Just Like You

by Nick Hornby

  “You’ll get into trouble if you inconvenience customers.”

  “Just tie him up out there,” said Joseph.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Cassie to Joseph. She handed the guy his bacon.

  “Thank you,” said the guy. “Nice to see that not everyone in here is unreasonable and aggressive.”

  Lucy came back into the shop.

  “I didn’t buy any meat,” she said to nobody in particular. “Oh, hello, David. Hello, Senna.”

  David was the man, Senna was the dog. Joseph guessed that he’d been named after Ayrton Senna, because this guy was just the sort of arsehole who liked Formula One.

  “How’s Emma?”

  Joseph was pretty sure that Emma was the loud blonde. If this was her husband, then it all made perfect sense: they spoke at the same volume, and were equally convinced that everyone would want to hear what they had to say.

  “Fine,” said David, but he wasn’t very interested in the question. His head was still in the argument. “If I were you,” he said, “I would make sure you’re served by the girl, not the chippy kid.”

  “Just take the dog out,” said Joseph. “Don’t stop for a chat.”

  “I beg your pardon? I’ll stop for a chat wherever I feel like it.”

  “Let’s go outside,” said Lucy.

  For a moment David looked as though he were going to resist. Joseph wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d started feeding the dog raw meat in the middle of the shop, just to make the visit last longer, but he sighed, shot Joseph a look, and followed Lucy into the street.

  * * *

  —

  “That’s nice,” she said to David the moment she thought Joseph couldn’t hear them.

  “What?”

  “Throwing your weight around in there.”

  “I was just about to pay for my bacon when he tried to chuck me out.”

  “First of all, he’s not a boy.”

  “Oh, here we go.”

  “And why was he chippy? Wasn’t he just trying to enforce the rules of the shop?”

  Such was Lucy’s indignation that she’d misquoted him. He hadn’t called Joseph a boy. He’d called him a kid. There was a difference, but she wasn’t going to tamp her indignation down. He was the sort of man who might have said “boy,” and the sort of man who would know nothing about the history of the word. That was enough for her.

  “I didn’t know there were no dogs allowed.”

  “I think you should go in there and apologize.”

  David barked an incredulous laugh.

  “Yeah, that’s not going to happen.”

  “I didn’t think it would. I was just telling you what normal people would regard as the decent thing.”

  “Nice to see you, Lucy. I’ll send your love to Emma. Come on, Senna.” And then he started whistling, to show just how insouciant he was.

  She didn’t want to go back into the butcher’s—for the third time—until she’d calmed down. She knew that her fury was out of all proportion to the event, and she had to at least try and work out what was going on before she saw Joseph again. She was worried that he wouldn’t like her interference, that there was something complicated in it that wasn’t good or healthy. Had she overreacted because David was white and posh? Why was it her business to intervene? Had she wanted to show Joseph something? Maybe that she was on his side, not David’s? Why?

  * * *

  —

  Joseph arrived on the dot of 7:30. She wasn’t ready—and this time she was going to make some kind of effort—but she showed him around and introduced him to the boys, who were playing Xbox.

  “This is Joseph. Joseph, this is Dylan and Al.”

  “Which one’s which?”

  They both put their hands up. Lucy rolled her eyes.

  “They’re clever at school. Not so smart at home.”

  “I’m Al.”

  “No, he isn’t,” said Lucy.

  “Is that in-form Ronaldo?” said Joseph.

  The boys looked at him with interest.

  “You play FIFA?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When did you start?” said Al.

  “FIFA ’06.’”

  “’06’? Wow.”

  “They weren’t born,” said Lucy.

  “I’m old,” said Joseph. “Anyway, I’ll beat both of you.”

  Dylan offered him a controller.

  “Wait a minute,” said Lucy. “I need to tell him some things before I lose him down a black hole.”

  “What time’s bedtime?”

  “They’re staying up late to watch something or another. A sporting event.”

  “El Clásico?” said Joseph.

  “Of course,” said Dylan.

  “Wow. So I play FIFA and then watch El Clásico? We don’t have Sky at home. I hope I can afford all this.”

  “It’s all free,” said Dylan.

  “Right, but I must have to pay your mum something?”

  “She’s going to pay you,” said Al, in the manner of someone delivering amazing news. “You’re the babysitter.”

  “I think he was joking,” said Lucy.

  “Kind of,” said Joseph.

  “Anyway, El Clásico. Whatever that is. And straight to bed.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “I’m not being tricked, am I? El Clásico isn’t something that lasts all night?”

  “It’s just a football match.”

  “Fine. And help yourself if you want something to eat or a drink.”

  “I might have a beer once they’ve gone up.”

  “I’ll be back no later than midnight.”

  “Whatever. Text me.”

  After she’d got ready and kissed the boys goodnight, she could see that they could scarcely believe their luck.

