How to Be Good (13 page)

‘That's a big question, Katie,' says GoodNews. ‘And I don't know if you're ready for the big answer.'

‘You are, aren't you, Mum?' says Tom, loyally.

‘Anyway,' says David. ‘GoodNews would like the bed taken out of the spare room. Because there isn't really room for him to sleep on the floor if it stays there.'

‘Right. And where shall we put it?'

‘I'll put it in my office,' says David.

‘Can I take my bed out?' Molly asks. ‘I don't like it.'

‘What's wrong with your bed?' I address this to David rather than Molly, just so that he can see what a mess of the world his friend is making.

‘I don't agree with it,' says Molly.

‘What, precisely, don't you agree with?'

‘I just don't. They're wrong.'

‘When you have your own flat, you can sleep on nails for all I care. While you're here, you'll sleep in a bed.'

‘I'm sorry,' says GoodNews. ‘I'm causing trouble, aren't I? Please, forget it. It's cool.'

‘Are you sure?' David says.

‘No, really. I can cope on a bed.' There is a pause, and he looks at David, who has clearly become GoodNews's representative on Earth.

‘The other thing that GoodNews was – well, we both were – worried about was where he's going to heal people.'

‘He was intending to heal them here?'

‘Yes. Where else?'

‘I thought he was only here for a couple of nights.'

‘Probably he will be. But he needs to work. And he has commitments to people. So, you know. If it does turn out to be a bit longer than a couple of days . . .'

‘The spare bedroom's no good?'

David looks at him, and he shrugs.

‘Not ideal,' says GoodNews. ‘Because of the bed. But if there's nothing else . . .'

‘Funnily enough, we've got an empty healing room that we never use.'

‘I'm afraid sarcasm is one of Katie's indulgences,' David says.

‘I've got loads of others, though. Millions of them.' And I suddenly remember that one of my most recent indulgences recently visited our home, and David was incredibly nice about it, and I feel bad. ‘Sorry. Maybe your bedroom is the best place for now.'

‘Fine. I can do good work there. It has a nice atmosphere, you know?'

‘And the last thing is, GoodNews is a vegetarian.'

‘Fine.'

‘A vegan, actually.'

‘Good. Very sensible. Much better for you. Is that it?'

‘I think so. For the time being.'

‘Enjoy your stay,' I tell GoodNews, who is sure that he will be very happy here. For my part, I am sure that he will never ever leave.

 

David cooks chicken pieces for us and vegetables for everyone while he and GoodNews talk in the kitchen, and then we have our first meal together. The main topic of conversation is GoodNews: GoodNews and the turtles (what they see, it transpires, is not really explicable in, like, words), GoodNews and how things really are (‘Bad, man. But there's hope, you know? Once you know where to find it') GoodNews and his healing hands: Molly wants him to warm them up there and then, on the spot, but David tells her that it's not a party trick.

‘Have you always been able to do it? Could you do it when you were my age?'

‘No. I couldn't do it till I was, like, twenty-five?'

‘How old are you now?'

‘Thirty-two.'

‘So how did you know you could do it, then?' This from Tom, who has remained oblivious to the GoodNews charm.

‘My girlfriend at the time – she had a cricked neck and she asked me to give her a massage and . . . everything went all weird.'

‘What sort of weird?'

‘Weird weird. The lightbulbs got brighter, the room got hot. It was a real scene.'

‘And how do you think your gift came about?' There is, I am pleased to note, less vinegar in my voice. I'm learning. I'm still not a very good white wine, but I'm drinkable – you could put me in a punch, anyway.

‘I know, but I can't tell you in front of the kids. Bad form.'

I have no idea what this means, but if GoodNews thinks that the story of how he became a healer is unsuitable for minors, I am not prepared to argue with him, even if the minors are.

‘Oh, go on,' Tom says.

‘No,' says GoodNews. ‘I mean it. Ask me another question.'

‘What was your girlfriend's name?' Molly asks.

‘That's a stupid question,' Tom snorts. ‘Who wants to know that? Idiot.'

