3

I come home from work and David almost skips out of his office to greet me. ‘Look,’ he says, and then proceeds to bow at me vigorously, as if I were the Queen and he were some kind of lunatic royalist.

‘What?’

‘My back. I don’t feel anything. Not a twinge.’

‘Did you go to see Dan Silverman?’ Dan Silverman is an osteopath that we recommend at the surgery, and I’ve been telling David to see him for months. Years, probably.

‘No.’

‘So what happened?’

‘I saw someone else.’

‘Who?’

‘This guy.’

‘Which guy?’

‘This guy in Finsbury Park.’

‘In Finsbury Park?’ Dan Silverman has a practice in Harley Street. There is no Harley Street equivalent in Finsbury Park, as far as I know. ‘How did you find him?’

‘Newsagent’s window.’

‘A newsagent’s window? What qualifications has he got?’

‘None whatsoever.’ Information delivered with a great deal of pride and aggression, inevitably. Medical qualifications belong on my side of the great marital divide, and are therefore to be despised.

‘So you let someone completely unqualified mess around with your back. Smart decision, David. He’s probably crippled you for life.’

David starts to bow again. ‘Do I look like someone who’s been crippled?’

‘Not today, no. But nobody can cure a bad back in one session.’

‘Yeah, well. GoodNews has.’

‘What good news?’

‘That’s his name. GoodNews. Capital G, capital N, all one word. D. J. GoodNews, actually. To give him his full title.’

‘DJ. Not Dr.’

‘It’s, you know, a clubby thing. I think he used to work in a disco or something.’

‘Always useful when you’re treating back complaints. Anyway. You went to see someone called GoodNews.’

‘I didn’t know he was called GoodNews when I went to see him.’

‘Out of interest, what did his advert say?’

‘Something like, I don’t know. “Bad Back? I can cure you in one session.” And then his telephone number.’

‘And that impressed you?’

‘Yeah. Of course. Why mess around?’

‘I’m presuming this GoodNews person isn’t some sort of alternative therapist.’ It may not surprise you to learn that David has not, up until this point, been a big fan of alternative medicine of any kind; he has argued forcefully, both to me and to the readers of his newspaper column, that he’s not interested in any kind of cure that isn’t harmful to small children and pregnant women, and that anyone who suggests anything different is a moron. (David, incidentally, is rabidly conservative in everything but politics. There are people like that now, I’ve noticed, people who seem angry enough to call for the return of the death penalty or the repatriation of Afro-Caribbeans, but who won’t, because, like just about everybody else in our particular postal district, they’re liberals, so their anger has to come out through different holes. You can read them in the columns and the letters pages of our liberal newspapers every day, being angry about films they don’t like or comedians they don’t think are funny or women who wear headscarves. Sometimes I think life would be easier for David and me if he experienced a violent political conversion, and he could be angry about poofs and communists, instead of homeopaths and old people on buses and restaurant critics. It must be very unsatisfying to have such tiny outlets for his enormous torrent of rage.)

‘I dunno what you’d call him.’

‘Did he give you drugs?’

‘Nope.’

‘I thought that was your definition of alternative. Someone who doesn’t give you drugs.’

‘The point is, he’s fixed me. Unlike the useless NHS.’

‘And how many times did you try the useless NHS?’

‘No point. They’re useless.’

‘So what did this guy do?’

‘Just rubbed my back a bit with some Deep Heat and sent me on my way. Ten minutes.’

‘How much?’

‘Two hundred quid.’

I look at him. ‘You’re kidding.’

‘No.’

He’s proud of this ludicrous amount, I can see it in his face. In other times he would have laughed in, or possibly even punched, the face of some unqualified quack who wanted to charge him two hundred pounds for ten minutes’ work, but now GoodNews (and if GoodNews is to become a regular conversational topic, I will have to find something else to call him) has become a useful weapon in the war between us. I think two hundred pounds is too much, therefore he gleefully pays the two hundred pounds. The perversity of the logic is actually alarming, when you think about it, because where will it end? Is it possible, for example, that he would sell the kids to a paedophile ring—for a piffling amount of money—just because it would really upset me? True, he loves his kids. But he really, really hates me, so it’s a tough one to call.

‘Two hundred pounds.’

‘I can go back as many times as I want. For anything. For free.’

‘But he fixes everything first time. So you don’t need to.’

‘That’s why he’s worth the money. That’s why he charges so much.’

He bows again, up down up down, and grins at me; I shake my head and go to find my children.

Later, we watch TV together, as a family, and not for the first time recently I wonder how an evening can be so ordinarily domestic when life isn’t that way. Even over the last few weeks, despite Stephen, and despite all the viciousness, we have developed a new Monday night routine, supper on laps during Walking with Dinosaurs; family ritual seems to be like some extraordinarily hardy desert flower, prepared to have a go at blooming in the most inhospitable terrain.

David still attempts to ruin our harmony—first by lying on the floor and attempting to do sit-ups (he is foiled by his girth and his general fitness level, rather than his back, but because it is not his back that has stopped him, he spends several minutes extolling the virtues of GoodNews, and he has to be hushed by the children), and then by poking fun at the commentary. ‘Three weeks later, the male returns for another attempt at mating,’ says Kenneth Branagh. ‘Are you sure it wasn’t a fortnight, Ken?’ says David. ‘Because it was a hundred million years ago, after all. You might find you’re a few days out.’

‘Shut up, David. They’re enjoying it.’

‘Bit of critical rigour won’t kill them.’

‘That’s just what you need when you’re a kid. Critical rigour.’

But we settle, in the end, and we watch the programme, bath the kids, put them to bed, eat an almost silent meal. And all the time I’m on the verge of saying something, doing something, except that I don’t know what to say or do.

Next morning Tom spends his breakfast time staring at me and David, and after a little while I begin to find it disconcerting. He is a disconcerting child, Tom—he’s quiet, quick on the uptake, direct to the point of being rude. He has the personality of a child prodigy, but no discernible talent.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ I ask him.

‘Nothing.’

‘Why do you keep staring at us?’

‘I want to see if you’re getting divorced.’

If this were a film I’d be holding a coffee mug to my lips, and Tom’s words would provoke a huge joke splutter, and coffee would be coming out of my nose and running on to my blouse. But as it is I’m putting toast in the toaster, and I have my back to him.

‘Why would we be getting a divorce?’

‘Someone at school told me.’

He says this with no sense of grievance; if someone at work told me that I was getting a divorce and I’d had no prior awareness of any marital difficulties, I would be more upset about the source of the news than anything else. But of course childhood is a time when information flies at you from all directions, and to Tom it’s all the same whether he hears this news from his mother and father or from little Billy in 2C.