' she said. 'Watch out. We're expecting trouble.' And then she went off.

I went behind the curtain, and there on the far wall was this massive picture of Jesus. I'd say it was probably ten feet high, five or six feet wide, something like that. It's kind of like the pictures you've seen before – eyes closed, the old crown of thorns on his head. That was when he was on the cross, wasn't it? It's sort of a close-up, head and shoulders, so, you only see a bit of the cross, but what this picture has that the normal ones don't – not to me they don't, anyway – is that you can really tell just how much it must have fucking hurt, being nailed up. Usually, it looks like he's having a kip, but this one, his face is all screwed up in agony. You really wouldn't want to be in his shoes, I'll tell you. So the first thing I thought was, bloody hell, that's a good picture. Because it makes you think, and I don't often think about things like that. I haven't been anywhere near Jesus since Lisa's sister got married, three years ago.

And the second thing I thought – I'd forgotten about the sign and the curtain and all that for a moment – was, who the fuck would get offended by that? Because you can go into any church and see the same sort of thing. Not so realistic, maybe, a bit more PG than R, but, you know, basically the same sort of stuff: moustache and beard, crown of thorns, sad. Because you can't tell how it's done from a distance, see. When you step behind the curtain, you just see the picture, and the face. You have to get quite close up to see anything else. So I couldn't understand it, why there was all the fuss. I just thought: religious people. Nutters. 'Cos they are, most of them, aren't they? I mean, to each his own and everything, but you wouldn't want to marry one, would you?