How to Be Good (18 page)

‘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.

‘When our invitation dropped through your letterbox, you probably thought to yourself, “What's the catch? Why is this guy who I don't know from Adam inviting us to a party?” '

‘I'm only here for the beer,' shouts Mike.

‘Well, it is Double Diamond,' shouts somebody else.

‘No it isn't,' Mike shouts back. The two shouters are convulsed for what seems like several minutes.

‘I'd love to tell you that there isn't a catch, but there is. A big catch. Because tonight I'm going to ask you to change people's lives, and maybe change your own life, too.'

‘Backs to the wall!' shouts Mike. You don't have to be a psychoanalyst to worry about someone who thinks that changing one's own life probably has something to do with homosexuality.

‘How many of you have got a spare bedroom?' David asks.

‘Yes, thank you,' Mike shouts. ‘It's where I sleep when the missus won't have me in with her.'

‘So that's one,' says David. ‘Any more?'

Most people choose to examine either their wine glasses or their feet.

‘Don't be shy,' David says. ‘I'm not going to ask you to do anything you don't want to do. All I know is that this street is full of three-storey houses, and there must be quite a few empty rooms somewhere, because you haven't all got two-point-four children.'

‘What about if you live in a flat?' asks a young guy in a leather jacket.

‘Is it a one-bedroom flat?'

‘Yes.'

‘Well, you haven't got a spare bedroom.'

‘Can I go home, then?'

‘You can go home any time you want. This is a party, not a detention centre.'

‘Could have fooled me,' shouts Mike. His partner in comedy, the man who made the Double Diamond witticism, has come to stand by him, and offers him his hand for a high-five.

‘I'm sorry to hear you're not enjoying yourself.' For a moment I think I catch a glimpse of the old David, visible like old paint through the new undercoat: there's a sarcasm in there that only I would be able to hear. The old taste for verbal confrontation is peeking out, too, because he doesn't say anything else: he's waiting for Mike's follow-up, his next crack, and Mike hasn't got one, because in the end he's merely a bit of a twit, someone who would shout out daft things at any sort of gathering with alcohol, be it a wedding or a christening or a save-the-world party such as this, and
he wants to push things so far but no further, and now David is calling his bluff.

‘Aren't you having a very nice time?'

‘No, you're all right,' says Mike, deflated.

‘Because
Eastenders
probably starts in a minute.' And that gets a laugh – not a huge one, but bigger than anything Mike has managed so far.

‘I don't watch
Eastenders
,' says Mike. ‘I don't watch any soaps, actually.' This gets the biggest laugh so far, but they're laughing at him, at the banality of the riposte, and the laughter clearly stings him a little bit.

‘So you're staying?'

‘I'll finish my drink, anyway.'

‘Glad to hear it.'

Another chuckle, and now they're on his side. David has put down a heckler, and I feel obscurely, perhaps nostalgically proud. Now I come to think of it, heckler downputting would have been the perfect job for the old David. He had just the right combination of belligerence and quickwittedness. He'd have made a terrible stand-up, because he mumbles quite a lot, and loses the thread, in an unamusing, bumbling way, and anyway the objects of his derision were always obscure and complicated (theatre curtains, small tubs of ice-cream, etc.). But maybe if he'd teamed up with a comedian, he could have been brought on at crucial moments, like an anaesthetist. Maybe that was his calling. (And is that the nicest thing I can find to say about his talent? That it is perfectly suited to quelling verbal insurrection at alcoholic gatherings? This is hardly the mark of a polymath. Hardly the mark of someone lovable, either.)

He pauses, to let the mood change.

‘Now, where was I? Oh yeah. Spare bedrooms. See, I don't know about you, but I turn on the TV, or I pick up a paper, and something terrible's happening in Kosovo or Uganda or Ethiopia, and sometimes I call a number and I give a tenner, and it changes nothing. The terrible thing continues to happen. And I feel guilty and powerless, and I continue to feel guilty and powerless when I go out later, to the pictures or for a curry or to the pub . . .'

The pub! The pub! Which ‘pub' would that be, David? The ‘local'? The Patronizing Bastard?

