‘Can you both shove off now?’ I say. ‘Mark and I want to talk privately.’ David shoots me a loving, wounded look, but they gather their stuff together and go.
‘Can I listen?’ says Molly.
‘No. Bye.’
‘That bloke was at the party,’ Mark says. ‘Who is he?’
‘GoodNews? My husband’s spiritual healer. He lives with us now. With them, anyway. I live in a bedsit round the corner. Not that the kids know.’
‘Oh. Right. So. Anything else happening?’
‘That’s about it.’
I tell him about the last few weeks with as much economy as he permits, and while I am talking it strikes me that if anyone needed the sadness drawing out of him it is Mark.
‘How about you?’
‘Oh, you know.’ He shrugs.
‘What do I know?’
‘I’ve been to church twice in the last fortnight. That sort of sums it up.’
He doesn’t mean that this is the sum total of his activity; he means that he has reached the end of his tether. Mark takes drugs, goes to see bands, swears a lot, hates Conservatives, has periods of promiscuity. If, on meeting him for the first time, you were asked to name one thing that he didn’t do, you would almost certainly choose churchgoing.
‘How did it start?’
‘I was driving to see you. I was feeling low, and I thought the kids would cheer me up, and it was Sunday morning, and… I dunno. I just saw the church, and it was the right time, and I went in. What about you?’
‘I wanted to be forgiven.’
‘For what?’
‘For all the shitty things I do,’ I say.
Mark only just made my guilt-list, and when I look at him now that seems almost laughably complacent. He’s a very unhappy man, maybe even suicidal, and I didn’t have a clue. All the lonely people… At least we know where they come from: Surrey. That’s where Mark and I come from, anyway.
‘You don’t do anything shitty.’
‘Thank you. But I’m human. That’s how humans spend their time, doing shitty things.’
‘Fucking hell. Glad I came here.’
I give him a cup of coffee, and he lights a cigarette—he gave up ten years ago—and I look for Monkey’s saucer ashtray while he tells me about his hopeless job, and his hopeless love life, and all the stupid mistakes he’s made, and how he has started to hate everyone and everything, including his nearest and dearest, which is how come he has ended up listening to a woman singing lines from The King and I at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning.
GoodNews has picked it all up already, of course. We sit down to a hastily assembled ploughman’s lunch, and without invitation he wades into the stagnant, foul-smelling pond that is Mark’s life.
‘I’m sorry if you think I’m being a bit, you know,’ he begins. ‘But when we shook hands… Man, you nearly took my arm off.’
‘I’m sorry,’ says Mark, apologetic but understandably surprised: I saw the whole incident, and it seemed like a pretty straightforward handshake to me; at no stage did it look as though anyone would end up with a permanent disability. ‘Did I hurt you?’
‘In here you hurt me.’ GoodNews taps his heart. ‘Because it hurts when I know fellow human beings are in trouble. And if ever a hand was shouting for help it was yours.’
Mark cannot help it: he has a quick look, back and front, to see if there is any evidence of this manual distress.
‘Nah, you won’t see anything there. It’s not a, like a visible thing. I mean, I feel it physically. Ow. You know?’ And he winces and massages his hand, to demonstrate the pain that Mark so recently caused him. ‘But sadness is a right sod for keeping itself hidden away. A right sod. Gotta come out sometime, though, and it’s pouring out of you.’
‘Oh,’ says Mark.
The children munch on relentlessly. It depresses me that they are so accustomed to conversations of this kind that they cannot even be bothered to gape.
‘I’m sure Mark would rather talk about something else,’ I say hopefully.
‘Perhaps he would,’ says GoodNews. ‘But I’m not sure it’d be a good idea. Do you know what you’re sad about, Mark?’
‘Well…’
‘As far as I can tell, it’s mostly in the area of relationships and work,’ says GoodNews, apparently uninterested in anything Mark has to say. ‘And it’s starting to get serious.’
‘How serious?’ says David, concerned.
‘You know,’ says GoodNews, nodding meaningfully at the children.
‘There’s not much point in Mark being here, is there?’ I say. ‘Why don’t you two sort it out between you?’
‘Oh, we can’t do that,’ says GoodNews. ‘In the end, Mark knows more about how unhappy he is than either of us.’
‘Really?’ I use a sarcastic tone of voice, and make a sarcastic face, and I even attempt a sarcastic posture, but it’s no use.
‘Oh, sure. I only get the vaguest sense of the causes.’
‘I’d say work and relationships just about covered it,’ Mark says.
‘Do you want to do anything about it?’ David asks him.
‘Well, yeah, I wouldn’t mind.’
‘GoodNews rubs it out of you,’ Molly says matter-of-factly. ‘His hands go all hot and then you’re not sad any more. I’m not sad about Grandma Parrot, or Poppy, or Mummy’s baby that died.’
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?