How to Be Good

by Nick Hornby

  These are, however, only the three-act dramas of conscience that are enacted daily in the Carr psyche. There are plenty of one-act dramas too, stuff that more properly belongs on the Fringe rather than in the West End, but provides some pretty compelling pre-sleep contemplation on occasions. There’s my brother (see ‘Parents’ above), who I know is unhappy, and yet I haven’t seen him since the day of the party; various other relatives, including mum’s sister Joan, who is still waiting for a thank-you for a very generous . . . oh God, never mind that one. And there’s an old school friend who once lent us her cottage in Devon and Tom broke one of her vases, but when she wanted to stay the night with us . . . Forget that one, too.

  I don’t wish to be melodramatic: I know I have not lived a bad life. But nor do I think that this crime-sheet amounts to nothing: believe me, it amounts to something. Look at it. Adultery. The casual exploitation of friends. Disrespect for parents who have done nothing apart from attempt to stay close to me. I mean, that’s two of the ten commandments broken already, and given that – what, three, four? – of the ten are all about Sunday working hours and graven images, stuff that no longer really applies in early twenty-first-century Holloway, I’m looking at a thirty-three per cent strike rate, and that, to me, is too high. I can remember looking at the list when I was about seventeen and thinking that I wasn’t going to have too much trouble, if you took out all the graven image restrictions and left in the ones that really mattered. In fact, I wouldn’t have minded if you’d left all the finicky commandments in. God would understand the occasional emergency Sunday house-call, surely? And how many graven images am I ever likely to make? The score is nil to date – I haven’t been tempted, and I’d be very surprised if I were ever to weaken. I haven’t got the time, for a start.

  When I look at my sins (and if I think they’re sins, then they are sins), I can see the appeal of born-again Christianity. I suspect that it’s not the Christianity that is so alluring; it’s the rebirth. Because who wouldn’t wish to start all over again?

  12

  When all the England football fans were rioting at some World Cup or another, I asked David why it was always the English and never the Scots, and he explained that the Scots’ fans refusal to misbehave was a kind of weird form of aggression: they hate us so much that even though a few of them would probably like to fight, they won’t, because they want to prove that they are better than us. Well, Molly has become a Scot. Ever since Tom hit the repulsive Christopher, she has insisted on being as nice as she possibly can to the repulsive Hope. Every day Hope comes round after school and smells the place out; and the more she smells, the keener Molly is for her to return the following evening, and the more Tom is made aware of his own unpleasantness to his Hope equivalent. I am seriously beginning to worry about Molly’s mental health: how many eight-year-olds would want to spend day after day doing something so unappealing just to show that they are morally superior to a sibling?

  And now we are approaching Molly’s birthday, and she is insisting that she doesn’t want a party; she wants to spend the day with us and her brother and her new best friend. To our immense discredit, two of the five people involved are not so keen.

  ‘She never gets invited anywhere,’ says Molly by way of explanation. They are very different, my son and my daughter, particularly at the moment. My son would make the same observation to justify the opposite course of action. Someone who was never invited anywhere would, ipso facto, be excluded from any party that Tom might contemplate throwing.

  ‘But she smells,’ Tom points out.

  ‘Yes,’ says Molly, almost affectionately. ‘But she can’t help it.’

  ‘Yes, she can.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘She could have a bath. And use deodorant. And she doesn’t have to fart all the time, does she?’

  ‘I think she does, yes.’

  I am struck suddenly both by the importance of this argument (it is, after all, about nothing less than how much we owe our fellow humans, and whether it is our duty to love everyone regardless of their personal attributes) and the form that it has taken – namely, a small child’s flatulence. I stifle a laugh, because this is a serious business. The idea of driving to an amusement park in a small family car with Hope is not, ultimately, very funny.

  ‘Why don’t you just have a big birthday party and invite Hope to that?’

  ‘She can do what she wants,’ says David.

  ‘Of course she can do what she wants. I just want to make sure that this is what she wants. I don’t want to have to look at photos of Molly’s ninth birthday party and try to remember who the hell she spent it with.’

