How to Be Good

  He looks at me.

  ‘What? It’s here, in the paper. It’s nothing to do with fairness. It’s a news story. A fact.’

  ‘There are so many other things you could have read out. I’ll bet there’s an article about, I don’t know, changes in the benefit laws. I’ll bet there’s something about Third World Debt.’

  ‘David, Third World Debt isn’t coming to live in our house. Third World Debt hasn’t killed . . .’ I stop dead, knowing that I’m wrong, that I’ve lost, that Third World Debt has killed – has killed millions and millions, a zillion more than homeless youths have ever killed, I know that I know that I know that, but I’m going to hear all about it anyway, for hours and hours and hours.

  10

  The homeless kids all arrive on the same day, in a minibus that their hosts have hired for the morning. It’s a sunny June Saturday, a little hazy because of the early heat and last night’s rain, and a few people have gathered outside their houses, either to gawp or to welcome their new housemates, and suddenly I feel as though our street is, after all, special. No other street in London or Britain or the world is having a morning like this, and whatever happens hereonafter, David and GoodNews have, I can see now, achieved something.

  The kids are loud and giggly as they get off the bus – ‘Er, look at her, I’ll bet she’s yours’ – but it’s bravado, and a couple of them are clearly scared. We are all scared of each other. David talks to each one – three boys, three girls – as they stand on the pavement, and points them towards their new houses. He shakes hands with one of the boys and points at me, and a couple of minutes later I am making tea while an eighteen-year-old who wants me to call him Monkey rolls a cigarette at my kitchen table.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asks Molly.

  ‘Rolling a cigarette.’

  ‘Do you smoke?’ says Molly.

  ‘Duh,’ says Tom, who promptly disappears to his bedroom. Molly, however, is awestruck. Her father Has Views on smoking, and her mother is a GP; she has heard that people smoke, but she has never seen anyone prepare to do it in front of her. For my part, I don’t know whether I want Monkey smoking in my kitchen, in front of the children. Probably I don’t. But asking Monkey to smoke outside in the back garden might get us off on the wrong foot: it might give him the feeling that he is not wanted, or that we do not respect his culture. Or it might serve to accentuate the differences between us – he might think that passive smoking is essentially a bourgeois fear, presupposing as it does the sort of long-term future he might feel he is currently denied, which is why he doesn’t worry about smoking roll-ups. Or asking him to go outside might simply make him angry, and his anger will compel him to steal everything we own, or murder us in our beds. I don’t know. And because I don’t know, I say nothing, apart from, ‘I’ll find you an ashtray.’ And then, ‘You’ll have to use this saucer.’ And then, when I replay that last sentence in my head, and hear a) a note that could be perceived as tetchiness and b) what could be construed as implicit disapproval, the buried suggestion that there are no ashtrays in this house FOR A REASON, I add ‘If you don’t mind.’ Monkey doesn’t mind.

  He is very tall and very thin – not like a monkey at all, more like a giraffe. He is wearing (from the bottom up) Dr Martens, combat trousers, a khaki jacket and a black turtle-neck sweater that is smeared with mud, or what I hope is mud. He has spots, but very little else: the rest of his wardrobe is contained in a plastic carrier bag.

  ‘So,’ I say. He looks at me expectantly, which is fair enough, considering that the word I have just used clearly induces expectation, but I’m temporarily stuck. I try to think of something to follow up with, something which won’t patronize or offend, but which might indicate sympathy and curiosity. (I feel both sympathetic and curious, by the way, and so the question is not merely for show. I care. Really.)

  ‘When was the last time you sat in someone’s kitchen?’

  That’s not offensive, surely? Because if you’ve been sleeping rough, it’s likely to have been a while, isn’t it? And maybe the question will help to draw him out, get him talking, and I’ll be able to understand a little more, learn something of what he’s been doing, and where. The only danger, I suppose, is that it could sound smug – haven’t we done well, we’ve got a kitchen, nah nah nah nah nah.

