‘What can I do for you?’
‘I’ve got a bad stomach. I’m getting pains.’
‘Whereabouts?’
‘Here.’
He points to his abdomen. I know from previous experience that I am not allowed to touch any part of BB’s body, but as most of BB’s troubles are caused, not by physiological malfunction, but by the first B of his name, this is not usually much of a handicap.
‘Have you been feeling nauseous? Sick?’
‘No.’
‘What about going to the toilet? Has that been OK?’
‘How do you mean?’ The tone of suspicion has returned.
‘Now, come on, Brian. If you’re having abdominal pain I need to ask you questions like this.’ A couple of years ago Brian frantically denied that he ever passed stools, and would only admit to peeing; I was reduced to insisting that I, too, had bowel movements, but he wouldn’t listen, and nor was he interested in hearing confessions from other members of staff.
‘I’ve stopped going.’
‘How long ago?’
‘Couple of weeks.’
‘That may well be your problem, then.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Two weeks without going to the loo is enough to give you a tummy ache. Has there been a change in your diet?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Are you eating different things?’
‘Yeah. Course.’ And he snorts, to emphasize the stupidity of the question.
‘Why?’
‘Because my mum died, didn’t she?’
If GoodNews were to touch my head now, he wouldn’t say that I had a flat battery. He would say that there were all sorts of things going on: pity, sadness, panic, hopelessness. I hadn’t realized that Brian had a mum—he is, according to my notes, fifty-one years old—but it makes complete sense. Of course there would have been a mum, and of course she would have kept the Brian show on the road, and now she has gone, and there are pyjamas and abdominal cramps.
‘I’m sorry, Brian.’
‘She was old old old. She said she’d die one day. But, see, how did she make the food hot? And how are you supposed to know what should be hot and what shouldn’t? ‘Cos sometimes we had ham. Cold. And sometimes we had bacon. Hot. And when you buy it they don’t tell you which one is which. I thought they would. I’ve been buying it, but I don’t know what to do with it. What about lettuce and cabbage? What about hot chicken and cold chicken? And I’m sure we had cold potatoes once, but they’re not like the cold potatoes that you buy in the shop. They were horrible, the ones I bought. I think I bought hot ones by mistake, but they were cold hot ones. I get muddled. I got muddled when I ate them and now I get muddled when I buy them. I feel very muddled.’
This is, I think, one of the saddest speeches I have ever heard, and it is all I can do to stop myself embracing poor Brian and weeping on his shoulder. ‘I feel very muddled, too,’ I want to tell him. ‘We all do. Not knowing what should be eaten raw and what you should cook isn’t such a big deal, when you consider the things other people get muddled about.’
‘I think maybe your tummy’s gone funny because of eating things like raw potatoes,’ I say eventually. ‘But it’s OK. There are all sorts of things we can do.’
And I do some of them. I prescribe him some liquid paraffin, and I recommend a bowel-loosening takeaway curry, and I promise that I will cook him dinner myself one evening. And when he has gone I call Social Services.
When I get home, David and GoodNews announce that after several weeks’ deliberation, they have finally isolated their candidates for ‘reversal’—their equivalents of Hope and Christopher, the people they feel most guilty about in their whole lives. I’m tired, and hungry, and not terribly interested, but they stand in front of me anyway and insist that they tell me.
‘Go on, then,’ I say, with as much weariness as I feel, plus a little extra for effect.
‘Mine’s called Nigel Richards,’ David says proudly.
‘Who’s Nigel Richards?’
‘He’s a kid I used to beat up at school. Except he’s not a kid now. He used to be. In the early seventies.’
‘You’ve never mentioned him before.’
‘Too ashamed,’ says David, almost triumphantly.
I cannot help feeling that there must be someone else, someone more recent—a former colleague, a family member, me me me—but even on a day like today, when I am depressed and tired, I know better than to provide David with a long, thorny list with which he will flagellate himself for months to come. If he feels bad about Nigel Richards, then Nigel Richards it is.
GoodNews, meanwhile, has chosen his sister.
‘What’, I ask, ‘did you do to your sister?’
‘Nothing, really. I just… I can’t stand her, that’s all. So I never see her. And she’s my sister. I feel bad about it, you know?’
‘Do I still have to play with Hope, Mummy?’
‘You’ve done your bit.’
‘Well, we’ve never really done our bit, have we?’ says David. ‘It’s a lifelong commitment.’
‘So Nigel Richards is going to be your new best friend? We’ll be spending all our time with Mr and Mrs Richards in the future?’
‘I’m sure Nigel Richards won’t need me as a best friend. I’m sure he’s gone on to have millions of successful and fulfilling relationships. But if he hasn’t, then I’ll be there for him, yes.’
‘You’ll be there for someone you don’t know because you thumped him twenty-five years ago?’
‘Yes. Exactly. I shouldn’t have done it.’
‘And that’s really the only thing you can think of that you shouldn’t have done?’
‘Not the only. The first.’
It looks like being a very long life.
It is, I confess, my idea to join forces—to combine Brian and Nigel and GoodNews’s sister Cantata (for that is her name—self-chosen at the age of twenty-three, apparently, after a particularly intense experience under the influence of acid in the Royal Festival Hall) at the dinner table in the hope of expunging all our sins at one fell swoop—or at least, that is how I present it to David, who cannot see the prospect of anything but a very jolly evening, even if Nigel is now the chairman of a multinational bank and is seated next to Brian and his malfunctioning bowels for the entire evening.
The truth is that I have given up expecting anything approaching a pleasant or even tolerable social life, and so my motives for the suggestion are born from cynicism and a kind of despairing perversity: why not sit them all down together? The more the merrier! The worse the better! If nothing else, the evening will become an anecdote that may amaze and delight my friends for years to come; and maybe the desire for nice evenings with people I know and love is essentially bourgeois, reprehensible—depraved, almost.
GoodNews goes first. He phones the last number he had for Cantata, and then he is given another one, and then another one, and finally he tracks her down to a squat in Brighton.
‘Cantata? It’s GoodNews.’
But apparently not—she hangs up.
GoodNews phones the number again.
‘Beforeyouputthephonedownagainlistento me… Thank you. I’ve been thinking a lot about you, and how badly I’ve treated you. And I wanted to…’
‘—‘
‘I know.’
‘—‘
‘I know.’
‘—‘
‘Ah, now that wasn’t my fault. I never called the police. That was Mum.’
‘—‘
‘Well, I didn’t run him over, did I? And I didn’t leave the door open, either.’
‘—‘
‘Oh, come on, Cantata. That cost seventy pence. And I’m pretty sure it was torn anyway.’
‘—‘
GoodNews jumps to his feet and then keeps jumping, up and down, like someone on a trampoline. Or rather, like someone who is trying to resolve a blood feud—the kind of problem that cannot be reached by healing hands, or answered on a piece of paper, or written about in a book, but only by jumping up and down, up and down, because that is the only response left to him. I wish I had thought of jumping up and down months ago. It would have been as useful as anything else.
‘No!’ GoodNews shouts. ‘No, no, no! YOU fuck off! YOU fuck off!’