  ‘Why not? We don’t know hardly anyone in our wedding photos any more.’

  ‘Yes. And look what . . .’ I stop myself just in time. Bitter contemplation of the wreck that is our marriage would be inappropriate right now. ‘. . . Look what was the cause of that.’ In my anxiety to finish the sentence seamlessly I have begun to speak like an Eastern European exchange student.

  However, if you wanted to look what was the cause of that, you couldn’t have found a neater illustration of how our marriage became a wreck: over the next few years David taunted and teased and sneered at all the guests at our wedding, our friends and colleagues and relatives, for years and years until they dropped us.

  ‘It’s my birthday. I can do what I want.’

  ‘It’s not for a couple of weeks. Why don’t you wait until you mention it to her, just to make sure?’ It’s not as if she’ll be busy, after all.

  ‘I don’t want to.’ And she goes to the telephone with more malicious glee, it seems to me, than is strictly appropriate for an act of such selfless generosity.

  *

  So. To recap: I wish to be forgiven for my trespasses (which include committing adultery, dishonouring my parents, being rude to the borderline mentally ill, e.g., Barmy Brian, and even lying to my own children about where I live), and yet I will not forgive those who trespass against me, even if they are eight-year-old girls whose only real trespass is smelling bad. And having grey skin. And not being terribly bright. Right. OK, then. Let me think about that, and I’ll come back to you.

  I don’t even know I’m going to say the words until they come out of my mouth, and when they do I feel slightly faint. Perhaps I was feeling faint already – it is Sunday morning, and I have not yet eaten, despite having left the flat a couple of hours ago. Perhaps if I’d had a bowl of cereal as soon as I got home, I would never have said anything.

  ‘I’m going to church. Does anyone want to come?’

  David and the children look at me with some interest, for some time. It’s as if, having said something eccentric, I might follow this up by doing something eccentric, like stripping naked or running amok with a kitchen knife. I am suddenly glad that it is not my job to convince people that going to church is a perfectly healthy leisure activity.

  ‘I told you,’ says Tom.

  ‘What did you tell me? When?’

  ‘Ages ago. When Dad was giving all our stuff away. I said we’d have to go to church in the end.’

  I had forgotten that. So Tom was right, in a way he could never have predicted.

  ‘This is nothing to do with your father,’ I say. ‘And no one has to go anywhere.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ says Molly.

  ‘What church?’ says David.

  Good question.

  ‘The one round the corner.’ There must be one round the corner. They’re like betting shops, churches, aren’t they? There’s always one round the corner, and you never notice them if you don’t use them.

  ‘What corner?’

  ‘We could go with Pauline,’ says Molly. ‘I know which church she goes to.’ Pauline is a schoolfriend of Molly’s. She’s Afro-Caribbean. Oh, God.

  ‘That wasn’t . . . I was thinking of a different sort of church.’

  ‘Pauline says it’s fun, hers.’

  ‘I’m not looking for a fun church.’


  ‘What are you looking for?’ David asks, relishing my discomfort.

  ‘Just . . . I want to sit at the back and not join in. I expect Pauline’s is a . . . well, a joining-in sort of church, isn’t it?’

  ‘What do you want to go for if you don’t join in? What’s the point of that?’

  ‘I just want to listen.’

  ‘I’m sure we can listen at Pauline’s church.’

  It’s the lack of conviction I want, of course. I was hoping for a mild, doubtful liberal, possibly a youngish woman, who would give a sermon about, say, asylum seekers and economic migrants, or maybe the National Lottery and greed, and then apologize for bringing up the subject of God. And somehow in the process I would be forgiven my imperfections, permitted not to like Hope and Barmy Brian, made to understand that just because I wasn’t good, it didn’t mean I was bad. That sort of thing. And maybe that’s exactly what Pauline’s church is like – how would I know? I am, however, presuming that it isn’t. I am presuming that at Pauline’s church there is no doubt, simply joyful and committed worship, and I am presuming that because it is easier to stereotype racially than it is to find out the truth. So there we have it. I get up in the morning determined to do something approximating to the right thing, and within two hours find something else to feel guilty about.

