High Fidelity

by Nick Hornby

  “Yeah. Are they really into the same sort of stuff as you, Barry?” asks Dick innocently.

  “We’re not ‘into stuff,’ Dick. We play songs. Our songs.”

  “Right,” says Dick. “Sorry.”

  “Oh, bollocks, Barry,” I say. “What do your songs sound like? The Beatles? Nirvana? Papa Abraham and the Smurfs?”

  “You probably wouldn’t be familiar with our immediate influences,” Barry says.

  “Try me.”

  “They’re mostly German.”

  “What, Kraftwerk and that?”

  He looks at me pityingly. “Er, hardly.”

  “Who, then?”

  “You wouldn’t have heard of them, Rob, so just shut up.”

  “Just name one.”

  “No.”

  “Give us the initial letters, then.”

  “No.”

  “You haven’t got a fucking clue, have you?”

  He stomps out of the shop.

  I know this is everybody’s answer to everything and I’m sorry, but if ever a chap needed to get laid, it’s Barry.

  She’s still living in London. I get her phone number and address from Directory Enquiries—she lives in Ladbroke Grove, of course. I call, but I hold the receiver about an inch away from the phone, so that I can hang up quick if anyone answers. Someone answers. I hang up. I try again, about five minutes later, although this time I hold the receiver a little nearer to my ear, and I can hear that a machine, not a person, is answering. I still hang up, though. I’m not ready to hear her voice yet. The third time, I listen to her message; the fourth time, I leave one of my own. It’s incredible, really, to think that at any time over the last decade I could have done this: she has come to assume such an importance I feel she should be living on Mars, so that attempts to communicate with her would cost millions of pounds and take light-years to reach her. She’s an extraterrestrial, a ghost, a myth, not a person with an answering machine and a rusting wok and a two-zone travel pass.

  She sounds older, I guess, and a little bit posher—London has sucked the life out of her Bristol burr—but it’s obviously her. She doesn’t say whether she’s living with anyone—not that I was expecting a message giving details of her current romantic situation, but she doesn’t say, you know, “Neither Charlie nor Marco can come to the phone right now,” or anything like that. Just, “There’s no one here, please leave a message after the bleep.” I leave my name, including surname, and my phone number, and stuff about long time no see, etc.

  I don’t hear anything back from her. A couple of days later I try again, and I say the same stuff. Still nothing. Now this is more like it, if you’re talking about rejection: someone who won’t even return your phone messages a decade after she rejected you.

  Marie comes into the shop.

  “Hi, guys.”

  Dick and Barry disappear, conspicuously and embarrassingly.

  “’Bye, guys,” she says after they’re gone, and shrugs.

  She peers at me. “You avoiding me, boy?” she asks, mock-angry.

  “No.”

  She frowns and cocks her head to one side.

  “Honest. How could I, when I don’t know where you’ve been the last few days?”

  “Well, are you embarrassed, then?”

  “Oh, God yes.”

  She laughs. “No need.”

  This, it seems, is what you get for sleeping with an American, all this up-front goodwill. You wouldn’t catch a decent British woman marching in here after a one-night stand. We understand that these things are, on the whole, best forgotten. But I suppose Marie wants to talk about it, explore what went wrong; there’s probably some group-counseling workshop she wants us to go to, with lots of other couples who spent a misguided one-off Saturday night together. We’ll probably have to take our clothes off and reenact what happened, and I’ll get my sweater stuck round my head.

  “I was wondering if you wanted to come see T-Bone play tonight.”

  Of course I don’t. We can’t speak anymore, don’t you understand, woman? We had sex, and that was the end of it. That’s the law in this country. If you don’t like it, go back to where you came from.

  “Yeah. Great.”

  “Do you know a place called Stoke Newington? He’s playing there. The Weavers Arms?”

  “I know it.” I could just not turn up, I suppose, but I know I’ll be there.

