How to Be Good

  ‘What is the point? Please tell me, because I don’t understand.’

  ‘The point is . . . The point is how I feel. I don’t care what gets done. I just don’t want to die feeling that I never tried. I don’t believe in Heaven, or anything. But I want to be the kind of person that qualifies for entry anyway. Do you understand?’

  Of course I understand. I’m a doctor.

  Later, half-asleep, I start to dream about all the people in the world who live bad lives – all the drug-dealers and arms manufacturers and corrupt politicians, all the cynical bastards everywhere – getting touched by GoodNews and changing like David has changed. The dream scares me. Because I need these people – they serve as my compass. Due south there are saints and nurses and teachers in inner-city schools; due north there are managing directors of tobacco companies and angry local newspaper columnists. Please don’t take my due north away, because then I will be adrift, lost in a land where the things I have done and the things I haven’t done really mean something.

  The next day is Thursday, when I have an afternoon off, so, when Tom comes back from school, I take him out for a walk. He is deeply resistant to and utterly confused by the idea – ‘What are we going to do on this walk? Where are we walking to?’ – and if he were in any position to refuse then he would. But he is in trouble, and he knows it, and he is smart enough to realize that if a stroll round the nearest park helps him in any way, then it is a detour worth taking.

  It hurts and worries me to say it, but I have become less fond of Tom and Molly. I have been aware of this for a while, and have always presumed that this was perfectly normal – how could I feel the same about this quiet, occasionally surly boy as I did about his smiling, miraculous two-year-old counterpart? But now I’m not so sure. Now I’m beginning to wonder whether he should not, in fact, be more lovable than he is, and whether the shortfall in lovability is due to something unattractive in him, or something unmaternal in me.

  ‘It’s not my fault, so don’t say it is,’ he says when we’re ten yards from the house. No, there’s no doubt about it: he should be nicer than this.

  ‘Why isn’t it your fault?’

  ‘ ’Cos it’s Dad’s fault. And GoodNews’s.’

  ‘They stole that stuff?’

  ‘No. But they made me steal it.’

  ‘They made you. How did they make you?’

  ‘You know how they made me.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘They’ve been depriving me.’

  ‘And what does “depriving” mean?’

  ‘Like those kids at school. You said they were deprived.’

  He asked me once why a certain group of boys at his school were always in trouble, and I – perhaps, in retrospect, unwisely – introduced the concept of deprivation. I thought I was doing my duty as a right-thinking mother; it turned out that I was merely providing mitigation for my own son’s criminality.

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘Why is it?’

  ‘Because . . .’

  ‘You said they didn’t have very much at home, and that’s why they got in trouble. And now I haven’t got very much at home. And that’s why I’m getting in trouble.’

  ‘You don’t think you’ve got very much at home.’

  ‘Not any more I haven’t.’

  I’m becoming heartily sick of liberalism. It’s complicated, and tiring, and open to misinterpretation and abuse by . . . by sneaky, spoiled children. And it breeds doubt, and I’m sick of doubt, too; I want certitude, like David has certitude, or like Margaret Thatcher had certitude. Who wants to be someone like me? People like us? Because we’re almost always sure that we’re wrong; we’re almost always sure that we will go to hell, even though an inordinate amount of our waking thoughts are directed towards achieving the opposite effect. We know what’s right but we don’t do it because it’s too hard, it asks too much, and even trying to cure Mrs Cortenza or Barmy Brian is no guarantee of anything, so I somehow end each day in debit rather than credit. Today I have learned that I don’t really like my children and that I have somehow encouraged one of them to steal from his classmates; David, meanwhile, has been plotting to save the homeless. And yet somehow I still cling to the belief that I’m better than him.

  ‘Tom, you’re turning into a horrible, whining boy,’ I tell him, without any explanation, and without any acknowledgement that he has been created by horrible, whining adults. We finish our walk in silence.

