by Nick Hornby
“You know I, like, made it, don’t you?”
“How many times?”
“All the way through? Since it was finished?”
Had he ever? He was trying to remember. There had been a moment in just about every relationship when he’d walked in on somebody listening to his music furtively; he could remember all the startled guilty faces. It had even happened with a couple of his kids, although not Grace, thankfully. But then, he hadn’t seen enough of Grace to catch her doing anything furtively. He shook his head.
“Never?”
“I don’t think so. Why would I have done that? But I played those songs on stage every night for a while, remember. I’d know if there was anything in them. And there isn’t. They’re all lies.”
“You’re telling me that art is made up? My God.”
“I’m telling you that my . . . art is inauthentic. Sorry. Let me rephrase that. I’m telling you my rock album is a fake bunch of crap.”
“And you think that matters to me?”
“I wouldn’t like it if I found out John Lee Hooker was a white accountant.”
“Is he not?”
“He’s dead.”
“You see, this is all news to me. Anyway, what you’re saying is I’m an idiot.”
“Huh? Where did that come from?”
“Well, I’ve listened to it hundreds of times, and it still doesn’t feel to me as though I’ve emptied it. So I must be daft. It’s all just facts, isn’t it, as far as you’re concerned? It’s a rotten album, fact. And if I can’t grasp the facts, then that makes me stupid.”
“No, no, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.”
“So, go on. Square your feelings about Juliet with mine.”
He studied her. As far as he could tell, she was really irritated, which had to mean that she really did have something invested in the music. And whatever it was, he was dumping all over it.
He shrugged.
“I can’t. Unless I say, you know, everyone’s opinion is valid.”
“Which you don’t believe?”
“Not in this case, no. See . . . It’s like I’m a chef, and you’re eating in my restaurant, and you’re telling me how great my food is. But I know I pissed all over it before I served it up. So, you know, your opinion is valid, but . . .”
Annie wrinkled her nose and laughed. “But it demonstrates a certain lack of taste.”
“Exactly.”
“So Tucker Crowe thinks his fans can’t taste pee when it’s served to them.”
That was exactly what Tucker Crowe thought during that tour. He hated himself, sure, but he also despised everyone who lapped it all up. That was one of the reasons it had been so easy to quit.
“You know that bad people can make great art, don’t you?” said Annie.
“Yes, of course. Some of the people whose art I admire the most are assholes.”
“Dickens wasn’t nice to his wife.”
“Dickens didn’t write a memoir called I’m Nice to My Wife.”
“You didn’t make an album called Julie Beatty Is a Deep and Interesting Human Being and I Didn’t Impregnate Anyone Else While I Was with Her. It doesn’t matter how it came about. You think it was all accidental. But like it or not, believe it or not, the music that Julie inspired was wonderful.”
He threw up his hands in mock despair and laughed.
“What?” said Annie.
“I can’t believe I told you all those things, and we’ve ended up talking about how great I am.”
“But we’re not. You’ve confused the two things again. You’re not great. You’re a, a shallow, feckless, self-indulgent . . . wanker.”
“Thanks.”
“Well, you were, anyway. We’re talking about how great your album is.”
He smiled.
“Okay. Compliment accepted, if not believed. And abuse accepted, too. I can honestly say that nobody has ever called me a wanker before. I quite enjoyed it.”
“You can only honestly say that you’ve never heard anybody call you a wanker before. I’ll bet it’s happened. Don’t you ever read the Internet? Actually, I know you do. That’s how we met.”
She paused. He could see that she wanted to say something and she was stopping herself.
“Go on,” he said.
“I have a confession to make, too. And it’s almost as bad as yours.”
“Good.”
“You know the guy who wrote the first review on that website? The one where you found mine?”
“Duncan somebody. Talking about wankers.”
Annie stared at him, then clapped her hands to her mouth. He’d have worried that he’d said something out of turn, except that her eyes were bright with a kind of astonished mischief.
“What?”
“Tucker Crowe knows who Duncan is and he called him a wanker. I cannot tell you how weird that is.”
“You know that guy?”
“He’s . . . This was his house, up until a few weeks ago.”
Tucker stared at her.
“So he’s the one? The man you wasted all those years with?”
“He’s the one. That’s why I’ve heard your music so much. That’s why I got to hear Juliet, Naked. That’s why I posted a review on his website.”
“And . . . Oh, shit. He lives in this town still?”
“A few minutes’ walk away.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Does that worry you?”
“It’s like . . . Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, I have to walk into his. That’s incredible.”
“Except not. As I said. Because without him, we wouldn’t know each other. I’d like you to meet him.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because (a) he’s a fucking fruitcake, and (b) I might kill him, and (c) if I didn’t kill him, he’d drop dead from the excitement anyway.”
“Well, ‘c’ is a definite possibility.”
“Why do you want me to meet him?”
“Because no matter what you think, he’s not stupid. Not about art, anyway. And you’re the only artist alive who’s made any sense to him, just about.”
“The only artist alive? Jesus Christ. I could write you a list of a hundred people better than me off the top of my head.”
