How to Be Good

by Nick Hornby

  I attempt to think about all this, and how it can best be used for maximum damage, by gazing across the church and into what I hope is a holy space, but I end up simply staring at someone I hadn’t noticed before: a man of around my age, with my nose and my complexion, wearing my husband’s old leather jacket. I am looking at my brother. My brother!

  My first reaction – and this says something about the state of contemporary Anglicanism, and also why I suspect my new-found enthusiasm for the Church is likely to be short-lived – is to feel terribly sad for him; I really hadn’t known things were this desperate. I watch him for a while, and manage to convince myself that the desperation is etched on his face. He clearly isn’t listening to a word that the nice lady is saying, and at one stage he emits a sigh and props his head up on his fist. I nudge Molly and point, and after she has spent an abortive couple of minutes failing to attract his attention, she crosses the church and joins him. He does a double-take, kisses her, then looks round and locates me, and we exchange baffled smiles.

  The nice mad lady is giving communion now, and the congregation gets shakily to its collective feet and begins to shuffle forward. The commotion, or what passes for a commotion here, allows me to scoop up the members of my family scattered around the church and lead them out.

  ‘Hello.’ When we get outside I kiss Mark on the cheek and look at him quizzically.

  ‘It’s like bumping into someone in a brothel, isn’t it?’ he says.

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yeah. I mean, I’m mortified that you’ve caught me. But then, you shouldn’t really be here either, should you?’

  ‘I’ve got a child.’

  ‘That’s an excuse for going to Toy Story2, not church.’

  ‘We’re going every week,’ says Molly. ‘It was great, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Well, Uncle Mark can take you next week. Do you want to come back for coffee?’

  ‘Yeah. Thanks.’

  Mark and I walk to the car – thirty seconds, it takes us! – in silence, listening to Molly rapping ‘1–2–3–4 Get With the Wicked’ and skipping along to the rhythm in her head. Neither Mark nor I are amused or delighted by her display, even though she is being relatively amusing and delightful, if you like that sort of thing; and I remember that when I was pregnant with Tom, I used to watch other parents reacting with either blankness or irritation to their children’s childishness and wondering whether I would ever be able to take it for granted like that. I couldn’t imagine it. The heady preparation of hope and hormones that courses through you during pregnancy had kidded me into believing I would always, always want to cry whenever my unborn child did anything joyful. But it just gets beaten out of you – not by the kids, but by life. You want to cry, but you’re too busy trying not to cry about something else, and this morning I’m trying not to cry about the state of my brother.

  Mark looks old, much older than I remember him looking: sadness has gouged some extra lines around his eyes and mouth, and there is some grey in his Sunday-morning stubble. He’s usually clean-shaven, so allowing the grey to poke out like that seems significant somehow – not so much as if he’s accepted the ageing process with dignity, but more that he has given up, that there’s no point in reaching for the shaving foam because shaving is the first move of a game he’s lost too many times already. Maybe I’m being silly and melodramatic, and maybe if I’d caught him coming out of a nightclub (or a brothel) looking like this the stubble and the weariness would prompt an entirely different interpretation, but I haven’t caught him coming out of a nightclub. I’ve caught him coming out of a church, and I know him well enough to presume that this is not a good sign.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Was that a one-off?’

  ‘A two-off.’

  ‘Twice in a row? Or twice ever?’

  ‘In a row.’

  ‘And how’s it going?’

  ‘You were there. I mean, she’s, you know . . . She’s one wafer short of a communion, isn’t she?’

  ‘So why go back? Why not go to a different one?’

  ‘I’m afraid that if I go to a good one I’ll get sucked in. No chance of that there.’

  ‘That’s the logic of a depressive.’

  ‘Well. Yeah. It would be, wouldn’t it?’

  I park outside the house and we go inside. GoodNews and David are at the kitchen table hunched over a piece of paper.

  ‘This is my brother Mark. I bumped into him in church. Mark, this is DJ GoodNews.’

