How to Be Good

by Nick Hornby

  I no longer have the answers to any of these questions. All I know is that I don’t want this party, and I don’t want to put my neighbours through this, and I wish David and GoodNews were interested in starting up an Internet company so that they could make millions of pounds to spend on Page Three girls and swimming pools and cocaine and designer suits. People would understand that. That wouldn’t upset the neighbours.

  David and GoodNews tell the kids about the party the next morning at breakfast. Molly is curious; Tom sits at the table playing on his Gameboy and eating his cereal in between lives, apparently uninterested. I sit between the two of them while the men lean side-by-side with their backs to the work surface, answering questions. It is impossible not to notice how the dynamic in this household has changed, how my place now is with the children. And I don’t mean that in the maternal sense, either; rather, I am reminded of going to large family parties when I was fourteen or fifteen, when there was always confusion as to whether I should sit with my younger cousins or with my aunts and uncles at mealtimes.

  ‘Are we going to get a homeless person to stay, too?’ Molly asks.

  ‘Of course,’ says David.

  ‘Haven’t we got ours already?’ I say, with meaningful looks at all the relevant parties.

  ‘So who else will get one?’

  ‘Anyone who wants one,’ says David, and his reply makes me snort with laughter. Anyone who wants one . . . It’s Christmas, and this year everyone wants a homeless person, just as a couple of years ago everyone wanted a Buzz Lightyear. But at the homeless shop they never go out of stock.

  ‘Would you like to tell us what’s so funny, Katie?’

  That’s what he says, I swear. And he even sounds like a teacher: stern, vaguely distracted, following a script that was written a hundred years ago.

  ‘That’s not the line,’ I say. I suddenly feel that, as I am the oldest child, it is incumbent on me to be the naughtiest. ‘The line is, “Would you like to share the joke with the whole class?” ’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I get it,’ says Tom. ‘Don’t you get it, Dad? You’re the teacher and Mum’s being naughty.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘It’s true,’ says Tom. ‘That’s what you sound like.’

  ‘Well, I’m very sorry. I don’t mean to. Anyway. Is everybody happy about this?’

  ‘I’ve got a question.’ Sitting at the table with the kids, and being told off like a kid, has liberated me; my disenfranchisement has empowered me.

  ‘Yes, Katie.’

  ‘What happens if a homeless person moves into a neighbour’s house and cleans them out?’ It takes a child to say the unsayable.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean . . . well, that. What if we assist in moving a thief into our neighbour’s house? Someone who’s broke and desperate with a drug habit?’

  ‘You’re stereotyping the homeless, Katie. I’m really not sure that’s the right way to go.’

  ‘I appreciate what I’m doing, David. It’s just, you know . . . The stereotype of a football fan is someone who gets drunk and breaks bottles over people’s heads. And I know it’s a stereotype, and I know lots of people who go to Arsenal who aren’t like that. Just . . . There might actually be one or two who are. And I’m not sure I’d like to tell Ros and Max that they have to live with them.’

  ‘I just don’t think this conversation is very helpful.’

  ‘Have you even thought about it?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Right. Are you going to think about it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I want to change the way people think. And I can’t change the way people think if I think like everybody else, can I? I want to believe the best of everybody. Otherwise what’s the point?’

  There are many, many answers to that last rhetorical question, but I can’t bring myself to utter any of them. I shake my head, and get up from the table, and go to work, so that I can become an adult again.

  Except, of course, work too has now been altered by my domestic circumstances, and when I get to the surgery, Dawn, the receptionist, is standing behind the desk with her mouth open and her brow furrowed, trying to make sense of a lot of very old European ladies waving their hands in the air and saying ‘Hot! Very hot!’, and miming sudden sprightliness (which, because they are not sprightly in any way, they have to effect with their eyes, mostly), and trying to look sad.

  Dawn looks at me despairingly. ‘What have you been doing?’ she asks.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say, quickly enough for Dawn to deduce the opposite. ‘Well, I got this guy in yesterday. A masseur. For Mrs Cortenza’s back. Is that what they’re on about?’

  ‘Is he very tasty or something?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think it’s that. I think he uses –’ and as I’m saying it I get a flash of déjà vu – ‘I think he uses some cream or another, and . . . I think it might have some kind of effect on old ladies.’

  ‘So what shall I tell them?’

  ‘Oh, just . . . I don’t know. Tell them to buy some liniment. It’ll have the same effect. Write it down on a bit of paper and send them packing.’ And I wander off down the corridor, in the vain hope that by walking away from the scene I might be able to put the whole unhappy episode behind me, but within an hour Becca has been in to see me.

  ‘There’s a rumour sweeping through the waiting room that somebody cured one of our patients,’ she says accusingly. ‘Somebody who’s got something to do with you.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.’

  ‘I should hope not. Hey, all these old ladies are coming in to see me gabbling about somebody with hot hands who’s a friend of yours. Is that the guy?’

