How to Be Good

by Nick Hornby

  In other words, it is impossible: we cannot function properly, and the evening ends in confusion and awkwardness, and very early. There is a consensus in our particular postal district that people like Ginger Spice and Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Archer are beyond the pale, and if someone goes around sticking up for them then that consensus fails, and all is anarchy. Is it possible to want to divorce a man simply because he doesn’t want to be rude about Ginger Spice? I rather fear it might be.

  9

  The party invitations have been sent out, and most evenings now David and GoodNews lock themselves away in David’s study to finesse their plan of attack. I attempted to use that phrase humorously the other day, but the generals concerned just looked at me blankly – not just because they react to most attempts at humour in that way, but because they really do see this as a military campaign, a crusade in the original, eleventh-century sense. Our neighbours have become infidels, barbarians; GoodNews and David are going to batter their doors down with the heads of the homeless.

  ‘Can’t you just enjoy it as a party?’ David says at breakfast, when I have complained once too often. ‘You like parties. Ignore the other bit.’

  ‘Ignore the bit where you harangue our friends and neighbours in my kitchen about the homeless?’

  ‘First, it’s our kitchen. Second, I’m not haranguing them – I’m talking to them, making suggestions about how we can create a better society in our street. And third, I’m going to do it in the living room, standing on a chair.’

  ‘You’ve completely turned me around,’ I say. ‘What can I do to help?’

  ‘We’re making cheese straws,’ says Molly. ‘You could do the sandwiches.’

  ‘I’m not making cheese straws,’ says Tom.

  ‘Why not?’ Molly is genuinely amazed that anyone could be this truculent when there is so much fun to be had.

  ‘Stupid.’

  ‘What do you want to make, then?’

  ‘I don’t want to make anything. I don’t want this party.’

  ‘Dad, Tom says he doesn’t want this party.’ She adds a little incredulous chuckle to the end of her report.

  ‘Not all of us feel the same way about things, Molly,’ says David.

  ‘You going to give anyone any more of my stuff?’

  ‘This thing isn’t about that,’ says David, somehow managing to imply that there might be another thing, later on, which is.

  GoodNews comes in just as we’re all about to leave for work and school. He gets up at five-thirty but never comes downstairs until after half-past eight; I don’t know what he does up there for three hours, but I suspect that it’s something that even the most spiritual of us wouldn’t do for more than a few minutes. Molly and David greet him warmly, I nod, Tom glowers at him.

  ‘What’s up? What’s the word?’

  ‘Yeah, good,’ says David.

  ‘I’m going to make cheese straws,’ says Molly.

  ‘That’s great,’ says GoodNews, to whom everything is good news. ‘I’ve been thinking. What about some kind of medal? For those who volunteer on the spot?’

  I don’t want to hear about medals. I don’t want to hear about parties or cheese straws, and I fantasize about spending the evening of the party in a cocktail bar with a girlfriend, drinking Slow Comfortable Screws or some other equally vulgar and anti-homeless concoction, hopefully at seven pounds a throw. I say goodbye to my children, but not to my husband or to GoodNews, and go to work.

  As I’m walking down the path a woman I don’t know – mid-forties, slightly stroppy-looking, too much lipstick, lines around her mouth that suggests she’s spent the last couple of decades pursing her lips disapprovingly – stops me.

  ‘Did you invite me to a party?’

  ‘Not me. My husband.’

  ‘I got an invitation.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’ This is the question that most of our neighbours would want answered, but which only the unpleasant or mad ones would actually ask.

  ‘What do you mean, why?’

  ‘Why did your husband invite me to a party? He doesn’t know me.’

  ‘No. But he’d like to.’

  ‘Why?’

  I look at her, and I can just about make out an aura of unpleasantness hovering above her head; I’m presuming that this particular ‘why’ is rhetorical, and that no one has ever wanted or could ever want to know her.

