Juliet, Naked

by Nick Hornby

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Hold that thought. I’m comin’ to getcha. See you in half an hour or so.”

  Annie squeezed her eyes shut and swore.

  After Linda had crawled under the fence surrounding her north London high school, she’d set about making a living as a freelance journalist, writing about liposuction and cellulite and leather boots and cats and sex aids and cakes and just about anything else the more down-market women’s magazines thought their readers might want to know about. Last time Annie had talked to her, she was just about getting by, although she gave the impression that the work was disappearing quickly down the Internet drain. Linda had hennaed hair and a loud voice, and whenever she and Annie met up, she always wanted Annie’s “take” on something or other, Barack Obama, or a reality TV show she never watched, or a band she’d never heard of. Annie didn’t really have a “take” on very much, really, unless a “take” was the same thing as an opinion, but she always had the feeling that it wasn’t, that it was something altogether more aggressive, definitive and unusual. Even if Annie had any of these qualities, she wouldn’t waste them on a “take.” Linda lived with a man who was every bit as hopeless as Duncan, although for some reason everyone had to pretend that he wasn’t, that his novel would get finished, and published, and recognized as a work of rare genius, and he could stop teaching English to Japanese businessmen.

  “So?” said Linda, as they sat down in the restaurant, even before Annie had taken her coat off. “Pray tell all.”

  Maybe Linda and Duncan should get together, Annie thought. Then they could “pray tell” and “aghast” each other to death.

  “I left Mike at home so we could have a proper girly chat.”

  “Oh, goody,” said Annie. Were there two words in the English language that combined more dispiritingly than “girly” and “chat”?

  “What did you do? Where did you go? What did you talk about?”

  Annie wondered for a moment whether Linda was par odying interest. Nobody could be as fascinated by a damp Internet date as the width of her eyes suggested.

  “Well.” What would they have done? “We went for a cup of coffee, and then we went to see a French film at the cinema in Russell Square, and then . . . That was it, really.”

  “What happened at the end?”

  “The woman found out her husband had been sleeping with a poet and she moved out.”

  “No, at the end of the date, stupid.”

  Typical Linda: she’d missed the admittedly mild witticism, but she made Annie seem like the idiot.

  “Yes, I . . .”

  Oh, what did it matter? It was all ridiculous. She had invented an Internet date, and the Internet date had been invented to replace another date that she was beginning to feel might have been half fantasy anyway. Why not continue on the same path and give Linda something to goggle at?

  “We just said good-bye. It was . . . It was all slightly awkward, actually. He brought his girlfriend with him, and I think he was hoping . . .”

  “Oh, my God!”

  “I know.”

  If the story she was telling were ever to be published, she’d have to thank Ros in the acknowledgments, maybe even offer her coauthorship. According to Ros, that sort of thing would almost certainly have happened, if she had really met somebody over the Internet.

  “It happens more than you think,” said Annie. “The stories I could tell.”

  She was beginning to feel like a real novelist, suddenly. Her first fiction was semiautobiographical, but now that she had some confidence she was pushing off into deeper imaginative territory.

  “Have you been doing a lot of Internet dating, then?”

  “Not really.” It was harder than it looked, storytelling. It involved chucking the truth out altogether, something that Annie clearly wasn’t prepared to do just yet. “But the couple of dates I’ve been on were so weird that I could probably tell you five or six stories about each one.”

  Linda shook her head sympathetically. “I’m so glad I’m not out there.”

  “You’re lucky.”

  This last sentiment wasn’t a reflection of Annie’s true feelings. The time she’d spent with Mike had led her to believe that Linda was one of the unluckiest people she had ever met.

  “And Duncan?”

  “He met somebody else.”

  “You’re kidding me. I don’t believe it. My God.”

  “He wasn’t so bad.”

  “Oh, Annie! He was ghastly.”

  “Well, he was no Mike, true, but . . .”

  Was that overdoing it? Surely even Linda could see that she was being satirical. But no. Linda just allowed a faint, smug smile to scud across her face. “Anyway. He met somebody else.”