  And we have a nice time. She’s right to be American about it: just because we’ve been to bed together doesn’t mean we have to hate each other. We enjoy T-Bone’s set, and Marie sings with him for his encore (and when she goes up onstage, people look at the place where she was standing, and then they look at the person next to the place where she was standing, and I quite like that). And then the three of us go back to hers for a drink, and we talk about London and Austin and records, but not about sex in general or the other night in particular, as if it were just something we did, like going to the curry house, which also requires no examination or elaboration. And then I go home, and Marie gives me a nice kiss, and on the way back I feel as though there’s one relationship, just one, that is OK really, a little smooth spot I can feel proud of.

  Charlie phones, in the end; she’s apologetic about not having called sooner, but she’s been away, in the States, on business. I try to make out like I know how it is, but I don’t, of course—I’ve been to Brighton on business, and to Redditch, and to Norwich, even, but I’ve never been to the States.

  “So, how are you?” she asks, and for a moment, just a moment but even so, I feel like doing a misery number on her: “Not very good, thanks, Charlie, but don’t let that worry you. You just fly out to the States, on business, never mind me.” To my eternal credit, however, I restrain myself and pretend that in the twelve years since we last spoke I have managed to live life as a fully functioning human being.

  “Fine, thanks.”

  “Good. I’m glad. You are fine, and you deserve to be fine.”

  Something’s wrong, somewhere, but I can’t put my finger on it.

  “How are you?”

  “Good. Great. Work’s good, nice friends, nice flat, you know. College all seems a long time ago, now. You remember when we used to sit in the bar, wondering how life would turn out for us?”

  Nope.

  “Well…I’m really happy with mine, and I’m glad you’re happy with yours.”

  I didn’t say I was happy with my life. I said that I was fine, as in no colds, no recent traffic accidents, no suspended prison sentences, but never mind.

  “Have you got, you know, kids and stuff, like everybody else?”

  “No. I could have had them if I’d wanted them, of course, but I didn’t want them. I’m too young, and they’re too…”

  “Young?”

  “Well, yes, young, obviously”—she laughs nervously, as if I’m an idiot, which maybe I am, but not in the way she thinks—“but too…I don’t know, time-consuming, I guess is the expression I’m looking for.”

  I’m not making any of this up. This is how she talks, as if nobody has ever had a conversation about this in the entire history of the world.

  “Oh, right. I see what you mean.”

  I just took the piss out of Charlie. Charlie! Charlie Nicholson! This is weird. Most days, for the last dozen or so years, I have thought about Charlie and attributed to her, or at least to our breakup, most things that have gone wrong for me. Like: I wouldn’t have packed in college; I wouldn’t have gone to work in Record and Tape; I wouldn’t be saddled with this shop; I wouldn’t have had an unsatisfactory personal life. This is the woman who broke my heart, ruined my life, this woman is single-handedly responsible for my poverty and directionlessness and failure, the woman I dreamed about regularly for a good five years, and I’m sending her up. I’ve got to admire myself, really. I’ve got to take my own hat off and say to myself, “Rob, you’re one cool character.”

  “Anyway, are you in or out, Rob?”

  “I’m sorr
y?” It is comforting to hear that she still says things that only she can understand. I used to like it, and to envy it; I could never think of anything to say that sounded remotely strange.

  “No, I’m sorry. It’s just…I find these long-lost boyfriend calls rather unnerving. There’s been a spate of them, recently. Do you remember that guy Marco I went out with after you?”

  “Um…Yeah, I think so.” I know what’s coming, and I don’t believe it. All that painful fantasy, the marriage and the kids, years and years of it, and she probably ended up packing him in six months after I last saw her.

  “Well, he called a few months back, and I didn’t really know what to say to him. I think he was going through, you know, some kind of what-does-it-all-mean thing, and he wanted to see me, and talk about stuff, and what have you, and I wasn’t really up for it. Do all men go through this?”

  “I haven’t heard of it before.”

  “It’s just the ones I pick, then. I didn’t mean…”

  “No, no, that’s OK. It must seem a bit funny, me ringing up out of the blue. I just thought, you know…” I don’t know, so I don’t see why she should. “But what does ‘Are you in or out’ mean?”