  *

  We haven’t had a meal with friends since Before GoodNews, but on the Friday night we go to our friends Andrew and Cam for supper. GoodNews is babysitting: he offered, and the kids seemed OK about it, and as we’d actually failed to arrange an alternative, the offer was gratefully accepted. Andrew and Cam are People Like Us, alarmingly so: Andrew has a perilous toehold on the bottom rung of the media ladder, except it’s not really perilous, because if he lost his footing he wouldn’t actually fall very far, nor would he do himself or his family very much damage. He has a monthly books column in a men’s fitness magazine, and is therefore probably the world’s least-read literary critic. He is, of course, writing something else – a screenplay, rather than a novel, felicitously, so David can commiserate rather than feel threatened, and they can – could – both bitch happily about awful films they have seen or terrible novels they have read, and the bitching miraculously becomes mutually supportive and comradely, rather than merely unpleasant. Cam works in the Health Service as a manager, and she’s nice enough, but we don’t have an awful lot in common: she is Health Service-obsessed and has never wanted children, whereas I am happy never to talk about work if there is another conversational topic, including children, on offer. We are nice to each other because we both recognize the value of this relationship to our angry, frustrated menfolk.

  Except now, suddenly, my man is neither angry nor frustrated. Andrew doesn’t know this yet. He phoned, he invited, I accepted, I hung up, and there was no opportunity to mention the Finsbury Park Miracle. David seems unconcerned. In the car on the way over (we usually take a minicab, but David has shown no desire to drink more than the occasional glass of wine, so he is driving), I ask him gently whether he’ll be telling Andrew about GoodNews.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No reason.’

  ‘Do you think I shouldn’t?’

  ‘No. I mean . . . You know, if you want to, you should.’

  ‘I’ll be perfectly honest with you, Katie. I’ve found it’s quite hard to talk about. Without coming across as a weirdo.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why do you think that is?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘People are blinkered, don’t you think?’

  ‘That must be it. Maybe best to leave the subject alone, then.’

  ‘I think you’re right. Until I’ve . . . Until I’ve developed the language to talk about it properly.’

  All sorts of muscles all over me relax, and I hadn’t even realized I was tense, although I still get the feeling that this evening might be tricky. ‘What do you think you’ll talk about, then?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘What do you think we’ll talk about? How will the conversation go?’

  ‘How should I know? What a peculiar question, Katie. You’ve been for dinner at people’s houses before. You know how it works. Things come up and then we discuss them.’

  ‘That’s true in theory.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Well, that’s how it works in most cases. But when we see Andrew and Cam, we walk in, and then Andrew says that so-and-so’s a wanker and his new book is awful, and you say that the new film by somebody else is unintentionally hilarious – even though nine times out of ten I know for a fact you haven’t seen it – and Cam and I sit there smiling and sometimes laughing if you’re being funny instead of just plain nasty, and then you get drunk and tell Andrew he’s a genius, and he gets drunk and tells you you’re a genius, and then we go home.’

>   David chuckles. ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  ‘Really? That’s your impression of our evenings with Andrew and Cam?’

  ‘It’s not an impression.’

  ‘I’m sorry if that’s what you think.’

  ‘It’s not what I think. It’s what happens.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  We walk in, we’re offered a drink, we sit down.

  ‘How are you?’ Cam asks.

  ‘We’re fine, I think,’ I reply.

  ‘Better than that fuckwit J—, then,’ says Andrew gleefully. That’s all it takes – ‘We’re fine’, because us being fine gives him the opportunity to talk about someone who isn’t fine: J— is a well-known writer who has had a famously bad time of late. His new novel has had unanimously stinking reviews and failed to reach the bestseller lists; meanwhile his wife has left him for one of his younger rivals. The old David would have drunk deep from this cup, but the new one simply looks discomforted.

  ‘Yes,’ says David mildly. ‘He’s been having a bad time, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Andrew. And then, presumably because David has, in his own way, responded to the bit about J— having a bad time, but not to the bit about J— being a fuckwit, he adds, hopefully, ‘Fuckwit.’

  ‘How are you two?’ says David.

  Andrew looks mystified: twice he has offered the hand of enmity, twice it has been refused. He tries one more time. ‘We’re better than that fuckwit J—, too,’ he says, and laughs at his own joke.

  ‘That’s good,’ says David. ‘I’m glad.’

