How to Be Good (19 page)

So Mike's exit (he bangs down his drink on the mantelpiece and storms out) is both a blessing and a defeat, because even though we all feel guilty about the homeless, we also feel guilty that we have failed to accommodate Mike, that he no longer feels a part of his own neighbourhood, and maybe this double guilt helps David, too, because there is now so much collective guilt in the room that the ponces are just dying to compensate somehow. They want to do something gritty and difficult just to prove that they are not ponces, that they are good, thoughtful people who are unafraid of difficulty. If David wanted people to give up their homes at this precise second, a couple of them might do so; a bedroom – pah! Nothing!

And David detects this mood, and storms through the rest of his speech, while GoodNews stands beside him with a self-satisfied beam on his face. Do these people want to be like Mike? Do they want to do something better than anything they have ever done in their lives? Because David doesn't care what we're doing now: however caring our job is, however much we give to charity, nothing is going to make as much difference to individuals as this. Six months without the use of a spare bedroom could literally save a life, because with a home and a permanent address and somewhere to shave and shower, then these kids can apply for jobs, and then they can earn, and with a wage comes self-respect, and the ability to build a life without this kind of intervention . . .

‘I'm forty-one years old,' says David, ‘and I have spent half my
life regretting that I missed the sixties. I read about the energy, and I imagine what the music would have sounded like when you hadn't heard it a thousand times before, and when it actually meant something, and I've always been sad that the world is different now. I got a bit excited about Live Aid, but then you realize that these problems . . . They're too big now. They're never going to go away. We can't change the world, but we can change our street, and maybe if we can change our street, then other people will want to change theirs. We have hand-picked ten kids who are living rough and who need some help. They're good kids. They're not winos or junkies or thieves or lunatics; they're people whose lives have gone badly wrong through no fault of their own. Maybe their stepfather has thrown them out, maybe someone died on them and they couldn't cope . . . But we can vouch for them. If I can find ten spare bedrooms for these kids I'd feel that it was the greatest thing I'd ever done.'

‘Are you having one?' someone asks.

‘Of course,' says David. ‘How could I ask you to do this if I wasn't prepared to?'

‘Can I ask where we'll be putting him or her?' This from the lady at the back, who already supports two children, a spiritual guru and a husband who has lost the will to work.

‘We'll sort it out when everyone's gone,' says David. ‘Does anyone want to talk more about this?'

Four people put their hands up.

‘Four's no good to me. I need more.'

One more hand, then nothing.

‘OK. Half now, half later.'

Weirdly, the whole room breaks into a spontaneous round of applause, and I feel as though I might cry the sort of tears that come at the end of soppy films.

 

GoodNews and David take the Famous Five into his study (a study that, presumably, is about to be converted into a bedroom) while the rest of us watch. It's like that bit in a church wedding where the bride and groom and a few others shuffle off round the corner
to sign the register, and the congregation beam at them, without knowing quite what else to do. (Is there singing at that point? Maybe. Maybe we should sing now –
You've Got a Friend
, or
You'll Never Walk Alone
, something where the secular just starts to rub against the spiritual.)

For the record, the five volunteers are:

 

1. Simon and Richard, the gay couple at number 25.
   
2. Jude and Robert, a couple in their late thirties, who someone once told me were unable to have kids, and were trying to adopt, without much success. They're at number 6.
   

    
   

   (So, for those of you who have a need to understand why anyone should wish to do what these people are doing, a theme begins to emerge . . .)
   

    
   

3. Ros and Max, diagonally opposite us at number 29. Don't know anything about them, because they've recently moved into the street, apart from 1) they have a daughter of Molly's age and 2) just before David turned, he said he'd seen Ros on the bus reading his column and laughing, so perhaps her willingness to offer up a bedroom is some kind of penance.
   
4. Wendy and Ed, an older couple at number 19. They've always stopped to talk when we've been out with the kids; I don't know much about them either, other than that they are both enormous and their children no longer live with them.
   
5. (Terrifying, this one) Martina, an old (properly old, seventy plus), frail Eastern European lady who lives on her own at number 21. Her grasp of English has always struck me as being remarkably weak for someone who has lived here for forty years, so heaven knows what she thinks she's volunteered for; we'll probably be given a large cake tomorrow, and she'll be baffled and horrified when someone with dreadlocks knocks on her door in a week's time.
   

 

A woman I've never seen before in my life comes up to me. ‘You must be very proud of him,' she says. I smile politely, and say nothing.

 

We don't get to bed until after midnight, but David's much too hyper to sleep.

‘Is five any good, do you think?'

‘It's amazing,' I tell him, and I mean it, because I had anticipated nobody, nothing, a dismal and humiliating failure and the end of the story.

‘Really?'

‘Did you honestly think you could get ten people to volunteer?'