  “Who on earth did he meet? If that’s any of my beeswax.”

  “A woman called Gina who teaches with him at the college.”

  “She must be desperate.”

  “Lots of lonely people are.”

  It was a gentle rebuke, but it did the trick. Linda seemed to recognize loneliness. Possibly she could see it sitting opposite her, sipping lager and trying not to lose its temper. It was an illness, loneliness—it made you weak, gullible, feebleminded. She’d never have stood for an hour outside the Dickens Museum like that if she hadn’t just been coming down with it.

  Annie’s cell phone rang just as the papadums were being served. She didn’t recognize the number, which was why she took the call.

  “Hello?”

  The voice was deeper than she had imagined, but weaker, too—tremulous, almost.

  “Is this Annie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hello. This is Tucker Crowe.”

  “Hello.” The first word she had ever said to him, and it came encrusted with ice. “I hope you have a good excuse.”

  “Moderately good. Mildly good. I had a mild heart attack, pretty much as soon as I got off the plane. I wish I could tell you that it was more serious than that, but there we are. It was enough.”

  “Oh, my God. Are you okay?”

  “I’m not so bad. Most of the damage seems to be psychic. Apparently I’m not going to live forever, as I previously thought.”

  “What can I do?”

  “I’d welcome a visit from somebody outside my own family.”

  “Done. And what can I bring you? Do you need anything?”

  “I could probably use some books. Something English and foggy. But not as foggy as Barnaby Rudge.”

  Annie laughed a little more than Tucker would have understood, got the name of the hospital, ended the call and blushed. She was always blushing these days. Perhaps she was literally getting younger, shooting all the way backward to prepubescence. And the whole terrible business could start all over again.

  “And was that one of your stories?” Linda asked her. “It looks like it, from the color you’ve turned.”

  “Well. Yes. I suppose he is.”

  He was a story at least, even if he never became anything else.

  Nobody, she discovered the next morning, ever waited impatiently outside a bookstore for it to open. She was on her own in the cold. She’d got to Charing Cross Road at eight-fifty, only to discover that none of them opened their doors before nine-thirty; she went for a coffee, came back, and at nine-thirty-one she was watching through the plate-glass door as the staff fiddled around with the displays in the front of the store. What were they doing? Surely they must have worked out that she wasn’t hopping up and down because she needed a celebrity cookbook. It was just as well that nobody could die of a thirst for literature: these people would just leave you gasping on the sidewalk. Finally, finally, a young man with stubble and long, greasy hair unlocked the door and slid it back, and Annie wriggled through the gap.

  She’d had a few ideas overnight. Tucker would never find out, but the truth was that she’d been unable to sleep, because she’d been constructing a reading list in her head. At two in the morning she’d decided that ten books
would be enough to cover his wants and her enthusiasms, but when she woke up she could see that turning up with a teetering tower of paperbacks would provide Tucker with all the evidence he needed to prove that she was unbalanced and obsessed. Two would be plenty, three if she really couldn’t decide. She ended up buying four, with the intention of ruling out two of them on the way to the hospital. She had no idea whether he’d like them, mainly because she knew nothing about him, other than that he liked Dickens. The hospital was somewhere near Marble Arch, so she walked up to Oxford Street and got a bus in what she hoped was a westerly direction.

  Except . . . surely everyone who liked nineteenth-century fiction had read Vanity Fair? And was a book titled Hangover Square an appropriate gift for a recovering alcoholic? And then there was the sex in Fingersmith . . . Would he think that was some kind of come-on? And wasn’t the sex mostly of the lesbian variety? Would he think she was trying to warn him that she wasn’t interested in him in that way? When in fact the whole idea was that she was trying to indicate the opposite? Plus, he’d had a heart attack, so maybe no book containing sex of any variety was tactful. Oh, shit. She looked out the window of the bus, saw a chain bookstore and got off at the next stop.

