How to Be Good by Nick Hornby

treatment table or anything – and he touched me and his hands got incredibly hot.’
    â€˜How do you know they weren’t hot already?’
    â€˜They were cold when he . . . when he first put them on my back, and they just started to warm up. And that’s why I thought he was using Deep Heat or something. But he didn’t massage me, or rub anything in. He just touched me, very gently, and . . . and all the pain went. Straight away. Like magic.’
    â€˜So this guy’s a healer. Like a faith healer.’
    â€˜Yeah.’ He thinks for a moment, as if trying to think of something that might make this easier for a couple of middle-class, university-educated literalists to understand – by which I mean, I suppose, that he would like to find something that makes it seem more difficult – less straightforward, more complicated, cleverer. It’s not very hard to grasp that someone is a healer, after all: he touches you, you feel better, you go home. What is there not to understand? It’s just that everything else you have ever believed about life becomes compromised as a result. David gives up the struggle to complexify with a shrug. ‘Yeah. It’s . . . amazing. He has a gift.’
    â€˜So. Great. Hurrah for GoodNews. He’s made your back better, and he made Molly’s eczema go away. We’re lucky you found him.’ I try to say all this in a way that draws a line under this whole conversation, but I’m guessing that this is not the end of the story.
    â€˜I didn’t want him to be a healer.’
    â€˜What did you want him to be?’
    â€˜Just . . . I don’t know. Alternative. That’s why me and Molly had that row about the cream. It freaked me out a bit, and I wanted there to be this, I don’t know, this magic cream from Tibet or somewhere that conventional medics knew nothing about. I didn’t want it just to be his hands. Do you understand?’
    â€˜Yes. Sort of. You’re happier with magic cream than with magic hands. Is that it?’
    â€˜Cream’s not magic, is it? It’s just . . . medicine.’
    This is typical of ignorant rationalists. For all they know, aspirin could be the most dramatic example of white witchcraft known to mankind, but because you can buy it in Boots it doesn’t count.
    â€˜It’d be magic if it cured back pain and eczema.’
    â€˜Anyway. It freaked me out a bit. And then the thing with the headache . . .’
    â€˜I had forgotten about the headache.’
    â€˜Well that was when things started to go weird. Because . . . I don’t even know why I told him I had a headache, but I did, and he looked at me, and he said, I can help you with a lot of things that are troubling you, and he touched me on the . . . here . . .’
    â€˜The temples.’
    â€˜Right, he touched me on the temples, and the headache went, but I started to feel . . . different.’
    â€˜What kind of different?’
    â€˜Just . . . Calmer.’
    â€˜That was when you told me you were going away and I had to tell the kids we were getting divorced.’
    â€˜I was calm. I didn’t rant and rave. I didn’t get sarcastic.’
    I remember my feeling that there was something different about him then, and in remembering find a new way to become sad and regretful and self-pitying: my husband visits a healer, is thus magically rendered calmer, and the only benefit for me is that he expresses without viciousness his desire for a separation. Except, of course, things have moved on since then, and there are countless benefits for me, none of which I enjoy. I hear my brother’s ‘Diddums’ ringing in my ear.
    â€˜And then you went to stay with him?’
    â€˜I didn’t know I was going to stay with him. I just . . . I wanted to see if he could do the thing with