How to Be Good (5 page)

‘You're not going to listen, are you?'

‘Course I'll listen. Listening isn't the same as cheering you on, though, is it? You can get one of your girlfriends to do that.'

I think of Becca, and I snort.

‘Who else have you told?'

‘No one. Well, someone. But she didn't seem to hear.'

Mark shakes his head impatiently, as if I am speaking in feminine metaphors.

‘What does that mean?'

I gesture helplessly. Mark has always envied my relationships with people like Becca; he would find it hard to believe that she simply smiled at me indulgently, as if I were a stroke victim babbling nonsense.

‘Jesus, Kate. David's a friend of mine.'

‘Is he?'

‘Well, all right, not, like, my best friend. But he's, you know, he's family.'

‘And that means he's got to stay family for ever. Because he's your brother-in-law and you went out for a curry a couple of times. No matter what he does to me.'

‘What has he done to you?'

‘It's not . . . what he's done. Nobody we know does things. He's just . . . He's always down on me.'

‘Diddums.'

‘Jesus, Mark. You sound like him.'

‘Maybe you should divorce me, too, then. You can run away from everyone who doesn't thoroughly approve of you every second of the day.'

‘He's breaking my spirit. He's grinding me down. Nothing's ever right, I don't make him happy . . .'

‘Have you thought about counselling?'

I snort, and Mark realizes that this is David we are talking about, and makes a Homer Simpson ‘Doh!'-type noise, and for a moment we are brother and sister again.

‘OK, OK,' he says. ‘Bad idea. Shall I talk to him?'

‘No.'

‘Why not?'

I don't say anything; I don't know why not. Except that I didn't want anything to leak out of this conversation into the real world. I just wanted my brother to come into this little weird bubble I'm in for an evening. I wanted empathy, not action.

‘What would make a difference to you?'

I know the answer to this one. I've thought about it, and I'm word-perfect.

‘I don't want David to be David any more.'

‘Ah. Who do you want him to be, then?'

‘Someone different. Someone who loves me properly, and makes me feel good, and appreciates me, and thinks I'm great.'

‘He does think you're great.'

I start to laugh. It's not an ironic laugh, or a bitter laugh, although surely if there was ever a moment that justified bitter laughter it would be now; it's a belly laugh. This is one of the funniest things I have heard for months. I am not sure of many things at the moment, but I do know, with every atom of my being, that David does not think I am great.

‘What? What have I said?'

It takes a while to compose myself. ‘I'm sorry. Just the idea that David thinks I'm great.'

‘I know he does.'

‘How?'

‘Just . . . You know.'

‘No. I really don't. That's the whole point, Mark.'

 

It's true that I don't want David to be David any more. I want things to be structurally the same – I want him to have fathered my children, I want him to have been married to me for twenty years, I don't even mind the weight and the bad back. I just don't want that voice, that tone, that permanent scowl. I want him to like me, in fact. Is that really too much to ask of a husband?

I come home from work and David almost skips out of his office to greet me. ‘Look,' he says, and then proceeds to bow at me vigorously, as if I were the Queen and he were some kind of lunatic royalist.

‘What?'

‘My back. I don't feel anything. Not a twinge.'

‘Did you go to see Dan Silverman?' Dan Silverman is an osteopath that we recommend at the surgery, and I've been telling David to see him for months. Years, probably.

‘No.'

‘So what happened?'

‘I saw someone else.'

‘Who?'

‘This guy.'

‘Which guy?'

‘This guy in Finsbury Park.'

‘In Finsbury Park?' Dan Silverman has a practice in Harley Street. There is no Harley Street equivalent in Finsbury Park, as far as I know. ‘How did you find him?'

‘Newsagent's window.'

‘A newsagent's window? What qualifications has he got?'

‘None whatsoever.' Information delivered with a great deal of pride and aggression, inevitably. Medical qualifications belong on my side of the great marital divide, and are therefore to be despised.

‘So you let someone completely unqualified mess around with your back. Smart decision, David. He's probably crippled you for life.'

David starts to bow again. ‘Do I look like someone who's been crippled?'

‘Not today, no. But nobody can cure a bad back in one session.'

‘Yeah, well. GoodNews has.'

‘What good news?'

‘That's his name. GoodNews. Capital G, capital N, all one word. D. J. GoodNews, actually. To give him his full title.'

‘DJ. Not Dr.'

‘It's, you know, a clubby thing. I think he used to work in a disco or something.'

‘Always useful when you're treating back complaints. Anyway. You went to see someone called GoodNews.'

‘I didn't know he was called GoodNews when I went to see him.'

‘Out of interest, what did his advert say?'

