Just Like You

by Nick Hornby

  “Crap, shit, piss, tits, knob, dick, cock, any of it.”

  The boys knew better than to laugh, and this time their sobriety was straightforwardly depressing.

  “So what words are we supposed to use instead?”

  “Just don’t talk about any of it. It’s a meal. Nobody wants to hear about your penis during a meal.”

  Lucy wanted to repeat the word “penis,” to see if she could introduce some levity into the proceedings, but that would be childish in several ways.

  “Anything else?”

  “Oh, no Christs or Jesuses, either.”

  “God?”

  “If you must. You’re clever boys. I want her to see it.”

  “Hey,” said Al. “Maybe Dylan could ask me about the capitals of the world. I know most of them.”

  “Not that sort of clever,” said Joseph.

  “I haven’t got a clue what to say now,” said Al.

  * * *

  —

  In the end, neither of the boys said very much for the first hour or so, because both of them fell violently in love with Grace. They wouldn’t have admitted or even necessarily known that this is what had happened to them, but the signs were obvious: the occasional blush, the goggle-eyed attention whenever Grace spoke. Eventually the awed silence was replaced by a comical willingness to help, an exaggerated politeness, and the occasional spelling of polysyllabic words that came up in the conversation. Lucy didn’t have to worry for a moment about inappropriate language, unless you counted the words they attempted to use to show their mastery of English. “Can I give you some assistance, Mum?” said Dylan. “A-S-S-I-S-T-A-N-C-E,” said Al. And so on. Joseph rolled his eyes a lot. Grace was amused.

  * * *

  —

  Meanwhile Lucy and Mrs. Campbell watched on fondly. They were, after all, in strangely similar situations: their boys were courting, with varying degrees of success. There would come a time when Al and Dylan would be sitting in somebody else’s kitchen, trying to decide which version of themselves to present to someone who might or might not like them. Maybe she would be with them. She felt a little pang of anticipatory panic. She would be landed with important relationships not of her choosing. She felt grateful to Grace and her mother, at least for their apparent willingness to suspend disbelief. Perhaps her age made it easier for them; they were probably telling themselves that they wouldn’t have to sit here in five years’ time.

  * * *

  —

  “We keep jumping over hurdles,” said Joseph that night. He was reading something on his phone. Lucy was halfway through a book that she wasn’t enjoying.

  “What do you mean?”

  “This weekend it was my friends and my family. That’s a lot. And I’ve met some of yours, and . . . Anyway.”

  “There’s nothing left,” Lucy said.

  “Well, my dad. But you won’t get on with him because he’s hard to get on with, and it doesn’t matter anyway.”

  “And you still haven’t met my parents, but ditto.”

  “So there we are. Sorted.”

  “I’m lying in bed with a twenty-three-year-old who is scrolling through his phone while I’m reading a tedious novel that was nominated for the Booker Prize. What could go wrong?”

  “So stop reading it.”

  “I never give up on books,” said Lucy.

  “Why not?”

  “Because . . . I don’t know. I’m scared that once I start, I’ll never stop.”

  “Do you always read boring books, then?”

  She laughed.

  “I try not to.”

  “Not sure you’re trying hard enough.”

  Now that they were living together, and bed did not always mean sex (although it meant sex much more often than Lucy was used to), Joseph knew that Lucy achieved oblivion quite quickly, and usually had to have a book removed from her chest and her bedside light turned off for her. Lucy now knew that Joseph’s phone addiction didn’t stop when he was under a duvet wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

  He went back to his article, completely absorbed.

  She re-read the most recent paragraph of her novel, and then read it again. The book was about the relationship between a gardener working on one of Capability Brown’s commissions and the daughter of the house. It wasn’t even that sort of relationship. The daughter of the house was helping the gardener to understand that he might love men, “as the Greeks loved men.” He seemed none the wiser so far. There was page after page about Brown’s philosophy. She sighed when she turned the page and saw another long unbroken paragraph about landscaping as punctuation.

  “If he wins, we’re fucked.”

  “Who?”

  “Fucking Trump.”

  “What are you looking at?”

  “An article on Ebony.”

  “Who’s fucked?”

  “We all are. But I guess especially black people in America.”

  “And women.”

  “And Muslims.”

  “And Mexicans. Are you interested in American politics?”

  “I guess. More than British politics, anyway. Ever since I was a kid, everything I listened to led me back to the Civil Rights movement somehow or another. You go from hip-hop to James Brown to Aretha to Martin Luther King. Or from Public Enemy to Malcolm X. It’s not the same here. Boring. Nothing very inspiring, anyway. Brexit and, I don’t know. Jeremy Corbyn. I don’t care.”

  Since Brexit she had avoided the news. She was now mostly focusing on Capability Brown. Perhaps he was right: there were no hurdles. And then what?

  17

  He didn’t know whether to wake her up, but he was angry, and he didn’t want to be angry on his own.

  “Lucy.”

  She looked at him, and then sat up in bed.