‘I didn't know. All I can say is that when I was going through it in my head, I couldn't think of any arguments against it.'

That's it. That's the whole David/GoodNews thing, right there: ‘I couldn't think of any arguments against it.' My problem exactly. I want to destroy David's whole save-the-world-and-love-everyone campaign, but I want to do it using his logic and philosophy and language, not the language of some moaning, spoiled, smug, couldn't-care-less, survival-of-the-fittest tabloid newspaper columnist. And of course it's not possible, because David's fluent in his language, and I'm a beginner. It's as if I'm trying to argue with Plato in Greek.

‘What arguments are there?' he says. ‘I mean, these people are . . .'

‘I know, I know. You don't have to argue with me. But that's not the point, is it?'

‘Isn't it?'

‘There are never any arguments against anything you want to do. People are hungry, give them food if you've got it. Kids have nothing to play with, give them toys if you've got too many. I can never think of anything to say to you. But that doesn't mean I agree with you.'

‘But it has to.'

‘That isn't how the world works.'

‘Why not? OK, I know why not. Because people are selfish and
scared and . . . and brainwashed into thinking that they have no alternatives. But they have. They have.'

And what am I supposed to say now? That people have a right to be selfish if they want to? That they don't have any alternatives? And what's the Greek for ‘Please shut up and leave me alone'?

 

The next morning I sit eating cereal with Tom while GoodNews and Molly and David clear up around me. I'm not moving. I'm selfish, and I have a right to be. In the
Guardian
there's an article about a gang of youths who beat a man unconscious and left him under a hedge in Victoria Park, where he died of hypothermia. Unless he was dead already – the coroner doesn't know. Three of the youths were homeless. OK, I accept that I shouldn't have read the story out loud, given that our children are relatively young, and we have a homeless youth coming to live with us imminently (I presume that still to be the case – no one's mentioned anything to me) and they will have nightmares for weeks about the poor and almost certainly harmless kid who'll be sleeping underneath them. But I'm feeling bolshie, and the ammunition was just sitting there, at the top of page five, waiting to be fired.

‘Oh, great,' says Tom. ‘So now Dad's going to get us killed.'

‘Why?' says Molly.

‘Weren't you listening to what Mum was reading? A homeless person's going to come round here and rob us and then probably kill us.' He seems quite phlegmatic about it all; indeed, he seems to relish the prospect, possibly because being murdered would prove a point, and make his father sorry. I suspect that he's being naive, and his father would be regretful and sad, but not sorry. Not the kind of sorry that Tom needs.

‘That's not fair,' David says to me angrily.

‘No,' I say. ‘One against five! He didn't stand a chance.'

He looks at me.

‘What? It's here, in the paper. It's nothing to do with fairness. It's a news story. A fact.'

‘There are so many other things you could have read out. I'll bet
there's an article about, I don't know, changes in the benefit laws. I'll bet there's something about Third World Debt.'

‘David, Third World Debt isn't coming to live in our house. Third World Debt hasn't killed . . .' I stop dead, knowing that I'm wrong, that I've lost, that Third World Debt has killed – has killed millions and millions, a zillion more than homeless youths have ever killed, I know that I know that I know that, but I'm going to hear all about it anyway, for hours and hours and hours.

The homeless kids all arrive on the same day, in a minibus that their hosts have hired for the morning. It's a sunny June Saturday, a little hazy because of the early heat and last night's rain, and a few people have gathered outside their houses, either to gawp or to welcome their new housemates, and suddenly I feel as though our street is, after all, special. No other street in London or Britain or the world is having a morning like this, and whatever happens hereonafter, David and GoodNews have, I can see now, achieved something.

The kids are loud and giggly as they get off the bus – ‘Er, look at her, I'll bet she's yours' – but it's bravado, and a couple of them are clearly scared. We are all scared of each other. David talks to each one – three boys, three girls – as they stand on the pavement, and points them towards their new houses. He shakes hands with one of the boys and points at me, and a couple of minutes later I am making tea while an eighteen-year-old who wants me to call him Monkey rolls a cigarette at my kitchen table.

‘What are you doing?' asks Molly.

‘Rolling a cigarette.'

‘Do you smoke?' says Molly.

