How to Be Good

  ‘When our invitation dropped through your letterbox, you probably thought to yourself, “What’s the catch? Why is this guy who I don’t know from Adam inviting us to a party?” ’

  ‘I’m only here for the beer,’ shouts Mike.

  ‘Well, it is Double Diamond,’ shouts somebody else.

  ‘No it isn’t,’ Mike shouts back. The two shouters are convulsed for what seems like several minutes.

  ‘I’d love to tell you that there isn’t a catch, but there is. A big catch. Because tonight I’m going to ask you to change people’s lives, and maybe change your own life, too.’

  ‘Backs to the wall!’ shouts Mike. You don’t have to be a psychoanalyst to worry about someone who thinks that changing one’s own life probably has something to do with homosexuality.

  ‘How many of you have got a spare bedroom?’ David asks.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ Mike shouts. ‘It’s where I sleep when the missus won’t have me in with her.’

  ‘So that’s one,’ says David. ‘Any more?’

  Most people choose to examine either their wine glasses or their feet.

  ‘Don’t be shy,’ David says. ‘I’m not going to ask you to do anything you don’t want to do. All I know is that this street is full of three-storey houses, and there must be quite a few empty rooms somewhere, because you haven’t all got two-point-four children.’

  ‘What about if you live in a flat?’ asks a young guy in a leather jacket.

  ‘Is it a one-bedroom flat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, you haven’t got a spare bedroom.’

  ‘Can I go home, then?’

  ‘You can go home any time you want. This is a party, not a detention centre.’

  ‘Could have fooled me,’ shouts Mike. His partner in comedy, the man who made the Double Diamond witticism, has come to stand by him, and offers him his hand for a high-five.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear you’re not enjoying yourself.’ For a moment I think I catch a glimpse of the old David, visible like old paint through the new undercoat: there’s a sarcasm in there that only I would be able to hear. The old taste for verbal confrontation is peeking out, too, because he doesn’t say anything else: he’s waiting for Mike’s follow-up, his next crack, and Mike hasn’t got one, because in the end he’s merely a bit of a twit, someone who would shout out daft things at any sort of gathering with alcohol, be it a wedding or a christening or a save-the-world party such as this, and he wants to push things so far but no further, and now David is calling his bluff.

  ‘Aren’t you having a very nice time?’

  ‘No, you’re all right,’ says Mike, deflated.

  ‘Because Eastenders probably starts in a minute.’ And that gets a laugh – not a huge one, but bigger than anything Mike has managed so far.

  ‘I don’t watch Eastenders,’ says Mike. ‘I don’t watch any soaps, actually.’ This gets the biggest laugh so far, but they’re laughing at him, at the banality of the riposte, and the laughter clearly stings him a little bit.

  ‘So you’re staying?’

  ‘I’ll finish my drink, anyway.’

  ‘Glad to hear it.’

  Another chuckle, and now they’re on his side. David has put down a heckler, and I feel obscurely, perhaps nostalgically proud. Now I come to think of it, heckler downputting would have been the perfect job for the old David. He had just the right combination of belligerence and quickwittedness. He’d have made a terrible stand-up, because he mumbles quite a lot, and loses the thread, in an unamusing, bumbling way, and anyway the objects of his derision were always obscure and complicated (theatre curtains, small tubs of ice-cream, etc.). But maybe if he’d teamed up with a comedian, he could have been brought on at crucial moments, like an anaesthetist. Maybe that was his calling. (And is that the nicest thing I can find to say about his talent? That it is perfectly suited to quelling verbal insurrection at alcoholic gatherings? This is hardly the mark of a polymath. Hardly the mark of someone lovable, either.)

  He pauses, to let the mood change.

  ‘Now, where was I? Oh yeah. Spare bedrooms. See, I don’t know about you, but I turn on the TV, or I pick up a paper, and something terrible’s happening in Kosovo or Uganda or Ethiopia, and sometimes I call a number and I give a tenner, and it changes nothing. The terrible thing continues to happen. And I feel guilty and powerless, and I continue to feel guilty and powerless when I go out later, to the pictures or for a curry or to the pub . . .’