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “Christ. I’m sorry,” said Lucy.

  “Why are you sorry for me and not for you? It’s awful for everyone,” said Joseph. “Awful for the whole fucking world. Awful for women. He goes on about grabbing pussies.”

  “I know. But I suppose it’s like Brexit. The people who voted for him will be happy.”

  “It’s nothing like Brexit. Brexit might turn out to be a good thing. This bastard retweets stuff from white supremacists.”

  “Racists voted for Brexit.”

  “Racists like my dad? This is different.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “You just said it was the same. Trump retweeted something with the Twitter handle ‘White Genocide Now.’ The Ku Klux Klan support him. You don’t know. Really.”

  He was angry, and he wanted to pick a fight with the first white person he saw. This morning, like every other morning, it was Lucy. This felt personal, in a way that no other political event in his lifetime had. And if Trump was President, then he’d come to England, shake hands with the Prime Minister, and she was supposed to represent him. Wasn’t she? Later, he wished they hadn’t argued. He wished he hadn’t had an excuse.

  * * *

  —

  Success, when it came, was nothing like he’d imagined it would be. It was fast, and meant almost nothing, as far as he could tell. £Man remixed the track he’d made with Jaz, and put it up on Spotify, and because £Man had blown up, J. and J., as they called themselves quickly and without any thought, got ninety thousand streams within a few days. £Man was asked to remix another couple of tracks by people who were hot, and Joseph got swept up in the slipstream. A jeans company asked him to do something for an ad. “Gonna Drive,” as they called the track quickly and without any thought, got played on Rinse F.M. a few times. And then the day that he had woken Lucy up to tell her the news about Trump, Joseph and Jaz went to a massive club in Leeds to do a P.A.

  There was no money involved anywhere, although maybe the jeans
company would pay him something if they used the track, and maybe the club in Leeds would give him a paid D.J. set eventually, and maybe the record company who’d set £Man up with a deal would be interested in a similar arrangement with Joseph, if the track continued to build. Someone was making a few quid somewhere, but it wasn’t J. and J. That was the way the world worked now. Jaz was happy, though.

  “I never thought I’d have a job where I got to stay in a hotel and other people paid the bill,” said Jaz when they had found seats on the train.

  “Yeah, I’m not sure it’s a job yet,” said Joseph. And they were staying in a cheap and crappy chain hotel way out of town, so they were unlikely to feel the glamour.

  “Still,” said Jaz. “It’s all amazing. What you wearing?”

  “How do you mean?” said Joseph.

  “What are you wearing?” She repeated the question, but with more incredulity.

  “You can see what I’m wearing.”

  “Tonight.”

  “Oh. Well. You can see what I’m wearing.”

  “You didn’t bring anything else?”

  “T-shirt and underwear for tomorrow. They haven’t come to look at me.” He was wearing Nike joggers, his red Adidas Gazelles, and a yellow retro Adidas T-shirt.

  “You should try wearing a few more brands,” said Jaz. “Can’t you get some Puma specs or something? With PUMA in big letters on the lenses?”

  She was being sarcastic, and he ignored her.

  “You don’t want to know what I’m wearing?”

  “Why would I? I’ll see it later.”

  “I think I’d better prepare you otherwise you might have a heart attack. It’s a skintight black jumpsuit. No room for anything on underneath.”

  Joseph thought his own thoughts, and got out his phone.

  When they went to the hotel to leave their bags, they found that the promoter had booked one room instead of two.

  “We’ll sort it out later,” said Jaz.

  When they got to the club, neither of them remembered to mention the problem to the promoter. Joseph suspected that neither of them had forgotten the problem, though.

  * * *

  —

  The P.A. was both exciting and stupid. People cheered when they came on, but Joseph had to sit behind a keyboard pretending he was doing something, and Jaz had to mime to the song. She was good at it, though, and completely nerveless, like she’d always expected to be gyrating in front of a crowd in a nightclub, and she couldn’t understand why she’d had to wait this long. The skintight black jumpsuit was as advertised, and she moved well, and the crowd loved her. When they left the stage she was buzzing, and she kissed Joseph on the lips as they were walking toward their disgusting little dressing room.

  “That was amazing,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  He felt flat. You could look at it two ways: all sorts of people who were doing well had started out like this, with phony appearances in nightclubs. Also, all sorts of people nobody had ever heard of had started out like this, and ended like this, and that group was a lot bigger than the first group.

  “I’m hungry,” said Jaz. “And I want to get drunk. And I want to get you drunk.”

  “No need for that,” said Joseph helplessly.

  * * *

  —

  Afterward he felt so sick that he thought he might actually have to throw up.

  “You OK?” said Jaz.

  “Yeah. Good.”

  “We’ll have time to do that again in the morning.”

  He didn’t say anything. What was the point? He would either have sex with Jaz again or he wouldn’t. Right now he didn’t think he would, because he had had his fill, and he was feeling guilty and miserable as fuck. But he’d been pretty sure he wouldn’t earlier in the day, and look what had just happened.