  “It means, I don’t know, are we pals or aren’t we? Because if we are, fine, and if we’re not, I don’t see the point of messing about on the phone. Do you want to come to dinner Saturday? I’m having some friends over and I need a spare man. Are you a spare man?”

  “I…” What’s the point? “Yes, at the moment.”

  “So are you in or out?”

  “I’m in.”

  “Good. My friend Clara is coming, and she hasn’t got a chap, and she’s right up your street. Eight o’clockish?”

  And that’s it. Now I can put my finger on what’s wrong: Charlie is awful. She didn’t use to be awful, but something bad has happened to her, and she says terrible, stupid things and has no apparent sense of humor whatsoever. What would Bruce Springsteen make of Charlie?

  I tell Liz about Ian phoning me up, and she says it’s outrageous, and that Laura will be appalled, which cheers me up no end. And I tell her about Alison and Penny and Sarah and Jackie, and about the stupid little flashlight-pen thing, and about Charlie and how she’d just come back from the States on business, and Liz says that she’s just about to go to the States on business, and I’m amusingly satirical at her expense, but she doesn’t laugh.

  “How come you hate women who have better jobs than you, Rob?”

  She’s like this sometimes, Liz. She’s OK, but, you know, she’s one of those paranoid feminists who see evil in everything you say.

  “What are you on about now?”

  “You hate this woman who took a little flashlight-pen into the cinema, which seems a perfectly reasonable thing to do if you want to write in the dark. And you hate the fact that…Charlie?…Charlie went to the States—I mean, maybe she didn’t want to go to the States. I know I don’t. And you didn’t like Laura wearing clothes that she had no choice about wearing when she changed jobs, and now I’m beneath contempt because I’ve got to fly to Chicago, talk to some men in a hotel conference room for eight hours, and then fly home again…”

  “Well, I’m sexist, aren’t I? Is that the right answer?”

  You just have to smile and take it, otherwise it would drive you mad.

  TWENTY-ONE

  WHEN Charlie opens the door, my heart sinks: she looks beautiful. She still has the short, blond hair, but the cut is a lot more expensive now, and she’s aging in a really elegant way—around her eyes there are faint, friendly, sexy crow’s-feet which make her look like Sylvia Sims, and she’s wearing a self-consciously grown-up black cocktail dress (although it probably only seems self-conscious to me because as far as I’m concerned she’s only just stepped out of a pair of baggy jeans and a Television T-shirt). Straightaway I start to worry that I’m going to fall for her again, and I’ll make a fool of myself, and it’s all going to end in pain, humiliation, and self-loathing, just as it did before. She kisses me, hugs me, tells me I don’t look any different and that it’s great to see me, and then she points me to a room where I can leave my jacket. It’s her bedroom (arty, of course, with a huge abstract painting on one wall and what looks like a rug on another); I have a sudden panic when I’m in there. The other coats on the bed are expensive, and for a moment I entertain the idea of going through the pockets and then doing a runner.

  But I want to see Clara, Charlie’s friend, who’s right up my street. I want to see her because I don’t know where my street is; I don’t even know which part of town it’s in, which city, which country, so maybe she’ll enable me to get my bearings. And it’ll be interesting, too, to see what street Charlie thinks I live on, whether it’s the Old Kent Road or Park Lane. (Five women who don’t live on my street, as far as I know, but would be very welcome if they ever decided to move into the area: the Holly Hunter of Broadcast News; the Meg Ryan of Sleepless in Seattle; a woman doctor I saw on the telly once, who had lots of long frizzy hair and carved up a Tory MP in a debate about embryos, although I don’t know her name and I’ve never been able to find a pinup of her; Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story; Valerie Harper in the TV series Rhoda. These are women who talk back, women with a mind of their own, women with snap and crackle and pop…but they are also women who seem to need the love of a good man. I could rescue them. I could redeem them. They could make me laugh, and I could make them laugh, maybe, on a good day, and we could stay in and watch one of their films or TV programs or embryo debates on video and adopt disadvantaged children together and the whole family could play soccer in Central Park.)