  ‘Which guy?’

  ‘Affair guy?’

  ‘No. It’s . . . someone else.’

  ‘Really someone else? Or pretend someone else, but actually, between you and me, and I promise I won’t tell anyone, the same man?’

  ‘Really someone else. Affair Guy has gone. This is Spiritual Healer Guy. The one who gave David the brain tumour. He’s moved in with us.’

  ‘And you’re not sleeping with him?’

  ‘No, I’m not sleeping with him. Jesus. I thought you might be more interested in his apparent ability to heal the sick by touching them than who he’s sleeping with.’

  ‘Not really. I only came in to ask what it’s like to have sex with someone who has hot hands. But you say you don’t know.’

  ‘No, I don’t know.’

  ‘Will you tell me if you find out?’

  ‘Becca, you seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that because of . . . recent events I will now always have a lover of some description. Infidelity’s not a career, you know. I’m embarrassed about what happened before. Can you please stop joking about it?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘What should I do about this guy?’

  ‘Which guy? There seem to be so many.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Sorry, sorry.’

  ‘Should I use him again?’

  ‘God, no.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We’re GPs, Katie. We trained for seven years. I’m sure the world’s full of people who can do a better job than we do, but we can’t let the patients know that, or it’s finished.’

  She’s right, of course. I don’t want GoodNews here every day, even if he has the power to make my patients well. Especially if he has the power to make my patients well. That’s my job, not his, and he’s already taken too much as it is.

  8

  Tom doesn’t own a Gameboy. I knew this, and so did David, and we watched him playing with it all through breakfast, and the impossibility of what we were seeing didn’t register with either of us. And nor did I get to work and become suddenly distracted by a puzzling image, something slightly odd that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I would like to claim that a mother’s
intuition made me pick up the phone in order to put my mind at rest, but that is not the case: I only pick up the phone because it is ringing, and I only realize Tom doesn’t own a Gameboy when David calls to tell me that we have been invited to the school, to talk to his head-teacher about our son’s recent spate of thieving.

  ‘What’s he stolen?’ I ask David. ‘That Gameboy, for starters,’ he says.

  Only then does my maternal-detective instinct kick in.

  When we get to the school at four, there is an array of stolen goods displayed on the headteacher’s desk, like one of those memory games: there’s the Gameboy, but also a couple of videotapes, an S Club 7 CD, a Tamagotchi, a whole load of Pokémon stuff, a Manchester United shirt, some half-eaten bags of sweets and, somewhat bizarrely, a paper wallet containing a classmate’s holiday snaps.

  ‘What did you want those for?’ I ask Tom, but he doesn’t know, predictably, and he just shrugs. He knows he has done wrong, and he’s hunched up in the chair, hugging himself; but there is some part of him that is angry, too. One of the things that has always broken my heart about Tom is that when he is in trouble he stares very intently at you, and one day I realized that what he was looking for was softness, evidence that, despite your disapproval of his misdemeanour, you still loved him. Today, however, he’s not interested. He won’t make eye contact with anyone in the room.

  ‘He’s basically been pinching anything that wasn’t nailed down,’ says the head. ‘He’s not very popular with his schoolmates at the moment, as you can imagine.’ She’s a nice, intelligent, gentle woman, Jeanie Field, and she’s always been very complimentary about our kids, partly, I suspect, because they demand so little of her. They come to school. They enjoy their lessons. They don’t hit anyone. They go home. Now Tom has become just another drain on her time and her energy, and it is that as much as anything that is making me feel wretched.

  ‘Have his home circumstances changed in any way?’

  Where would one begin? With the Damascene conversion of his father? The discussion about which parent he would live with in the event of a divorce? The appearance of GoodNews? I look at David, to let him know that it is his unhappy task to explain the events of the last few months in a way that will embarrass nobody in the room, and he shifts uncomfortably in his seat.

  ‘We have had some difficulties, yes.’ I realize with horror that since he met GoodNews, David regards the avoidance of embarrassment as a bourgeois hang-up with which he will have no truck.

  ‘Tom, will you wait outside, please?’ I say quickly. Tom doesn’t move, so I grab him by the hand, pull him to his feet, and march him outside. David starts to protest, but I just shake my head, and he shuts up.

  ‘I’m sure Katie won’t mind me saying that she had an affair,’ David is saying as I come back into the room.

  ‘I do mind you saying that, actually.’ I want him to know, just for the record.

  ‘Oh,’ says David, baffled. ‘It was my fault, though. I was an inattentive and ill-tempered husband. I didn’t love her enough, or appreciate her properly.’

  ‘That . . . Well, that sort of thing can happen,’ says Jeanie, who clearly wishes that she were having a meeting with the knife-wielding, drug-dealing parents of an illiterate sexual deviant.

  ‘But I . . . well, I . . . My shortcomings were revealed to me when I met a spiritual healer, and I think I’ve changed. Wouldn’t you say, Katie?’