  At the entrance to the hospital, Annie found herself stuffing four brand-new paperbacks that she couldn’t afford into a trash can and feeling sick with guilt. She was throwing the books away because she’d bought too many and didn’t know where to hide the ones she didn’t need; also because he might decide that some of her choices were overobvious and patronizing; also because she hadn’t read one or two of them, and she should have, and if he asked her what they were about she would stutter and blush. She was in a panic, of course, she could see that. She was nervous, and when she was nervous she overthought everything. She caught sight of herself in the mirrored door of the elevator on the way up to his room: she looked awful, tired and old. Maybe instead of worrying about Victorian novels she should have worried more about her makeup. And she wished she’d slept better; she never looked good when she’d had less than seven hours’ sleep. He probably wasn’t looking so great, though, which was some consolation. Maybe that was the Annie Paradox: she could only appeal to men too sick to do much about anything. She flicked uselessly at her hair and walked out of the elevator and down the hall.

  On the way to Tucker’s room, she saw Jackson walking toward her, hand in hand with an impossibly glamorous but intimidatingly sulky woman in her late forties. Annie tried to smile at her, but she could feel the smile bounce off the woman’s face: Natalie, if that’s who the woman was, clearly didn’t dish out smiles for no reason, thus devaluing their currency. Annie was glad she had resisted the temptation to introduce herself; she’d have been like one of those crazy women who shout at soap-opera stars on the street because they think they know them. Just because Jackson spent his life stuck to her fridge didn’t mean that she could run up to him and frighten him half to death. As they walked past, she could see that he looked frightened enough as it was, and Annie hoped that didn’t mean she was walking into a room containing a very sick man. Supposing Tucker died when she was in there? And his last words were “Oh, I’ve read all those.” She’d have to make something up. And she’d never had to deal with a dying person. And it would be grotesquely inappropriate, hers being the last face he saw. Perhaps she should just go home. Or wait until she was sure there was somebody else in there, somebody he actually knew.

  But then she was knocking on the door and he was saying, “Come in,” and before she knew it she was sitting on his bed, and they were beaming at each other.

  “I bought you some books,” she said, much too soon. The books should have been an afterthought, not an introduction.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I meant to say I’d pay you back. I don’t know you well enough to ask you to spend money on me.”

  She’d asked for that by coming in and yelling about her kindness. Idiot.

  “Good grief, I don’t need paying back. I just didn’t want you to think I’d forgotten. Terrible, being in hospital with nothing to read.”

  He nodded at his bedside table. “I still have old Barnaby. But he’s not as much fun as I’d hoped. You read that one?”

  “Ummm . . .” Oh, come on, woman, she told herself. You know the answer to the question. You’ve read about four Dickens novels, and that’s not one of them. Barnaby Rudge isn’t going to be a deal breaker. On the other hand, why take the risk?

  “I’m like you,” she said brightly. “I got about a third of the way through and put it down. Anyway. You’ve had a heart attack, and we’re talking about me not finishing a book. How are you?”

  “Not so bad.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Tired. A little anxious about Jackson.”

  “I think I saw him walking down the corridor.”

  “Yeah. Natalie’s taken him to a toy store. It’s all too weird.”

  “They’d never met before this trip?”

  “Shit, no.” She laughed at his eyes widening in alarm. “Why would I do that to him? And I want him to look up to me. I don’t want him judging me on the basis of my past mistakes.”

  “But she’s being nice to him.”

  “Yeah. I guess. And me. Her old man paid for us to fly over here. And then I keel over in the reception of the fan ciest hospital in London, so he gets to pay for that, too.”

  He laughed wheezily.

  “So she’s not all that bad.”

  “Apparently not. Now I find out.”

  “How did you end up married to an Englishwoman?”

  “Ohhhh . . .” And he waved a hand, as if a wife from another continent were inevitable at some stage in the career of a serial husband, and the details were therefore wearyingly inconsequential.