‘Hey, Tom, man. If that information is important to someone, then who are we to judge?' says GoodNews. ‘There might be all sorts of reasons why Molly wanted to know what my girlfriend's name was. Probably some pretty good reasons, if I know Molly. So let's not be calling people idiots, eh? She was called Andrea, Molly.'

Molly nods smugly, Tom's face becomes a picture of smouldering hate – the kind of picture that a newspaper could use to illustrate an article on ethnic division in the former Yugoslavia – and I know that DJ GoodNews has made himself an enemy.

For the rest of the meal, we manage to avoid flashpoints; GoodNews asks politely about our jobs and our schools and our maths teachers, and we all answer politely (if, in some cases, tersely), and we pass the time in this way until the last mouthful has been eaten and it is time to clear away.

‘I'll wash up,' says GoodNews.

‘We have a dishwasher,' I tell him, and GoodNews looks anxiously at David. It is not difficult to anticipate what is coming, and so I do.

‘You don't hold with dishwashers,' I say, with a weariness exaggerated to convey the idea that GoodNews's various antipathies might at some point become grating.

‘No,' says GoodNews.

‘You don't hold with a lot of things that a lot of people don't have a problem with,' I observe.

‘No,' he agrees. ‘But just because a lot of people don't have a problem with something, it doesn't mean they're right, does it? I mean, a lot of people used to think that . . . I don't know . . . slavery was OK, but, you know. They were wrong, weren't they? They were so wrong it was unreal. Because it wasn't OK, was it? It was really bad, man. Slaves. No way.'

‘Do you think that slavery and dishwashers are the same thing, GoodNews? Or not quite the same, really?'

‘Maybe to me they're the same thing.'

‘Maybe to you all sorts of things are the same thing. Maybe paedophilia is the same thing as . . . as . . . soap. Maybe fascism is the same thing as toilets. But that doesn't mean I'm going to make my children pee in the garden, just because your peculiar moral code would prefer it.'
Maybe fascism is the same thing as toilets
 . . . I really said that, just now. This is the world I suddenly inhabit, a world where this might pass for a coherent line of argument.

‘You're being silly. And sarcastic,' David says.

Sarcasm – my terrible indulgence. ‘Oh, so it's me being silly, is it? Not the man who won't sleep on a bed because it's not, like, real?' I feel bad. I should be able to handle the slavery versus dishwashers argument without recourse to childish insult.

‘I try to survive without things that not everybody has,' says GoodNews. ‘I'm not joining in until everyone's got everything. When, like, the last peasant in the Brazilian rainforest has a dishwasher, or a, you know, like, a cappuccino maker, or one of those TVs that's the size of a house, then count me in, yeah? But until then, I'm making a stand.'

‘That's very noble of you,' I say.
Nutter
, I think, with an enormous sense of relief. There is, after all, nothing to learn from this person, no way he can make me feel small or wrong or ignoble or
self-indulgent: he is simply a crank, and I can ignore him with impunity.

‘Everybody in the world's got a dishwasher,' Molly says, clearly puzzled, and all the times I feel I have failed as a mother are as nothing compared to this one, humiliating moment.

‘That's not true, Molly,' I say quickly and sharply. ‘And you know it.'

‘Who hasn't, then?' She's not being cheeky. She just can't think of anyone.

‘Don't be silly,' I say, but I'm just buying myself time while I dredge up someone in her universe who does their own washing-up. ‘What about Danny and Charlotte?' Danny and Charlotte go to Molly's school and live in a council flat down the road, and even as I speak I realize I am guilty of the most ludicrous form of class stereotyping.

‘They've got everything,' says Molly.

‘They've got DVD and OnDigital,' says Tom.

‘OK, OK. What about the children Daddy gave Tom's computer to?'

‘They don't count,' says Molly. ‘They've got nothing. They haven't even got homes. And I don't know any of them. I wouldn't want to know them, thank you very much, because they sound a bit too rough for my liking. Even though I feel sorry for them and I'm happy they've got Tom's computer.'

This is my daughter?