  * * *

  —

  The boys were with her because Paul had got drunk last night, his first lapse. He had woken this morning sick and wretched, but at least he’d had the decency to call and tell her. He didn’t try to get out of his weekend obligations to his sons. On the contrary, she knew that he looked forward to them, and they made the battles he was fighting easier for a couple of days, gave shape and purpose to a time otherwise only defined by absence. She knew he was angry with himself, and she knew this weekend was going to be terribly hard, unless he spent it drinking, in which case it would be ruinously easy. If he’d gone even a couple of days without booze she would have tried to convince herself that forty-eight hours of parenthood would do him good, but the freshness of the calamity meant that the risk was too high.

  She would have canceled the evening in most circumstances, but she’d been looking forward to it. Her college friend Fiona and her husband, Pete, had invited Lucy to dinner, and even though Fiona hadn’t said as much, she was setting her up with a recently divorced writer, a novelist whose work she liked. He was ten years older than them, but he had kids of the same age, and Fiona had been careful to mention that his ex wasn’t up to much. She’d worked at his publishers, and Fiona said it was a fling that had gone terribly wrong. Lucy just wanted to flirt with someone. It had been awhile.

  * * *

  —

  Michael Marwood’s books were sober, quiet, and short, but Michael Marwood the person did not seem to prize brevity, and he drank two glasses of wine while Lucy was watching him speak. He was in the middle of a long story about a reception at 10 Downing Street to which he had been invited, a story with lots of famous people but no narrative or subtext, as far as Lucy could tell, and he barely broke off to say hello. He had a rapt audience (there was another couple there, neighbors called Marsha and Claire) and he wasn’t about to relinquish it for anyone. Even when Pete disappeared into the kitchen and came back with the food, Michael showed no inclination to let anybody
actually eat it.

  * * *

  —

  It was a round dining table, and he was sitting to her right.

  “I was hoping this might happen,” he said conspiratorially, but as nobody else had started talking, they all heard.

  “What?”

  “That we’d be sitting next to each other.”

  “Well,” said Lucy. “Fifty-fifty chance.”

  “With six of us? I must be luckier than that.”

  “Well. I’d be two of us, because I could have sat either side. And you’re one.”

  There was a silence for a moment, while they both tried to work out whether this was right, and then gave up on the calculation at exactly the same time. Michael shrugged and laughed, and Lucy wondered whether she might be able to forgive him for his boring story.

  “Were you listening to my boring story?” he said.

  She laughed.

  “I caught the end of it.”

  “Was it terrible? I drank three glasses of wine quite quickly, and I suddenly found myself in the middle of it. I mean, those things really did happen. But so what? I’m so sorry. I’ve sobered up now.”

  She found his apology rather disarming, and now she began to notice other things about him, better things. He had a smart but age-appropriate haircut and a neat, speckled-gray beard. And he smelled good, some kind of limey old-school gentleman’s cologne that was probably part of a shtick. But smelling nice was good, however one got there.

  “So,” he said. “How are you?” And yes, he placed the stress on the second word.

  Lucy rolled her inner eyes, and then immediately hated herself for being so judgmental. Perhaps she would be better off on her own, with occasional sexual adventures. Who would want to live with someone who got irritated by one of the simplest and most commonplace questions in the English language? But you couldn’t ask strangers how they were. You asked friends how they were. The inquiry presupposed some kind of knowledge of the past, a context in which to set the answer, and he had nothing. Only those young charity people who stopped you in the street used that particular route in, which told you something about its insincerity.

  “Hello,” said Lucy.

  She had confused herself. She had meant to say something dry and acerbic along the lines of, “I’ve had a sniffle but it’s cleared up now,” and he might have realized that the question was synthetically intimate and unanswerable, and laughed at himself. Instead, he looked at her as if she were mad.

  “Hello again,” he said.

  The others were all talking now, so there was a little bubble of privacy around them. Michael wanted to make the little bubble even smaller, though. He leaned in, and started murmuring things that she couldn’t really hear. She was pleased to learn that he had a volume control knob, because there had been no sign of one before dinner. However, it wasn’t a dial, as such, more of a switch, with a choice of two settings.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Did you know beforehand that we were being paired off?”

  “I knew a single man was coming. Does that count?”

  “Did you mind?”

  “Did I mind that Pete and Fiona were inviting a single man for dinner?”

  “You know perfectly well what I mean.”

  “No, I didn’t mind. I was pretty sure there was no pressure on me for a long-term commitment.”

  “Ah. I see. You prefer shorter-term commitments. I shall bear that in mind.”

  “The length of a dinner party is fine.”

  She was quite enjoying herself now. She didn’t mean to be unkind, but he kept placing her in situations where the put-down was so inviting as to be unavoidable.

  “I’ve read your books.”

  She cursed herself. Now she was the gauche one. She had never sat next to a writer at dinner before, especially one who had been brought along for the purposes of evening up the numbers.

  “All of them?”

  “I don’t know. How many are there?”

  “Seven, if you don’t include the poetry collections.”

  “Oh, I haven’t read the poetry. Should I?”