  Andrew chuckles maliciously, as if David has somehow taken the bait. ‘Did you read that review in the Sunday Times? Man, I’d have thrown my WP out of the window and emigrated.’

  ‘I didn’t read it.’

  ‘I’ve got it somewhere. I was thinking of having it framed. Shall I dig it out?’

  ‘No, it’s fine.’

  Usually by this point Cam and I have left them to it, and the four has folded neatly into two pairs along the gender crease, but now there is no ‘it’ to which we can leave them, so we sit there listening quietly.

  ‘How come you missed it?’

  ‘I . . . well, I’ve stopped reading reviews. I’m too busy.’

  ‘Ooooh, get you. That’s put me in my place.’

  ‘No, no, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that those who had the time to read reviews were, you know, were inferior in any way. I don’t want to judge anyone.’

  ‘You don’t want to judge anyone?’ Andrew laughs delightedly. David, the man who sits at the head of the top table in the High Court of all judgements, saying he doesn’t want to judge anyone! This, you can see Andrew thinking, is irony taken to new, impossibly sophisticated levels.

  ‘So. How come you’re too busy to read reviews all of a sudden? What have you been up to?’

  ‘Right now I’m . . . Well, I’m trying to sort out a neighbourhood adopt-a-street-kid campaign sort of thing.’

  There is a pause, and both Andrew and Cam study David’s face before the laughter starts again, this time from both of them. The laughter clearly stings David: his ears go red, as if the laughs had little brambles on them that prick him as they enter his head.

  ‘When you say you’re trying to sort it out,’ says Andrew, ‘do you mean you’re trying to stop it?’

  ‘No,’ David says meekly. ‘I’m trying to start it.’

  The first traces of doubt are visible on Andrew’s face now.

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Oh, it’s a long story. I’ll tell you another time.’

  ‘Right.’

  There is a long, long silence.

  ‘Who wants to eat?’ Cam says.

  Here is a list of the people that Andrew and David have hitherto regarded as talentless, overrated, or simply wankers: Oasis, the Stones, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Robbie Williams, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Salman Rushdie, Jeffrey Archer, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, William Shakespeare (although to be fair they despise the comedies and some of the history plays only), Charles Dickens, E. M. Forster, Daniel Day-Lewis, the Monty Python team, Gore Vidal, John Updike, Thomas Harris, Gabriel García Márquez, Milan Kundera, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Melvyn Bragg, Dennis Bergkamp, David Beckham, Ryan Giggs, Sam Mendes, Anthony Burgess, Virginia Woolf, Michael Nyman, Philip Glass, Steven Spielberg, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ted Hughes, Mark Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Stevie Smith, Maggie Smith, the Smiths, Alan Ayckbourn, Harold Pinter, David Mamet, Tom Stoppard, of course, all other contemporary playwrights, Garrison Keillor, Sue Lawley, James Naughtie, Jeremy Paxman, Carole King, James Taylor, Kenneth Branagh, Van Morrison, Jim Morrison, Courtney Love, Courteney Cox and the entire cast of Friends, Ben Elton, Stephen Fry, Andre Agassi, Pete Sampras and all contemporary male tennis players, Monica Seles and all female tennis players throughout history, Pele, Maradona, Linford Christie, Maurice Greene (‘How can a sprinter who’s faster than anyone else be overrated?’ I asked once, despairingly, but I received no satisfactory reply), T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Gilbert and Sullivan, Gilbert and George, Ben and Jerry, Powell and Pressburger, Marks and Spencer, the Coen Brothers, Stevie Wonder, Nicole Farhi and anyone who designs fucking suits for a living, Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, Johnny Depp, Stephen Sondheim, Bart Simpson (but not Homer Simpson), Homer, Virgil, Coleridge, Keats and all the Romantic poets, Jane Austen, all the Brontës, all the Kennedys, the people who made the film of Trainspotting, the people who made the film of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Madonna, the Pope, anyone they were at school or college with who is now making a name for themselves in the fields of journalism, broadcasting or the arts, and many, many others, so many others, too many to list here. It is easier, in fact, to write down the people in world history that they both like: Bob Dylan (although not recently), Graham Greene, Quentin Tarantino and Tony Hancock. I can’t remember anyone else ever receiving the double thumbs-up from these two guardians of our culture.