  “Where have you gone?” said Jaz.

  “I’m here,” he said, but he wanted to be anywhere else.

  “I knew we’d end up like this in the end,” said Jaz. “And I knew you’d give up on gray tings.”

  When Jaz fell asleep, he got dressed and went out looking for something to eat. He was starving. That seemed like a metaphor: in his head he was sick to his stomach, but he was starving and he had to have food. He had no control over his appetites.

  * * *

  —

  Back in London, he went straight home to his mother’s house. She was at work. He had no clothes there anymore, so he washed everything he was wearing and everything he’d worn the day before, and sat around in an old dressing gown waiting for it all to dry. He didn’t know when he’d have access to the rest of his wardrobe.

  He turned the T.V. on, and watched Sky Sports News, and then an old compilation of Premier League goals, and then the teatime quizzes. Lucy texted him during Eggheads.

  You OK? What time are you back?

  Staying at my mum’s tonight. Even remembering the apostrophe made him sad.

  Why?

  Will explain soon.

  Is everything OK?

  Nobody ill. He didn’t want to use another apostrophe.

  But is everything OK?

  He turned the sound off on his phone and put it down the side of the sofa, just for a few minutes, and then fell asleep.

  His mother woke him up two hours later.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m staying the night.”

  “Why?”

  “No reason.”

  “Has she thrown you out?”

  “No.” And then, because his self-loathing was uncontainable, “But she should.”

  “Why? What have you done?”

  He sighed.

  “The usual.”

  “You cheated on her?”

  “Yes.”

  He didn’t feel good about telling someone, exactly, but it was a relief to let some of his shame escape. He was beginning to think it might make him burst.

  “Joseph.”

  “I know.”

  “No, you don’t. You don’t know at all.”

  Joseph had used those words when he got angry with Lucy about Trump. So he was thinking about her, and he knew his mother was thinking of her most recent, and maybe her last, relationship, with a man who had cheated on her, many times, just as he had cheated on his first wife while he was seeing Joseph’s mother. This man had ended her marriage, and had replaced it with nothing that was worth having.

  “You’ve told her?” his mother said.

  “Not yet.”

  “When are you planning on doing that, then?”

  “I don’t know. The weekend, I suppose.”

  “You’re going over there now.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Because?”

  “Because I can’t.”

  “Because you’re scared. You’re not staying here.”

  “Great. Thanks.”

  “You can come back afterward. But you tell her first.”

  “I haven’t got any clothes.”

  “Where are they?”

  “In the washing machine.”

  But he’d put them in the dryer hours ago. They would offer him no relief, unless they’d shrunk so much that he literally couldn’t put them on, and even then his mother would probably make him go on the bus in his dressing gown.

  * * *

  —

  He nearly got off the bus at most of the stops. He sat downstairs, near the doors, and he stood up just about every time they opened. Alternative plans were forming in his head: he’d go to his sister’s, although she probably wouldn’t let him through the door if she found out why he was knocking on it. Or to his dad’s—his dad wouldn’t care what he’d done, which was one of the reasons he couldn’t bear to stay with him. Or he’d just walk all night. He got
three texts from Jaz during the journey, and he didn’t reply to any of them. She seemed to be working under the assumption that their night in Leeds marked the beginning of a long relationship. The first text said, What we doing tomorrow?

  He wished he smoked. He wished he was a proper drinker. He wished he took drugs. If nothing else, he’d have to go to a corner shop, or find a dealer, and that would kill some time. Maybe Lucy would go to bed early, if he spent ages looking for drugs. There wouldn’t be many dealers near her house. He’d have to go to Camden or somewhere. What would he choose to become addicted to? He googled “Best drugs” and found a lot of helpful suggestions. He liked the look of ketamine. He knew people who did it, but he didn’t really know what it was. According to Wikipedia, it induced a trancelike state while providing pain relief, sedation, and memory loss. He could take it just before he arrived at Lucy’s house, say what he had to say, and collapse. And when he woke up he wouldn’t remember any of it. Lucy would, though. He couldn’t take a drug for that.

  * * *

  —

  He didn’t do any of those things. He didn’t get off the bus, he didn’t take any drugs. He did, however, arrive at her house in a trancelike state. He couldn’t believe what he’d done, or what he was about to do. And she hadn’t gone to bed.

  He had a key but he knocked anyway. She opened the door cautiously, and then gave a big, loving smile when she saw him.

  “I didn’t think you were coming! Why didn’t you text! Have you lost your key? It’s so nice to see you!”

  She stepped forward to kiss him and he stopped her, and she looked puzzled, and then anxious.

  “I have to talk to you.”

  “Oh,” she said, and her expression changed immediately. She knew. What else could the subject have been?

  She ushered him into the house, and he told her before they’d even sat down. She was walking in front of him and he told her back, right between the shoulder blades. That was the last opportunity for cowardice, the not looking at her, and he took it. It was better than some of the others he’d been thinking of.