‘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.

‘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…