Just Like You

by Nick Hornby

  “Really. You?”

  “It’s good. I’d like to say more, but I’m bursting.”

  Joseph offered silent thanks to Lucy’s bladder. She stood up and pushed her way past the grumpy couple, who were even grumpier the second time, and probably wouldn’t be thrilled the third. He looked around at the people who’d stayed put. They were reading their programs, talking quietly. He had never sat in a crowd like this.

  The guy sitting in front of him, forties, wearing a suit, turned around and said something to him.

  “Sorry?” said Joseph.

  “My glasses. I think I’ve managed to drop them by your feet.”

  Joseph looked down, and there they were. He picked them up and handed them back.

  “Thank you,” said the man. And then, “It’s a long old haul, isn’t it? I only ever understand about one word in three.”

  “So you keep doing this?”

  “She keeps doing this.” He nodded his head toward the bar, or the toilet, or wherever she was.

  Joseph smiled. He was tempted to ask the guy for his phone number so that they could keep in touch.

  * * *

  —

  In the queue for the toilet, Lucy looked at the women ahead of her. She felt that somehow she had told Joseph that this was her crowd, even though he’d bought the tickets, and now she was beginning to doubt whether she had anything in common with any of them. There was Shakespeare, she supposed—but how many of them loved Shakespeare? Or even the theater? How many of them came because they thought they should, or because they had been brought up to do so? There were no young people in the queue, but that might have been because they didn’t need to pee, and there were no black people anywhere. She looked at their faces, trying to discern whether any of them might have voted for Brexit, and concluded that it was hard to tell. Over half the country had voted for Brexit, and some of them must have been there. How would Shakespeare have voted? She supposed it depended on how old he was at the time of the referendum. If he was his actual age, four hundred and fifty-odd, he would probably have voted out. The older you got, the less tolerant you became, so he would have been very intolerant indeed. The man who wrote Romeo and Juliet and Two Gentlemen of Verona, however, might have had more time for foreigners. But what would he have thought of all the people who took his name in vain? To some English people, Shakespeare was a justification for never having anything to do with the rest of the world. He confirmed the nation’s superiority. He might not have liked many of these people much. On the other hand, that kind of deification was hard to resist, she would imagine. She would never have thought about any of this if she’d come with Paul. (Fat chance of that. She couldn’t remember ever going to the theater with Paul.) She’d have thought, I’m me, and I have nothing to do with any of these people. Or rather, she’d have thought nothing, apart from, what is that woman up to in there? Who does a poo in the interval of a play?

  * * *

  —

  “Perhaps this will be the last time,” said the grumpy man as he picked his coat up and rose wearily to his feet.

  “I hope so,” said Lucy, and gave him a grateful smile. When she got back to her seat, Joseph was talking to the man in front about whether Arsène Wenger, the manager of Arsenal, should go. They were both in agreement: his time was up.

  * * *

  —

  Outside the theater, they talked about whether they’d go on somewhere for a drink (they wanted to get home) and where the nearest bus stop was (just up the road). But now they were on the bus, and conversation was unavoidable.

  “Was it good?” he asked her.

  She laughed.

  “You tell me.”

  “No,” he said, too quickly.

  “You’re entitled to an opinion.”

  “I know. But just because I’m entitled to one, it doesn’t mean it’s worth your while listening to it.”

  “It was a good production,” she said. “In my opinion. It was sharp, and light on its feet. And Julianne Lawrence was fantastic.”

  “Which one was she?”

  “Rosalind.”

  He stopped himself from repeating the question. Rosalind had to be the main woman.

  “Oh. Yeah. She was great.”

  “I wondered whether Orlando was a little too dour, but I warmed to him. He was a slow burn. In a good way.”

  “Right.”

  He liked her talking about what she thought. It was sort of sexy, for some reason. Maybe it was because he’d never met anyone who would describe an actor as “a little too dour.” It reminded him that this was new, and different. She’d been sitting there, thinking thoughts and making judgments, and having this access to them reminded him that she was both separate and part of him at the same time. He wanted to get back to her house.

  “Would you go to another one?” she asked him.

  “Another Shakespeare? Or another play? I like going places with you, so, yeah.”

  She wanted to kiss him, right there, on the bus, properly, but she resisted.

  “That guy you were talking to about football . . .”

  “Ah, he was suffering, man. His wife had booked the tickets.”

  “Do you think he wondered about us? When I came back?”

  “No.”

  “Just no?”

  “Just no. I think you wondered whether he wondered. That was the only wondering going on.”

  Maybe that was it, Lucy thought. Maybe there was only wondering about wondering, which had to be as good a definition of self-consciousness as any.

  14

  Yeah, I’m not singing that,” said Jaz.

  Joseph sighed internally, and possibly externally too. He had e-mailed her the lyric, the track, and his guide vocal so that she knew what she was doing when they got into the studio; at no stage had she said that she was unhappy with anything.

