How to Be Good (21 page)

The only scenes I can stand in any of the
Star Wars
films are the quiet scenes in the second one,
The Empire Strikes Back
. Or rather, it used to be the second one, before the fourth one became the first one, thus making the second one the fifth one. A couple of years ago Tom used to watch his
Star Wars
videos over and over again, in sequence, and at first I preferred
The Empire Strikes Back
simply because it offered some respite from all the roaring and banging and whizzing. But later I came to appreciate its . . . I don't know what you'd call it. Message? Moral? Do
Star Wars
films have messages? Anyway, something in it began to chime somewhere in me, and I wanted to be Luke Skywalker, off somewhere on my own, learning to be a Jedi. I wanted a break from the war. I wanted someone wise to teach me how to do the things I needed to know to survive the rest of my life. And I know it's pathetic that it should have been a children's science-fiction film telling me this – it should have been George Eliot, or Wordsworth, or Virginia Woolf. But then, that's precisely the point, isn't it? There is no time or energy for Virginia Woolf, which means that I am forced to look for meaning and comfort in my son's
Star Wars
videos. I have to be Luke Skywalker because I don't know who else to be.

When Monkey and his pals moved into the street, I became acutely aware of the need to think; it seemed as though life were unsustainable without thought, in fact. I couldn't work out who was right and who was wrong, my house was full of people I didn't know . . . I was going mad, really. So I had to do this, didn't I? And of course it's selfish and indulgent and bad, but it seemed at the time as though I couldn't work out how to be good without being bad. Anyone would understand. God, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Miriam Stoppard, anyone. Wouldn't they? And it doesn't mean I love my children less, and it doesn't even mean I
love my husband less (I don't think, although that's one of the things I need to think about) . . .

 

I've moved out. Sort of, anyway. Except that nobody knows. Well, David and GoodNews know, and a colleague called Janet, for reasons that will become clear, but Molly and Tom don't, not yet. I now live, or at least sleep, in a bedsit just around the corner, and I put the kids to bed at night, and I set the alarm for six-fifteen in the morning, get dressed, and walk straight out of the flat, no tea, no muesli, nightdress and dressing gown in a carrier bag, so that I am back in the familial house at six-thirty. The children usually need to be woken an hour later, but I'm there on the off-chance that either of them should get up earlier. (They rarely wake in the night now, and when they do, David has always been the one to deal with them, simply because I am the one with the proper job.) I then change back into my nightdress and dressing gown in order to remove any last doubts the children might have – although they would have to be very suspicious indeed to suspect that the mother who puts them to bed at night and is there at breakfast the next morning has moved out – and spend my extra hour reading the paper that I have brought with me. In theory, I get an hour's less sleep, but this is no hardship, because in practice it feels like I have slept for an hour longer, such is the revivifying effect of being on my own for the night.

 

I'm not paying for the room; it belongs to Janet Walder, the third person who knows about my new domestic arrangements. Janet works at the surgery and has gone back to New Zealand for a month to see her new niece. If it hadn't been for Janet's new niece, in fact, I would never have taken the decision to move out. Like those thieves who would never have dreamed of stealing a wallet if they hadn't seen it sticking out of somebody's pocket, the opportunity was all: she just happened to mention that she was leaving her room empty, and within seconds I had made my mind up. It was as if I were powerless to resist the temptation; my senses were overcome. I could hear the emptiness, and taste the silence, and
smell the solitude, and I wanted it more than I have ever wanted anything before. (And what does that say about me? What kind of sensualist craves nothingness?) And then I invented my post-bedtime, pre-breakfast plan, on the spot, in seconds, because necessity is the mother of invention. And then I went home and told David what I was doing, and then I did it.

‘Why?' David asked – not unreasonably, I suppose.

Because of everything, I told him. Because of GoodNews, and because of Monkey, and because I'm frightened of what you might do next. And because I'm disappearing, I wanted to tell him. Every day I wake up and there's a little bit less of me. But I couldn't say that, because I didn't know whether I was entitled to, and nor would I ever know, unless I got my Jedi training.

‘I dunno, really,' I said. ‘I just want some time out.'

‘Time out of what?'

Time out of our marriage, I should have said. Because that, really, is what it comes down to. That's all there is left, when you take away working hours and family suppers and family breakfasts: the time I get on my own is the time I would have spent being a wife, rather than being a mother or a doctor. (And God, how frightening, that those are the only options available. The only times when I am not performing one of those three roles is when I am in the bathroom.) But of course I didn't say that either; I just waved a hand airily at what I hoped he would see was a decaying, wartorn planet that didn't have enough oxygen to support complex life forms.

‘Please don't go,' he said, but I couldn't hear any conviction or desperation in his voice. Maybe I wasn't trying hard enough.

‘Why don't you want me to go?' I asked him. ‘What difference will it make to you?'

And there was a long, thoughtful, fatal pause before he said anything, a pause that allowed me first to ignore and then to forget what it was he eventually cobbled together.

 

Janet's bedsit is at the top of a large terraced house on Taymor Road, which runs parallel to Webster Road. The terrace is weird,
because it's actually very beautiful, but was allowed to decay. Now the houses are being recovered, one by one, and I'm in the middle of a row of the last three tatty houses left.

There are three flats underneath me, and I now know and like the inhabitants of all of them. Gretchen, who works in PR and has promised me all sorts of free samples, lives in the garden flat, the biggest of the four; and above her is Marie, who teaches philosophy at the University of North London and goes home to Glasgow at weekends, and above Marie is Dick, a quiet, very nervous guy who works in a local record shop.