  “Not if you don’t want to.”

  “You’re on the syllabus now, you know.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “What does that feel like?”

  “It’s very flattering.”

  “So it doesn’t make you want to hang yourself?”

  “No! Should it?”

  “All those children hating you.”

  “I went to talk to a class and they seemed very enthusiastic.”

  “Where was that?”

  “Highgate.”

  “Oh. Right.” Of course he’d been to Highgate. “You don’t mind going to talk to private schools?”

  “I haven’t been invited to a state school. I’ll come to yours, if you want.”

  “We wouldn’t know what to do with you.”

  The head wouldn’t be pleased if he ever found out that she was gaily turning down offers from Michael Marwood, even if he was unlikely to know who Michael Marwood was. He was very interested in feathering caps, and he didn’t mind which bird the feathers had fallen off.

  “Well. That’s telling me.”

  “Sorry. We’re not a terribly literary school. We’re happy if they read anything.”

  “Am I not anything?”

  “What would you say to them?”

  “I’d tell them how lucky they were to have you as a teacher.”

  “You have no idea what I’m like.”

  “I wasn’t talking about your classroom management.”

  And he looked at her. Lucy was beginning to suspect that he might be what the girls at her school would refer to as a “fuckboy,” a word she discouraged them from using because of its first four letters but which in all other ways seemed an entirely welcome neologism. There had always been tarts and slags and sluts, and now there were fuckboys, and the contempt with which the girls spat the word out gladdened her heart. If she had to guess, she’d say Michael Marwood’s marriage had ended because he was a fuckboy, or a fuckman, at least, and his wife’s nightmarishness was neither here nor there. Marriages ended, and marriages ended because unhappy or dissatisfied people met somebody else. But when unhappy and dissatisfied people met somebody else and then somebody else and somebody else again, you could be forgiven for wondering whether the unhappiness and dissatisfaction were incurable.

  There was nothing wrong with fucking a fuckman, of course, as long as one understood the terms in advance. Lucy hadn’t had sex for a year, hadn’t had sex with anyone other than Paul for twelve years, and even the sex a year ago was an oasis in the desert, which was almost certainly the wrong metaphor to describe a moment of weakness and unhappiness in the middle of a whole lot of confusion. Her mental energy was almost entirely spent on the boys and work, but there was a little bit left over for herself, and increasingly it went on fantasies, or speculation, at least: when, who, where. So why not Michael Marwood?

  She excused herself, partly because she needed to pee, partly because she thought she should check her phone, and saw that she’d missed five messages from Joseph.

  * * *

  —

  It was as Joseph had described. Paul was outside, sitting on the pavement with his back to the front wall. Joseph was standing guard in the doorway. As she was paying the cab driver, she couldn’t help thinking about how cold the house must be.

  She stood over her ex-husband.

  “What are you doing?”

  “That fucking kid assaulted me.”

  “We talked about that before it happened,” said Joseph. “I told you I wasn’t going to let you in, and that I’d use physical force to stop you. I didn’t hit him,” he said to Lucy. “I pushed him and he fell into the hedge and then he crawled o
ut there.”

  “Thanks, Joseph. Close the door and sit with the boys, would you?”

  “Ring me if you need any help.”

  “Thank you.”

  The light cast onto the pavement from the doorway disappeared, and Lucy stood there for a moment, not knowing what to say or do. She wanted to sit down next to Paul, to show some kind of love and solidarity, but it wasn’t even ten o’clock, and she had no wish to explain to a neighbor putting out the bins or returning from the cinema that . . . Actually, there was no explanation she could come up with, other than the truth, which was that she had been summoned home from a dinner party because her ex-husband, formerly an ex-drunk, was now a drunk again, although he was not her husband again. She had wanted to stay married to him, because staying married to anyone is an accomplishment, but there were circumstances beyond one’s control, and here were several of them. (Were these circumstances beyond her control? Or were they her fault? The therapist had told her off about this way of thinking, but every now and again she found herself wondering whether Paul’s dependency was a product of their relationship, rather than an act of God, or genetics, if those two causes weren’t the same thing. Maybe if she hadn’t asked for or refused to be more this, or less that, then none of it would ever have happened. The therapist could say whatever she wanted, but who knew, really?)

  “Can you stand up?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want to have to call the police.”

  He looked at her, hurt.

  “Why would you call the police?”

  “Oh, Paul.”

  “It’s not about ‘Oh, Paul.’ Don’t give me any ‘Oh, Paul.’ There’s too much ‘Oh, Paul.’ And not enough . . .”

  He clearly couldn’t think what there wasn’t enough of, compared to the excess of “Oh, Pauls,” but he pursued the thought nevertheless.

  “Not enough just normal Paul.”

  “When I say, ‘Oh, Paul,’ I’m expressing sympathy and despair. I have plenty of both, and I can’t do much about the latter, but I can cut out the former if it helps.”

  “Just stop saying stupid stuff about the police.”