Part 1

How to Be Good
by Nick Hornby

Katie Carr is a good person. She recycles. She's against racism. She's a good doctor, a good mom, a good wife...well, maybe not that last one, considering she's having an affair and has just requested a divorce via cell phone. But who could blame her? For years her husband's been selfish, sarcastic, and underemployed, writing the "Angriest Man in Holloway" column for their local paper.

But now David's changed. He's become a good person, too - really good. He's found a spiritual leader. He has become kind, soft-spoken, and earnest. He's even got a homeless kid set up in the spare room. Katie isn't sure if this is a deeply-felt conversion, a brain tumor or David's most brilliantly vicious manipulation yet. Because she's finding it more and more difficult to live with David and with herself.

I am in a car park in Leeds when I tell my husband I don't want to be married to him anymore. David isn't even in the car park with me. He's at home, looking after the kids, and I have only called him to remind him that he should write a note for Molly's class teacher. The other bit just sort of . . . slips out. This is a mistake, obviously. Even though I am, apparently, and to my immense surprise, the kind of person who tells her husband that she doesn't want to be married to him anymore, I really didn't think that I was the kind of person to say so in a car park, on a mobile phone. That particular self-assessment will now have to be revised, clearly. I can describe myself as the kind of person who doesn't forget names, for example, because I have remembered names thousands of times and forgotten them only once or twice. But for the majority of people, marriage-ending conversations happen only once, if at all. If you choose to conduct yours on a mobile phone, in a Leeds car park, then you cannot really claim that it is unrepresentative, in the same way that Lee Harvey Oswald couldn't really claim that shooting presidents wasn't like him at all. Sometimes we have to be judged by our one-offs.

Later, in the hotel room, when I can't sleep-and that is some sort of consolation, because even though I have turned into the woman who ends marriages in a car park, at least I have the decency to toss and turn afterward-I retrace the conversation in my head, in as much detail as I can manage, trying to work out how we'd got from there (Molly's dental appointment) to here (imminent divorce) in three minutes. Ten, anyway. Which turns into an endless, three-in-the-morning brood about how we'd got from there (meeting at a college dance in 1976) to here (imminent divorce) in twenty-four years.

To tell you the truth, the second part of this self-reflection only takes so long because twenty-four years is a long time, and there are loads of bits that come unbidden into your head, little narrative details, that don't really have much to do with the story. If my thoughts about our marriage had been turned into a film, the critics would say that it was all padding, no plot, and that it could be summarized thus: two people meet, fall in love, have kids, start arguing, get fat and grumpy (him) and bored, desperate and grumpy (her), and split up. I wouldn't argue with the synopsis. We're nothing special.

The phone-call, though . . . I keep missing the link, the point where it turned from a relatively harmonious and genuinely banal chat about minor domestic arrangements into this cataclysmic, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it moment. I can remember the beginning of it, almost word for word:

Me: "Hiya."

Him: "Hello. How's it going?"

Me: "Yeah, fine. Kids all right?"

Him: "Yeah. Molly's here watching TV, Tom's round at Jamie's."

Me: "I just phoned to say that you've got to write a note for Molly to take in to school tomorrow. About the dentist's."

See? See? It can't be done, you'd think, not from here. But you'd be wrong, because we did it. I'm almost sure that the first leap was made here, at this point; the way I remember it now, there was a pause, an ominous silence, at the other end of the line. And then I said something like, "What?", and he said, "Nothing." And I said "What?" again and he said "Nothing" again, except he clearly -wasn't baffled or amused by my question, just tetchy, which means, does it not, that you have to plow on. So I plowed on.

"Come on."

"No."

"Come on."

"No. What you said."

"What did I say?"

"About just phoning to remind me about Molly's note."

"What's wrong with that?"

-"It'd be nice if you just phoned for some other reason. You know, to say hello. To see how your husband and children are."

"Oh, David."

"What, 'Oh David'?"

"That was the first thing I asked. 'How are the kids?'"

"Yeah. OK. 'How are the kids?' Not, you know, 'How are you?' "

You -don't get conversations like this when things are going well. It is not difficult to imagine that in other, better relationships, a phone call that began in this way would not and could not lead to talk of divorce. In better relationships you could sail right through the dentist part and move on to other topics-your day's work, or plans for the evening, or even, in a spectacularly functional marriage, something that has taken place in the world outside your home, a coughing fit on the Today Programme, say-just as ordinary, just as forgettable, but topics that form the substance and perhaps even the sustenance of an ordinary, forgettable, loving relationship. David and I, however . . . this is not our situation, not anymore. Phone calls like ours only happen when -you've spent several years hurting and being hurt, until every word you utter or hear becomes coded and loaded, as complicated and full of subtext as a bleak and brilliant play. In fact, when I was lying awake in the hotel room trying to piece it all together, I was even struck by how clever we had been to invent our code: it takes years of miserable ingenuity to get to this place.

"I'm sorry."

"Do you care how I am?"

"To be honest, David, I -don't need to ask how you are. I can hear how you are. Healthy enough to look after two children while simultaneously sniping at me. And very, very aggrieved, for reasons that remain obscure to me at this point. Although I'm sure -you'll enlighten me."

"What makes you think I'm aggrieved?"

"Ha! -You're the definition of aggrieved. Permanently."

"Bollocks."

"David, you make your living from being aggrieved."

This is true, partly. David's only steady income derives from a newspaper column he contributes to our local paper. The column is illustrated by a photograph of him snarling at the camera, and is subtitled "The Angriest Man in Holloway." The last one I could bear to read was a diatribe against old people who traveled on buses: Why did they never have their money ready? Why -wouldn't they use the seats set aside for them at the front of the bus? Why did they insist on standing up ten minutes before their stop, thus obliging them to fall over frequently in an alarming and undignified fashion? You get the picture, anyway.

"In case you -hadn't noticed, possibly because you never bother to fucking read me-"

"Where's Molly?"

"Watching TV in the other room. Fuck fuck fuck. Shit."

"Very mature."

"-Possibly because you never bother to fucking read me, my column is ironic."

I laughed ironically.

"Well, please excuse the inhabitants of 32 Webster Road if the irony is lost on us. We wake up with the angriest man in Holloway every day of our lives."

"What's the point of all this?"

Maybe in the film of our marriage, written by a scriptwriter on the lookout for brief and elegant ways of turning dull, superficial arguments into something more meaningful, this would have been the moment: you know, "That's a good question. . . . Where are we going? . . . What are we doing? . . . Something something something . . . It's over." OK, it needs a little work, but it would do the trick. As David and I are not Tom and Nicole, however, we are blind to these neat little metaphorical moments.

"I -don't know what the point of all this is. You got cross about me not asking how you were."

"Yeah."

"How are you?"

"Fuck off."

I sighed, right into the mouthpiece of the phone, so that he could hear what I was doing; I had to move the mobile away from my ear and toward my mouth, which robbed the moment of its spontaneity, but I know through experience that my mobile -isn't good on nonverbal nuance.

"Jesus Christ! What was that?"

"It was a sigh."

"Sounds like -you're on top of a mountain."

Copyright © 2001 by Nick Hornby. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

About the Author

Nick Hornby is the author of the novels How to Be Good, High Fidelity, and About a Boy, and of the memoir Fever Pitch. He is also the author of Songbook, a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and editor of the short-story collection Speaking with the Angel. He is also the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award, and the Orange Word International Writers London Award 2003.