How to Be Good

by Nick Hornby

  ‘That’s OK. Take your time.’

  ‘That’s where I went. For my two days. I went to stay with GoodNews.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’ This is how we were taught to respond: listen carefully to what the patient says, don’t interject, let him finish, even if that patient is your husband and he has gone completely mad.

  ‘You don’t think I’ve gone completely mad?’

  ‘No. Of course not. I mean, if that’s what you thought you wanted to do, and it helped . . .’

  ‘He’s changed my life.’

  ‘Yes. Well. Good for you! And good for him!’

  ‘You’re patronizing me.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m finding it difficult to . . . to grasp, all this.’

  ‘I can understand that. It’s . . . It’s all a bit weird.’

  ‘Can I ask a question?’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  ‘Will you explain about the cream?’

  ‘He wasn’t using any.’

  ‘Sure, sure, I have understood that much. He wasn’t using any cream. I’m just trying to make the link between . . . between him not using any cream and you giving eighty quid to that homeless kid. It’s not immediately obvious.’

  ‘Yes. Right. OK.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘I only went to see him in the first place because I thought it would annoy you.’

  ‘I guessed.’

  ‘Yes, well. I’m sorry. Anyway. He lives in this little flat above a minicab office behind Finsbury Park station, a real dump, and I was just going to go home. But I sort of felt sorry for him, so . . . I told him about my back, and where it hurt, and I asked him what he thought he could do for me. Because if he’d said he was going to manipulate me or, you know, do anything that would make it worse, I wouldn’t have let him anywhere near me. But he just said that he’d touch it, nothing more, just put his hands there and the pain would go away. He said it would take him two seconds, and if nothing happened I wouldn’t have to pay him. So I thought, what the hell, and anyway he’s only a skinny little guy and . . . Anyway. I took my shirt off and lay down on his couch, face down – he hasn’t even got a treatment table or anything – and he touched me and his hands got incredibly hot.’

  ‘How do you know they weren’t hot already?’

  ‘They were cold when he . . . when he first put them on my back, and they just started to warm up. And that’s why I thought he was using Deep Heat or something. But he didn’t massage me, or rub anything in. He just touched me, very gently, and . . . and all the pain went. Straight away. Like magic.’

  ‘So this guy’s a healer. Like a faith healer.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He thinks for a moment, as if trying to think of something that might make this easier for a couple of middle-class, university-educated literalists to understand – by which I mean, I suppose, that he would like to find something that makes it seem more difficult – less straightforward, more complicated, cleverer. It’s not very hard to grasp that someone is a healer, after all: he touches you, you feel better, you go home. What is there not to understand? It’s just that everything else you have ever believed about life becomes compromised as a result. David gives up the struggle to complexify with a shrug. ‘Yeah. It’s . . . amazing. He has a gift.’

  ‘So. Great. Hurrah for GoodNews. He’s made your back better, and he made Molly’s eczema go away. We’re lucky you found him.’ I try to say all this in a way that draws a line under this whole conversation, but I’m guessing that this is not the end of the story.

  ‘I didn’t want him to be a healer.’

  ‘What did you want him to be?’

  ‘Just . . . I don’t know. Alternative. That’s why me and Molly had that row about the cream. It freaked me out a bit, and I wanted there to be this, I don’t know, this magic cream from Tibet or somewhere that conventional medics knew nothing about. I didn’t want it just to be his hands. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes. Sort of. You’re happier with magic cream than with magic hands. Is that it?’

  ‘Cream’s not magic, is it? It’s just . . . medicine.’

  This is typical of ignorant rationalists. For all they know, aspirin could be the most dramatic example of white witchcraft known to mankind, but because you can buy it in Boots it doesn’t count.

  ‘It’d be magic if it cured back pain and eczema.’

  ‘Anyway. It freaked me out a bit. And then the thing with the headache . . .’

  ‘I had forgotten about the headache.’