  They shake hands, and GoodNews gives Mark a long, quizzical stare that clearly unnerves him.

  ‘Can you both shove off now?’ I say. ‘Mark and I want to talk privately.’ David shoots me a loving, wounded look, but they gather their stuff together and go.

  ‘Can I listen?’ says Molly.

  ‘No. Bye.’

  ‘That bloke was at the party,’ Mark says. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘GoodNews? My husband’s spiritual healer. He lives with us now. With them, anyway. I live in a bedsit round the corner. Not that the kids know.’

  ‘Oh. Right. So. Anything else happening?’

  ‘That’s about it.’

  I tell him about the last few weeks with as much economy as he permits, and while I am talking it strikes me that if anyone needed the sadness drawing out of him it is Mark.

  ‘How about you?’

  ‘Oh, you know.’ He shrugs.

  ‘What do I know?’

  ‘I’ve been to church twice in the last fortnight. That sort of sums it up.’

  He doesn’t mean that this is the sum total of his activity; he means that he has reached the end of his tether. Mark takes drugs, goes to see bands, swears a lot, hates Conservatives, has periods of promiscuity. If, on meeting him for the first time, you were asked to name one thing that he didn’t do, you would almost certainly choose churchgoing.

  ‘How did it start?’

  ‘I was driving to see you. I was feeling low, and I thought the kids would cheer me up, and it was Sunday morning, and . . . I dunno. I just saw the church, and it was the right time, and I went in. What about you?’

  ‘I wanted to be forgiven.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For all the shitty things I do,’ I say.

  Mark only just made my guilt-list, and when I look at him now that seems almost laughably complacent. He’s a very unhappy man, maybe even suicidal, and I didn’t have a clue. All the lonely people . . . At least we know where they come from: Surrey. That’s where Mark and I come from, anyway.

  ‘You don’t do anything shitty.’

  ‘Thank you. But I’m human. That’s how humans spend their time, doing shitty things.’

  ‘Fucking hell. Glad I came here.’

  I give him a cup of coffee, and he lights a cigarette – he gave up ten years ago – and I look for Monkey’s saucer ashtray while he tells me about his hopeless job, and his hopeless love life, and all the stupid mistakes he’s made, and how he has started to hate everyone and everything, including his nearest and dearest, which is how come he has ended up listening to a woman singing lines from The King and I at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning.

  GoodNews has picked it all up already, of course. We sit down to a hastily assembled ploughman’s lunch, and without invitation he wades into the stagnant, foul-smelling pond that is Mark’s life.

  ‘I’m sorry if you think I’m being a bit, you know,’ he begins. ‘But when we shook hands . . . Man, you nearly took my arm off.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Mark, apologetic but understandably surprised: I saw the whole incident, and it seemed like a pretty straightforward handshake to me; at no stage did it look as though anyone would end up with a permanent disability. ‘Did I hurt you?’

  ‘In here you hurt me.’ GoodNews taps his heart. ‘Because it hurts when I know fellow human beings are in trouble. And if ever a hand was shouting for help it was yours.’

  Mark cannot help it: he has a quick look, back an
d front, to see if there is any evidence of this manual distress.

  ‘Nah, you won’t see anything there. It’s not a, like a visible thing. I mean, I feel it physically. Ow. You know?’ And he winces and massages his hand, to demonstrate the pain that Mark so recently caused him. ‘But sadness is a right sod for keeping itself hidden away. A right sod. Gotta come out sometime, though, and it’s pouring out of you.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Mark.

  The children munch on relentlessly. It depresses me that they are so accustomed to conversations of this kind that they cannot even be bothered to gape.

  ‘I’m sure Mark would rather talk about something else,’ I say hopefully.

  ‘Perhaps he would,’ says GoodNews. ‘But I’m not sure it’d be a good idea. Do you know what you’re sad about, Mark?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘As far as I can tell, it’s mostly in the area of relationships and work,’ says GoodNews, apparently uninterested in anything Mark has to say. ‘And it’s starting to get serious.’