The moral education of my children has always been important to me. I have talked to them about the Health Service, and about the importance of Nelson Mandela; we've discussed the homeless, of course, and racism, and sexism, and poverty, and money, and fairness. David and I have explained, as best we can, why anyone who votes Conservative will never be entirely welcome in our house, although we have to make special arrangements for Granny and Grandpa. And though I was sickened by Molly's unctuous performance during the computer and lasagne episodes, there was a part of me that thought, yes, she's coming along, she gets it, all those conversations and questions have not been in vain. Now I see that she's a stinking patrician Lady Bountiful who in twenty
years' time will be sitting on the committee of some revolting charity ball in Warwickshire, moaning about refugees and giving her unwanted pashminas to her cleaning lady.

‘You see,' says GoodNews. ‘This is why I don't want to play the game. The possessions game. Because I think people become lazy and spoiled and uncaring.'

I look at my lazy and uncaring and spoiled daughter, and then I tell GoodNews that my children would love to help him with the dishes.

I have about twelve hundred patients. There are some patients that I see a lot, and some I hardly see at all, and there are some I can help, and some I can't, and the patients that distress me the most are the ones I see a lot who I can't help. We call them heartsink patients, for obvious reasons, and someone once reckoned that most partners in a practice have about fifty heartsinks on their books. They come in, and sit down, and they look at me, and both of us know it's hopeless, and I feel guilty and sad and fraudulent, and, if the truth be told, a little persecuted. These people don't see anyone else who can't help them, who fail them on such a regular basis. The TV repairman who can't fix your picture, the plumber who can't stop a leak, the electrician who can't get your lights back on . . . Your relationship with these people ceases, after a while, because they cannot do anything for you. But my relationship with my heartsinks will never cease. They will sit and stare accusingly at me for ever.

I know and, I hope, Mrs Cortenza knows that I cannot do anything for her. Her joints hurt, her back hurts, she cannot sleep with the pain, and the painkillers no longer seem to do anything for her, and she comes back again and again and we talk and talk and I think and think and come up with nothing that works (and in the process I spend and spend and spend, on drugs and X-rays and exploratory operations), and now I just wish that she would go to see another doctor and leave me alone, leave me to treat people I feel I have a chance with. Hopeful people,
younger
people, because Mrs Cortenza is old, older even than her seventy-three years, and it is her age and a lifetime spent cleaning other people's houses that have damaged her. (Let's face it: these houses belong to people like me, so there is a peculiar circularity in all this. Maybe if we all forgot about being good and saving the world, and stayed at home and cleaned our own houses, then people like Mrs Cortenza
wouldn't need doctors. Maybe Mrs Cortenza, thus liberated from her pain and her domestic drudgery, could have got on with something socially useful. Maybe she would have spent her life teaching adult literacy, or working with teenage runaways, if I hadn't been so hellbent on curing her, and thus never having time to scrub my own floors.)

The morning after GoodNews's arrival Mrs Cortenza shuffles in, grey with age and effort, and slumps into the chair, and shakes her head, and my heart does what it is supposed to do. We are silent for a couple of minutes while she recovers her breath; during this silence she points at the picture of Molly and Tom that I have pinned to the noticeboard, and then points at me, and I smile and nod, and she smiles and makes a thumbs-up sign and a gesture with her hand to indicate how big they are. I am sure that the same thought then seizes both of us: they didn't use to be big when she first started coming to see me. The photo on the noticeboard probably depicted a couple of toddlers, and thus my children serve only to emphasize my uselessness.

‘How are you, Mrs Cortenza?' I say, when the wheezing has subsided sufficiently to make conversation seem feasible. She shakes her head. She is not good.

I look at my notes. ‘How were the pills I gave you last time?' She shakes her head again. They were not good.

‘And are you sleeping?' She is not sleeping. Her sleep is not good. Nothing is good. I look at her for as long as I can without embarrassment, and then stare at my notes intently, as if there might be something in them that will solve not only Mrs Cortenza's problems, but the problems of all the world.

And suddenly I realize that at home I have something which has worked for somebody, and if I am any kind of a doctor then I am compelled to try it. I call David, and ask him to bring GoodNews down to the surgery.

‘You have to pay him,' he says.

‘Out of what? My mystical healing budget?'

