by Nick Hornby
“Did he look like Tucker Crowe?”
“No. Not at all.”
They found their eyes straying over to the mantel-piece, and the photograph he’d brought with him when he’d moved in: Tucker onstage, maybe at the Bottom Line, sometime in the late seventies. Duncan could feel the beginnings of another little panic, rather like the panic he’d felt the other night when he was talking to Gina about Juliet. The man he saw on the beach this morning wasn’t the man who’d sung “Farmer John” in a club a few weeks ago, that was for sure. And the man he saw on the beach this afternoon definitely wasn’t the man in the famous Neil Ritchie shot, the wild man lunging for the camera. What was troubling Duncan now was that, for the first time, he’d begun to wonder whether the young man on the mantel-piece could possibly be the crazy person with the matted hair who’d tried to attack Ritchie. They looked nothing like each other, really. Their eyes were different, their noses were different, their coloring was different. He’d never for a second doubted the wisdom of the Crowologists until now; he’d accepted the Neil Ritchie story as a piece of history, fact. Except—and these panics were coming thick and fast now—Neil Ritchie was an idiot. Duncan had never met him, but his ignorance, his rudeness and his self-importance were common knowledge, and Duncan had had an e-mail from him a few years back that had been offensive and a little deranged. Neil Ritchie was a man who’d traveled God knows how many miles in order to invade the privacy of a long-retired singer-songwriter who didn’t want to be disturbed. This, let’s face it, was not normal behavior. And yet this was the man Duncan was prepared to trust more than Annie and the pleasant-looking chap on the beach? If one took the two Farmer John pictures out of the equation and put glasses on the singer in the Bottom Line picture, changed his hair color to silver, trimmed it . . .
“Oh, God,” said Duncan.
“What?”
“I can’t think of any good reason why that man would introduce himself as Tucker Crowe unless he actually was.”
“Really?”
“Annie’s not really a cruel person. And the person on the beach looked a little bit like the person in that picture. Except older.”
“And did she explain how she knew him?”
“She said he wrote to her. Out of the blue. After she posted that review of Naked on our website.”
“If that’s true,” said Gina, thoughtfully, “then you must want to hang yourself.”
Unfortunately, Duncan was not physically capable of jogging through the streets of Gooleness for the second time in less than an hour, so he had to settle for a brisk walk, with occasional pauses. He needed the time to think, anyway; there was a lot to think about.
Duncan had not been a regretful man, not until recently. However, over the last few weeks, he had found himself wishing that he had done a lot of things differently. He had been impulsive, and overeager, and lacking in judgment. He’d got a lot of things wrong, and he hated himself for it. And the thing he’d got most wrong, he’d come to realize, was Juliet, Naked. What had he been thinking of? Why had he responded like that? After about five more plays, the songs in their acoustic form had started to pall; after ten, he’d decided he didn’t want to hear the album again. Not only was it a weak, malnourished, puny thing, but it had started to diminish the magnificence of Juliet: who wanted to see the rusty old innards of a work of art, really? It was of interest to scholars, and he was a scholar. But how had he come to the conclusion that it was better than the original? He knew part of the answer to that question: he’d had access to Naked before any of his peers, and to post a review saying that it was dull and pointless would have thrown away his advantage. But then that’s what art is, sometimes, he always felt: something that confers advantages. His had come at a cost, though. He’d had currency, but the exchange rate turned out to be dismally low. Why hadn’t he just taken the wretched review down? He turned back—to run home to his computer—and then spun around again. He’d do it later.
All that, and now this. If it was true that Tucker Crowe was in Gooleness—staying in his old house—then he had many other reasons to mourn the temporary desertion of his critical faculties. If he hadn’t been so irritated by Annie’s indifference, they might not have split up, and they might have met Tucker together. If he’d posted the same kind of review that Annie had written, Tucker might have e-mailed him. It was all too much, really. He’d lived his whole life cautiously, and on the one occasion when he’d screwed his caution up into a ball and thrown it to the wind it had ended like this. (And there was Gina, too, of course, which was another narrative strand in the same story. Gina was, metaphorically, Naked, and her literal nakedness, or the offer of it, had only served to underline the aptness of the metaphor. He’d jumped too quickly there, too.)
