How to Be Good (20 page)

David gives me a look that lets me know I am being unhelpful, but I don't think that's true. Wendy and Ed are actually being pretty good about this. They could have come round here and thrown David from an upstairs window, or sat on him until he burst, but
they just seem bewildered and hurt. And now they are being told that their powers of deduction are faulty.

‘GoodNews is right,' says David, with a wearying predictability. ‘We mustn't stereotype these kids. That's kind of how they got into this mess in the first place.'

Monkey comes into the kitchen, dressed in some of David's cast-offs and yawning.

‘Do you know Robbie?' I ask him. ‘The guy who was living with Ed and Wendy here?'

‘Yeah,' says Monkey. ‘He's a thieving little cunt. Pardon my language.'

‘How do you know?' David asks.

‘How do I know he's a thieving little cunt? 'Cos he steals everything.' Misjudging the mood somewhat, he laughs heartily at his own witticism.

‘He's stolen some stuff from us and disappeared,' says Ed.

‘Yeah, well, I could have told you that would happen. What's he taken?'

Ed tells him what is missing.

‘Little fucker. Right.' And Monkey disappears too.

We make Ed and Wendy a cup of tea. David puts his head in his hands and stares mournfully at the floor. ‘It was a high-risk strategy, I suppose. Thinking about it now.' That last phrase I would have found particularly difficult to swallow, if I were Ed and Wendy. They might have hoped that the thought had been done beforehand.

‘You shouldn't worry too much about it,' GoodNews tells them cheerfully. ‘You did the right thing. No matter how much you've lost. He could have taken everything you own, every last penny you've got, and you could go to sleep tonight knowing that your conscience is clear. More than clear. It's . . .' GoodNews struggles for a moment to find a word that means ‘more than clear', and then gives up and settles for a beaming smile that doesn't seem to offer Ed and Wendy as much consolation as he might have anticipated.

*

Forty-five minutes later Monkey is back, with the camera, the bracelet, fifty of the seventy pounds, and Robbie, who is bleeding profusely from a cut above his right eye. David is angry, GoodNews anguished.

‘How did he get that?' David asks.

Monkey laughs. ‘He walked into a door.'

‘Oh, man,' says GoodNews. ‘This isn't what we're about.'

‘I can't sanction violence,' David says.

‘What does that mean?'

‘It means I don't agree with it.'

‘Yeah, well,' says Monkey. ‘I asked him nicely but he wouldn't listen.'

‘I was going to come back with the stuff,' wails Robbie. ‘There wasn't any need for him to slap me around. I was only . . .' Robbie tries and fails to come up with a convincing explanation for why he would need purely temporary use of a video camera and a bracelet, and trails off.

‘Is that true, Monkey?' David asks. ‘Was he going to come back with the stuff?'

‘I'll give you my honest opinion, David: No, it isn't true. He wasn't going to come back with the stuff. He was going to flog it.' Monkey delivers the line for laughs, and gets them – from Ed and me, anyway. David and GoodNews aren't laughing, though. They just look stricken.

I ask Monkey to take Robbie for a walk somewhere while we talk.

‘So now what?' I ask. ‘Do you want to get the police in, you two?'

‘Ah, now, you really want to think hard about that,' says GoodNews. ‘Because the police, you know . . . That's quite heavy. If twenty pounds means so much to you, you know . . .'

Significantly, he trails off before completing the sentence in the way that sense and custom dictate. There will be no offers of recompense from this quarter, clearly.

‘What?' I ask him.

‘It's like, not much, is it, twenty quid? I mean, a young life has got to be worth more than that.'

‘So you're saying that Ed and Wendy are mean. Callous.'

‘I'm just saying that if it were me that lost the money, you know . . .'

‘You're not involved,' I tell him. ‘It's Ed and Wendy's decision.'

‘If we get the police in,' David says, ‘it'll make it very difficult for Robbie to carry on where he is. He might feel that Ed and Wendy don't want him.'

