‘Reverse it.’
‘Yeah. Right. Reversal. That’s what we’re calling it. You take something you’ve done wrong, or some bad you’ve done to someone, and you reverse it. Do the opposite. If you stole something you give it back. If you were horrible, you have to be nice.’
‘Because we’re introducing the personal alongside the political.’
‘Thanks, David. I forgot to say that bit. Right. The personal and the political. We’ve done the political thing, right? With the homeless kids and all that?’
‘Oh, so that’s finished now, is it? Homelessness cured? World a better place?’
‘Please don’t be facetious, Katie. When GoodNews says we’ve “done” it, he doesn’t mean we’ve solved anything…’
‘God, no way. There’s still a lot to do out there. Phew.’ And GoodNews fans himself with his hand, apparently to indicate the amount of sweat yet to be expended on the plight of the world’s poor. ‘But there’s just as much to do in here, you know?’ And he points at his own skull. ‘Or in here, maybe.’ His finger shifts towards his heart. ‘So that’s the work we’re doing at the moment.’
‘And that’s why we had Christopher and Hope round for tea?’
‘Exactly,’ says David. ‘We talked to Molly and Tom, asked them what they wanted to reverse, and we kind of pinpointed these two poor kids as particular sources of… regret. Molly always felt bad that she didn’t ask Hope to her last birthday party, and… Well, you’ll laugh, but Tom felt bad that he’d thumped Christopher at school.’
‘Which is sort of ironic, isn’t it? Seeing as he’s just thumped him again.’
‘I can see why you’d say that, yes.’
‘And maybe what happened today was predictable?’
‘Do you think?’ David clearly hadn’t anticipated the possibility of history repeating itself. ‘Why?’
‘Think about it.’
‘I don’t want my son bullying kids, Katie. And I don’t want him disliking kids, either. I want him to find the good and the… the lovable in everybody.’
‘And you think I don’t?’
‘I’m not sure. Do you want him to find what’s lovable in Christopher?’
‘Yes, well. Christopher may well prove to be a special case. A loophole in the law of universal love.’
‘So you don’t want him to love everybody.’
‘Well, in an ideal world of course I do. But…’
‘Don’t you see?’ GoodNews says excitedly. ‘That’s what we’re doing! Building an ideal world in our own home!’
An ideal world in my own home… I’m not yet sure why the prospect appals me quite so much, but I do know somewhere in me that GoodNews is wrong, that a life without hatred is no life at all, that my children should be allowed to despise who they like. Now, there’s a right worth fighting for.
‘What about you?’ David says after Tom and Molly are in bed and I’m about to leave.
‘What about me?’
‘What do you want to reverse?’
‘Nothing. I take the view that anything we do, we do for a good reason. Like Tom thumping Christopher. This afternoon proved it. Tom thumped him twice because he can’t not, so the best thing to do is keep them apart, not put them together.’
‘So you don’t believe that, like, warring tribes can ever live side-by-side in peace?’ says GoodNews sadly. ‘Belfast? Just give up? Palestine? That place with the, you know, the Tutsis and those other guys? Forget it?’
‘I’m not sure that Tom and Christopher are warring tribes, are they? They’re two small boys, more than warring tribes, surely?’
‘You could argue that they are in a sense representative,’ David says. ‘You could argue that Christopher is a Kosovan Albanian, say. He’s got nothing, he’s despised by the majority…’
‘Except unlike the average Kosovan Albanian, he could just stay at home and watch TV on his own, and nothing much would happen to him,’ I point out. I point it out in my head on the way back to the bedsit; I closed the door on them somewhere during the second syllable in the word ‘majority’.
But of course I find myself thinking about the whole reversal concept. How could one not? David knows I feel guilty about just about everything, which is why he launched the idea in my direction. Bastard. When I get back to Janet’s place, I want to read, and I want to listen to the Air CD I borrowed from downstairs, but I end up making a mental list of the things I feel guilty about, and whether there is anything I can do about making any of it better. What alarms me is just how easy it is to remember things I’ve done wrong, as if they are floating on the surface of my consciousness all the time and I can simply skim them off with a spoon. I’m a doctor, I’m a good person, and yet there’s all this stuff…
Number one, top of the pops: staying here. And it’s because I feel bad about it that I’ve made it such hard work, what with the getting up at six-fifteen and all that. That’s a sort of penance, I suppose, and maybe I can forgive myself for this one. (Except the real reason I get up at six-fifteen is because I don’t have the courage to tell the children that I’ve moved out of their house, so in fact I should add the sin of cowardice to the sin of bedsit-dwelling. So in effect I’m doubly guilty, rather than completely absolved.)
Number two: Stephen. Or rather, David. Nothing much to say about that. I took marriage vows, I broke them, and I can’t unbreak them. (Although there are mitigating circumstances, as I hope you are by now aware.) (Except there are never any mitigating circumstances when it comes to this sort of thing, are there? Whenever I have seen Jerry Springer, the guilty party always says to the devastated spouse ‘I tried to tell you we wasn’t happy, but you wouldn’t listen.’ And I always end up thinking that the crime of not listening does not automatically deserve the punishment of infidelity. In my case, however, I really do think that there is a case to be made. Obviously. How many of Jerry Springer’s guests are doctors, for a start? How many of those transvestites and serial fathers ever wanted to do good works?) (Maybe all of them. Maybe I’m being a judgmental middle-class prig. Oh, God.)
Number three: my parents. I never call them. I never go to see them. (Or rather, I do, but not without a great deal of ill-will, procrastination, and so on.) (I really do think my parents are worse than anybody else’s, though. They never complain, they never ask, they simply suffer in silence, in a way that is actually terribly aggressive, if you think about it. Or, even more provocatively, they affect to understand. ‘Oh, don’t worry about it. You’ve got so much on your plate, with work, and the kids. Just phone when you can…’ Unforgivably manipulative stuff like that.) There is a paradox here, however, a paradox that provides some consolation: these feelings of guilt are harmful to one’s mental health, yes, granted. But those who have no need to feel guilty are, in my experience, the most mentally unhealthy of all of us, because the only way to have a guilt-free relationship with one’s parents is to talk to them and see them constantly, maybe even live with them. And that can’t be good, can it? So if those are the choices—permanent guilt, or some kind of Freudian awfulness involving five phone calls a day—then I have made the sane and mature choice.
Number four: work. This seems particularly unfair. You’d think that my choice of profession would in itself be enough to absolve me from all worries on that score; you’d think that even a bad doctor on a bad day would feel better than a good drug dealer on a good day, but I suspect that this might not be true. I suspect that drug dealers have days when everything clicks, and it’s all buzz buzz buzz, and they chalk off their jobs one by one, and they return home with a sense of accomplishment. Whereas I have days when I have been rude to people, and very little help, and I can see in my patients’ eyes that they feel fobbed off, misunderstood, uncared-for (Hello, Mrs Cortenza! Hello, Barmy Brian!), and I never ever do my paperwork, and all the insurance claims are shoved straight to the bottom of my in-tray, and I promised at the last surgery meeting that I would write to our local MP about how refugees are being denied access to practices and I haven’t done the first thing about it…