  ‘Because he has this mad vision that everyone in this street could love each other and get on with each other and Webster Road would be this lovely, happy place to live and we’d be in and out of each other’s houses and maybe each other’s beds and in any case we’d really look after each other. And he really wants you to . . . What’s your name?’

  ‘Nicola.’

  ‘He really wants you, Nicola, to be a part of all this.’

  ‘What night is it? Wednesday?’

  ‘Wednesday.’

  ‘I’m busy Wednesdays. I do women’s self-defence.’

  I raise my palms and make a sad face, and she walks on. But I have a lot to thank her for: I can see the fun in this. Who would have thought that a desire to make the world a better place could be so aggressive? Maybe David hasn’t changed at all. Maybe all he ever wanted to do was upset people who need upsetting.

  ‘Would you like to come to a party?’

  Mr Chris James stares at me. We have just been arguing for ten minutes about my refusal to provide a note explaining his absence from work for the previous fortnight; it is my belief that he was not ill. (It is my belief, in fact, that he has been in Florida or somewhere on holiday, because when he was rummaging in his pockets for a biro he managed to spill a whole handful of American small change all over the floor, and got very defensive when I asked him where he got it from.)

  ‘What sort of party?’

  ‘The usual sort. Drink, food, conversation, dancing.’ There will be no dancing, of course – it’s more your standing-around-listening-to-a-man-standing-on-a-chair-and-lecturing-you party than a dancing party – but Mr James isn’t to know that. (He isn’t to know that there is unlikely to be very much conversation, either, given the nature of the evening, but if I tell the truth then it doesn’t really sound like much of an invitation.)

  ‘What are you asking me for?’

  ‘I’m asking all my regulars.’ This is not true either, obviously, although I certainly intend to ask the patients I don’t like very much, which may well turn out to be the regulars, many of whom I have learned to dislike.

  ‘I don’t want to come to a party. I want a doctor’s note.’

  ‘You’ll have to settle for a doctor’s invitation.’

  ‘Shove it.’

  I raise my palms and make a sad face, and Mr James walks out of my surgery. This is great! I’m not exactly killing with kindness, but I’m certainly leaving the odd flesh wound. I am a convert.

  Barmy Brian Beech, Heartsink Number One, has come in to ask whether he can help me with the operations.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to do the actual cutting bits. Not straight away. I’d have to have a look at what to take out and all that.’

  ‘I’m a doctor,’ I tell him. ‘I don’t do operations.’

  ‘Who does, then?’

  ‘Surgeons. In hospitals.’

  ‘You’re just saying that,’ he says. ‘You’re just saying that because you don’t want me to help.’

  It is true that if I were a surgeon, Barmy Brian would not be my first choice as assistant, but as I am not, I don’t have to have that particular conversation. I just have to have this one, which is in itself tortuous enough.

  ‘Just give me a chance,’ he says. ‘Just one chance. And if I mess it up, I won’t ask again.’

  ‘Do you want to come to a party?’ I ask him. He looks at me, all surgical ambitions suddenly abandoned, and I have achieved my immediate ambition, namely, to lead Brian away from a putative career in medicine. I have, however, invited him to a party at my house – not something I
had thought of doing before. This party isn’t mine, though. It’s David’s.

  ‘How many people are at a party? More than seventeen?’

  ‘There’ll be more than seventeen at this one, probably. Why?’

  ‘I can’t go anywhere where there’s more than seventeen people. That’s why I couldn’t work at the supermarket, you see. There are loads of people there, aren’t there?’

  I concede that the combined staff and customer numbers at the supermarket regularly exceed seventeen.

  ‘Well, there you are,’ he says. ‘Could I come maybe the day after, when they’ve all gone?’