‘I don't care. But you're not to take advantage of him.'

‘How about this: he treats Mrs Cortenza, and we don't charge
him for board and lodging. Or for electricity. Or for general inconvenience.'

‘You're not taking him down there every day.'

‘I won't need to bring him down here every day. I am a perfectly competent doctor, you know. I have managed to prescribe the occasional effective antibiotic.' But even as I am saying this, I am making a list of my other recidivists. Just imagine: a working life without Mr Arthurs! Or Mrs McBride! Or Barmy Brian Beech, as we call him here, with no affection whatsoever!

 

GoodNews arrives within fifteen minutes, a quarter-hour which seems as long but no longer than my usual consultations with Mrs Cortenza, but which I am happy to curtail. I get some funny looks from reception, but no vocal objections from anyone.

Mrs Cortenza stares at GoodNews's eyebrow-brooches with naked hostility.

‘Hello, love,' says GoodNews. ‘You're a smasher, aren't you? What's your name?'

She continues to stare.

‘This is Mrs Cortenza.'

‘Not that name. Her proper name. Her first name.'

I don't have a clue, of course. How would I know? I've only been seeing her for five years. I scrabble through my notes.

‘Maria.'

‘Maria,' says GoodNews, and then he says it again, this time in an exaggerated, all-purpose European accent. ‘Marrrrriaaaaa. What are we going to do about Maria, eh? You know that song?
West Side Story
?'

‘That's
The Sound of Music
,' I tell him. ‘The
West Side Story
one is different.' I wonder for a moment whether this will be my only demonstration of expertise throughout the entire consultation.

‘So you've had two songs written about you?' says GoodNews. ‘I'm not surprised. Lovely girl like you.'

Mrs Cortenza smiles shyly. I want to throttle her for being so gullible.

‘So what needs doing here? How can we get Maria dancing again?'

‘She's got chronic inflammation around most of her joints. Hips, knees. A lot of back pain.'

‘Is she sad?'

‘I should think so, with that lot.'

‘No, I mean, like, mentally.'

‘Is she mentally sad? You mean, sad in her mind as opposed to sad in her knees?'

‘Yeah, all right, I'm not as good at talking as you, Dr Smartypants. But let's see which one of us can do something for her.'

‘Why, does she have to be unhappy before you can treat her?'

‘It helps if I can really key into that stuff, yeah.'

‘Are you sad, Mrs Cortenza?' I ask her.

She looks at me. ‘Sad? Sadness?' Neither her hearing nor her English is perfect, and so it is difficult to know which of these difficulties is responsible for the confusion.

‘Yes. Sadness.'

‘Oh, yes,' she says, with the relish only the old can bring to such a subject. ‘Very, very sad.'

‘Why?' says GoodNews.

‘Too many things,' she says. She gestures at her clothes – she has worn black ever since I have known her – and her eyes fill with tears. ‘My husband,' she says. ‘My sister. My mother. My father. Too many things.' One doesn't want to feel unsympathetic, and it is certainly unhelpful to be prescriptive about grief, but one wonders whether Mrs Cortenza should maybe have come to terms with being an orphan by now. ‘My son,' she continues.

‘Your son's dead?'

‘No, no, not dead. Very bad. He move to Archway. He never call me.'

‘Is that enough sadness?' I ask GoodNews. I didn't know we had to key into sadness, and suddenly the idea of GoodNews seeing Barmy Brian is a little less attractive. I would imagine that there is a lot of sadness hidden away somewhere in Barmy Brian, and not all of it would be easy to listen to.

‘That all makes sense,' says GoodNews. ‘I can feel most of that.
Explain to her that I will need to touch her shoulders, neck and head.'

‘I understand,' says Mrs Cortenza, somewhat affronted.

‘Is that OK?' I ask her.

‘OK. Yes.'

GoodNews sits opposite her and closes his eyes for a while; then he gets up, stands behind her and starts to massage her scalp. He whispers while he's doing it, but I can't make out anything he's saying.

‘Very hot!' Mrs Cortenza says suddenly.

‘That's good,' says GoodNews. ‘The hotter the better. Things are happening.'