  She told herself not to ask too many questions, even though there was so much she wanted to know about him. She liked to think she was curious about people, but her hunger for information went beyond curiosity: she wanted to piece the entirety of his adult life together and she seemed to be lacking even the straight edges that would get her started. Why did she care so much? Part of it was because of Duncan, of course: she was thinking with his fan’s head and she felt obliged to collect as much information as she could, because nobody else was in a position to do so. But it wasn’t just that. She’d never been given the opportunity to meet someone this exotic, and she feared she’d never be given it again, unless some other vanished bohemian contacted her out of the blue.

  “Ah,” she said. “One of those.”

  “Did that seem as if I’m being mysterious?” he said.

  “It seemed as though you weren’t feeling up to talking about the marriage before last to someone you’ve only just met.”

  “Perfect. Amazing what you can do with the limp flap of a wrist.”

  “How’s your daughter doing?”

  “Not so great. Okay physically, but angry. Angry with me, too.”

  “With you?”

  “I’ve gone and fucked it all up for her again. For once, she was supposed to be the center of attention.”

  “I’m sure that’s not what she means.”

  In the first five minutes, she had defended both Lizzie and Natalie, and she vowed not to say anything nice about anybody related to Tucker for the remainder of the visit. It made her sound bland and boring and good and exactly the sort of person that a reclusive cult musician in recovery wouldn’t like, if she knew anything about reclusive cult musicians in recovery, which she didn’t. And in any case, there was every chance that these people were horrible. She’d only seen Natalie for two seconds in the hallway, but those two seconds had been salutary: they suggested to her that the rich and beautiful really were different. “I’m sure that’s not what she means . . .” How would she know what the daughter of a model meant?

  “Do you know many people in London?”

  “Nope. Lizzie and Nat. And you, now that you’re in London.”

  “So you hav
en’t been bombarded with visitors?”

  “Not yet. But I understand there are a fair few on the way.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Nat and Lizzie decided in their wisdom that my children should all come here to see me before I croak. So I’ve got three more kids and another ex-wife on the way.”

  “Oh. And how do you feel . . . ?”

  “I don’t care for the idea much.”

  “No. Well. I can see that.”

  “The truth is, Annie, I’m not going to be able to go through with it. I’m going to need you to get me out of here. If you live in a small seaside town a ways away from this hospital, then that sounds like exactly the sort of place I need to rest up in. Might be fun for Jackson, too.”

  For a moment, Annie forgot to breathe. She had written that last sentence for him several times since he’d called to tell her what had happened, although it sounded better in his voice, of course, and there were some linguistic details that she’d never have come up with: “a ways away,” “rest up.” And then, after she had started inhaling and exhaling again, with a little more noise than she might have wished, she started thinking about train times. She’d been intending to get the two-twelve, unless she’d been given a compelling or even a mildly plausible reason to stay in London; if Jackson came back from the toy store in time, they could jump in a cab to King’s Cross and be back in Gooleness by four-thirty.

  “What do you think?” She’d not only forgotten to breathe; she’d forgotten that she was supposed to be taking part in a conversation with a real person.

  “I don’t think Jackson would have much fun. It’s not such a fun place, especially this time of year.”

  “You still got that shark’s eye?”

  “I have loads of pieces of shark.”

  “Well, that’s a happy afternoon right there.”

  The trouble was, she couldn’t help but be boring and bland and sensible and good. There was nothing she wanted more than to nurse Tucker back to health in Gooleness, yet the desire was untrustworthy, and dangerously, self-indulgently whimsical: it was the crush talking. For a start, he’d had a heart attack, not a bout of flu. He probably didn’t need blankets and hot-water bottles and homemade soup; for all she knew, any of those things might kill him. And stealing him away from his family, it seemed to her, would be wrong and bad and none of her business; she tried not to think conventionally, but she probably did believe that families were important, that fathers had a duty to their children, that Tucker couldn’t just run away from them out of fear or embarrassment or both. All of these doubts, when she examined them, started to lead to the unwelcome conclusion that Tucker was a real person, with actual problems, and neither he nor the problems could comfortably be accommodated in her life, or in her house, or in Gooleness. If that was where doubts led, then she didn’t especially want to follow them.