  ‘How serious?’ says David, concerned.

  ‘You know,’ says GoodNews, nodding meaningfully at the children.

  ‘There’s not much point in Mark being here, is there?’ I say. ‘Why don’t you two sort it out between you?’

  ‘Oh, we can’t do that,’ says GoodNews. ‘In the end, Mark knows more about how unhappy he is than either of us.’

  ‘Really?’ I use a sarcastic tone of voice, and make a sarcastic face, and I even attempt a sarcastic posture, but it’s no use.

  ‘Oh, sure. I only get the vaguest sense of the causes.’

  ‘I’d say work and relationships just about covered it,’ Mark says.

  ‘Do you want to do anything about it?’ David asks him.

  ‘Well, yeah, I wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘GoodNews rubs it out of you,’ Molly says matter-of-factly. ‘His hands go all hot and then you’re not sad any more. I’m not sad about Grandma Parrot, or Poppy, or Mummy’s baby that died.’

  Mark nearly chokes. ‘Jesus, Katie . . .’

  ‘You should try it, Uncle Mark. It’s great.’

  ‘Can I have some more ham, Mum?’ says Tom.

  ‘We could really do a lot for you, Mark,’ says David. ‘You could leave a lot of things behind you here today if you wanted to.’

  Mark pushes his chair back and stands up.

  ‘I’m not listening to this shit,’ he says, and walks out.

  Getting married and having a family is like emigrating. I used to live in the same country as my brother, I used to share his values and his tastes and his attitudes, and then I moved away. And even though I didn’t notice it happening, I started to speak with a different accent, and think differently, and even though I remembered my native land fondly, all traces of it had gone from me. Now, though, I want to go home. I can see that I made a big mistake, that the new world isn’t all it was cracked up to be, and the people there are much saner and wiser than the people who live in my adopted nation. I want him to take me back with him. We could go home to Mum and Dad’s. We’d both be happier there. He wasn’t suicidal when he was there, and I wasn’t careworn and guilty. It would be great. We’d fight about what television programmes to watch, probably, but apart from that . . . And we wouldn’t make the same mistakes as before. We wouldn’t decide that we wanted to get older and live lives of our own. We tried that, and it didn’t work.

  I follow him out, and we go and sit in the car for a while.

  ‘You can’t carry on like that,’ he says.

  I shrug.

  ‘It’s not impossible. What’ll happen to me if I do?’

  ‘You’ll crack up. You won’t be able to bring the kids up. You won’t be able to work.’

  ‘Maybe that’s just because I’m pathetic. My husband’s got a new hobby and he’s invited a friend to stay. And OK, the hobby is redeeming souls, but . . . You know, I should be able to cope with that.’

  ‘They’re mad.’

  ‘They’ve done some pretty amazing things. They got the whole street to take in homeless kids.’

  ‘Yeah, but . . .’ Mark goes quiet. He can’t think of anything to say. It’s always ‘Yeah, but . . .’ and then nothing when the homeless are brought into it.

  ‘And, anyway, what kind of advertisement are you for the other side? Christ. You’re thirty-eight years old, you don’t have a full-time job, you’re depressed and lonely, and you’ve started going to church because you’ve run out of ideas.’

  ‘I’m not the other side. I’m just . . . normal.’

  I laugh.

  ‘Yeah. Normal. That’s right. Suicidal and hopeless. The thing is, they’re all mad in there. But I’ve never seen David so happy.’

  Later that night, when I’m back cocooned in my bedsit, I read the arts pages of the newspaper, like the rounded adult I am desperately trying to become, and in a book review someone talks about how Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell led a ‘rich, beautiful life’. I follow the phrase right the way up a blind alley. What can it possibly mean? How can one live a rich and beautiful life in Holloway? With David? And GoodNews? And Tom and Molly, and Mrs Cortenza? With twelve hundred patients, and a working day that lasts until seven o’clock in the evening some nights? If we don’t live rich, beautiful lives, does it mean we’ve screwed up? Is it our fault? And when David dies, will someone say that he too lived a rich, beautiful life? Is that the life I want to stop him from leading?