  “What?” said Jaz sharply, although that might have been because of the face that accompanied the internal sigh, rather than an indication that the sigh had slipped out into the world. It wasn’t as if everything or anything had been easy up until this point. When they’d arrived, she’d said the room was too cold, and they had to wait for the heating to come on before she’d start. But then her throat was dry, and it turned out that she never drank water, tea, or coffee, which were the three options that were available in the studio, so she had to go to the nearest shop to buy a Coke Zero—with a fiver from Joseph, because she was fucked if she was going to finish out of pocket. She came back with the Coke and a ton of sweets, some of which had to be eaten for energy, and some of which got stuck in her teeth, which had to be picked with a fingernail. The engineer, an old hippy called Colin, went to sit in the little kitchen to read the paper rather than watch the picking.

  And now the lyric was no good. It wasn’t even supposed to be any good. He wasn’t trying to write “What’s Going On,” or to flow like Kendrick. He just wanted the sound of a human voice over his track, so there were a lot of “baby’s” and “yeah’s.” Once he knew the words were for Jaz, he tried to tailor them for her. He had written about female empowerment, kind of, using the metaphor of a car: “Gonna drive/ gonna sit behind the wheel/ gonna drive/ wanna check that life is real.” He was pleased he’d avoided “feel.” There were another couple of verses, but they were very small variations on the same theme.

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  He regretted asking the question, because he knew it could be answered in many different ways, most of them unkind, but Jaz’s objections were literal.

  “I can’t drive.”

  “Right. And you can’t pretend?”

  “I could if I’d had some lessons.”

  “So I have to pay for driving lessons before you’ll sing.”

  “I’m not saying that. I’m just saying you wouldn’t get the best out of me
if I have to sing about driving.”

  “It’s not about driving.”

  “What is it about, then?”

  “It’s about you being a powerful woman.”

  “Who’s driving.”

  “Metaphorically.”

  “Can’t I do something else metaphorically?”

  “What do you want to sing about?”

  “Depends which way you want to go. I was thinking either Brexit or oral sex. Receiving, not giving.”

  “They’re quite different.”

  “According to men they are. One’s disgusting and one’s a human right.”

  “I meant the subjects.”

  “Oh. Yeah. One’s more, you know, political. Topical. One’s more sexual. Depends what you like.”

  “I can see that.”

  He thought that getting inside a recording studio, even one as basic as this, might make him feel closer to a music career, but Jaz seemed to be pushing him backward, right to the outermost edge. He could almost touch his mother from where he was now, and she wasn’t interested in a music career.

  “I don’t have lyrics about either of those subjects right now, though. And we’re recording right now.”

  “Well, we’re a bit stuck then.”

  “What about ‘fly’ instead of ‘drive’?”

  “There’s no wheel, though, is there?”

  “We can find something else.”

  “How about this? ‘Want you there/ Where I can feel/ Want you to taste/ my love is real.’”

  “I’m a Christian,” said Joseph. It had worked with the school theater trip.

  “So am I.”

  “Well, behave like one.”

  Colin the engineer popped his head back through the door.

  “Are we getting anywhere?”

  “What do you think I should sing about?” said Jaz. “Cars, Brexit, or oral sex?”

  “Cars,” said Colin.

  “Really?”

  “There are a lot of good car songs,” said Colin. “No Brexit songs. There are probably oral sex songs, but they don’t get on the radio. Unless you want to sing about lollipops and so on.”

  “I’d be doing it the other way around,” said Jaz.

  “Ah,” said Colin. “Well, then.”

  He had nothing else to offer.

  * * *

  —

  “I hadn’t thought about the radio,” said Jaz. “Why don’t we do the car one then?”

  She said it as if it were her idea.

  “One more thing,” said Jaz. “Maybe you should think about making it a bit more Afro Housey?”

  “Well,” said Joseph. “I’ll think about it.” He would have to ask £Man what the hell she was talking about. He didn’t go to enough clubs.

  “You’re ready to start?”

  The engineer took some levels.

  “Whoa,” he said, when Jaz sang, too loud, and too close to the mic, and his levels went haywire.

  “I have a very powerful voice,” she said. “Nothing I can do about it.”

  But she was brilliant. She found the melody, and then found a variation for the next verse, and all kinds of cool stuff for the fade, and she hung just off the beat like a much more experienced singer. When they played it back afterward, Joseph got a little shiver of excitement, and he could see she felt the same.

  “Very nice,” said Colin, as if it were just another day in the studio for him.

  * * *

  —

  They walked to the Tube together.

  “Are you on gray tings now?” said Jaz. “That’s what I heard.”

  She was talking about Lucy, and for a moment he wondered if she was referring to her age, even though he also knew that the word “gray” was a reference to her color. Well, he thought. Now I know what I’m most paranoid about.