  ‘Well that was when things started to go weird. Because . . . I don’t even know why I told him I had a headache, but I did, and he looked at me, and he said, I can help you with a lot of things that are troubling you, and he touched me on the . . . here . . .’

  ‘The temples.’

  ‘Right, he touched me on the temples, and the headache went, but I started to feel . . . different.’

  ‘What kind of different?’

  ‘Just . . . Calmer.’

  ‘That was when you told me you were going away and I had to tell the kids we were getting divorced.’

  ‘I was calm. I didn’t rant and rave. I didn’t get sarcastic.’

  I remember my feeling that there was something different about him then, and in remembering find a new way to become sad and regretful and self-pitying: my husband visits a healer, is thus magically rendered calmer, and the only benefit for me is that he expresses without viciousness his desire for a separation. Except, of course, things have moved on since then, and there are countless benefits for me, none of which I enjoy. I hear my brother’s ‘Diddums’ ringing in my ear.

  ‘And then you went to stay with him?’

  ‘I didn’t know I was going to stay with him. I just . . . I wanted to see if he could do the thing with the head again, and maybe try to find out what was going on when he did it. I was thinking of writing about him, about the eczema and everything, and . . . I just ended up staying and talking for a couple of days.’

  ‘As one does.’

  ‘Please, Katie. I don’t know how to talk about this. Don’t make it hard.’

  Why not? I want to ask. Why shouldn’t I make it hard? How often have you made things easy for me?

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Go on.’

  ‘He doesn’t say very much. He just looks at you with these piercing eyes and listens. I’m not even sure whether he’s very bright. So it was me who did all the talking. He just sort of sucked it all out of me.’

  ‘He seems to have sucked everything out of you.’

  ‘Yes, he did. Every bad thing. I could almost see it coming out of me, like a black mist. I didn’t realize I was so full of all this stuff.’

  ‘And what makes him so special? How come he can do it and no one else could?’

  ‘I don’t know. He just . . . He just has this aura about him. This’ll sound stupid, but . . . He touched my temples again, when I was talking to him, and I just felt this, this amazing warmth flood right through me, and he said it was pure love. And that’s what it felt like. Do you understand how panicky it made me feel?’

  I do understand, and not just because David is an unlikely candidate for a love bath. Love baths are . . . not us. Love baths are for the gullible, the credulous, the simple-minded, people whose brains have been decayed like teeth by soft drugs, people who read Tolkien and Erich Von Daniken when they are old enough to drive cars . . . let’s face it, people who don’t have degrees in the arts or sciences. It is frightening enough just listening to David’s story, but to undergo the experience must have been terrifying.

  ‘So now what?’

  ‘The first thing I thought afterwards was that I had to do everything differently. Everything. What I have been doing isn’t enough. Not enough for you. Not enough for me. Not enough for the kids, or the world, or . . . or . . .’

  He grinds to a halt again, presumably because even though the laws of rhetoric and rhythm require a third noun, the reference to the world has left him with nowhere to go, unless he starts babbling ab
out the universe.

  ‘I still don’t understand what you talked about for two days.’

  ‘Neither do I. I don’t know where the time went. I was amazed when he told me it was Tuesday afternoon. I talked about . . . about you a lot, and how I wasn’t good to you. And I talked about my work, my writing, and I found myself saying that I was ashamed of it, and I hated it for its, I don’t know, its unkindness, its lack of charity. Now and again he made me . . . God, I’m embarrassed.’ A sudden thought – it may or may not be a fear, I’ll have to think about that another time – comes to me.

  ‘There’s nothing funny going on, is there?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re not sleeping with him, are you?’

  ‘No,’ he says, but blankly, with no sense of amusement or outrage or defensiveness. ‘No, I’m not. It’s not like that.’

  ‘Sorry. So what did he make you do?’

  ‘He made me kneel on the floor and hold his hand.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘He just asked me to meditate with him.’

  ‘Right.’

