How to Be Good by Nick Hornby Read Free Book Online Page B

session.” And then his telephone number.’
    â€˜And that impressed you?’
    â€˜Yeah. Of course. Why mess around?’
    â€˜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.)
    â€˜I dunno what you’d call him.’
    â€˜Did he give you drugs?’
    â€˜Nope.’
    â€˜I thought that was your definition of alternative. Someone who doesn’t give you drugs.’
    â€˜The point is, he’s fixed me. Unlike the useless NHS.’
    â€˜And how many times did you try the useless NHS?’
    â€˜No point. They’re useless.’
    â€˜So what did this guy do?’
    â€˜Just rubbed my back a bit with some Deep Heat and sent me on my way. Ten minutes.’
    â€˜How much?’
    â€˜Two hundred quid.’
    I look at him. ‘You’re kidding.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Two hundred pounds.’
    â€˜I can go back as many times as I want. For anything. For free.’
    â€˜But he fixes everything first time. So you don’t need to.’
    â€˜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