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…
It’s not enough just to be a doctor, you have to be a good doctor, you have to be nice to people, you have to be conscientious and dedicated and wise, and though I enter the surgery each morning with the determination to be exactly those things, it only takes a couple of my favourite patients—a Barmy Brian, say, or one of the sixty-a-day smokers who are aggressive about my failure to deal with their chest complaints—and I’m ill-tempered, sarcastic, bored.
Number five: Tom and Molly. All the obvious things, too dull to go into here, and much too familiar to anyone who has ever been a parent or a child. Plus, see number one above: I have moved out of their house (albeit temporarily, albeit because I was provoked, albeit to a small bedsit around the corner), and I haven’t told them. I suspect that a number of mothers would find themselves wondering whether they had done the right thing in this particular circumstance.
These are, however, only the three-act dramas of conscience that are enacted daily in the Carr psyche. There are plenty of one-act dramas too, stuff that more properly belongs on the Fringe rather than in the West End, but provides some pretty compelling pre-sleep contemplation on occasions. There’s my brother (see ‘Parents’ above), who I know is unhappy, and yet I haven’t seen him since the day of the party; various other relatives, including mum’s sister Joan, who is still waiting for a thank-you for a very generous… oh God, never mind that one. And there’s an old school friend who once lent us her cottage in Devon and Tom broke one of her vases, but when she wanted to stay the night with us… Forget that one, too.
I don’t wish to be melodramatic: I know I have not lived a bad life. But nor do I think that this crime-sheet amounts to nothing: believe me, it amounts to something. Look at it. Adultery. The casual exploitation of friends. Disrespect for parents who have done nothing apart from attempt to stay close to me. I mean, that’s two of the ten commandments broken already, and given that—what, three, four?—of the ten are all about Sunday working hours and graven images, stuff that no longer really applies in early twenty-first-century Holloway, I’m looking at a thirty-three per cent strike rate, and that, to me, is too high. I can remember looking at the list when I was about seventeen and thinking that I wasn’t going to have too much trouble, if you took out all the graven image restrictions and left in the ones that really mattered. In fact, I wouldn’t have minded if you’d left all the finicky commandments in. God would understand the occasional emergency Sunday house-call, surely? And how many graven images am I ever likely to make? The score is nil to date—I haven’t been tempted, and I’d be very surprised if I were ever to weaken. I haven’t got the time, for a start.