How to Be Good (9 page)

And hey presto! David is a happy person, or at least, a calm
person, here, now, in the real world, and all I do is sigh. The thing is, of course, I don't really want the hey presto! part. I am a rationalist, and I don't believe in genies, or sudden personality changes. I wanted David's anger to vanish only after years and years in therapy.

‘I am pleased,' I say, unconvincingly. ‘I just wish you'd had the courage to tell Nigel.'

‘Nigel's an angry man,' David says sadly. ‘He wouldn't understand.' This last observation at least is incontrovertible, given that Nigel has just ended his attempt to attract David's attention with a volley of abuse. He even used the C-word, although we all pretended we hadn't heard it.

‘Why don't you play Cluedo with us, Mummy?'

And I do, until tea time. And after tea, we play Junior Scrabble. We are the ideal nuclear family. We eat together, we play improving board games instead of watching television, we smile a lot. I fear that at any moment I may kill somebody.

At lunchtime the next day, Becca and I walk up the road to get a sandwich, and I tell her about GoodNews, and the theatre, and the street kid, and even about the lovemaking. (‘Ugh!' she says. ‘Your own husband? How disgusting!') And then, suddenly, she grabs my arm.

‘Katie! My God!'

‘What?'

‘Shit!'

‘What? You're frightening me.'

‘David's sick.'

‘How do you know?'

‘Change of personality. And did you say something about a headache?'

My stomach lurches. This is text-book stuff. This is the sinister medical explanation for his behaviour. David almost certainly has a brain tumour. How could I have been so oblivious? I run back to work and phone him.

‘David. I don't want you to panic, but please listen carefully and do exactly what I say. You probably have a brain tumour. You have to go to hospital and have a CAT scan, urgently. We can get you the referral here, but . . .'

‘Katie . . .'

‘Please listen. We can get you the referral here, but . . .'

‘Katie, there's nothing wrong with me.'

‘Well, let's hope not. But these are classic symptoms.'

‘Are you saying this because I've started to be nice to you?'

‘Well, yes. And then there was the theatre.'

‘You think that if I enjoyed a play I must have a brain tumour?'

‘And the money. And the sex the other night.'

There's a long pause.

‘Katie, I'm so sorry.'

‘And that's the other thing. You keep apologizing all the time. David, I think you may be very ill.'

‘It's so sad.'

‘It might not be. But I do think . . .'

‘No, no. Not that. It's so sad that the only explanation you can come up with for all this is that I'm about to die. I'm really not, I promise. We should talk.'

And he puts the phone down.

 

David won't discuss his tumour until we are alone, and even then I don't really grasp what he's saying.

‘He didn't use cream,' is how he chooses to begin.

‘I'm sorry?'

‘DJ GoodNews. He didn't use cream.'

‘Right. So . . .' I attempt to locate the import of this clearly important announcement, and fail.

‘So . . . Molly was right? Is that it?'

‘Oh. Yes. Sure. Absolutely. She was right all along. But don't you see? He just used his hands.'

‘Right. No cream, then.'

‘No.'

‘OK. Thank you for telling me. I've . . . I've got a clearer picture of the whole thing now.'

‘That's what all this is about. How it all started, anyway.'

‘All what?'

David gestures outwards impatiently, at everything in the world.

‘All . . . well, me. This. The money the other night. The . . . the problem with my column. All of it. The change of . . . I don't know, the change of atmosphere. You've presumably noticed the change in atmosphere? I mean, that's why you thought I was ill, right? Well. That's . . . That's where it all comes from.'

‘It all comes from your friend GoodNews not using cream?'

‘Yeah. Sort of. I mean, no cream was . . . That was the . . . Oh, I can't explain this. I thought I could and I can't.' I cannot recall David ever being like this – inarticulate, agitated, acutely embarrassed. ‘I'm sorry.'

‘That's OK. Take your time.'

‘That's where I went. For my two days. I went to stay with GoodNews.'