‘Duh,' says Tom, who promptly disappears to his bedroom. Molly, however, is awestruck. Her father Has Views on smoking, and her mother is a GP; she has heard that people smoke, but she has never seen anyone prepare to do it in front of her. For my part, I don't know whether I want Monkey smoking in my kitchen, in front of the children. Probably I don't. But asking Monkey to smoke outside in the back garden might get us off on the wrong foot: it might give him the feeling that he is not wanted, or that we do not respect his culture. Or it might serve to accentuate the differences between us – he might think that passive smoking is essentially a
bourgeois fear, presupposing as it does the sort of long-term future he might feel he is currently denied, which is why he doesn't worry about smoking roll-ups. Or asking him to go outside might simply make him angry, and his anger will compel him to steal everything we own, or murder us in our beds. I don't know. And because I don't know, I say nothing, apart from, ‘I'll find you an ashtray.' And then, ‘You'll have to use this saucer.' And then, when I replay that last sentence in my head, and hear a) a note that could be perceived as tetchiness and b) what could be construed as implicit disapproval, the buried suggestion that there are no ashtrays in this house FOR A REASON, I add ‘If you don't mind.' Monkey doesn't mind.

He is very tall and very thin – not like a monkey at all, more like a giraffe. He is wearing (from the bottom up) Dr Martens, combat trousers, a khaki jacket and a black turtle-neck sweater that is smeared with mud, or what I hope is mud. He has spots, but very little else: the rest of his wardrobe is contained in a plastic carrier bag.

‘So,' I say. He looks at me expectantly, which is fair enough, considering that the word I have just used clearly induces expectation, but I'm temporarily stuck. I try to think of something to follow up with, something which won't patronize or offend, but which might indicate sympathy and curiosity. (I feel both sympathetic and curious, by the way, and so the question is not merely for show. I care. Really.)

‘When was the last time you sat in someone's kitchen?'

That's not offensive, surely? Because if you've been sleeping rough, it's likely to have been a while, isn't it? And maybe the question will help to draw him out, get him talking, and I'll be able to understand a little more, learn something of what he's been doing, and where. The only danger, I suppose, is that it could sound smug – haven't we done well, we've got a kitchen, nah nah nah nah nah.

‘Dunno. Ages ago. Last time I saw my mum, probably.'

‘When was that?'

‘A couple of years ago. Is Ali G really funny?'

‘Who's Ali G?'

‘That comedian on the telly.'

‘I don't know. I've never seen him.'

‘He isn't,' says Molly, who is drawing at the table.

‘When have you seen him?' I ask her.

‘I haven't. But I've seen a picture of him. He doesn't look very funny. He looks stupid. Why are you called Monkey?'

‘I dunno. That's what they call me. Why are you called Molly?'

‘Because Daddy didn't like Rebecca.'

‘Oh. Have you got digital?'

‘No.'

‘Cable?'

‘Yes.'

‘Sky Sports?'

‘No.'

‘Oh.'

As it turns out, we are something of a disappointment to Monkey, and, if I am being honest, he is something of a disappointment to me. I cannot answer any of the questions he asks me, and nor do we have any of the things he seems to want most (apart from Sky Sports, we don't have Dreamcast, or a dog); meanwhile he will not help me to understand how it was he came to be sleeping on the streets, which means that I am unable to show him the side of me that I wanted him to see: Katie the therapist, the listener, the imaginative solver of insoluble problems. He goes for a bath; regrettably, we don't have a proper shower.

 

For a couple of days, all is quiet. We only see Monkey during the evenings; he doesn't talk about where he goes during the day, but it is clear that old habits are hard to break, and old friendships are as important to him as they are to everyone else. And, anyway, one night he comes back and attempts to give me housekeeping money out of a huge pile of coins that he dumps on the kitchen table, which gives us all an idea of his whereabouts during working hours. I am almost tempted to take the money: after all, he is the only person in the house other than me who is working. He is courteous,
he keeps himself to himself, he reads, he watches TV, he plays with Tom at the computer, he enjoys every mouthful of food he is given, and he makes no dietary demands.

One night we leave our guests in charge of the children (imaginary conversation with my parents, or social services: ‘Who's in charge of your children?' ‘Oh, GoodNews and Monkey') and we go to the local cinema. We see a Julia Roberts film: she plays a struggling single mother who gets a job at a law firm and discovers that a water company is poisoning people, and she goes on a campaign to get compensation for them. Her relationship with a sexy bearded man suffers, and she becomes a bad, neglectful mother, but she is Fighting the Good Fight, and the water company is bad bad bad, and she only has two children and one boyfriend and there are hundreds of sick people, so it's OK. It's not a particularly good film, but I love it simply because it is a film, in colour, with a story that doesn't involve spacecraft or insects or noise, and I drink it down in one, like I drank the Stoppard play. David loves it because he thinks it is about him.

‘Well?' he says afterwards.

‘Well what?'

‘Do you see?'

‘Do I see what?'

‘If you're going to do this stuff, it comes at a cost.'

‘There was no cost. Not in the film. Everyone lived happily ever after. Apart from the sick people, perhaps.'

‘Her boyfriend left her.'

‘She made it up with him,' I point out.

‘But weren't you on her side?'