‘Something like, I don't know. “Bad Back? I can cure you in one session.” And then his telephone number.'

‘And that impressed you?'

‘Yeah. Of course. Why mess around?'

‘I'm presuming this GoodNews person isn't some sort of alternative therapist.' It may not surprise you to learn that David has not, up until this point, been a big fan of alternative medicine of any kind; he has argued forcefully, both to me and to the readers of his newspaper column, that he's not interested in any kind of cure that isn't harmful to small children and pregnant women, and that anyone who suggests anything different is a moron. (David, incidentally, is rabidly conservative in everything but politics. There are people like that now, I've noticed, people who seem angry enough to call for the return of the death penalty or the repatriation of Afro-Caribbeans, but who won't, because, like just about everybody else in our particular postal district, they're liberals, so their anger has to come out through different holes. You can read them in the columns and the letters pages of our liberal newspapers every day, being angry about films they don't like or comedians they don't think are funny or women who wear headscarves. Sometimes I think life would be easier for David and me if he experienced a violent political conversion, and he could be angry about poofs and communists, instead of homeopaths and old people on buses and restaurant critics. It must be very unsatisfying to have such tiny outlets for his enormous torrent of rage.)

‘I dunno what you'd call him.'

‘Did he give you drugs?'

‘Nope.'

‘I thought that was your definition of alternative. Someone who doesn't give you drugs.'

‘The point is, he's fixed me. Unlike the useless NHS.'

‘And how many times did you try the useless NHS?'

‘No point. They're useless.'

‘So what did this guy do?'

‘Just rubbed my back a bit with some Deep Heat and sent me on my way. Ten minutes.'

‘How much?'

‘Two hundred quid.'

I look at him. ‘You're kidding.'

‘No.'

He's proud of this ludicrous amount, I can see it in his face. In other times he would have laughed in, or possibly even punched, the face of some unqualified quack who wanted to charge him two hundred pounds for ten minutes' work, but now GoodNews (and if GoodNews is to become a regular conversational topic, I will have to find something else to call him) has become a useful weapon in the war between us. I think two hundred pounds is too much, therefore he gleefully pays the two hundred pounds. The perversity of the logic is actually alarming, when you think about it, because where will it end? Is it possible, for example, that he would sell the kids to a paedophile ring – for a piffling amount of money – just because it would really upset me? True, he loves his kids. But he really, really hates me, so it's a tough one to call.

‘Two hundred pounds.'

‘I can go back as many times as I want. For anything. For free.'

‘But he fixes everything first time. So you don't need to.'

‘That's why he's worth the money. That's why he charges so much.'

He bows again, up down up down, and grins at me; I shake my head and go to find my children.

*

Later, we watch TV together, as a family, and not for the first time recently I wonder how an evening can be so ordinarily domestic when life isn't that way. Even over the last few weeks, despite Stephen, and despite all the viciousness, we have developed a new Monday night routine, supper on laps during
Walking with Dinosaurs
; family ritual seems to be like some extraordinarily hardy desert flower, prepared to have a go at blooming in the most inhospitable terrain.

David still attempts to ruin our harmony – first by lying on the floor and attempting to do sit-ups (he is foiled by his girth and his general fitness level, rather than his back, but because it is not his back that has stopped him, he spends several minutes extolling the virtues of GoodNews, and he has to be hushed by the children), and then by poking fun at the commentary. ‘Three weeks later, the male returns for another attempt at mating,' says Kenneth Branagh. ‘Are you sure it wasn't a fortnight, Ken?' says David. ‘Because it was a hundred million years ago, after all. You might find you're a few days out.'

‘Shut up, David. They're enjoying it.'

‘Bit of critical rigour won't kill them.'

‘That's just what you need when you're a kid. Critical rigour.'

But we settle, in the end, and we watch the programme, bath the kids, put them to bed, eat an almost silent meal. And all the time I'm on the verge of saying something, doing something, except that I don't know what to say or do.

 

Next morning Tom spends his breakfast time staring at me and David, and after a little while I begin to find it disconcerting. He is a disconcerting child, Tom – he's quiet, quick on the uptake, direct to the point of being rude. He has the personality of a child prodigy, but no discernible talent.

‘What's the matter with you?' I ask him.

‘Nothing.'

‘Why do you keep staring at us?'

‘I want to see if you're getting divorced.'

If this were a film I'd be holding a coffee mug to my lips, and
Tom's words would provoke a huge joke splutter, and coffee would be coming out of my nose and running on to my blouse. But as it is I'm putting toast in the toaster, and I have my back to him.

‘Why would we be getting a divorce?'

