‘Ha! Good question!’ When normal people give this answer to that question, they are usually making a joke. You know: ‘Good question! Bugger all, really! Blowed if I know!’, etc. But David means: ‘Phew! How would I explain it, in all its knotty complexity!’
‘Thank you.’
The woman on the next table catches my eye. ‘Don’t move in!’ she’s trying to say. ‘He doesn’t even recognize sarcasm!’ I try to answer her back, using similar methods: ‘It’s OK! We’ve been married for donkey’s years! But we’ve sort of lost touch recently! Spiritual conversion!’ I’m not sure she picks it all up, though. It’s a lot of information to convey without words.
‘We’re more at a strategic stage. We haven’t got any actual projects on the go, but we’re thinking.’
‘Right. What are you thinking about?’
‘We’re thinking about how we can persuade people to give away everything they earn over and above the national average wage. We’re just doing the sums at the moment.’
‘How are they working out?’
‘Well, you know. It’s tough. It’s not as straightforward as it sounds.’
I’m not making this up. This is actually what he says, in real life, in the Curry Queen.
‘Oh, and we’re sort of writing a book.’
‘A book.’
‘Yes. “How to be Good”, we’re going to call it. It’s about how we should all live our lives. You know, suggestions. Like taking in the homeless, and giving away your money, and what to do about things like property ownership and, I don’t know, the Third World and so on.’
‘So this book’s aimed at high-ranking employees of the IMF?’
‘No, no, it’s for people like you and me. Because we get confused, don’t we?’
‘We do.’
‘So it’s a good idea, don’t you think?’
‘It’s a fantastic idea.’
‘You’re not being sarcastic?’
‘No. A book telling us what to think about everything? I’d buy it.’
‘I’ll give you a copy.’
‘Thank you.’
The woman on the next table doesn’t want to catch my eye any more. We’re no longer pals. She thinks I’m as daft as David is, but I don’t care. I want this book badly, and I shall believe every word, and act on every suggestion, no matter how impractical. ‘How to be Good’ will become the prescription the nice lady denied me. All I need to do is quell the doubt and scepticism that makes me human.
When we get home, GoodNews is asleep in an armchair, a notebook open on his chest. While David is putting the kettle on, I pick the notebook up carefully and sneak a look. ‘VEGETARIAN OR MEAT?????’ it says in large red letters. ‘ALLOWED ORGANIC???? Probly.’ No doubt the book will tell us how to feed a family of four on organic meat when we have given away most of our income. I put the book back gently where I found it, but GoodNews wakes anyway.
‘Did you have a cool time?’
‘Very cool,’ I say. ‘But I’ve got a splitting headache.’
David comes into the living room with three mugs of tea on a tray.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘You didn’t tell me.’
‘I’ve had it for a while. A few days. Anyone got any ideas?’
David laughs. ‘You know GoodNews. He’s full of ideas. But I didn’t think you were interested.’
‘I’m interested in having headaches taken away. Who wouldn’t be? And I can’t take any more paracetamol. I’ve been popping them all day.’
‘You serious?’ says GoodNews. ‘You want the treatment?’
‘Yeah. Why not?’
‘And you’re prepared for what might happen?’ David asks.
‘I’m prepared.’
‘OK, then. Shall we go to the study?’
In a way, I wish I did have a headache, but I don’t; I just have a soul-ache, and I want it taken away, whatever the cost. I have given up. I have not been able to beat them, so I will join them, and if that means that I never again utter a cogent sentence, or think a sardonic thought, or trade banter with colleagues or friends, then so be it. I will sacrifice everything that I have come to think of as me for the sake of my marriage and family unity. Maybe that’s what marriage is anyhow, the death of the personality, and GoodNews is irrelevant: I should have killed myself, as it were, years ago. As I walk up the stairs I feel like I am experiencing my own personal Jonestown.
GoodNews ushers me in and I sit on David’s writing chair.
‘Do I have to take anything off?’ I’m not afraid of GoodNews in that way. I doubt if he has a sexuality. I think it has been subsumed in some way, used as a stock for his spiritual stew.
‘Oh, no. If I can’t get through a couple of layers of cotton, I’m not gonna get through to the inner Katie, am I?’
‘So what do you want me to do?’
‘Just sit there. Where’s the headache?’
I point to a place where a headache might feasibly be, and GoodNews touches it gently.
‘Here?’
‘Yeah.’
He massages it for a little while. It feels good.
‘I’m not getting anything.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I mean, are you sure the headache is there?’
‘Maybe over a bit?’
He moves his fingers along a couple of inches and begins to knead my scalp gently.
‘Nah. Nothing.’
‘Really? Not even—ow!—just there?’
‘Not even just there. Sorry.’
The tone in his voice suggests that he knows I’m faking it, but is too polite to say anything.
‘Is that it, then?’
‘Yeah. Nothing I can do. I can’t find the pain.’
‘Can’t you just do the warm hands thing anyway?’
‘That’s not how it works. There’s got to be something there.’
‘What does that mean?’ I ask this because I know he’s not just talking about the headache. He is talking about something else, something that he thinks is missing, and I believe him to be right: there is something missing, which is why I came into this room in the first place.
‘I dunno. That’s just what my hands tell me. You’re not… I’m sorry if this sounds rude, but you’re not all there. In, like, the spiritual sense of the word.’
‘And David was?’
‘Must have been.’
‘But that’s not fair! David used to be a horrible, sarcastic, uncaring pig!’
‘Yeah, well, I don’t know about that. But there was something to work on. With you… It’s like a flat battery in a car. You know, I’m turning the ignition, and I’m turning the ignition, and it’s just… ker-chunk-ker-chunk-ker-chunk.’
The noise he makes is an uncanny articulation of how I feel.
‘Maybe you need some jump leads,’ says GoodNews cheerfully. ‘Shall we go downstairs and drink our tea?’
14
Barmy Brian, Heartsink No. 1, is first on my Monday morning list, and he’s not looking good. I know that a doctor’s surgery is not the place to see people looking their best, but Brian has deteriorated rapidly since I last saw him, about three weeks ago. He seems to be wearing pyjamas under his raincoat, he is unshaven, his hair is wild, his face is grey, his breath you would have to file under alcoholic/agricultural.
‘Hello, Brian,’ I say cheerily. ‘In a rush this morning?’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Aren’t those pyjamas you’re wearing?’
‘No.’
Even though Brian comes to see me regularly, he mistrusts me intensely and always thinks that I am trying to catch him out, as if I think that he is not who he says he is. Perhaps he isn’t—perhaps he’s Mental Mike, or Crazy Colin, or Loony Len—but my more or less constant position is that, whoever he is, he’s not a well man, and therefore in need of my help. It’s not the way he sees it, though. He seems to feel that if I succeed in unmasking him, I will banish him from the surgery.
‘I see. You’re just wearing matching pink-and-blue striped shirt and trousers.’
‘No.’
I don’t push it (although believe me, he is wearing pyjamas, and he is only denying it because to admit it would give me some sort of crucial information he’d rather I didn’t have). There are unwritten rules for dealing with BB: you’re allowed some fun—otherwise we would all be as barmy as he is—but not too much fun.