  When I walk into the sitting room, I can see immediately that I’m doomed to die a long, slow, suffocating death. There’s a man wearing a sort of brick red jacket and another man in a carefully rumpled linen suit and Charlie in her cocktail dress and another woman wearing fluorescent leggings and a dazzling white silk blouse and another woman wearing those trousers that look like a dress but which aren’t. Isn’t. Whatever. And the moment I see them I want to cry, not only through terror, but through sheer envy: Why isn’t my life like this?

  Both of the women who are not Charlie are beautiful—not pretty, not attractive, not appealing, beautiful—and to my panicking, blinking, twitching eye virtually indistinguishable: miles of dark hair, thousands of huge earrings, yards of red lips, hundreds of white teeth. The one wearing the white silk blouse shuffles along Charlie’s enormous sofa, which is made of glass, or lead, or gold—some intimidating, unsofa-like material, anyway—and smiles at me; Charlie interrupts the others (“Guys, guys…”) and introduces me to the rest of the party. Clara’s on the sofa with me, as it were, ha ha, Nick’s in the brick red jacket, Barney’s in the linen suit, Emma’s in the trousers that look like a dress. If these people were ever up my street, I’d have to barricade myself inside the flat.

  “We were just talking about what we’d call a dog if we had one,” says Charlie. “Emma’s got a Labrador called Dizzy, after Dizzy Gillespie.”

  “Oh, right,” I say. “I’m not very keen on dogs.”

  None of them says anything for a while; there’s not much they can say, really, about my lack of enthusiasm for dogs.

  “Is that size of flat, or childhood fear, or the smell, or…?” asks Clara, very sweetly.

  “I dunno. I’m just…” I shrug hopelessly, “you know, not very keen.”

  They smile politely.

  As it turns out, this is my major contribution to the evening’s conversation, and later on I find myself recalling the line wistfully as belonging to a Golden Age of Wit. I’d even use it again if I could, but the rest of the topics for discussion don’t give me the chance—I haven’t seen the films or the plays they’ve seen, and I haven’t been to the places they’ve visited. I find out that Clara works in publishing, and Nick’s in PR; I find out too that Emma lives in Clapham. Anna finds out that I live in Crouch End, and Clara finds out that I own a record shop. Emma has
read Wild Swans; Charlie hasn’t, but would very much like to, and may even borrow Emma’s copy. Barney has been skiing recently. I could probably remember a couple of other things if I had to. For most of the evening, however, I sit there like a pudding, feeling like a child who’s been allowed to stay up late for a special treat. We eat stuff I don’t know about, and either Nick or Barney comments on each bottle of wine we drink apart from the one I brought.

  The difference between these people and me is that they finished college and I didn’t (they didn’t split up with Charlie and I did); as a consequence, they have smart jobs and I have a scruffy job, they are rich and I am poor, they are self-confident and I am incontinent, they do not smoke and I do, they have opinions and I have lists. Could I tell them anything about which journey is the worst for jet lag? No. Could they tell me the original lineup of the Wailers? No. They probably couldn’t even tell me the lead singer’s name.

  But they’re not bad people. I’m not a class warrior, and anyway, they’re not particularly posh—they probably have mothers and fathers just outside Watford or its equivalent, too. Do I want some of what they’ve got? You bet. I want their opinions, I want their money, I want their clothes, I want their ability to talk about dogs’ names without any hint of embarrassment. I want to go back to 1979 and start all over again.

  It doesn’t help that Charlie talks bollocks all night; she doesn’t listen to anyone, she tries too hard to go off at obtuse angles, she puts on all sorts of unrecognizable and inappropriate accents. I would like to say that these are all new mannerisms, but they’re not; they were there before, years ago. The not listening I once mistook for strength of character, the obtuseness I misread as mystery, the accents I saw as glamor and drama. How had I managed to edit all this out in the intervening years? How had I managed to turn her into the answer to all the world’s problems?

  I stick the evening out, even though I’m not worth the sofa space for most of it, and I outstay Clara and Nick and Barney and Emma. When they’ve gone, I realize that I spent the whole time drinking instead of speaking, and as a consequence I can no longer focus properly.