How to Be Good

How to Be Good by Nick Hornby Page A

Book: How to Be Good by Nick Hornby Read Free Book Online
Authors: Nick Hornby
Ads: Link
the head again, and maybe try to find out what was going on when he did it. I was thinking of writing about him, about the eczema and everything, and . . . I just ended up staying and talking for a couple of days.’
    â€˜As one does.’
    â€˜Please, Katie. I don’t know how to talk about this. Don’t make it hard.’
    Why not? I want to ask. Why shouldn’t I make it hard? How often have you made things easy for me?
    â€˜Sorry,’ I say. ‘Go on.’
    â€˜He doesn’t say very much. He just looks at you with these piercing eyes and listens. I’m not even sure whether he’s very bright. So it was me who did all the talking. He just sort of sucked it all out of me.’
    â€˜He seems to have sucked everything out of you.’
    â€˜Yes, he did. Every bad thing. I could almost see it coming out of me, like a black mist. I didn’t realize I was so full of all this stuff.’
    â€˜And what makes him so special? How come he can do it and no one else could?’
    â€˜I don’t know. He just . . . He just has this aura about him. This’ll sound stupid, but . . . He touched my temples again, when I was talking to him, and I just felt this, this amazing warmth flood right through me, and he said it was pure love. And that’s what it felt like. Do you understand how panicky it made me feel?’
    I do understand, and not just because David is an unlikely candidate for a love bath. Love baths are . . . not us. Love baths are for the gullible, the credulous, the simple-minded, people whose brains have been decayed like teeth by soft drugs, people who read Tolkien and Erich Von Daniken when they are old enough to drive cars . . . let’s face it, people who don’t have degrees in the arts or sciences. It is frightening enough just listening to David’s story, but to undergo the experience must have been terrifying.
    â€˜So now what?’
    â€˜The first thing I thought afterwards was that I had to do everything differently. Everything. What I have been doing isn’t enough. Not enough for you. Not enough for me. Not enough for the kids, or the world, or . . . or . . .’
    He grinds to a halt again, presumably because even though the laws of rhetoric and rhythm require a third noun, the reference to the world has left him with nowhere to go, unless he starts babbling about the universe.
    â€˜I still don’t understand what you talked about for two days.’
    â€˜Neither do I. I don’t know where the time went. I was amazed when he told me it was Tuesday afternoon. I talked about . . . about you a lot, and how I wasn’t good to you. And I talked about my work, my writing, and I found myself saying that I was ashamed of it, and I hated it for its, I don’t know, its unkindness, its lack of charity. Now and again he made me . . . God, I’m embarrassed.’ A sudden thought – it may or may not be a fear, I’ll have to think about that another time – comes to me.
    â€˜There’s nothing funny going on, is there?’
    â€˜What do you mean?’
    â€˜You’re not sleeping with him, are you?’
    â€˜No,’ he says, but blankly, with no sense of amusement or outrage or defensiveness. ‘No, I’m not. It’s not like that.’
    â€˜Sorry. So what did he make you do?’
    â€˜He made me kneel on the floor and hold his hand.’
    â€˜And then what?’
    â€˜He just asked me to meditate with him.’
    â€˜Right.’
    David is not homophobic, although he has expressed occasional mystification at gay culture and practices (it’s the Cher thing that particularly bewilders him), but he is certainly heterosexual, right down to his baggy Y-fronts and his preference for Wright’s Coal Tar soap. There is no ambiguity there, if you know what I mean. And yet it is easier for me to

Similar Books

The Saint's Wife

Lauren Gallagher

Put on by Cunning

Ruth Rendell

Batty for You

Zenina Masters

Worldmaking

David Milne

Resolution: Evan Warner Book 1

Shawn Underhill, Nick Adams