‘Oh. Right.' This is how we were taught to respond: listen carefully to what the patient says, don't interject, let him finish, even if that patient is your husband and he has gone completely mad.

‘You don't think I've gone completely mad?'

‘No. Of course not. I mean, if that's what you thought you wanted to do, and it helped . . .'

‘He's changed my life.'

‘Yes. Well. Good for you! And good for him!'

‘You're patronizing me.'

‘I'm sorry. I'm finding it difficult to . . . to grasp, all this.'

‘I can understand that. It's . . . It's all a bit weird.'

‘Can I ask a question?'

‘Yes. Of course.'

‘Will you explain about the cream?'

‘He wasn't using any.'

‘Sure, sure, I have understood that much. He wasn't using any cream. I'm just trying to make the link between . . . between him not using any cream and you giving eighty quid to that homeless kid. It's not immediately obvious.'

‘Yes. Right. OK.' He takes a deep breath. ‘I only went to see him in the first place because I thought it would annoy you.'

‘I guessed.'

‘Yes, well. I'm sorry. Anyway. He lives in this little flat above a minicab office behind Finsbury Park station, a real dump, and I was just going to go home. But I sort of felt sorry for him, so . . . I told him about my back, and where it hurt, and I asked him what he thought he could do for me. Because if he'd said he was going to manipulate me or, you know, do anything that would make it worse, I wouldn't have let him anywhere near me. But he just said that he'd touch it, nothing more, just put his hands there and the pain would go away. He said it would take him two seconds, and if nothing happened I wouldn't have to pay him. So I thought, what
the hell, and anyway he's only a skinny little guy and . . . Anyway. I took my shirt off and lay down on his couch, face down – he hasn't even got a treatment table or anything – and he touched me and his hands got incredibly hot.'

‘How do you know they weren't hot already?'

‘They were cold when he . . . when he first put them on my back, and they just started to warm up. And that's why I thought he was using Deep Heat or something. But he didn't massage me, or rub anything in. He just touched me, very gently, and . . . and all the pain went. Straight away. Like magic.'

‘So this guy's a healer. Like a faith healer.'

‘Yeah.' He thinks for a moment, as if trying to think of something that might make this easier for a couple of middle-class, university-educated literalists to understand – by which I mean, I suppose, that he would like to find something that makes it seem more difficult – less straightforward, more complicated, cleverer. It's not very hard to grasp that someone is a healer, after all: he touches you, you feel better, you go home. What is there not to understand? It's just that everything else you have ever believed about life becomes compromised as a result. David gives up the struggle to complexify with a shrug. ‘Yeah. It's . . . amazing. He has a gift.'

‘So. Great. Hurrah for GoodNews. He's made your back better, and he made Molly's eczema go away. We're lucky you found him.' I try to say all this in a way that draws a line under this whole conversation, but I'm guessing that this is not the end of the story.

‘I didn't want him to be a healer.'

‘What did you want him to be?'

‘Just . . . I don't know. Alternative. That's why me and Molly had that row about the cream. It freaked me out a bit, and I wanted there to be this, I don't know, this magic cream from Tibet or somewhere that conventional medics knew nothing about. I didn't want it just to be his hands. Do you understand?'

‘Yes. Sort of. You're happier with magic cream than with magic hands. Is that it?'

‘Cream's not magic, is it? It's just . . . medicine.'

This is typical of ignorant rationalists. For all they know, aspirin could be the most dramatic example of white witchcraft known to mankind, but because you can buy it in Boots it doesn't count.

‘It'd be magic if it cured back pain and eczema.'

‘Anyway. It freaked me out a bit. And then the thing with the headache . . .'

‘I had forgotten about the headache.'

‘Well that was when things started to go weird. Because . . . I don't even know why I told him I had a headache, but I did, and he looked at me, and he said, I can help you with a lot of things that are troubling you, and he touched me on the . . . here . . .'

‘The temples.'