“It’s not about better, Tucker. You speak to him. For him. He connects. You plug right into a very complicated-looking socket in his back. I don’t know why, but you do.”
“So I don’t need to meet him, then. We’ve already talked.”
“Oh, it’s up to you. It’s weird. He was unfaithful, and that relationship cost me a lot. But you staying here and me not telling him . . . That seems like a betrayal beyond all comprehension.”
“So tell him after I’ve gone.”
They finished their tea, and Annie found a spare duvet and pillows for the sofa. Jackson was fast asleep in the spare room; Tucker had already lost an argument about who was going to sleep in her bed.
“Thank you, Annie,” he said. “Really.” And he kissed her on the cheek.
“It’s nice, having people to stay,” she said. “Hasn’t happened since Duncan left.”
“Oh. Yeah. Thanks for that, too.” He kissed her on the other cheek and went upstairs.
Saturday morning was, despite Annie’s warnings, clear and bright and cold, but in Tucker’s considered opinion the town didn’t look a whole lot better: without the cheap nighttime neon it just looked tired, like a middle-aged hooker wearing no makeup. They walked down to the sea after breakfast; they took a detour so that Annie could show her visitors where the museum was, and they stopped at a store where the candy was kept in jars, and you had to ask for a quarter-pound of what you wanted. Jackson bought some lurid-looking pink candy shrimp.
And then, while they were down on the beach trying to teach Jackson how to skip stones on the waves, Annie said, “Uh-oh.”
A pudgy middle-aged man was jogging toward them, red-faced and sweaty, d
espite the temperature. He stopped when he spotted Annie.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hi, Duncan. I didn’t have you down as a jogger.”
“No, me neither. It’s a, a new thing. New regime.”
Tucker knew enough about the relationships between ex-partners to realize that this exchange was bursting with meaning, but there was nothing on Annie’s face he could read. The four of them stood there for a moment. Annie was clearly trying to work out the best way of breaking the news, but Duncan made a big deal of sticking his hand out, as if he were being magnanimous in some way.
“Hello,” said Duncan. “Duncan Thomson.”
“Hello,” said Tucker. “Tucker Crowe.” He had never been more conscious of the weight of his own name.
Duncan dropped Tucker’s hand as if it were red-hot and looked at Annie with real contempt.
“That’s just pathetic,” he said to Annie. And he jogged away.
The three of them watched as he plodded off along the beach.
“Why did that man call you pathetic?” said Jackson.
“It’s complicated,” said Annie.
“I want to know. He was mad at us.”
“Well,” said Tucker. “I think that man thought I wasn’t who I said I was. He thought Annie had told me to say that my name was, was my name because she thought it would be funny.”
There was a beat, while Jackson examined every side of this misunderstanding for any possible trace of humor.
“That’s way not funny,” said Jackson.
“No,” said Tucker.
“So why did you think it would be?” Jackson addressed this question to Annie, as the originator of the incomprehensible joke.
“I didn’t, sweetheart,” said Annie.
“Dad just said you did.”
“No, he said . . . You see, I know who your dad is. But that man doesn’t. That man knows who Tucker Crowe is, but he doesn’t think that’s who your dad is.”
“Who does he think Dad is? Fucker?”
Annie presumably knew better than to laugh at the sound of an obscenity emerging from the mouth of a six-year-old, but she laughed anyway. Tucker understood the impulse. It was the combination of the curse with the boy’s earnestness, his attempt to understand what had just happened.
“Yes!” said Tucker. “That’s exactly who he thinks I am.”
“There’s actually a further complication,” said Annie. “I know the confessional window has closed, but . . .” She took a deep breath. “He also thinks you’re somebody I’m . . . seeing.”
“Why would he think that?”
“He asked about the photo on the fridge, and I didn’t want to tell him the truth, and . . .”
At least Tucker now understood the implied generosity of the handshake.
“So there we are,” said Tucker. “That man thinks I’m Annie’s boyfriend. And he thinks Fucker is Tucker.”
“I was right,” said Jackson. “It’s so, so not funny.”
“No.”
“Cool,” said Jackson. “Because I don’t like it when jokes are funny for everybody else.”
“Anyway,” said Tucker. “All in all, I’m a long way from being me at the moment.”
“Exactly.”
“Do I have to go to all the trouble of proving it?”
“The trouble is, he knows more about Tucker Crowe than you do.”
“Yeah, but I have the documentation.”
About fifteen minutes later, Duncan called her on her cell phone. She was outside the museum with Tucker and Jackson, fishing around in her bag for her work keys: the charms of Gooleness had been exhausted already, so, much earlier than anticipated, she was about to show her guests pieces of long-dead shark.
“I can’t believe you did that,” said Duncan.
“I haven’t actually done anything,” said Annie.
“If you want to make a sad spectacle of yourself around town with someone old enough to be your dad, then that’s up to you. But the Tucker business . . . What’s the point? Why would you do that?”
“I’m actually with him now,” said Annie. “So this is slightly embarrassing.”
Tucker waved at the mouthpiece.