Most of his adult life he’d wanted to meet Tucker Crowe, or at least to be in the same room, and here he was, possibly on the verge of realizing that ambition, and he was scared. If Tucker had read Annie’s piece, then the chances were he’d have read Duncan’s, too. Presumably he’d hated it, and hated its author. Tucker Crowe knows who I am, thought Duncan, and he hates me! Is that possible? Surely he’d recognize and appreciate the passion for the work, at least. Wouldn’t he? Or would he hate that, too? It would be better for everyone if, after all, Annie were playing some kind of cruel and juvenile trick. He turned toward Gina’s place for a second time, thought better of it again.
And in the middle of all these doubts and anxieties, all this self-loathing, Duncan found himself trying to think of test questions that would either prove Tucker was who he said he was or expose him as a fraud. It was difficult, though. Duncan had to concede that Tucker Crowe was an even greater authority on the subject of Tucker Crowe than Duncan Thomson. If he were to ask him, say, who played that pedal steel on “And You Are?” and Tucker insisted that it wasn’t Sneaky Pete Kleinow, that the album sleeve was wrong, then who was he to argue? Tucker would know, surely. He could win those arguments every time. No, he needed something different, something that only the two of them could possibly know about. And he thought he had it.
When Annie saw Duncan skulking on the other side of her front hedge, obviously trying to summon up the courage necessary to knock on what was, until comparatively recently, his own front door, and trying to peek through the window without anybody noticing, she almost hooted at the irony. Less than two hours before, she’d been quietly lamenting his lack of passion for her, her inability to provoke in him the desire to hide behind her hedge trying to catch a glimpse of her; and now here he was, doing exactly that. And then very quickly she realized that there was no irony here at all. Duncan was hiding behind her hedge because Tucker Crowe was in her kitchen. She was still not enough, in exactly the same way she hadn’t been enough before.
She opened the front door.
“Duncan! Don’t be an idiot. Come in.”
“I’m sorry. I was just . . .” And then, unable to come up with any plausible explanation for his behavior, he shrugged and walked down the path into the house. Jackson was at the kitchen table, drawing, and Tucker was frying bacon for their brunch.
“Hello again,” said Duncan.
“Hello there,” said Tucker.
“There is a possibility that I might perhaps owe you an apology,” said Duncan.
“Okay,” said Tucker. “And when will you know for sure?”
“Well, it’s all very difficult, isn’t it?”
“Is it?”
“I’m beginning to think that there’s no real reason for you to tell me you’re Tucker Crowe if you’re not.”
“That’s a good start.”
“But as I’m sure Annie has explained . . . I’m a, a long-term admirer of your work, and for some years now I’ve been under the impression that you don’t look like that.”
“That’s Fucker,” said Jackson, without looking up from his drawing. “Fucker is our friend Farmer John. A man took a photo of him and told everyone it was Daddy.”
“Right,”
said Duncan. “Well. I can see how . . . It’s plausible, I grant you.”
“Thanks,” said Tucker, genially. “If it helps, I have a passport.”
Duncan looked stunned
“Oh,” said Duncan. “I hadn’t thought about that.”
“Sorry to disappoint you,” said Tucker. “You were probably thinking more along the lines of some exhaustive trivia questions. But there’s your world, which is full of, you know, rumor and conspiracy theories and scary photos of people who aren’t me. And there’s my world, which is all passports and PTA meetings and insurance claims. It’s pretty banal in my world. There’s plenty of paperwork.”
Tucker went to a jacket hanging over the arm of a chair, and pulled his passport out from the inside pocket.
“There.” He handed it to Duncan.
Duncan flicked through it.