  ‘Dunno. Ages ago. Last time I saw my mum, probably.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘A couple of years ago. Is Ali G really funny?’

  ‘Who’s Ali G?’

  ‘That comedian on the telly.’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen him.’

  ‘He isn’t,’ says Molly, who is drawing at the table.

  ‘When have you seen him?’ I ask her.

  ‘I haven’t. But I’ve seen a picture of him. He doesn’t look very funny. He looks stupid. Why are you called Monkey?’

  ‘I dunno. That’s what they call me. Why are you called Molly?’

  ‘Because Daddy didn’t like Rebecca.’

  ‘Oh. Have you got digital?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Cable?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sky Sports?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh.’

  As it turns out, we are something of a disappointment to Monkey, and, if I am being honest, he is something of a disappointment to me. I cannot answer any of the questions he asks me, and nor do we have any of the things he seems to want most (apart from Sky Sports, we don’t have Dreamcast, or a dog); meanwhile he will not help me to understand how it was he came to be sleeping on the streets, which means that I am unable to show him the side of me that I wanted him to see: Katie the therapist, the listener, the imaginative solver of insoluble problems. He goes for a bath; regrettably, we don’t have a proper shower.

  For a couple of days, all is quiet. We only see Monkey during the evenings; he doesn’t talk about where he goes during the day, but it is clear that old habits are hard to break, and old friendships are as important to him as they are to everyone else. And, anyway, one night he comes back and attempts to give me housekeeping money out of a huge pile of coins that he dumps on the kitchen table, which gives us all an idea of his whereabouts during working hours. I am almost tempted to take the money: after all, he is the only person in the house other than me who is working. He is courteous, he keeps himself to himself, he reads, he watches TV, he plays with Tom at the computer, he enjoys every mouthful of food he is given, and he makes no dietary demands.

  One night we leave our guests in charge of the children (imaginary conversation with my parents, or social services: ‘Who’s in charge of your children?’ ‘Oh, GoodNews and Monkey’) and we go to the local cinema. We see a Julia Roberts film: she plays a struggling single mother who gets a job at a law firm and discovers that a water company is poisoning people, and she goes on a campaign to get compensation for them. Her relationship with a sexy bearded man suffers, and she becomes a bad, neglectful mother, but she is Fighting the Good Fight, and the water company is bad bad bad, and she only has two children and one boyfriend and there are hundreds of sick people, so it’s OK. It’s not a particularly good film, but I love it simply because it is a film, in colour, with a story that doesn’t involve spacecraft or insects or noise, and I drink it down in one, like I drank the Stoppard play. David loves it because he thinks it is about him.

  ‘Well?’ he says afterwards.

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘Do you see?’

  ‘Do I see what?’

  ‘If you’re going to do this stuff, it comes at a cost.’

  ‘There was no cost. Not in the film. Everyone lived happily ever after. Apart from the sick people, perhaps.’

  ‘Her boyfriend left her.’

  ‘She made it up with him,’ I point out.

  ‘But weren’t you on her side?’

  And he used to have such a complicated, interesting mind. ‘No. I was on the side of the water company. Of course I was on her side. I wasn’t given much cho
ice. Are you trying to say that you’re Julia Roberts?’

  ‘No, but . . .’

  ‘Because you’re not.’

  We stop while he gives a kid fifty pence, and then continue in silence for a little while.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘David, I’m not going to waste an awful lot of time on this.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why aren’t I going to waste time explaining why you’re not Julia Roberts?’

  ‘Yes. This is important. Tell me the difference between what I’m doing and what she was doing.’

  ‘What are you doing? Explain it to me.’

  ‘You explain to me what she was doing first. And then we’ll see what the differences are.’

  ‘You’re going to drive me mad.’

  ‘OK, I’m sorry. The point is that she and I want to do something about things. A water company is poisoning people. Bad. She wants justice for the people affected. Kids are sleeping out on the street. Bad. I want to help them.’

  ‘Why you?’

  ‘Why her?’

  ‘It was a film, David.’

  ‘Based on a true story.’