  ‘Oh, you’ve changed,’ I say wearily.

  ‘And the spiritual healer is currently staying with us, and we’re . . . we’re re-examining a lot of our lifestyle choices, and . . . Maybe, thinking about it, some of this has unsettled Tom.’

  ‘I’d say that was a possibility, yes,’ says Jeanie. I look at her, but there’s no trace in her face of the dryness in her words. She knows how to do the white wine thing.

  There is a knock on the door, and Tom comes back in.

  ‘Have you finished?’ he says. ‘I mean, have you finished the stuff that I can’t hear? About Mum’s boyfriend and everything?’

  We all stare at our feet.

  ‘Sit down, Tom,’ says Jeanie. He sits down in the corner of the room, in a chair that faces none of us, so we all have to turn to look at him. ‘We’ve been talking about what might have made you do this. Whether there’s anything you’re not happy with at school or at home, or . . .’

  ‘I haven’t got anything,’ says Tom suddenly and angrily.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Jeanie asks him.

  ‘I haven’t got anything. At home. He keeps giving it away.’ He nods at his father.

  ‘Oh, Tom,’ says David, wounded. ‘That’s silly. You’ve got so much. That’s why we decided together to lose some of it.’

  ‘Hold on, hold on.’ I’m missing something here. ‘Tom, are you telling me there’s something else apart from the computer?’

  ‘Yeah. Loads of stuff.’

  ‘It wasn’t loads,’ says David, but the impatience in his voice gives him away.

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Last week. He made us go through our toys and get rid of half of them.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I address the question to Tom rather than David, which is indicative of something.

  ‘He told us not to.’

  ‘Why do you listen to him? You know he’s a lunatic.’

  Jeanie stands up. ‘I think these are things more profitably discussed at home,’ she says gently. ‘But there seems a fair bit to work on, I’d say.’

  It turns out that most of what they gave away – to the women’s refuge, again – was junk, or at least stuff they no longer played with. According to David, it was Molly who raised the stakes: she felt that the gifts would be meaningless unless they were really good toys, things they both enjoyed playing with. So there was an agreement (an agreement to which Tom seems to have been a somewhat reluctant signatory) to donate something from the current playlist. He gave away his radio-controlled car, and regretted it almost immediately. Here, then, is the complex psychological explanation for his life of crime: he gave some stuff away, and then wanted some other stuff to replace it.

  We have a chat with Tom when we get home, and extract all the necessary guarantees about future conduct; we also agree on a fair and appropriate punishment (no TV of any kind for a week, no Simpsons for a month). But it is not my son I need to talk to.

  ‘I’m getting lost,’ I say to David when we are on our own. ‘You have to explain things to me. Because I don’t know what any of this is supposed to achieve.’

  ‘Any of what?’

  ‘You’re turning our kids into weirdos.’ Please don’t say it’s everyone else who’s weird please don’t say that please please. Because it’s not true, is it? It can’t be true, unless the word ‘weird’ means nothing at all. (But then, is it weird not to want to watch Who Wants to be a Millionaire? when everyone else does? Is it weird to find Big Macs inedible, when millions of people eat almost nothing else? Aha: no it isn’t, because I can draw a circle within a circle – a circle around my particular postal district, as it happens – and place myself in a majority, not a minority. The only circle I can draw encompassing people who want to give their Sunday lunch and their kids’ toys away, however, would be a circle around my house. That’s my definition of weird. It is also fast becoming my definition of lonely, too.)

  ‘Is it really so weird to worry about what’s happening out there?’

  ‘I don’t mind you worrying. You can worry yourself sick. It’s trying to do something about it that’s causing all the problems.’

  ‘Tell me what you think the problems are.’

  ‘What I think the problems are? You don’t see any?’

  ‘I can see what might seem like problems to you. But they’re not problems to me.’

  ‘Your son becoming the Artful Dodger isn’t a problem to you?’

  ‘He’ll stop taking things. And there are bigger issues at stake.’

  ‘That’s where I’m lo
st. I don’t understand what the issues are.’

  ‘I can’t explain them. I keep trying, and I can’t explain them. It’s just . . . It’s just about wanting to live a different life. A better life. We were living the wrong one.’

  ‘We? We? You were the one writing the shitty novel. You were the one writing the newspaper column about how awful everyone was. I was trying to make sick people better.’ I know how this sounds, but he makes me so angry. I’m a good person, I’m a doctor, I know I had an affair but that doesn’t make me bad, that doesn’t mean I have to give away everything I own or watch while my children give away everything they own . . .

  ‘I know I’m asking a lot. Maybe too much. Maybe it’s not fair, and maybe you’ll decide that you can’t put up with it. That’s your business. But there’s nothing I can do about it now. I just . . . The scales have fallen from my eyes, Katie. I was living a wasted life.’

  ‘But where is this going to get you?’

  ‘That’s not the point.’