  It never occurred to him that Jaz would know anything about her.

  “I’m not on anything.”

  “So I heard wrong.”

  “I can’t imagine who’s bothering to talk about me.”

  “When a black guy goes out with a forty-year-old white teacher, people talk.”

  “Even with everything going on in the world?”

  That was pathetic, like his mum telling him to eat his dinner because of the starving children.

  “Especially because of everything going on in the world,” said Jaz. “Who wants to talk about that? Anyway. What’s wrong with us? Because you know I tried and got nowhere.”

  “I was with a black girl over the summer.”

  “Yeah. I was there when you met her. And she wasn’t good enough either?”

  “It’s nothing to do with who’s not good enough.”

  “What is it to do with?”

  “People.”

  “What does that mean?”

  It meant, of course, that some people he wanted to sleep with and some people he didn’t, and that was that. But as Jaz belonged in the category of people he didn’t want to sleep with, it probably wasn’t the time to get into it.

  “Some people I meet at the right time, and others I meet at the wrong time.”

  “So timing, more than people.”

  “Yeah. That would be a better way of putting it. Timing.”

  “And is it like a train? Once you miss it, it’s gone? Or can you get on the next one?”

  Joseph couldn’t pick his way through the simile. Either way it was like a train, it seemed to him.

  “I dunno.”

  “Well, we’ll see, shall we?”

  He gave her a smile, and though he couldn’t look at his own face, obviously he could feel in his muscles that the smile was forced and nervous. He didn’t want to see anything. He told Jaz it made more sense for him to get the bus, turned around, and walked the other way. “On gray tings.” Fucking hell.

  * * *

  —

  Lucy asked if she could hear it.

  “Oh, you don’t want to listen to it all over again.”

  “It’s not like you’ve written a thousand-page book. How long is it? Five minutes?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Well then.”

  “You see, last time . . .”

  Was he going to get into last time? With the jigging, and the earnest enthusiasm? Had it really been that bad?

  “What happened last time? Which last time?”

  “When I played you the track.”

  “Did I say something wrong?”

  “No.”

  He didn’t want to hurt her. But he had a job to do too: the job was to stop her morphing into someone he couldn’t sleep with. He couldn’t sleep with his mother, or stepmother, or whatever she had turned into before. Their relationship was healthy, at the moment. If she jigged or nodded, it became unhealthy. Neither of them wanted that.

  “Can you keep still?”

  “What?”

  “While you’re listening. Don’t move.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happens if I move?”

  “Nothing happens. Not really.”

  “It’s for dancing to, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  There was no kind or easy way of doing this, that he could see. Either he played it and let her do what she wanted, or he told her that when she tried to express her feelings for the music, he felt every single second of the twenty years between them.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll go upstairs.”

  “There’s no need to be embarrassed. It was good before, without the vocals. It will be even better now.”

  “I’m just not very good at this yet.”

  “I understand.”

  He went upstairs and lay on the bed. He could
hear the music through the floorboards. When it faded out, he went back downstairs. Lucy was flushed and a little disheveled.

  “It’s great,” she said. “Jaz is a wonderful singer, isn’t she? I had a proper boogie. I couldn’t help myself. I’m glad you weren’t there to see it.”

  “Yeah,” he said. The word “boogie” set his teeth on edge. “But thanks for listening.”

  “I will always want to hear everything you do.”

  Joseph had once broken up with a girl because she bought a horrible coat. He hadn’t realized that was the reason he couldn’t go on seeing her until a lot later, when he started to wonder why, when he remembered her, she always had the coat on. He had seen her with nothing on, and in her underwear, and in jeans and a tight jumper, but the coat haunted him. It was fake fur, although God knows what animal it was pretending to be, and it drew attention to itself and to her and to him, and he couldn’t forgive it. In every other way, the girl was nice, and she was really hot. He didn’t want Lucy’s dancing to become like that coat; Lucy was wonderful. She had just said something sweet, and supportive, and loyal, and maybe he was looking at things the wrong way round. Yes, she was oldish and he was youngish, but it was his youth that was the problem, not her age. He was too young to let stupid things go. But how were you supposed to learn?

  * * *

  —

  It started on a Monday morning with the words “fuck off” and a vigorous nod, and Lucy worked backward from there. Of course, she could have been wrong. Year Eleven students nodded and said “fuck off” approximately every twenty seconds, so there was no reason to presume that Shenika Johnson and Marlon Harris were talking about her love life. But she was able to subtitle the scene so easily.

  Shenika: You know Ms. Fairfax is banging a twenty-two-year-old black guy?

  Marlon: Fuck off.

  Shenika nods vigorously . . .

  And they stopped talking the moment she came into the room, which nobody ever did, normally. (They weren’t bad kids. She wasn’t a bad teacher. But the lesson usually took a couple of minutes to get started.)