  I got sick of hearing why everybody was useless, and ghastly, and talentless, and awful, and how they didn’t deserve anything good that had happened to them, and they completely deserved anything bad that had happened to them, but this evening I long for the old David – I miss him like one might miss a scar, or a wooden leg, something disfiguring but characteristic. You knew where you were with the old David. And I never felt any embarrassment, ever. Weary despair, sure, the occasional nasty taste in the mouth, certainly, flashes of irritation almost constantly, but never any embarrassment. I had become comfortable with his cynicism, and in any case, we’re all cynical now, although it’s only this evening that I recognize this properly. Cynicism is our shared common language, the Esperanto that actually caught on, and though I’m not fluent in it – I like too many things, and I am not envious of enough people – I know enough to get by. And in any case it is not possible to avoid cynicism and the sneer completely. Any conversation about, say, the London mayoral contest, or Demi Moore, or Posh and Becks and Brooklyn, and you are obliged to be sour, simply to prove that you are a fully functioning and reflective metropolitan person.

  I no longer understand very much about the man I live with, but I understand enough to know that this evening is almost bound to throw up a decisive moment, a moment where David’s new-found earnestness, his desire to love and understand even the most wayward of God’s creatures, will be met with blank incomprehension. As it turns out, the wayward creature turns out to be the outgoing President of the United States, and it is Cam, not Andrew, who is on the receiving end of David’s terrifying sincerity. We’re talking – as best we can, from a position of almost fathomless ignorance – about the US primaries, and Cam says that she doesn’t really care about who the next president is as long as he keeps his thing in his trousers and doesn’t monster young interns, and David shifts in his seat and eventually wonders, with a patent reluctance, who we are to judge, and Cam laughs at him.

  ‘I mean it,’ says David. ?
??I no longer want to condemn people whose lives I know nothing about.’

  ‘But . . . that’s the basis for all conversation!’ says Andrew.

  ‘I’m tired of it,’ says David. ‘We don’t know anything about him.’

  ‘We know more than we want to.’

  ‘What do you know?’ David asks him.

  ‘We know he puts it about.’

  ‘Do we? And even if he does, do we know why?’

  ‘What?’ says Cam. ‘Society is to blame? Or Hillary? I don’t believe this, David.’

  ‘What don’t you believe?’

  ‘You’re sticking up for Clinton.’

  ‘I’m not sticking up for him. I’m just sick of all the poison. The drip drip drip of slagging off and cheap cracks and judgements of people we don’t know and the endless nastiness of it all. It makes me want to have a bath.’

  ‘Be our guest,’ says Andrew. ‘There’s a clean towel up there.’

  ‘But Bill Clinton!’ says Cam. ‘I mean, if you can’t be rude about him, who can you be rude about?’

  ‘I don’t know the facts. You don’t know the facts.’

  ‘The facts? The most powerful man in the world – the most powerful married man in the world – gets a blow-job off a twenty-something-year-old and lies about it afterwards.’

  ‘I think he must have been a very troubled and unhappy man,’ says David.

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ says Andrew. ‘You used to e-mail me filthy Clinton and Lewinsky jokes all the time.’

  ‘I wish I hadn’t,’ David says with a vehemence that causes visible bafflement on a couple of the faces round the table. We all concentrate very hard on our tricolore.

  I venture an entirely positive opinion on our hosts’ newly renovated kitchen, and we are happy for a while, but it clearly occurs to all of us simultaneously that there are very few subjects which offer that kind of harmony, and every now and again one of the three of us slips up, as if we are suffering from cultural Tourette’s. I make a disparaging remark about Jeffrey Archer’s literary ability (a passing observation – not even an observation, more a simile – buried in the middle of an otherwise unexceptionable exchange about a TV programme) and David tells me that I have no conception of how hard it is to write a book. Cam makes a joke about a politician who has recently been jailed for embezzlement, a man who has become a byword for untrustworthiness, and David makes a plea for forgiveness. Andrew has a little sneer about Ginger Spice’s role with the UN and David says it is better to do something than nothing.