It’s not enough just to be a doctor, you have to be a good doctor, you have to be nice to people, you have to be conscientious and dedicated and wise, and though I enter the surgery each morning with the determination to be exactly those things, it only takes a couple of my favourite patients—a Barmy Brian, say, or one of the sixty-a-day smokers who are aggressive about my failure to deal with their chest complaints—and I’m ill-tempered, sarcastic, bored.
Number five: Tom and Molly. All the obvious things, too dull to go into here, and much too familiar to anyone who has ever been a parent or a child. Plus, see number one above: I have moved out of their house (albeit temporarily, albeit because I was provoked, albeit to a small bedsit around the corner), and I haven’t told them. I suspect that a number of mothers would find themselves wondering whether they had done the right thing in this particular circumstance.
These are, however, only the three-act dramas of conscience that are enacted daily in the Carr psyche. There are plenty of one-act dramas too, stuff that more properly belongs on the Fringe rather than in the West End, but provides some pretty compelling pre-sleep contemplation on occasions. There’s my brother (see ‘Parents’ above), who I know is unhappy, and yet I haven’t seen him since the day of the party; various other relatives, including mum’s sister Joan, who is still waiting for a thank-you for a very generous… oh God, never mind that one. And there’s an old school friend who once lent us her cottage in Devon and Tom broke one of her vases, but when she wanted to stay the night with us… Forget that one, too.
I don’t wish to be melodramatic: I know I have not lived a bad life. But nor do I think that this crime-sheet amounts to nothing: believe me, it amounts to something. Look at it. Adultery. The casual exploitation of friends. Disrespect for parents who have done nothing apart from attempt to stay close to me. I mean, that’s two of the ten commandments broken already, and given that—what, three, four?—of the ten are all about Sunday working hours and graven images, stuff that no longer really applies in early twenty-first-century Holloway, I’m looking at a thirty-three per cent strike rate, and that, to me, is too high. I can remember looking at the list when I was about seventeen and thinking that I wasn’t going to have too much trouble, if you took out all the graven image restrictions and left in the ones that really mattered. In fact, I wouldn’t have minded if you’d left all the finicky commandments in. God would understand the occasional emergency Sunday house-call, surely? And how many graven images am I ever likely to make? The score is nil to date—I haven’t been tempted, and I’d be very surprised if I were ever to weaken. I haven’t got the time, for a start.
When I look at my sins (and if I think they’re sins, then they are sins), I can see the appeal of born-again Christianity. I suspect that it’s not the Christianity that is so alluring; it’s the rebirth. Because who wouldn’t wish to start all over again?
12
When all the England football fans were rioting at some World Cup or another, I asked David why it was always the English and never the Scots, and he explained that the Scots’ fans refusal to misbehave was a kind of weird form of aggression: they hate us so much that even though a few of them would probably like to fight, they won’t, because they want to prove that they are better than us. Well, Molly has become a Scot. Ever since Tom hit the repulsive Christopher, she has insisted on being as nice as she possibly can to the repulsive Hope. Every day Hope comes round after school and smells the place out; and the more she smells, the keener Molly is for her to return the following evening, and the more Tom is made aware of his own unpleasantness to his Hope equivalent. I am seriously beginning to worry about Molly’s mental health: how many eight-year-olds would want to spend day after day doing something so unappealing just to show that they are morally superior to a sibling?
And now we are approaching Molly’s birthday, and she is insisting that she doesn’t want a party; she wants to spend the day with us and her brother and her new best friend. To our immense discredit, two of the five people involved are not so keen.
‘She never gets invited anywhere,’ says Molly by way of explanation. They are very different, my son and my daughter, particularly at the moment. My son would make the same observation to justify the opposite course of action. Someone who was never invited anywhere would, ipso facto, be excluded from any party that Tom might contemplate throwing.
‘But she smells,’ Tom points out.
‘Yes,’ says Molly, almost affectionately. ‘But she can’t help it.’
‘Yes, she can.’
‘How?’
‘She could have a bath. And use deodorant. And she doesn’t have to fart all the time, does she?’
‘I think she does, yes.’
I am struck suddenly both by the importance of this argument (it is, after all, about nothing less than how much we owe our fellow humans, and whether it is our duty to love everyone regardless of their personal attributes) and the form that it has taken—namely, a small child’s flatulence. I stifle a laugh, because this is a serious business. The idea of driving to an amusement park in a small family car with Hope is not, ultimately, very funny.
‘Why don’t you just have a big birthday party and invite Hope to that?’
‘She can do what she wants,’ says David.
‘Of course she can do what she wants. I just want to make sure that this is what she wants. I don’t want to have to look at photos of Molly’s ninth birthday party and try to remember who the hell she spent it with.’
‘Why not? We don’t know hardly anyone in our wedding photos any more.’
‘Yes. And look what…’ I stop myself just in time. Bitter contemplation of the wreck that is our marriage would be inappropriate right now. ‘…Look what was the cause of that.’ In my anxiety to finish the sentence seamlessly I have begun to speak like an Eastern European exchange student.
However, if you wanted to look what was the cause of that, you couldn’t have found a neater illustration of how our marriage became a wreck: over the next few years David taunted and teased and sneered at all the guests at our wedding, our friends and colleagues and relatives, for years and years until they dropped us.
‘It’s my birthday. I can do what I want.’
‘It’s not for a couple of weeks. Why don’t you wait until you mention it to her, just to make sure?’ It’s not as if she’ll be busy, after all.
‘I don’t want to.’ And she goes to the telephone with more malicious glee, it seems to me, than is strictly appropriate for an act of such selfless generosity.
So. To recap: I wish to be forgiven for my trespasses (which include committing adultery, dishonouring my parents, being rude to the borderline mentally ill, e.g., Barmy Brian, and even lying to my own children about where I live), and yet I will not forgive those who trespass against me, even if they are eight-year-old girls whose only real trespass is smelling bad. And having grey skin. And not being terribly bright. Right. OK, then. Let me think about that, and I’ll come back to you.
I don’t even know I’m going to say the words until they come out of my mouth, and when they do I feel slightly faint. Perhaps I was feeling faint already—it is Sunday morning, and I have not yet eaten, despite having left the flat a couple of hours ago. Perhaps if I’d had a bowl of cereal as soon as I got home, I would never have said anything.
‘I’m going to church. Does anyone want to come?’
David and the children look at me with some interest, for some time. It’s as if, having said something eccentric, I might follow this up by doing something eccentric, like stripping naked or running amok with a kitchen knife. I am suddenly glad that it is not my job to convince people that going to church is a perfectly healthy leisure activity.