How to Be Good (25 page)

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 was 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.

 

When we get home, Molly plays us the Lauryn Hill song, and David disappears off upstairs and comes down with a box full of bits and pieces from our wedding day, a box that I don't think I knew we owned.

‘Where did that come from?'

‘The old suitcase under our bed.'

‘Did my mother give it to us?'

‘No.'

He starts to rummage through the box.

‘Who did, then?'

‘Nobody.'

‘What, it just appeared on its own?'

‘You can't think of any other explanation?'

‘Don't be stupid, David. It's a very simple question. There's no need for all this mystery.'

‘It's a very simple answer.'

And still I cannot think of it, so I make a frustrated, impatient growling noise and start to walk away.

‘It's mine,' he says quietly.

‘Why is it yours all of a sudden?' I say aggressively. ‘Why isn't it ours? I was there, too, you know.'

‘No, I mean, of course it's yours as well, if you want it. I just mean . . . I bought the box. I got the stuff together. That's how it came into the house.'

‘When?' And still I can hear a snort in my voice, as if I don't believe him, as if he is somehow trying to put one over on me.

‘I don't know. When we came back from our honeymoon. It was a fantastic day. I was so happy. I just didn't want to forget it.'

I burst into tears, and I cry and cry until it feels as though it is not salt and water being squeezed from my eyes, but blood.

‘ “Without love I am nothing at all,” ' Lauryn Hill sings for the twelfth and seventeenth and twenty-fifth time on Janet's CD player, and each time I think, yes, that is me, that is what I have become, nothing at all, and I either cry again, or merely feel like crying. That's why David's box devastated me, I realize now – not just because I had no idea that my husband still felt anything at all about our wedding day, but because the part of me that should feel things is sick, or dying, or dead, and I never even noticed until tonight.

I'm not too sure when this happened, but I know that it was a long time ago – before Stephen (otherwise there wouldn't have been a Stephen), long before GoodNews (otherwise there wouldn't have been a GoodNews); but after Tom and Molly were born, because I was something and someone then, the most important person in the whole world. Maybe if I kept a diary I could date it precisely. I could read an entry and think, oh, right, it was on 23 November 1994, when David said this or did that. But what could David have possibly said or done to make me close down in this way? No, I suspect that I closed myself down, that something in me just got infarcted, or dried up, or sclerotic, and I let it happen because it suited me. And there is just enough for Molly and Tom, but it doesn't really count, because it's a reflex, and my occasional flashes of warmth are like my occasional desire to wee.

Maybe that's what's wrong with all of us. Maybe Mark thought he was going to find that warmth in church, and all those people in our street who took the street kids in thought they could find it in their spare bedrooms, and David found it in GoodNews's fingertips – went looking for it because he wanted to feel it once more before he died. As do I.

Oh, I'm not talking about romantic love, the mad hunger for someone you don't know very well. And the feelings that constitute
my working week – guilt, of course, and fear, and irritation, and a few other ignoble distractions that simply serve to make me unwell half the time – are not enough for me, nor for anybody. I'm talking about that love which used to feel something like optimism, benignity . . . Where did that go? I just seemed to run out of steam somewhere along the line. I ended up disappointed with my work, and my marriage, and myself, and I turned into someone who didn't know what to hope for.

The trick, it seems to me, is to stave off regret. That's what the whole thing is about. And we can't stave it off for ever, because it is impossible not to make the mistakes that let regret in, but the best of us manage to limp on into our sixties or seventies before we succumb. Me, I made it to about thirty-seven, and David made it to the same age, and my brother gave up the ghost even before that. And I'm not sure that there is a cure for regret. I suspect not.

 

The new patient seems vaguely familiar, but I'm not feeling very sharp: the little Turkish girl I have just seen probably has something seriously wrong with her, and I have been attempting to explain to her mother, through the Turkish-speaking health visitor, why I am sending her for a brain scan. So my nerves are jangling a little, and initially I don't have as much interest in the new patient's skin complaint as I would wish.