  ‘Let me ask you something: is this worth wrecking your family for?’

  ‘I don’t intend to wreck my family.’

  ‘I know you don’t intend to wreck your family. But two of us are very unhappy. And I don’t know how much more I can take.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘That’s all you can say?’

  ‘What else is there to say? You’re threatening to leave me because I’m trying to do something for people who can’t do much for themselves. And I . . .’

  ‘That’s not true, David. I’m threatening to leave you because you’re becoming unbearable.’

  ‘What can’t you bear?’

  ‘Any of it. The . . . the sanctimony. The smugness. The . . .’

  ‘People are dying out there, Katie. I’m sorry if you think that I’m being smug.’

  I cannot bring myself to say any more.

  *

  What with one thing and another – a broken leg one summer, post-college poverty the next – David and I did not go away on holiday together until the third year of our relationship. We were a proper couple by then, by which I mean that we had rows, that some days I didn’t like him very much, that if he or I went away for a few days I didn’t miss him, although I found myself jotting down inconsequential things to tell him, but that I never ever thought about whether I wanted to be with him or not, because I knew, somewhere in me, that I was in for the long haul. What I am saying, I suppose, is that this first holiday was not a honeymoon, and there was not very much chance of us spending the entire fortnight in bed, emerging only to feed each other spoonfuls of exotic fruits. It was more likely, in fact, that David would lapse into a two-week long sulk over a dispute about his loose interpretation of the rules of Scrabble, during the course of which I would call him a pathetic cheating baby. That was the stage we were at.

  We found cheap flights to Egypt, with the intention of travelling around a bit, but on our second day in Cairo David became ill – sicker than he’s ever been since, in fact. He became delirious, and he vomited every couple of hours, and at the height of it he lost control of his bowels, and we were in a cheap hotel and we didn’t have our own toilet or shower, and I had to clean him up.

  And there was a part of me that was pleased, because I’d set myself a test years before (probably when I first conceived of being a doctor, and realized that sometimes my private life would resemble my professional life): would I be able to see a man in that state and still respect him in the morning? I passed the test with flying colours. I had no qualms about cleaning David up, I could still bring myself to have sex with him afterwards (after the holiday, and after his restoration to health, I mean, rather than after his accident) . . . I was capable of a mature relationship after all. This was love, surely?

  But now I can see I was wrong. That wasn’t a test. What kind of woman would leave her boyfriend to rot in his soiled bedsheets in a strange hotel in a foreign country? This is a test. And Lord, am I failing it.

  Wendy and Ed, the enormous couple who live at number 19, come to see us first thing the next morning. They took in a kid called Robbie, who they said they liked. Last night the three of them stayed in together and talked about Robbie’s life, and how it had turned out in the way that it had, and Wendy and Ed went to bed feeling positive about the choice they had made to have him stay. But when they got up Robbie had vanished. Also vanished: a video camera, seventy pounds in cash, a bracelet that Wendy had left by the sink when she was doing the washing-up. GoodNews listens to the story with increasing agitation, which surprises me: I was presuming that he would be happy to write off the loss to experience, that he would argue – and as he is the owner of nothing very much, it is an easy argument to make – that these sorts of risks were worth running, that it was all for the greater good, and so on. It turns out, however, that it is not the theft that has agitated him, but our bourgeois logic.

  ‘Oh, no, no, no, people,’ he says. ‘We’re jumping to conclusions. We shouldn’t be jumping. We should be sitting and thinking, not jumping.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Ed is genuinely baffled. He, like me, is trying to see how any other interpretation of events is possible.

  ‘Don’t you see? We’re putting two and two together and making the proverbial. I mean . . . OK, Robbie has gone. And OK, some stuff has gone. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve gone to the same place.’

  ‘I’m sure they haven’t,’ I say. ‘I’m sure they’ve gone to different places. I’m sure the video camera has gone to the second-hand shop in Holloway Road and Robbie’s gone to the off-licence.’