And he used to have such a complicated, interesting mind. ‘No. I was on the side of the water company. Of course I was on her side. I wasn't given much choice. Are you trying to say that you're Julia Roberts?'

‘No, but . . .'

‘Because you're not.'

We stop while he gives a kid fifty pence, and then continue in silence for a little while.

‘Why not?'

‘David, I'm not going to waste an awful lot of time on this.'

‘Why not?'

‘Why aren't I going to waste time explaining why you're not Julia Roberts?'

‘Yes. This is important. Tell me the difference between what I'm doing and what she was doing.'

‘What are you doing? Explain it to me.'

‘You explain to me what she was doing first. And then we'll see what the differences are.'

‘You're going to drive me mad.'

‘OK, I'm sorry. The point is that she and I want to do something about things. A water company is poisoning people. Bad. She wants justice for the people affected. Kids are sleeping out on the street. Bad. I want to help them.'

‘Why you?'

‘Why her?'

‘It was a film, David.'

‘Based on a true story.'

‘Let me ask you something: is this worth wrecking your family for?'

‘I don't intend to wreck my family.'

‘I know you don't intend to wreck your family. But two of us are very unhappy. And I don't know how much more I can take.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘That's all you can say?'

‘What else is there to say? You're threatening to leave me because I'm trying to do something for people who can't do much for themselves. And I . . .'

‘That's not true, David. I'm threatening to leave you because you're becoming unbearable.'

‘What can't you bear?'

‘Any of it. The . . . the sanctimony. The smugness. The . . .'

‘People are dying out there, Katie. I'm sorry if you think that I'm being smug.'

I cannot bring myself to say any more.

*

What with one thing and another – a broken leg one summer, post-college poverty the next – David and I did not go away on holiday together until the third year of our relationship. We were a proper couple by then, by which I mean that we had rows, that some days I didn't like him very much, that if he or I went away for a few days I didn't miss him, although I found myself jotting down inconsequential things to tell him, but that I never ever thought about whether I wanted to be with him or not, because I knew, somewhere in me, that I was in for the long haul. What I am saying, I suppose, is that this first holiday was not a honeymoon, and there was not very much chance of us spending the entire fortnight in bed, emerging only to feed each other spoonfuls of exotic fruits. It was more likely, in fact, that David would lapse into a two-week long sulk over a dispute about his loose interpretation of the rules of Scrabble, during the course of which I would call him a pathetic cheating baby. That was the stage we were at.

We found cheap flights to Egypt, with the intention of travelling around a bit, but on our second day in Cairo David became ill – sicker than he's ever been since, in fact. He became delirious, and he vomited every couple of hours, and at the height of it he lost control of his bowels, and we were in a cheap hotel and we didn't have our own toilet or shower, and I had to clean him up.

And there was a part of me that was pleased, because I'd set myself a test years before (probably when I first conceived of being a doctor, and realized that sometimes my private life would resemble my professional life): would I be able to see a man in that state and still respect him in the morning? I passed the test with flying colours. I had no qualms about cleaning David up, I could still bring myself to have sex with him afterwards (after the holiday, and after his restoration to health, I mean, rather than after his accident) . . . I was capable of a mature relationship after all. This was love, surely?

But now I can see I was wrong. That wasn't a test. What kind of woman would leave her boyfriend to rot in his soiled bedsheets in
a strange hotel in a foreign country? This is a test. And Lord, am I failing it.

 

Wendy and Ed, the enormous couple who live at number 19, come to see us first thing the next morning. They took in a kid called Robbie, who they said they liked. Last night the three of them stayed in together and talked about Robbie's life, and how it had turned out in the way that it had, and Wendy and Ed went to bed feeling positive about the choice they had made to have him stay. But when they got up Robbie had vanished. Also vanished: a video camera, seventy pounds in cash, a bracelet that Wendy had left by the sink when she was doing the washing-up. GoodNews listens to the story with increasing agitation, which surprises me: I was presuming that he would be happy to write off the loss to experience, that he would argue – and as he is the owner of nothing very much, it is an easy argument to make – that these sorts of risks were worth running, that it was all for the greater good, and so on. It turns out, however, that it is not the theft that has agitated him, but our bourgeois logic.

‘Oh, no, no, no, people,' he says. ‘We're jumping to conclusions. We shouldn't be jumping. We should be sitting and thinking, not jumping.'

‘How do you mean?' Ed is genuinely baffled. He, like me, is trying to see how any other interpretation of events is possible.

‘Don't you see? We're putting two and two together and making the proverbial. I mean . . . OK, Robbie has gone. And OK, some stuff has gone. But it doesn't necessarily mean that they've gone to the same place.'

‘I'm sure they haven't,' I say. ‘I'm sure they've gone to different places. I'm sure the video camera has gone to the second-hand shop in Holloway Road and Robbie's gone to the off-licence.'