‘. . . And maybe I'm feeling guilty and powerless enough to keep it going, this feeling of wanting to do something, and there's this kid sitting by the cashpoint with a blanket and a dog, and I give him fifty pence, and that changes nothing either, because next time I go to the cashpoint he's still sitting there, and my fifty pence has done nothing. Well, of course it's done nothing, because it's fifty pence, and if I give him ten fifty pences, well, that'll do nothing either, because that's five quid. And I hate him sitting there. I think we all do. If you think about it for ten seconds, you can sort of guess just how horrible it would be, sleeping in the cold, begging for change, getting rained on, people coming up and abusing you . . .'

I look around. He's doing OK, apart from the pub bit. People are listening, and one or two are nodding, but you couldn't say that the light of conversion was shining in their eyes. He needs to pull something out of the bag, before he loses them.

Luckily, someone does it for him.

‘I don't believe this,' says Mike. ‘They're all arseholes, these people.'

‘Which people?'

‘These bloody homeless people. And they're loaded, half of them. Loads of money.'

‘Ah,' says David. ‘Loads of money. Which is why they sit on the pavement begging?'

‘That's how they get it, isn't it? And then they blow it on drugs. I've been looking for bricklayers for six months, and have I heard from any of that lot? Course I haven't. They don't want to work.'

There are a couple of snorts, one or two tuts, a great deal of head-shaking and exchanged glances followed by raised eyebrows. Mike is surrounded by gay actors, Health Service professionals, teachers, psychoanalysts, people whose hearts bleed right through their Gap T-shirts, and even if, in the middle of the night, they catch themselves thinking that the homeless only have themselves
to blame and they all take drugs and have bank balances bigger than ours, they would never ever say so out loud, during waking hours, and especially not at a party. Mike has misjudged his audience, and in doing so, he changes the dynamic in the room. Two minutes ago, David was talking to a lot of bemused faces; no one here wished him any ill, but neither were they willing to pledge a substantial part of their house to his cause. Now, it's different. Whose side are they on? Are they going to line up with the forces of right-wing darkness, i.e., Mike? Or are they on the side of the (slightly eccentric, possibly misguided, but angelic nonetheless) angels? Hurrah for angels! the psychoanalysts cry. Down with the right-wing forces of darkness! shout the gay actors. Not that there's any actual shouting, of course. They're too restrained for that. But Mike certainly has a little more floor space than he did. People have shuffled away from him, as if he were about to launch into some fancy dance routine.

‘If that's how you feel, then you wouldn't be interested in what I've got to say.'

‘No. I'm not. But I'm still finishing my drink.'

‘You're welcome to finish your drink. But could I ask you to keep your views to yourself? I'm not sure whether anyone here is very interested in them.'

‘That's 'cos they're a lot of stuck-up ponces.'

Mike's floor space expands a little further. He could do a breakdancing routine now without landing on anyone's head. Even the other half of his comedy duo has moved away from him. Mike has called David the thing that most people in this room fear being called; after all, we want to fit in, become part of the neighbourhood. We want Mike to be one of us, and we want Mike to want us to be his neighbours. It is true that he probably paid a few hundred pounds for his house back in the late sixties, when nobody like us wanted to live here, and some of us paid a quarter of a million pounds for our houses a couple of years ago. (Not David and I, though! We paid a hundred thousand for our house ten years ago!) But does that make us ponces? After all, Mike's house is worth a quarter of a million, too, now. But of course that's not the point.
The point is that we are the sort of people who can afford to pay a quarter of a million for a house (or rather, we are the sort of people to whom banks will lend a quarter of a million for a house); which makes us the sort of people who give money to beggars (and no wonder, if we are mad enough to pay a quarter of a million for a house); and then there's the pub at the end of the road, which once upon a time Mike might have drunk in, but which has now changed hands and clientele and serves Spanish sausages on a bed of something-or-other for ten pounds, and isn't really a pub at all, and let's face it, the ponces are responsible for that, as well as for other things, like the corner shop becoming an organic delicatessen . . . Golly, do we have a lot to answer for.