“Yes. Well. That all seems to be in order.”
Annie and Tucker burst out laughing. Duncan looked startled, and then forced a smile.
“Sorry. That probably sounded a little officious.”
“You want to see Jackson’s? I can see you might think that I’ve forged this one. But would I go to all the trouble of forging a passport for a kid just so he has the same last name as me?”
“Can I use your loo, Annie?” said Duncan. And he left the room, without receiving permission.
“I think he’s a little overcome,” said Annie. “He needs to recover his composure. Try and be nice to him. Just remember: this is the most amazing moment of his life.”
When Duncan came back in, Tucker gave him a big bear hug.
“It’s okay,” Tucker said. “Everything’s okay.”
Annie laughed, but Duncan held on a little too long, and she could see that he had his eyes closed.
“Duncan!” she said. And then, to make it sound as though she wasn’t telling him off, “Do you want to eat with us?”
They chatted, as best they could, while toast was buttered and eggs were scrambled. Annie could have kissed Tucker: he could see how nervous Duncan was, and he was asking him questions—about the town, his work, the kids at the college—that he seemed reasonably sure Duncan could answer without crying. There was a tremble in Duncan’s voice whenever he spoke, and he was adopting a slightly over-formal register for the occasion, and sometimes he’d giggle for no apparent reason, but most of the time it was possible to imagine that the four of them were participating in a casual weekend social occasion, the sort of thing they’d all done before and might do again.
Annie could have kissed Tucker for lots of other reasons, too. It struck her that everybody in her kitchen loved him with some degree of intensity. (Everybody else, anyway—she knew him well enough to understand that he wasn’t too keen on himself.) Jackson’s love was the most neurotic and needy, but well within the realms of the normal, as far as she could remember from her child psychology classes; Duncan’s was weird and obsessive; and hers . . . She could characterize it as a crush, or the beginnings of something deeper, or the pathetic fantasy of an increasingly lonely woman, or the recognition that she needed to sleep with someone before the decade was out, and sometimes she thought of it as all of these things at once, and she always wished that she hadn’t told him off so often over the previous twenty-four hours. And yes, he’d needed it, sort of, but only if he were to stay in the world he’d stepped into. There’d been a subtext to the scoldings: if you’re going to live with me in Gooleness, then you have to do right by your family. That’s how we do things around here. But seeing as he wasn’t going to live with her in Gooleness, what business was it of hers? It was like telling Spider-Man not to climb up buildings while he was here, because of health and safety. She was missing the point of him.
The social occasion soon fell, inevitably, into something else, mostly because every single thing that either Jackson or Tucker said either confirmed or disproved theses that Duncan had been constructing for years.
“Well,” said Duncan, as they sat down. “This looks nice.”
“My sister doesn’t eat bacon,” said Jackson, and Annie could see Duncan wrestling with himself: What was he allowed to ask?
“Have you got other brothers and sisters, Jackson?” he asked eventually, presumably on the grounds that to ask nothing at all would be rude.
“Yeah. Four. But they don’t live with me. They have different moms.”
Duncan choked on a piece of toast.
“Oh. Well. That’s . . .”
“And none of the moms is named Julie,” said Tucker.
“Ha!” said Duncan. “We’d rather given up on that theory anyway.”
Jackson looked at the men, uncomprehending.
“Don’t worry about it, Jack,” said Tucker.
“Okay.”
“I took Tucker and Jackson into the museum this morning,” said Annie. There was very little neutral ground for them to clamber on, in this conversation, seeing as every little detail about Tucker’s personal life would offer a life-threatening level of excitement. “Showed them the shark’s eye. Do you remember me telling you about that?”
“Yes,” said Duncan. “Indeed. Your exhibition must be opening soon.”
“Wednesday.”
“I must try and get along to see it.”
“We’re having a little drinks reception for it on Tuesday night. Nothing much. Just a few councillors, and the Friends.”
