‘If that’s how you feel, then you wouldn’t be interested in what I’ve got to say.’
‘No. I’m not. But I’m still finishing my drink.’
‘You’re welcome to finish your drink. But could I ask you to keep your views to yourself? I’m not sure whether anyone here is very interested in them.’
‘That’s ‘cos they’re a lot of stuck-up ponces.’
Mike’s floor space expands a little further. He could do a breakdancing routine now without landing on anyone’s head. Even the other half of his comedy duo has moved away from him. Mike has called David the thing that most people in this room fear being called; after all, we want to fit in, become part of the neighbourhood. We want Mike to be one of us, and we want Mike to want us to be his neighbours. It is true that he probably paid a few hundred pounds for his house back in the late sixties, when nobody like us wanted to live here, and some of us paid a quarter of a million pounds for our houses a couple of years ago. (Not David and I, though! We paid a hundred thousand for our house ten years ago!) But does that make us ponces? After all, Mike’s house is worth a quarter of a million, too, now. But of course that’s not the point. The point is that we are the sort of people who can afford to pay a quarter of a million for a house (or rather, we are the sort of people to whom banks will lend a quarter of a million for a house); which makes us the sort of people who give money to beggars (and no wonder, if we are mad enough to pay a quarter of a million for a house); and then there’s the pub at the end of the road, which once upon a time Mike might have drunk in, but which has now changed hands and clientele and serves Spanish sausages on a bed of something-or-other for ten pounds, and isn’t really a pub at all, and let’s face it, the ponces are responsible for that, as well as for other things, like the corner shop becoming an organic delicatessen… Golly, do we have a lot to answer for.
So Mike’s exit (he bangs down his drink on the mantelpiece and storms out) is both a blessing and a defeat, because even though we all feel guilty about the homeless, we also feel guilty that we have failed to accommodate Mike, that he no longer feels a part of his own neighbourhood, and maybe this double guilt helps David, too, because there is now so much collective guilt in the room that the ponces are just dying to compensate somehow. They want to do something gritty and difficult just to prove that they are not ponces, that they are good, thoughtful people who are unafraid of difficulty. If David wanted people to give up their homes at this precise second, a couple of them might do so; a bedroom—pah! Nothing!
And David detects this mood, and storms through the rest of his speech, while GoodNews stands beside him with a self-satisfied beam on his face. Do these people want to be like Mike? Do they want to do something better than anything they have ever done in their lives? Because David doesn’t care what we’re doing now: however caring our job is, however much we give to charity, nothing is going to make as much difference to individuals as this. Six months without the use of a spare bedroom could literally save a life, because with a home and a permanent address and somewhere to shave and shower, then these kids can apply for jobs, and then they can earn, and with a wage comes self-respect, and the ability to build a life without this kind of intervention…
‘I’m forty-one years old,’ says David, ‘and I have spent half my life regretting that I missed the sixties. I read about the energy, and I imagine what the music would have sounded like when you hadn’t heard it a thousand times before, and when it actually meant something, and I’ve always been sad that the world is different now. I got a bit excited about Live Aid, but then you realize that these problems… They’re too big now. They’re never going to go away. We can’t change the world, but we can change our street, and maybe if we can change our street, then other people will want to change theirs. We have hand-picked ten kids who are living rough and who need some help. They’re good kids. They’re not winos or junkies or thieves or lunatics; they’re people whose lives have gone badly wrong through no fault of their own. Maybe their stepfather has thrown them out, maybe someone died on them and they couldn’t cope… But we can vouch for them. If I can find ten spare bedrooms for these kids I’d feel that it was the greatest thing I’d ever done.’
‘Are you having one?’ someone asks.
‘Of course,’ says David. ‘How could I ask you to do this if I wasn’t prepared to?’
‘Can I ask where we’ll be putting him or her?’ This from the lady at the back, who already supports two children, a spiritual guru and a husband who has lost the will to work.
‘We’ll sort it out when everyone’s gone,’ says David. ‘Does anyone want to talk more about this?’
Four people put their hands up.
‘Four’s no good to me. I need more.’
One more hand, then nothing.
‘OK. Half now, half later.’
Weirdly, the whole room breaks into a spontaneous round of applause, and I feel as though I might cry the sort of tears that come at the end of soppy films.
GoodNews and David take the Famous Five into his study (a study that, presumably, is about to be converted into a bedroom) while the rest of us watch. It’s like that bit in a church wedding where the bride and groom and a few others shuffle off round the corner to sign the register, and the congregation beam at them, without knowing quite what else to do. (Is there singing at that point? Maybe. Maybe we should sing now—You’ve Got a Friend, or You’ll Never Walk Alone, something where the secular just starts to rub against the spiritual.)
For the record, the five volunteers are:
1. Simon and Richard, the gay couple at number 25.
2. Jude and Robert, a couple in their late thirties, who someone once told me were unable to have kids, and were trying to adopt, without much success. They’re at number 6.
(So, for those of you who have a need to understand why anyone should wish to do what these people are doing, a theme begins to emerge…)
3. Ros and Max, diagonally opposite us at number 29. Don’t know anything about them, because they’ve recently moved into the street, apart from 1) they have a daughter of Molly’s age and 2) just before David turned, he said he’d seen Ros on the bus reading his column and laughing, so perhaps her willingness to offer up a bedroom is some kind of penance.
4. Wendy and Ed, an older couple at number 19. They’ve always stopped to talk when we’ve been out with the kids; I don’t know much about them either, other than that they are both enormous and their children no longer live with them.
5. (Terrifying, this one) Martina, an old (properly old, seventy plus), frail Eastern European lady who lives on her own at number 21. Her grasp of English has always struck me as being remarkably weak for someone who has lived here for forty years, so heaven knows what she thinks she’s volunteered for; we’ll probably be given a large cake tomorrow, and she’ll be baffled and horrified when someone with dreadlocks knocks on her door in a week’s time.
A woman I’ve never seen before in my life comes up to me. ‘You must be very proud of him,’ she says. I smile politely, and say nothing.
We don’t get to bed until after midnight, but David’s much too hyper to sleep.
‘Is five any good, do you think?’
‘It’s amazing,’ I tell him, and I mean it, because I had anticipated nobody, nothing, a dismal and humiliating failure and the end of the story.
‘Really?’
‘Did you honestly think you could get ten people to volunteer?’
‘I didn’t know. All I can say is that when I was going through it in my head, I couldn’t think of any arguments against it.’
That’s it. That’s the whole David/GoodNews thing, right there: ‘I couldn’t think of any arguments against it.’ My problem exactly. I want to destroy David’s whole save-the-world-and-love-everyone campaign, but I want to do it using his logic and philosophy and language, not the language of some moaning, spoiled, smug, couldn’t-care-less, survival-of-the-fittest tabloid newspaper columnist. And of course it’s not possible, because David’s fluent in his language, and I’m a beginner. It’s as if I’m trying to argue with Plato in Greek.