  ‘They go to a different sort of church, don’t they, Mum?’ says Tom.

  ‘Who are “they”?’ I ask sharply. If I’m going down, I’m going to take them with me.

  ‘Pauline’s family,’ says Tom, puzzled.

  ‘Oh. I thought you were being . . . Never mind.’

  Because, of course, it wasn’t him that was being anything. It was me. As usual.

  Eventually I manage to convince Molly that we are Church of England, although this line of argument is not without its horrifying moments either, and the two of us cruise the neighbourhood in the car, looking for the right church putting on the right show at the right time. We strike it lucky almost immediately: Molly spots a few ancient parishioners hobbling into St Stephen’s, a couple of streets away, and we park the car right outside. (If you are the kind of person whose choice of entertainment is governed by ease of parking, then I thoroughly recommend Anglican Sunday services. You can arrive at five to ten for a ten o’clock service, and you’re away by two minutes past eleven. Anyone who’s had to wait for an hour in the Wembley car park after a Spice Girls concert may find this attractive.)

  It has everything I want. The vicar is indeed a kindly middle-aged lady who seems vaguely ashamed of her beliefs; the sparsity of the congregation, and its apparent lack of interest in anything or anyone, allows us to sit towards the back and pretend that we’re nothing to do with anything or anybody. Molly is of course the youngest person in the pews on this side of the church, but I am probably the second youngest, by ten or fifteen years, although with a couple of them it’s hard to tell: time has not, it is fair to say, been kind to some of these people. God knows what is cause and what is effect here.

  We sing a hymn, ‘Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken’ – an easy one, easy-peasy, clearly remembered from school assemblies and assorted weddings, and both Molly and I join in with both energy and expertise, even if we do say so ourselves; and then there is a reading, and then there are notices. They’re having a bring-and-buy sale. The reason there is no choir this week is that it has been invited to join forces with another choir to do something else somewhere else . . . I start to drift off. I have never been to an ordinary church service before. I have been to weddings, funerals, christenings, carol services and even harvest festivals, but I have never been to a bog-standard, nobody-there Sunday service.

  It all feels a long way from God – no nearer than the bring-and-buy sale would be, and much further away than I imagine Molly’s friend Pauline is at this precise moment. It feels sad, exhausted, defeated; this may have been God’s house once, you want to tell the handful of people here, but He’s clearly moved, shut up shop, gone to a place where there’s more of a demand for that sort of thing. And then you look around and wonder whether the sadness isn’t part of the point: those who are able to drag themselves here once a week are clearly not social church-goers, because there is nothing social happening here. This isn’t a place to see and be seen, unless opera glasses are placed on the backs of the pews. You’d have to walk twenty yards to shake somebody’s hand. No, these people are the hardcore, the last WASPs in Holloway, the beaten and the lonely and the bereaved, and if there is a place for them in the Kingdom of Heaven, they deserve it. I just hope that it’s warmer there than here, and there is more hope, and youth, and there is no need for bring-and-buy sales, and the choir of angels isn’t singing elsewhere that day, but you rather fear it might be; C of E heaven is in all probability a quarter-full of unhappy old ladies selling misshapen rock cakes and scratched Mantovani records. Every day of the week, for all eternity. And what about the nice lady reading the notices to us? Is she ever dispirited by her hobbling, careworn flock? I thought that I could detect a touch of weariness, maybe even despair, during the appeal for flower-arrangers, but maybe this is because flower-arranging is not her thing.

  Sermons, however, clearly are her thing – electrifyingly, embarrassingly, hilariously so. She takes a deep breath, fixes us with a stare, and then shouts ‘1–2–3–4 GET WITH THE WICKED!’, and we shrink back into our pews, afraid and confused – all of us apart from Molly, who recognizes the reference. ‘1–2–3–4 Get With the Wicked’ is her favourite song in the charts at the moment – she bought it last Saturday afternoon with her pocket money, in Holloway Road, and she spent the afternoon dancing to it. The rest of the congregation, however, the varicose women and emphysemic men who constitute the nice lady’s flock . . . I would wager that none of them have, as yet, bought the CD, so they do not know why the nice lady is shouting these things at them, and those who are physically capable of doing so stare hard at their shoes.