I ask her to take her top off, and she says something jovial about how she hates showing disgustingly slim doctors her fat stomach, and at the very moment the jumper covers her face, I recognize the voice. It belongs to the nice lady from the church.

She stands up so that I can see the rash on her back.

‘Have you had this before?'

‘Not for a long time. It's stress-related.'

‘What makes you say that?'

‘Because the last time I got it was when my mother died. And now I've got a lot of work problems.'

‘What kind of work problems?'

This is an unprofessional question. I am always hearing that
people have work problems, and I have never before shown the slightest interest, although if I am feeling especially sympathetic I might cluck a little. The nice lady, though . . . Of course I want to know about what is wrong with her job.

‘It's utterly pointless, and I hate my . . . I hate the people I work for. Especially . . . Well, especially the boss.'

‘You can put your top back on.'

I start to write a prescription.

‘I was in your church last week.'

She flushes.

‘Oh. I shouldn't have said anything.'

‘It's fine. Patient–doctor confidentiality and all that.'

‘Well, anyway, you know what my problems are, then.'

‘Do I?'

‘Isn't it obvious?'

I decide that it is best to say nothing, on the grounds that what was obvious to me – her rendition of ‘Getting to Know You' was excruciating, all reference to the current rap hits is misguided to the point of lunacy – might not be obvious to her, and I will only succeed in making the angry red marks on her back positively furious. I write her a prescription and hand it to her.

‘I enjoyed it,' I tell her.

‘Thank you. But basically I no longer believe in what I'm doing, and I think it's all a waste of time, and my body knows it. So I feel ill every day.'

‘Well, that's hopefully something I can help with.'

‘Why did you come to my church? You haven't been before, have you?'

‘No. I'm not a Christian. But I'm having a spiritual crisis, so . . .'

‘Do doctors have spiritual crises?'

‘Apparently they do, yes. My marriage is in big trouble and I'm very sad and I'm trying to decide what to do about it. What do you recommend?'

‘I'm sorry?'

‘What should I do?'

She smiles nervously; she's not sure whether I'm joking. I'm not.
I'm suddenly consumed with the desire to hear what she has to say.

‘I've told you what to do about your rash. That's what I'm here for. You tell me what to do about my marriage. That's what you're there for.'

‘I'm not sure you understand what the role of the church is.'

‘What is it, then?'

‘I'm not the one to ask, am I? Because I haven't got a clue.'

‘Who has, then?'

‘Have you tried counselling?'

‘I'm not talking about counselling. I'm talking about what's right and wrong. You know about that, surely?'

‘Do you want to know what the Bible says about marriage?'

‘No!' I'm shouting now, I can hear myself, but I don't seem to be able to do anything about it. ‘I want to know what YOU say. Just tell me. I'll do whatever it is you recommend. Stay or go. Come on.' And I mean it. I'm sick of not knowing. Someone else can sort it out.

The nice lady looks a little afraid, as she has every right to do, I suppose. I am seriously contemplating holding her hostage until she comes out with an answer, any answer, although I will not fill her in on this plan of action for the moment.

‘Dr Carr, I can't tell you what to do.'

‘I'm sorry, that's not good enough.'

‘Do you want to come and see me in my office?'

‘No. No need. Waste of time. It's a yes/no question. I don't want to spend hours talking about it with you. I've already spent months thinking about it. It's gone on long enough.'

‘Do you have children?'

‘Yes.'

‘Is your husband cruel to you?'

‘No. Not any more. He used to be, but he saw the light. Not your sort of light. Another one.'

‘Well. . .' She is on the verge of saying something, but then she stands up. ‘This is ridiculous. I can't . . .'

I snatch the prescription out of her hand. ‘In which case, I can't help you. You do your job and I'll do mine.'

‘It's not my job. Please give me my prescription.'

‘No. It's not much to ask. Stay or go, that's all I want. God, why are you people so timid? It's no wonder the churches are empty, when you can't answer even the simplest questions. Don't you get it? That's what we want. Answers. If we wanted woolly minded nonsense we'd stay at home. In our own heads.'