“You should have thought about that before you made him take part in your juvenile games.”
“It’s not a game,” said Annie. “That was Tucker Crowe. Still is. You can ask him any question about himself, if you want.”
“Why are you doing this?” said Duncan.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“I sent you a picture of Tucker Crowe a few weeks ago. You know what he looks like. He doesn’t look like a retired accountant.”
“That wasn’t him. That was his neighbor John. Also known as Fake Tucker, or Fucker, because of a misunderstanding that people like you have spread all over the Internet.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. So how did you meet ‘Tucker Crowe,’ actually?”
“He e-mailed me about that review of Juliet, Naked I wrote.”
“E-mailed you.”
“Yes.”
“You post up one piece and you get an e-mail from Tucker Crowe.”
“Listen, Duncan, Tucker and Jackson are standing here and it’s cold and . . .”
“Jackson.”
“Tucker’s son.”
“Oh, he’s got a son now, has he? And where did he appear from?”
“You know how babies are made, Duncan. Anyway. You saw a picture of Jackson on my fridge.”
“I saw a picture of your retired accountant and his grandson on your fridge. This is a circuitous argument.”
“It’s not an argument. Listen, I’ll call you later. You can come round for tea if you want. Bye.”
And she hung up on him.
Ros had worked hard over the couple of days Annie had spent in London. The day before she left, the two of them had gone over to Terry Jackson’s house to rummage through his collection of Gooleness memorabilia and had ended up taking most of it, in the absence of anything else to show; Terry’s wife, denied the use of a spare bedroom for the whole of her married life because of all the old bus tickets and newspapers, was insisting that it was a gift, not a loan. Terry had been unable to provide any kind of budget for the exhibition, so they were using anything they had on hand—old photo frames, unused dusty cases—to display his stuff. A lot of it was still in garbage bags, a conservation decision that would get them thrown out of the Museums Association if anyone ever found out.
“Gross,” said Jackson, when Annie showed him the eye.
Annie admired his determination to say the right things, but the eye didn’t really stare at you, in the way that Annie and Ros had hoped it might, mostly because it didn’t really look like an eye any longer, unfortunately. They had decided to keep it in the exhibition because of what it said about the people of Gooleness, rather than what it said about sharks, although they would not be explaining their decision to the people of Gooleness.
Tucker liked Terry’s Stones poster, though, and he loved the photograph of the four pals on their day out at the seaside.
“Why does it make me feel sad?” he said. “Even though they’re happy? I mean, sure, they’re all old or dead now. But it’s more than that, I think.”
“I have exactly the same reaction. It’s because their leisure time was so precious, I think. We have so much, by comparison, and we get to do so much more with it. When I first saw it, I’d just had this three-week holiday trekking around the U.S., and . . .” She stopped.
“What?”
“Oh,” she said. “You don’t know about that, either.”
“What?”
“My American holiday.”
“No,” said Tucker. “But then, we only met recently. There are probably a few holidays I need to catch up on.”
“But this one should have come up in the full disclosure section of our conversation.”
“Why?”
“We went to Bozeman, Montana. And the site of some studio
that isn’t there anymore in Memphis. And Berkeley. And the toilet in the Pits Club in Minneapolis . . .”
“Shit, Annie.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why did you go with him?”
“It seemed like as good a way of seeing America as any. I enjoyed it.”
“You went to San Francisco to stand outside Julie Beatty’s house?”
“Ah. No. Not guilty. I let him get on with it. I went to San Francisco to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge and to do some shopping.”
“So this guy Duncan . . . he’s like a real stalker.”
“I suppose he is.”
For a moment, Annie felt a little pang of envy. It wasn’t that she’d ever wanted Duncan to stalk her, exactly. She didn’t want to see him hiding behind her hedge, or ducking behind a supermarket aisle when she was doing her shopping. But she wouldn’t have minded if he’d had the same appetite for her that he’d shown for Tucker. She had only just realized that the man talking to her now was much more of a rival than another woman could ever be.
Duncan poured himself an orange juice and sat down at the kitchen table.
“Gina.”
“Yes, my sweet.”
She was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and reading the Guardian magazine.
“What do you think are the chances of Tucker Crowe being in Gooleness?”
She looked at him.
“The Tucker Crowe?”
“Yes.”
“This Gooleness?”
“Yes.”
“I’d say the chances were very slim indeed. Why? Do you think you just saw him?”
“Annie says I did.”
“Annie says you did.”
“Yes.”
“Well, without knowing why she said it, I’d have to say that she’s winding you up.”
“That’s what I think.”
“Why did she tell you that? It seems quite a peculiar thing to say. And quite cruel, given your . . . interests.”
“I was jogging along the beach, and she was there with a, a respectable-looking middle-aged man and a young boy. And I stopped, and introduced myself to the man, and he said he was Tucker Crowe.”
“That must have been a bit of a shock to you.”
“I just couldn’t understand why she made him say it. I mean, it’s not very clever. Or funny. And then I just called her from the bedroom before my shower and she’s sticking to her story.”