  The pub! The pub! Which ‘pub’ would that be, David? The ‘local’? The Patronizing Bastard?

  ‘. . . And maybe I’m feeling guilty and powerless enough to keep it going, this feeling of wanting to do something, and there’s this kid sitting by the cashpoint with a blanket and a dog, and I give him fifty pence, and that changes nothing either, because next time I go to the cashpoint he’s still sitting there, and my fifty pence has done nothing. Well, of course it’s done nothing, because it’s fifty pence, and if I give him ten fifty pences, well, that’ll do nothing either, because that’s five quid. And I hate him sitting there. I think we all do. If you think about it for ten seconds, you can sort of guess just how horrible it would be, sleeping in the cold, begging for change, getting rained on, people coming up and abusing you . . .’

  I look around. He’s doing OK, apart from the pub bit. People are listening, and one or two are nodding, but you couldn’t say that the light of conversion was shining in their eyes. He needs to pull something out of the bag, before he loses them.

  Luckily, someone does it for him.

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ says Mike. ‘They’re all arseholes, these people.’

  ‘Which people?’

  ‘These bloody homeless people. And they’re loaded, half of them. Loads of money.’

  ‘Ah,’ says David. ‘Loads of money. Which is why they sit on the pavement begging?’

  ‘That’s how they get it, isn’t it? And then they blow it on drugs. I’ve been looking for bricklayers for six months, and have I heard from any of that lot? Course I haven’t. They don’t want to work.’

  There are a couple of snorts, one or two tuts, a great deal of head-shaking and exchanged glances followed by raised eyebrows. Mike is surrounded by gay actors, Health Service professionals, teachers, psychoanalysts, people whose hearts bleed right through their Gap T-shirts, and even if, in the middle of the night, they catch themselves thinking that the homeless only have themselves to blame and they all take drugs and have bank balances bigger than ours, they would never ever say so out loud, during waking hours, and especially not at a party. Mike has misjudged his audience, and in doing so, he changes the dynamic in the room. Two minutes ago, David was talking to a lot of bemused faces; no one here wished him any ill, but neither were they willing to pledge a substantial part of their house to his cause. Now, it’s different. Whose side are they on? Are they going to line up with the forces of right-wing darkness, i.e., Mike? Or are they on the side of the (slightly eccentric, possibly misguided, but angelic nonetheless) angels? Hurrah for angels! the psychoanalysts cry. Down with the right-wing forces of darkness! shout the gay actors. Not that there’s any actual shouting, of course. They’re too restrained for that. But Mike certainly has a little more floor space than he did. People have shuffled away from him, as if he were about to launch into some fancy dance routine.

  ‘If that’s how you feel, then you wouldn’t be interested in what I’ve got to say.’

  ‘No. I’m not. But I’m still finishing my drink.’

  ‘You’re welcome to finish your drink. But could I ask you to keep your views to yourself? I’m not sure whether anyone here is very interested in them.’

  ‘That’s ’cos they’re a lot of stuck-up ponces.’

  Mike’s floor space expands a little further. He could do a breakdancing routine now without landing on anyone’s head. Even the other half of his comedy duo has moved away from him. Mike has called David the thing that most people in this room fear
being called; after all, we want to fit in, become part of the neighbourhood. We want Mike to be one of us, and we want Mike to want us to be his neighbours. It is true that he probably paid a few hundred pounds for his house back in the late sixties, when nobody like us wanted to live here, and some of us paid a quarter of a million pounds for our houses a couple of years ago. (Not David and I, though! We paid a hundred thousand for our house ten years ago!) But does that make us ponces? After all, Mike’s house is worth a quarter of a million, too, now. But of course that’s not the point. The point is that we are the sort of people who can afford to pay a quarter of a million for a house (or rather, we are the sort of people to whom banks will lend a quarter of a million for a house); which makes us the sort of people who give money to beggars (and no wonder, if we are mad enough to pay a quarter of a million for a house); and then there’s the pub at the end of the road, which once upon a time Mike might have drunk in, but which has now changed hands and clientele and serves Spanish sausages on a bed of something-or-other for ten pounds, and isn’t really a pub at all, and let’s face it, the ponces are responsible for that, as well as for other things, like the corner shop becoming an organic delicatessen . . . Golly, do we have a lot to answer for.