‘Right, he touched me on the temples, and the headache went, but I started to feel . . . different.'

‘What kind of different?'

‘Just . . . Calmer.'

‘That was when you told me you were going away and I had to tell the kids we were getting divorced.'

‘I was calm. I didn't rant and rave. I didn't get sarcastic.'

I remember my feeling that there was something different about him then, and in remembering find a new way to become sad and regretful and self-pitying: my husband visits a healer, is thus magically rendered calmer, and the only benefit for me is that he expresses without viciousness his desire for a separation. Except, of course, things have moved on since then, and there are countless benefits for me, none of which I enjoy. I hear my brother's ‘Diddums' ringing in my ear.

‘And then you went to stay with him?'

‘I didn't know I was going to stay with him. I just . . . I wanted to see if he could do the thing with the head again, and maybe try to find out what was going on when he did it. I was thinking of writing about him, about the eczema and everything, and . . . I just ended up staying and talking for a couple of days.'

‘As one does.'

‘Please, Katie. I don't know how to talk about this. Don't make it hard.'

Why not? I want to ask. Why shouldn't I make it hard? How often have you made things easy for me?

‘Sorry,' I say. ‘Go on.'

‘He doesn't say very much. He just looks at you with these piercing eyes and listens. I'm not even sure whether he's very bright. So it was me who did all the talking. He just sort of sucked it all out of me.'

‘He seems to have sucked everything out of you.'

‘Yes, he did. Every bad thing. I could almost see it coming out of me, like a black mist. I didn't realize I was so full of all this stuff.'

‘And what makes him so special? How come he can do it and no one else could?'

‘I don't know. He just . . . He just has this aura about him. This'll sound stupid, but . . . He touched my temples again, when I was talking to him, and I just felt this, this amazing warmth flood right through me, and he said it was pure love. And that's what it felt like. Do you understand how panicky it made me feel?'

I do understand, and not just because David is an unlikely candidate for a love bath. Love baths are . . . not us. Love baths are for the gullible, the credulous, the simple-minded, people whose brains have been decayed like teeth by soft drugs, people who read Tolkien and Erich Von Daniken when they are old enough to drive cars . . . let's face it, people who don't have degrees in the arts or sciences. It is frightening enough just listening to David's story, but to undergo the experience must have been terrifying.

‘So now what?'

‘The first thing I thought afterwards was that I had to do everything differently. Everything. What I have been doing isn't enough. Not enough for you. Not enough for me. Not enough for the kids, or the world, or . . . or . . .'

He grinds to a halt again, presumably because even though the laws of rhetoric and rhythm require a third noun, the reference to the world has left him with nowhere to go, unless he starts babbling about the universe.

‘I still don't understand what you talked about for two days.'

‘Neither do I. I don't know where the time went. I was amazed when he told me it was Tuesday afternoon. I talked about . . . about you a lot, and how I wasn't good to you. And I talked about my work, my writing, and I found myself saying that I was ashamed of it, and I hated it for its, I don't know, its unkindness, its lack of charity. Now and again he made me . . . God, I'm embarrassed.' A sudden thought – it may or may not be a fear, I'll have to think about that another time – comes to me.

‘There's nothing funny going on, is there?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘You're not sleeping with him, are you?'

‘No,' he says, but blankly, with no sense of amusement or outrage or defensiveness. ‘No, I'm not. It's not like that.'

‘Sorry. So what did he make you do?'

‘He made me kneel on the floor and hold his hand.'

‘And then what?'

‘He just asked me to meditate with him.'

‘Right.'

David is not homophobic, although he has expressed occasional mystification at gay culture and practices (it's the Cher thing that particularly bewilders him), but he is certainly heterosexual, right down to his baggy Y-fronts and his preference for Wright's Coal Tar soap. There is no ambiguity there, if you know what I mean. And yet it is easier for me to imagine him going down on GoodNews than it is for me to picture him kneeling on the floor and meditating.