‘Can’t you just enjoy it as a party?’ David says at breakfast, when I have complained once too often. ‘You like parties. Ignore the other bit.’
‘Ignore the bit where you harangue our friends and neighbours in my kitchen about the homeless?’
‘First, it’s our kitchen. Second, I’m not haranguing them—I’m talking to them, making suggestions about how we can create a better society in our street. And third, I’m going to do it in the living room, standing on a chair.’
‘You’ve completely turned me around,’ I say. ‘What can I do to help?’
‘We’re making cheese straws,’ says Molly. ‘You could do the sandwiches.’
‘I’m not making cheese straws,’ says Tom.
‘Why not?’ Molly is genuinely amazed that anyone could be this truculent when there is so much fun to be had.
‘Stupid.’
‘What do you want to make, then?’
‘I don’t want to make anything. I don’t want this party.’
‘Dad, Tom says he doesn’t want this party.’ She adds a little incredulous chuckle to the end of her report.
‘Not all of us feel the same way about things, Molly,’ says David.
‘You going to give anyone any more of my stuff?’
‘This thing isn’t about that,’ says David, somehow managing to imply that there might be another thing, later on, which is.
GoodNews comes in just as we’re all about to leave for work and school. He gets up at five-thirty but never comes downstairs until after half-past eight; I don’t know what he does up there for three hours, but I suspect that it’s something that even the most spiritual of us wouldn’t do for more than a few minutes. Molly and David greet him warmly, I nod, Tom glowers at him.
‘What’s up? What’s the word?’
‘Yeah, good,’ says David.
‘I’m going to make cheese straws,’ says Molly.
‘That’s great,’ says GoodNews, to whom everything is good news. ‘I’ve been thinking. What about some kind of medal? For those who volunteer on the spot?’
I don’t want to hear about medals. I don’t want to hear about parties or cheese straws, and I fantasize about spending the evening of the party in a cocktail bar with a girlfriend, drinking Slow Comfortable Screws or some other equally vulgar and anti-homeless concoction, hopefully at seven pounds a throw. I say goodbye to my children, but not to my husband or to GoodNews, and go to work.
As I’m walking down the path a woman I don’t know—mid-forties, slightly stroppy-looking, too much lipstick, lines around her mouth that suggests she’s spent the last couple of decades pursing her lips disapprovingly—stops me.
‘Did you invite me to a party?’
‘Not me. My husband.’
‘I got an invitation.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’ This is the question that most of our neighbours would want answered, but which only the unpleasant or mad ones would actually ask.
‘What do you mean, why?’
‘Why did your husband invite me to a party? He doesn’t know me.’
‘No. But he’d like to.’
‘Why?’
I look at her, and I can just about make out an aura of unpleasantness hovering above her head; I’m presuming that this particular ‘why’ is rhetorical, and that no one has ever wanted or could ever want to know her.
‘Because he has this mad vision that everyone in this street could love each other and get on with each other and Webster Road would be this lovely, happy place to live and we’d be in and out of each other’s houses and maybe each other’s beds and in any case we’d really look after each other. And he really wants you to… What’s your name?’
‘Nicola.’
‘He really wants you, Nicola, to be a part of all this.’
‘What night is it? Wednesday?’
‘Wednesday.’
‘I’m busy Wednesdays. I do women’s self-defence.’
I raise my palms and make a sad face, and she walks on. But I have a lot to thank her for: I can see the fun in this. Who would have thought that a desire to make the world a better place could be so aggressive? Maybe David hasn’t changed at all. Maybe all he ever wanted to do was upset people who need upsetting.
‘Would you like to come to a party?’
Mr Chris James stares at me. We have just been arguing for ten minutes about my refusal to provide a note explaining his absence from work for the previous fortnight; it is my belief that he was not ill. (It is my belief, in fact, that he has been in Florida or somewhere on holiday, because when he was rummaging in his pockets for a biro he managed to spill a whole handful of American small change all over the floor, and got very defensive when I asked him where he got it from.)
‘What sort of party?’
‘The usual sort. Drink, food, conversation, dancing.’ There will be no dancing, of course—it’s more your standing-around-listening-to-a-man-standing-on-a-chair-and-lecturing-you party than a dancing party—but Mr James isn’t to know that. (He isn’t to know that there is unlikely to be very much conversation, either, given the nature of the evening, but if I tell the truth then it doesn’t really sound like much of an invitation.)
‘What are you asking me for?’
‘I’m asking all my regulars.’ This is not true either, obviously, although I certainly intend to ask the patients I don’t like very much, which may well turn out to be the regulars, many of whom I have learned to dislike.
‘I don’t want to come to a party. I want a doctor’s note.’
‘You’ll have to settle for a doctor’s invitation.’
‘Shove it.’
I raise my palms and make a sad face, and Mr James walks out of my surgery. This is great! I’m not exactly killing with kindness, but I’m certainly leaving the odd flesh wound. I am a convert.
Barmy Brian Beech, Heartsink Number One, has come in to ask whether he can help me with the operations.
‘I wouldn’t want to do the actual cutting bits. Not straight away. I’d have to have a look at what to take out and all that.’
‘I’m a doctor,’ I tell him. ‘I don’t do operations.’
‘Who does, then?’
‘Surgeons. In hospitals.’
‘You’re just saying that,’ he says. ‘You’re just saying that because you don’t want me to help.’
It is true that if I were a surgeon, Barmy Brian would not be my first choice as assistant, but as I am not, I don’t have to have that particular conversation. I just have to have this one, which is in itself tortuous enough.
‘Just give me a chance,’ he says. ‘Just one chance. And if I mess it up, I won’t ask again.’
‘Do you want to come to a party?’ I ask him. He looks at me, all surgical ambitions suddenly abandoned, and I have achieved my immediate ambition, namely, to lead Brian away from a putative career in medicine. I have, however, invited him to a party at my house—not something I had thought of doing before. This party isn’t mine, though. It’s David’s.
‘How many people are at a party? More than seventeen?’
‘There’ll be more than seventeen at this one, probably. Why?’
‘I can’t go anywhere where there’s more than seventeen people. That’s why I couldn’t work at the supermarket, you see. There are loads of people there, aren’t there?’
I concede that the combined staff and customer numbers at the supermarket regularly exceed seventeen.
‘Well, there you are,’ he says. ‘Could I come maybe the day after, when they’ve all gone?’
‘Then it wouldn’t be a party, though.’
‘No.’
‘We’ll try and have one with sixteen. Another time.’
‘Would you?’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
For the first time ever, Brian leaves the surgery happy. And that makes me happy, until I realize that all this happiness comes as a direct result of David’s lunacy, and that, far from sabotaging David’s plans, I’m actually endorsing them. I have just been nice to exactly the kind of person David thinks I should be nice to, and as a consequence that person’s life has been momentarily ameliorated. I don’t like the implications of that.