  So Mike’s exit (he bangs down his drink on the mantelpiece and storms out) is both a blessing and a defeat, because even though we all feel guilty about the homeless, we also feel guilty that we have failed to accommodate Mike, that he no longer feels a part of his own neighbourhood, and maybe this double guilt helps David, too, because there is now so much collective guilt in the room that the ponces are just dying to compensate somehow. They want to do something gritty and difficult just to prove that they are not ponces, that they are good, thoughtful people who are unafraid of difficulty. If David wanted people to give up their homes at this precise second, a couple of them might do so; a bedroom – pah! Nothing!

  And David detects this mood, and storms through the rest of his speech, while GoodNews stands beside him with a self-satisfied beam on his face. Do these people want to be like Mike? Do they want to do something better than anything they have ever done in their lives? Because David doesn’t care what we’re doing now: however caring our job is, however much we give to charity, nothing is going to make as much difference to individuals as this. Six months without the use of a spare bedroom could literally save a life, because with a home and a permanent address and somewhere to shave and shower, then these kids can apply for jobs, and then they can earn, and with a wage comes self-respect, and the ability to build a life without this kind of intervention . . .

  ‘I’m forty-one years old,’ says David, ‘and I have spent half my life regretting that I missed the sixties. I read about the energy, and I imagine what the music would have sounded like when you hadn’t heard it a thousand times before, and when it actually meant something, and I’ve always been sad that the world is different now. I got a bit excited about Live Aid, but then you realize that these problems . . . They’re too big now. They’re never going to go away. We can’t change the world, but we can change our street, and maybe if we can change our street, then other people will want to change theirs. We have hand-picked ten kids who are living rough and who need some help. They’re good kids. They’re not winos or junkies or thieves or lunatics; they’re people whose lives have gone badly wrong through no fault of their own. Maybe their stepfather has thrown them out, maybe someone died on them and they couldn’t cope . . . But we can vouch for them. If I can find ten spare bedrooms for these kids I’d feel that it was the greatest thing I’d ever done.’

  ‘Are you having one?’ someone asks.

  ‘Of course,’ says David. ‘How could I ask you to do this if I wasn’t prepared to?’

  ‘Can I ask where we’ll be putting him or her?’ This from the lady at the back, who already supports two children, a spiritual guru and a husband who has lost the will to work.

  ‘We’ll sort it out when everyone’s gone,’ says David. ‘Does anyone want to talk more about this?’

  Four people put their hands up.

  ‘Four’s no good to me. I need more.’

  One more hand, then nothing.

  ‘OK. Half now, half later.’

  Weirdly, the whole room breaks into a spontaneous round of applause, and I feel as though I might cry the sort of tears that come at the end of soppy films.

  GoodNews and David take the Famous Five into his study (a study that, presumably, is about to be converted into a bedroom) while the rest of us watch. It’s like that bit in a church wedding where the bride and groom and a few others shuffle off round the corner to sign the register, and the congregation beam at them, without knowing quite what else to do. (Is there singing at that point? Maybe. Maybe we should sing now – You’ve Got a Friend, or You’ll Never Walk Alone, something where the secular just starts to rub against the spiritual.)

  For the record, the five volunteers are:

  Simon and Richard, the gay couple at number 25.

  Jude and Robert, a couple in their late thirties, who someone once told me were unable to have kids, and were trying to adopt, without much success. They’re at number 6.

  (So, for those of you who have a need to understand why anyone should wish to do what these people are doing, a theme begins to emerge . . .)

