by Nick Hornby
I don’t think about how long I can live like this. Janet will be back in a few weeks, but already I have wondered whether Marie will be using her flat during the summer, and whether I could afford my own bedsit as well as the mortgage and two children and a husband and GoodNews and the homeless. And all this without considering whether this is a life worth living – whether these couple of hours every night, either on my own, or listening to Air with Dick and Marie and Gretchen and talking about letter box capacity, would do me for the next forty-odd years. At the moment it feels as though it would, but I’d probably be unwise to sign a forty-year lease on anything just yet.
But, bloody hell, I’m happy, for those precious two hours. I’m happier than I’ve been for years and years. I think. I watch Janet’s tiny TV. I have even been reading the review pages of newspapers, and in the two weeks I’ve been here, I have got through seventy-nine pages of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. I pay for it during the night, I hasten to add. Those two hours cost me. On my first night here I woke up covered in sweat after a nightmare, and realized where I was, and where I wasn’t. And I got dressed, and walked home and back, just so that I could hear the kids breathing. I have woken most nights since then at 2.25 a.m. precisely, feeling bereft and lonely and guilty and frantic with worry and fear, and it takes me ages to get back to sleep. And yet I still wake up in the morning feeling refreshed.
At the beginning of my third week in Janet’s flat, I come home to find Tom watching TV with a new friend. The new friend is a little fat child with a boil near his nose and a boy-band fringe that only serves to accentuate, or perhaps even poke fun at, his almost startling unattractiveness. ‘You know the kind of faces I’m usually found on?’ the fringe seems to be saying. ‘Well, have a look at this one!’ Tom’s friends don’t look like this. They look handsome and cool. Cool is very important to Tom; fat and boils (and fluffy brown-and-white sweaters) are usually of even less interest to him than they are to anyone else.
‘Hello,’ I say brightly. ‘Who’s this?’
The new friend looks at me, and then looks around the room, head wobbling, to try to locate the stranger in our midst. Heartbreakingly, given his other disadvantages, he doesn’t appear to be very bright; even after having ascertained that there is no one else with us, he declines to answer my question, presumably on the assumption that he would get it wrong.
‘Christopher,’ mumbles Tom.
‘Hello, Christopher.’
‘Hello.’
‘Are you staying for tea?’
He stares at me again. Nope. He’s not going to risk getting caught out on that one.
‘She’s asking you if you’re staying for tea,’ shouts Tom.
I am suddenly stricken with remorse and embarrassment. ‘Is Christopher deaf?’
‘No,’ says Tom contemptuously. ‘Just thick.’
Christopher turns his head to look at Tom, and then pushes him in the chest, feebly. Tom looks at me and shakes his head in what I can only interpret as disbelief.
‘Where’s your father?’
‘In GoodNews’s room.’
‘Molly?’
‘Upstairs. She’s got a friend round, too.’
Molly is in her room with what appears to be the eight-year-old female equivalent of Christopher. Molly’s new friend is tiny, grey-skinned, bespectacled and unambiguously malodorous – Molly’s bedroom has never smelt like this before. The air in the room is a witch’s brew of farts, body odour and socks.
‘Hello. I’m Hope.’ Hope. My God. The almost supernatural inappropriateness of Hope’s name is an awful warning to all parents everywhere. ‘I’ve come to play with Molly. We’re playing cards. It’s my turn.’ She places a card carefully on a pile.
‘The three of diamonds. It’s your turn now, Molly.’ Molly places a card on the pile. ‘The five of clubs.’ Hope is as loquacious as Christopher is silent. She describes everything that she does. And everything she sees. And she has an apparent fear of compound sentences. So she sounds like Janet, from ‘Janet and John’.
‘What are you playing?’
‘Snap. This is our third game. Nobody’s won yet.’
‘No. Well, you see . . .’ I begin to explain the fatal flaw in their approach and equipment, and then think better of it.
‘Can I come round tomorrow?’ Hope asks.
I look at Molly for signs of reluctance or active distaste, but her face is a mask of diplomacy.