“You should get Tucker to sing,” said Duncan. It was going to be impossible, Annie could see that now. Duncan might only ever get one shot at this and he wasn’t going to waste it.
“Yes,” said Annie. “I’m sure that, if Tucker wanted to break his twenty-year silence, then the Gooleness Seaside Museum would be the most appropriate venue.”
Tucker laughed. Duncan looked down at his plate.
“I’d enjoy it, anyway. I . . . I don’t know what Annie’s told you, but I really am a very big admirer of your work. I’m . . . Well, I don’t think it would be overstating the case were I to describe myself as a world expert.”
“I’ve read your stuff,” said Tucker.
“Oh,” said Duncan. “Gosh. I . . . Well, you can tell me where I’ve gone wrong.”
“I wouldn’t know where to start,” said Tucker.
“Would you maybe like to do an interview? To set the record straight? You’ve possibly seen the website, so you know you’d get a fair hearing.”
“Duncan,” said Annie. “Don’t start.”
“Sorry,” said Duncan.
“There isn’t a record,” said Tucker. “There’s me and my life, and fifteen people like you who have for reasons best known to yourselves spent too much time guessing what that life is.”
“I suppose that’s what it must look like. From your perspective.”
“I’m not sure there’s another one.”
“We could limit the questions to the songs.”
“Don’t push it, Duncan,” said Annie. “I don’t think Tucker’s keen on the idea.”
“Was I right, by the way?” said Tucker. “Did you have some questions that you thought would prove that I am who I said I was?”
“I . . . Well, yes. I did have one.”
“Hit me. I want to see if I know my own life.”
“It’s possibly . . . I’m wondering whether it’s possibly too invasive.”
“Is it something I’d have to send Jackson out of the room for?”
“Oh, no. It’s just . . . Well, it’s silly really. I was going to ask you who else you’ve drawn, apart from Julie Beatty.”
Annie could feel the drop in temperature. Duncan had said something he shouldn’t have said, although she didn’t understand why he shouldn’t have said it.
“What makes you so sure I drew her?”
“I can’t divulge my sources.”
“Your sources are no good.”
“I respectfully beg to differ.”
Tucker put down his knife and fork.
“What is it with you guys? Why do yo
u think you know stuff, when you know nothing at all about anything?”
“Sometimes we know more than you think.”
“Doesn’t sound like it to me.”
Duncan was suddenly unable to make eye contact with anyone at the table, which in Annie’s experience was the first sign that he was losing his temper. His anger was so carefully and closely managed that it only came out through the wrong holes.
“It’s a lovely drawing, the one of Julie. You’re good. I’ll bet she doesn’t smoke anymore, though.”
That last detail was triumphantly delivered, but the triumph was diminished by Tucker standing up, reaching across the table and lifting Duncan up by the neck of his Graceland T-shirt. Duncan looked terrified.
“You went into her house?”
Annie remembered the day Duncan had gone out to Berkeley. He’d come back to the hotel in a peculiar mood, flustered and a little evasive; that night he’d even told her that he felt his Tucker Crowe obsession was waning.
“Only to use the toilet.”
“She invited you in to use her toilet?”
“Tucker, please put him down,” said Annie. “You’re frightening Jackson.”
“He’s not,” said Jackson. “It’s cool. I don’t like that guy anyway. Punch him, Dad.”
The request was enough to loosen Tucker’s grip on Duncan.
“That’s not nice, Jackson,” said his father.
“No, it isn’t,” said Duncan.
Tucker shot him a warning look, and Duncan held both hands up in immediate apology.
“So come on, Duncan. Explain to me how you ended up using Julie’s toilet.”
“I shouldn’t have done it,” said Duncan. “When I got to her house, I was bursting. And there was this kid there who knew where she kept her front-door key. And she was out, so we let ourselves in, and I went for a pee, and he showed me the picture. We were in there for five minutes maximum.”
“Oh, that makes it okay,” said Tucker. “Seven would have constituted a violation of her privacy.”