‘Someone at school told me.'

He says this with no sense of grievance; if someone at work told me that I was getting a divorce and I'd had no prior awareness of any marital difficulties, I would be more upset about the source of the news than anything else. But of course childhood is a time when information flies at you from all directions, and to Tom it's all the same whether he hears this news from his mother and father or from little Billy in 2C.

‘Who?' says David, with slightly too much aggression, thus revealing himself immediately as the source of the leak.

‘Joe Salter.'

‘Who the hell's Joe Salter?'

‘This kid at school.'

‘What's it got to do with him?'

Tom shrugs. He's not interested in Joe Salter. He's interested in whether David and I are splitting up. I can see his point.

‘Of course we're not getting a divorce,' I say. David looks at me triumphantly.

‘Why did Joe Salter say you were, then?' Tom asks.

‘I don't know,' I say. ‘But if we're not, it doesn't really matter what Joe Salter says, does it?' I had never heard Joe Salter's name until three minutes ago, and I'm sick of him already. I have a very strong mental image of a smug, malevolent little blond boy, angelic looking to everyone but his classmates and, now, David and me, all of whom have had a glimpse into his stinking, poisonous soul. ‘I mean, we know more about it than he does. And we're staying married, aren't we, David?'

‘If you say so.' He's really enjoying this, and I can't say I blame him.

‘Will you ever get divorced?' asks Molly. Jesus. I can now see, for the first time, just how many worms a can holds, and why it's not a good idea to open one under any circumstances.

‘We're not planning to,' I tell her.

‘Who would we live with if you did?'

‘Who would you want to live with?' asks David. This is not a question you will find recommended in even the most brutal childcare books.

‘Daddy!' says Molly. And then, as an afterthought, ‘But not Tom.'

‘Tom can go and live with Mummy, then. That's fair.'

‘Daddy's joking,' I say to Tom quickly, but I suspect the damage has already been done: David has alienated brother from sister, daughter from mother and son from father in the time it takes to eat a bowl of Golden Grahams. And I've just promised not to divorce him. ‘Doh!' as my brother and my son and Homer Simpson would say.

 

At my insistence, David comes to the surgery at lunchtime and we go to a greasy spoon around the corner, to talk about what was said at breakfast. David is unrepentant. (Or should that be: David is Unrepentant. Like James Bond is 007.)

‘If we're not getting divorced, what harm can it do? It's a purely hypothetical situation.'

‘Come on, David. You can do better than that.'

‘Than what? What was I doing?'

‘Setting traps.'

‘What, the “if we're not getting divorced . . .” bit, you mean? That's a trap?'

‘You want me to say “Ah, but we might be . . .” And then you'd hammer me for being inconsistent, and telling you one thing and the kids another.'

For some time now I have looked on David's verbal landmines with some contempt, so clunkingly obvious are they (and it should come as no surprise that the author of
The Green Keepers
is as clunkingly obvious in conversation as he is in prose). But clearly I've been getting sloppy, because David seizes on my last remark with an alacrity that suggests he'd been hoping I'd say precisely that.

‘Hold on, hold on. What did you tell me when you called me from Leeds?'

‘I didn't . . . Well, I did, but I just wanted . . .'

‘No. What did you say?'

‘You know what I said.'

‘Say it again.'

‘You don't have to do this, David. You know what I said then, and you know what I said to the kids this morning.'

‘And that's consistent, is it?'

‘I can see that from your point of view it might appear inconsistent.'

‘And what about from yours? Because, really, I'm interested. I want to know how asking for a divorce and then saying you don't want one appears anything but.'

‘None of this is the point.' And I really mean that. I want to find out how he could ask our daughter to choose between one parent and another, and why he was so unthinkingly cruel to Tom, and why he's been telling the parents of small boys called Joe Salter, or friends of the parents of small boys called Joe Salter, or even small boys called Joe Salter, about our marital difficulties. It's fair enough that I should want to know these things, just as it is fair enough that he should want to know why I told him I wanted the marriage to end, apparently out of the blue; but we only have a lunchtime to talk. And suddenly it seems that a lifetime wouldn't be long enough, let alone a lunchtime, because if a breakfast conversation can be broken down into this many tiny pieces, none of which can be put back together, then how many tiny pieces could we extract from the last quarter of a century? He said and I said and he said and I said and he thought and I thought and he thought and I thought and he did this and I did that and . . . It shouldn't be like this. This isn't the way it's supposed to be. If it had been what
we
thought and what
we
did, there wouldn't be anything to argue about, because we had thought and done it together, but the only thing we have managed to do together is create an enormous mess, and I just can't see how . . .