  ‘Then it wouldn’t be a party, though.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We’ll try and have one with sixteen. Another time.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  For the first time ever, Brian leaves the surgery happy. And that makes me happy, until I realize that all this happiness comes as a direct result of David’s lunacy, and that, far from sabotaging David’s plans, I’m actually endorsing them. I have just been nice to exactly the kind of person David thinks I should be nice to, and as a consequence that person’s life has been momentarily ameliorated. I don’t like the implications of that.

  It goes without saying that the old David hated parties. To be precise, he hated throwing parties. To be even more precise, to be as precise as that BMW engineer in the TV ads, he hated the idea of throwing parties, because we never went as far as actually throwing one, not once in twenty years together. Why did he want a load of people he didn’t like putting cigarettes out on his carpet? Why did he want to stay up until three in the morning just because Becca or some other arsehole friend of mine was drunk and wouldn’t go home? These were, as you may have guessed, rhetorical questions. I never actually attempted to argue all the reasons why he might have wanted cigarette burns on the carpet. The way the rhetorical questions were phrased, I felt, indicated that I was highly unlikely to persuade him that parties could be FUN!, or that seeing all one’s friends together in one place was GREAT! That wasn’t how things used to work.

  I start thinking about all sorts of things that didn’t use to work in the way that they are working now, and I don’t know how I feel about it. Here’s something: David used to spend a lot of money on CDs and books, and sometimes, when he wasn’t working properly, we used to argue about it, even though – or probably because – I am unhappy that I have become a culture-free organism. I know that he tried to hide new things from me, by burying the CDs on the shelves, playing new ones when I was out, scuffing paperbacks around a bit so that I wouldn’t notice their newness. But now he has lost interest completely. He doesn’t go out much, and the review sections of newspapers are thrown away untouched. And, if I am honest, I miss what he brought to the household. I may have become an unwitting convert to an extremist religion that regards all forms of entertainment as frivolity and self-indulgence, but I secretly enjoyed living with someone who knew what Liam Gallagher does for a living, and now that has gone.

  And here’s another thing: he doesn’t make jokes, not proper ones, anyway. He tries to make the kids laugh, in a 1960s children’s television kind of way – he puts things that aren’t hats on his head, which is always a hoot, he uses pieces of fruit as ventriloquist’s dummies (‘Hello, Mr Banana’ ‘Hello, Mrs Strawberry’, that sort of thing), he pretends to be a Spice Girl, etc., and so on. Molly laughs falsely, Tom looks at him as if he were attempting to defecate rather than amuse. But adults (in other words, me, because GoodNews doesn’t look like he spends a lot of time at his local comedy club) . . . forget it. His relentless quest for the gag in everything used to drive me potty, because he’d get this look on his face when you were talking to him, and it would fool you into thinking that he was listening to what you were saying, and then some elaborate and usually nasty witticism would come darting out of his mouth like Hannibal Lecter’s tongue, and I would either laugh, or, more often, walk out of the room, slamming the door on the way. But every now and again – say, five per cent of the time – something would hit me right on the end of my funny bone, and however serious I felt, or angry, or distracted, he’d get the reaction he was looking for.

  So now I very rarely walk out of the room and slam the door; on the other hand, I never laugh. And I would have to say that as a consequence I am slightly worse off. Part of the reason I married David in the first place was that he made me laugh, and now he doesn’t, doesn’t even want to, and part of me wants my money back. Am I entitled to it? What if a sense of humour is like hair – something a lot of men lose as they get older?

  But here we are, in the real world, the world of now, and in the world of now David doesn’t make jokes and we are having a party, a party for all the people in our street, many of whom David has been extremely rude about, on very thin evidence (coats, cars, faces, visitors, shopping bags). And before I know it, the doorbell is ringing, and the first of our guests is standing on the doorstep with a puzzled but not altogether unfriendly smile on his face and a bottle of Chardonnay in his hand.

  The puzzled face belongs to Simon, one half of a gay couple who have just moved in to number 25. His partner, Richard, an actor whom Tom claims to have seen in The Bill, is coming along later.