‘We’ll see,’ I say.
‘I don’t mind,’ Molly says quickly. ‘Really.’
It’s a strange thing for a little girl to say about the prospect of a playdate with her new best friend, but I let it pass.
‘Are you staying for tea, Hope?’
‘I don’t mind that, either,’ Molly says. ‘She can if she wants. Honestly. It would be good for me.’
This last phrase, cheerily and sincerely delivered, tells me everything I need to know about our guests.
As chance would have it, it is my turn to cook; David and GoodNews stay up in the bedroom, plotting. Christopher and Hope stay for tea, which is eaten in almost complete silence, apart from the occasional snatch of main-clause commentary from Hope – ‘I love pizza!’ ‘My mum drinks tea!’ ‘I like this plate!’ As Christopher seems only to be able to breathe through his mouth, his eating is a somewhat alarming cacophony of splutters, grunts and squelches which Tom regards with utter disdain. People talk about a face that only a mother could love, but Christopher’s entire being would surely stretch maternal ties beyond the point of elasticity: I have never met a less lovable child, although admittedly Hope, whose peculiar personal aroma has not been dissipated by her proximity to food or other people, runs him close.
Christopher pushes his plate away from him. ‘Finished.’
‘Would you like some more? There’s another slice.’
‘No. Didn’t like it.’
‘I did,’ says Tom, who has never once expressed approval for anything I have ever cooked, presumably because he has never hitherto been presented with an opportunity to make such approval sound aggressive. Christopher turns his head to look for the source of the remark, but once he has located it, cannot think of anything to say in reply.
‘I like pizza,’ says Hope, for the second time. Tom could normally be relied upon to leap upon that kind of repetition and rip the repeater to shreds, but he seems to have given up: he merely rolls his eyes.
‘Your telly’s too small,’ says Christopher. ‘And it dunt go very loud. When that thing blew up it sounded rubbish.’
‘Why didn’t you just ask for it to be turned up?’ Tom says. Again, Christopher turns his head creakily, like some prototype robot, to study his friend; again, no response is forthcoming. In forty-five minutes Christopher has made me question my commitment to comprehensive education; suddenly I suspect that stupidity is contagious, and this boy should be thrown out of the house immediately.
‘Where do you live, Christopher?’ I ask him, in an attempt to find a conversational topic to which he might be able to make a contribution.
‘Suffolk Rise,’ he says, in exactly the same pugnaciously defensive rising tone – which other children use for the phrase ‘No I never’.
‘And do you like it there?’ Molly asks. Another child might be suspected of satirizing the social situation, but Molly, I fear, is simply Trying Her Best.
‘All right. Better than here. Here’s a dump.’
It’s Tom’s timing that is so revealing. He counts to ten, maybe even twenty or thirty, and while he is counting he examines Christopher as if he were a chess problem, or a particularly complicated patient history. Then he stands up and punches Christopher squarely and calmly on the boil, which, on closer examination, turns out to have burst and spilled its dayglo yellow contents all over its former owner’s cheek.
‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ he says sadly as he walks out, anticipating the first stage of his punishment before it has even been delivered. ‘But you must understand a bit.’
‘We’re doing guilt,’ David says after Christopher and Hope have gone home. (Christopher’s mother, a large, pleasant and perhaps understandably disappointed woman, does not seem particularly surprised to learn that her son has been punched, and perhaps as a consequence does not seem particularly interested in my long and detailed outline of the sanctions we intend to take.)
‘What does that mean?’
‘We’re all guilty, right?’ GoodNews chips in enthusiastically.
‘So you’ve always led me to understand.’
‘Oh, no, I’m not talking about how we’re all guilty because we’re members of an unfeeling society. Even though we are, of course.’
‘Of course. I wouldn’t for a moment suggest otherwise.’
‘No, I’m talking about individual guilt. We’ve all done something we feel guilty about. The lies we’ve told. The, you know, the affairs we’ve had. The hurts we’ve caused. So, David and I have been talking to the kids about it, trying to get a feel of where their own particular guilt lies, and then kind of encouraging them to reverse it.’