I don't think even I had quite realized, up until this point, just what a limp grasp on reality David now has.

‘We don't bloody want him,' says Ed. ‘Little shit.'

GoodNews is staggered. ‘You don't want him? Because of this? Come on, guys. We knew it was going to be a hard road. I didn't think you two would fall at the first hurdle.'

‘You told us you'd vetted everybody,' says Wendy.

‘We did,' David says. ‘We got recommendations from a local hostel. But, you know. It must have been very tempting for him. There's money lying around, and jewellery, and electronic goods, and . . .'

‘So it's our fault?' says Ed. ‘Is that what you're telling us?'

‘Not your fault, exactly. But maybe we're not quite seeing the . . . the extent of the cultural gap here.'

Ed and Wendy look at each other and walk out.

‘I'm very disappointed in them,' says David, almost to himself. ‘I thought they were made of tougher stuff than that.'

 

I clean Robbie up and suggest to him that it might be politic to disappear. He's not entirely happy with the suggestion – like David and GoodNews, he seems to believe that I am indulging in some unhelpful stereotyping, and that he hasn't been given a chance. We have quite a lively debate about it all, as you can imagine, because my own feeling, a feeling that Robbie doesn't share, is that he has been given a chance, and he hasn't responded entirely positively to it.

He disagrees. ‘That camera thing was cheap Korean crap,' he says. ‘And like GoodNews says, it was only twenty quid.'

This, I try to point out, is beside the point – indeed, it is a non
sequitur – but I don't make very much headway. After a much briefer conversation with Monkey he decides that Webster Road isn't for him after all. We never see him again.

 

News of the misfortune spreads up and down the street, and we receive several visits during the course of the day. All the other four hosts want to talk to David and GoodNews, of course, but Ed and Wendy's immediate neighbours – including Mike, whose ideological opposition to the project has predictably hardened overnight – are also unhappy. Mike pays us a visit.

‘This isn't anything to do with you,' says David.

‘What, when I've got a bloody tea-leaf living next door?'

‘You don't know who you've got living next door,' says David. ‘You're judging someone before you've got to know them.'

‘You're jumping,' says GoodNews, pleased with his new verb. ‘And we're not jumpers here.'

‘What, so I've got to wait until half my fucking stuff has gone before I'm allowed to complain?'

‘Why don't we call a street meeting?' says David.

‘What good will that do?'

‘I want to gauge the temperature. See how other people feel.'

‘I don't give a fuck how other people feel.'

‘That's not what living in a community is about, Mike.'

‘I don't live in a fucking community. I live in my house. With my things. And I want to keep them.'

‘OK. So maybe you should be given the opportunity to express that. Meet the kids and tell them you don't want them in your house.'

‘Tell them! Tell them! If they have to be told not to break in, they shouldn't be here in the first place.'

‘And where should they be?'

‘In a hostel, back on the street, who cares?'

‘I do, obviously. That's why I'm doing this.'

‘Yeah, well, I don't.'

‘What do you care about, Mike?' This is GoodNews's first contribution to the debate, but it is the most incendiary so far: Mike is
now dangerously close to thumping somebody. I have conflicting loyalties. I don't like Mike very much, but on the other hand both David and GoodNews clearly need thumping, and it is difficult to see who else is going to do it.

‘Listen,' says David. He has come back from the brink; I can hear the desire to pacify in his voice. ‘I understand why you're worried. But I promise you you've got nothing to worry about. Please meet the other kids and listen to what they've got to say. And if anything else like this happens, well, I've got it all wrong and I'll have to think again. OK?'

It's enough, just; Mike calms down, and agrees to come round later on, although I suspect that David has some way to go before he manages to convert him to the cause. Meanwhile we prepare – some of us with heavier hearts than others – yet more cheese straws, for yet another community gathering in our house.