It's fun here. We make decisions together, decisions about how to live our lives, and where responsibilities lie, and what would be for the greatest possible good. Last week, for example, Gretchen hosted a house meeting, and we voted to get a bigger letter box: Marie orders a lot of books from Amazon and the postman can't put them through the door, so he has taken to leaving them out on the front step, where they get wet. Do you hear that, David? Letter box sizes! Those are the things we can change! (Probably – although we haven't yet got a quote, and we're not sure who instals letter boxes, or how to find out.) It was an entirely satisfactory discussion, short, logical, harmonious and just: Marie will pay two thirds of the installation costs, and I will pay nothing. And we drank wine, and listened to Air, who are French, and play mostly instrumentals that sound as if they are best heard in lifts. Air are my new favourite group, although Dick is a bit snooty about them, in his quiet, nervous way. He says there's much better ambient French pop than this, and he could do us a tape if we wanted.

But to me Air sound modern and childless and single, compared to, say, Dylan, who sounds old and married and burdened – who sounds like home. If Air are Conran, then Dylan is the greengrocers. Mushrooms, lettuce and tomato, home to cook bolognese and prepare a salad, and how does it feeeeeel? To be on your oowwwn? Except I never am whenever Bob is singing. This, I can't help feeling, is what communal living should be about: cool music and white wine and letter boxes and a closed door when you need it. Next time we're going to talk about whether we need a table in the
hall for post, and I'm looking forward to it. (My feeling is that we do, although I'm prepared to listen to those who disagree.)

Everyone is single here, and I like that, too. None of them want to be single, I suspect; even the other night there were lots of very forced, very self-deprecating and very well-rehearsed jokes about their romantic status, and I would surmise that if the subject came up during a house meeting about letter boxes – Gretchen wondered whether the size of the slot was responsible for the poor show on Valentine's Day, and we all laughed dutifully and mock-sorrowfully – it would come up in a discussion about anything at all. And though I'm sorry for them, if they are sorry for themselves, it suits my purposes that none of them should be in relationships, because it adds to that in-between, Empire-Strikes-Back atmosphere; it feels as though I have just started a fresh sheet on someone else's drawing pad. Mine got used up, every corner filled in, and I didn't like what I had done.

I don't think about how long I can live like this. Janet will be back in a few weeks, but already I have wondered whether Marie will be using her flat during the summer, and whether I could afford my own bedsit as well as the mortgage and two children and a husband and GoodNews and the homeless. And all this without considering whether this is a life worth living – whether these couple of hours every night, either on my own, or listening to Air with Dick and Marie and Gretchen and talking about letter box capacity, would do me for the next forty-odd years. At the moment it feels as though it would, but I'd probably be unwise to sign a forty-year lease on anything just yet.

But, bloody hell, I'm happy, for those precious two hours. I'm happier than I've been for years and years. I think. I watch Janet's tiny TV. I have even been reading the review pages of newspapers, and in the two weeks I've been here, I have got through seventy-nine pages of
Captain Corelli's Mandolin
. I pay for it during the night, I hasten to add. Those two hours cost me. On my first night here I woke up covered in sweat after a nightmare, and realized where I was, and where I wasn't. And I got dressed, and walked home and back, just so that I could hear the kids breathing. I have woken
most nights since then at 2.25 a.m. precisely, feeling bereft and lonely and guilty and frantic with worry and fear, and it takes me ages to get back to sleep. And yet I still wake up in the morning feeling refreshed.

 

At the beginning of my third week in Janet's flat, I come home to find Tom watching TV with a new friend. The new friend is a little fat child with a boil near his nose and a boy-band fringe that only serves to accentuate, or perhaps even poke fun at, his almost startling unattractiveness. ‘You know the kind of faces I'm usually found on?' the fringe seems to be saying. ‘Well, have a look at this one!' Tom's friends don't look like this. They look handsome and cool. Cool is very important to Tom; fat and boils (and fluffy brown-and-white sweaters) are usually of even less interest to him than they are to anyone else.

‘Hello,' I say brightly. ‘Who's this?'

The new friend looks at me, and then looks around the room, head wobbling, to try to locate the stranger in our midst. Heartbreakingly, given his other disadvantages, he doesn't appear to be very bright; even after having ascertained that there is no one else with us, he declines to answer my question, presumably on the assumption that he would get it wrong.

‘Christopher,' mumbles Tom.

‘Hello, Christopher.'

‘Hello.'

‘Are you staying for tea?'

He stares at me again. Nope. He's not going to risk getting caught out on that one.

‘She's asking you if you're staying for tea,' shouts Tom.

I am suddenly stricken with remorse and embarrassment. ‘Is Christopher deaf?'

‘No,' says Tom contemptuously. ‘Just thick.'

Christopher turns his head to look at Tom, and then pushes him in the chest, feebly. Tom looks at me and shakes his head in what I can only interpret as disbelief.

‘Where's your father?'

‘In GoodNews's room.'

‘Molly?'

‘Upstairs. She's got a friend round, too.'

Molly is in her room with what appears to be the eight-year-old female equivalent of Christopher. Molly's new friend is tiny, grey-skinned, bespectacled and unambiguously malodorous – Molly's bedroom has never smelt like this before. The air in the room is a witch's brew of farts, body odour and socks.

‘Hello. I'm Hope.' Hope. My God. The almost supernatural inappropriateness of Hope's name is an awful warning to all parents everywhere. ‘I've come to play with Molly. We're playing cards. It's my turn.' She places a card carefully on a pile.

‘The three of diamonds. It's your turn now, Molly.' Molly places a card on the pile. ‘The five of clubs.' Hope is as loquacious as Christopher is silent. She describes everything that she does. And everything she sees. And she has an apparent fear of compound sentences. So she sounds like Janet, from ‘Janet and John'.

‘What are you playing?'

‘Snap. This is our third game. Nobody's won yet.'