‘Who are these people?’
‘I don’t know.’
He wanders off.
Remarkably, the party has started to resemble a party: people are laughing, talking, drinking, and the doorbell keeps ringing, and before long there is no more space in the living room, and people have spilled over into the kitchen. After a couple of glasses of wine, I even begin to feel a little sentimental. You know—here we all are, black, white, gay, straight, a microcosm of swinging, multicultural, multisexual London, eating cheese straws and talking about traffic schemes and mortgages, and getting on and isn’t this great? And then David stands on a chair and bangs a saucepan with a wooden spoon, and I am woken from my little reverie.
‘Good evening, everyone,’ says David.
‘Good evening,’ shouts Mike, the seedy looking builder, who, as luck would have it, is A Character.
‘When our invitation dropped through your letterbox, you probably thought to yourself, “What’s the catch? Why is this guy who I don’t know from Adam inviting us to a party?” ’
‘I’m only here for the beer,’ shouts Mike.
‘Well, it is Double Diamond,’ shouts somebody else.
‘No it isn’t,’ Mike shouts back. The two shouters are convulsed for what seems like several minutes.
‘I’d love to tell you that there isn’t a catch, but there is. A big catch. Because tonight I’m going to ask you to change people’s lives, and maybe change your own life, too.’
‘Backs to the wall!’ shouts Mike. You don’t have to be a psychoanalyst to worry about someone who thinks that changing one’s own life probably has something to do with homosexuality.
‘How many of you have got a spare bedroom?’ David asks.
‘Yes, thank you,’ Mike shouts. ‘It’s where I sleep when the missus won’t have me in with her.’
‘So that’s one,’ says David. ‘Any more?’
Most people choose to examine either their wine glasses or their feet.
‘Don’t be shy,’ David says. ‘I’m not going to ask you to do anything you don’t want to do. All I know is that this street is full of three-storey houses, and there must be quite a few empty rooms somewhere, because you haven’t all got two-point-four children.’
‘What about if you live in a flat?’ asks a young guy in a leather jacket.
‘Is it a one-bedroom flat?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, you haven’t got a spare bedroom.’
‘Can I go home, then?’
‘You can go home any time you want. This is a party, not a detention centre.’
‘Could have fooled me,’ shouts Mike. His partner in comedy, the man who made the Double Diamond witticism, has come to stand by him, and offers him his hand for a high-five.
‘I’m sorry to hear you’re not enjoying yourself.’ For a moment I think I catch a glimpse of the old David, visible like old paint through the new undercoat: there’s a sarcasm in there that only I would be able to hear. The old taste for verbal confrontation is peeking out, too, because he doesn’t say anything else: he’s waiting for Mike’s follow-up, his next crack, and Mike hasn’t got one, because in the end he’s merely a bit of a twit, someone who would shout out daft things at any sort of gathering with alcohol, be it a wedding or a christening or a save-the-world party such as this, and he wants to push things so far but no further, and now David is calling his bluff.
‘Aren’t you having a very nice time?’
‘No, you’re all right,’ says Mike, deflated.
‘Because Eastenders probably starts in a minute.’ And that gets a laugh—not a huge one, but bigger than anything Mike has managed so far.
‘I don’t watch Eastenders,’ says Mike. ‘I don’t watch any soaps, actually.’ This gets the biggest laugh so far, but they’re laughing at him, at the banality of the riposte, and the laughter clearly stings him a little bit.
‘So you’re staying?’
‘I’ll finish my drink, anyway.’
‘Glad to hear it.’
Another chuckle, and now they’re on his side. David has put down a heckler, and I feel obscurely, perhaps nostalgically proud. Now I come to think of it, heckler downputting would have been the perfect job for the old David. He had just the right combination of belligerence and quickwittedness. He’d have made a terrible stand-up, because he mumbles quite a lot, and loses the thread, in an unamusing, bumbling way, and anyway the objects of his derision were always obscure and complicated (theatre curtains, small tubs of ice-cream, etc.). But maybe if he’d teamed up with a comedian, he could have been brought on at crucial moments, like an anaesthetist. Maybe that was his calling. (And is that the nicest thing I can find to say about his talent? That it is perfectly suited to quelling verbal insurrection at alcoholic gatherings? This is hardly the mark of a polymath. Hardly the mark of someone lovable, either.)
He pauses, to let the mood change.
‘Now, where was I? Oh yeah. Spare bedrooms. See, I don’t know about you, but I turn on the TV, or I pick up a paper, and something terrible’s happening in Kosovo or Uganda or Ethiopia, and sometimes I call a number and I give a tenner, and it changes nothing. The terrible thing continues to happen. And I feel guilty and powerless, and I continue to feel guilty and powerless when I go out later, to the pictures or for a curry or to the pub…’
The pub! The pub! Which ‘pub’ would that be, David? The ‘local’? The Patronizing Bastard?
‘…And maybe I’m feeling guilty and powerless enough to keep it going, this feeling of wanting to do something, and there’s this kid sitting by the cashpoint with a blanket and a dog, and I give him fifty pence, and that changes nothing either, because next time I go to the cashpoint he’s still sitting there, and my fifty pence has done nothing. Well, of course it’s done nothing, because it’s fifty pence, and if I give him ten fifty pences, well, that’ll do nothing either, because that’s five quid. And I hate him sitting there. I think we all do. If you think about it for ten seconds, you can sort of guess just how horrible it would be, sleeping in the cold, begging for change, getting rained on, people coming up and abusing you…’
I look around. He’s doing OK, apart from the pub bit. People are listening, and one or two are nodding, but you couldn’t say that the light of conversion was shining in their eyes. He needs to pull something out of the bag, before he loses them.
Luckily, someone does it for him.
‘I don’t believe this,’ says Mike. ‘They’re all arseholes, these people.’
‘Which people?’
‘These bloody homeless people. And they’re loaded, half of them. Loads of money.’
‘Ah,’ says David. ‘Loads of money. Which is why they sit on the pavement begging?’
‘That’s how they get it, isn’t it? And then they blow it on drugs. I’ve been looking for bricklayers for six months, and have I heard from any of that lot? Course I haven’t. They don’t want to work.’
There are a couple of snorts, one or two tuts, a great deal of head-shaking and exchanged glances followed by raised eyebrows. Mike is surrounded by gay actors, Health Service professionals, teachers, psychoanalysts, people whose hearts bleed right through their Gap T-shirts, and even if, in the middle of the night, they catch themselves thinking that the homeless only have themselves to blame and they all take drugs and have bank balances bigger than ours, they would never ever say so out loud, during waking hours, and especially not at a party. Mike has misjudged his audience, and in doing so, he changes the dynamic in the room. Two minutes ago, David was talking to a lot of bemused faces; no one here wished him any ill, but neither were they willing to pledge a substantial part of their house to his cause. Now, it’s different. Whose side are they on? Are they going to line up with the forces of right-wing darkness, i.e., Mike? Or are they on the side of the (slightly eccentric, possibly misguided, but angelic nonetheless) angels? Hurrah for angels! the psychoanalysts cry. Down with the right-wing forces of darkness! shout the gay actors. Not that there’s any actual shouting, of course. They’re too restrained for that. But Mike certainly has a little more floor space than he did. People have shuffled away from him, as if he were about to launch into some fancy dance routine.