‘Reverse it.’
‘Yeah. Right. Reversal. That’s what we’re calling it. You take something you’ve done wrong, or some bad you’ve done to someone, and you reverse it. Do the opposite. If you stole something you give it back. If you were horrible, you have to be nice.’
‘Because we’re introducing the personal alongside the political.’
‘Thanks, David. I forgot to say that bit. Right. The personal and the political. We’ve done the political thing, right? With the homeless kids and all that?’
‘Oh, so that’s finished now, is it? Homelessness cured? World a better place?’
‘Please don’t be facetious, Katie. When GoodNews says we’ve “done” it, he doesn’t mean we’ve solved anything . . .’
‘God, no way. There’s still a lot to do out there. Phew.’ And GoodNews fans himself with his hand, apparently to indicate the amount of sweat yet to be expended on the plight of the world’s poor. ‘But there’s just as much to do in here, you know?’ And he points at his own skull. ‘Or in here, maybe.’ His finger shifts towards his heart. ‘So that’s the work we’re doing at the moment.’
‘And that’s why we had Christopher and Hope round for tea?’
‘Exactly,’ says David. ‘We talked to Molly and Tom, asked them what they wanted to reverse, and we kind of pinpointed these two poor kids as particular sources of . . . regret. Molly always felt bad that she didn’t ask Hope to her last birthday party, and . . . Well, you’ll laugh, but Tom felt bad that he’d thumped Christopher at school.’
‘Which is sort of ironic, isn’t it? Seeing as he’s just thumped him again.’
‘I can see why you’d say that, yes.’
‘And maybe what happened today was predictable?’
‘Do you think?’ David clearly hadn’t anticipated the possibility of history repeating itself. ‘Why?’
‘Think about it.’
‘I don’t want my son bullying kids, Katie. And I don’t want him disliking kids, either. I want him to find the good and the . . . the lovable in everybody.’
‘And you think I don’t?’
‘I’m not sure. Do you want him to find what’s lovable in Christopher?’
‘Yes, well. Christopher may well prove to be a special case. A loophole in the law of universal love.’
‘So you don’t want him to love everybody.’
‘Well, in an ideal world of course I do. But . . .’
‘Don’t you see?’ GoodNews says excitedly. ‘That’s what we’re doing! Building an ideal world in our own home!’
An ideal world in my own home . . . I’m not yet sure why the prospect appals me quite so much, but I do know somewhere in me that GoodNews is wrong, that a life without hatred is no life at all, that my children should be allowed to despise who they like. Now, there’s a right worth fighting for.
‘What about you?’ David says after Tom and Molly are in bed and I’m about to leave.
‘What about me?’
‘What do you want to reverse?’
‘Nothing. I take the view that anything we do, we do for a good reason. Like Tom thumping Christopher. This afternoon proved it. Tom thumped him twice because he can’t not, so the best thing to do is keep them apart, not put them together.’
‘So you don’t believe that, like, warring tribes can ever live side-by-side in peace?’ says GoodNews sadly. ‘Belfast? Just give up? Palestine? That place with the, you know, the Tutsis and those other guys? Forget it?’
‘I’m not sure that Tom and Christopher are warring tribes, are they? They’re two small boys, more than warring tribes, surely?’
‘You could argue that they are in a sense representative,’ David says. ‘You could argue that Christopher is a Kosovan Albanian, say. He’s got nothing, he’s despised by the majority . . .’
‘Except unlike the average Kosovan Albanian, he could just stay at home and watch TV on his own, and nothing much would happen to him,’ I point out. I point it out in my head on the way back to the bedsit; I closed the door on them somewhere during the second syllable in the word ‘majority’.
But of course I find myself thinking about the whole reversal concept. How could one not? David knows I feel guilty about just about everything, which is why he launched the idea in my direction. Bastard. When I get back to Janet’s place, I want to read, and I want to listen to the Air CD I borrowed from downstairs, but I end up making a mental list of the things I feel guilty about, and whether there is anything I can do about making any of it better. What alarms me is just how easy it is to remember things I’ve done wrong, as if they are floating on the surface of my consciousness all the time and I can simply skim them off with a spoon. I’m a doctor, I’m a good person, and yet there’s all this stuff . . .