 

Rather sweetly, the kids all come with their hosts, rather than with each other, as if to demonstrate their new allegiances. They have to be nudged through the door, like much younger children attending a birthday party, and when they are in they stand there staring at the floor while the adults introduce them gently and, well, yes, proudly.

‘This is Sas,' says Richard, the gay actor from
The Bill
. Sas is a chronically shy eighteen-year-old from Birmingham who arrived in London two years ago after being sexually assaulted by her stepfather. She wants to be a nurse; she has recently been working as a prostitute. Some parts of her – her body language, the braids in her hair – make her look nine; her eyes make her look forty-five.

No one, not even Mike, could want anything else bad to happen to her.

Martina brings a girl called Tiz. Tiz is spotty and fat, and she and Martina, I notice, are holding hands when they come in. Ros and Max bring their own daughter Holly and her new best friend, Annie, who is older than the others, twenty-two or so, and is wearing what are clearly Ros's clothes – a long dress with a flowered print and a pair of sparkly sandals. Robert and Jude's Craig is
wearing a suit, another cast-off, and his hair is wet from the shower and he looks like a sweet, scared little boy. That's what strikes you most about all of them: when they arrived they all looked as though they had seen too much, too young, and it's as if the comforts of Webster Road, the baths and the showers, have washed all that unimaginable filthy experience from their bodies and their faces. Now they all look as they should – and shouldn't, if the world were a different place. They look like terrified young people who are a long way from family and home and a life that any of us would want to live.

Mike doesn't stand a chance – he isn't even allowed to speak. Max points out that they have been burgled three times in the last two years, and it doesn't really matter if thieves are living next door to you or a couple of streets away. Martina tells Mike that she has lived alone for fifteen years, and enjoys Tiz's company so much that she would be devastated if she disappeared now. ‘I would haf to go and find another Tiz,' she says.

Sas speaks last. She's not a good speaker – she's shy, and she looks at her shoes, and she stops and starts, and no one can really hear her anyway. But what is clear is that she is desperate for this chance – desperate to stay with Simon and Richard, desperate to go to college so that she can pass some exams, desperate not to return to how things were for her before. She wanted to kill Robbie, she said, because she knew what it meant, and what people would think of the rest of them, and she said if anything else got stolen while they were in the street she would personally pay the victims back out of her own pocket, even if it took her the rest of her life. When she has finished Richard comes up and hugs her, while everyone else claps. Mike goes home, looking as if he might burgle his own house and disappear.

Richard comes up to me afterwards to thank me for the evening – as if I have done anything apart from complain about yet more intrusion.

‘I know Sas thinks we've done a lot for her,' he says. ‘But I can't describe what she's done for us. I mean, look at me. A bad actor who's thrilled to bits if I survive more than one week in a hospital
bed in
Casualty
. I've done nothing with my life. And now I'm on this permanent high. If Sas ever qualifies as a nurse I'll die a happy man. And I'd cry for a month. You must be very proud of David.'

‘I am a doctor, you know,' I say. ‘I've saved the odd life myself.' Richard stares at me until I run off and lock myself in the toilet.

 

This is not their story; it is mine, and David's. So I want to bring their story to an end, and tell you what has happened to them all. Craig and Monkey disappeared, after a few days in Monkey's case, and a few weeks in Craig's. Monkey took some money when he went, but it was money that David and I had put to one side to be stolen: when we began to suspect that Monkey was unhappy, and uncomfortable, and itching to move on to something else, I showed him the kitchen jar where we keep our emergency money, and then we put five twenty pound notes in it. We knew it would go, and it did. Craig was talking about going to find his mother, apparently, and we hope that's where he has gone. The girls are still here, in the street, and it is as if they never had a previous life at all. So. David wanted to rescue ten kids. He had to settle for six. Three of those six were beyond his reach. If the other three stay, and get jobs, and find homes of their own, and partners, maybe, then . . . Oh, you can do the maths yourself. I don't mean the three-out-of-ten maths, of course. I mean the rest of it. Because I don't know the value of anything any more.