  Ros and Max, diagonally opposite us at number 29. Don’t know anything about them, because they’ve recently moved into the street, apart from 1) they have a daughter of Molly’s age and 2) just before David turned, he said he’d seen Ros on the bus reading his column and laughing, so perhaps her willingness to offer up a bedroom is some kind of penance.

  Wendy and Ed, an older couple at number 19. They’ve always stopped to talk when we’ve been out with the kids; I don’t know much about them either, other than that they are both enormous and their children no longer live with them.

  (Terrifying, this one) Martina, an old (properly old, seventy plus), frail Eastern European lady who lives on her own at number 21. Her grasp of English has always struck me as being remarkably weak for someone who has lived here for forty years, so heaven knows what she thinks she’s volunteered for; we’ll probably be given a large cake tomorrow, and she’ll be baffled and horrified when someone with dreadlocks knocks on her door in a week’s time.

  A woman I’ve never seen before in my life comes up to me. ‘You must be very proud of him,’ she says. I smile politely, and say nothing.

  We don’t get to bed until after midnight, but David’s much too hyper to sleep.

  ‘Is five any good, do you think?’

  ‘It’s amazing,’ I tell him, and I mean it, because I had anticipated nobody, nothing, a dismal and humiliating failure and the end of the story.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Did you honestly think you could get ten people to volunteer?’

  ‘I didn’t know. All I can say is that when I was going through it in my head, I couldn’t think of any arguments against it.’

  That’s it. That’s the whole David/GoodNews thing, right there: ‘I couldn’t think of any arguments against it.’ My problem exactly. I want to destroy David’s whole save-the-world-and-love-everyone campaign, but I want to do it using his logic and philosophy and language, not the language of some moaning, spoiled, smug, couldn’t-care-less, survival-of-the-fittest tabloid newspaper columnist. And of course it’s not possible, because David’s fluent in his language, and I’m a beginner. It’s as if I’m trying to argue with Plato in Greek.

  ‘What arguments are there?’ he says. ‘I mean, these people are . . .’

  ‘I know, I know. You don’t have to argue with me. But that’s not the point, is it?’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘There are never any arguments against anything you want to do. People are hungry, give them food if you’ve got it. Kids have nothing to play with, give them toys if you’ve got too many. I can never think of anything to say to you. But that doesn’t mean I agree with you.’

&nbs
p; ‘But it has to.’

  ‘That isn’t how the world works.’

  ‘Why not? OK, I know why not. Because people are selfish and scared and . . . and brainwashed into thinking that they have no alternatives. But they have. They have.’

  And what am I supposed to say now? That people have a right to be selfish if they want to? That they don’t have any alternatives? And what’s the Greek for ‘Please shut up and leave me alone’?

  The next morning I sit eating cereal with Tom while GoodNews and Molly and David clear up around me. I’m not moving. I’m selfish, and I have a right to be. In the Guardian there’s an article about a gang of youths who beat a man unconscious and left him under a hedge in Victoria Park, where he died of hypothermia. Unless he was dead already – the coroner doesn’t know. Three of the youths were homeless. OK, I accept that I shouldn’t have read the story out loud, given that our children are relatively young, and we have a homeless youth coming to live with us imminently (I presume that still to be the case – no one’s mentioned anything to me) and they will have nightmares for weeks about the poor and almost certainly harmless kid who’ll be sleeping underneath them. But I’m feeling bolshie, and the ammunition was just sitting there, at the top of page five, waiting to be fired.

  ‘Oh, great,’ says Tom. ‘So now Dad’s going to get us killed.’

  ‘Why?’ says Molly.

  ‘Weren’t you listening to what Mum was reading? A homeless person’s going to come round here and rob us and then probably kill us.’ He seems quite phlegmatic about it all; indeed, he seems to relish the prospect, possibly because being murdered would prove a point, and make his father sorry. I suspect that he’s being naive, and his father would be regretful and sad, but not sorry. Not the kind of sorry that Tom needs.

  ‘That’s not fair,’ David says to me angrily.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘One against five! He didn’t stand a chance.’