  David is not homophobic, although he has expressed occasional mystification at gay culture and practices (it’s the Cher thing that particularly bewilders him), but he is certainly heterosexual, right down to his baggy Y-fronts and his preference for Wright’s Coal Tar soap. There is no ambiguity there, if you know what I mean. And yet it is easier for me to imagine him going down on GoodNews than it is for me to picture him kneeling on the floor and meditating.

  ‘And that was OK, was it? When he asked you to meditate? You didn’t, you know, hit him or anything?’

  ‘No. The old David would have, I know. And that would have been wrong.’ He says this with such earnestness that I am temporarily tempted to abandon my own position on domestic violence. ‘I must admit, it did make me feel a little uncomfortable at first, but there’s so much to think about. Isn’t there?’

  I agree that yes, there is an enormous amount to think about.

  ‘I mean, just thinking about one’s own personal circumstances . . .’ (‘One’s own personal circumstances’? Who is this man, who talks to his own wife in his own bed in phrases from ‘Thought for the Day’?) ‘. . . That could occupy you for hours. Days. And then there’s everything else . . .’

  ‘What, the world and all that? Suffering and so on?’ It is impossible not to be facetious, I am beginning to find, with someone from whom all trace of facetiousness, every atom of self-irony, seems to have vanished.

  ‘Yes, of course. I had no idea how much people suffered until I was given the time and space to think about it.’

  ‘So now what?’ I don’t want to go through this process. I want to take a short cut and go right to the part where I find out what all this means for me me me.

  ‘I don’t know. All I know is I want to live a better life. I want us to live a better life.’

  ‘And how do we do that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I cannot help but feel that all this sounds very ominous indeed.

  Stephen leaves a message on my mobile. I don’t return the call.

  I come home the next night to the sound of trouble; even as I’m putting the key in the lock I can hear Tom shouting and Molly crying.

  ‘What’s going on?’ David and the kids are sitting around the kitchen table, David at the head, Molly to his left, Tom to his right. The table has been cleared of its usual detritus – post, old newspapers, small plastic models found in cereal packets – apparently in an attempt to create the atmosphere of a conference.

  ‘He’s given my computer away,’ says Tom. Tom doesn’t often cry, but his eyes are glistening, either with fury or tears, it’s hard to tell.

  ‘And now I’ve got to share mine,’ says Molly, whose ability to cry has never been in any doubt, and who now looks as though she has been mourning the deaths of her entire family in a car crash.

  ‘We didn’t need two,’ says David. ‘Two is . . . Not obscene, exactly. But certainly greedy. They’re never on the things at the same time.’

  ‘So you just gave one away. Without consulting them. Or me.’

  ‘I felt that consultation would have been pointless.’

  ‘You mean that they wouldn’t have wanted you to do it?’

  ‘They maybe wouldn’t have understood why I wanted to.’

  It was David, of course, who insisted on the kids having a computer each for Christmas last year. I had wanted them to share, not because I’m mean, but because I was beginning to worry about spoiling them, and the sight of these two enormous boxes beside the tree (they wouldn’t fit under it) did nothing to ease my queasiness. This wasn’t the kind of parent I wanted to be, I remember thinking, as Tom and Molly attacked the acres of wrapping paper with a violence that repelled me; David saw the look on my face and whispered to me that I was a typical joyless liberal, the sort of person who would deny their kids everything and themselves nothing. And here I am six months later, outraged that my son and daughter aren’t allowed to keep what is theirs, and yet still, somehow, on the wrong side, an agent of the forces of darkness.

  ‘Where did you take it?’

  ‘The women’s refuge in Kentish Town. I read about it in the local paper. They had nothing there for the kids at all.’

  I don’t know what to say. The frightened, unhappy children of frightened, unhappy women have nothing; we have two of everything. We give away some, a tiny fraction, of what we have too much of. What is there for me to be angry about?

  ‘Why does it have to be us who gives them something? Why can’t the Government?’ asks Tom.

  ‘The Government can’t pay for everything,’ says David. ‘We’ve got to pay for some things ourselves.’

  ‘We did,’ says Tom. ‘We paid for that computer ourselves.’

