‘Oh.’
As it turns out, we are something of a disappointment to Monkey, and, if I am being honest, he is something of a disappointment to me. I cannot answer any of the questions he asks me, and nor do we have any of the things he seems to want most (apart from Sky Sports, we don’t have Dreamcast, or a dog); meanwhile he will not help me to understand how it was he came to be sleeping on the streets, which means that I am unable to show him the side of me that I wanted him to see: Katie the therapist, the listener, the imaginative solver of insoluble problems. He goes for a bath; regrettably, we don’t have a proper shower.
For a couple of days, all is quiet. We only see Monkey during the evenings; he doesn’t talk about where he goes during the day, but it is clear that old habits are hard to break, and old friendships are as important to him as they are to everyone else. And, anyway, one night he comes back and attempts to give me housekeeping money out of a huge pile of coins that he dumps on the kitchen table, which gives us all an idea of his whereabouts during working hours. I am almost tempted to take the money: after all, he is the only person in the house other than me who is working. He is courteous, he keeps himself to himself, he reads, he watches TV, he plays with Tom at the computer, he enjoys every mouthful of food he is given, and he makes no dietary demands.
One night we leave our guests in charge of the children (imaginary conversation with my parents, or social services: ‘Who’s in charge of your children?’ ‘Oh, GoodNews and Monkey’) and we go to the local cinema. We see a Julia Roberts film: she plays a struggling single mother who gets a job at a law firm and discovers that a water company is poisoning people, and she goes on a campaign to get compensation for them. Her relationship with a sexy bearded man suffers, and she becomes a bad, neglectful mother, but she is Fighting the Good Fight, and the water company is bad bad bad, and she only has two children and one boyfriend and there are hundreds of sick people, so it’s OK. It’s not a particularly good film, but I love it simply because it is a film, in colour, with a story that doesn’t involve spacecraft or insects or noise, and I drink it down in one, like I drank the Stoppard play. David loves it because he thinks it is about him.
‘Well?’ he says afterwards.
‘Well what?’
‘Do you see?’
‘Do I see what?’
‘If you’re going to do this stuff, it comes at a cost.’
‘There was no cost. Not in the film. Everyone lived happily ever after. Apart from the sick people, perhaps.’
‘Her boyfriend left her.’
‘She made it up with him,’ I point out.
‘But weren’t you on her side?’
And he used to have such a complicated, interesting mind. ‘No. I was on the side of the water company. Of course I was on her side. I wasn’t given much choice. Are you trying to say that you’re Julia Roberts?’
‘No, but…’
‘Because you’re not.’
We stop while he gives a kid fifty pence, and then continue in silence for a little while.
‘Why not?’
‘David, I’m not going to waste an awful lot of time on this.’
‘Why not?’
‘Why aren’t I going to waste time explaining why you’re not Julia Roberts?’
‘Yes. This is important. Tell me the difference between what I’m doing and what she was doing.’
‘What are you doing? Explain it to me.’
‘You explain to me what she was doing first. And then we’ll see what the differences are.’
‘You’re going to drive me mad.’
‘OK, I’m sorry. The point is that she and I want to do something about things. A water company is poisoning people. Bad. She wants justice for the people affected. Kids are sleeping out on the street. Bad. I want to help them.’
‘Why you?’
‘Why her?’
‘It was a film, David.’
‘Based on a true story.’
‘Let me ask you something: is this worth wrecking your family for?’
‘I don’t intend to wreck my family.’
‘I know you don’t intend to wreck your family. But two of us are very unhappy. And I don’t know how much more I can take.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘That’s all you can say?’
‘What else is there to say? You’re threatening to leave me because I’m trying to do something for people who can’t do much for themselves. And I…’
‘That’s not true, David. I’m threatening to leave you because you’re becoming unbearable.’
‘What can’t you bear?’
‘Any of it. The… the sanctimony. The smugness. The…’
‘People are dying out there, Katie. I’m sorry if you think that I’m being smug.’
I cannot bring myself to say any more.
What with one thing and another—a broken leg one summer, post-college poverty the next—David and I did not go away on holiday together until the third year of our relationship. We were a proper couple by then, by which I mean that we had rows, that some days I didn’t like him very much, that if he or I went away for a few days I didn’t miss him, although I found myself jotting down inconsequential things to tell him, but that I never ever thought about whether I wanted to be with him or not, because I knew, somewhere in me, that I was in for the long haul. What I am saying, I suppose, is that this first holiday was not a honeymoon, and there was not very much chance of us spending the entire fortnight in bed, emerging only to feed each other spoonfuls of exotic fruits. It was more likely, in fact, that David would lapse into a two-week long sulk over a dispute about his loose interpretation of the rules of Scrabble, during the course of which I would call him a pathetic cheating baby. That was the stage we were at.
We found cheap flights to Egypt, with the intention of travelling around a bit, but on our second day in Cairo David became ill—sicker than he’s ever been since, in fact. He became delirious, and he vomited every couple of hours, and at the height of it he lost control of his bowels, and we were in a cheap hotel and we didn’t have our own toilet or shower, and I had to clean him up.
And there was a part of me that was pleased, because I’d set myself a test years before (probably when I first conceived of being a doctor, and realized that sometimes my private life would resemble my professional life): would I be able to see a man in that state and still respect him in the morning? I passed the test with flying colours. I had no qualms about cleaning David up, I could still bring myself to have sex with him afterwards (after the holiday, and after his restoration to health, I mean, rather than after his accident)… I was capable of a mature relationship after all. This was love, surely?
But now I can see I was wrong. That wasn’t a test. What kind of woman would leave her boyfriend to rot in his soiled bedsheets in a strange hotel in a foreign country? This is a test. And Lord, am I failing it.
Wendy and Ed, the enormous couple who live at number 19, come to see us first thing the next morning. They took in a kid called Robbie, who they said they liked. Last night the three of them stayed in together and talked about Robbie’s life, and how it had turned out in the way that it had, and Wendy and Ed went to bed feeling positive about the choice they had made to have him stay. But when they got up Robbie had vanished. Also vanished: a video camera, seventy pounds in cash, a bracelet that Wendy had left by the sink when she was doing the washing-up. GoodNews listens to the story with increasing agitation, which surprises me: I was presuming that he would be happy to write off the loss to experience, that he would argue—and as he is the owner of nothing very much, it is an easy argument to make—that these sorts of risks were worth running, that it was all for the greater good, and so on. It turns out, however, that it is not the theft that has agitated him, but our bourgeois logic.
‘Oh, no, no, no, people,’ he says. ‘We’re jumping to conclusions. We shouldn’t be jumping. We should be sitting and thinking, not jumping.’
‘How do you mean?’ Ed is genuinely baffled. He, like me, is trying to see how any other interpretation of events is possible.