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.
13
‘ “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.