  ‘I mean,’ says David, ‘that if we’re worried about what’s happening to poor people, we can’t wait for the Government to do anything. We have to do what we think is right.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think this is right,’ says Tom.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s my computer.’

  David merely flashes him a beatific smile.

  ‘Why isn’t it just their bad luck?’ Molly asks him, and I laugh. ‘Just your bad luck’ was, until relatively recently, David’s explanation for why our kids didn’t own a Dreamcast, or a new Arsenal away shirt, or anything else that every other person at school owns.

  ‘These children don’t have much luck anyway,’ David explains with the slow, over-confident patience of a recently created angel. ‘Their dads have been hitting their mums, and they’ve had to run away from home and hide, and they haven’t got their toys with them . . . You have lots of luck. Don’t you want to help them?’

  ‘A bit,’ says Tom grudgingly. ‘But not as much as a whole computer.’

  ‘Let’s go and see them,’ says David. ‘Then you can tell them that. You can say you want to help them a bit and then ask for your computer back.’

  ‘David, this is outrageous.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You can’t blackmail your own children like that.’

  I’m beginning to feel better. I was struggling for a while back there, pinned back by the moral force of David’s arguments, but now I can see that he’s gone mad, that he wants to humiliate us all. How could I have forgotten that this is what always happens with zealots? They go too far, they lose all sense of appropriateness and logic, and ultimately they are interested in nobody but themselves, nothing but their own piousness.

  David drums his fingers on the table and thinks furiously.

  ‘No, I’m sorry, you’re right. It is outrageous. I’ve overstepped the mark. Please forgive me.’

  Shit.

  It is a fractious family dinner. Somehow David has managed to recruit Molly to the cause – possibly because she has spotted an opportunity to taunt Tom, possibly because Molly has never been able to see her father as anything le
ss than a perfect and perfectly reasonable man, possibly because the computer David gave away was in Tom’s bedroom rather than hers, although the one we have left has now been placed in the neutral territory of the spare bedroom. Tom, however, is clinging stubbornly to his deeply held Western materialist beliefs.

  ‘You’re just being selfish, Tom. Isn’t he, Dad?’

  David refuses to be drawn.

  ‘There are children there who don’t have anything,’ she continues. ‘And you’ve got lots.’

  ‘I haven’t got anything now. He’s given it all away.’

  ‘What are all those things in the bedroom, then?’ asks David gently.

  ‘And you’ve got half a computer.’

  ‘Can I get down?’ Tom has hardly eaten anything, but he’s clearly had his fill of the great steaming bowls of sanctimony being pushed at him from all directions, and I can’t say I blame him.

  ‘Finish your dinner,’ says David. He opens his mouth to say something else – almost certainly something about how fortunate Tom is to have a plate of lukewarm spaghetti bolognese in front of him given the plight of blah blah blah – but he catches my eye and thinks better of it.

  ‘Do you really not want anything else?’ I ask Tom.

  ‘I want to go on the computer before she gets it.’

  ‘Go on, then.’ Tom shoots off.

  ‘You shouldn’t have let him, Mummy. He’ll think he never has to eat his dinner now.’

  ‘Molly, shut up.’

  ‘She’s right.’

  ‘Oh, you shut up, too.’

  I need to think. I need guidance. I’m a good person, I’m a doctor, and here I am championing greed over selflessness, cheering on the haves against the have-nots. Except I’m not really championing anything, am I? I am not, after all, standing up to my unbearably smug husband and – now – my unbearably smug eight-year-old daughter and saying, ‘Now look here, we worked jolly hard to pay for that computer, and if some women are daft enough to shack up with men who beat them, that’s hardly our fault, is it?’ That would be championing. All I’m doing is thinking unworthy thoughts that nobody can hear, and then sniping about unfinished spaghetti bolognese. If I had any real conviction, I’d be passing on some offensive piece of homespun wisdom about how the Good Samaritan could only afford to be the Good Samaritan because he held on to his old computers and . . . and . . . gave them to a charity shop when they were knackered. Something like that, anyway.