He's right. Things are happening. Maybe it's just the momentary intensity of the experience, maybe it's just the collective concentration, but it seems to me that the room has become warmer, much warmer, and for a moment it seems to become brighter, too. I don't want to feel this heat, and I don't want to notice how the wattage of the one bulb in the ceiling seems to have increased from its dim forty to a dazzling one hundred; feeling and seeing these things seems akin to feeling and seeing a whole lot of other, more complicated things, and I'd really rather not, if you don't mind. So I shall forget about them, as best I can.

What will prove more difficult to forget is this: after a few minutes of gentle massage and attendant ambient disturbance, Mrs Cortenza stands up, stretches herself gingerly and says to GoodNews, ‘Thank you. Is much better now. Much much better.' And she nods to me – I may be paranoid, but the nod seems quite cool, a way of telling me how negligible her problems were, and how easy to fix if I had any kind of expertise – and walks out at about five times the speed she walked in.

‘So,' I say. ‘You can cure old age. Well done. Hurrah for you. There should be a few quid in that somewhere.'

‘Nah, she's not cured,' says GoodNews. ‘Of course she's not cured. Her body's fucked. But life will be much better for her.' I can see that he's pleased, genuinely pleased – not for himself, but for Mrs Cortenza, and I feel small and petty and hopeless.

*

‘You can tell me now,' I say before he leaves. ‘The children aren't here. What's the secret?'

‘I don't know what the secret is. That wasn't what I couldn't tell you.'

‘So tell me what you couldn't tell me.'

‘Drugs.'

‘What do you mean, drugs? Drugs what?'

‘That's how it started. E. That's what I think, anyway. I was doing loads, and it was all that “I love you, you're my friend” stuff in clubs every Friday night, and . . . I'm like one of those American comic-book guys. Spiderman and all them. It changed my molecular make-up. Gave me superpowers.'

‘Ecstasy gave you superpowers.'

‘I reckon.' He shrugs. ‘Weird, innit? I mean, there's you at university and all that finding out about, like, your thigh-bone's connected to your knee-bone or whatever you do there. And there's me down the clubs dropping a few. And we've come out at the same place. I mean, don't get me wrong, I still think there's a place for what you do.'

‘Thank you. That's very generous of you.'

‘No, no problem. I'll see you back at the ranch.'

 

Later, I sit watching Molly in the bath, looking for and failing to find any traces of her eczema.

‘Molly. Do you remember when you went to see GoodNews?'

‘Yes. Course.'

‘Do you remember what he said to you? Did he ask you anything?'

‘Like what?'

‘I don't know. Did he ask you how you were feeling?'

‘Ummmm. Oh, yes. He asked me if I was feeling sad.'

‘And what did you say?'

‘I said I felt a bit sad sometimes.'

‘What about?'

‘I'm sad about Grandma Parrot.' David's mother, who died last year, so-called because she had a stone parrot on her gatepost.

‘Yes. That was sad.'

‘And Poppy.' Family cat, killed shortly after Grandma Parrot. Molly's proximity to these deaths was much closer than we would have wanted, in an ideal world. Grandma Parrot collapsed when she was visiting us, and although she didn't actually die until later that night, in hospital, it was clear that she wasn't well when she was taken away; and – foolishly, in retrospect – we organized a search party for the missing Poppy. Molly and I found her up (and in, and all over) the road. I wish she had seen neither casualty.

‘That was sad, too.'

‘And your baby.'

‘My baby?'

‘The baby that died.'

‘Oh. That baby.'

I had a miscarriage, eighteen months or so before I had Tom. A run-of-the-mill, ten-week, first-baby miscarriage, distressing at the time, almost completely forgotten about now; I cannot for the life of me recall telling Molly about it, but clearly I must have done, and she has remembered and mourned, in her own way.

‘Did that make you sad?'

‘Yes. Of course. That was my brother or sister.'

‘Well, kind of.' I want to tell her that it's OK really without getting into some huge thing about souls and foetuses and all sorts of other areas that eight-year-olds should be spared for as long as possible. I change the subject. ‘Anything else?'