  ‘Am I the first?’ asks Simon.

  ‘Someone’s got to be,’ I say, and we both chuckle, and then stare at each other. David comes over to join us.

  ‘Someone’s got to be first,’ says David, and all three of us chuckle. (This does not qualify as a joke, by the way. Yes, David said something that was designed to lighten the atmosphere, and yes, I registered audible amusement, but these are special, desperate circumstances.)

  ‘How long have you been living in the street?’ I ask Simon.

  ‘Oh, how long is it now? Two months? Long enough for it to feel like home. Not long enough for us to have unpacked all our boxes.’ You remember that bit in Fawlty Towers when Basil’s car broke down, and he got out, and started beating it with the branch of a tree? You remember how when the first time you saw it you laughed until you were almost sick? That is more or less the effect that Simon’s box witticism has on David and me. You had to be there, I suppose.

  Molly comes over with a bowl of cheese straws and offers one to all of us. ‘Tom says you were in The Bill,’ she says to Simon.

  ‘That wasn’t me. I’m not an actor. That was Richard.’

  ‘Who’s Richard?’

  ‘My boyfriend.’

  You may have thought that this was the first straight line (if you’ll excuse both puns) that Simon has delivered since he arrived, but you’d be wrong, because if something makes somebody laugh, then by definition it must be funny, and by referring to Richard as his boyfriend, Simon makes Molly laugh. A lot. Not immediately: first she blushes, and stares at her parents in awe; then she collapses into uncontrollable giggles and whoops.

  ‘Your boyfriend!’ she repeats, when she has enough breath to do any repeating. ‘Your boyfriend!’

  ‘That’s not funny,’ says David, but because he is looking at Simon sympathetically when he says it, Molly gets the wrong end of the stick, and thinks that Simon is being told off.

  ‘He was only being silly, Daddy. Don’t be cross with him.’

  ‘Go away now, Molly,’ I tell her. ‘Other people would like some of those cheese straws.’

  ‘There aren’t any other people.’

  ‘Just go.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ David and I say simultaneously, although neither of us offers any explanation as to why our daughter thinks that a man with a boyfriend is the best joke she has ever heard.

  ‘Never mind,’ says Simon. And then, just to break the silence, ‘This was such a good idea.’

  I am so convinced that he is being sarcastic that I snort.

  The doorbell rings again, and this time it is Nicola, the unpleasant woman with the pursed-lip lines who wasn’t going to be able to come because of her self-defence class.
She hasn’t brought a bottle.

  ‘I cancelled my self-defence class.’

  ‘Good for you.’ I introduce her to Simon, and leave the two of them talking about whether the council should introduce a parking scheme in our neighbourhood.

  The room fills up. Richard from The Bill arrives, and I forbid Molly to talk to him. The Asian family from next-door-but-one arrives, and GoodNews attempts to engage them in a debate about Eastern mysticism. I am chatted up by the seedy-looking builder from number 17 whose wife is in bed with flu. My brother Mark turns up, looking baffled. David must have invited him, because I didn’t. I have no idea whether Mark is supposed to be a recipient or a donor of the expected largesse: he’s right on the dividing line.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asks me.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say.

  ‘Who are these people?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He wanders off.

  Remarkably, the party has started to resemble a party: people are laughing, talking, drinking, and the doorbell keeps ringing, and before long there is no more space in the living room, and people have spilled over into the kitchen. After a couple of glasses of wine, I even begin to feel a little sentimental. You know – here we all are, black, white, gay, straight, a microcosm of swinging, multicultural, multisexual London, eating cheese straws and talking about traffic schemes and mortgages, and getting on and isn’t this great? And then David stands on a chair and bangs a saucepan with a wooden spoon, and I am woken from my little reverie.

  ‘Good evening, everyone,’ says David.

  ‘Good evening,’ shouts Mike, the seedy looking builder, who, as luck would have it, is A Character.