  David gives me a look that lets me know I am being unhelpful, but I don’t think that’s true. Wendy and Ed are actually being pretty good about this. They could have come round here and thrown David from an upstairs window, or sat on him until he burst, but they just seem bewildered and hurt. And now they are being told that their powers of deduction are faulty.

  ‘GoodNews is right,’ says David, with a wearying predictability. ‘We mustn’t stereotype these kids. That’s kind of how they got into this mess in the first place.’

  Monkey comes into the kitchen, dressed in some of David’s cast-offs and yawning.

  ‘Do you know Robbie?’ I ask him. ‘The guy who was living with Ed and Wendy here?’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Monkey. ‘He’s a thieving little cunt. Pardon my language.’

  ‘How do you know?’ David asks.

  ‘How do I know he’s a thieving little cunt? ’Cos he steals everything.’ Misjudging the mood somewhat, he laughs heartily at his own witticism.

  ‘He’s stolen some stuff from us and disappeared,’ says Ed.

  ‘Yeah, well, I could have told you that would happen. What’s he taken?’

  Ed tells him what is missing.

  ‘Little fucker. Right.’ And Monkey disappears too.

  We make Ed and Wendy a cup of tea. David puts his head in his hands and stares mournfully at the floor. ‘It was a high-risk strategy, I suppose. Thinking about it now.’ That last phrase I would have found particularly difficult to swallow, if I were Ed and Wendy. They might have hoped that the thought had been done beforehand.

  ‘You shouldn’t worry too much about it,’ GoodNews tells them cheerfully. ‘You did the right thing. No matter how much you’ve lost. He could have taken everything you own, every last penny you’ve got, and you could go to sleep tonight knowing that your conscience is clear. More than clear. It’s . . .’ GoodNews struggles for a moment to find a word that means ‘more than clear’, and then gives up and settles for a beaming smile that doesn’t seem to offer Ed and Wendy as much consolation as he might have anticipated.

  *

  Forty-five minutes later Monkey is back, with the camera, the bracelet, fifty of the seventy pounds, and Robbie, who is bleeding profusely from a cut above h
is right eye. David is angry, GoodNews anguished.

  ‘How did he get that?’ David asks.

  Monkey laughs. ‘He walked into a door.’

  ‘Oh, man,’ says GoodNews. ‘This isn’t what we’re about.’

  ‘I can’t sanction violence,’ David says.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means I don’t agree with it.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ says Monkey. ‘I asked him nicely but he wouldn’t listen.’

  ‘I was going to come back with the stuff,’ wails Robbie. ‘There wasn’t any need for him to slap me around. I was only . . .’ Robbie tries and fails to come up with a convincing explanation for why he would need purely temporary use of a video camera and a bracelet, and trails off.

  ‘Is that true, Monkey?’ David asks. ‘Was he going to come back with the stuff?’

  ‘I’ll give you my honest opinion, David: No, it isn’t true. He wasn’t going to come back with the stuff. He was going to flog it.’ Monkey delivers the line for laughs, and gets them – from Ed and me, anyway. David and GoodNews aren’t laughing, though. They just look stricken.

  I ask Monkey to take Robbie for a walk somewhere while we talk.

  ‘So now what?’ I ask. ‘Do you want to get the police in, you two?’

  ‘Ah, now, you really want to think hard about that,’ says GoodNews. ‘Because the police, you know . . . That’s quite heavy. If twenty pounds means so much to you, you know . . .’

  Significantly, he trails off before completing the sentence in the way that sense and custom dictate. There will be no offers of recompense from this quarter, clearly.

  ‘What?’ I ask him.

  ‘It’s like, not much, is it, twenty quid? I mean, a young life has got to be worth more than that.’

  ‘So you’re saying that Ed and Wendy are mean. Callous.’

  ‘I’m just saying that if it were me that lost the money, you know . . .’

  ‘You’re not involved,’ I tell him. ‘It’s Ed and Wendy’s decision.’

  ‘If we get the police in,’ David says, ‘it’ll make it very difficult for Robbie to carry on where he is. He might feel that Ed and Wendy don’t want him.’