Number one, top of the pops: staying here. And it’s because I feel bad about it that I’ve made it such hard work, what with the getting up at six-fifteen and all that. That’s a sort of penance, I suppose, and maybe I can forgive myself for this one. (Except the real reason I get up at six-fifteen is because I don’t have the courage to tell the children that I’ve moved out of their house, so in fact I should add the sin of cowardice to the sin of bedsit-dwelling. So in effect I’m doubly guilty, rather than completely absolved.)
Number two: Stephen. Or rather, David. Nothing much to say about that. I took marriage vows, I broke them, and I can’t unbreak them. (Although there are mitigating circumstances, as I hope you are by now aware.) (Except there are never any mitigating circumstances when it comes to this sort of thing, are there? Whenever I have seen Jerry Springer, the guilty party always says to the devastated spouse ‘I tried to tell you we wasn’t happy, but you wouldn’t listen.’ And I always end up thinking that the crime of not listening does not automatically deserve the punishment of infidelity. In my case, however, I really do think that there is a case to be made. Obviously. How many of Jerry Springer’s guests are doctors, for a start? How many of those transvestites and serial fathers ever wanted to do good works?) (Maybe all of them. Maybe I’m being a judgmental middle-class prig. Oh, God.)
Number three: my parents. I never call them. I never go to see them. (Or rather, I do, but not without a great deal of ill-will, procrastination, and so on.) (I really do think my parents are worse than anybody else’s, though. They never complain, they never ask, they simply suffer in silence, in a way that is actually terribly aggressive, if you think about it. Or, even more provocatively, they affect to understand. ‘Oh, don’t worry about it. You’ve got so much on your plate, with work, and the kids. Just phone when you can . . .’ Unforgivably manipulative stuff like that.) There is a paradox here, however, a paradox that provides some consolation: these feelings of guilt are harmful to one’s mental health, yes, granted. But those who have no need to feel guilty are, in my experience, the most mentally unhealthy of all of us, because the only way to have a guilt-free relationship w
ith one’s parents is to talk to them and see them constantly, maybe even live with them. And that can’t be good, can it? So if those are the choices – permanent guilt, or some kind of Freudian awfulness involving five phone calls a day – then I have made the sane and mature choice.
Number four: work. This seems particularly unfair. You’d think that my choice of profession would in itself be enough to absolve me from all worries on that score; you’d think that even a bad doctor on a bad day would feel better than a good drug dealer on a good day, but I suspect that this might not be true. I suspect that drug dealers have days when everything clicks, and it’s all buzz buzz buzz, and they chalk off their jobs one by one, and they return home with a sense of accomplishment. Whereas I have days when I have been rude to people, and very little help, and I can see in my patients’ eyes that they feel fobbed off, misunderstood, uncared-for (Hello, Mrs Cortenza! Hello, Barmy Brian!), and I never ever do my paperwork, and all the insurance claims are shoved straight to the bottom of my in-tray, and I promised at the last surgery meeting that I would write to our local MP about how refugees are being denied access to practices and I haven’t done the first thing about it. . .
It’s not enough just to be a doctor, you have to be a good doctor, you have to be nice to people, you have to be conscientious and dedicated and wise, and though I enter the surgery each morning with the determination to be exactly those things, it only takes a couple of my favourite patients – a Barmy Brian, say, or one of the sixty-a-day smokers who are aggressive about my failure to deal with their chest complaints – and I’m ill-tempered, sarcastic, bored.
Number five: Tom and Molly. All the obvious things, too dull to go into here, and much too familiar to anyone who has ever been a parent or a child. Plus, see number one above: I have moved out of their house (albeit temporarily, albeit because I was provoked, albeit to a small bedsit around the corner), and I haven’t told them. I suspect that a number of mothers would find themselves wondering whether they had done the right thing in this particular circumstance.