  Molly gets the birthday party she wants: the four of us and Hope go swimming, and then we go for hamburgers, and then we go to the cinema to see Chicken Run, which Hope doesn’t really understand. After a little while Molly decides that Hope is to all intents and purposes blind, and begins a running commentary for her benefit, which eventually provokes an irritated complaint from the row behind us.

  ‘Oi. Shut it.’

  ‘She’s not very clever,’ Molly retorts, in aggrieved self-defence. ‘And it’s my birthday, and I invited her to my party because she hasn’t got any friends and I felt sorry for her, and I want her to enjoy it, and she can’t if she doesn’t know what’s happening.’

  There is an appalled silence – or what I imagine, in my shame, to be an appalled silence – and then the sound of someone making an exaggerated vomiting noise.

  ‘Why did that man pretend to be sick?’ Molly asks when we have dropped Hope off at her house.

  ‘Because you made him sick,’ Tom says.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’re disgusting.’

  ‘That’s enough, Tom,’ says David.

  ‘She is, though. So goody-goody.’

  ‘And you don’t like her being good?’

  ‘No. She’s just doing it to show off.’

  ‘How do you know? And anyway, what difference does it make? The point is that Hope had a nice time for a change. And if that’s because Molly was showing off, that’s fine.’

  And Tom is silenced, like everyone is silenced, by the unanswerable righteousness of David’s logic.

  ‘ “Charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up”,’ I say.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You heard me. You two are puffing and vaunting at every available opportunity.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Tom darkly. He doesn’t know what I’m talking about, but he can recognize an aggressive tone when he hears one.

  ‘Where do you get all that stuff?’ David asks. ‘Where does it come from, the puffing and the vaunting?’

  ‘The Bible. St Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 13. They read it out in church on Sunday.’

  ‘The one we had at our wedding?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Corinthians, Chapter 13. Your brother read it.’

  ‘Mark didn’t read anything about charity. It was all about love. That corny one that everyone has.’ Please forgive me, St Paul, because I don’t think it’s corny; I think, and have always thought, that it’s beautiful, even if everyone else does, too, and the reading w
as my choice.

  ‘I don’t know. All I know is that Corinthians, Chapter 13 is what we had at our wedding.’

  ‘OK, so I got the number wrong. But the one they read in church on Sunday was all about charity, and how true charity is not puffed up, and I thought of you and your puffed-up friend.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It’s a pleasure.’

  We drive on in silence, but then David suddenly thumps the steering-wheel.

  ‘It’s the same thing,’ he says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Love is not boastful, nor proud. It vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up. See? What Mark read was translated.’

  ‘Not love. Charity.’

  ‘They’re the same word. I remember this now. Caritas. It’s Latin or Greek or something, and sometimes it’s translated as “charity” and sometimes it’s translated as “love”.’

  That is why the reading seemed strangely familiar, then: because my own brother read it at my own wedding, and it is one of my own favourite pieces of writing. For some reason I feel dizzy and nauseous, as if I have done something terrible. Love and charity share the same root word . . . How is that possible, when everything in our recent history suggests that they cannot coexist, that they are antithetical, that if you put the two of them together in a sack they would bite and scratch and scream, until one of them is torn apart?

  ‘ “And though I have the faith to move mountains, without love I am nothing at all”. That one.’

  ‘We’ve got that song,’ says Molly.

  ‘It’s not a song, idiot,’ says Tom. ‘It’s the Bible.’

  ‘Lauryn Hill sings it. On that CD Daddy bought ages ago. I’ve been playing it in my room. The last song, she sings that.’ And Molly gives us a pretty, if occasionally off-key, rendition of St Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 13.