  The nice lady pauses and smiles. ‘Is that what Jesus wanted, for us to “get with the wicked”?’ she asks. ‘I think it is.’ She points at us, suddenly and theatrically, as if she had a microphone in the other hand. ‘Think about it.’ Her invitation is welcome, because it means that we can continue to look at our shoes for a while longer as we struggle to tease out all the theological implications of the lyric. Who on earth does she think she is talking to? I can only presume she is literally looking at a different audience, that she has entered a parallel universe full of young, trendy Christians who wouldn’t miss her sermons for the world and whoop with joy at each reference she makes to their culture. I want to run up to the pulpit and shake her.

  ‘Think about it,’ she says again. ‘Mary Magdalene. Judas Iscariot. Zaccheus the tax collector. The woman at the well. One, two, three, four! That was Jesus getting with the wicked!’ Suddenly, though, she switches her line of thought, and, with a grinding change of gears that would make even the most hopeless learner driver wince, she wonders whether God wants us to get with the good as much as He wants us to get with the wicked. She suspects not. She suspects that He wants us merely to be ourselves, and that if we spend all our time being falsely pious, then He won’t be able to get to know us, which is what He wants to do.

  Suddenly she starts singing ‘Getting to Know You’ from The King and I. I am blushing now. I can feel the blood pumping through every vein in my face and neck, and for the first time I wonder whether the nice lady is actually demented. It is only fair to point out, however, that not everyone is as agonized as I am by the performance. Some of us are waggling our heads and smiling, and it is clear that The King and I is closer to our collective heart than ‘Get With the Wicked’.

  ‘This is a good church, isn’t it, Mum?’ Molly whispers, and I nod with as much enthusiasm as I can access.

  ‘Is this the one we’ll be coming to every week?’

  I shrug. Who knows? It is not easy to see how I might become a committed Christian through listening to a madwoman singing
selections from musicals at me, but then again, I never really anticipated sharing my house with men called names like GoodNews and Monkey.

  ‘I know that song is from The King and I,’ says the nice lady, ‘but it could have been written about God. He wants to get to know you. And that’s why He is not interested in you being artificially good, because that prevents Him from discovering you.’

  Ha. This is more like it. ‘Artificially good’. I like that phrase, and I will throw it in somebody’s face at the first available opportunity. This is why I have moved out: because of the artificiality of David’s behaviour, which prevents God from knowing him. In fact, David may well end up going to hell, paradoxically and ironically, because God will not have a clue who he really is. I am coming round to the Christian viewpoint. The nice lady is arguing that doing nothing – and anyway, I don’t do nothing, because I am a doctor, a good person, but my goodness is organic and natural, rather than artificial – is better, more holy, than doing something. I decide, on the spot, to let God into my heart, in the hope that my new-found faith can somehow be used as a vicious weapon in the marital war. It is true that not everyone discovers the Lord in this way; some would argue that it is distinctly unChristian, in fact, to become a convert in the hope that it might really upset somebody. But God, famously, moves in mysterious ways.

  The sermon is followed by a reading that I find so pertinent that it is all I can do to stop myself leaping out of my pew and punching the air. The reading is given by one of the very few men in the congregation with the puff to get up the steps to the pulpit; when he has recovered from his exertions, he launches in to one of St Paul’s Letters to the Corinthians. It’s famous, this reading, and I’ve heard it many times before (how? where?), and because I think I know it, I drift off. The word ‘charity’ reels me back in. ‘ “Charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up”,’ the man with puff says. Hurrah for St Paul! Right on! Vaunting and puffing! Puffing and vaunting! You want any of that, you should come round to Webster Road, which has become a Puffers and Vaunters Social Club! Why have I never heard this stuff properly before?