‘I think you'll do what you want to do anyway, so it won't make any difference what I say.'

‘Wrong. Wrong. Because I haven't got a clue any more. Do you remember
The Dice Man
, that book everyone read at college? Maybe not at theological college they didn't, but at normal college they did. Well, I am the Vicar Woman. Anything you say, I will do.'

She looks at me and holds up her hands, indicating defeat. ‘Stay.'

I feel suddenly hopeless, the way one always does when two alternatives become one chosen course of action. I want to go back to the time just seconds ago when I didn't know what to do. Because here's the thing: when you get into a mess like mine, your marriage is like a knife in your stomach, and you know that you're in big trouble whatever you decide. You don't ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy; happiness is no longer the point. It's all about survival; it's all about whether you pull the knife out and bleed to death or keep it in, in the hope that you might be lucky, and the knife has actually been staunching the blood. You want to know the conventional medical wisdom? The conventional medical wisdom is that you keep the knife in. Really.

‘Really?'

‘Yes. I'm a vicar. I can't go around telling people to break up families on a whim.'

‘Ha! You think it's whimsical?'

‘I'm sorry, but you can't start arguing with the decision. You wanted me to say something and I've said it. You're staying. Can I have my prescription now?'

I hand it to her. I'm starting to feel a little embarrassed, as perhaps is only appropriate.

‘I won't say anything to anyone,' she says. ‘I'm going to work on the assumption that you're having a bad day.'

‘And I won't say anything about
The King and I
,' I say – somewhat gracelessly, given the circumstances. Our professional misconduct trials, should it come to that, are almost certain to have different outcomes, given the relative gravity of our crimes. She could argue that it is part of her brief to illuminate her sermons with highlights from the great musicals; I, on the other hand, would be hard pushed to make a case for the violent witholding of treatment until I had received inappropriate marital advice.

‘Good luck.'

‘Thank you.' I don't feel so graceless now, and I pat her on the back on her way out. I will miss her.

 

‘Have you ever . . . Have you ever threatened a patient?' I ask Becca before I leave for the day. Becca has done many, many bad things, some of them during working hours.

‘God, no,' she says, appalled. ‘Is that what you think of me?'

So rehearsed is our good doc/bad doc routine that she never for a moment suspects that I am confessing, rather than accusing. That is why Becca is so good to talk to: she doesn't listen.

 

I want to speak to my husband when I get home, but his relationship is with GoodNews now. The two of them have become inseparable – joined, not at the hip, but at the temple, because whenever I see them they are hunched over their piece of paper, head joining head in a way that is presumably conducive to the mutual flow of psychic energy. In the old days, it would have been reasonable to ask David what was on the piece of paper; indeed, it would have been deemed both rude and unsupportive to show no interest. These days, however, everyone accepts that Molly and Tom and I are the footsoldiers and they are the generals, and any curiosity on our part would be regarded as impertinent, possibly even actionable.

I knock on the invisible office door.

‘David, could I speak to you?'

He looks up, momentarily irritated.

‘Now?'

‘If possible.'

‘Fire away.'

‘Can we have dinner tonight?'

‘We have dinner every night.'

‘You and me. Out. GoodNews babysitting. If that's OK with him.'

‘Tonight?' GoodNews consults his mental Psion Organiser and finds that, as it happens, he is indeed free tonight.

‘OK, then. Do you think we need to talk?'

‘Well, yes.'

‘About . . . ?'

‘There are a couple of things. Maybe we should talk about last night, for example. My reaction.'

‘Oh, don't worry about that. We all get upset from time to time.'

‘Yeah,' says GoodNews. ‘Can't be helped. Like I said to your brother, sadness can be a right sod for keeping itself hidden away and then popping out.' He waves a magnanimous hand. ‘Forget about it. It never happened.'

They smile beatifically and return to their piece of paper. I have been dismissed. I do not wish to be dismissed.

‘I'm not looking for forgiveness. I want to talk about it. I want to explain. I want you and I to go out and attempt to communicate. As husband and wife.'